Six Young Men by Ted Hughes

A comment from the people of his home town: Hebden Bridge

At first reading this poem is about the futility of war; particularly the first world
war. Hughes's father had come through the First World War, psychologically
scarred by his ordeal and the trauma of witnessing the slaughter of nearly all his
friends and fellow soldiers at Gallipoli in 1915. Hughes's father was one of just
two per cent of his regiment to survive.

Newsnight Review critic Tom Paulin has pointed out that Ted Hughes, having
been born in 1930 belonged to 'that slightly different species' - a generation 'who
took in the blood of the First World War with their mother's milk, and who up to
their middle age knew Britain only as a country always at war, or inwardly
expecting and preparing for war…'

However, this poem does more than attack war. It is also about the knowledge of
our own death and non-existence. We are reminded that one day all that will be
left of us will be a smiling face in a photograph.

http://www.hebdenbridge.co.uk/news/news07/102.html

Ted Hughes
 Edward James Hughes OM (17 August 1930 – 28 October 1998) was an
English poet and children's writer, known as Ted Hughes. Critics routinely rank
him as one of the best poets of his generation. Hughes was British Poet Laureate
from 1984 until his death.
Hughes was married to the American poet Sylvia Plath, from 1956 until her
death. She committed suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. His part in the
relationship became controversial to some feminists and (particularly) American
admirers of Plath. Hughes himself never publicly entered the debate, but his last
poetic work, Birthday Letters (1998), explored their complex relationship. To
some, it put him in a significantly better light whereas, to others, it seemed a
failed attempt to deflect blame from himself and onto a neurotic father fixation
he ascribed to Plath.
Hughes studied English, anthropology and archaeology at Pembroke College,
Cambridge. At this time his first published poetry appeared in the journal he
started with fellow students, St. Botolph's Review, and at a party to launch the
magazine he met Sylvia Plath. He and Plath married at St George the Martyr
Holborn on 16 June 1956, four months after they had first met.
Hughes and Plath had two children, Frieda Rebecca and Nicholas Farrar, but
separated in the autumn of 1962. He continued to live at Court Green, North
Tawton, Devon irregularly with his lover Assia Wevill after Plath's death on 11
February 1963. As Plath's widower, Hughes became the executor of Plath’s
personal and literary estates. He oversaw the publication of her manuscripts,
including Ariel (1966). He also claimed to have destroyed the final volume of
Plath’s journal, detailing their last few months together. In his foreword to The
Journals of Sylvia Plath, he defends his actions as a consideration for the couple's
young children.
On 25 March 1969, six years after Plath's suicide by asphyxiation from a gas
stove, Assia Wevill committed suicide in the same way. Wevill also killed her
child, Alexandra Tatiana Elise (nicknamed Shura), the four-year-old daughter of
Hughes, born on 3 March 1965.
In August 1970 Hughes married Carol Orchard, a nurse, and they remained
together until his death. He was appointed a member of the Order of Merit by
Queen Elizabeth II just before he died.

Séamus Heaney, speaking at Ted Hughes' funeral, in North Tawton on 3

November 1998, said:

No death outside my immediate family has left me feeling more bereft.

“ No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more. He was a tower of
tenderness and strength, a great arch under which the least of poetry's
children could enter and feel secure. His creative powers were, as
Shakespeare said, still crescent. By his death, the veil of poetry is rent
and the walls of learning broken.[7] ”
Hughes' son with Plath, Nicholas Hughes, committed suicide on 16 March
2009 after battling depression.

Hughes' earlier poetic work is rooted in nature and, in particular, the

innocent savagery of animals, an interest from an early age. He wrote
frequently of the mixture of beauty and violence in the natural world.
Animals serve as a metaphor for his view on life: animals live out a
struggle for the survival of the fittest in the same way that humans strive
for ascendancy and success. A classic example is the poem "Hawk
Roosting."

His later work is deeply reliant upon myth and the bardic tradition, heavily
inflected with a modernist, and ecological viewpoint. Hughes' first
collection, Hawk in the Rain (1957) attracted considerable critical acclaim.
In 1959 he won the Galbraith prize which brought $5,000. His most
significant work is perhaps Crow (1970), which whilst it has been widely
acclaimed also divided critics, combining an apocalyptic, bitter, cynical
and surreal view of the universe with what appears to be simple verse. In
Birthday Letters, his last collection, Hughes broke his silence on Plath,
detailing aspects of their life together and his own behaviour at the time.
The cover artwork was by their daughter Frieda.

In addition to his own poetry, Hughes wrote a number of translations of

European plays, mainly classical ones. HisTales from Ovid (1997) contains
a selection of free verse translations from Ovid's Metamorphoses. He also
wrote both poetry and prose for children, one of his most successful books
being The Iron Man, written to comfort his children after Sylvia Plath's
suicide. It later became the basis of Pete Townshend's rock opera of the
same name.

Hughes was appointed as Poet Laureate in 1984 following the death of

John Betjeman. It was later known that Hughes was second choice for the
appointment after Philip Larkin, the preferred nominee, declined, because
of ill health and writer's block. Hughes served in this position until his
death in 1998. In 1993 his monumental work inspired by Graves' The
White Goddess was published. Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete
Being is considered to be a unique work among Shakespeare studies. His
definitive 1,333-page Collected Poems (Faber & Faber) appeared in 2003.

Study tasks for Six Young Men

Read the poem and make notes on each verse following these points of
enquiry: –

1. Who and what is being presented in the first verse? Put this into
your own words. Where would you say the speaker of the poem is
standing? What is the speaker’s perspective?
 2. There are changes of focus in the second verse. What are these
changes? (Think of how Hughes changes focus in ‘Wind’.)

3. The focus changes again in the third verse, how? Think of the
mechanical function of a camera lens.

Closer reading …

4. The six young men are seen as fixed in time – what technique,
beyond the key image of the photograph itself, does the poet use to
achieve this?

5. The key theme of the first verse can be seen as change. What
changes and what doesn’t? Identify the lines that express the
change that occurs/does not occur.

6. Celluloid is a very fragile medium. Old movies – many early silent

films and ‘talkies’ have since disintegrated. Which predominant
fricative alliterative consonant in the early part of the first verse
seems to represent the flimsy and impermanent nature of the
snapshot? How does this mirror the key theme of change and
impermanence throughout the poem?

7. A famous line from a World War One poem seems to find its echo in
the first verse. Do you know what it is? It is always read at the
Remembrance Day Service at the Cenotaph in London and at
memorial services throughout the land. What do you think its key
effect is on the reader – how do we feel when reading it?

8. What is the immediate impact on the reader of the final line of the
first verse? What type of language is used to achieve this effect?

9. The third verse ends with a smile. This smile is not linked to
laughter, but what? What would you say is smiling – ‘forty years
rotting into soil’?

10. The poet uses a technique familiar to readers of World War

One poetry to involve the reader in the final verse. What is the
name of this technique and how does it achieve this effect?

A photograph of
six young men
who have died in Imagery of photography and photographic techniques is
the Great War is used throughout the poem. The key single image is the
found by the photograph, which seemingly captures life in a frozen
speaker. The moment, but this is an illusion, as they and we shall die.
poem is an Language – blunt, simple, often monosyllabic, illustrated
account of the
thoughts and
feelings about the by the title – the men are simply that; ‘six young men’.
brevity of human Hughes creates a picture of them as typical young lads on
life that are an outing together; the descriptions are given added
induced in the poignancy by the final statement. The sorrow of their
speaker by such a deaths is conveyed simply; they were young, they were
discovery. friends, there were six of them and their lives were brief –
‘six months after’, ‘they were all dead’. The stanza ends
(as do all of the others) with an abrupt, shocking
statement. The repetition of ‘six’ hammers home this fact.
The poet’s
role

As observer of the The second stanza illustrates the key idea of permanence
photograph. This, and impermanence that runs throughout the poem. The
however, is not a speaker knows the photograph’s setting well, ‘I know that
‘war poem’. The bilberried bank, that thick tree, that black wall,/ Which are
photograph is there yet and not changed’. (Hughes’ frequently used
almost a ‘memento
technique of alliterative plosive consonants draws our
mori’, a reminder
that we shall die. attention to this simply described background.) Forty years
We are exposed to have passed, but nature remains untouched by time.
this inescapable Hughes contrasts human life and nature here, emphasising
‘horror’, just as the the key concept of the brevity of human life compared with
six young men the landscape, the ‘valley has not changed its sound’.
were and as is the Human life seems to have no impact on nature.
speaker of the
poem.

The The third stanza returns to the technique of listing used in

relationships the first, this time to tell about the ways in which the men
in the poem died in war. Again, the language is simple and blunt, but
in a very few words, Hughes humanises the men by
Between the describing the intimate details of their deaths. There is no
speaker and the story-book heroism here, in fact one of the deaths is rather
six young men – silly, even mundane, ‘the very moment he was warned/
the manners of From potting at tin-cans in no man’s land,/ Fell back dead’.
their deaths are The description is even more touching for its bare,
known to the unvarnished truth. ‘Smile’ is repeated throughout the
speaker. poem as a key motif. Its first use establishes a
relationship between the speaker, the young men and the
reader, as they smile at us from the confines of the
photograph. Its subsequent use is a reminder of death and
decay, again it is strongly focused on the notions of change
and impermanence.

The tone changes dramatically in the final stanza, although

it has been building up to this terrible self-revelation. The
speaker seems suddenly overwhelmed by the thought of
the inevitability of human death, particularly his own. The
imagery of photography ends the poem, ‘the contradictory
permanent horrors’ of the photograph might almost
‘dement’, send one mad.

There is a set of exposures in the poem, the young men

were exposed to the photograph, then to the war, their