Ted Hughes


Hughes has been described as various things at various times during and after his career. Poet Laureate, 'murderer', shaman, 'nature poet,' he is a figure of much controversy, particularly in relation to the suicide of Sylvia Plath, which saw him cast as responsible for her death. I think she was a nut-case, regardless of Hughes' callousness, but I'm not going to go into that here. Because of this widely publicised tragedy, Hughes became very unpopular more or less overnight, with many feeling shamed to admit their admiration for his work. It didn't start or end that way, though.

When Hawk in the Rain was published back in 1957 it met with huge critical acclaim. The collection is a fair one, with hughes' characteristic voice full of harsh consonants and anglo-saxon derivatives immediately apparent (and a lot like Marmite: love it or hate it). The far better poems in the collection are those focused on animals, for which he would become famous and often dismissively named as a 'nature poet'. Other poems in the collection dwell more on human vanity, death, religion and so on (to speak vaguely) and with varying quality. The collection does surely not possess the level quality of Heaney's 1st collection Death of a Naturalist which would be published ten years later, or the power of Hughes' 2nd collection Lupercal (1960) with poems such as Pike and Hawk Roosting which are simply magnificent. Nevertheless, it was undoubtedly his potent and, at the time, extremely unique voice which won him such acclaim.

The up-side to Hughes' involvement in Plath's suicide is of course his final collection Birthday Letters (1998), in which he explores his relationship with her. It is quite probably his best collection, showing a poet in full command of his abilities with the confidence and experience to write extremely convincingly. He enjoyed a surge of revived interest in his work before his death in on October 28, 1998 from secondary cancer of the liver, interest which has continued and increased till the present. He is undoubtedly one of the best poets of his generation.


Pike


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.

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

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.

Three we kept behind glass,
Jungled in weed: three inches, four,
And four and a half: red fry to them-
Suddenly there were two. Finally one

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
And indeed they spare nobody.
Two, six pounds each, over two feet long
High and dry and dead in the willow-herb-

One jammed past its gills down the other's gullet:
The outside eye stared: as a vice locks-
The same iron in this eye
Though its film shrank in death.

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 toward me, watching.

--Ted Hughes, Lupercal