Ted Hughes

1930 – 1998

W hen Ted Hughes was chosen to succeed Sir John Betjeman as England’s Poet Laureate in 1984,
a reporter in The Times described the selection as “a bit like appointing a grim young cow to
replace a cuddly old teddy bear.” Coming on the British literary scene in the 1950s, Hughes startled
readers with his poetic voice. With bold metaphors and forceful rhythms, his poems paint grim, often
violent, visions of human existence. At the same time, he celebrates the power of nature and attempts
to reunite humanity with the natural world, using myth and folklore to explore alternative possibilities
of spirituality.
Edward James Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd, a county
in West Yorkshire, the landscape of which—with its valleys, cliffs,
and surrounding moors—pervades much of his poetry. Hughes
studied English literature for two years at Cambridge before
switching to archaeology and anthropology in his final year of
study—seeking to escape what he called “the terrible, suffocating,
maternal octopus” of the English poetic tradition. In 1956 after
graduating, Hughes met and married Sylvia Plath, an American
student studying at Cambridge on a Fulbright Fellowship. The
following year, having published some individual poems, Hughes
released his first collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957). The
poems of this début—including “The Thought-Fox” and
“Pike”—depict animals participating in a natural world from
which humans are isolated by their intellect.
After teaching briefly in the United States, Hughes and Plath
returned to England, where their two children were born and
where Hughes published his second collection, Lupercal (1960). Hughes also began writing children’s
books and radio plays during this period. After Plath committed suicide in 1963, following the
couple’s separation, Hughes put his own poetry on hold to focus on editing and publishing his wife’s
poems and journals.
Hughes’s return to poetry, Wodwo (1967), signaled a change in direction from his earlier work.
An interest in anthropology began to color his work, as did a marked interest in occult, mythic, and
folktale sources. The collection often features characters looking for meaning or identity through
various belief systems—such as the mysterious wodwo figure in the collection’s title poem, who seeks
to know, “What am I?” The volume following, Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow (1970),
created in collaboration with artist Leonard Baskin, presents a series of poems informed by Hughes’s
own mythology. These poems, which follow a crow from the genesis of the world until nuclear
apocalypse, lay bare the brutality in nature, though with more humor than was present in his earlier
work. Hughes said his goal in the Crow poems was to achieve a certain style consisting of “a super-
simple and a super-ugly language which would in a way shed everything except just what he [Crow]
wanted to say.” Perhaps not surprisingly, this carrion-eating, graceless, self-serving protagonist (who
became the main character of several subsequent works) brought charges of misanthropy and
crudeness upon Hughes.
With Crow Hughes discovered his penchant for collaborative ventures, and more followed,
including Cave Birds (1978), also with Leonard Baskin; Remains of Elmet (1979), in which he
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explores, with photographer Fay Godwin, the history of his native region from ancient to industrial
times; and River (1983), which, accompanied by photographs by Peter Keen, provides a composite
view of a river over the course of a year. Another of his later collections, Moortown (1979), documents
his experiences dairy farming with Jack Orchard, the father of his second wife, Carol.
Though Hughes continued to publish volumes of new and collected poems, in his later years he
devoted himself increasingly to judging competitions and performing readings—particularly for
children—and became an active supporter of environmental and ecological causes. Hughes also
turned to writing prose and to translating, publishing Tales from Ovid (1997), a collection of essays
entitled Winter Pollen (1994), and his critical work on Shakespeare, Shakespeare and the Goddess of
Complete Being (1992), which united his interest in the author with his passion for mythology.
In 1998 Hughes broke his thirty-year silence concerning his marriage with Plath and published
Birthday Letters, a series of poems addressed to his dead wife. During the years following her death,
Hughes had frequently been accused by some of Plath’s admirers of “murdering” the female poet, and
his surname was repeatedly defaced on her gravestone. Hughes’s last collection had the effect of
silencing, rather than reigniting, the expected opposition, and sales for the book have remained high
since its publication.
Hughes was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1997 and died in 1998, two weeks after receiving the
Order of Merit from Queen Elizabeth II. Hughes’s unique vision of the natural world—and of
humanity’s place in it—has endured after his death, and his poetry remains widely read and studied.
Of his continued popularity, British poet and critic Dick Davis explains, “He brings back to our
suburban, centrally-heated and, above all, safe lives reports from an authentic frontier of reality and
the imagination. His poems speak to us of a world that is constantly true in a way that we know our
temporary comforts cannot be.”

zzz

The Thought-Fox Sets neat prints into the snow

Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
I imagine this midnight moment’s forest: 15

Something else is alive Of a body that is bold to come

Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move. Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
5 Through the window I see no star: Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Something more near 20 Coming about its own business
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness: Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox,
It enters the dark hole of the head.
Cold, delicately as the dark snow The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
10 A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf; The page is printed.
Two eyes serve a movement, that now —1957
And again now, and now, and now

Pike
P
ike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.
5 Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.
In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads—
10 Gloom of their stillness:
Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards.
Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds
The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs
Not to be changed at this date;
15 A life subdued to its instrument;
The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.
Three we kept behind glass,
Jungled in weed: three inches, four,
And four and a half: fed fry to them—
20 Suddenly there were two. Finally one.
With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
And indeed they spare nobody.
Two, six pounds each, over two feet long,
High and dry and dead in the willow-herb—
25 One jammed past its gills down the other’s gullet:
The outside eye stared: as a vice locks—
The same iron in this eye
Though its film shrank in death.
A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
30 Whose lilies and muscular tench1
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them—
1
tench Fish, like a carp.
Ted Hughes 767
Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
35
That past nightfall I dared not cast
But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
40 The still splashes on the dark pond,
Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching.
—1959
Wodwo 2
W hat am I? Nosing here, turning leaves over
Following a faint stain on the air to the river’s edge
I enter water. What am I to split
The glassy grain of water looking upward I see the bed
5 Of the river above me upside down very clear
What am I doing here in mid-air? Why do I find
this frog so interesting as I inspect its most secret
interior and make it my own? Do these weeds
know me and name me to each other have they
10 seen me before, do I fit in their world? I seem
separate from the ground and not rooted but dropped
out of nothing casually I’ve no threads
fastening me to anything I can go anywhere
I seem to have been given the freedom
15 of this place what am I then? And picking
bits of bark off this rotten stump gives me
no pleasure and it’s no use so why do I do it
me and doing that have coincided very queerly
But what shall I be called am I the first
20 have I an owner what shape am I what
shape am I am I huge if I go
to the end on this way past these trees and past these trees
2
Wodwo Middle English word, taken from Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight, that means “an enemy in the forest,” “a wild man of
the woods,” or (Hughes’s own definition) “some sort of goblin
creature.”
 768 Ted Hughes

till I get tired that’s touching one wall of me
for the moment if I sit still how everything
25 stops to watch me I suppose I am the exact centre
but there’s all this what is it roots
roots roots roots and here’s the water
again very queer but I’ll go on looking
—1967
Theology
He stuffed the head half headfirst into woman
And it crept in deeper and up
To peer out through her eyes
Calling its tail-half to join up quickly, quickly
15 Because O it was painful.
Man awoke being dragged across the grass.
Woman awoke to see him coming.
Neither knew what had happened.
God went on sleeping.

N o, the serpent did not

Seduce Eve to the apple.
All that’s simply
20 Crow went on laughing.
—1972
Corruption of the facts.

5 Adam ate the apple. The Seven Sorrows

Eve ate Adam.
The serpent ate Eve.
This is the dark intestine. T he first sorrow of autumn
Is the slow goodbye
Of the garden who stands so long in the evening—
The serpent, meanwhile,
10 Sleeps his meal off in Paradise— A brown poppy head,
Smiling to hear 5 The stalk of a lily,
God’s querulous calling. And still cannot go.
—1967
The second sorrow
Is the empty feet
A Childish Prank Of the pheasant who hangs from a hook with his
brothers.
The woodland of gold
M an’s and woman’s bodies lay without souls, 10

Dully gaping, foolishly staring, inert Is folded in feathers

On the flowers of Eden. With its head in a bag.
God pondered.
And the third sorrow
5 The problem was so great, it dragged him asleep. Is the slow goodbye
15 Of the sun who has gathered the birds and who gathers
Crow laughed. The minutes of evening,
He bit the Worm, God’s only son, The golden and holy
Into two writhing halves. Ground of the picture.

He stuffed into man the tail half The fourth sorrow

10 With the wounded end hanging out. 20 Is the pond gone black
 Ted Hughes 769

Ruined and sunken the city of water—

The beetle’s palace,
The catacombs
Of the dragonfly.

25 And the fifth sorrow

Is the slow goodbye
Of the woodland that quietly breaks up its camp.
One day it’s gone. It has left only litter—
Firewood, tentpoles.

30 And the sixth sorrow

Is the fox’s sorrow
The joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds,
The hooves that pound
Till earth closes her ear
35 To the fox’s prayer.

And the seventh sorrow

Is the slow goodbye
Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the
window Heptonstall Old Church.
As the year packs up
40 Like a tatty fairground Its song brought a crystal from space
That came for the children. And set it in men’s heads.
—1975
Then the bird died.

Heptonstall Old Church 1 Its giant bones

10 Blackened and became a mystery.

A great bird landed here.

The crystal in men’s heads
Blackened and fell to pieces.
Its song drew men out of rock,
Living men out of bog and heather. The valleys went out.
The moorland broke loose.
Its song put a light in the valleys —1979
5 And harness on the long moors.

1
Heptonstall Old Church The town of Heptonstall was three miles
from Hughes’s childhood home of Mytholmroyd, in West York-
shire. The ruins of the “old church” (dating from the thirteenth
century) stand beside the present church, constructed in 1854. The
bodies of Sylvia Plath and of Hughes’s parents are buried in its
churchyard.
 770 Ted Hughes

You Hated Spain 1 A new soul, still not understanding,

Thinking it is still your honeymoon
In the happy world, with your whole life waiting,
S pain frightened you. Spain
Where I felt at home. The blood-raw light,
The oiled anchovy faces, the African
35 Happy, and all your poems still to be found.
—1998
Black edges to everything, frightened you.
5 Your schooling had somehow neglected Spain.
Daffodils
The wrought-iron grille, death and the Arab drum.
You did not know the language, your soul was empty
Of the signs, and the welding light
Made your blood shrivel. Bosch2
R emember how we7 picked the daffodils?
Nobody else remembers, but I remember.
Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,
10 Held out a spidery hand and you took it
Timidly, a bobby-sox3 American. Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
You saw right down to the Goya4 funeral grin 5 She cannot even remember you. And we sold them.
And recognized it, and recoiled It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.
As your poems winced into chill, as your panic Were we so poor? Old Stoneman, the grocer,
15 Clutched back towards college America. Boss-eyed, his blood-pressure purpling to beetroot
So we sat as tourists at the bullfight (It was his last chance,
Watching bewildered bulls awkwardly butchered, 10 He would die in the same great freeze as you),
Seeing the grey-faced matador, at the barrier He persuaded us. Every Spring
Just below us, straightening his bent sword He always bought them, sevenpence a dozen,
20 And vomiting with fear. And the horn “A custom of the house.”
That hid itself inside the blowfly belly Besides, we still weren’t sure we wanted to own
Of the toppled picador punctured 15 Anything. Mainly we were hungry
What was waiting for you. Spain To convert everything to profit.
Was the land of your dreams: the dust-red cadaver Still nomads—still strangers
25 You dared not wake with, the puckering amputations To our whole possession. The daffodils
No literature course had glamorized. Were incidental gilding of the deeds,
The juju5 land behind your African lips. 20 Treasure trove. They simply came,
Spain was what you tried to wake up from And they kept on coming.
And could not. I see you, in moonlight, As if not from the sod but falling from heaven.
30 Walking the empty wharf at Alicante6 Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck.
Like a soul waiting for the ferry, We knew we’d live for ever. We had not learned
25 What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
1
You Hated Spain Both this poem and “Daffodils” are from Daffodils are. Never identified
Hughes’s collection Birthday Letters, the poems in which are all The nuptial flight of the rarest ephemera—
addressed to Sylvia Plath.
Our own days!
2
Bosch Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516), whose We thought they were a windfall.
works often depicted figures that were part human, part monster.
30 Never guessed they were a last blessing.
3
bobby-sox I.e., adolescent. “Bobby-socks” were short socks,
So we sold them. We worked at selling them
reaching just above the ankle, often worn by girls in their early teens
in the 1950s and early 1960s. As if employed on somebody else’s
4
Goya Spanish painter Françisco de Goya (1746–1828), known
Flower-farm. You bent at it
for his grotesques. In the rain of that April—your last April.
5
juju Possessing supernatural or magical powers.
6
Alicante Port and tourist center in southeastern Spain. 7
we I.e., Hughes and Sylvia Plath.
 Ted Hughes 771

35 We bent there together, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks—
Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Opened too early.
40 We piled their frailty lights on a carpenter’s bench,
Distributed leaves among the dozens—
Buckling blade-leaves, limber, groping for air, zinc-
silvered—
Propped their raw butts in bucket water,
Their oval, meaty butts,
45 And sold them, sevenpence a bunch—
Wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth,
With their odourless metals,
A flamy purification of the deep grave’s stony cold
As if ice had a breath—
Every March since they have lifted again
55 Out of the same bulbs, the same
Baby-cries from the thaw,
Ballerinas too early for music, shiverers
In the draughty wings of the year.
On that same groundswell of memory, fluttering
60 They return to forget you stooping there
Behind the rainy curtains of a dark April,
Snipping their stems.
But somewhere your scissors remember.
Wherever they are.
65 Here somewhere, blades wide open,
April by April
Sinking deeper
Through the sod—an anchor, a cross of rust.
—1998

50 We sold them, to wither.

The crop thickened faster than we could thin it.
Finally, we were overwhelmed
And we lost our wedding-present scissors.