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CHAPTER: 3

Metaphysical and Literary Introspections in Other Natural and

Geological Phenomena

Ted Hughes poetic vision is not limited to the animal order alone. It
also deals with other natural and geological elements of the universe.
Hughes, like other poets of Nature, is greatly preoccupied with a landscape
which is of autobiographical importance. What makes him different from
others is . . . the freshness and sharpness of his psychological penetration of
the features of that landscape, bringing them very close to us while at the
same time showing us the distance between us and that landscape.1 The
landscape in Hughes poetry is extremely violent, irrational and nihilistic in
opposition to the harnessed and tamed landscape of Movement poetry which
was quite popular during that time as pointed out earlier. Owing to post-
modern ideologies, Hughes chiefly deals with the life of instinct and blood or
the predatory energies which he marked not only in the animal world but also
in other natural and geological phenomena. Hughes associates predatory
energies with the life-force, or what Schopenhauer calls the Will to Live. His
main concern is to bring about a reconciliation between the human and the
non-human world. Man, having been cut-off from the life of instinct and blood
which the brutes exemplify, is so conscious of his vulnerability that he hardly
dares to come in contact with the violent energies of the cosmos. The poetry
Hughes wrote suggests that man should identify with his own predatory
animal energies which endow him with a life-force to face the violent but vital
forces of the cosmos. In other words, Hughes advocates a Dionysian force
which suggests ones frenzied participation in life in the presence of the
destructive forces of Nature.
In the first book, The Hawk in the Rain, various aspects of the natural
and geological world appear in poems such as Wind, October Dawn and
Roarers in a Ring. In a significant poem entitled Wind, Hughes exploits the
power of the wind as an elemental energy or a nihilistic force which can
disrupt life. The wind is representative of all those natural forces we try to
 73

shut out of our lives, which, if let in on our sense would leave us blind,
floundering or mad.2 The first stanza depicts how the wind violently shakes
the house, the woods, the hills, and the fields:
This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet
(The Hawk in the Rain: Wind, 40)
The reverberating sounds of violence are brilliantly conveyed by the use of
forceful verbs such as crashing, booming, stampeding and Floundering.
The use of alliteration in black-blinding suggests chaos and confusion in the
dark depth of the stormy night. The house is presented as a storm-tossed
ship3 which is far out at sea all night. The house, in this poem, does not
simply suggest a safe and secure place of habitation but is used as a symbol
of a rationally organized world where man lives in a given culture of
pretensions and illusions. Simultaneously it also signifies the restrained and
disciplined world of Movement poetry as opposed to unrestrained, irrational
forces outside the house. Hughes himself says about his rejection of the
pretentious attitude of the Movement poets who seek to escape from reality
that is violent into a world that is sheltered, cozy and confined:
One of the things those poets had in common I think was the post-war
mood of having had enoughenough rhetoric, enough overweening
push of any kind, enough of the dark gods, enough of the id, enough
of the Angelic powers and the heroic efforts to make new worlds. ()
The second world war after all was a colossal negative revelation. ()
it set them dead against negotiation with anything outside the cosiest
arrangement of society. They wanted it cosy. () They were like
eskimos in their igloo, with a difference. Theyd had enough sleeping
out. Now I came a bit later, I hadnt had enough. I was all for opening
negotiations with whatever happened to be out there.4
The second stanza depicts the natural forces during the day:
. . . then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.
(The Hawk in the Rain: Wind, 40)
The Blade-light suggests very sharp and striking light which keeps moving
like the lens of a mad eye.
In the third stanza, the personas reluctant attitude is revealed when he
dares to come out but prefers to scale along the house-side as far as / The
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coal-house door. The house-side and coal-house door stand for a rational
and materialistic world. An extreme sense of chaos and confusion is
conveyed by the violent visual imagery, forceful verbs and anthropomorphism:
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope, / The fields quivering,
the skyline a grimace, / At any second to bang and vanish with a flap . . . The
hills are metaphorically presented as a tent held with a guyrope. It reinforces
the vulnerability of everything in the physical world. The transience of physical
existence is highlighted in the lines: The wind flung a magpie away and a
black- / Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly . . .
In the last two stanzas, the wind as an irrational and nihilistic force
violently shakes the house:
. . . The house
Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,
Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.
(The Hawk in the Rain: Wind, 40)
Two sets of words, hills-wind and fire-house are used repeatedly in the
poem and present a contrast. The wind and the hills are the elemental
forces of Nature blindly striving against each other. On the other hand, the
house and the fire symbolize a safe and secure domestic atmosphere. But
the situation here is ironical. The very root of domestic existence is shaken
forcefully by external forces. The wind in this poem also . . . recalls the great
wind that blows in through the crack in primitive cosmologies.5 The house,
in this poem, also stands for the Lacanian notion of the symbolic order which
has no relationship with anything real and the window stands for the crack
which needs to be open to have an access to the real that lies beyond the
symbolic order. Man, who is so engrossed in his complacent way of life, dares
not to open the window to look at the vital energies essential for life:
The I - speaker is reluctant to budge from the sheltering centrality of
the house-side, a kind of axis mundi around which the poets images
and metaphors are oriented: in this the poems speaker displays the
kind of resistance to opening negotiations with whatever happened to
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be out there that Hughes identifies in the post-war poetry of the

Movement . . .6
October Dawn is a poem about the month of October which
announces the forthcoming ice-age. Although October is a pleasant month
with a starlit sky and beautiful flowers, Ted Hughes highlights its vulnerability
by comparing it with marigold, a solitary flower which blooms in a frosty age.
This month is presented as a premonition of an approaching ice-age. The
imagery communicates the threat of impending violence:
The lawn overtrodden and strewn
From the night before, and the whistling green
Shrubbery are doomed. Ice
Has got its spearhead into place.
(The Hawk in the Rain: October Dawn, 41)
The use of words such as overtrodden, strewn and doomed depict a
picture of decay and destruction. The lawn is crushed and scattered. After a
series of partial rhymes the poem ends with a full final rhyme (heart/start)
which suggest a determined tone warning about the forthcoming fist of cold
which Squeezes the fire at the core of the heart, / And now it is about to
start. Commenting on the technique of the poem, Keith Sagar says:
. . . it is not in these dramatic mammoths and sabre-tooths that the
poems power lies so much as in that relentless rhythm, that ruthless
march of monosyllables, and the stark finality of that last full rhyme
after so many half-rhymes. And all that weight falling on the word
start! No one since Hopkins had used rhythm and rhyme so
powerfully.7
Roarers in a Ring is another poem in which elements of Nature have
been highlighted. The poem begins with the image of snowfall which covered
the moorland like a white / Running sea. A beautiful simile is used to present
the landscape which is cold and hostile: The moor foamed like a white /
Running sea. In such a frosty night, a starved fox is out searching for its prey
and stares at the inn light with predatory eyes. The fox, like other animals in
Hughes poetry, represents the Will to Live. The farmers, in contrast, are
living images of their deaths. The title Roarers in a Ring, satirically
suggests their limitation and confinement. They laugh in order to rid
themselves of the fear that they feel:
 76

. . . if they did not

Laugh, they must weep.
Therefore the ale went round and round.
Their mouths flung wide
The cataract of a laugh, lest
Silence drink blood.
(The Hawk in the Rain: Roarers in a Ring, 42)
The images that occur later in the poem are those of the moor and the
moon which are highlighted with the use of a simile and an alliteration: The
moor looked like the moon. The Moon is generally associated with the
White Goddess. The moorland, which is clothed with snow, is also a
manifestation of the White Goddess. Here, the Goddess manifests herself
through instinctive life as well, which is represented by the fox in this poem.
On the other hand, the roaring farmers refuse to identify with this life of
instinct and impulse and hence reject the White Goddess. The roots of their
existence are, therefore, badly shaken:
While the world under their footsoles
Went whirling still
Gay and forever, in the bottomless black
Silence through which it fell.
(The Hawk in the Rain: Roarers in a Ring, 43)
The poem is a satire against man who refuses to identify with the natural
energies, the instinctive ways of the animals, and the White Goddess.
The second book, Lupercal, presents other natural and geological
aspects in poems such as Mayday on Holderness, Crow Hill, Pennines in
April, To Paint a Water Lily, Fire-Eater, Relic, Snowdrop and Sunstroke.
The poem Mayday on Holderness depicts a will-driven predatory
world of Nature and that of human beings. It moves from a geographical
observation towards a realization of the greater tension at work in the
universe. It is worth noting that simple geographical aspects of Nature in
Hughes poetry exhibit an instinct of hunger which is an expression of the Will
to Live. In this poem, the North Sea engulfs everything and is a manifestation
of this instinct of hunger:
From Hulls sunset smudge
Humber is melting eastward, my south skyline:
A loaded single vein, it drains
The effort of the inert NorthSheffields ores,
Bog pools, dregs of toadstools, tributary
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Graves, dunghills, kitchens, hospitals.

The unkillable North Sea swallows it all.
Insects, drunken, drop out of the air.
(Lupercal: Mayday on Holderness, 11)
The speaking persona of the poem identifies his own body as the food
apparatus mute eater which can swallow everything. Animals and men are
defined primarily as killers. Appropriate use of figurative language, alliteration
and a hyperbolic tone do this effectively:
As the incinerator, as the sun,
As the spider, I had a whole world in my hands.
Flowerlike, I loved nothing.
.........................
What a length of gut is growing and breathing
This mute eater, biting through the minds
Nursery floor, with eel and hyena and vulture,
With creepy-crawly and the root,
With the sea-worm, entering its birthright.
(Lupercal: Mayday on Holderness, 11)
It is the Will to Live which guides every action. The birds watch over the eggs
and participate in procreation since their progeny too has to function as
predators. The love of the laughing couples is rooted in the sexual impulse
which is, to quote Schopenhauer, nothing less than the composition of the
next generation.8 The following lines substantiate it: There are eye-guarded
eggs in the hedgerows, / Hot haynests under the roots in burrows. / Couples
at their pursuits are laughing in the lanes. Towards the end, the imagery
becomes more violent with the memory of war which disturbs the comfort of
motherly summer:
The North Sea lies soundless. Beneath it
Smoulder the wars: to heart-beats, bomb, bayonet.
Mother, Mother! cries the pierced helmet.
Cordite oozings of Gallipoli,
(Lupercal: Mayday on Holderness, 12)
The predatory rage and madness or the Will to Live is exhibited not only by
The expressionless gaze of the leopard, / The coils of the sleeping
anaconda, / The nightlong frenzy of shrews . . . but also by the men fighting
in the battle field. Thus, Hughes poetry, which appeared in the post-modern
period, seems to equate violence with a greater reality, a Dionysian fury for
life or the Will to Live. Leonard M. Scigaj refers to the element of Surrealism in
this poem: . . . the coils of the sleeping anaconda attend a nightmare vision
 78

of destruction and anticipate the surrealism of the Sixties . . .9 By adopting a

Surrealist mode, Hughes poetry rejects logic and order and celebrates chaos
and violence.
The poem Crow Hill presents human beings in relation to the
elemental energies. The farmers are living in the midst of violent
surroundings:
The farms are oozing craters in
Sheer sides under the sodden moors:
When it is not wind it is rain,
Neither of which will stop at doors:
One will damp beds and the other shake
Dreams beneath sleep it cannot break.
(Lupercal: Crow Hill, 14)
Words such as beds and Dreams metaphorically, suggest the domestic
comforts of human life which are shaken by the violent forces of Nature.
Neither wind nor rain stops at doors; they intrude into the human world.
In the second stanza, the farmers are seen drawing vitality from the
wild energies: Between the weather and the rock / Farmers make a little heat
. . . Animals such as cows and pigs also exhibit great strength:
Cows that sway a bony back,
Pigs upon delicate feet
Hold off the sky, trample the strength
That shall level these hills at length.
(Lupercal: Crow Hill, 14)
Living with blowing mist and walking along the ridges of ruined stone, they
resist death in a strong manner. The cows with the bony back and the pigs
with delicate feet are capable of enacting the Will to Live. They,
hyperbolically, even Hold off the sky.
In the last stanza, the poet talks about the arrogance of blood and
bone in the face of death and destruction:
What humbles these hills has raised
The arrogance of blood and bone,
And thrown the hawk upon the wind,
And lit the fox in the dripping ground.
(Lupercal: Crow Hill, 14)
The use of words like blood and bone, which are highlighted by the use of
alliteration, suggest physical existence which can be done away with by the
violent forces of Nature. The hawk too is hacked by the wind. The important
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thing about the animals is that they do not easily give up; they forcefully resist
death. Hughes relates animal vitality, which is exhibited by their predatory
rage and frenzy, with the universal processes of creation and destruction, life
and death. One has to accept this creative-destructive tension and must get
committed to it since one is himself a part of this cycle. In the words of Terry
Gifford and Neil Robert, Hughes advocates . . . the necessity of the war
between vitality and death [. . .] in the wider context of a creative-destructive
universe.10
Pennines in April presents a geographical description of the valley
which stretches between Lancashire and Yorkshire where Hughes lived
during his childhood. Keith Sagar familiarizes us with this place:
. . . there are parts of England with every bit as much character as
anywhere over the borders for example, that stretch of the Pennine
moors and valleys between Lancashire and Yorkshire which has
Haworth at its northern edge and the Calder Valley running through
the middle of it, from Todmorden to Halifax. It was once part of the
ancient kingdom of Elmet, the last British Celtic kingdom to fall to the
Angels according to Ted Hughes, who was born there, and who
celebrates its Celtic and more recent past in Remains of Elmet.11
The poem begins with a description of the Pennines and presents the valley in
a captivating moment of vitality:
If this country were a sea (that is solid rock
Deeper than any sea) these hills heaving
Out of the east, mass behind mass, at this height
Hoisting heather and stones to the sky
Must burst upwards and topple into Lancashire.
Perhaps, as the earth turns, such ground-stresses
Do come rolling westward through the locked land.
(Lupercal: Pennines in April, 25)
As the above lines demonstrate, forceful language is used to depict the
landscape as extremely dynamic and energetic but violent. In Hughes poetry
The violence is caught in a moment which crystallizes it, but in which it is still
heavingly alive.12 This moment of violence, which is also regarded as a
moment of vitality or energy or the life-force, is represented in this poem by
the hills which are heaving out / Of the east and Hoisting heather and
stones to the sky. The use of verbs such as heaving, Hoisting and burst
upwards suggest, at the metaphorical level, a forceful upward movement of
the unconscious natural energies of man which are now rising forcefully and
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even violently from a state of repression. In the landscape of the poem,

natural energies which were in barrels are now
. . . heaving slowly and heave
To your feet and surf upwards
In a still, fiery air, hauling the imagination,
Carrying the larks upward.
(Lupercal: Pennines in April, 25)
The larks too are metaphors for the unconscious natural energies which are
now carried upward towards mans conscious existence. The poem captures
a big moment which hauls up the imagination of man by making him
conscious of the suppressed energies and bringing them to the surface in a
forceful manner.
In To Paint a Water Lily, the unconscious repressed life of human
beings is metaphorically represented by the simple and beautiful natural sight
of the lily. This is highlighted by Dennis Walder: As in the stilled legendary
depth of the pound in Pike, there is here once again an unnameable horror
approaching from below, primitive, strange, rising to the surface of
consciousness.13 The simple natural setting of the water lily evokes dreadful
feelings. Ted Hughes uses powerful, hyperbolic metaphors14 such as that of
the dragonfly which appears violent when it eats meat or when it bullets by
or stands in space to take aim. But man sees only the beautiful colours of
the flies which seems that the battle shouts and death-cries which are
arising from the depth of mans unconscious mind are inaudible to him.
Hughes, in this poem, invites man to
. . . Think what worse
Is the pond-beds matter of course;
Prehistoric bedragonned times
Crawl that darkness with Latin names,
Have evolved no improvements there,
Jaws for heads, the set stare,

Ignorant of age as of hour

(Lupercal: To Paint a Water Lily, 29-30)
The ponds depth and darkness symbolize the unconscious mind of man
which is inhabited by the violent energies of Prehistoric bedragonned times.
Those primitive violent energies which man ignored for a long time are now
coming to the surface to disturb the beautiful natural setting of the water lily.
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The poet, like a painter, is painting a water lily which is deep in both worlds
half submerged in the primitive darkness of the unconscious mind of man and
half visible to the world of light and consciousness. The lily is not trembling
while meeting the horror at her root.
The poem presents a mysterious world through the brilliant fusion at
the level of the pictorial and the verbal. Ted Hughes uses the old heroic
Anglo-Saxon verse form, the four-beat alliterative line15 in this poem. It
consists of thirteen octosyllabic couplets16 which rhyme aa, bb, cc, dd, ee, ff,
gg, hh, ii, jj, kk, ll, mm.
Natural phenomena attracted Hughes immensely. In the poem Fire-
Eater, Hughes presents how ones life, death and rebirth are affected by
natural forces. Creation and destruction or life and death are affected or
governed by the stars in this poem: The stars are like materialized fires, the
gods making themselves visible to men. We give them the names of gods.
These gods gave life, and they snuff it out as easily as swallowing the tiny
spark which is the life of a gnat.17 The gnats light is devoured by the stars
mouth and its skin is burned like that of Mary and Semele:
The death of a gnat is a stars mouth: its skin,
Like Marys or Semeles, thin
As the skin of fire:
A star fell on her, a sun devoured her.
(Lupercal: Fire-Eater, 33)
Both Virgin Mary and Semele were devoured by divine forces but this
devouring or consummation also brought in fertility and renewal of life. Virgin
Mary, according to Christian belief, was impregnated by the Spirit of God in
the form of a dove. The result of this was that she gave birth to Jesus Christ.
Hence fertility was assured and life was renewed. Semele, a Greek mythic
figure, was loved by Zeus who was The Father of gods and men.18 On
Semeles insistence, Zeus appeared to her in his most glorious form
surrounded by lightning and thunder19 which resulted in Semeles
consummation by celestial flames.20 Zeus took the unborn child from
Semeles womb and attached it to his own thigh till the child was born as
Dionysus. The myth of Semele is generally associated with fertility, vegetation
and renewal of life:
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When the earth has been made fertile by life-giving rains it must, in
order that its products may reach maturity, endure the bite of the sun
which burns and dries it up. Only then do its fruits develop and the
golden grapes appear on the knotty vine. This seems to be the
meaning of the myth of Semele who was normally considered to be
the mother of Dionysus.21

Dionysus symbolizes life, an ever-living fire. He dies and is reborn. Life is

recycled in this way. In the second half of the poem, the speaking persona
does not humbly surrender to the divine powers but boastfully claims to be
himself a fire-eater22 capable of managing whole constellations but inspite of
his resolve he is subject to the same forces of creation and destruction as the
slug and the tree:
My appetite is good
Now to manage both Orion and Dog
With a mouthful of earth, my staple.
Worm-sort, root-sort, going where it is profitable.
A star pierces the slug,
The tree is caught up in the constellations.
My skull burrows among antennae and fronds.
((Lupercal: Fire-Eater, 33)
The sea is often represented as a big eater in Hughes poetry as
exemplified in Mayday on Holderness and Relic. The poem Relic presents
the sea as a devourer which has devoured crabs and dogfish. The bones
are scattered at the seas edge. The sea, which sustains as well as engulfs
life, represents primitive forces of life and death, creation and destruction at
work in the universe. The title of the poem, which carries a religious
resonance23 itself suggests a celebration of that universal fact of death.24
No camaraderie can work out in the dark depth of the sea where Nothing
touches but, clutching, devours. It denies the possibility of human values
such as love, harmony, friendship and comradeship in a world which is all the
time driven by the conflicting forces of Nature. The poem uses words such as
clutching and devours to suggest the instinct of hunger which is a
manifestation of the fierce struggle for existence or the Will to Live. This
struggle is focused on the universal processes of life and death, creation and
destruction:
. . . And the jaws,
Before they are satisfied or their stretched purpose
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Slacken, go down jaws; go gnawn bare. Jaws

Eat and are finished and the jawbone comes to the beach:
This is the seas achievement; with shells,
Vertebrae, claws, carapaces, skulls.
((Lupercal: Relic, 44)
Body organs are highlighted in this poem to present the conflict between life
and death. The jaws which eat are themselves to be eaten. The jawbone
which once has eaten others has itself become a cenotaph. The use of
words such as the cenotaph and the Relic show that Hughes imagination
is
. . . here rooted in the memory of war, a war we are obliged by annual
ceremonies at the Cenotaph not to forget, but which in Hughes is a
reminder of the darker, hidden memory of the instinctual drives which
are so cruelly apparent in the midst of battle.25

Another factor which is highlighted in the poem is Time which eats its tail
yet thrives. This presents the theme of rebirth or regeneration in the poem.
According to Leonard M. Scigaj, . . . the tail-eating Uroboros serpent of
alchemy affirms the possibility of spiritual rebirth in nature26 and stands for
time. Hence, the poem presents the cycle of life, death and rebirth in the world
of Nature as well as in the human world.
Natures violent face is again highlighted in the poem Snowdrop. The
poem presents the biting and freezing winter when life almost comes to a halt:
Now is the globe shrunk tight / Round the mouses dulled wintering heart.
But Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass, / Move through an outer
darkness. The weasel and the crow exhibit a strong sense of vitality or the
life-force in the face of the extreme violence of Nature. This vitality is also
revealed by the snowdrop who, despite her frailty and vulnerability, pursues
her ends, / Brutal as the stars of this month, whose pale head shows a
metallic strength. She is not weaker than the weasel and the crow in her fight
for survival. Words such as weasel, snowdrop, and pale head also refer
to the White Goddess who is described as a lovely, slender woman with a
hooked nose, deathly pale face, lips red as rowan-berries, startlingly blue
eyes and long fair hair.27 She may transform herself into sow, mare, bitch,
vixen, she-ass, weasel, serpent, owl, she-wolf, tigress, mermaid, or loathsome
hag.28 A sense of vitality, which is marked not only in the animals like the
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weasel and the crow, but also in the tiny snowdrop, is a reflection of the
Goddess. Richard Webster observes:
. . . the feminine snowdrop a little incarnation, almost, of the White
Goddess is located within that world of frozen and sleeping vitality
which is created by the poem, a vitality which can only be preserved, it
would seem, if it is encased within a hard, metallic, evolutionary will.29

The poem Sunstroke presents violence in ordinary activities. The

poem begins with an image of the grass cutting machine which is,
hyperbolically, presented as a big eater: Frightening the blood in its tunnel /
The mowing machine ate at the field of grass. This expresses damage and
destruction in the world of vegetation. The second couplet presents imagery
of war and violence which is again man-made: . . . Through a red heat / The
cradled guns, damascus, blued . . . The speaking personas eyes had been
glared dark to view reality which is violent. The guns blued and flared
frightening the speaker. He feels that some molten embers have entered his
head. The next couplet again depicts how the plants are destroyed. The
saw is working on the clover . . . / Till the blades bit roots, stones, ripped
into red . . . The colour red stands for bloodshed and violence. The speaker,
unable to resist violence, is in confinement with his lungs suffering the
unpleasant smell of paraffin. Lying on a sack in an engine-shed, he is
frightened to hear heavy rain outside. He takes refuge Under the ragged
length of a dog fox / That dangled head downward from one of the beams, /
With eyes open, forepaws strained at a leap. The presence of the life-force in
the dog fox encourages him to continue living no matter how adverse the
circumstances may be. The life-force present in both man and beast asserts
itself so that the struggle for survival may continue.
The natural and geological elements continue to receive attention in
Ted Hughes third collection of poetry entitled Wodwo. Different natural and
geological phenomena are present in a number of poems such as Thistles,
Still Life, Cadenza, Fern, A Wind Flashes the Grass, Sugar Loaf,
Mountains, and Pibroch.
The poem Thistles presents, through hyperbolic metaphors and
symbols, the violent outburst of ferocity and bloodshed from the forgotten
past. This is metaphorically highlighted through the thorny plants such as the
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thistles. These thistles are capable of fighting against the rubber tongues of
cows and the hoeing hands of men. They spike and pierce the summer air
and make harsh sounds under a blue-black pressure. The thistles represent
a revengeful burst / Of resurrection of something violent from the depth of
mans unconscious:
. . . a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up

From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.

They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.
Every one manages a plume of blood.

Then they grow grey, like men.

Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear,
Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.
(Wodwo: Thistles, 147)
The poet uses the thistles as a metaphor to deal with the bloody past i.e., the
vengeful Viking the Scandinavian pirate and raider of the 8th-11th
century.30 This is also affirmed by John Lucas that The Thistles become a
metaphor for Englands Viking inheritance: weaponry and warriodom.31 The
revengeful burst of the warriors and feud amongst them is a reality which
was once suppressed under rational and moral obligations. The offsprings of
these decayed Viking are now slowly raising their head. This suppressed
reality is represented as coming out in the open from the deep recesses of the
unconscious, to the conscious mind of man through such ordinary and familiar
plants like the thistles. It is this aspect which Dennis Walder highlights:
. . . Hughess vision transforms them into a grasped fistful/Of
splintered weapons and Icelandic frost, as the archaic, repressed
memory of Viking invaders Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the
same ground, looms into focus. This is what, apparently, lies beneath
the everyday surface of life: a vengeful reality which demands to be
remembered.32

The violent energies, as exemplified by Scandinavian warriors, are inevitably

present in the blood of mankind. The poet apparently deals with the plant but
it is actually man who is the focus of attention here.
The poem Still Life is concerned with the impermanence of physical
existence on one hand and affirms the power of the life-force on the other.
Lifes impermanence is presented in this poem through the stone. Here
Hughes takes stone as the most perfect, most self-sufficient of substances,
 86

giving nothing of itself, eternal, itself the measure of the transience of all other
things.33 The stone is attributed anthropomorphic characteristics throughout
the poem:
Outcrop stone is miserly
With the wind. Hoarding its nothings,
Letting wind run through its fingers,
It pretends to be dead of lack.
Even its grimace is empty,
Warted with quartz pebbles from the seas womb.
It thinks it pays no rent,
Expansive in the suns summerly reckoning.
Under rain, it gleams exultation blackly
As if receiving interest.
Similarly, it bears the snow well.
(Wodwo: Still Life, 147)
Although the stone apparently presents a still life, it exhibits power and
endurance like that of the horses that figure in the poem The Horses in The
Hawk in the Rain by Ted Hughes. The stone puts up with the ravages of the
wind, the rain and the snow. But this strong and powerful stone will meet its
end at the hands of a fragile harebell. The harebell, which itself is vulnerable,
contains . . . the power which made the sea, which made the stone, and will
ultimately . . . break the stone.34 The harebell too,
. . . trembles, as under threats of death,
In the summer turfs heat-rise,
And in which-filling veins
Any known name of blue would bruise
Out of existence sleeps, recovering,

The maker of the sea.

(Wodwo: Still Life, 148)
This is a manifestation of the life-force or the Will to Live which is part of the
processes of creation and destruction in geological phenomena.
The poem Cadenza presents a violinist who is caught in extremely
violent surroundings. In Hughes poetry, violence is a result of the struggle
between the contradictory forces of life and death, creation and destruction.
This is presented in this poem by powerful images. The poem begins with a
description of the condition of the violinist in the face of violence: The
violinists shadow vanishes. The image of The husk of a grasshopper,
which Sucks a remote cyclone and rises, manifests the Will to Live or the
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life-force which is needed to survive in the face of the creative-destructive

energies. Another image is that of a female character who is highlighted in
this poem through the use of alliteration: The full, bared throat of a woman
walking water, / The loaded estuary of the dead. The poem presents a
similarity between the full, bared throat of a woman and the tidal mouth of
the river which is loaded with the dead. The woman here is a reflection of
the White Goddess who is as furious as the loaded estuary of the dead. The
throat and the estuary stand for the instinct of hunger which is an
expression of the Will to Live. Hence, the Goddess manifests herself through
the furious instinct of hunger or the Will to Live. Hughes not only accepts the
reality of a will-driven predatory world but adopts a positive attitude towards it
by associating it with vigour and vitality. The vitality is thus caught in the midst
of death, destruction, war and violence. Terms like Sucks, swallows and
mouth are repeatedly used in the poem to reinforce the instinct of hunger
which is inherently present in the world. The violinist, who deliberately ignores
this instinct does not dare to confront the threatening but vital forces of
Nature: Blue with sweat, the violinist / Crashes into the orchestra, which
explodes. The violinist sweats when he is exposed to the water which
carries a coffin, the outrageous clouds full of surgery and collisions, the
sea which swallows wings and flings and a bat with a ghost in its mouth.
The poet reveals a grasshopper which is better adjusted to the violent
surroundings. The metaphorical force of the language with hyperbolic
overtones and brilliant sound patterns effectively communicates meaning in
this poem.
Fern is a poem which is concerned with fertility and growth in the
world of Nature. This is presented by an image of the fern which is powerfully
drawn, with alliterative force:
Here is the ferns frond, unfurling a gesture,
Like a conductor whose music will now be pause
And the one note of silence
To which the whole earth dances gravely.
(Wodwo: Fern, 153)
The fern, unfurling its feathers, is compared with a conductors music To
which the whole earth dances gravely. This is a dance of life and growth in
 88

Nature. Hughes presents the ferns frond as the plume / Of a warrior who
dances while returning to his kingdom. Vision of war and violence in Hughes
poetry is generally associated with survival. The warrior in this poem has won
the battle against death, hence Hughes foregrounds the plume on his head as
his crowning glory. The poem affirms the necessity of the struggle for survival.
In Ted Hughes poetry violence is essential for survival. This is again
reinforced by the poem entitled A Wind Flashes the Grass. An intense sense
of violence is suggested at the very outset of the poem: Leaves pour blackly
across. Vegetative life in Hughes poetry manifests a Dionysian impulse or
the Will to Live. The personae present in the poem are trying to maintain their
hold on earth but are pierced afresh by the trees cry. They are not able to
comprehend the cry coming out from the boughs of the tree, the wind,
and the rock:
And the incomprehensible cry
From the boughs, in the wind
Sets us listening for below words,
Meanings that will not part from the rock.
(Wodwo: A Wind Flashes the Grass, 153)
The Meanings of the cry, be it from the tree or the wind or the rock refer to
the fearful struggle for survival in a world where the antagonistic forces of
creation and destruction blindly strive against each other. These urges are
manifested in the leaves pouring blackly, the trees, the boughs and the wind
crying. Since the Will is incomprehensible to man, he grows anxious when
he sees violence:
The trees thunder in unison, on a gloomy afternoon,
And the ploughman grows anxious, his tractor becomes terrible,
As his memory litters downwind
And the shadow of his bones tosses darkly on the air.
(Wodwo: A Wind Flashes the Grass, 153)
Both the trees and the ploughman respond differently to the creative-
destructive forces of Nature. The ploughman is worried but the trees, on the
contrary, show vitality or the life-force, which Hughes presents as the oracle
of the earth, in the face of the destructive forces. The twigs too are
vulnerable but have the courage to stand up to the negative forces present in
the universe.
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Geological elements are again projected as predators in another poem

entitled Sugar Loaf. The poem presents the predatory impulse in the water,
which can devour the hill. Hughes locates Will or volition in the trickle of the
water which . . . cutting from the hill-crown / Whorls to a pure pool here, with
a whisp trout like a spirit. The ferocity of the Will is manifested by the water
which is wild as alcohol. In Hughes poetry, a strong instinct of hunger is not
only reflected in the predatory advances of creatures like the hawk, the jaguar
or the pike but also by natural phenomena like the water when it engulfs the
hill: I see the whole huge hill in the small pools stomach. The hill, when it is
engulfed by the water is compared to a sugar loaf, which can be easily
engulfed by the small pools stomach. Hence, volition or the Will to exist is
furiously and actively present even in a small pool which engulfs the hill as
easily as it can engulf a sugar loaf. Entrapping, catching and engulfing
actually focus on the struggle for survival. The hill, being a part of the creative-
destructive processes of the universe, will have to meet its end. It does not
suspect its impending destruction at the hands of the water. Hence, the poem
depicts a Schopenhauerian vision of a predatory and antagonistic world
where
Every grade of the wills objectification fights for the matter, the space,
and the time of another. Persistent matter must constantly change the
form, since, under the guidance of causality, mechanical, physical,
chemical, and organic phenomena, each striving to appear, snatch the
matter from one another. 35

Mountains is another poem which presents the conflict amongst the

different phenomena of Nature. In this poem, the stones or the mountains are
subject to creation and destruction, life and death. Beautiful natural images
and elements of anthropomorphism are used throughout the poem. The
stones acquire a human personality and possess a Finger, a shoulder, and
an eye. They are the epitome of strength or force which has enabled them to
survive since yesterday and the world before yesterday. The strong
enactment of the Will to Live is manifested through the very power and
presence of the mountains. Despite having their faces lit with the peace / Of
the fathers will and testament, they face the threat of destruction as they are
themselves part of the creative-destructive processes at work in the universe.
 90

Acquiring a human personality, the stones have to go through pleasure and

pain, life and death: Wearing flowers in their hair, decorating their limbs /
With the agony of love and the agony of fear and the agony of death.
The poem Pibroch, which is perhaps the ultimate expression of
Hughes vision of the world in Wodwo, presents an extremely antagonistic
predatory world of Nature. This antagonistic world is brilliantly suggested by
the poems title Pibroch which . . . denotes a set of variations for bagpipes
on a traditional dirge or martial theme. Music thus becomes an analogue of
sorts for the functioning of the mysterious but fundamental dynamic that
preoccupies Hughes in this poem.36 The variations in the music are
analogous to Schopenhauers notion of conflict amongst different phenomena
such as the sea, the stone, the wind and the tree. This concept of conflict or
antagonism stands in opposition to the bourgeois illusions like, harmony,
compassion, love and peace. Bourgeois adherence to the life of illusions and
pretensions is cul-de-sac in the Schopenhauerian notion of a will-driven world
of killing and hunting or a Dionysian world of madness and frenzy. Different
symbols are used to present antagonism amongst different phenomena.
These symbols are the sea, the stone, and the tree. To begin with,
The sea cries with its meaningless voice
Treating alike its dead and its living,
Probably bored with the appearance of heaven
After so many millions of nights without sleep,
Without purpose, without self-deception.
(Wodwo: Pibroch, 179)
The sea, which strives aimlessly and meaninglessly, is a manifestation of a
blind force the Will which stands in contrast to the appearance of heaven.
Here heaven refers to the logos that betokens a moral code and a coherent
technology.37
The stone is another symbol which presents an aimless life
imprisoned / Like nothing in the Universe. Hughes presents the illusions and
pretensions of human beings through the stone which occasionally becomes
Conscious of the suns red spot and dreams of itself as the foetus of God.
Dwight Eddins opines:
The rocks occasional dream that it is the foetus of God is yet
another ironic subversion of the divine logos, a process continued by
the wind that rushes over it as a parody of the divine afflatus. This
 91

spiritus associated with the blind stone and able to mingle with
nothing negates any hope of communion with the First Cause and of
cosmic orientation amid the mere fantasy of directions that its
arbitrary shiftings represent. Once again we are faced with an
analogue of the invisible, boundless, aimless will.38

The tree, another manifestation of the Will to Live, too struggles to survive:
Drinking the sea and eating the rock / A tree struggles to make leaves . . . It
drinks the sea and eats the rock, and in this way makes its own survival
possible. This is the universal condition of all forms of life which is . . . neither
a bad variant nor a tryout. / This is where the staring angels go through. / This
is where all the stars bow down. Here the angels and the stars often
associated with divinity are subject to the same laws since Hughes denies the
very concept of God and are forced to bow down to an absolute irrationality
at the very core of things.39
There are other creative writers who have been influenced by the
Schopenhauerian philosophy. Bernard Shaw, for example, exploits creatively
the concept of the Will to Live or the life-force in a number of his texts such as
his famous play Man and Superman. The Will to Live is a powerful concept
and can be used imaginatively by creative writers.
 92

References

1. Grant, Allan. Ted Hughes: Hawk Roosting, An Otter. Criticism in

Action: A Critical Symposium on Modern Poems. ed. Maurice Hussey.
London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd., 1969, 101.
2. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1975, 28.
3. Ibid., 27.
4. Faas, Ekbert. Interview with Ted Hughes. Ted Hughes and Crow.
London Magazine. 10. 10 (January 1971) 10-11.
5. Bentley, Paul. The Poetry of Ted Hughes: Language, Illusion and
Beyond. London: Longman, 1999, 9.
6. Ibid., 9.
7. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1975, 27.
8. Edman, Irwin. ed. The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. New York: Carlton
House, 1928, 341.
9. Scigaj, Leonard M. The Ophiolatry of Ted Hughes. Twentieth
Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal. 31. 4 (Winter
1985): 382.
10. Gifford, Terry, and Neil Roberts. Ted Hughes: A Critical Study. London:
Faber & Faber, 1981, 75.
11. Sagar, Keith. Hughes and His Landscape. The Achievement of Ted
Hughes. ed. Keith Sagar. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1983, 3.
12. Rawson, C. J. Ted Hughes: A Reappraisal. Essays in Criticism: A
Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism. 15. 1 (July 1965): 78.
13. Walder, Dennis. Ted Hughes. England: Open University Press, 1987,
37.
14. Ibid., 37.
15. Ibid., 38.
16. Ibid., 37.
17. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 56.
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18. Aldrington, Richard, and Delano Ames. Trans. The Larousse

Encyclopedia of Mythology. London: Chancellor Press, 1997, 99.
19. Ibid.,105.
20. Ibid.,105.
21. Ibid., 157.
22. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 56.
23. Walder, Dennis. Op. cit., 38.
24. Ibid., 38.
25. Ibid., 38.
26. Scigaj, Leonard M. Op. cit., 382.
27. Graves, Robert. The White Goddess. New York: Vintage Books,
1959, 12.
28. Ibid., 12.
29. Webster, Richard. The thought-fox and the poetry of Ted
Hughes. Critical Quarterly. 26. 4 (Winter 1984): 41.
30. Elliott, Julia. ed. Oxford Dictionary & Thesaurus. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006, 864.
31. Lucas, John. Modern English Poetry From Hardy to Hughes: A Critical
Survey. London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1986, 196.
32. Walder, Dennis. Op. cit., 26.
33. Sagar, Keith. The Art of Ted Hughes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975, 68.
34. Ibid., 69.
35. 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.
36. Ibid., n. pag.
37. Ibid., n. pag.
38. Ibid., n. pag.
39. Ibid., n. pag.