A Ted Hughes Bestiary

by Ted Hughes

  Those eyes in their helmet

  Still wired direct

  To the nuclear core – they alone

  Laser the lark-shaped hole

  In the lark’s song.

  You find the fallen spurs, among soft ashes.

  And maybe you find him

  Materialised by twilight and dew

  Still as a listener –

  The warrior

  Blue shoulder-cloak wrapped about him

  Leaning, hunched,

  Among the oaks of the harp.

  Wolfwatching

  Woolly-bear white, the old wolf

  Is listening to London. His eyes, withered in

  Under the white wool, black peepers,

  While he makes nudging, sniffing offers

  At the horizon of noise, the blue-cold April

  Invitation of airs. The lump of meat

  Is his confinement. He has probably had all his life

  Behind wires, fraying his eye-efforts

  On the criss-cross embargo. He yawns

  Peevishly like an old man and the yawn goes

  Right back into Kensington and there stops

  Floored with glaze. Eyes

  Have worn him away. Children’s gazings

  Have tattered him to a lumpish

  Comfort of woolly play-wolf. He’s weary.

  He curls on the cooling stone

  That gets heavier. Then again the burden

  Of a new curiosity, a new testing

  Of new noises, new people with new colours

  Are coming in at the gate. He lifts

  The useless weight and lets it sink back,

  Stirring and settling in a ball of unease.

  All his power is a tangle of old ends,

  A jumble of leftover scraps and bits of energy

  And bitten-off impulses and dismantled intuitions.

  He can’t settle. He’s ruffling

  And re-organizing his position all day

  Like a sleepless half-sleep of growing agonies

  In a freezing car. The day won’t pass.

  The night will be worse. He’s waiting

  For the anaesthetic to work

  That has already taken his strength, his beauty

  And his life.

  He levers his stiffness erect

  And angles a few tottering steps

  Into his habits. He goes down to water

  And drinks. Age is thirsty. Water

  Just might help and ease. What else

  Is there to do? He tries to find again

  That warm position he had. He cowers

  His hind legs to curl under him. Subsides

  In a trembling of wolf-pelt he no longer

  Knows how to live up to.

  And here

  Is a young wolf, still intact.

  He knows how to lie, with his head,

  The Asiatic eyes, the gunsights

  Aligned effortless in the beam of his power.

  He closes his pale eyes and is easy,

  Bored easy. His big limbs

  Are full of easy time. He’s waiting

  For the chance to live, then he’ll be off.

  Meanwhile the fence, and the shadow-flutter

  Of moving people, and the roller-coaster

  Roar of London surrounding, are temporary,

  And cost him nothing, and he can afford

  To prick his ears to all that and find nothing

  As to forest. He still has the starlings

  To amuse him. The scorched ancestries,

  Grizzled into his back, are his royalty.

  The rufous ears and neck are always ready.

  He flops his heavy running paws, resplays them

  On pebbles, and rests the huge engine

  Of his purring head. A wolf

  Dropped perfect on pebbles. For eyes

  To put on a pedestal. A product

  Without a market.

  But all the time

  The awful thing is happening: the iron inheritance,

  The incredibly rich will, torn up

  In neurotic boredom and eaten,

  Now indigestible. All that restlessness

  And lifting of ears, and aiming, and re-aiming

  Of nose, is like a trembling

  Of nervous breakdown, afflicted by voices.

  Is he hearing the deer? Is he listening

  To gossip of non-existent forest? Pestered

  By the hour-glass panic of lemmings

  Dwindling out of reach? He’s run a long way

  Now to find nothing and be patient.

  Patience is suffocating in all those folds

  Of deep fur. The fairy tales

  Grow stale all around him

  And go back into pebbles. His eyes

  Keep telling him all this is real

  And that he’s a wolf – of all things

  To be in the middle of London, of all

  Futile, hopeless things. Do Arctics

  Whisper on their wave-lengths – fantasy-draughts

  Of escape and freedom? His feet,

  The power-tools, lie in front of him –

  He doesn’t know how to use them. Sudden

  Dramatic lift and re-alignment

  Of his purposeful body –

  the Keeper

  Has come to freshen the water.

  And the prodigious journeys

  Are thrown down again in his

  Loose heaps of rope.

  The future’s snapped and coiled back

  Into a tangled lump, a whacking blow

  That’s damaged his brain. Quiet,

  Amiable in his dogginess,

  Disillusioned – all that preparation

  Souring in his skin. His every yawn

  Is another dose of poison. His every frolic

  Releases a whole flood

  Of new hopelessness which he then

  Has to burn up in sleep. A million miles

  Knotted in his paws. Ten million years

  Broken between his teeth. A world

  Stinking on the bone, pecked by sparrows.

  He’s hanging

  Upside down on the wire

  Of non-participation.

  He’s a tarot-card, and he knows it.

  He can howl all night

  And dawn will pick up the same card

  And see him painted on it, with eyes

  Like doorframes in a desert

  Between nothing and nothing.

  from Arachne

  Minerva tore from the loom

  That gallery of divine indiscretions

  And ripped it to rags.

  Then, all her power gone

  Into exasperation, struck Arachne

  With her boxwood shuttle

  One blow between the eyes, then another,

  Then a third, and a fourth. Arachne

  Staggered away groaning with indignation.

  She refused to live

  With the injustice. Making a noose

  And fitting it round her neck

  She jumped into air, jerked at the rope’s end,

  And dangled, and spun.

  Pity touched Minerva.

  She caught the swinging girl: ‘You have been wicked

  Enough to dangle there for ever

  And so you shall. But alive,

  And your whole tribe the same through all time

  Populating the earth.’

  The goddess

  Squeezed onto the dangling Arachne

  Venom from Hecate’s deadliest leaf.

  Under that styptic drop

  The poor girl’s head shrank to a poppy seed

  And her hair fell out.

  Her eyes, her ears, her nostrils

  Diminished beyond being. Her body

  Became a tiny ball.

  And now she is all belly

  With a dot of head. She retains

  Only her slender skilful fingers

  For legs. And so for ever

/>   She hangs from the thread that she spins

  Out of her belly.

  Or ceaselessly weaves it

  Into patterned webs

  On a loom of leaves and grasses –

  Her touches

  Deft and swift and light as when they were human.

  The Owl

  I saw my world again through your eyes

  As I would see it again through your children’s eyes.

  Through your eyes it was foreign.

  Plain hedge hawthorns were peculiar aliens,

  A mystery of peculiar lore and doings.

  Anything wild, on legs, in your eyes

  Emerged at a point of exclamation

  As if it had appeared to dinner guests

  In the middle of the table. Common mallards

  Were artefacts of some unearthliness,

  Their wooings were a hypnagogic film

  Unreeled by the river. Impossible

  To comprehend the comfort of their feet

  In the freezing water. You were a camera

  Recording reflections you could not fathom.

  I made my world perform its utmost for you.

  You took it all in with an incredulous joy

  Like a mother handed her new baby

  By the midwife. Your frenzy made me giddy.

  It woke up my dumb, ecstatic boyhood

  Of fifteen years before. My masterpiece

  Came that black night on the Grantchester road.

  I sucked the throaty thin woe of a rabbit

  Out of my wetted knuckle, by a copse

  Where a tawny owl was enquiring.

  Suddenly it swooped up, splaying its pinions

  Into my face, taking me for a post.

  The Chipmunk

  A rippling, bobbing wood-elf, the chipmunk came

  Under the Cape Cod conifers, over roots,

  A first scout of the continent’s wild game,

  Midget aboriginal American. Flowing

  On electrical accurate feet

  Through its circuitry. That was the first real native –

  Dodging from flashlit listening still

  To staring flashlit still. It studied me

  Sitting at a book – a strange prisoner,

  Pacing my priceless years away, eyes lowered,

  To and fro, to and fro,

  Across my page. It snapped a tail-gesture at me –

  Roused me, peremptory, to this friendship

  It would be sharing with me

  Only a few more seconds.

  Its eyes

  Popping with inky joy,

  Globed me in a new vision, woke me,

  And I recognised it.

  You stayed

  Alien to me as a window model,

  American, airport-hopping superproduct,

  Through all our intimate weeks up to the moment,

  In a flash-still, retorting to my something,

  You made a chipmunk face. I thought

  An eight-year-old child was suddenly a chipmunk.

  Pursed mouth, puffed cheeks. And suddenly,

  Just in that flash – as I laughed

  And got my snapshot for life,

  And shouted: ‘That’s my first ever real chipmunk!’ –

  A ghost, dim, a woodland spirit, swore me

  To take his orphan.

  Epiphany

  London. The grimy lilac softness

  Of an April evening. Me

  Walking over Chalk Farm Bridge

  On my way to the tube station.

  A new father – slightly light-headed

  With the lack of sleep and the novelty.

  Next, this young fellow coming towards me.

  I glanced at him for the first time as I passed him

  Because I noticed (I couldn’t believe it)

  What I’d been ignoring.

  Not the bulge of a small animal

  Buttoned into the top of his jacket

  The way colliers used to wear their whippets –

  But its actual face. Eyes reaching out

  Trying to catch my eyes – so familiar!

  The huge ears, the pinched, urchin expression –

  The wild confronting stare, pushed through fear,

  Between the jacket lapels.

  ‘It’s a fox-cub!’

  I heard my own surprise as I stopped.

  He stopped. ‘Where did you get it? What

  Are you going to do with it?’

  A fox-cub

  On the hump of Chalk Farm Bridge!

  ‘You can have him for a pound.’ ‘But

  Where did you find it? What will you do with it?’

  ‘Oh, somebody’ll buy him. Cheap enough

  At a pound.’ And a grin.

  What I was thinking

  Was – what would you think? How would we fit it

  Into our crate of space? With the baby?

  What would you make of its old smell

  And its mannerless energy?

  And as it grew up and began to enjoy itself

  What would we do with an unpredictable,

  Powerful, bounding fox?

  The long-mouthed, flashing temperament?

  That necessary nightly twenty miles

  And that vast hunger for everything beyond us?

  How would we cope with its cosmic derangements

  Whenever we moved?

  The little fox peered past me at other folks,

  At this one and at that one, then at me.

  Good luck was all it needed.

  Already past the kittenish

  But the eyes still small,

  Round, orphaned-looking, woebegone

  As if with weeping. Bereft

  Of the blue milk, the toys of feather and fur,

  The den life’s happy dark. And the huge whisper

  Of the constellations

  Out of which Mother had always returned.

  My thoughts felt like big, ignorant hounds

  Circling and sniffing around him.

  Then I walked on

  As if out of my own life.

  I let that fox-cub go. I tossed it back

  Into the future

  Of a fox-cub in London and I hurried

  Straight on and dived as if escaping

  Into the Underground. If I had paid,

  If I had paid that pound and turned back

  To you, with that armful of fox –

  If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox

  Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage –

  I would not have failed the test. Would you have failed it?

  But I failed. Our marriage had failed.

  from The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets

  Come back, my own son, come back

  for I am no longer as I was,

  I am a used-up shadow from the inner visions

  that flare through the thickening organs

  like an old cock’s crowing, on winter dawns,

  from a fence of shirts hanging board-frozen.

  I am calling, your own mother,

  come back, my own son, come back,

  force new order onto the anarchic things,

  discipline the savage objects, tame the knife and domesticate the comb,

  because now I am only two gritty green eyes

  glassy and weightless, like the dragonfly,

  whose winged nape and mouth, that you know so well, so delicately clasp

  two crystal apples in the green-illumined skull,

  I am two staring eyes without a face,

  seeing all, and one with the unearthly beings.

  Come back, my own son, come back into place,

  with your fresh breath bring everything again to

  order.

  In the remote forest the boy heard.

  He jerked up his head in an instant,

  his spread nostrils testing the air,

  his soft dewlap throbbing, the
veined ears pointing

  tautly to that lamenting music

  as to the still tread of the hunter,

  as to hot wisps fronding from the cradle

  of a forest fire, when the skyline trees

  smoke and begin to whimper bluely.

  He turned his head to the old voice,

  and now an agony fastens on him,

  and he sees the shag hair over his buttocks,

  and he sees, on his bony legs,

  the cleft hooves that deal his track,

  sees, where lilies look up in pools,

  low-slung hair-pursed buck-balls.

  He forces his way towards the lake,

  crashing the brittle willow thickets,

  haunches plastered with foam that spatters

  to the earth at his every bound,

  his four black hooves rip him a path

  through a slaughter of wild flowers,

  sock a lizard into the mud,

  throat ballooned and tail sheared,

  till he reaches the lake at last,

  and looks in at its lit window

  that holds the moon, moving beech-boughs,

  and a stag staring at him.

  For the first time he sees the bristling pelt

  covering all his lean body,

  hair over knees and thighs, the transverse

  tasselled lips of his male purse,

  his long skull treed with antlers,

  bone boughs bursting to bone leaves,

  his face closely furred to the chin,

  his nostrils slit and slanted in.

  The great antlers knock against trees,

  roped veins lump on his neck,

  he strains fiercely, stamping he tries

  to put out an answering cry, but in vain,

  it is only a stag’s voice belling

  in the throat of this mother’s son,

  and he scatters a son’s tears, trampling the shallows

  to drive out that lake-horror, scare it

  down into the whirlpool gullet

  of the water-dark, where glittering

  little fishes flicker their laces,

  miniature bubble-eyed jewellery.

  The ripples smooth off into the gloom,

  but still a stag stands in the foam of the moon.

  after the Hungarian by FERENC JUHÁSZ

  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.

  He touched my ears

  And a thunderous clangour filled them,

  The shudderings of heaven,

  The huge wingbeat of angels,

  The submarine migration of sea-reptiles

  And the burgeoning of the earth’s vine.