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CHAPTER: 2
Metaphysical and Literary Introspections: Animal Poems
Ted Hughes’ poetry is mainly known for his poetic vision deeply rooted
in the world of Nature. Among various elements of Nature, birds and beasts
are largely dealt in his poetry. The animal world, in his poetry, represents the
irrational instinctive life in totality as opposed to the rational tradition of
Movement poetry. Being a Group poet, Hughes is intensely preoccupied with
violence which springs from his vision of the creative and the destructive
processes at work in the cosmos as a whole of which the instinctive predatory
world of animals is just a part. Animal fury and frenzy is actually a struggle or
war between life and death. Animals are instinctively predators and they fight
against death. Hughes presents animal energy/savagery as the life-force or
what Schopenhauer calls the Will to Live. Schopenhauer’s observation of
animal life in a state of constant struggle finds expression in Hughes’
presentation of birds and beasts in his poetry. Since the whole universe is
inherently chaotic, being all the time haunted by the contradictory forces of life
and death, creation and destruction, one needs the life-force or animal-like
voluntarism for survival. The modesty, genteelness, self-restraint and control
of Movement poetry are not relevant in such a violent situation. Through the
irrational predatory energies of the animals, Hughes seems to present a
different mode of life as offered by the Dionysian frenzy, the Dadaist and the
Surrealist modes and Baudrillard’s Pataphysics.
These modes altogether
reject the bourgeois’ adherence to rational and moral pretensions which is the
attitude of an escapist. Animals are completely free from societal mores and
instinctively strive for life. Nothing can prohibit them from the act of
voluntarism. The predatory and instinctive life of the animal world presents a
contrast to the rationally oriented world of human beings and it is also used as
metaphor for the instinctive impulses which inhabit man’s unconscious being.
Ted Hughes brilliantly captures the fury and frenzy of animals in his
first book of forty collected poems The Hawk in the Rain1 which appeared in
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1957. Portraying the minutest behavioural details and depicting the sheer
physical presence of animals, the poet moves to greater metaphorical
implications: will and vitality, shamanism and mysticism, myths and rituals.
The animals are well portrayed mainly in poems such as ‘The Hawk in the
Rain,’ ‘The Jaguar,’ ‘Macaw and Little Miss,’ ‘The Thought-Fox,’ and ‘The
Horses.’
The title poem, ‘The Hawk in the Rain,’ presents a contrast between
man and the hawk in terms of their reaction to the violent forces of Nature
such as earth, wind, rain, and death. Man feels threatened in the stormy
weather but the hawk shows effortless poise in the face of these elemental
energies. The poem reveals the poet’s preoccupation with intense violence
lurking in the heart of Nature. The poem is hence one of the best examples of
Hughes’ interest in violence in reaction to the passive escapism of Movement
poetry. It is written in the first person narrative. The narrator, I, in the poem
represents human beings in general. The first stanza presents man struggling
against the earth. His nightmarish struggle against the muddy land is brilliantly
conveyed through the stressed alliteration and assonance in the opening
lines:
I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up
Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth’s mouth,
From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle
With the habit of the dogged grave . . .
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘The Hawk in the Rain,’ 11)
In contrast, “. . . the hawk / Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye. / His
wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet . . .” The second and third stanzas
reveal man and the hawk in relation with the wind and the rain. The hawk
steadily maintains its survival in “the streaming air,” while man is in a state of
bewilderment. Man shows no kinship with the energy which the hawk exhibits.
The reverberating sounds of violence, which seem to strike the body and
brain of man, are reinforced through the repetitive consonantal words, violent
verbs, internal rhymes and heavy caesura: “While banging wind kills these
stubborn hedges, / Thumbs my eyes, // throws my breath, // tackles my heart .
. .” In contrast, the hawk’s equilibrium is presented through such words:
“hangs,’’ “still,” “hold,” “weightless quiet,” and “Steady.” Similarly, rain strikes
26
man from “head to the bone,” while the hawk reveals “The diamond point of
will” which is the most counterbalancing thing in him to survive. It alludes to
Schopenhauer’s insight about animal’s voluntarism that emanates from the
Will to Live which, alone forms the very basis of all existence. The hawk
sustains his life through the act of voluntarism which is an expression of the
Will to Live. Schopenhauer writes: “. . . every voluntary motion (functiones
animales) is the manifestation of an act of will.”2 The hawk’s vitality, his Will to
Live, his endurance like that of a sea drowner – all contribute to maintain his
survival in the face of “the master- / Fulcrum of violence.”
Towards the end, Hughes brings in the reality of death. The hawk, too,
becomes the morsel of the earth’s mouth: “The horizon trap him; the round
angelic eye / Smashed, mix his heart’s blood with the mire of the land.” But
the hawk is not all the time conscious of his mortality. Death comes to it as a
part of the scheme of things. It is noted by C. J. Rawson that “The Hawk’s
impressiveness resides in his enormous energy, in life and in the moment of
death.”3 The basic difference between man and animal lies in their response
to death. Yeats has best revealed it in his poem ‘Death’:
Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
A man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
....................
He knows death to the bone –
Man has created death.4
Man is more conscious of all the forces that threaten his survival because he
is rooted in man-made cultural mores and is conscious of his own
vulnerability. Man himself has created the consciousness of death which
makes him deviate from the instinctive life of birds and beasts. He shows
neither Schopenhauerian Will to Live nor the Dionysian frenzy to fight for his
existence and identity in the face of death and destruction. He lacks the
hawk’s vitality and endurance. Man, in this poem, exhibits some of the traits of
Blake’s “single vision”5 such as lack of voluntarism, passive escape from
reality, moral and rational pretensions. The hawk’s enactment of the will
power which is reflected in his flight “in the streaming air” sustains his life at
the moment. “The will to survive, a kind of unflinching stoicism in the face of
27
mortality, emerges as the central meaning of the poem.”6 Thus, Hughes here
seems to voice Baudrillard’s Pataphysics which renders a sense of dignity by
asserting life’s pre-eminence over death. At another metaphorical level
Hughes is commenting on both man, who is imprisoned by the earth and the
hawk who is flying effortlessly at a height. Hence, the poet presents
contraries: physical and spiritual. Man, gripped by the land, indicates physical
existence where death is a reality, while the hawk flying up in the sky
metaphorically presents an immortal spiritual existence which is accessible to
those who dare to have the hawk-like eye contact with “the master- / Fulcrum
of violence.” Man clutched by “the earth’s mouth” appears to have been
imprisoned by his physical limitations which seem to have been transcended
by the hawk at the moment. This momentary illusion of transcendence offers
one an escape from the very consciousness of mortality because the
consciousness hinders one’s life-force, or the Will to Live. Through animal
imagery the poet also seeks a shamanic flight from the physical to the spiritual
world. A shaman is capable of transcending physical existence and reaching
the spiritual world. Hence, the hawk at a height may be represented as the
poet’s shamanic flight transcending physical limitations – consciousness of
mortality, or the symbolic order that supports the moral and rational
consciousness of people. The poem is written with no regular rhyme pattern.
‘The Jaguar,’ another animal poem, presents a contrast between
animal fury and frenzy which reflects a Dionysian mode of existence and
man’s inactivity which reflects Apollinian pretensions. The poem can also be
taken as a metaphorical representation of a sharp contrast between not only
the human and non-human world but also between Group poetry which boldly
evokes violent energies and Movement poetry which is escapist in
comparison. The poem begins with a metaphorical representation of man’s
inability to show a breathtaking enactment of energies; rather he indulges in
indolence, inactivity, pretensions and illusions:
The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion
Lie still as the sun . . .
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘The Jaguar,’ 12)
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In contrast, the jaguar appears “. . . hurrying enraged / Through prison
darkness after the drills of his eyes / On a short fierce fuse . . . .” The sheer
contrast between furious animal energies and the inactivity of human beings
is presented through different sets of words. Words such as “yawn,”
“Fatigued,” and “indolence” are used to suggest the lack of vitality and energy
in human beings, while “hurrying,” “enraged,” “fierce,” “bang,” “spins,” “stride,”
and “wildernesses” are used to suggest the fierce energy of the jaguar. The
jaguar which appears “hurrying enraged / Through prison darkness” echoes
Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night”7 from his
famous poem ‘The Tyger.’ The jaguar like Blake’s tiger represents the
bursting out of the energies from rational and moral bondage. Physically
imprisoned, the jaguar metaphorically represents the repressed animal
energies in the unconscious mind of man. Hughes himself said in an interview
given to a London Magazine in January 1971 that
A Jaguar [. . .] is a beautiful, powerful nature spirit, he is a homicidal
maniac, he is a supercharged piece of cosmic machinery, he is a
symbol of man’s baser nature shoved down into the id and growing
cannibal murderous with deprivation, he is an ancient symbol of
Dionysus since he is a leopard raised to the ninth power, he is a
precise historical symbol to the bloody-minded Aztecs and so on. Or
he is simply a demon…a lump of ectoplasm. A lump of astral energy.
The symbol opens all these things…it is the reader’s own nature that
selects.8
The Id refers to the unconscious mind of man which inhabits the instinctive
drives or those desires (like hunger, sex and other impulses) which were
repressed under the threat of denial by social mores. Thus, the wild and
instinctive urge, of which the jaguar is an embodiment, is part of man’s own
nature (Id). The imprisonment of the jaguar, symbolically, suggests the
suppression of instinctive impulses in the unconscious mind of mankind. The
use of heavy alliteration and assonance suggests the rage of wild animal
energies which will not stand any physical limitation: “By the bang of blood in
the brain deaf the ear− / He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him.”
The use of the stressed words, heavy assonance, hyperbolic language, and
an authoritative tone, particularly towards the end of the poem, help the poet
to give expression to deep rooted Dionysian impulses:
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. . . there’s no cage to him
More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘The Jaguar,’ 12)
The repressed energies, which are metaphorically represented by the jaguar’s
imprisonment, are not dead; they rather strive beneath the conscious
existence. The repressed life will crack the wall of consciousness, at some
moment, and will appear more threatening and predatory. This is reminiscent
of Jung’s analysis of the return of the repressed desires:
When the discharge of energy either through instinctual or sublimated
channels is blocked it is said to be repressed. Repressed energy
cannot just disappear; it has to go somewhere according to the
principle of conservation of energy. Consequently, it takes up
residence in the consciousness. By adding energy to unconscious
material, the unconscious may become more highly charged than the
conscious ego. When this happens, energy from the unconscious will
tend to flow into the ego, according to the principle of entropy, and
disrupt the rational process. In other words highly energized
unconscious will try to break through the repression, and if they
succeed, the person will behave in an irrational and impulsive
fashion.9
Animals, in Hughes’ poetry, are thus metaphors for a life of instinct and blood
which inhabits man’s unconscious self. Having been deliberately suppressed
by the rational, moral and other conservative religious modes of existence,
such
life
becomes
demonic
and virulent.
Owing
largely to
these
psychoanalytic insights, Hughes presents a nihilistic view of life and treats the
religious and moral in an ironic manner. Here he seems to adopt a position
which is close to that of the Surrealist mode which aims at the disruption of
the rational and moral order of Western culture. The poem consists of the
four-lined stanzas with a recurrent rhyme scheme: abba, cddc, effe, ghhg, ijij.
‘Macaw and Little Miss’ is another poem which focuses on repressed
desires and their violent release. The animal energy or natural impulses are
again presented as caged, suppressed and repressed by the human hand.
Man has not only suppressed his own natural energies but that of animals
also which is vividly revealed in this poem by the macaw which has been
caged by an old lady and her granddaughter. Being imprisoned, the macaw is
30
not able to experience sexual fulfillment and consequently gets enraged and
furious. The enraged macaw, like the jaguar,
. . . bristles in a staring
Combustion, suffers the stoking devils of his eyes.
In the old lady’s parlour, where an aspidistra succumbs
To the musk of faded velvet, he hangs as in clear flames,
Like a torturer’s iron instrument preparing
With dense slow shudderings of greens, yellows, blues,
Crimsoning into the barbs:
Or like the smouldering head that hung
In Killdevil’s brass kitchen, in irons, who had been
Volcano swearing to vomit the world away in black ash,
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘Macaw and Little Miss,’ 13)
Sexual fulfillment is a basic need not only for animals but for human beings as
well. Sexuality is an urge to procreate or what Schopenhauer calls the Will to
Live which should not be hindered. But human beings have ignored their
basic impulses under the burden of moral and rational consciousness. They
equated sexuality with sin. The caged macaw metaphorically presents the lifeforce or the Will to Live in a state of repression in the unconscious mind of
man. The natural energies are burning within revengefully preparing for a
volcanic eruption. This is brilliantly conveyed by using words like
“Combustion,” “stoking,” “flames,” “smouldering,” “Volcano,” and “black ash.”
This poem is also indebted to the Freudian notion of the violent comeback of
the repressed desires. According to Freudian insights, when one’s instinctive
desires are suppressed for a long time, they become violent and threatening.
The repressed natural energies which are metaphorically suggested by the
macaw’s imprisonment are “smouldering” and will one day erupt like a
volcano and reduce the whole world to “black ash.”
In the third stanza, the girl is shown making fun of the macaw and its
natural desires. Although she pretends to live a life of chastity and morality,
she too seeks sexual fulfillment under the disguise of romantic love. She
romanticizes her basic need of sexual fulfillment. She
. . . lies under every full moon,
The spun glass of her body bared and so gleam-still
Her brimming eyes do not tremble or spill
The dream where the warrior comes, lightning and iron,
Smashing and burning and rending towards her loin:
Deep into her pillow her silence pleads.
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘Macaw and Little Miss,’ 13)
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The above lines make it clear that the girl is eager to seek sexual fulfillment
but she has suppressed her desires under moral and rational pretensions. In
Hughes’ poetry, female sexuality is presented as an image of the Mother
Goddess in a state of fertility and procreation. To reject sexuality is to reject
the Goddess and her ability to procreate, to regenerate life. Hence, rejection
of sexual and other impulses is a denial of life itself.
Although human beings have for a long time suppressed the life of
instinct and impulse, it is not completely dead. It reappears causing disruption
in the rational world of man. This is shown metaphorically through the macaw:
All day he stares at his furnace
With eyes red-raw . . .
..........................
Instantly beak, wings, talons crash
The bars in conflagration and frenzy,
And his shriek shakes the house.
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘Macaw and Little Miss,’ 13)
Hence, Hughes’ presentation of animal energy, basic instincts and impulses
emerge as a Dionysian force which rejects the rational and moral codes of the
human world. One can also trace an element of Surrealism in this poem as it
aims at disruption in the rational process of human society.
Through the animal poems, Hughes seeks to penetrate into man’s
unconscious and tries to make contact with the real self. He makes a
shamanic attempt, on behalf of the whole of society, to rebuild a connection
with the suppressed real self of mankind. ‘The Thought-Fox’ is another effort
on the part of the poet, to gain insight into life beyond the physical one. The
poem opens with a remarkable alliterative sound pattern “I imagine this
midnight moment’s forest,” which echoes “I CAUGHT this morning morning’s
minion. . .”10 from Hopkins’ ‘The Windhover.’ The poet imagines the midnight
forest in its extreme loneliness. Even the stars are not visible to mellow the
biting stillness of the moment. Rather,
Something else is alive
..................
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness . . .
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘The Thought-Fox,’ 14)
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One most clearly and widely accepted interpretation of this poem is that it is
about writing a poem which is made clear by the line: “And this blank page
where my fingers move.” But through images and symbols, Hughes explores
a reality other than the visible one. The fox, here, is used as a symbol for the
unseen and the unfrequented world – a world beyond conscious physical
existence which needs to be penetrated. The poet intends not only to capture
the beast but to explore the hidden reality in human beings too. The fox too,
like the jaguar, is the embodiment of the terrifying energies and impulsive
desires alive somewhere in the “darkness”: “Something more near / Though
deeper within darkness.” Since the fox “enters the dark hole of the head” of
man, Hughes is offering, through symbols, a contact with the inner reality
which inhabits man’s unconscious mind. Here he acts like a shaman who, in
primitive societies, was supposed to make a flight to the other world, to his
own unconscious self:
Creativity is necessary for survival and it requires both imagination
and logic. Hughes sees it as the job of any kind of artist to help
release our suppressed creative energies, and he believes that poetry
is particularly effective for this purpose. Often, he sees himself as a
shaman, a kind of tribal medicine man who makes symbolic journeys
to the underworld of the subconscious to bring back lost souls and to
cure sick people. The words, the symbols, the images and the musical
rhythms of the poetry, are, for him, like the shaman’s magic drum
which helps him on his journey. It is these which stir our imagination,
and the effect is a magical release of emotional energy.11
‘The Thought-Fox’ is composed of four-lined stanzas. The lines contain
both feminine and masculine endings. The poem is written in an emotive
language which reflects its speculative mood and tone. The reader can feel
the biting stillness of the midnight forest conveyed through the heavily
stressed alliterative words in the opening lines: “I imagine this midnight
moment’s forest.” The repetition of the vowel sound ‘i’ also adds to the
heaviness of the moment.
In another equally significant poem, ‘The Horses,’ Hughes focuses not
on the predatory aspect of the animals but on their power of endurance in the
face of extreme violence. Nature is shown in its usual harshness. The speaker
dares to go onto “woods” and is struck by the atmosphere of intense violence
– “Evil air,” biting “stillness,” and the “iron light.” In the next few lines, Hughes
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describes the emergence of dawn out of the darkness: “. . . the valleys were
draining the darkness / Till the moorline—blackening dregs of the brightening
grey ─ / Halved the sky ahead . . .” The use of antithetical imagery effectively
paints the picture: “blackening dregs of the brightening grey.” The division
here may also suggest contradictory forces – creation and destruction, life
and death. It may refer to the twin faces of the Goddess – as the Goddess of
love and reproduction, and the Goddess of death and destruction as well. The
Goddess manifests herself through the antagonistic forces of Nature. In a
world haunted by contradictory forces, the speaking persona is surprised to
see that the horses are full of stability and fortitude:
Huge in the dense grey—ten together—
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,
With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.
I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments
Of a grey silent world.
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘The Horses,’ 15)
They do not exhibit predatory rage like that of beasts but exhibit the hawk’s
poise in the face of violent surroundings. The poet metaphorically presents
the horses as “Megalith” to suggest their stability, endurance, and power in
the presence of violent forces of Nature. But they are also described as “Grey
silent fragments / Of a grey silent world.” The term “fragments” immediately
captures the reader’s attention as it stands in sharp contrast to the term
“Megalith.” “Megalith” suggests stability, firmness, and wholeness, while
“fragments” denote disintegration which is the real face of life.
What follows is a very striking description of sunrise. The sun,
generally conceived as a life-giving force, is described rising in a violent way:
. . . Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted
Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘The Horses,’ 15)
Hence, one can see that Hughes is so obsessed with violence that he even
presents sunrise as a violent process which is otherwise associated with
34
warmth and happiness. The imagery is that of disruption and disintegration,
and is close to the Surrealist mode:
. . . Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted
Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open . . .
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘The Horses,’ 15)
In a state of hallucination, the speaker sees “the big planets hanging” and
thinks that he is “Stumbling in the fever of a dream.” It immediately reminds
one of the speaking persona in ‘The Hawk in the Rain’ for whom the Hawk’s
effortless flight in the air appears “as a hallucination.” In sharp contrast, the
horses stand with “hung heads patient as the horizons, / High over valleys, in
the red levelling rays.” The speaking persona, on the other hand, can hardly
bear the “red levelling rays.” Here, one is reminded of Walt Whitman’s poem
‘Song of Myself’ where he portrays man’s inability to face “sun-rise”: “Dazzling
and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me, / If I could not now and
always send sun-rise out of me.”12 Burdened under the consciousness of
vulnerability and mortality, man lacks the hawk’s dynamism and the horse’s
tolerance, which make survival possible when confronted with death and
destruction. The poem ends with the speaker’s desire to use this fascinating
memory of the patient horses to sustain him:
In din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the
faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place
Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.
(The Hawk in the Rain: ‘The Horses,’ 16)
These lines are reminiscent of Wordsworth’s poem ‘Resolution and
Independence’ which
too begins with the evocation of a sun-rise and of all the creatures
which seem to be at one with it. But Wordsworth thinks only of the
years to come, of
Solitude, pain of heart, distress and poverty
madness and death. At this moment he comes upon the Leechgatherer on the moor, an old man who seems, like the horses, to be in
a ‘sort of stupor’ – ‘not all alive nor dead, nor all asleep’. His stillness
immediately reminds the poet of ‘a huge Stone’
Couch’d on the bald top of an eminence.
He seems like one met with in a dream.13
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This poem has loose stanza form. There is no uniformity in the number and
the length of the lines. It does not follow a regular rhyme scheme.
Animals continue to be the focus of attention in Hughes’ second book
of poems Lupercal14. Most of these poems were written during Hughes’ stay
in the United States with Sylvia Plath, his wife, in the year 1957. The book
finally appeared in 1960. The poet’s metaphysical vision abounding in animal
savagery finds expression in this book with greater clarity of thought and
enhanced poetic technique:
No poet has observed animals more accurately, never taking his eyes
from the object, capturing every characteristic up to the limits of
language. So vivid is his rendering, so startling and true his insights,
that the way one looks at a hawk, a thrush or a pike (or, in later
poems, a jaguar, a skylark or a swarm of gnats) is permanently
altered. But the description generates metaphors, and the metaphors
relate the creature to all other creatures and to human experiences
and concepts.15
The major animal poems in this book are ‘February,’ ‘Strawberry Hill,’ ‘A
Dream of Horses,’ ‘Esther’s Tomcat,’ ‘Hawk Roosting,’ ‘The Bull Moses,’ ‘View
of a Pig,’ ‘An Otter,’ ‘Thrushes,’ ‘Bullfrog,’ ‘Pike’ and ‘Lupercalia.’
The poem ‘February,’ with which the collection begins, focuses on the
predatory as well as nurturing energies of which the wolves are an
embodiment. The title of the poem alludes to the dread of winter and also to
the purification and fertility rituals of “Lupercalia”16 which, according to Roman
mythology, is a festival celebrated in the month of February. Hence, the
energies which the wolves exhibit are life threatening on one hand and
purificatory or life-giving on the other. The wolves, like other animals in
Hughes’ poetry, are metaphors for the unconscious creative-destructive
energies of human beings themselves. In this context Ann Skea opines: “To
Hughes, the instinctive, predatory, wild energies that wolves exemplify are
part of our own nature: they are part of the uncivilised prehistoric inheritance
which is still present in our instincts and emotions.”17 Human beings have
suppressed their energies under rational and moral consciousness. But the
energies, killed or suppressed, take on threatening forms and “siege all
thought” through dreams:
36
Now it is the dream cries “Wolf!” where these feet
Print the moonlit doorstep, or run and run
Through the hush of parkland, bodiless, headless;
With small seeming of inconvenience
By day, too, pursue, siege all thought;
(Lupercal: ‘February,’ 13)
Under the burden of metaphorical usage, language is weighed down and
successfully communicates feelings that are eerie. The internally rhymed
words “bodiless” and “headless,” focus on the mysterious and frightening
characteristics of the “Wolf.” The repetition of the word “run” adds to the sense
of urgency present in the poem. The figurative language conveys effectively
the mystical burden of an unintelligible world. The life, which man tried to kill,
survives and roams about in the psyche of mankind. Thus wolf, in this poem,
represents the inevitable predatory energy that haunts the world and the mind
of man:
. . . These feet, deprived,
Disdaining all that are caged, or storied, or pictured,
Through and throughout the true world search
For their vanished head, for the world
Vanished with the head, the teeth, the quick eyes—
Now, lest they choose his head,
(Lupercal: ‘February,’ 13)
The energy of the wolves has either been suppressed as the term “caged”
suggests or modified as the terms “storied” or “pictured” suggest. These
repressed primitive energies refuse to remain “caged,” “storied” or “pictured,”
and re-emerge in order to ensnare the reasonable ways of the world in their
predatory grip. The internally rhymed words like “caged,” “storied” and
“pictured” also provide a verbal rhythm to the poem.
Towards the end, the protagonist is frightened that the wolf will take his
head in its wild grip. He starts making “Wolf-masks” in order to invoke the
creative and destructive energies, and rebuild the connection with the
suppressed reality of the unconscious life of human beings.
‘Strawberry Hill’ is another animal poem which presents the instinctive
life or elemental energies as tamed or suppressed by the human hand. The
animal that figures in the poem is a stoat which, like other animals, is a source
37
of pure instinctive life or one that symbolizes the elemental energies. The title
of the poem, ‘The Strawberry Hill’
was the name of the house which Horace Walpole bought in 1747 and
converted into a monument to the Gothic tastes of the time. He added
battlements, pinnacles and all the other vulgarities which were
supposed to suggest wild Nature, the supernatural, and the romantic,
heroic past. The forces such writers as Walpole trivialized and sought
to tame in their architecture and ‘Gothic’ novels [. . .] are here
represented by a stoat which they expected to dance to their tune.18
The poem satirically presents Walpole’s vain effort to harness the life-force or
natural energies through artificial means, or through other pretensions and
illusions. The stoat not only “‘danced on the lawns’ of Horace Walpole’s
Gothic castle but also ‘bit through grammar and corset’ was nailed to a
door.”19 The natural forces which are represented by the stoat are treated in a
trivial manner in Walpole’s Gothic castle:
A stoat danced on the lawns here
To the music of the maskers;
Drinking the staring hare dry, bit
Through grammar and corset. They nailed to a door
The stoat with the sun in its belly.
(Lupercal: ‘Strawberry Hill,’ 16)
The words like “music,” “maskers,” “grammar” and “corset” are the devices of
artificiality. The alliterative terms like “music-maskers” and “Drinking-dry” hint
at the poet’s mastery over language through which he is able to communicate
the symbolic meanings in a deft manner.
In this poem, Hughes clearly distances himself from Movement poetry
which depicts life as restrained and controlled. Ted Hughes criticizes man’s
vain effort to tame or harness elemental energies. In the second stanza, the
stoat appears carrying “the sun in its belly” and violently counters the
reasonable ways of mankind. This is brilliantly conveyed through the use of
hyperbolic statements and figurative expression of language:
The stoat with the sun in its belly,
But its red unmanageable life
Has licked the stylist out of their skulls,
Has sucked that age like an egg . . .
(Lupercal: ‘Strawberry Hill,’ 16)
The reverberating sound ‘g’ gives a sense of heaviness to the last line of the
above mentioned stanza. The stoat—a mammal of the weasel family, is
38
perhaps the image of Robert Graves’s concept of the White Goddess since it
shares the contradictory qualities of the Goddess. It belongs to the class of
animals who secrete milk to feed their young, and hence is akin to the image
of the White Goddess as the mother. Like the White Goddess, the stoat
appears ferocious since it is a flesh eating mammal. Hence, the stoat, as an
embodiment of the forces of creation and destruction, life and death,
symbolizes the White Goddess who was suppressed by the rational ways of
mankind. The stoat or natural forces, with which the White Goddess is
primarily associated, have
. . . gone off
Along ditches where flies and leaves
Overpower our tongues, got into some grave—
Not a dog to follow it down—
Emerges, thirsting, in far Asia, in Brixton.
(Lupercal: ‘Strawberry Hill,’ 16)
The grave here symbolically refers to the unconscious mind of man where the
natural forces live in a repressed mode and erupt destructively in the course
of time. The forces that seem to have been easily tamed or sent to “some
grave” re-emerge, which is in keeping with Freud’s claim that “There is always
a return of the repressed.”20
‘A Dream of Horses’ is another poem which presents animals as
metaphors for the unconscious animal energies of man himself. The animals
that figure in this poem are the horses. Horses have been encountered earlier
in Hughes’ first collection of poetry The Hawk in the Rain. The horses stand
for endurance and stability in the poem ‘The Horses.’ In ‘A Dream of Horses,’
the horses are enraged and wild: “Out of the night that gulfed beyond the
palace-gate / There shook hooves and hooves and hooves of horses: / Our
horses battered their stalls; their eyes jerked white.” The repetition of the word
“hooves” which internally rhymes with “horses” along with an alliterative force
suggests not only the sheer physical presence of the horses but also their
violent but vital energies. These animal energies also stand for the
suppressed unconscious reality of human beings themselves. Since the poem
is about a dream of horses, it can be argued that human beings momentarily
come in contact with their own brute energies that lie repressed in the
39
unconscious mind of man through the world of dreams. A. Alvarez points out
that the horses or “Their brute world is part physical, part state of mind.”21
The poem is hence a kind of plunge into the psyche of man. Human beings
are frightened by this contact with the energies which are part of their own
psyche and are revealed through dreams:
And we ran out, mice in our pockets and straw in our hair,
Into darkness that was avalanching to horses
And a quake of hooves. Our lantern’s little orange flare
Made a round mask of our each sleep-dazed face,
Bodiless, or else bodied by horses
That whinnied and bit and cannoned the world from its place.
..........................................
We crouched at our lantern, our bodies drank the din,
And we longed for a death trampled by such horses
As every grain of the earth had hooves and mane.
(Lupercal: ‘A Dream of Horses,’ 21)
The repetitive use of the sound ‘i,’ in the fourth stanza, suggests forceful
energies which overpower man in his dreams. As a result man is shocked and
bewildered: “We must have fallen like drunkards into a dream / Of listening,
lulled by the thunder of the horses. / We awoke stiff; broad day had come.”
The word, “drunkards,” refers to the unstable condition of human beings after
facing the “thunder of the horses” – the vital energies. Getting frightened and
shattered by the forces, human beings long for death. This longing for death
ironically suggests their separation from the brute energies which form the
inner reality of their own selves. The animal energies are the manifestations of
the Schopenhauerian concept of the Will to Live. But, man has denied these
energies and as a result they lie repressed in the unconscious. The
separation of man from this inner reality causes pain and suffering. Therefore,
a descent into his own unconscious self may enable him to establish a
connection between his inner reality and the forces at work in the outer world.
Hughes tries to reinstate man’s relation with the animal energies and with his
own unconscious self. The reader feels the presence of the horses throughout
the poem. This is achieved through the repetition of the word “horses” at the
end of every second line of each stanza. The poem is written in three-lined
stanza form with a recurrent rhyme scheme: aba, cbc, dbd, ebe, fbf, gbg, hbh,
ibi, jbj.
40
‘Esther’s Tomcat,’ yet another poem of Hughes, focuses on repressed
natural energies and their violent release. In this poem, “Hughes gives a
version of the legend of Barnburgh knight.”22 In the original “legend the knight
and the cat were both found dead, locked together”23 but the tomcat in this
poem is not dead; it rather represents a life which is inviolable:
A tomcat sprang at a mounted knight,
Locked round his neck like a trap of hooks
While the knight rode fighting its clawing and bite.
After hundreds of years the stain’s there
On the stone where he fell, dead of the tom:
That was at Barnborough. The tomcat still
Grallochs odd dogs on the quiet,
Will take the head clean off your simple pullet,
Is unkillable . . .
(Lupercal: ‘Esther’s Tomcat,’ 23)
Initially, the poet presents a humorous picture of the tomcat which lies with
“tattered” eyes and with “battered” head and seems without “eyes” and
“mouth.” He sleeps “Like a bundle of old rope and iron.” Suddenly he appears
as a powerful spirit: “. . . Then reappear / His eyes, green as ringstones: he
yawns wide red, / Fangs fine as a lady’s needle and bright.” The poet again
metaphorically presents the violent return of repressed energies. The brilliant
use of the language enables the poet to present two different situations. One
set of internally rhymed words “tattered-battered” suggest the repressed state
of energies while the other set “wide-red” suggest the violent outbreak of the
energies from the state of repression. Here the tomcat is converted into a
bundle of frightful energy due to a long period of repression. It looks ferocious
and its teeth are sharp which were earlier “tattered” and “battered” by “wars”
and “wives.” The terms “wars” and “wives,” which are highlighted by the use of
alliteration, actually refer to the futility of the human world which suppressed
natural energies embodied in the tomcat. But, the tomcat/the suppressed
energies make a violent return according to the principle of the return of the
repressed. Since the tomcat’s body is in complete correspondence to the Will
to Live, it saves itself from the dog’s furious advances and also from
gunshots. It instinctively fights against death. Hence the poem reinforces life’s
importance over death which is very close to a Dionysian force or
41
Baudrillard’s Pataphysics. The tomcat as a life-force or the Will to Live is
“unkillable.” It is subject to death as a “phenomenon of will’’24 not as a force to
live. It appears that man has completely killed the life-force, i.e., the Will to
Live by adopting moral and rational measures but the Will is an ever-living fire
which cannot be done away with. Thus animals represent life which was once
thought to be dead but survives somewhere and will come to the fore one
day. This is referred to as “outcry” and stands for the violent outburst of
energy after a long period of suppression.
The poem ‘Hawk Roosting,’ through which Ted Hughes earned great
fame, is written in the first person, supposedly from the point-of-view of the
hawk. It presents an unrelenting aspect of Nature. It is commonly believed
that the poem has some historical implications as the hawk here reflects the
spirit of some dictator, a tyrant like Hitler, particularly in these lines:
My manners are tearing off heads—
The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:
The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.
(Lupercal: ‘Hawk Roosting,’ 26)
But such historical implications vanish when the poem is read, keeping in
mind what Hughes himself states in an interview given to the London
Magazine in January 1971. He said of the hawk:
The bird is accused of being a fascist…the symbol of some horrible
totalitarian genocidal dictator. Actually what I had in mind was that in
this hawk Nature is thinking. Simply Nature. It’s not so simple maybe
because Nature is no longer so simple. I intended some Creator like
the Jehovah in Job but more feminine. When Christianity kicked the
devil out of Job what they actually kicked out was Nature…and Nature
became the devil. He doesn’t sound like Isis, mother of the gods,
which he is. He sounds like Hitler’s familiar spirit.25
The poem aptly reveals the poet’s vision of violence in the heart of Nature.
Nature in his poetry is an incarnation of the “mother of the gods” who
becomes amoral when deceived by the God of Christianity. The hawk’s
savagery is a part of the creative and destructive forces at work in the whole
42
cosmos which is understood in terms of this enraged mother goddess. This
gives an insight into what can be called the psychological undercurrents of the
poem. The Goddess that got repressed in the unconscious mind of mankind
comes back according to the Freudian notion of “the return of the
repressed.”26 The devilish force in Nature, as presented in Hughes’ poetry,
could be understood in terms of this return of the unconscious content, i.e. the
unrelenting and amoral powers of the Goddess.
The hawk’s savagery is by instinct a struggle against death; hence it
reveals the conflict between life and death. This vision of the poet also springs
from his awareness of Schopenhauer’s vision of total physical existence as an
expression of furious assertion of the Will to Live. The hawk is in complete
kinship with its natural impulse. No rational ways or “falsifying dream” stops
him from his instinctive life:
I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
(Lupercal: ‘Hawk Roosting,’ 26)
The hawk’s predatory instinct enables him to survive. The predator’s ferocious
advances are the demands of the hungry Will. The fearful ways of the hawk
are the expression of the Will which cannot be streamlined by any rational
viewpoint. Such universal power cannot be channelized by our sense of
morals. In this poem man-made false values and the natural energy of the
hawk are brought in sharp contrast:
This antithesis between the awful certitude of will-driven instinct and
the fancy-prone irresolution of human reason provides the animating
tension of “Hawk Roosting.” The “hooked head and hooked feet” of
the predator represent, like the human brain, organic “objectifications”
of the rapacious will, but they are free from the “falsifying dream” that
debilitates the brain and cause it to send delayed or faulty commands
to the extremities by which it survives.27
The contrast between the rational and pretentious ways of mankind and the
instinctive life of animals is suggested by the vocabulary which can be divided
into two different sets. Man’s indulgence in illusions and pretensions is
suggested by “falsifying dream,” “sophistry,” “arguments.” The words such as
“hooked head,” “hooked feet,” “perfect kills” suggest the hawk’s vitality. The
“falsifying dream” and “sophistry” in one’s body distract him from fulfilling the
43
demands of the Will. The hawk’s voice is the voice of the Will to Live which
appears in the predatory urge of the animals and is the expression of the Will
to Live at the phenomenal level. One apparent expression of this Will is the
instinct of hunger that characterizes human as well as animal life.
Commenting on the instinct of hunger, Lawrence expresses a similar idea in
his prose work ‘Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine’:
Food, food, how strangely it relates man with the animal and
vegetable world! How important it is! And how fierce is the fight that
goes on around it. The same when one skins a rabbit, and takes out
the inside, one realizes what an enormous part of the animal,
comparatively, is intestinal, what a big part of him is just for foodapparatus; for living on other organisms.28
It is for the enactment of the Will to Live that Hughes presents the whole
surroundings in such a way that they favour the hawk’s persistent predatory
impulse:
The convenience of the high trees!
The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.
(Lupercal: ‘Hawk Roosting,’ 26)
Hyperbolic statements are used to characterize the body organs of the
predator as the visible expression of the impulse of hunger:
My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot
(Lupercal: ‘Hawk Roosting,’ 26)
Thus through the predatory impulse of the hawk, the poet depicts Nature as
amoral and unrelenting, which seeks no justification, permits “no change” and
revengefully counters the reasonable ways of mankind.
‘The Bull Moses’ is an attempt to re-establish a connection between
man and his suppressed inner (animal) self. The poem transports the reader
from his physical world of rational consciousness to the depths of his
unconscious self. It begins with an observer leaning over the “half-door” of the
cowshed and looking through “the byre’s / Blaze of darkness” and he
suddenly looking “Backward into the head.” This shows a sense of connection
between “the byre’s / Blaze of darkness” and his unconscious mind. The use
of oxymoron, “Blaze of darkness,” highlights the darkness. The theme has
44
been brought out with the help of animal imagery. The animal that figures in
this poem is the bull. Ted Hughes said in an interview with the Guardian on
23rd March, 1965 that “The bull represents what the observer sees when he
looks into his own head . . .”29
In the second stanza, the observer feels the haunting physical
presence of the bull: “. . . the warm weight of his breathing, / The ammoniac
reek of his litter, the hotly-tongued / Mash of his cud, steamed against me.”
The bull belongs to the world of darkness which is “depth / Beyond star.” This
sensuous physical perception of the bull gives way to an insight into another
world which can be called the spiritual or the unconscious world:
Then, slowly, as onto the mind’s eye—
The brow like masonry, the deep-keeled neck:
Something come up there onto the brink of the gulf,
Hadn’t heard of the world, too deep in itself to be called to,
(Lupercal: ‘The Bull Moses,’ 37)
Through “the mind’s eye,” the observer comes in contact with the other world
which the bull inhabits. He sees the bull which reaches “onto the brink of the
gulf.” The world represented by the bull is the world of darkness which stands
for the unconscious mind of man. Man is unable to fill the gap between the
physical world and the world beyond it, which the bull inhabits. Since human
beings have imprisoned themselves within a rational and moral culture, that
is, the symbolic order, they are unable to perceive the reality which exists
outside this symbolic order. Through animal imagery, the poet takes a
shamanic flight into another world beyond the physical one in order to
perceive the truth. In this poem, “the brink of the gulf” is reminiscent of “Axis of
the World”30 through which a shaman takes a flight to the other world.
To the observer, the bull appears extremely submissive, unlike the
other animals in Hughes’ poetry. The bull’s indifference at being overpowered
by the farmers appears strange. This indifference shows that the bull has
forgotten his forefathers who had wildly roamed “the ages and continents.”
The bull’s submissiveness metaphorically represents the repressed life of
instinct and blood in the unconscious mind of human beings. The persona is
not able to have an access to “the locked black of his powers.” The bull
apparently appears submissive and tamed but there is “something /
45
Deliberate in his leisure, some beheld future / Founding in his quite.” The use
of internally rhymed words, “leisure”- “future” immediately catch the reader’s
attention. Though the term “leisure” suggests a moment of calm and quiet but
there is something burning within, which will burst out in “future.” The tamed
bull like the caged jaguar represents the energies which are repressed or
seemed dead but are alive in the unconscious mind of man and will violently
break out from this state of repression. Hughes’ language particularly
highlights the image of darkness: “Blaze of darkness,” “Blackness is depth /
Beyond star,” and “the locked black of his powers.” Here the imagery of
darkness suggests the repressed energies in the unconscious mind of
mankind.
The persona “kept the door wide, / Closed it after him and pushed the
bolt.” One feels the weight of the verbs, “Closed-pushed,” which suggest the
speaker’s deliberate attempt to seek a passive escape from reality. It reveals
the inability of man to fill the gap between the world of his consciousness and
the world which is inhabited by the bull, which also forms the inner reality of
his unconscious being. Keith Sager points out that “The gulf between man
and animal is also the gulf between civilized man and his animal self, which is
also his angelic self – the only self capable of recognizing a divinity in the
darkness and being at one with it.”31
‘View of a Pig’ is another animal poem which takes as its theme the
reality of death. In most of the animal poems, Hughes focuses on survival, the
Will to Live. But being aware of the contradictory forces of creation and
destruction at work in the universe, he simultaneously deals with death. The
theme of death has also been dealt with earlier in the title poem of his first
collection of poetry The Hawk in the Rain. Death is presented in both the
poems as a part of the material processes of life and death, creation and
destruction.
The poem begins with a “factual description”32 of a dead pig lying on a
hand cart:
The pig lay on a barrow dead.
It weighed, they said, as much as three men.
Its eyes closed, pink white eyelashes.
Its trotters stuck straight out.
46
Such weight and thick pink bulk
Set in death seemed not just dead.
It was less than lifeless, further off.
It was like a sack of wheat.
(Lupercal: ‘View of a Pig,’ 40)
The physical description of the dead pig is given by the persona in a series of
statements using end-stopped lines. The use of the simile, “It was like a sack
of wheat” suggests not only “. . . bulk and weight; it expresses the way the pig
now seems unanimal, neither living nor dead, just material.”33 This expresses
the idea that once life or the Schopenhauerian notion of the Will to Live
passes from the body, physical existence does not really matter. The body
becomes “less than lifeless.” The persona thinks that he is not feeling a sense
of guilt for the dead pig. “The man is breaking taboos in thinking this, and
concentrates on the fact that he is missing the normal response, the usual
guilt that affirms a link with death.”34 People usually respond to the dead with
moral pretensions which the persona does not feel in this case of the dead
pig: “I thumped it without feeling remorse. / One feels guilty insulting the dead,
/ Walking on graves . . .” After death the pig has become “A poundage of lard
and pork.” All the “earthly pleasure” that the pig would have enjoyed during his
life ends with his death. The persona, in the poem, remembers how the pig
was so “faster and nimbler than a cat” in his life. He also says:
Pigs must have hot blood, they feel like ovens.
Their bite is worse than a horse’s—
They chop a half-moon clean out.
They eat cinders, dead cats.
(Lupercal: ‘View of a Pig,’ 41)
The life and energy present in the pig was reflected in his predatory instinct, to
eat in order to survive. The furious animal energy present in the pig is
comparable to that of the sow, in Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Sow,’ who is able to
“swill / The seven troughed seas and every earthquaking continent.”35 Besides
the Schopenhauerian vision, the poem also reveals an element of
Existentialism. Despite the fact that death is inevitable, one should be full of
energy or the life-force the way that animals are full of it. Animals are also not
conscious of their impending death the way human beings are. Death comes
to them as a part of the scheme of things. The poem is written in a four-lined
47
stanza form with no recurrent rhyme scheme and uniformity in the length of
the lines.
‘An Otter’ is a poem which begins with a brilliant physical description of
an otter and moves towards greater metaphorical implications. The otter, a
fish eating mammal, is blessed with a body easily adaptable to aquatic life:
Underwater eyes, an eel’s
Oil of water body, neither fish nor beast is the otter:
Four-legged yet water-gifted, to outfish fish;
With webbed feet and long ruddering tail
And a round head like an old tomcat.
(Lupercal: ‘An Otter,’ 46)
The otter’s “webbed feet” and “long ruddering tail” enable him to hunt in the
water with ease. Being a “Four-legged” creature, he can also roam about on
the land like other beasts but this predator prefers fish. He is therefore
referred to in the poem as “neither fish nor beast . . . / Of neither water nor
land.” The otter shows anguish for the lost world he had once belonged to:
. . . Wanders, cries;
Gallops along land he no longer belongs to;
Re-enters the water by melting.
Of neither water nor land. Seeking
Some world lost when first he dived, that he cannot come at
since,
(Lupercal: ‘An Otter,’ 46)
The otter’s anguish metaphorically represents man’s existential anxiety. Man
is caught between his own dual nature, his physical versus spiritual self and
his conscious versus unconscious self. Unable to reconcile his dual nature,
man suffers emotionally which is metaphorically represented by the otter in
this poem. It is this aspect which Keith Sagar highlights: “. . . the otter, crying
without answer for his lost paradise, is surely, in part, an image of the duality
of man, neither body nor spirit, neither beast nor angel, yearning for his Eden
home where death was not.”36 Hughes ironically presents the condition of
modern man who neither possesses the brute energies nor enjoys the eternal
blessed life of Eden. He cries for the lost life of Eden. Now he is fallen and
eternally damned with no hope of redemption. He lives in a situation that is
absurd. Hughes seems to suggest that brute energies are essential for
survival in such a violent, disillusioned world but man is not even able to
recognize his brute energies that lie repressed in his unconscious mind.
48
The second part of this poem highlights other metaphorical implications
of the otter’s dual nature. The otter, “neither fish nor beast” of “neither water
nor land,” is also subjected to the natural processes of material reality: life and
death, creation and destruction. It unfolds Hughes’s vision of the creative and
the destructive, of the life-assuring and the life-denying forces always at work
in the cosmos. The otter’s duality of nature is also highlighted when he hunts
and is hunted. The force of life – to hunt, and the force of death – to be hunted
unfolds the mystery of the creative-destructive principle at work in the
universe. Water gives life as well as death to the otter by nourishing and
drowning him. Land gives him a physical shape and length and also makes
him a subject of prey:
. . . The otter belongs
In double robbery and concealment—
From water that nourishes and drowns, and from land
That gave him his length and the mouth of the hound.
(Lupercal: ‘An Otter,’ 47)
Hence, it can be argued that the poem is an attempt to unfold and reconcile
opposites: the conscious and the unconscious, life and death, creation and
destruction, angelic and beastly.
‘Thrushes’ is also an animal poem which focuses on animal energies
and man’s pretensions. The poem opens with a brilliant description of a
display of energies by the thrushes:
Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn,
More coiled steel than living—a poised
Dark deadly eye, those delicate legs
Triggered to stirrings beyond sense—with a start, a bounce, a
stab
Overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing.
(Lupercal: ‘Thrushes,’ 52)
The furious advances of the thrushes emanate from a kinship with the
immediacy of the act of the Will to Live. The alliterative words “Dark deadly,”
which characterize the predators’ eyes, reveal the ferocity of the Will to Live.
The term “delicate” stands in contrast to “Triggered” and “stirrings”: “. . .` those
delicate legs / Triggered to stirrings beyond sense . . .” The “delicate legs” of
the thrushes are assigned with forceful vital actions as the terms “Triggered”
and “stirrings’ suggest. The thrushes do not show inactivity; rather they exhibit
49
unhindered enactment of energies: “No indolent procrastinations and no
yawning stares, / No sighs or head-scratchings. Nothing but bounce and stab
/ And a ravening second.” The language in the above lines sheds a critical
light on human habits of indolence and inactivity. Phrases such as “indolent
procrastinations,” “yawning stares,” and “sighs or head-scratchings” suggest
the imprisonment of animal energies within the wall of the unconscious mind
of man. Human beings are not capable of the thrushes’ breathtaking display
of energies: “bounce and stab.” Since the animal energies in Hughes’ poetry
are often seen in the light of Schopenhauerian vision of the Will to Live, it can
be argued that the thrushes’ voluntary motions are the individualized
expressions of an immediacy and urgency of the act of the Will to Live. The
individuality of the actions is highlighted by the use of caesura: "with a start, //
a bounce, // a stab.” According to Schopenhauer:
. . . the whole series of actions, and consequently every individual act,
and also its condition, the whole body itself which accomplishes it,
and therefore also the process through which and in which it exists,
are nothing but the manifestation of the will, the becoming visible, the
objectification of the will.37
Though the thrushes have “delicate legs’ yet they are capable of furious
advances which are comparable to the vigour of a “bullet.” The poet wonders
what gives them the “automatic Purpose”:
Is it their single-mind-sized skulls, or a trained
Body, or genius, or a nestful of brats
Gives their days this bullet and automatic
Purpose? . . .
(Lupercal: ‘Thrushes,’ 52)
The predators are not conscious of the guiding principle behind their voluntary
acts. Animals, not by “knowledge,”38 but by instinct are drawn to their
“automatic purpose.” The Will is actively present in “the instinct and
mechanical skill of animals”39 who are not conscious of their motives but
instinctively enact the Will to Live. The vision deepens when the thrushes’
vigour is compared with the energies exhibited by “Mozart’s brain” and “the
shark’s mouth.”
The poem opens with the fierce energies of the thrushes and ends with
a deeper insight into human nature. The last stanza presents man in contrast
with the thrushes:
50
With a man it is otherwise. Heroisms on horseback,
Outstripping his desk-diary at a broad desk,
Carving at a tiny ivory ornament
For years: his act worships itself—while for him,
Though he bends to be blent in the prayer, how loud and
above what
Furious spaces of fire do the distracting devils
Orgy and hosannah, under what wilderness
Of black silent waters weep.
(Lupercal: ‘Thrushes,’ 52)
Man’s indulgence in acts of complacency and pride, “Heroisms” and
“worships,” cannot satisfy him unless he recognizes what tensions build up
under “silent waters” and finds a sense of continuity with that. Here, “silent
waters” metaphorically stand for the unconscious mind of man. By indulging in
rational and moral pretensions, man cannot escape “the distracting devils”,
“Orgy and hosannah.” By “the distracting devils” the poet means the energies
which lie repressed in the unconscious mind and become threatening. “Orgy
and hosannah” suggest Hughes’ perception of the energies as a source of
horror and adoration. These repressed energies, which are creative as well as
destructive, “weep” under the “black silent” world of the unconscious mind of
man. Keith Sagar very aptly describes man’s inability to perceive a sense of
kinship with his inner reality:
Beyond the little area lit by his consciousness, his desk-lamp, is a vast
darkness peopled by demons. The distracting devils which sin, praise,
or despair are those suppressed powers within any man which will not
let him be satisfied with the heroisms he invents at his desk, or with
any enclosed self-worshiping activity. A man totally given over to
those powers, genius or hero, is a madman or automaton. A man
totally cut off from them denies, trivializes or perverts the life that is in
him, drops out of the divine circuit from which alone come the
energies to destroy or create.40
‘Bullfrog’ is a poem about fierce animal energy. As the title makes it
obvious, the animal that figures in this poem is the bullfrog. The imagery
suggests that something terrible, ghostly and threatening, is emerging out of
the fogs and the darkness. The narrator is surprised to see the rat-sized
creature - bullfrog which is capable of pumping out “fogs full of horn—a threat
/ As of a liner looming,” pouring out his “gouts of darkness” and “belching out
black cloud / And a squall of gudgeon and lilies.” These hyperbolic
characteristics of the bullfrog, metaphorically, suggest the wild energies
51
coming out from a state of repression, from the dark depth of the unconscious
mind. Here, the bullfrog resembles Blake’s tiger, in the poem ‘The Tyger.’
Both the tiger and the bullfrog metaphorically represent energy or the natural
impulse. The bullfrog’s furious ways which resemble that of a “wounded god”
suggests a sense of revenge. What Hughes said of the hawk in ‘Hawk
Roosting’ is that it is Nature which speaks through the hawk is true of most of
the animals in his poetry. Nature for Hughes is not just a sensual perception
of flora and fauna but a vision which springs from a metaphysical and
psychological depth. Nature to him is a manifestation of a feminine deity who
is divine as well as demonic. He opines: “When Christianity kicked the devil
out of Job what they actually kicked out was Nature . . . and Nature became
the devil.”41 This revengeful devilish part of Nature which represents the
suppressed feminine deity breaks out from the state of repression and speaks
through the terrifying animals that figure in Hughes’ poetry. The bullfrog is one
such animal.
The poem ‘Pike’ reinforces the creative-destructive energies which are
part of our life though they exist in a concealed manner. The poem is a
celebration of those instinctive energies which the pikes exhibit and which are
also present in the deep psyche of man. It begins with a physical description
of the pikes and their instinctive predatory quality:
Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.
Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.
(Lupercal: ‘Pike,’ 56)
The characteristics of the pikes, in the first stanza, are suggested through
striking words which have a common reverberating consonantal sound ‘g’.
Pikes are the “Killers from the egg.” They are predators by instinct. Their
predatory acts are nothing but a matter of survival i.e. Schopenhauerian vision
of the Will to Live. The “parts” refer to the body organs of the predators which
individually manifest the Will to Live. The term “perfect” is used in the sense of
52
perfect kinship with their instincts and impulses. The “dance,” in the poem,
suggests the urgency of the predatory movements in “all parts” of the body of
the predators. The pikes, which are small fishes, are surprised to see their
own “grandeur” in terms of their fierce energy. They are “silhouette / Of
submarine delicacy and horror.” The fierce energies of the pikes are the mirror
of the creative-destructive forces which inhabit the unconscious mind of man.
This is affirmed by Mathew D. Fisher: “The final terror of the pike is that we
recognize . . . the violent energy that permeates its world – and our own.”42
Ted Hughes is often at his best when he locates contradictory qualities like
beauty and terror in the various aspects of Nature. He combines, in his poetry,
Wordsworth’s perception of beauty and Tennyson’s vision of horror in the
different aspects of Nature. Since Hughes is aware of ever-striving creative
and destructive forces in the universe, he presents the world of Nature as
threatening as well as nurturing.
The third stanza of the poem locates a burning fire under the surface of
the ponds:
In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads—
Gloom of their stillness:
Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards.
Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds
(Lupercal: ‘Pike,’ 56)
The life beneath the “stillness” of the pond’s surface is “watching upwards.”
The whole process metaphorically refers to the life which inhabits man’s
unconscious self which is now “watching upwards” that is it is trying to come
to the surface and be part of conscious existence.
The fourth stanza again highlights the individual body organs of the
pikes and their fierce advances:
The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs
Not to be changed at this date;
A life subdued to its instrument;
The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.
(Lupercal: ‘Pike,’ 56)
The jaws of the pike refer to the instinct of hunger which is there by birth and
has not changed till date. The body organs are here presented as an
“instrument” for the enactment of the Will to Live. The “gills,” the pectoral fins
of the pikes and their propellant moves suggest an instinctive urge for life. The
53
fifth, sixth and seventh stanzas highlight the conflict inherent in the nature of
the Will itself. The devouring instinct presents a sort of tension and conflict
amongst the phenomena which is related to the matter of survival. The death
of one is the life of another. What generates a conflict is the natural order, to
eat and to be eaten. In this context Bryan Magee opines:
In the animal world the war of all against all is a struggle in which one
manifestation of the will survives by devouring, by literally eating,
another. It is a hungry will, insatiable and unassuageable, and the
will’s phenomena have only each other to feed upon, for there is
nothing else in the world. In this sense the will devours, and can
devour only, itself.43
The last four stanzas talk about the poet’s act of fishing into the “Stilled
legendary depth”:
A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them—
Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast
But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,
Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching.
(Lupercal: ‘Pike,’ 57)
The act of fishing here is metaphorically analogous to the ability of the poet’s
imagination to hunt in the darkness of the unconscious self. Fishing in “Stilled
legendary depth” which is “as deep as England” suggests not only the poet’s
plunge into his own unconscious self but the unconscious of the whole of
mankind in general. He reveals that beneath this civilized conscious physical
existence of mankind, there exist wild primitive energies which are impatiently
“watching,” ready to come to the surface and be part of conscious existence.
The poet here is a hunter but he himself is hunted by the darkness within the
54
deeper level of the self. Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts refer to another
dimension of the poem:
The poem anticipates and authenticates Hughes’s later more explicit
preoccupation with shamanism: the pike, like the thought-fox and
most of his other animals, is akin to the ‘helping spirits’ of the shaman,
which often take animal form, arousing feelings of terror, and act as
intermediaries between the shaman and the mysterious pre-conscious
animal world.44
Through animal imagery, the poet journeys into another mysterious world. His
preoccupation with shamanism is an effort to re-establish a relationship with
the unconscious self. This is an effort on the part of the poet to heal the
wound which modern man suffers due to his alienation from his unconscious,
predatory, animal energies. The last two stanzas describe the shamanic
experience which takes man from an ordinary world to the world of darkness,
i.e. the unconscious world which is the seat of metaphysical truth.
‘Lupercalia,’ with which the volume ends, is the title poem of the
collection since the book itself is entitled Lupercal. The poem is an attempt to
resolve the tensions presented through all the animal poems in the first two
volumes. In this poem an attempt is made to bring human beings in contact
with the vital energies that inhabit the unconscious mind, through rituals and
festivity. Hughes suggests that myths and rituals can transform destructive
energies and make them constructive. In this context he said in an interview
given to Egbert Faas for the London Magazine in January, 1971:
Any form of violence—any form of vehement activity—invokes the
bigger energy, the elemental power circuit of the Universe. Once the
contact has been made—it becomes difficult to control. Something
from beyond ordinary human activity enters. When the wise men
know how to create rituals and dogma, the energy can be contained.
When the old rituals and dogma have lost credit and disintegrated,
and no new ones have been formed, the energy cannot be contained,
and so its effect is destructive—and that is the position with us. And
that is why force of any kind frightens our rationalist, humanist style of
outlook. In the old world God and divine power were invoked at any
cost—life seemed worthless without them. In the present world we
dare not invoke them—we wouldn’t know how to use them or stop
them destroying us. We have settled for the minimum practical energy
and illumination—anything bigger introduces problems, the demons
get hold of it. That is the psychological stupidity, the ineptitude, of the
rigidly rationalist outlook—it’s a form of hubris, and we’re paying the
traditional price. If you refuse the energy, you are living a kind of
death. If you accept the energy, it destroys you. What is the
alternative? To accept the energy, and find methods of turning it to
55
good, of keeping it under control—rituals, the machinery of religion.
The old method is the only one.45
According to Roman mythology “Lupercalia”46 were festivals celebrated
to vitalize one’s life. Their aim was “purificatory.”47 It was believed that these
rituals would purge man of his infertility or barrenness. In the rituals,
Goats and he-goats were sacrificed, and perhaps dogs. After the
animals were immolated two youths were led to altar. The priests
touched their brows with the bloody knife and wiped them with a wad
of wool soaked in milk, after which the youths would burst out
laughing. The priests of the college of the Luperci, half naked, draped
only in the skins of the sacrificed goats, would then perform a
ceremony during which women who wanted to become pregnant
would hold out their hands and turn their backs to be struck with a
whip of goat’s hide.48
Animals play a dominating role in all the rituals taken up in this poem.
Violence lies at the core of the rituals which invoke the inner creativedestructive energies. The poem contains four parts; each is well tuned to the
rituals referred to. The first part deals with the dog, the second with the barren
women, the third with the goats, and the last one with the athletes. In the first
part of the poem man’s rational outlook is criticized. The dog “held man’s
reasonable ways / Between its teeth.” The second part of the poem refers to
the woman who lacks a sense of continuity with the life of blood and impulse
like that of the animals. She suffers barrenness and infertility:
This woman’s as from death’s touch: a surviving
Barrenness: she abides; perfect,
But flung from the wheel of the living,
The past killed in her, the future plucked out.
(Lupercal: ‘Lupercalia,’ 61)
It is through these rituals that the woman gets back her fertility. The third part
highlights the vital energies of the goats:
Rustle of their dry hooves, dry patter,
Wind in the oak-leaves; and their bent
Horns, stamp, sudden reared stare
Startle women . . .
(Lupercal: ‘Lupercalia,’ 62)
These energies that the goats possess and the woman lacks are restored to
her by striking her with whips made of goat-skin. The last part deals with the
athletes who whipped the woman in order to transform her into “the figure of
racers.” In Hughes’ poetry, the athletes or racers are referred to as having a
56
sense of power which is reflected in their vigorous and vital moves during
athletic performances, as exemplified in the poem “Acrobats” wherein these
energies find full expression:
Among ropes and dark heights
Spot-lights sparkle those silver postures:
(The trapeze beginning to swing)
Casually they lean out
Over eyes opened deeper
Than the floored drop. Then fling
Out onto nothing, snap, jerk
Fulcrumed without fail
On axes immaterial as
Only geometry should use.
(Lupercal: ‘Acrobats,’ 34)
The athletes in ‘Lupercalia’ exhibit the hawk’s “poise” between the earth and
the sky. While in the air, they emerge free from earthly limitations: “. . . Their
attitudes— / A theorem of flung effort, blades: / Nothing mortal falters their
poise.” These athletes strike women in order to equip them with the racer’s
unearthly grace and poise. The poem ends with a kind of prayer to the “Maker
of the world” for the blessed touch.
Animal life is once again highlighted in Ted Hughes’ third collection of
poetry Wodwo49, which appeared in 1967. The title of this book Wodwo is
drawn from the medieval romance entitled Sir Gawain and the Green Knight:
Sumwhile with wormes he werres, and with wolves als
Sumwhile with wodwos, that woned in the knarres,
Bothe with bulles and beres, and bores otherwhile,
And etains, that him anelede of the heghe felle.
(Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knight, 720-4)
Sometimes with serpents he fought, and with wolves also
Sometimes with wodwos, that lived in the rocks,
Both with bulls and bears, and at other times with boars,
And giants that pursued him on the high fells.50
The above lines also constitute the epigraph of the Wodwo collection. Ted
Hughes explains “Wodwo” as “some sort of goblin creature” which is “a sort of
half-man half-animal spirit of the forests.”51 The poet’s attempt to unify the
image of man and beast reveals a clear development not only in the approach
to the mythical pattern of the book but also in the total structure of the thought
process. It is another attempt to re-establish man’s relationship with the world
of animals or the life of pure instinct and blood. Animal imagery is present in a
number of poems such as ‘Ghost Crabs,’ ‘Second Glance at a Jaguar,’ ‘A
57
Vegetarian,’ ‘The Bear,’ ‘Song of a Rat,’ ‘Skylarks,’ and ‘Gnat-Psalm’ in a
significant manner.
The poem ‘Ghost Crabs’ focuses on the unconscious life of mankind
which is here represented by the crabs. The crabs emerge from the sea’s
dark depth. The imagery of depth and darkness suggests the inner
unconscious self of man:
At nightfall, as the sea darkens,
A depth darkness thickens, mustering from the gulfs and the
submarine badlands,
To the sea’s edge . . .
(Wodwo: ‘Ghost Crabs,’ 149)
Words like “darkens,” “darkness” and “thickens” not only work at the
metaphorical level, but also provide verbal rhythm to the poem. The poem
uses words such as “gulfs” and “submarine” to suggest life beyond conscious
existence. The submerged life in the dark depth of the unconscious mind is
now “mustering from the gulfs and the submarine badlands / To the sea’s
edge,” i.e. towards the surface of the conscious existence of human beings.
The crabs, which are referred to here as “Giant Crabs” and “ghost crabs,” are
coming slowly to the surface, and remind one of the “rough beast,”52 in Yeats’
‘The Second Coming.’ The beast in Yeats’ poem is revealed coming slowly to
the surface with a “lion body and the head of a man, / A gaze blank and
pitiless as the sun.”53 In the context of Hughes’ vision, it is the second coming
of the life which was once suppressed somewhere in the darkness of the
unconscious mind of man. This life emerges in violent forms and giants and
ghosts are manifestations of this way of life:
Giant crabs, under flat skulls, staring inland
Like a packed trench of helmets.
Ghosts, they are ghost-crabs.
They emerge
An invisible disgorging of the sea’s cold
Over the man who strolls along the sands.
They spill inland, into the smoking purple
Of our woods and towns – a bristling surge
Of tall and staggering spectres
Gliding like shocks through water.
(Wodwo: ‘Ghost Crabs,’ 149-50)
The crabs make a “surge” into “our woods and towns” and glide through “Our
walls” and “our bodies” which are of “no problem to them.” They keep
58
pressing “through our nothingness.” The term “nothingness,” here, refers to
the futile life with which the modern man is occupied. The crabs intrude upon
human life through dreams and disturb everyday life. The apt use of language
unfolds the strange mysterious world of the unconscious mind of man. The
use of phrases such as “jerk awake,” “a gasp,” “a sweat burst” and “brains
jamming blind” suggest man’s alienation from the reality which inhabits his
unconscious mind. The term “silence” stands for the unconscious life which
has been silenced by the so-called civilized society. The crabs, which inhabit
the silenced world of the unconscious, are part of the contradictory forces of
creation and destruction present in the universe:
All night, around us or through us,
They stalk each other, they fasten on to each other,
They mount each other, they tear each other to pieces,
They utterly exhaust each other.
They are the powers of this world.
We are their bacteria,
Dying their lives and living their deaths.
(Wodwo: ‘Ghost Crabs,’ 150)
Through the use of strong metaphors, Hughes highlights the eternal conflict
inherent in the universe. The crabs, mounting “each other,” tearing “each
other” and exhausting “each other” are the metaphors for the conflicting forces
of creation and destruction. These contradictory forces or energies, which
were once repressed in the unconscious under the burden of rational and
moral consciousness, are now emerging and moving towards the world of
consciousness. Everything in the universe is subject to these violent and
chaotic energies. One lives on the cost of the other’s life. This is the natural
order of things and this continues endlessly. Life here is presented as a
battlefield where one kills in order to live. The conflict, therefore, emerges out
of the war between life and death. Physical existence is a “battleground”
where everyone lives in a state of war with each other. The energies, which
the crabs exhibit, are present in the roots and blood of mankind:
They are the powers of this world.
We are their bacteria,
Dying their lives and living their deaths.
At dawn, they sidle back under the sea’s edge.
They are the turmoil of history, the convulsion
In the roots of blood, in the cycles of concurrence.
To them, our cluttered countries are empty battleground.
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(Wodwo: ‘Ghost Crabs,’ 150)
The energies of the crabs are referred to as “the powers of this world” which
govern the processes of life and death. These energies cannot be ignored
because they are rooted in the violent history of the human world, in “the roots
of blood,” in the instincts and emotions of the human beings.
The next poem, ‘Second Glance at a Jaguar,’ is Hughes’ second
attempt to write about a jaguar. The jaguar, in this poem, exhibits the furious
acts of the Will to Live. This frenzied participation in life is highlighted through
forceful verbs such as “bowls,” “going,” “dropping,” “Glancing,” “running,”
“grind,” “Carrying,” “spilling,” “Swivelling,” “shoving,” Lifting.” The jaguar’s body
organs too are focused:
Skinful of bowls he bowls them,
The hip going in and out of joint, dropping the spine
With the urgency of his hurry
Like a cat going along under thrown stones, under cover,
Glancing sideways, running
Under his spine . . .
(Wodwo: ‘Second Glance at a Jaguar,’ 151)
These organs of the jaguar present individualized expressions of the Will to
Live or the Dionysian frenzy for life. The jaguar acts under the command of
this impulse. The term “running” is suggestive of a kind of motivation or a
desire for achievement. The use of internally rhymed verbs such as “goingdropping,” “Glancing-running,” “dragging-keeping” adds to the meaning and
gives verbal rhythm to the poem. The present tense of the verbs suggests the
immediacy of the act of the Will to Live. To quote Schopenhauer: “. . . we
must distinctly recognise that the form of the phenomenon of will, the form of
life or reality, is really only the present, not the future nor the past.”54 He
further adds: “For life is firm and certain in the will, and the present is firm and
certain in life.”55
The last part of the poem presents shamanic rituals through animal
imagery. The jaguar is “Muttering some mantra.” There is also “some drumsong of murder / To keep his rage brightening.” Both an animal and a shaman
are able to reach that state of “rage” or ecstasy and as a result they transcend
their physical existence or the world of rational consciousness. The poem
‘The Jaguar,’ which appeared in the first collection of Ted Hughes’ poetry The
60
Hawk in the Rain, presented the energies in a state of repression. Now in
‘Second Glance at a Jaguar,’ the energies are released through shamanic
rituals:
Muttering some mantra, some drum-song of murder
To keep his rage brightening, making his skin
Intolerable, spurred by the rosettes, the Cain-brands,
Wearing the spots off from the inside,
Rounding some revenge. Going like a prayer-wheel,
The head dragging forward, the body keeping up,
The hind legs lagging. He coils, he flourishes
The blackjack tail as if looking for a target,
Hurrying through the underworld, soundless.
(Wodwo: ‘Second Glance at a Jaguar,’ 152)
The alliterative sound ‘m’ in the above lines communicates the violent outburst
of energies through shamanic rituals.
The furious predatory energies are active not only in flesh eating
animals but also in a vegetative life which is highlighted in the poem ‘A
Vegetarian’:
Fearful of the hare with the manners of a lady.
Of the sow’s loaded side and the boar’s brown fang,
Fearful of the bull’s tongue snaring and rending,
And of the sheep’s jaw moving without mercy.
Tripped on Eternity’s stone threshold.
Staring into the emptiness,
Unable to move, he hears the hounds of the grass.
(Wodwo: ‘A Vegetarian,’ 154)
The presence of predatory energies in simple vegetative life is again a matter
of survival or the Will to Live. Man is shocked to see “the hounds of the
grass.” This is also affirmed by Schopenhauer:
He [man] will recognise this will of which we are speaking not only in
those phenomenal existences which exactly resemble his own, in men
and animals as their inmost nature, but the course of reflection will
lead him to recognise the force which germinates and vegetates in the
plant . . .56
A herbivorous animal also has a strong instinct of hunger which is manifested
through its body organs: “the bull’s tongue” and “the sheep’s jaw.” The
urgency of the act of the Will is conveyed through the use of verbs with an
adjectival force. The bull’s tongue is revealed furiously “snaring” and “rending”
and the jaw of a sheep “moving without mercy.” Terms like “snaring,”
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“rending” and “moving” suggest an enactment of the Will to Live. A vegetarian
is also “Tripped on Eternity’s stone threshold.” Here, the use of the word
‘Eternity” with the capital letter suggests an endless and universal Will for life.
‘The Bear’ is another poem which presents the animal energies in a
state of repression in the unconscious mind of man. The poem is notable for
its subject matter, vivid imagery and brilliant metaphorical pattern. The vision
deepens with one metaphor leading to another:
In the huge, wide-open, sleeping-eye of the mountain
The bear is the gleam in the pupil
Ready to awake
And instantly focus.
(Wodwo: ‘The Bear,’ 160)
The mountain, in this poem, is a symbol of the soundless and “sleeping”
unconscious life of man. “The bear” which is a “gleam” in the mountain’s
“sleeping-eye,” represents these natural energies which are gleaming and
focused, always “Ready to awake” and to intrude on the conscious world of
human beings:
The bear is digging
In his sleep
Through the wall of the Universe
With a man’s femur.
The bear is a well
Too deep to glitter
Where your shout
Is being digested.
The bear is a river
Where people bending to drink
See their dead selves.
The bear sleeps
In a kingdom of walls
In a web of rivers.
(Wodwo: ‘The Bear,’ 160)
Words such as “well” and “river” stand for the dark depth of the unconscious
mind. “‘The Bear’ is part of Hughes’ initiation into the secrets of the earth, a
confrontation with that which seems capable of swallowing all we are.”57
‘Song of a Rat’ is another poem which deals with the theme of death
and satirizes human pretensions. Commenting on the theme of the poem,
Keith Sagar writes: “The rat in extremity, in the grip of death, stands on the
62
threshold between two worlds, the world of dogs, traps, and a vulnerable
body, meaning living and dying, and the world of disembodied spirits and
powers which know nothing of space and time, life and consciousness.”58 In
the poem, the rat is trapped by the reality of death, but it does not give up
easily. In the first part, ‘The Rat’s dance,’ the “screeches” of the rat show a
struggle against death. This struggle is an assertion of the Will to Live:
The rat is in the trap, it is in the trap,
And attacking heaven and earth with a mouthful of screeches
like torn tin,
An effective gag.
(Wodwo: ‘Song of a Rat,’ 169)
The rat, unlike man, does not indulge in pretensions and illusions which
human beings have invented to seek passive escape from reality:
When it stops screeching, it pants
And cannot think
‘This has no face, it must be God’ or
‘No answer is also an answer.’
(Wodwo: ‘Song of a Rat,’ 169)
Man attaches value to the illusion of God – the logos because he does not
understand the “Iron Jaws” of death as a part of the creative-destructive
processes at work in the whole universe. Hughes rejects the Western idea of
the logos. The rat is not conscious of death as such but comes to know it only
when death “suddenly” grasps him with “Iron jaws”: “The rat understands
suddenly. It bows and is still, / With a little beseeching of blood on its noseend.”
In the next part, entitled ‘The Rat’s Vision,’ the land is depicted as lying
waste. “The widowed land,” “the old barbed wire,” and “the trenched gateway”
communicate a picture of devastation and of nihilism. The rat is able to see “. .
. the earth as a vast design of dereliction, like a no-man’s-land, in mourning
for its losses, anticipating nothing but further losses.”59 Despite the fact that
death will conquer all, one should not stop fighting for one’s existence. The rat
hears the cries “Do not go” from the “dandelions,” the “cinders” and the “stars”
but they themselves are subject to destruction and will meet their end:
The rat screeches
And ‘Do not go’ cry the dandelions, from their heads of folly
63
And ‘Do not go’ cry the yard cinders, who have no future, only
their infernal aftermath
And ‘Do not go’ cries the cracked trough by the gate, fatalist of
starlight and zero
‘Stay’ says the arrangement of stars
Forcing the rat’s head down into godhead.
(Wodwo: ‘Song of a Rat,’ 170)
The third part entitled ‘The Rat’s Flight’ is about the flight of the rat and
deals with the soul transcending the wall of bodily existence in order to reach
the world of the spirit. This passing of the soul from the body is so powerful
that it shocks and disturbs everything:
The heaven shudders, a flame unrolled like a whip,
And the stars jolt in their sockets.
And the sleep-souls of eggs
Wince under the shot of shadowThat was the Shadow of the Rat
Crossing into power
Never to be buried
(Wodwo: ‘Song of a Rat,’ 170)
Hence, death and destruction are the medium of entry into the world of the
spirit. The poem presents a conflict between life and death:
The horned Shadow of the Rat
Casting here by the door
A bloody gift for the dogs
While it supplants Hell.
(Wodwo: ‘Song of a Rat,’ 170)
The body of the rat becomes the morsel of the dog’s mouth. The dog’s instinct
of hunger is an enactment of the Will to Live. Thus, both life as in the case of
the dog, and death as with the rat, revolve around a fierce struggle for life.
‘Skylarks’ is a significant poem in Hughes’ third collection of poetry
Wodwo which reminds one of P. B. Shelley’s famous poem ‘Ode to a Skylark.’
Hughes’ Skylark unlike the one in Shelley’s ode is a bird of prey “Crueller than
owl or eagle.” Its physical flight towards the sun is, metaphorically, a journey
from physical existence into the spiritual one. The skylark’s body is a
phenomenon which has to be burned out by the greedy sun. Its suicidal flight
is a consequence of its complete obedience to the Will to Live that makes it
go up and up until it meets its end. The poem has an Existential element. It
talks about the futility of life on one hand, and finds meaning in life on the
64
other. The flight of Hughes’ skylark is an unyielding effort to continue to live
without
bothering
about
the
final
destination
in
keeping
with
the
Schopenhauerian concept of the Will to Live and an endless striving for life.
Using figurative language, the first part of the poem describes the
skylark’s body organs and their strength and energy. The skylark is “Barrelchested for heights, / Like an Indian of the high Andes.” It possesses “A
whippet head” which is “barbed like a hunting arrow” and “leaden / With
muscle” to resist the gravitational force of the earth. The bird is also “Leaden /
Like a bullet” to enact the Will to Live. It reminds one of the hawk in ‘Hawk
Roosting’ which is also an epitome of the Will to Live. In the second part, the
skylark is referred to as a “towered bird” which is suggestive of its upward
movement enacting the Will to Live. It gets “the command” not to “die” but to
“climb” despite the fact that with every moment brings it closer to death. In this
context, Schopenhauer states:
Every breath we draw wards off the death that is constantly intruding
upon us. In this way we fight with it every moment, and again, at
longer intervals, through every meal we eat, every sleep we take,
every time we warm ourselves, &c. In the end, death must conquer,
for we became subject to him through birth, and he only plays for a
little while with his prey before he swallows it up.60
In the third part, the skylark is asked to sing an incomprehensible song of
“Joy” and “Help,” delight as well as anguish which communicates the idea that
everyone is subject to the contradictory forces of life and death, creation and
destruction. In the fourth part Hughes presents the skylark’s flight as an
unhindered enactment of the Will to Live:
You stop to rest, far up, you teeter
Over the drop
But not stopping singing
Resting only for a second
Dropping just a little
Then up and up and up
Like a mouse with drowning fur
Bobbing and bobbing at the well-wall
Lamenting, mounting a little –
But the sun will not take notice
And the earth’s centre smiles.
(Wodwo: ‘Skylarks,’ 174)
65
The fifth part presents the skylark fiercely fighting for life, its “feathers thrash”
and “its heart” starts “drumming like a motor.” It is finally “evaporating” under
the sun but “the sun goes silently and endlessly on with the lark’s song.” The
death of the skylarks does not affect the sun’s Will to Live. According to
Schopenhauer:
The earth rolls from day into night, the individual dies, but the sun
itself shines without intermission, an eternal noon. Life is assured to
the will to live; the form of life is an endless present, no matter how
the individuals, the phenomena of the Idea, arise and pass away in
time, like fleeting dreams.61
The sixth and the seventh parts are again about the skylarks’ fight for life.
“Heaven” has become “a madhouse / With the voices and frenzies of the
larks” at the moment of death. The skylarks keep “battering their last sparks”
of life till “the sun’s sucked them empty.” By association, one is also reminded
of the flight of Icaras, the Greek mythic figure who flew too close to the sun
leading to his death as his wings melted and he fell into the sea.
The concluding part of the poem compares the struggle of the skylarks
to that of Cuchulain who struggled against death: “Manacled with blood, /
Cuchulain listened bowed, / Strapped to his pillar (not to die prone).”
According to Celtic mythology, Cu Chulainn was “invincible”62 but not
“invulnerable,”63 yet he proudly resisted death, which “was brought about by
supernatural means against which he was powerless,”64 by tying himself to “a
pillar-stone”65 and struggling. He was not beheaded until Morrigu, the crowheaded Goddess of war, overtook him by perching on his shoulder.
Comparing Cuchulain’s behaviour with that of the skylarks, Keith Sagar
comments:
The skylarks have also been ‘sucked empty’, have battered out their
last sparks at the limit, but not for fame, not in resistance to life’s
imperatives, but in blind obedience and self-abandonment. Their song
tells Cuchulain that, though he is ‘the strongest of the strong’ he is
feeble in relation to the non-human powers he resists and totally
misguided in that resistance.66
Ending the way the poem ends “. . . more weight must be given to the
skylarks as living sacrifices and to their ‘agony’.”67
66
The poem ‘Gnat-Psalm’ resembles ‘Skylarks’ in mood and tone. The
skylark is commanded to go up and up till the body is burned by the sun. But
the gnats are made to dance till they are overcome by death:
When the gnats dance at evening
Scribbling on the air, sparring sparely,
Scrambling their crazy lexicon,
Shuffling their dumb Cabala,
Under leaf shadow
(Wodwo: ‘Gnat-Psalm,’ 181)
The reader can feel the urgency of the act of the Will to Live reflected through
forceful verbs such as “Scribbling,” “Scrambling” and “Shuffling.” Here the
gnats too, suffer “the broad swipes” and “dusty stabs” of the sun through their
“frail eyes and crepuscular temperaments.” Although the gnats possess a
fragile body yet they are an embodiment of the Will to Live. Whether it is the
hawk’s suicidal “dive” in ‘The Hawk in the Rain,’ the skylark’s continuous
climbing in ‘Skylarks,’ the wolf’s running in ‘February’ or the gnat’s dancing in
‘Gnat-Psalm,’ all reflect a determined Will to Live. The gnats themselves are
“Immense magnets fighting around a centre.” Despite the fact that life will
ultimately take them to the verge of death, they keep fighting for life till death
overtakes them. They are not conscious of “the cycles of this Universe,” that
is the processes of creation and destruction, life and death. The gnats are “not
afraid” of their death due to the sun because they themselves are the sun –
the energy that will fight “the blaze.”
In ‘Gnat-Psalm,’ the poet presents life as the “death- dance”:
A dance never to be altered
A dance giving their bodies to be burned
......................
Riding your bodies to death
You are the angels of the only heaven!
(Wodwo: ‘Gnat-Psalm,’ 182)
Due to their “agility,” the gnats seem to have “outleaped” or conquered death.
As suggested by the title of the poem itself, the gnats have been given a
sacred and divine status: “And God is an Almighty Gnat! / You are the
greatest of all the galaxies!” A persona who is completely absorbed in the
sight of the dancing-gnats is also present in the poem:
My hands fly in the air, they are follies
My tongue hangs up in the leaves
67
My thoughts have crept into crannies
Your dancing
Your dancing
Rolls my staring skull slowly away into outer space.
(Wodwo: ‘Gnat-Psalm,’ 182)
M. Scigaj observes that “. . . in ‘Gnat-Psalm’ the persona’s absorption in the
frenetic, untiring activities of the gnats inspires him to create a metaphor for
the totality of life as an unceasing expenditure of energy.”68 The gnats’
voluntary activities present an example of continuous struggle for life.
Ted Hughes in his animal poems celebrates predatory energies as a
part of the forces of creation and destruction which work simultaneously in the
universe. If human beings are to live in harmony with life they must accept this
creative-destructive tension and be committed to it, seems to be Hughes’
belief.
68
References
1.
Hughes, Ted. The Hawk in the Rain. London: Faber and Faber, 1957.
(References to this book have been given in parenthesis).
2.
Edman, Irwin. ed. The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. New York: Carlton
House, 1928, 70.
3.
Rawson, C. J. “Ted Hughes and Violence.” Essays in Criticism: A
Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism. 16.1 (January 1966): 125.
4.
Yeats, W. B. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. London: Macmillan
and Company Limited, 1955, 264.
5.
Sagar, Keith. “Fourfold vision in Hughes.” The Achievement of Ted
Hughes. ed. Keith Sagar. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1983, 285.
6.
Walder, Dennis. Ted Hughes. England: Open University Press, 1987, 11.
7.
Roy, P. K. ed. Poetry of William Blake. Jaipur: ABD Publishers,
2006, 77.
8.
Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 18.
9.
Hall, Calvin S., Gardner Lindzey, and John B. Campbell. Theories of
Personality. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Inc., 1998, 107.
10. Gardner, W. H., and N. H. Mackenzie. ed. The Poems of Gerard
Manley Hopkins. London: Oxford University Press, 1967, 69.
11. Skea, Ann. Ted Hughes: An Introduction. Accessed on June 23, 2011,
from http://ann.skea.com/under85.htm. n. pag.
12. Holloway, Emory. ed. Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Selected
Prose and Letters. London: The Nonesuch Press, 1964, 51.
13. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 20-21.
14. Hughes, Ted. Lupercal. London: Faber and Faber, 1960. (References to
this book have been given in parenthesis).
15. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 37.
69
16. Aldrington,
Richard,
and
Delano
Ames.
Trans.
The
Larousse
Encyclopedia of Mythology. London: Chancellor Press, 1997, 207.
17. Skea, Ann. Wolf-Masks: From Hawk to Wolfwatching. Accessed on
November 21, 2008, from http://www.zeta.org.au/~annskea/Wolves.htm.
n. pag.
18. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 57.
19. May, Derwent. “Ted Hughes.” The Survival of Poetry: A Contemporary
Survey. ed. Martin Dodsworth. London: Faber, 1970, 144.
20. Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural
Theory. Chennai: T. R. Publications Pvt. Ltd., 2006, 100.
21. Rawson, C. J. “Ted Hughes: A Reappraisal.” Essays in Criticism: A
Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism. 15. 1 (July 1965): 81.
22. Gifford, Terry, and Neil Roberts. Ted Hughes: A Critical Study. London:
Faber & Faber, 1981, 70.
23. Ibid., 70.
24. Edman, Irwin. Op. cit., 218.
25. Faas, Ekbert. Interview with Ted Hughes. “Ted Hughes and Crow.”
London Magazine. 10.10 (January 1971): 8.
26. Barry, Peter. Op. cit., 100.
27. Eddins, Dwight. Ted Hughes and Schopenhauer: The Poetry of the Will.
Accessed on
December 10, 2009, from
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_1_45/ai_54895477. n. pag.
28. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 43.
29. Gifford, Terry, and Neil Roberts. Op. cit., 70.
30. Bentley, Paul. The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Language, Illusion and
Beyond. London: Longman, 1999, 9.
31. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 41.
32. Gifford, Terry, and Neil Roberts. Op. cit., 41.
33. Ibid., 41.
70
34. Ibid., 41.
35. Hughes, Ted. ed. Sylvia Plath: The Colossus. London: Faber and
Faber, 1967, 12.
36. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 39.
37. Edman, Irwin. Op. cit., 71.
38. Ibid., 78.
39. Ibid., 78.
40. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 46.
41. Faas, Ekbert. Op. cit., 8.
42. Fisher, Mathew D. “Hughes’s Pike.” The Expelicator. 47. 4
(Summer 1989): 59.
43. Magee, Bryan. The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. New York: Oxford UP,
1983, 155.
44. Gifford, Terry, and Neil Roberts. Op. cit., 44.
45. Faas, Ekbert. Op. cit., 9-10.
46. Aldrington, Richard, and Delano Ames. Op. cit., 207.
47. Ibid., 207.
48. Ibid., 207-8.
49. Hughes, Ted. Wodwo. Ted Hughes Collected Poems. ed. Paul Keegan.
London: Faber and Faber, 2003. (References to this book have been
given in parenthesis).
50. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 98.
51. Hughes, Ted. Poetry in the Making: An Anthology of Poems and
Programmes from Listening and Writing. London: Faber & Faber, 1967,
62.
52. Yeats, W. B. Op. cit., 211.
53. Ibid., 211.
54. Edman, Irwin. Op. cit., 220.
55. Ibid., 220.
71
56. Ibid., 72.
57. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 66.
58. Ibid., 85.
59. Ibid., 86.
60. Edman, Irwin. Op. cit., 252.
61. Ibid., 223.
62. Aldrington, Richard, and Delano Ames. Op. cit., 233.
63. Ibid., 233.
64. Ibid., 233.
65. Ibid., 233.
66. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 93.
67. Ibid., 93.
68. Scigaj, Leonard M. “Oriental Mythology in Wodwo.” The Achievement of
Ted Hughes. ed. Keith Sagar. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1983, 143.