A Ted Hughes Bestiary

by Ted Hughes

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  Introduction

  Ted Hughes said, in Poetry in the Making, that he thought of his poems as animals, meaning that he wanted them to have ‘a vivid life of their own’. So there is something very distilled and self-defining about his animal poems, almost as if they were prayers to language itself; which is why, out of the mass of his Collected Poems, it has seemed a good idea to gather this Bestiary.

  A bestiary was originally a Christian idea – a book of animals sketchily recorded and then reduced to emblems – which sounds inimical to Hughes, whose animals are so radiantly themselves. The purpose of a bestiary (and this purpose was more and more neurotically observed through the Middle Ages) was to find distinctions between Man and the animals; but Hughes always worked in the opposite direction, aiming to show us what they have in common. He was wary of any project that was too narrowly Christian.

  Nevertheless, there is some bestiary flavour – half scientific, half imaginative – in the tone of Hughes’s voice. He writes, in the notes to Moortown Diary, about his practice of ‘getting reasonably close to what is going on, and staying close, and of excluding everything else that might be pressing to interfere with the watching eye’; but then also, in a letter to his brother, he finds fault with the watching eye: ‘when a man becomes a mirror, he just ceases to be interesting to men.’

  His poems, from one collection to the next, oscillate between these extremes. Sometimes – for example in Moortown Diary, Remains of Elmet, Birthday Letters – they catch the ‘vivid life’ of their subject by standing back, turning down the voice, letting the facts in all their strangeness bend the verse. Sometimes – for example in Crow or Cave Birds – the language comes out tensed and singing, as if by dictation from the Underworld. I’ve tried to do justice to that doubleness. Like a bestiary, this book is a herd of both outward and inward animals, but, unlike a bestiary, there is nothing moralising about its vision.

  What is it that turns language into an animal? What gives poems a ‘vivid life’ of their own, such that ‘nothing can be added to them or taken away without maiming and perhaps even killing them’? I think, in Hughes’s case, it’s a matter of percussion. There is something irresistible about the rhythm of a Hughes poem, which makes every word of it connected and essential.

  The lark begins to go up

  Like a warning

  As if the globe were uneasy –

  Barrel-chested for heights,

  Like an Indian of the high Andes,

  A whippet head, barbed like a hunting arrow,

  But leaden

  With muscle

  For the struggle

  Against

  Earth’s centre.

  And leaden

  For ballast

  In the rocketing storms of the breath.

  Leaden

  Like a bullet

  To supplant

  Life from its centre.

  (‘Skylarks’)

  These are ecstatic sounds, not so much spoken as drummed. They remind me of accounts of ancient dancers, who could disorder their minds and turn into any creature or character by means of music. It’s as if the bodily movement of Hughes’s verse is actually driving him through the shape of a skylark.

  The rule of this selection is that the poems included, like the one just quoted, should embody animals, not just describe them, which is why so many of Hughes’s children’s poems, with their ironic, chatting rhythms, have been omitted. On the other hand, I’ve allowed some poems, such as ‘The Lake’ and ‘Thistles’, because, although not strictly speaking animal, they become so in the process of the writing; and, in keeping with the bestiary tradition, I’ve put in plenty of imaginary animals: Wodwo, the Lovepet, Littleblood, the Human Calf, the Phoenix. I’ve aimed to keep a balance between the different books and styles, but perhaps I’ve favoured those poems that have the wildest tunes.

  The poems are arranged chronologically, because my focus is not really on Hughes as ‘animal poet’ or ‘eco-poet’, in spite of his obvious and lifelong commitment to the natural world. I’m more interested in presenting his work dramatically as a pursuit or flight. I picture him, like Taliesin, engaged in a kind of folktale chase, hiding himself in different animal forms: from the Hawk to the Fox to the Bull to the Rat to the Crow, ending with that strange final creature, the Prophet:

  Crazed by my soul’s thirst

  Through a dark land I staggered.

  And a six-winged seraph

  Halted me at a crossroads.

  With fingers of dream

  He touched my eye-pupils.

  My eyes, prophetic, recoiled

  Like a startled eaglet’s.

  (‘The Prophet’)

  This poem, a translation from Pushkin and one of the last pieces he wrote, might seem an odd choice for a book of animals, but its position at the end, completing the poet’s story, puts the rest into perspective. You do get the feeling, when you read his letters, that he lived life on this dreamed or nightmare level.

  Hughes was quite clear about the importance of folktale in balancing the imagination; and quite clear about the role of imagination in balancing our impact on the earth. ‘What alters the imagination’, he said, ‘alters everything.’ My hope is that this anthology will alter people’s imaginations. When I was compiling it, I had to type the poems to work out which ones to discard. About two weeks through the task, I noticed an unusual brightness behind my eyes. It was as if the top of my skull had been wedged open and the poems were moving around in there like animals woken by daylight. Although the poems are here assembled and printed in a book, I challenge the reader to imagine them still unbound – like the Thought-Fox – ‘Brilliantly, concentratedly, / Coming about [their] own business’.

  ALICE OSWALD

  Four prose excerpts

  There are all sorts of ways of capturing animals and birds and fish. I spent most of my time, up to the age of fifteen or so, trying out many of these ways and when my enthusiasm began to wane, as it did gradually, I started to write poems.

  You might not think that these two interests, capturing animals and writing poems, have much in common. But the more I think back the more sure I am that with me the two interests have been one interest. My pursuit of mice at threshing time when I was a boy, snatching them from under the sheaves as the sheaves were lifted away out of the stack and popping them into my pocket till I had thirty or forty crawling around in the lining of my coat, that and my present pursuit of poems seem to me to be different stages of the same fever. In a way, I suppose, I think of poems as a sort of animal. They have their own life, like animals, by which I mean that they seem quite separate from any person, even from their author, and nothing can be added to them or taken away without maiming and perhaps even killing them. And they have a certain wisdom. They know something special … something perhaps which we are very curious
to learn. Maybe my concern has been to capture not animals particularly and not poems, but simply things which have a vivid life of their own outside mine.

  (Poetry in the Making, 1967)

  *

  The luminous spirit (maybe he is a crowd of spirits), that takes account of everything and gives everything its meaning, is missing, not missing, just incommunicado. But here and there, it may be, we hear it.

  It is human of course, but it is also everything that lives. When we hear it, we understand what a strange creature is living in this Universe, and somewhere at the core of us – strange, beautiful, pathetic, terrible. Some animals and birds express this being pure and without effort, and then you hear the whole desolate, final reality in a voice, a tone.

  (Orghast, 1971)

  *

  Both Hawk and Pike (like the Bull) are motionless, or almost motionless. In a planned, straightforward way, I began them as a series in which they would be angels – hanging in the radiant glory around the creator’s throne, composed of terrific, holy power (there’s a line in ‘Hawk Roosting’ almost verbatim from Job), but either quite still, or moving only very slowly – at peace, and actually composed of the glowing substance of the law. Like Sons of God. Pike (luce = ‘fish of light’), Apis Bull and Horus. I wanted to focus my natural world – these familiars of my boyhood – in a ‘divine’ dimension. I wanted to express my sense of that. Again, these creatures are ‘at rest in the law’ – obedient, law-abiding, and are as I say the law in creaturely form. If the Hawk and the Pike kill, they kill within the law and their killing is a sacrament in this sense. It is an act not of violence but of law.

  (Poetry and Violence, 1971)

  *

  I was aware, as I went on writing, that above all I wanted to rid my language of the penumbra of abstractions that to my way of thinking cluttered the writing of all other poetry being written by post-Auden poets … So I squirmed and weaseled a way towards a language that would be wholly my own. Not my own by being exotic or eccentric in some way characteristic of me. But my own in that it would be an ABC of the simplest terms that I could feel rooted into my own life, my own feelings about quite definite things. So this conscious search for a ‘solid’ irrefutably defined basic (and therefore ‘limited’) kit of words drew me inevitably towards the solid irrefutably defined basic kit of my experiences – drew me towards animals, basically: my childhood and adolescent pantheon of wild creatures, which were saturated by first hand intense feeling that went back to my infancy. Those particular subjects, in a sense, were the models on which I fashioned my workable language.

  (Letter to Anne-Lorraine Bijou, 1992)

  The Hawk in the Rain

  I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up

  Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth’s mouth,

  From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle

  With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk

  Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.

  His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,

  Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air.

  While banging wind kills these stubborn hedges,

  Thumbs my eyes, throws my breath, tackles my heart,

  And rain hacks my head to the bone, the hawk hangs

  The diamond point of will that polestars

  The sea drowner’s endurance: and I,

  Bloodily grabbed dazed last-moment-counting

  Morsel in the earth’s mouth, strain towards the master-

  Fulcrum of violence where the hawk hangs still.

  That maybe in his own time meets the weather

  Coming the wrong way, suffers the air, hurled upside down,

  Fall from his eye, the ponderous shires crash on him,

  The horizon trap him; the round angelic eye

  Smashed, mix his heart’s blood with the mire of the land.

  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.

  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.

  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 sun

  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 horiz
ons,

  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.

  Meeting

  He smiles in a mirror, shrinking the whole

  Sun-swung zodiac of light to a trinket shape

  On the rise of his eye: it is a role

  In which he can fling a cape,

  And outloom life like Faustus. But once when

  On an empty mountain slope

  A black goat clattered and ran

  Towards him, and set forefeet firm on a rock

  Above and looked down

  A square-pupilled yellow-eyed look

  The black devil head against the blue air,

  What gigantic fingers took

  Him up and on a bare

  Palm turned him close under an eye

  That was like a living hanging hemisphere

  And watched his blood’s gleam with a ray

  Slow and cold and ferocious as a star

  Till the goat clattered away.

  February

  The wolf with its belly stitched full of big pebbles;

  Nibelung wolves barbed like black pineforest

  Against a red sky, over blue snow; or that long grin

  Above the tucked coverlet – none suffice.

  A photograph: the hairless, knuckled feet

  Of the last wolf killed in Britain spoiled him for wolves:

  The worst since has been so much mere Alsatian.

  Now it is the dream cries ‘Wolf!’ where these feet

  Print the moonlit doorstep, or run and run

  Through the hush of parkland, bodiless, headless;

  With small seeming of inconvenience

  By day, too, pursue, siege all thought;

  Bring him to an abrupt poring stop

  Over engravings of gibbet-hung wolves,

  As at a cage where the scraggy Spanish wolf

  Danced, smiling, brown eyes doggily begging