Major Themes in the Poetry of Ted Hughes

Unlike some modern poets so believe that a poem should not mean but be, Ted Hughes is profoundly
concerned with the subject matter of his poetry. The major theme of his poetry as well as short stories and
plays is of course man, that is, the question of human existence, man’s relation with the universe, with the
natural world and with his own inner self. He is awfully serious about this last aspect of the problem of
being, namely, the problem of human consciousness.
As Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts have observed, Ted Hughes’s “endeavour is to gain access to, and give
expression to, a level of being at which the continuity between the processes of nature experienced within
and observed without is unimpeded by consciousness. Here lies the source of all energy, creativity and
delight. Individual consciousness, insisting all the time on it separateness, is the cause of painful and
destructive alienation from this inner life—the obscure unhappiness of many of the human protagonists of
Hughes’s poems and stories. But consciousness is inescapable, and poems are ultimately acts of
consciousness. The subterranean world that Hughes’s poems explore can never be completely projected
into language, nor can anyone permanently live in it.” Poetry for Hughes has been a life-long vocation
and commitment, as he himself has written, “You choose a subject because it serves, because you need it.
We go on writing poems because one poem never gets the whole account right. There is always
something missed. At the end of the ritual up comes a goblin.” That goblin is a new perspective to look at
the same subject afresh. The subjects he prefers to write on are, however, several: man in relation to
the animal world, man and nature, war and death. Let us now explore Hughes’s treatment of these
subjects in some detail.
Animals in Ted Hughes’s Poetry
Right from his childhood, Ted Hughes has been interested in animals. When his parents lived in the
Calder valley, Ted Hughes had a chance to see the world of the animals from close quarters. As he later
recalled, he had a brother whose “one interest in life was creeping about on the hillside with a rifle. He
took me along as a retriever and I had to scramble into all kinds of places collecting animals:
An animal I never succeeded in keeping alive is the fox. I was always frustrated, twice by a farmer
who killed cubs I had caught before I could not get to them, and once by a poultry keeper who freed my
cub while his dog waited.
Here, Hughes learnt the first lesson that animals were by and large victims. The wild world of the
animals was at the mercy of the ordered human world. Yet, as Hughes realized and emphasized in his
poetry, the human world was fascinated by the world of the animals because it had pushed into the
unconscious what the animal world still possessed: vat, untapped energies.
It was this close intimacy with the interest in animals that informed Hughes’s poetry collected in The
Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal. The title poem of the first collection itself announces the major themes:
man in relation to the animals, the earth, the weather, time, and mortality. In the first poem, as Keith
Sagar comments on it, “The ‘eye of the hawk hangs as still as a polestar, at the eye of the storm the still
centre round which all that violence threatens. The poet’s eyes are his most vulnerable part, tumbed by
wind nd rain, but the hawk’s seems as impervious as immortal diamond.” Symbolically, “the eye is the
‘I’, the window of the soul, the outward expression of the hawk’s innermost being, its unquestionable
identity, its concentrated, inflexible being.”
Other animal poems establish a similar connection between man and animals. Like “The Hawk in the
Rain,” “The Horses” too is concerned with the poet-perceiver’s view of the patience and endurance of the
horses during a cold winter night. In “The Thought-Fox” the fox that the poet-perceiver visualized is
a symbol of the poetic inspiration which intrudes into the dark, lonely room and then into the mind of the
poet and causes the poem to be written. Symbolically, the movement of the fox pervades and describes
the process of the composition of a poem, not only a particular poem but all poems in general:
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business,
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head,
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.
 “The Jaguar” is of course the nearest thing to what can be called an orthodox animal-poem, in that
a real jaguar with all its characteristics is described and a particular setting is provided for it:
But who runs like the rest past these arrives
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying engaged
Through prison darkness after the drill of his eyes.
On a short fierce fuse. Not is boredom—
The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,
By the bag of blood in the brain deaf the ear—
He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him…
But even this poem, as Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts have noted, “is not a poem just of observation
but of longing and affirmation, particularly in its final lines which broaden out to suggest a human
possibility: an enticing possibility but one that entails preserving intact the predatory ferocity, rage,
blindness and deafness of our own nature.” Ted Hughes himself emphasized the symbolic nature of “The
Jaguar” thus:
A jaguar after all can be received in several different aspects…..he 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.
This is also true of another animal, the hawk in “Hawk Roosting” who was taken as a symbol of
fascism. But in this London Magazine interview Ted Hughes explained what he thought of the hawk:
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. There is a line in the poem almost verbatim from job.
This is quite right since as the hawk speaks of his centrality what he means is the centrality of
Nature; otherwise, a hawk is as mortal as any other creature and his description of himself as the centre of
the creation would be an example of misguided, inflated ago:
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly—
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.
It is this ferocity of Nature, the Darwinian Nature “red in tooth and claw” that elicits Hughes’s
praise. In “The Thrushes,” he speaks of he mechanical energy of the simple birds in the following
manner:
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 strt, a bounce, a stab
Overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing.
No indolent procrastinations and no yawning stares,
No sighs or head-scratchings. Nothing but bounce and stab
And a ravening second.
As Gifford and Roberts comment, “The stanza is hinged on the double perception of the
predatoriness of the thrushes and their delicacy, brilliantly fused in the word “triggered’. To be so
‘triggered’ to the beyond-sense stirrings is to be in a state of bliss: In an interview in the Guardian (23
March 1965), Hughes described the animals in his poems as ‘living the redeemed life of joy’. On the
practical level this joy is perfect adaptation to the needs of life, and the total absorption of being in
action.”
“The Thrushes” is also an example of Hughes’s assertion that it is a human tendency to associate
ideas with animals of which they may not at all be aware. But apart from this several of Hughes’s poems
about animals also contain an arra of mystery when this mystery is associated with the objects of
description. This is how “Bull Moss” moves from external reality about the bull to the mystery
surrounding his meekness and submissiveness:
Each dusk the farmer led him
Down to the pond to drink and smell the air,
And he took no pace but the farmer
Led him to take it, as if he knew nothing
Of the ages and continents of his fathers,
Shut, while he wombed, to a dark shed
And steps between his door and the duckpond.
The mystery hedging the bull remains unsolved. In case of “An Otter,” the very process of arriving at
the definition of this amphibian is a problem:
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.
Brings the legend of himself
From before wars or burials, in spite of bounds and vermin-poles;
Does not take root like the badger. Wanders, cries;
Gallops along land he no longer belongs to;
Re-enters the water by melting.
Once again Hughes follows the method which, according to Roberts and Gifford, is exemplified in
“Bull Moses” by which Hughes “characteristically moves from physical detail to general idea, from a
specific moment to universal processes.
In later poems, found in Wodow, Ted Hughes continues to show his interest in the animals in the
same way and takes them as representatives of the Nature that human beings have suppressed and which
Christianity has described as diabolical. In the Crow group of poems, the nightmare itself is presented
through the eyes of the crow, himself a creation of nightmare, as Hughes suggests in an interview. It
needs to be noted, by way of conclusion, that Hughes’s interest in animals is quite central to his poetic
vision. For these animals, the crow, the jaguar, the tomcat, skylark, the hawk, the thrushes, the pike and,
the horses, all are in one way or another representatives of Nature. Nature that once belonged to man but
now lies deep-buried in the human consciousness. This is not to detract from Hughes’s skilful capturing
of animals in verse. But, as emphasized earlier, animals in Hughes’s poetry do operate on several levels:
literal, mythical and symbolic.
2. Nature
Just as Hughes explores the relations between the animal world and the human world, he also thinks
of Nature as part of this universe to which man is closely related. In this respect, Hughes continues the
tradition of Nature poetry which starts with the pastoral and reaches the twentieth
century via Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Blake, and Tennyson. In his plays Shakespeare tries to establish a
harmony between the human world and the world of Nature. A disorder in the one is often reflected in
another. But it world be difficult to say that Shakespeare agrees with the Duke Senior of As You Like
It who finds sermons in stones, tongues, in trees and good in everything. For, as Hughes comments
on Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare does not hesitate to present a certain
ambivalence about Nature. After all, it is Nature which produces a Cordelia and Goneeil and mrkes them
sisters.
Wordsworth, who is known as the greatest poet of Nature in English, is rather limited in his view, a
view which Duke Senior of As You Like It anticipated. Wordsworth’s attitude to Nature in his own words
makes it rather narrow. In a letter cited by A. P. Rossiter, Wordsworth refers to “the spirituality with
which I have endeavoured to invest the material universe, and the moral relations under which I have
wished to exhibit its most ordinary appearances.” And to prove his point, Wordsworth often chose to
select a “favoured corner” in his own countryside landscape, which could convince him that “Nature
never did betray the heart that loved her.”
In contrast to Wordsworth, poets like Tennyson were aware of the presence of Nature which was not
a moral teacher, nurse and guardian, but instead, a terrible force, “red in tooth and claw.” This version is
close to the Schopenhauer’s concept which treats Nature as a nightmarish force. Much earlier than
Tennyson and Schopenhauer, Hume had spoken of blind Nature in the following words:
Look around this Universe. What an unmense profusion of Beings, animated and organized, sensible
and active! You admire this prodigious variety and fecundity. But inspect a little more narrowly these
living Existences, the only beings worth regarding. How hostile and destructive to each other! How
insufficient all of them are for their own Happiness! How contemptible or odious to the Spectator! The
whole presents nothing but the idea of a blind Nature impregnated by a great vivifying Principle, and
pouring forth from her lap without Discernment or parental Care, her maim’d and abortive Children.
But Ted Hughes unlike Hume, Schopenhauer, Wordsworth and Tennyson, but like Shakespeare on
the one hand and Robert Grave on the other, consider Nature an ambivalent force. This is why Ted
Hughes looks at Nature with various, differing attitudes. In a poem like “The Horses,” Ted Hughes
describes a natural landscape in winter as vividly and pictorially as Wordsworth:
But the valleys were draining the darkness
Till the moorline-blackening dregs of the brightening gry
Halved the sky ahead.
I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.
Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun Orange, red, red erupted.
In “October Dawn” he describes the onset of winter by creating a veritable myth:
October is marigold, and yet
A glass half full of win left out
To the dark heaven all night, by dawn
Has dreamed a premonition,
Of ice across its eye as if
The ice-age had begun its heave.
The myth of a wedding party in the lawn that Hughes creates in this poem is necessary to emphasize
the continuum that he finds in the world of Nature. But, unlike Wordsworth, Hughes is aware of the
destructive forces of Nature as well.
In “Wind,” for example, the security that a man seeks in the hills in order to avoid the storm is
precarious indeed:
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
Till day rose: then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.
The description here is as vivid as it is terrific. But external Nature in this poem, as Keith Sagar has
noted, is symbolic of the violence that lies inside man, deep in his subconsciousness: “The wind is
representative of all those natural forces we try to shut out of our lives, which, if let in on our sense would
leave to blind, floundering or mad.”
Hughes often sees this violence and restless energy in Nature in which, according to Darwin, the rule
of the survival of the fittest prevails. In “Hawk Roosting” as discussed in the preceding section of this
chapter, the hawk is symbolic of the thinking of Nature itself, which, treats everything as a means to its
end. The predatory nature of the thrushes, the otter, and the jaguar are sings of the law of jungle. In yet
another poem, “The Relic,” the vast sea demonstrates the Darwinian view of Nature by devouring
everything in it:
I found this jawbone at the sea’s edge:
The crabs, dogfish, broken by the breakers or tossed
To flap for half an hour and turn to a crust
Continue the beginning. The deeps are cold:
In that darkness camaraderie does not hold:
Nothing touches but, clutching, devours. And the jaws
Before they are satisfied or their stretched purpose
Slacken, go down jaws; go gnawn bare. Jaws
Eat and are finished and the jawbone comes to the beach;
Vertebrae, claws, carapaces, skulls.
As Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts comment, “The matter-of-fact tone of the poem is consistent with
the vision that is expressed in these statements: that all life in the sea eats and is eaten, and that this must
be accepted without sentimentality or imposing values such as ‘camaraderie.’ All efforts to understand
Nature in terms of human morality are as doomed as Job’s effort to understand his God. His successors
decided to remake God in their own image, separating out and exalting the Logos, leaving the dark side of
God, unacknowledged, marauding destructively as Satan, serpent, dragon, God, unredeemable Nature and
the ghosts of all pagan gods and goddesses. And it is this process which Hughes sees as having more to
do with the sad state of the world than the adoration of Job’s savage God which Richard strangely
imagines to have characterized the last two thousand years.”
But Hughes feels that the dark, inscrutable forces of Nature can be negotiated with provided we learn
how to do that. For one thing, he, like Robert Graves, takes external Nature as representative of all the
violence, horror, and nightmare that lies deeply buried within the human consciousness. The jaguar
fascinates the viewers largely because they find in him what they feel they once possessed but have been
deprived of by Puritans who dismissed all Nature as evil. For this reason, Hughes admires all those who
show courage and adjustment enough to live with Nature. Dick Straightup is, for example, one such
strong person, as strong as the earth, who finds himself invulnerable in open Nature:
But this one,
With no more application than sitting
And drinking, and singing, fell in the sleet, late,
Damned the pouring gutter, and slept there and throughout
A night searched by shouts and lamps, froze,
Grew to the road with welts of ice. He was shipped out at dawn
Warm as a pie and snoring.
This is also true of the tramps in “November” and “Crag Jack’s Apostasy.” Similarly, the “Acrobats”
defy gravity by adapting themselves to it:
Out onto nothing, snap, jerk
Fulcrumed without fall
On axes immaterial as
Only geometry should use.
Crag Jack comes clear of the world because of his physical toughness. Hughes’ point is that once we
learn to negotiate with the forces of Nature we can find peace within ourselves, for these forces are
symbolic of what lies deep-seated in our own consciousness.
All in all, the subject of Nature fascinates Hughes much that whether he depicts Nature as
Wordsworth did, or uses it as symbolic of the internal human condition, he looks at Nature from varying
perspectives. Nature informs his poetry from The Hawk in the Rain to What is Truth. And with the
experience and knowledge of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Hume and Schopenhauer behind him,
Hughes. As Graham Bradshaw says, “The poems repeatedly explore those ways in which even as we
apprehend this nature as something outside humanity…we are brought to recognize something that is also
inside us in inner hinterland that ordinary consciousness excludes. So, although it will be no
recommendation to those who warble about Elizabethan world pictures and think that Macbeth shows a
reassuringly inevitable triumph of good over evil, Hughes is exceptionally alive to the terrifying
Shakespearean evocations of an unaccommodated universe. Moreover, his preoccupation with mythology
makes Hughes peculiarly sensitive to the long tails Shakespearean comets trail: whatever we think of
Hughes’s use of the world ‘puritan’….he sees how the ‘quarrel about the nature of Nature’ opened
archaic mythological dimension beyond the immediate theological one.”
3. War
When the Second World War started Ted Hughes was only nine; and when the War ended he was
scarcely fifteen. Ted Hughes therefore did not have much experience of the World War II. But his father
had fought in World War I and was one of the seventeen lucky men of his regiment to have survived
death in the Gullipoli battle. When Hughes was still young, his father told him of how a shrapnel which
would have killed him was diverted by his paybook in the breast-pocket. Afterwards he took several
months to recover the physical injures and the mental horror that he ha undergone during the war. All this
left an indelible impression on the mind of the young, sensitive poet. When World War II had caused a
great havoc, especially in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and when Hughes learnt of the large scale massacre of
the Jews by the Nazis, his poetic mind felt a great revolt against all this man-made calamity.
But his response to the nightmare created by World War II was quite different from that of the
movement poets, such as Amiss and Hollowy, who felt quite benumbed by the war, took refuge in
avoiding any talk of the war, and insisted on the faithful depiction of an urban reality. Ted Hughes felt
that this was not the right attitude because one could not avoid the problem by simply shutting one’s eyes
to it. Hughes, therefore, depicts faithful pictures of the nightmare that the War had created and the vision
of a nightmarish world it had left behind. This is how he recalled the experience of his childhood when he
described it in “Out”.
My father sat in his hair recovering
From the four-year mastication by gunfire and mud,
Body buffeted worldless, estranged by long soaking
In the colours of mutilation.
His outer perforations
Were valiantly healed, but he and the hearth-fire, its blood-flicker
On biscuit-bowl and piano and table leg,
Moved into strong and stronger possession
Of minute after minute, as the clock’s tiny cog
Laboured and on the thread of his listening
Dragged him bodily from under
The mortised four-year strata of dead Englishmen
He belonged with.
Similarly in “Six Young Men” Hughes brings out the contrast between what these six young men in
a holiday mood were before the war, and what became of them during it:
This one was shot in an attack and lay
Calling in the wire, then this one, his best friend,
Went out to bring him in and was shot too;
And this one, the very moment he was warned
From potting at tin-cans in no-man’s land. Fell back dead with his refle-shights shot away.
The rest nobody knows what they came to,
But come to the worst they must have done, and held
Closer than their hope; all were killed.
There is no air of sentimentality here, but the matter-of-fact tone points out the horrible end of their
norms and values, and of the youth, festivity and gaiety that belonged to them a little while ago. “bayonet
Charge” is close to Wilfred Owen’s war poems but its second stanza gives glimpses of the mature Ted
Hughes:
In bewilderment then he almost stopped—
In what cold clockwork of the stars and the nations
Was he the hand pointing that second? He was running
Like a man who has jumped up in the dark and runs
Listening between his footfalls for the reason
Of his still running, and his foot hung like
Statuary in mid-stride.
This is clearly a vivid picture of the senselessness of war and the havoc it brings to young man. In
“Grief for Dead Soldiers” Hughes first paints and ironically grandiloquent picture of the unveiling of a
cenotaph. But the real strength and point of the poem lies in its second section wherein the focus is on the
widow of a soldier. The cold master-of-fact manner in which Hughes brings out her grief avoids
sentimentality and gains in bitter poignancy:
The doors and windows open like great gates to hell.
Still she will carry cups from table to sink.
She cannot build her sorrow into a monument
And walk away from it. Closer than thinking
The dead man hangs around her neck, but never
Close enough to be touched, or thanked even,
For being all that remains in a world smashed.
The general horror created by the World War receives its telling description in “Crow’s Account of
the Battle” wherein Hughes writes,
And when the smoke cleared it became clear
This had happened too often before
And was going to happen too often in future
And happened too easily
Bones were too like lath and twigs
Blood was too like water
Cries were too like silence
The most terrible grimaces too like footprints in mud
And shooting somebody through the midriff
Was too like striking a match
Too like spotting a snooker ball
Too like tearing up a bill
Blasting the whole world to bits
Was too like slamming a door
Too like dropping in a chair
Exhausted with rage
Too like being down to bits yourself
Which happened too easily
With too like no consequence.
Hughes shows a rare boldness in facing the situation and in expressing the horror that war had
created. While the Movement poets were shutting their imagination from this ugly reality, Hughes
decided to face it. And since East European poets, many of whom had fought in the war and lost their
lives in the process, Hughes felt attracted towards them. Hughes wrote:
The Western poet perhaps envies his brother in East, for while he sings of comparative comfort,
comparative freedom, comparative despair, the reality of the threat and the disaster is not his. There is a
tendency for the Western poet to become isolated and turn inwards, whereas the poet of the East is in tune
with the rhythms of his people in a much more direct and dynamic way.
4. Death
Another recurrent theme in the poetry of Ted Hughes is death. Hughes examines its various facets,
ranging from death in war to the death of an animal and birngs out the sorrow as well as the fulfilment of
a process that death generally means for him. In his early poetry he writes of the death of the “Six Young
Men” and contrasts their holiday mood with their premature death; in “Grief for Dead Soldiers” he
poignantly brings out the ironical contrast between the remembering of war heroes and the grief and
despair which they leave behind for the widows and orphans. In “The Pig” he speaks of the death of an
animal and discusses it without any sentimentality and pathos. In “Bishop Nicholas Ferrar” he celebrates
the death of a martyr for a cause.
The shadow of death lengthens itself on many poems in Wodow and Crow. Again, an elegiac tone
enters the Moortown poems. In the five sections of “Stations” Hughes explores the mystery of death. In
the first of these he looks simultaneously with pathos and ironic wit at a dying man:
Suddenly his poor body
Had Its drowsy mind no longer
For insulation.
Before the funeral service foundered
The lifeboat coffin had shaken to pieces
And the great stars were swimming through where he had been.
Grief of the wife of the dead man is vividly captured:
For a while
The stalk of the tulip at the door that had outlived him.
And his jacket, and his wife, and his last pillow
Clung to each other,
“The Green Wolf” similarly paints a realistic and grim picture of death:
Your neighbour moves less and less, attempts less.
If his right hand still moves, it is a farewell
Already days posthumous.
But the left hand seems to freeze,
And the left leg with its crude plumbing,
And the left half jaw and the left eyelid and the words,
all the huge cries
Frozen in his brain his tongue cannot unfreeze—
While somewhere through a dark heaven
The dark bloodclot moves in.
As Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts comment on this poem, with greater realism, more detailed
concentration on the dying man himself, Hughes again achieves, as in the first part of “Stations,” a
modern elegiac language, which combines poignancy and wit, expressing sympathetic improvement with
the dying individual, and a firm objectivity about the fact of death.
Hughes-expresses the sense of loss and poignancy that death brings but he often avoids
sentimentality and morbidity by putting death in an ironical context. In “that Moment” form Crow, for
example, Hughes describes a death in a series of subordinate phrases, which fill the first twelve lines, and
then gives the main clause in the thirteenth:
Crow had to start searching for something to eat.
This last line provides an altogether ironic perspective by emphasizing the hunger of the crow. In
“The Stone,” Hughes emphasizes the central experience of loss—
Because she will never move now
Till it is not worn out.
She will not move now
Till everything is worn out.
In later poems, especially those in Moortown and Cave Birds, Hughes thinks of death as a
culmination of the reality of life. For Hughes beings to see a connection between physical extinction and
the religious experience, that of a shaman. In “The Knight” he shows an acceptance of death:
His sacrifice is perfect, He reserves nothing.
Skylines tug him apart, winds drink him,
Earth itself unravels him from beneath—
His submission is flawless.
Blueflies lift off his beauty.
Beetles and ants officiate
Pestering him with instructions.
His patience grows only more vast,
In such poems Hughes shows signs of his capacity to understand and negotiate, poetically, with
death. What he says about the poetry of an East European poet becomes true of his own attitude towards
poetry:
I think it was Milosz, the Polish poet, who when he lay in a doorway and watched the bullets lifting
the cobbles out of the street beside him realized that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where
people actually do die.
His later poetry reveals Hughes’s own attempt to write about a world where people do indeed
actually die. And he writes with a greater realism and less sentimentality and pathos; for, like the Sufis,
Hughes has begun to treat death as a process of life itself. In this respect he is quite close to American
poet Wallace Stevens who described death as the culmination of life.
Conclusion: Hughes’ Poetic Vision
As the above discussion of Hughes’ major themes will have shown, Ted Hughes is primarily
concerned with material reality not simply the reality of a superficial urbanity but the one that governs
larger questions of life and death, Nature and the animal world, and above all, the inner world of man.
Instead of shutting his eyes to the metaphysical and spiritual questions about life, Hughes tries to go to
their bottom. Like Blake he shows a fourfold vision which progresses from a knowledge of the surfaces
seen from a singular and therefore one-sided perspectives to the mature philosophic perspective which
goes to the heart of the matter. One of his recent books of poetry is most suitably entitled What is the
Truth?
Significantly, during the past thirty years during which Hughes has remained a poet thoroughly
dedicated to the art of poetry, he has shown clear signs of a maturing vision. Beginning as a watcher and
keeper of animals in his childhood, he is at first fascinated by their energy and then, in later poetry, finds
a kinship between this animal energy and the vast reservoirs of inner energy that mankind has suppressed.
Similarly, though his love for Nature began more or less on Wordsworthian lines, Hughes’ concept of
Nature has sufficiently matured during the past years. His view is a comprehensive one which
simultaneously accounts for the Wordsworthian, Schopenhauerian and Darwinian aspects of nature. At
the same time he finds a close kinship between the ambivalent but powerful time he finds a close kinship
between the ambivalent but powerful forces within man and the inscrutable and terrible working of the
world of Nature. Equally remarkable is the fact that Hughes has treated of many modern concerns, like
war and violence, with an awareness which is lacking in many of his contemporary poets. No wonder,
then, that Hughes has become a major poet during the last thirty years and been appointed the Poet
Laureate.

“He is famous for violence in style and subject-

matter”. Discuss. (P.U. 2005)
Violence, Painful, But also a Guarantee of Energy
Violence, and brutal violence at that, is certainly one of the dominant themes in the poetry of Ted
Hughes. This poet is fascinated by violence; he is fascinated by all kinds of violence—violence in love as
well as in hatred, violence in the jungle, violence in the arena, violence in a battle, and violence in the
form of murder and sudden death.
But, in Hughes’s eyes, violence though painful and very often fatal, is also a guarantee of energy and of
life. When Hughes looks at the caged jaguar, hurrying enraged through prison-darkness, he finds victory
in the beast’s untamed will: “His stride is wildernesses of freedom.” The cage is no more a cage to this
beast than a prison-cell is to a visionary or an idealistic dreamer. Beast and visionary are linked together
by Hughes because the will of both of them triumphs over the circumstances in which they exist. In The
Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar, Hughes goes further, and finds triumph in a moment of martyrdom. Here
we find that the fire burns the muscles and the bones of a man but that his spirit rises superior to his
suffering. The bishop’s victory is one of pure stoicism, creating in the flames a timeless moment of glory.
The spirit of the man continues to live long after his flesh has been consumed.
Violence, Depicted in the Animal Poems
The theme of violence finds a most vivid expression in the animal poems of Hughes. That Morning,
Full Moon and Little Frieda, The Jaguar, Second Glance at a Jaguar, Pike; Hawk Roosting; Thrushes—
these are all poems depicting the cruelty, the fierceness, and the violence which are inseparable from the
world of Nature. Hughes sees even more clearly and unambiguously than Tennyson did; “Nature red in
tooth and claw.” In The Jaguar, for instance, we are made to visualize a beast hurrying enraged through
prison darkness, not in boredom, but with a stride which represents vast, unlimited freedom. By contrast
with the fierceness of a caged jaguar, the boa-constrictor’s coil is a fossil. In Pike, we are told that the
pike-fish are “killers from the egg”, meaning that their killer-instinct is basic to their nature. A pike-fish
would kill and eat up one of its own tribe if it can get nothing else to satisfy its appetite. “And indeed they
spare nobody,” meaning that the pike-fish make no distinctions when it comes to eating. No poet of the
past had been able to convey the murderousness of Nature with such economy and such effect as Hughes
has done through these poems. In Hawk Roosting, the bird says to himself: “I kill where I please because
it is all mine.” And he further says; “My manners are tearing off heads.” In Thrushes we read that these
birds move about with “a bounce and a stab” to catch hold of some insect in the grass, and that they do so
without the least delay or hesitation. The cruel hunger of the thrushes reminds the poet of the shark’s
 mouth which bites its own tail. The thrushes possess a “bullet and automatic purpose” which impels them
to accomplish their brutal function. “Hughes’s view of Nature is Nazi, not Wordsworthian”, says M.L.
Rosenthal.
Violence in Battle and War
Then there are other poems depicting cruelty and violence. There is the Bayonet Chargein which we
read about the “bullets smacking the belly out of the air” and of “a green hedge that dazzled with rifle
fire.” Later in the poem we are made to visualize a soldier “plunging past with his bayonet toward the
green hedge,” and forgetting king, honour, human dignity, etcetera. Then we have the poem Six Young
Men which is about a photograph of six young men who went to the war and were all killed. Grief for
Dead Soldiers is another poem about the death of soldiers in action, every soldier dying a separate death.
Of course, in both these poems the deaths are also depicted as heroic as well as tragic; and both these
poems arouseour pity and grief. But in both of them the cruelty and the violence are kept in the forefront.
The Psychological Basic for the Violent Imagery in Hughes’s Poetry
One of the critics, John Lucas in his Modern English Poetry, has expressed the opinion that poetry
should take risks because poetry is a “murderous art.” According to this critic, the only English poet who
fulfils this condition is Ted Hughes who seems to him to have broken new ground by dealing with the
dark, psychic, violent forces latent in modern life. On the contrary, M.G. Ramanan has expressed the view
that Hughes’s violent imagery in his poems shows the continuance of the imperialistic sense of power
among the English people. According to this critic, Hughes’s violent imagery is closely allied with
authoritarian politics. It is significant in this context that Hughes was appointed the Poet Laureate by the
government of Mrs. Thatcher who was an authoritarian Prime Minister. In any case, nobody doubts that
Hughes’s poetry, both at its best and worst, shows a preoccupation with violence. The
poem Thrushes begins with a picture of the terrifying thrushes on the lawn. Of course, Hughes has a right
to write a poem such as Thrushes because through it he can explore the lust for power and violence which
is part of the story of twentieth-century experience, and perhaps of all human experience. Certainly, Hawk
Roosting is about the egotism of a single-minded concern with a violence which seeks no justification for
itself. The hawk in this poem says that nothing has changed since his life began, that his eye has permitted
no change, and that he is going to keep things like this. The hawk’s view may seem to the readers to be
absurd; but that is the point of view of the hawk, and surely this point of view reflect the point of view of
many politicians and many governments who are equally absurd in their thinking.
Violence as an Expression of Identity
But it is not only the egotism of violence which interests Hughes. At the heart of much of his poetry
is violence as a pure expression of spirit, violence as an assertion of identity. In this connection, the
closing lines of the poem Pike are significant. The pond where the narrator in this poem fished was “as
deep as England.” This pond held pike “too immense to stir”, so immense and old that after nightfall he
dared not continue fishing. A darkness released by the darkness of the night seemed to him to be rising
slowly towards him. In these lines, the darkness is expressed through the rapacious pike. The narrator’s
dream here is a dream of violence. This is not without a basis because the England people have always
been more aggressive and war-like than they think, and the imperialism which our Indian critic has talked
about in connection with Hughes is really dear to the heart of England.
Other Aspects of the Violence in Hughes’s Poetry
Hughes certainly seems to be endorsing this violence and the imperialism which it seems to convey.
Through his pictures of the ruthless predatoriness of the thrushes, the hawk, and the pike, Hughes seems
to be saying that there is no alternative to this violence. And Hughes is very skilful in handling this theme
because the very style of these poems suits the subject. And yet there is something objectionable about
Hughes’s use of birds and fish to deal with issues as complex as the history and use of power, authority,
and violence. Hughes often does this sort of thing. In the poem called Thistles, for example, he describes
the plants as “like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects/Every one manages a plume of blood.” The
thistles become a metaphor for England’s Viking inheritance which consists of weaponry and warrior-
dom. And nothing has changed since those plants grew: “Their sons appear/Stiff with weapons, fighting
back over the same ground.” This kind of apprehension of a violence latent in English history is not
without some justification. According to an eminent critic, A.E. Dyson, the quality of violence, which
many of the English novelists explore as moralists, is presented in Hughes’s poem in a manner which
makes us more alive to what certain forces in modern politics and life really are.
Nothing Monotonous About Hughes’s Concern With Violence
 However, we do not agree with the opinion that Hughes’s habitual concern with violence is
monotonous, or that it becomes some sort of handicap to Hughes in the writing of his poetry. In each one
of the poems dealing with the theme of violence or depicting violence in one form or the other, Hughes
shows himself to be a great and gifted maker of memorable images, and taut, packed lines.

Auden as a modern poet

The “Oxford Coterie”of young poets that included Stephen Spenders and W.H.Auden together catalyzed
the process of introducing themes that are now archetypal to the modernist poetry of the 20th century. ...
In the 1930s his poemsmirrored his travels as well as his obsession with the work of Karl Marx and
Sigmund Freud.Apr 18, 2017

Wysten Hugh Auden is remembered as one of the best American poets of the 20th century. Even much
before the time that the World War II broke out, Auden was engaged in highlighting various loopholes in
the political systems of the world which engendered flaws in the social apparatus as well as the economic
paraphernalia of any country. This article carries out an exegesis into some of the ideas in W.H. Auden’s
poetry, based on his social analysis of the world.

The “Oxford Coterie”of young poets that included Stephen Spenders and W.H. Auden together catalyzed
the process of introducing themes that are now archetypal to the modernist poetry of the 20th century.
One sees Auden’s poetry as beautiful and at times surreal on a normative vision, but upon a deeper level
of study, his poetry unravels its underlying explanations to the problems that the world is confronted with.
Not only does Auden talk about the social and political problems but the problems of identity,
reclamation of space, and the herculean difficulties associated with war-affected nations that breathe
perpetual pessimism and existential crises.

At Oxford in the late 1920s, Auden read the work of Eliot and was inspired majorly by the latter. Auden’s
earliest verse was also influenced by Thomas Hardy and Wilfred Owens. His poems are fragmented,
hinging on substantial images and colloquial concerns to convey Auden’s political and psychological
fears.

In the 1930s his poems mirrored his travels as well as his obsession with the work of Karl Marx and
Sigmund Freud. Journey to War, written with Christopher Isherwood, a regular collaborator, featured
short sonnets and a verse interpretation. The famous Spain, dealing with the Spanish Civil War, is from
this period.

One of the chief factors that sets Auden different from his lot is his ability to explain matters and topics of
sheer intellect with use of the simplest linguistic facility, easily graspable and pragmatically structured.

A terse description to define Auden as a poet could be taken from one of his own very brief poems,
Epitaph on a Tyrant:

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets

The More Loving Oneis a poem by Auden that talks about him looking up at the stars and while
examining these, it can be understood that the poet makes significant allusions. The “stars” in the poem
could allude to the ruling hierarchy, the upper tiers that rule over masses. It is a substantial interpretation
to the poem that the poet hinges his idea upon; Auden, being the social analyst that he was, through this
poem placed emphasis on the discordance between the government tiers and the ordinary masses—
drawing people’s attention towards the asymmetrical society—the widening of the gyre between the bases
and the superstructures. It is this ever-widening gap between the proletariat and the bourgeois class that
engenders a social conflict between the two, which ultimately becomes a cause of the struggle that the
proletariat class undergoes in order to eventually bring a revolution.

The poet refers to himself as the more loving entity, a kind of proverbial glue that would keep the bases
together by forging unity of purpose. This particular notion is inclined towards critiquing capitalism in
which cleavages are formed within a society,

If equal affection there cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me.

The Marxist idea in the poem is brought under perspective by highlighting what capitalism is capable of
doing to a society, creating factions and divisions within it and polarizing it to a lethal extent. It is this
idea that is mirrored in the tone of the third stanza:

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day

When the working classes and middle classes of a country feel alienated and realize that they have been
brutally left on their own, downtrodden and disenfranchised, they stop relying on their elected
representatives, the ones that they bestowed their trust upon—their so-called support-systems and the
ones that they admired.

This paves way for a pro-Marxist ideology to set in, which for the most part, is a revolution brought about
by the toiling bases.

The poem is partly pessimistic and partly optimistic. The pessimistic part of the poem manifests itself in
the last stanza whereby the poet says,

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky

It needs to be understood that the poet here is trying to establish the idea that all ‘big stars’ that one
admires and deems as his savior and protector are petty in themselves, their shine is transient and short-
lived, which is why one should be prepared to open his eyes to witness an empty sky. The empty sky
could allude to a society without social hierarchies and class structures.

The optimistic approach, however, is closely linked to the very idea of a silver silhouette seen being
engendered by an impeccable belief in revolution which would dissolve the anxieties and pressures
endured by the working class.

Auden is famous for highlighting contemporary issues that were prevalent under totalitarianism under the
veneer of lyrical pieces of beauty.

In The Unknown Citizen, Auden describes an individual who is robed off his individuality in such a way
that he has been displayed as an entity recognizable by the various external agencies that keep a track of
his life:

For in everything he did he served the greater Community.

Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues

One could argue over the nature of the title of this poem, it is essential to bear in mind the reality that the
readership is made to imbibe by the poet rightly pointing out that an individual is nothing but a cog in the
social machinery—and this mechanical existence fosters nothing evolutionary, rather paves way for a life
punctuated by stagnation. As the individual grows older he becomes emotionally sterilized, transposed
into a robot. What the poet means to willfully state is the abstract notion that any individual, towards the
later years of his life in any society, does not remain the person he was born as.

The Press are convinced that he brought a paper every day

And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way

The names of all the agencies begin with capitalized letters, this shows that the poet is hinting at the idea
that in societies, from a bird’s eye view, the individual himself coupled with all his obstinate pursuits of
individuality, is dwarfed by the system that runs the society and affects the major stakeholders. The major
stakeholders could be the mega institutions, institutionalized norms and major private owners in the
managerial, working apparatus of any country.

This again makes the idea of Marxism very prominent in Auden’s work as it is inexorably this very
situation that results in demarcations and cornering of individuals who are constructive citizens of the
society, demeaned and dwarfed by the big fishes in the game who not only use their well-established
image and infrastructure to crush these individuals but also use art, religion and politics to exert their
influence.

Was he happy? Was he free? The question is absurd

The absurdity about the question arises straight from the time when one looks up at the title of the poem,
The Unknown Citizen, ideally the citizen is the state’s responsibility but in the poem, Auden explains
how the state treats the citizen as nothing more than a duty that needs to be kept a check upon with the
help of a few external sources- ensuring the veritable happiness of the citizen has never been on the
state’s list of priorities.

In his poem, In Time of War, Auden gives an in-depth analysis of the complete process of proto-industrial
capitalism. He talks about the various aspects of capitalism affecting the natural fabric of any country
which is responsible for instilling unity within individuals.

In the Engines bear them through the sky: they’re free

And isolated like the very rich;/

Here war is simple like a monument:

A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan

For living men in terror of their lives,

Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.

The effects of capitalism as we see it, the machines and the mechanical devices are what have reduced the
‘human” in man. Man has become a prey to dejection feeling strangulated by man-made social orders, the
poet describes how war is itself the biggest of human follies and the biggest of human failures in essence.
It is important to note here that Auden relates war and the “journey to war” directly with the idea of
capitalism. Marxism, being a binary to capitalism, is what Auden, socially, propagates in this poem. The
rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, being the hallmark of an asymmetrical society is what
Auden has carried out a spoken battle against.

But ideas can be true although men die/

Requires their skill; will never see how flying

Is the creation of ideas they hate,

Auden points out here that the valiant skill with the art of soldering is what the higher authorities require
from the individuals, the citizens, but the ideas dwelling within these mindsets might be true, Auden
throws light at the fact that it is easier to see men dying in a war but an ideology cannot be buried so
plainly. The perplexity of war is what Auden has talked about as failure and a futile exercise but at the
same time the motivation that these men have, that provides the impetus for such an exercise in the first
place, is what bears significance in Auden’s eyes and it is this motivation that Auden defends and revels
in. The poet says that it is this motivation that would make the people actualize their true potential as
veritable individuals, cognizant of the fact that they should not waste their energies on activities like war,
but ought to channelize their energies to bring essential changes to the very system that creates room for
war.

In a nutshell, Auden worked not only as a beautiful poet but as one whose poetry did not do away with
creating an impeccable balance between reasonable excess and required reality, beautiful in its form, yet
practical and poignant in its message.

W.H. Auden A MODERNIST POET

A MODERNIST POET
Historical Background
The poet whose work you will study now is the closest to your own time. Rooted in the concerns of post –
World War despair and the search for identity, the poet represents the multifarious themes of an era of the
Second World War. There can be strength and responsibility in the art in an age when pessimism
abounds. The ethos emphasized the greater need to get to the heart of the human condition and trace the
lines of possible salvation. Auden lived in an age of anxiety when the “trusted” systems began to impart
the individual and social relations in unperceived ways.
The poet and his poetry (1907-1973)
Born in England, Wystan Hugh Auden, was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was known as a
leader of the poets of his generation. He lived for a time in Berlin under the Weimar Public when Nazism
was already becoming a threat. His early work was verse of social criticism and protest and showed the
influence of psycho-analysis as well as of Marxist ideas. At Oxford, he formed a group of “political”
poets most of whom were involved in the Spanish Civil War. He left England in 1939 and lived in
America and Austria. He opted for American citizenship and later accepted Christianity. Most of Auden’s
poetry revolves around the violence of political struggle and the imposition of impersonal policy on the
poor and the ignorant as well as the callous self-justification of the powerful. Auden’s voluminous
writings have been brought out in various editions. Recordings of the poet’s own readings have also been
prescribed and are available for listening.

The poem
Musée des Beaux Arts
bout suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking
dully along;
How when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
 On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturers horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

The poem is part of the collection of short poems, first brought out under the title ‘Another time’, 1930.
According to some critics, the poem marked the beginning of the poet’s maturity. The poem reads like a
passage in conversation, simply composed. The title of the poem refers to the Museum of Fine Arts in
Brussels which Auden visited in 1938. He saw and admired greatly Peter Brueghel’s work called the Fall
of Icarus, based on a well known Greek legend. The poem begins abruptly as though it is a continuation
of an ongoing conversation. The theme of this assumed conversation, perhaps with the reader is human
suffering and its depiction in art. The reference to the Old Masters in the second line contextualizes the
depiction. The Renaissance artists excelled in their sensitive representation of human suffering which
‘ironically occurs in the daily rounds of everyday life, but remains unnoticed ignored, or uncomprehended
but that does not reduce the experience of suffering. In an illustration of the great artist’s perception and
depiction, the poet suggests the abstract experience of contrasted emotions and attitude to birth. For the
old birth is a miracle understood only as such, whereas, for the young life in its most casusal moments,
remains an unwanted burden, mysterious and dangerous. The miraculous birth is associated also with the
birth of Christ who lived in suffering to redeem and in death too suffered.
“They never forgot”, takes the poem back to the Great masters whose works evoke another understanding
of imposed violence and self-willed annihilation. Suffering, however, is enacted amidst the most mundane
aspects of life, “that even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course / anyhow in a corner…” The last
four lines parallel ordinary impulses and sights with heightened and intense impulses and motivations. In
the rounds of existence, suffering remains, experienced, and unexpressed. The last two lines of the section
focus on the self-absorbtion of life and lack of identification with individual acts and individual suffering.
The imagery of domesticated animals, “dogs” and “horse” re-create, ordinary life, but in this case the
“torturer’s horse” re-inforces the different qualities and levels of life and existence. The poet also hints at
the animal – like existence of human beings who are insensitive to those elevated moments of martyrdom.
The second section of the poem works out the juxtaposition between individualized personal suffering
and the drift of surrounding life by examining Brueghel’s painting, titled 'Fall of Icarus'.
The poet’s own stray thoughts about suffering and his glimpses of life acquire a greater meaning, when he
casually in a conversational tone begins a discourse on Icarus: “how everything turns away/ quite
leisurely from the disaster”. The whole of this section re-creates a verbal picture of the painting which
seems to have fore-grounded the entire surrounding when Icarus fell and though, it was “something
amazing, a boy falling out of the sky”, both seen heard and registered, but the “sun shone as it had to; ….
And the ship “had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on”. Icarus was a lonely sufferer, alone in his
“failure” which was not important for the ploughman. The “forsaken cry” was heard but the suffering was
a solitary experience. It is this agony which the great artists have captured successfully through another
medium.
The conversational, easy style of the poem constructs a treatise on the notion of alienation. At the turn of
the twentieth century, writers and artists worked through a variety of forms to understand human
behaviour and share the experience of a breakdown in the social fabric. A momenteous event or
experience of one individual remained a personal, private state of mind. The silence surrounding the fall
of Icarus is given form through the artist’s vision. The poem also explores the possibility of what art can
create.