Ted Hughes Selected Poems

In 1979, one of the first books I read for the purposes of studying English literature, a book that made a deep and lasting impression on me, after reading it from cover to cover, was Ted Hughes Selected Poems, from 1957 to 1967.

As I recall the very first poem in the book was called The Thought Fox. It was a poem that used a poetic device called extended metaphor. What this meant was that the entire poem was a metaphoric description of the creative process involved in writing a poem.

The Thought Fox

Stanza I

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:

Something else is alive

Beside the clock's loneliness

And this blank page where my fingers move.

Stanza III

Cold, delicately as the dark snow

A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;

Two eyes serve a movement, that now

And again now, and now, and now

Stanza V

Sets neat prints into the snow

Between trees, and warily a lame

Shadow lags by stump and in hollow

Of a body that is bold to come

Stanza VI

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 fox itself was also a metaphor for a finished poem. Many years later, I began to see the poem and the fox as a metaphor for Hughes himself, bursting onto the literary scene as an exciting new poetic talent.

What impressed me above all in reading this, and a great many other Hughes poems, was the ease with which he used poetic devices such as that metaphor and almost onomatopoeic grammar and punctuation.

The darkness of the night outside becomes the poet's imagination, the blank page is the snow-covered terrain, and the words being written on the page become the fox,"...setting neat prints into the snow." So Hughes himself becomes the fox as he makes those prints on the page. 'Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox,...' the poet, Hughes, entered that dark hole in my head.

What truly amazed me was how one could make a living, breathing, walking, animal like a fox actually come alive on the written page. And leafing through the book one can find one example after another of a whole zoological, myriad of living, breathing animals.

***

In Hawk Roosting, Hughes becomes a hawk, setting out his stall about what he is and what he does.

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.

Inaction, no falsifying dream

Between my hooked head and hooked feet:

Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

***

The fox and the hawk are just the tip of what is to come as a whole panoply of nature's finest animals, poetically paraded before our very eyes. The thrush, pike, jaguar, bull, skylark, mouse, horse, cat, pig, otter, and various others are the subjects of Hughes's poems. He discovers symbolic significance and uses metaphors to reveal the relationship between man and animal.

Do not underestimate these poems, short-sightedly seeing them as merely literal portrayals of the animal kingdom. They all have something deep and meaningful to say, not just about the animals and our relationship with them, but also about our own humanity.

In the poem Jaguar, we can learn a great deal about humankind. What Hughes teaches us is how we too can either be indolently entrapped by the physical constraints of our material world, or we can be visionaries like the jaguar, seeing far beyond the bars of a cage.

The Jaguar

The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.

The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut

Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.

Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion...lie still as the sun.

***

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 enraged

Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes

***

On a short fierce fuse...he spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him...

***

His stride is wildernesses of freedom:

The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.

Over the cage floor the horizons come.

Overall, what reading and studying the poetry of Hughes did was enable me to experience the worlds of animals, in the wild or in a zoo, and to see things in a different way. In this way, what Hughes's poetry taught me was empathy for the animals that we cohabitate on this planet with. And of course, I learned an enormous amount about writing poetry too.