New and Selected Poems

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New and Selected Poems Page 1

by Hughes, Ted




  TED HUGHES

  New Selected Poems 1957–1994

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  from THE HAWK IN THE RAIN

  The Thought-Fox

  Song

  The Jaguar

  Famous Poet

  Soliloquy

  The Horses

  Fallgrief’s Girlfriends

  Egg-Head

  Vampire

  The Man Seeking Experience Enquires His Way of a Drop of Water

  Meeting

  Wind

  October Dawn

  The Casualty

  Bayonet Charge

  Six Young Men

  The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar

  Song from Bawdry Embraced

  from LUPERCAL

  Mayday on Holderness

  February

  Crow Hill

  A Woman Unconscious

  Strawberry Hill

  Fourth of July

  Esther’s Tomcat

  Wilfred Owen’s Photographs

  Relic

  Hawk Roosting

  Fire-Eater

  To Paint a Water Lily

  The Bull Moses

  Cat and Mouse

  View of a Pig

  The Retired Colonel

  November

  An Otter

  Witches

  Thrushes

  Snowdrop

  Pike

  Sunstroke

  Cleopatra to the Asp

  UNCOLLECTED

  Recklings

  Crow Wakes

  from WODWO

  Thistles

  Still Life

  Her Husband

  Cadenza

  Ghost Crabs

  Public Bar TV

  Kafka

  Second Glance at a Jaguar

  Fern

  Stations

  The Green Wolf

  The Bear

  Scapegoats and Rabies

  Theology

  Gog

  Kreutzer Sonata

  Out

  New Moon in January

  The Warriors of the North

  Song of a Rat

  Heptonstall

  Skylarks

  Pibroch

  The Howling of Wolves

  Gnat-Psalm

  Full Moon and Little Frieda

  Wodwo

  from CROW

  Two Legends

  Lineage

  Examination at the Womb-Door

  A Childish Prank

  Crow’s First Lesson

  That Moment

  Crow Tyrannosaurus

  The Black Beast

  Crow’s Account of the Battle

  Crow’s Fall

  Crow and the Birds

  Crow on the Beach

  The Contender

  Crow’s Vanity

  A Horrible Religious Error

  In Laughter

  Robin Song

  Conjuring in Heaven

  Owl’s Song

  Crow’s Elephant Totem Song

  Dawn’s Rose

  The Smile

  Crow’s Battle Fury

  Crow Blacker than Ever

  Revenge Fable

  Bedtime Anecdote

  Apple Tragedy

  Crow’s Last Stand

  Fragment of an Ancient Tablet

  Lovesong

  Notes for a Little Play

  The Lovepet

  How Water Began to Play

  Littleblood

  from CAVE BIRDS

  The Scream

  The Executioner

  The Knight

  A Flayed Crow in the Hall of Judgement

  The Guide

  His Legs Ran About

  Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days

  The Risen

  from SEASON SONGS

  A March Calf

  The River in March

  Apple Dumps

  Swifts

  Sheep

  Evening Thrush

  The Harvest Moon

  Leaves

  from Autumn Notes

  A Cranefly in September

  from GAUDETE

  Collision with the earth has finally come –

  Once I said lightly

  This is the maneater’s skull.

  I see the oak’s bride in the oak’s grasp.

  A primrose petal’s edge

  Waving goodbye, from your banked hospital bed,

  The swallow – rebuilding –

  The grass-blade is not without

  I know well

  Sometimes it comes, a gloomy flap of lightning,

  Calves harshly parted from their mamas

  A bang – a burning –

  At the bottom of the Arctic sea, they say.

  Your tree – your oak

  from REMAINS OF ELMET

  Football at Slack

  Stanbury Moor

  Leaf Mould

  Moors

  Chinese History of Colden Water

  Rhododendrons

  Sunstruck

  Curlews

  For Billy Holt

  When Men Got to the Summit

  The Canal’s Drowning Black

  Cock-Crows

  Mount Zion

  The Long Tunnel Ceiling

  Tree

  Heptonstall Old Church

  Widdop

  Emily Brontë

  from MOORTOWN DIARY

  Rain

  Dehorning

  Bringing in New Couples

  Tractor

  Roe-Deer

  Sketching a Thatcher

  Ravens

  February 17th

  Birth of Rainbow

  Coming Down Through Somerset

  The Day He Died

  A Memory

  from EARTH-NUMB

  Earth-Numb

  A Motorbike

  Deaf School

  Life is Trying to be Life

  Speech out of Shadow

  from Seven Dungeon Songs

  Tiger-Psalm

  Orts

  The Beacon

  A God

  UNCOLLECTED

  Remembering Teheran

  Bones

  Do not Pick up the Telephone

  Reckless Head

  from Prometheus on His Crag

  from FLOWERS AND INSECTS

  A Violet at Lough Aughresberg

  Two Tortoiseshell Butterflies

  Where I Sit Writing My Letter

  Tern

  The Honey Bee

  Sunstruck Foxglove

  Eclipse

  In the Likeness of a Grasshopper

  from WHAT IS THE TRUTH?

  New Foal

  The Hen

  The Hare

  from RIVER

  The River

  Milesian Encounter on the Sligachan

  Low Water

  Japanese River Tales

  Ophelia

  Strangers

  The Gulkana

  Go Fishing

  Salmon Eggs

  A Cormorant

  An Eel

  Performance

  Night Arrival of Sea-Trout

  October Salmon

  That Morning

  from WOLFWATCHING

  Astrological Conundrums

  Dust As We Are

  Telegraph Wires

  Sacrifice

  For the Duration

  Walt

  Little Whale Song

  On the Reservations

  from RAIN-CHARM FOR THE DUCHY

  Rain-Charm for the Duchy

  UNCOLLECTED

  Old Oats

  The Last of the 1st/5th Lancashire Fusiliers

  Anniversary

  Chaucer

  You Hated
Spain

  The Earthenware Head

  The Tender Place

  Black Coat

  Being Christlike

  The God

  The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother

  The Other

  The Locket

  Shibboleth

  Snow

  Folktale

  Opus 131

  Descent

  The Error

  Lines about Elias

  A Dove

  INDEXES

  INDEX OF TITLES

  INDEX OF FIRST LINES

  About the Author

  Copyright

  NEW SELECTED POEMS

  from THE HAWK IN THE RAIN

  The Thought-Fox

  I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:

  Something else is alive

  Beside the clock’s loneliness

  And this blank page where my fingers move.

  Through the window I see no star:

  Something more near

  Though deeper within darkness

  Is entering the loneliness:

  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

  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

  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.

  Song

  O lady, when the tipped cup of the moon blessed you

  You became soft fire with a cloud’s grace;

  The difficult stars swam for eyes in your face;

  You stood, and your shadow was my place:

  You turned, your shadow turned to ice

  O my lady.

  O lady, when the sea caressed you

  You were a marble of foam, but dumb.

  When will the stone open its tomb?

  When will the waves give over their foam?

  You will not die, nor come home,

  O my lady.

  O lady, when the wind kissed you

  You made him music for you were a shaped shell.

  I follow the waters and the wind still

  Since my heart heard it and all to pieces fell

  Which your lovers stole, meaning ill,

  O my lady.

  O lady, consider when I shall have lost you

  The moon’s full hands, scattering waste,

  The sea’s hands, dark from the world’s breast,

  The world’s decay where the wind’s hands have passed,

  And my head, worn out with love, at rest

  In my hands, and my hands full of dust,

  O my lady.

  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. The boa-constrictor’s coil

  Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or

  Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.

  It might be painted on a nursery wall.

  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. Not in boredom –

  The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,

  By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear –

  He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him

  More than to the visionary his cell:

  His stride is wildernesses of freedom:

  The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.

  Over the cage floor the horizons come.

  Famous Poet

  Stare at the monster: remark

  How difficult it is to define just what

  Amounts to monstrosity in that

  Very ordinary appearance. Neither thin nor fat,

  Hair between light and dark,

  And the general air

  Of an apprentice – say, an apprentice house-

  Painter amid an assembly of famous

  Architects: the demeanour is of mouse,

  Yet is he monster.

  First scrutinize those eyes

  For the spark, the effulgence: nothing. Nothing there

  But the haggard stony exhaustion of a near-

  Finished variety artist. He slumps in his chair

  Like a badly hurt man, half life-size.

  Is it his dreg-boozed inner demon

  Still tankarding from tissue and follicle

  The vital fire, the spirit electrical

  That puts the gloss on a normal hearty male?

  Or is it women?

  The truth – bring it on

  With black drapery, drums and funeral tread

  Like a great man’s coffin – no, no, he is not dead

  But in this truth surely half-buried:

  Once, the humiliation

  Of youth and obscurity,

  The autoclave of heady ambition trapped,

  The fermenting of the yeasty heart stopped –

  Burst with such pyrotechnics the dull world gaped

  And ‘Repeat that!’ still they cry.

  But all his efforts to concoct

  The old heroic bang from their money and praise

  From the parent’s pointing finger and the child’s amaze,

  Even from the burning of his wreathed bays,

  Have left him wrecked: wrecked,

  And monstrous, so,

  As a Stegosaurus, a lumbering obsolete

  Arsenal of gigantic horn and plate

  From a time when half the world still burned, set

  To blink behind bars at the zoo.

  Soliloquy

  Whenever I am got under my gravestone

  Sending my flowers up to stare at the church-tower,

  Gritting my teeth in the chill from the church-floor,

  I shall praise God heartily, to see gone,

  As I look round at old acquaintance there,

  Complacency from the smirk of every man,

  And every attitude showing its bone,

  And every mouth confessing its crude shire;

  But I shall thank God thrice heartily

  To be lying beside women who grimace

  Under the commitments of their flesh,

  And not out of spite or vanity.

  The Horses

  I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.

  Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

  Not a leaf, not a bird, –

  A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

  Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.

  But the valleys were draining the darkness

  Till the moorline – blackening dregs of the brightening grey –

  Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

  Huge in the dense grey – ten together –

  Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

  With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,

  Making no sound.

  I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.

  Grey silent fragments

  Of a grey silent world.

  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 su
n

  Orange, red, red erupted.

  Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,

  Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

  And the big planets hanging –

  I turned

  Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards

  The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

  And came to the horses.

  There, still they stood,

  But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

  Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves

  Stirring under a thaw while all around them

  The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.

  Not one snorted or stamped,

  Their hung heads patient as the horizons

  High over valleys, in the red levelling rays –

  In din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,

  May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

  Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing curlews,

  Hearing the horizons endure.

  Fallgrief’s Girlfriends

  Not that she had no equal, not that she was

  His before flesh was his or the world was;

  Not that she had the especial excellence

  To make her cat-indolence and shrew-mouth

  Index to its humanity. Her looks

  Were what a good friend would not comment on.

 

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