Ted Hughes 3h5a4a

Thursday, December 16, 2010 Discuss the major themes and subject matter of Ted Hughes’ poetry Ted Hughes is a very important modern British poet. As a poet, he commands full individual technical superiority over most of his contemporaries. He understands modern sensibility and contemporary issues; but writes in his own perspective. He creates before us worlds which delight and instruct us and elevate us emotionally, intellectually and esthetically. Unlike some modern poets so believe that a poem should not mean but be, Ted Hughes is profoundly concerned with the subject matter of his poetry. The major theme of his poetry is of course man, that is, the question of human existence, man‘s relation with the universe, with the natural world and with his own inner self. He is awfully serious about this last aspect of the problem of being, namely, the problem of human consciousness. His subjects range from animals, landscapes, war; the problem posed by the inner world of modern man, to the philosophical and metaphysical queries about the status of man in this universe. His moods and methods of presentation reveal a similar variety. Ted Hughes says about his vigor and vitality (usually associated with violence): ―Any form of violence—any form of vehement activity-invokes the bigger energy. To accept the energy, and find method of turning it to good. The old method is the only one. My poems are not about violence but vitality. Animals are not violent; they are so much more completely controlled than me‖ The main theme in his poetry is this energy which has to be turned into a positive force. Violence is misunderstood in his poetry. Most of Hughes‘s poetry can be said to be an attempt to negotiate with these energies as we see his argument in the case of Hawk. This poem is often criticized on the ground that the hawk is a mouthpiece of fascism. What is forgotten, however, is Hughes‘s assertion that the Hawk symbolizes ―Nature thinking.‖ Secondly, the point of view in this poem is the hawks; that is to say, the hawk is as mortal and part of creation as any other creature, violent or timid. Right from his childhood, Ted Hughes has been interested in animals. When his parents lived in the Calder valley, Ted Hughes had a chance to see the world of the animals from close quarters. Hughes learnt the first lesson that animals were by and large victims. The wild world of the animals was at the mercy of the ordered human world. Yet, as Hughes realized and emphasized in his poetry, the human world was fascinated by the world of the animals because it had pushed into the unconscious what the animal world still possessed: vat, untapped energies. As depicted in ‗That Morning‘: ―Two gold bears came down and swam like men… Eating pierced salmon off their talons‖ Here, the untamed natural impulses have been beautifully externalized as the two bears representing the two visitors to the lake. He writes violence chiefly of savage animals,

but violence also in human nature. Indeed, violence is one of the dominant themes in Hughes‘s poetry; and for this reason he has often been regarded as a poet of violence. But these poems of violence by Hughes are certainly genuine poetry; and we certainly enjoy reading them. And it is not only the sadistic persons among us who would appreciate these poems. Even the normal reader can find a certain degree of pleasure in them, especially because they are perfectly realistic, and very vivid, in their depiction of brutality and cruelty. But not violence alone but treats nature in a unique way as in: ―A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket –‖ Nature is one of the most prevalent scenes in his poetry. In a way Hughes‘s poetry continues the tradition of nature poetry. But unlike Wordsworth who found Nature a ―nurse, guide and guardian,‖ and Tennyson who found Nature ―red in tooth and Claw‖ Hughes tries to take both the Wordsworthian and Tennyson approaches to Nature. In poems like ―Full Moon and Little Frieda‖ Hughes can describe Nature to continue the Wordsworthian tradition, but in poems like ―Hawk Roosting‖ the ―That Morning‖ Hughes recognizes the powerful, vital, violent and predacious Nature without commenting on it. It doesn‘t mean that he copies their style. One of the causes underlying Hughes‘s greatness as a modern poet is his maturity and originality of style. Hughes has experimented with several different styles, ranging from the Wordsworthian and ‗their metaphysical to that of the modern East European poets. In each case, he has made the style his own as in ‗Thought-Fox‘. ―The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed‖ He can convey his meaning and tone through the use of diction. As in the above extract, as soon as the thought-fox springs into action, the vowels are short: ―brilliantly, concentratedly.‖ The action reaches its climax in the last line which is virtually monosyllabic: ―And the page isprinted.‖ The poem thus shows a fine blending of vowels and consonants so as to provide a fusion of sense and sound. At other times, he uses animals as symbols. In each case, there is a remarkable mastery over the medium, whether it is to depict a scene, portray an animal, tell a story, or present a one-sided vision as that of Hawk. Even the theme of violence is handled with the lexical entities. Ted Hughes is primarily concerned with material reality not simply the reality of a superficial urbanity but the one that governs larger questions of life and death, Nature and the animal world, and above all, the inner world of man as in ‗Full Moon and Little Frieda‘: ―A dark river of blood, many boulders, Balancing unspilled milk‖ Instead of shutting his eyes to the metaphysical and spiritual questions about life, Hughes tries to go to their bottom. He brings round that blood can be spilled as mercilessly as milk and water. The reality is depicted in the ‗boulders‘ troubles of life. Like Blake he shows a fourfold vision which progresses from knowledge of the surfaces

seen from a singular and therefore one-sided perspectives to the mature philosophic perspective which goes to the heart of the matter. He finds aclose kinship between the ambivalent but powerful forces within man and the inscrutable and terrible working of the world of Nature. Equally remarkable is the fact that Hughes has treated of many modern concerns, like war and violence, with an awareness which is lacking in many of his contemporary poets. His poetry evokes a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in a specific emotional response through language that he chooses and arranges for its meaning, sound, rhythm and a purpose.

Thursday, December 16, 2010 Discuss Hughes’ use of Dreams and occult Symbolism Ted Hughes is a highly symbolic and mythical poet who dreams and animal imagery have been traced with symbolic notes. Almost each and every thing mentioned in Ted‘s poetry is symbolic. A symbol is an object which stands for something else as Dove symbolizes Peace. Similarly, Blake‘s tiger symbolizes creative energy; Shelley‘s wind symbolizes inspiration; Ted Hughes‘s Hawk symbolizes terrible destructiveness at the heart of nature. There is a difference between an image and symbol, the former evokes a picture and the latter has wide range of connotations. Hughes‘ poetry permeates with animal imagery which serves as a symbolic purpose. Ted‘s poem ‗Thought-Fox‘ is the best example of symbol.

―I imagine the midnight moments‘ forest: Something else is alive Beside the clock‘s loneliness‖ The Thought-Fox describes, in an indirect or oblique manner, the process by which a poem gets written. What a poet needs to write a poem is inspiration. A poet waits for the onrush of an idea through his brain. And, of course, he also needs solitude (loneliness) and silence around him. Solitude and silence are, however, only contributory circumstances. They constitute a favourable environment, while the poem itself comes out of the poet‘s head which has been invaded, as it were, by an idea or thought. The idea or thought takes shape in his head like a fox entering a dark forest and then coming out of it suddenly. The fox embodies the thought which a poet expresses in his poem. The fox here serves as a symbol. Hughes‘s sensibility is pagan in the original sense; and his poetry is as suggestive of the lair as it is of the library. He feels greatly attracted by ancient mythologies, Oriental as well as Western, though he makes use of those ancient myths for his own purpose. He certainly does not believe literally in the ancient myths, but he finds a great value in them and, throughout his poetry, tries to show his readers where the value of these ancient myths lies.

―As if we flew slowly, their formations Lifting us toward some dazzle of blessing‖ As a poet, Hughes believes that he must make ―secret flights‖ to go back in time in order to be able to probe his own mind through his knowledge of the past consciousness of the human race. He believes that the principal method of making such secretflights is through dreams which provide an insight into the unconscious mind and which have a collective meaning when they have mythical contents. Hughes invests his poem with a dream-like quality because dreams reveal the unconscious mind just as the shamanistic procedures do that. The Thought-Fox is a dream-like poem, a reverie on a cold winter‘s night. The same is the case with the poem called ‗That Morning‘. What is even more remarkable is his ability to adjust his style to the purpose. Sometimes, as in ―The Thought-Fox‖ he can convey his meaning and tone through the use of diction. At other times, he uses animals as symbols; but his symbols are occult and perceived only through senses. This occult symbolism is pronounced in the following lines: The subjects he prefers to write on are, however, several: man in relation to the animal world, man and nature, war and death. Hughes‘s animal poems are among the best in his work, and among the finest in the whole range of English poetry. The imagery in these poems has its own appeal. The imagery in these poems is at once graphic and realistic; and the language which Hughes has employed in describing the variousanimals shows a striking originality and felicity. The emphasis in this imagery is on the vitality or energy of the animals concerned and also on the violence, the fierceness, and the cruelty of most of those animals. The Thought-Fox is also partly an animal poem, in which the poet‘s inspiration is compared to a fox making a sudden and silent entry into his head. In this case, instinct replaces intellect. In the poem ‗Chaucer‘ Ted says: ―You declaimed Chaucer To a field of cows‖ Where the image of ‗cow‘ symbolizes the so-called critics and those scholastic critics whose only purpose is to find faults with or find pleasurism in literature. The cows have similar resemblance to the Hawk. In the poem ‗Hawk Roosting‘ the poet does not praise the hawk so much as he denigrates man by comparison. The hawk is here seen as vastly superior to man who is unable to accept Nature for what it is and, instead, tries to tame it by giving it philosophical names. Elsewhere, cows are thesymbol of nature and the purity one may wish to enjoy: ―Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm wreaths of breath‖ Thus, he uses images, metaphors and realistic imagery for a symbolic purpose; but purpose seems to be more and more occult. Alliteration and syntax structure are one of the devices for Ted to achieve the purpose. The paradoxical situations are in the hawk are also vividly presented. Hughes‘s technique of writing poems includes one very striking and highly commendable quality which is to be found in almost every poem that

he wrote. This quality is the structural unity of his poems. Almost every poem by him is well-knit, compact, and self-sufficient as the poems discussed above. Hughes has the ability to capture the reality of things in words; and he has displayed this ability in his poem ‗The Though-Fox‘ and ‗Full Moon and Little Frieda‘. Conclusively, it is established that Ted Hughes‘ is a highly symbolic poet who uses an individual style and technique. Although, hissymbols are occult, yet they are unique and cinematic. Especially, the symbolic use of Hawk and that of Fox gets so much stamped on the mind of the reader that it is difficult to forget it. No wonder that his poetry, like the poetry of every modern poet, is a tough nut to crack, because the modern poet tends to be more subtle and more elusive in the expression of his ideas than the traditional poet (like Thomas Hardy). But otherwise too, poets are the seers, sages, philosophers, and Magi of the world, and their techniques of expression, like their modes of thought, are often complex, involved, intricate, and sometimes even baffling and bewildering. In any case, Hughes‘s work has considerably enriched English poetry and enlarged its scope and its bounds.

Thursday, December 16, 2010 Ted Hughes' Full Moon and Little Frieda: Critique and Analysis This is rightly one of Hughes‘s most popular poems and he has called it a favorite one of his poetry. The beauty and aptness of its movement could never have been predicted from most of the poems in The Hawk in the Rain—even The Thought-Fox‘ is mechanical in comparison. It is rare to find such freedom of line accompanied by such appropriateness and inevitability, so that it seems to have a form as tight as a sonnet— the whole evening in one long line, the listening child who is the focus of it in a balancing short one; the ‗mirror‘ poised between the water of which it is composed and the star that it reflects; the herd of cows in a long, lazy line that nevertheless doesn‘t fall apart. The humor that belongs to the wonder is there throughout: in ‗tempt‘; in the cows being communally the river and individually the boulders that impede its progress; and above all in the final two lines, where something of the artist‘s wonder at the life of his work, the moon‘s ancient divinity, the child‘s suddenness and wholeness of attention, combine in a delicacy of suggestion that really does defy analysis. But what the poem‘s subtext reveals is the innocence of the Frieda contrasted with the experience of her father as the very first lines form the keynote: ―A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket And you listening. A spider‘s web, tense for the dew‘s touch‖ The evening has shrunk not only because the light is failing but also because, as it does so, time seems to slow down, as it approaches that crucial moment of nightfall, dewfall, the first tremor of the first star. And the poet is aware that his daughter is the hand;

pointing to that moment because she is utterly open, without defenses, without distracting consciousness of past and future, to the scene, her fine web of senses perfectly tuned to it, tense as a spider‘s web, brimming as a lifted pail. The cows, too, are part of the scene, the condensation from their ‗warm wreaths of breath‘ falling like dew on the hedges, their udders brimming like the pail of water, their blood like a river flowing darkly through, bringing fertility, their bony haunches like boulders ballasting the moment, balancing its fragility and delicacy with permanence and solidity. Perhaps it needs the child to and hold all this because the poet cannot open himself, cannot jettison his knowledge of past and future, his knowledge that blood can be spilled as easily as milk and run in rivers outside the body, that boulders in a river are dangerous, that darkness is dangerous, that the moon is a fickle murderous goddess. The poem as we have it holds all this at bay, submerges all darker knowledge which might disturb the perfect harmony of man and nature the child experiences. ―Moon!‘ you cry suddenly, ‗Moon! Moon!‘ The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work That points at him amazed‖ The persona of ―Full Moon and Little Frieda‖ views the child as a ―mirror,‖ a brimming pail of offering, who gazes at the moon, the largest reflecting object in the cosmos available to the naked eye. The resulting astonishment at the recognition of an identity of mirroring artworks is very striking and describes another experience of the undifferentiated original essence of the cosmos, at times called by Buddhist poets the ―full moon of suchness.‖ When little Frieda speaks the word ―moon,‖ one of the first words she ever articulated as a toddler, subject and object, self and environment merge in ecstatic recognition of self-in-other, in the clarity of spotless, mutually reflecting mirrors. The cows that loop the hedges ―with their warm wreaths of breath‖ earlier in the poem convey an almost nativity-scene sense of the purity and iveness of a benign nature in attendance. The cows, sacred in Oriental symbology as representations of the plenitude of creation, are an apt background for Frieda‘s offering of self as a brimming pail of youthful purity to an equally pure moonlight. In ‗Full Moon and Little Frieda‘, for the first time, there is a moment of harmony. The poem testifies in its delicacy of utterance, its utterly fresh sense of wonder, to the possibility of knowing ‗the redeemed life of joy‘ in normal daily experience, when, with an unspectacular access of grace, the elements of a scene - human, animal, domestic, rural, cosmic - suddenly cohere to express a plenitude, all the ‗malicious negatives‘ miraculously melted away. There is no self-consciousness to close her, she points at the moon with an amazement the moon can only reciprocate, like an artist whose work has come to life or perfectly reflects the life of its creator who has created innocent and experience at the same time. But the conflict goes hand in hand where The river of blood, can actually be a river, but he's personifying this river into the lives of himself and Frieda , and the dark past they've since had to overcome (Sylvia's suicide) . So he's saying how dangerous it is, with boulders and blood. But then he says it's balancing unspilled milk, saying that for this moment, this peaceful moment in the country, life is balanced, it's calm. Their bond (which must be strong after withstanding everything the two have gone through) is so great, and the moment that they're in is so beautiful, that

even the moon stood back in awe. The poem is really picturesque and imagist along with the theme of masculinity: ―A pail lifted, still and brimming—mirror To tempt a first star to a tremor‖ The theme of masculinity versus femininity is continued with some of the imagery in Full Moon and Little Frieda. For example, the pail full of water is described as a "mirror", an object which usually has feminine connotations. The full phrase has possible religious implications -"mirror/ To tempt a first star to tremor." The specific use of the word "tempt" could suggest the temptation of Eve in The Bible. With the religious and nature imagery in both poems, this is not surprising. As Eve arguably caused the rift between mankind and nature, feminists would undoubtedly argue that Hughes is trying to blame women for this rift. However, I believe that Hughes is presenting us with the repair of the relationship between mankind and nature. I think this is a crucial poem in the Hughes‘ canon – one of his most arresting, strange, and moving. Central to Hughes‘ poetic vision is the extraordinary strangeness, otherness, of nature, and the miracle of our complex response to it. And this poem presents that most directly. This is a tremendous moment, because Little Frieda is either responding to the moon or to the cows, and there‘s no way of telling which. She‘s just giving a response so human, so innocent, so touching, that it transforms everything, tying together the earth and the heavens, instinctively, naturally and miraculously. Frieda‘s cry transforms and fulfils the whole scene. It is a miracle, a true miracle, by which humanity understands, recognizes and blesses this strange nature which is otherwise so alien.

Thursday, December 16, 2010 ‘Thought-Fox’ is a completely realized and artistically satisfying poem. Discuss! The ‗Thought-Fox‘ has often been acknowledged as one of the most completely realized and artistically satisfying of the poems in Ted Hughes‘s first collection, The Hawk in the Rain. I will become saying that ‗The thought-fox‘ is a poem about writing a poem. Its external action takes place in a room late at night where the poet is sitting alone at his desk. Outside the night is starless, silent, and totally black. But the poet senses a presence which disturbs him. In the first two paragraphs we can observe how the author is describing the environment, a forest in the midnight; he also has in front of him a blank page where his fingers move, and as he says ‗through the window I see no star‘. But inside that completely darkness we can find the loneliness. ―Something more near

Though deeper within darkness Is entering the loneliness‖ The disturbance is not in the external darkness of the night, for the night is itself a metaphor for the deeper and more intimate darkness of the poet‘s imagination in whose depths an idea is mysteriously stirring. At first the idea has no clear outlines; it is not seen but felt – frail and intensely vulnerable. The poet‘s task is to coax it out of formlessness and into fuller consciousness by the sensitivity of his language. The remote stirrings of the poem are compared to the stirrings of an animal – a fox, whose body is invisible, but which feels its way forward nervously through the dark undergrowth: But in the middle of that darkness the author finds something that corrupts his loneliness, it is a fox: ―Cold, delicately as the dark snow, A fox‘s nose touches twig, leaf;‖ The idea of the delicate dark snow evokes the physical reality of the fox‘s nose which is itself cold, dark and damp, twitching moistly and gently against twig and leaf. In this way the first feature of the fox is mysteriously defined and its wet black nose is nervously alive in the darkness. Gradually the fox‘s eyes appear out of the same formlessness, leading the shadowy movement of its body as it comes closer as the poet says, ―Two eyes serve a movement, that now/ And again now, and now, and now‖. The tracks which the fox leaves in the snow are themselves duplicated by the sounds and rhythm of the line ‗Sets neat prints into the snow‘. The first three short words of this line are internal half-rhymes, and these words press down gently but distinctly into the soft open vowel of ‗snow‘. The fox‘s body remains indistinct, a silhouette against the snow. But the phrase ‗lame shadow‘ itself evokes a more precise image of the fox, as it freezes alertly in its tracks, holding one front-paw in mid-air, and then moves off again like a limping animal. At the end of the stanza the words ‗bold to come‘ are left suspended – as though the fox is pausing at the outer edge of some trees. The gap between the stanzas is itself the clearing which the fox, after hesitating warily, suddenly shoots across: ‗Of a body that is bold to come / Across clearings.‘ The fox has scented safety. It has come suddenly closer, bearing down upon the poet (and upon the reader). In this part of the poem we can see what color its eyes are: ―an eye, A widening deepening greenness, Brilliantly, concentratedly, Coming about its own business. ..‖ It is so close now that its two eyes have merged into a single green glare which grows wider and wider as the fox comes nearer, its eyes heading directly towards ours: ‗Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox / It enters the dark hole of the head‘. If we are following the full poem the ‗visual logic‘ of the poem makes us to imagine the fox actually jumping through the eyes of the poet – with whom us (the readers of the poem) is inevitably drawn into identification. That means that the fox enters the lair of the head as it would enter its own lair, bringing with it the hot, sensual, animal reek of its body and all the excitement and power of the achieved vision. The fox is no longer a

formless stirring somewhere in the dark depths of the bodily imagination; it has been coaxed out of the darkness and into full consciousness. And all this has been done purely by the imagination. For in reality there is no fox at all, and outside, in the external darkness, nothing has changed: ‗The window is starless still; the clock ticks, / The page is printed.‘ "The Thought-Fox" is a poem about writing a poem and not at all about an animal. The fox in the poem is the poetic energy or inspiration that comes out of darkness (the unconscious) and leaves its footprints on snow, the blank white page. But the annual image in the title as well as the movement of the symbolic animal in the poem is not only appropriate in its own context but also consistent with Ted Hughes concept of poetic composition which he compared with the capturing of animals. The Thought-Fox describes the process by which a poem gets written. What a poet needs to write a poem is inspiration. A poet waits for the onrush of an idea through his brain. And, of course, he also needs solitude (loneliness) and silence around him. Solitude and silence are, however, only contributory circumstances. They constitute a favourableenvironment , while the poem itself comes out of the poet‘s head which has been invaded, as it were, by an idea or thought. The idea or thought takes shape in his head like a fox entering a dark forest and then coming out of it suddenly. That is why the phrase ―The Thought-Fox‖ has been used as a title for this poem. The fox symbolizes the thought. The secret, says Hughes, is to "imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. ... Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen to it, turn your self into it. When you do this, the words look after themselves, like magic." This is borne out by the present poem in which a kind of drama goes on between the "I" that imagines and the "I" that perceives. Finally I have to say that Hughes‘s vision has opened in me like a window through which I could know that poetry is always there but we do not know how many things a poem can give to us every time that we read it. Because it depends on the moment we read a poem, where we read a poem, or even if we know the environmental in which a poem was written we can improve ourselves by different ways. But Hughes is always talking of modern civilization as consisting in ‗mental disintegration‘. And for that reason I want to show something that Ted Hughes has written, ‗that long after I am gone, as long as a copy of the poem exists, every time anyone reads it the fox will get up somewhere out of the darkness and come walking towards them‘. The presence that moves in deep darkness is like a fox touching the twigs and leaves with its nose. The blank page will receive the footprints of the thought-fox in the form of a poem and the page will always beprinted.