A Ted Hughes Bestiary

by Ted Hughes

  So I felt it now, my blood

  Prickling and thickening, altering

  With an ushering-in of chills, a weird onset

  As if mountains were pushing mountains higher

  Behind me, to crowd over my shoulder –

  Then the pool lifted a travelling bulge

  And grabbed the tip of my heart-nerve, and crashed,

  Trying to wrench it from me, and again

  Lifted a flash of arm for leverage

  And it was a Gruagach of the Sligachan!

  Some Boggart up from a crack in the granite!

  A Glaistig out of the skull!

  – what was it gave me

  Such a supernatural, beautiful fright

  And let go, and sank disembodied

  Into the eye-pupil darkness?

  Only a little salmon.

  Salmo salar

  The loveliest, left-behind, most-longed-for ogress

  Of the Palaeolithic

  Watched me through her time-warped judas-hole

  In the ruinous castle of Skye

  As I faded from the light of reality.

  That Morning

  We came where the salmon were so many

  So steady, so spaced, so far-aimed

  On their inner map, England could add

  Only the sooty twilight of South Yorkshire

  Hung with the drumming drift of Lancasters

  Till the world had seemed capsizing slowly.

  Solemn to stand there in the pollen light

  Waist-deep in wild salmon swaying massed

  As from the hand of God. There the body

  Separated, golden and imperishable,

  From its doubting thought – a spirit-beacon

  Lit by the power of the salmon

  That came on, came on, and kept on coming

  As if we flew slowly, their formations

  Lifting us toward some dazzle of blessing

  One wrong thought might darken. As if the fallen

  World and salmon were over. As if these

  Were the imperishable fish

  That had let the world pass away –

  There, in a mauve light of drifted lupins,

  They hung in the cupped hands of mountains

  Made of tingling atoms. It had happened.

  Then for a sign that we were where we were

  Two gold bears came down and swam like men

  Beside us. And dived like children.

  And stood in deep water as on a throne

  Eating pierced salmon off their talons.

  So we found the end of our journey.

  So we stood, alive in the river of light

  Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.

  A Rival

  The cormorant, commissar of the hard sea,

  Has not adjusted to the soft river.

  He lifts his pterodactyl head in the drought pool

  (Sound-proof cellar of final solutions).

  The dinosaur massacre-machine

  Hums on in his skull, programme unaltered.

  That fossil eye-chip could reduce

  All the blood in the world, yet still taste nothing.

  At dawn he’s at it, under the sick face –

  Cancer in the lymph, uncontrollable.

  Level your eye’s aim and he’s off

  Knocking things over, out through the window –

  An abortion-doctor

  Black bag packed with vital organs

  Dripping unspeakably.

  Then away, heavy, high

  Over the sea’s iron curtain –

  The pool lies there mutilated,

  face averted,

  Dumb and ruined.

  Performance

  Just before the curtain falls in the river

  The Damselfly, with offstage, inaudible shriek

  Reappears, weightless.

  Hover-poised, in her snake-skin leotards,

  Her violet-dark elegance.

  Eyelash-delicate, a dracula beauty,

  In her acetylene jewels.

  Her mascara smudged, her veils shimmer-fresh –

  Late August. Some sycamore leaves

  Already in their museum, eaten to lace.

  Robin song bronze-touching the stillness

  Over posthumous nettles. The swifts, as one,

  Whipcracked, gone. Blackberries.

  And now, lightly,

  Adder-shock of this dainty assassin

  Still in mid-passion –

  still in her miracle play:

  Masked, archaic, mute, insect mystery

  Out of the sun’s crypt.

  Everything is forgiven

  Such a metamorphosis in love!

  Phaedra Titania

  Dragon of crazed enamels!

  Tragedienne of the ultra-violet,

  So sulphurous and so frail,

  Stepping so magnetically to her doom!

  Lifted out of the river with tweezers

  Dripping the sun’s incandescence –

  suddenly she

  Switches her scene elsewhere.

  (Find him later, halfway up a nettle,

  A touch-crumple petal of web and dew –

  Midget puppet-clown, tranced on his strings,

  In the nightfall pall of balsam.)

  An Eel

  I

  The strange part is his head. Her head. The strangely ripened

  Domes over the brain, swollen nacelles

  For some large containment. Lobed glands

  Of some large awareness. Eerie the eel’s head.

  This full, plum-sleeked fruit of evolution.

  Beneath it, her snout’s a squashed slipper-face,

  The mouth grin-long and perfunctory,

  Undershot predatory. And the iris, dirty gold

  Distilled only enough to be different

  From the olive lode of her body,

  The grained and woven blacks. And ringed larger

  With a vaguer vision, an earlier eye

  Behind her eye, paler, blinder,

  Inward. Her buffalo hump

  Begins the amazement of her progress.

  Her mid-shoulder pectoral fin – concession

  To fish-life – secretes itself

  Flush with her concealing suit: under it

  The skin’s a pale exposure of deepest eel

  As her belly is, a dulled pearl.

  Strangest, the thumb-print skin, the rubberised weave

  Of her insulation. Her whole body

  Damascened with identity. This is she

  Suspends the Sargasso

  In her inmost hope. Her life is a cell

  Sealed from event, her patience

  Global and furthered with love

  By the bending stars as if she

  Were earth’s sole initiate. Alone

  In her millions, the moon’s pilgrim,

  The nun of water.

  II

  Where does the river come from?

  And the eel, the night-mind of water –

  The river within the river and opposite –

  The night-nerve of water?

  Not from the earth’s remembering mire

  Not from the air’s whim

  Not from the brimming sun. Where from?

  From the bottom of the nothing pool

  Sargasso of God

  Out of the empty spiral of stars

  A glimmering person

  October Salmon

  He’s lying in poor water, a yard or so depth of poor safety,

  Maybe only two feet under the no-protection of an outleaning small oak,

  Half under a tangle of brambles.

  After his two thousand miles, he rests,

  Breathing in that lap of easy current

  In his graveyard pool.

  About six pounds weight,

  Four years old at most, and hardly a winter at sea –

  But already a veteran,

  Already a death-patched h
ero. So quickly it’s over!

  So briefly he roamed the gallery of marvels!

  Such sweet months, so richly embroidered into earth’s beauty-dress,

  Her life-robe –

  Now worn out with her tirelessness, her insatiable quest,

  Hangs in the flow, a frayed scarf –

  An autumnal pod of his flower,

  The mere hull of his prime, shrunk at shoulder and flank,

  With the sea-going Aurora Borealis

  Of his April power –

  The primrose and violet of that first upfling in the estuary –

  Ripened to muddy dregs,

  The river reclaiming his sea-metals.

  In the October light

  He hangs there, patched with leper-cloths.

  Death has already dressed him

  In her clownish regimentals, her badges and decorations,

  Mapping the completion of his service,

  His face a ghoul-mask, a dinosaur of senility, and his whole body

  A fungoid anemone of canker –

  Can the caress of water ease him?

  The flow will not let up for a minute.

  What a change! from that covenant of polar light

  To this shroud in a gutter!

  What a death-in-life – to be his own spectre!

  His living body become death’s puppet,

  Dolled by death in her crude paints and drapes

  He haunts his own staring vigil

  And suffers the subjection, and the dumbness,

  And the humiliation of the role!

  And that is how it is,

  That is what is going on there, under the scrubby oak tree, hour after hour,

  That is what the splendour of the sea has come down to,

  And the eye of ravenous joy – king of infinite liberty

  In the flashing expanse, the bloom of sea-life,

  On the surge-ride of energy, weightless,

  Body simply the armature of energy

  In that earliest sea-freedom, the savage amazement of life,

  The salt mouthful of actual existence

  With strength like light –

  Yet this was always with him. This was inscribed in his egg.

  This chamber of horrors is also home.

  He was probably hatched in this very pool.

  And this was the only mother he ever had, this uneasy channel of minnows

  Under the mill-wall, with bicycle wheels, car-tyres, bottles

  And sunk sheets of corrugated iron.

  People walking their dogs trail their evening shadows across him.

  If boys see him they will try to kill him.

  All this, too, is stitched into the torn richness,

  The epic poise

  That holds him so steady in his wounds, so loyal to his doom, so patient

  In the machinery of heaven.

  Visitation

  All night the river’s twists

  Bit each other’s tails, in happy play.

  Suddenly a dark other

  Twisted among them.

  And a cry, half sky, half bird,

  Slithered over roots.

  A star

  Fleetingly etched it.

  Dawn

  Puzzles a sunk branch under deep tremblings.

  Nettles will not tell.

  Who shall say

  That the river

  Crawled out of the river, and whistled,

  And was answered by another river?

  A strange tree

  Is the water of life –

  Sheds these pad-clusters on mud-margins

  One dawn in a year, her eeriest flower.

  The Hare

  I

  That Elf

  Riding his awkward pair of haunchy legs

  That weird long-eared Elf

  Wobbling down the highway

  Don’t overtake him, don’t try to drive past him,

  He’s scatty, he’s all over the road,

  He can’t keep his steering, in his ramshackle go-cart,

  His big loose wheels, buckled and rusty,

  Nearly wobbling off

  And all the screws in his head wobbling and loose

  And his eyes wobbling

  II

  The Hare is a very fragile thing.

  The life in the hare is a glassy goblet, and her yellow-fringed frost-flake belly says: Fragile.

  The hare’s bones are light glass. And the hare’s face –

  Who lifted her face to the Lord?

  Her new-budded nostrils and lips,

  For the daintiest pencillings, the last eyelash touches

  Delicate as the down of a moth,

  And the breath of awe

  Which fixed the mad beauty-light

  In her look

  As if her retina

  Were a moon perpetually at full.

  Who is it, at midnight on the A30,

  The Druid soul,

  The night-streaker, the sudden lumpy goblin

  That thumps your car under the belly

  Then cries with human pain

  And becomes a human baby on the road

  That you dare hardly pick up?

  Or leaps, like a long bat with little headlights,

  Straight out of darkness

  Into the driver’s nerves

  With a jangle of cries

  As if the car had crashed into a flying harp

  So that the driver’s nerves flail and cry

  Like a burst harp.

  III

  Uneasy she nears

  As if she were being lured, but fearful,

  Nearer.

  Like a large egg toppling itself – mysterious!

  Then she’ll stretch, tall, on her hind feet,

  And lean on the air,

  Taut – like a stilled yacht waiting on the air –

  And what does the hunter see? A fairy woman?

  A dream beast?

  A kangaroo of the March corn?

  The loveliest face listening,

  Her black-tipped ears hearing the bud of the blackthorn

  Opening its lips,

  Her black-tipped hairs hearing tomorrow’s weather

  Combing the mare’s tails,

  Her snow-fluff belly feeling for the first breath,

  Her orange nape, foxy with its dreams of the fox –

  Witch-maiden

  Heavy with trembling blood – astounding

  How much blood there is in her body!

  She is a moony pond of quaking blood

  Twitched with spells, her gold-ringed eye spellbound –

  Carrying herself so gently, balancing

  Herself with the gentlest touches

  As if her eyes brimmed –

  Two Tortoiseshell Butterflies

  Mid-May – after May frosts that killed the Camellias,

  After May snow. After a winter

  Worst in human memory, a freeze

  Killing the hundred-year-old Bay Tree,

  And the ten-year-old Bay Tree – suddenly

  A warm limpness. A blue heaven just veiled

  With the sweatings of earth

  And with the sweatings-out of winter

  Feverish under the piled

  Maywear of the lawn.

  Now two

  Tortoiseshell butterflies, finding themselves alive,

  She drunk with the earth-sweat, and he

  Drunk with her, float in eddies

  Over the Daisies’ quilt. She prefers Dandelions,

  Settling to nod her long spring tongue down

  Into the nestling pleats, into the flower’s

  Thick-folded throat, her wings high-folded.

  He settling behind her, among plain glistenings

  Of the new grass, edging and twitching

  To nearly touch – pulsing and convulsing

  Wings wide open to tight-closed to flat open

  Quivering to keep her so near, almost reaching

 
To stroke her abdomen with his antennae –

  Then she’s up and away, and he startlingly

  Swallowlike overtaking, crowding her, heading her

  Off any escape. She turns that

  To her purpose, and veers down

  Onto another Dandelion, attaching

  Her weightless yacht to its crest.

  Wobbles to stronger hold, to deeper, sweeter

  Penetration, her wings tight shut above her,

  A sealed book, absorbed in itself.

  She ignores him

  Where he edges to left and to right, flitting

  His wings open, titillating her fur

  With his perfumed draughts, spasming his patterns,

  His tropical, pheasant appeals of folk-art,

  Venturing closer, grass-blade by grass-blade,

  Trembling with inhibition, nearly touching –

  And again she’s away, dithering blackly. He swoops

  On an elastic to settle accurately

  Under her tail again as she clamps to

  This time a Daisy. She’s been chosen,

  Courtship has claimed her. And he’s been conscripted

  To what’s required

  Of the splitting bud, of the talented robin

  That performs piercings

  Out of the still-bare ash,

  The whole air just like him, just breathing

  Over the still-turned-inward earth, the first

  Caresses of the wedding coming, the earth

  Opening its petals, the whole sky

  Opening a flower

  Of unfathomably-patterned pollen.

  In the Likeness of a Grasshopper

  A trap

  Waits on the field path.

  A wicker contraption, with working parts,

  Its spring tensed and set.

  So flimsily made, out of grass

  (Out of the stems, the joints, the raspy-dry flags).

  Baited with a fur-soft caterpillar,

  A belly of amorous life, pulsing signals.

  Along comes a love-sick, perfume-footed

  Music of the wild earth.

  The trap, touched by a breath,

  Jars into action, its parts blur –

  And music cries out.

  A sinewy violin

  Has caught its violinist.

  Cloud-fingered summer, the beautiful trapper,

  Picks up the singing cage

  And takes out the Song, adds it to the Songs

  With which she robes herself, which are her wealth,

  Sets her trap again, a yard further on.

  A Sparrow Hawk

  Slips from your eye-corner – overtaking

  Your first thought.

  Through your mulling gaze over haphazard earth

  The sun’s cooled carbon wing

  Whets the eyebeam.