New and Selected Poems
Page 1
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.