Philip Larkin

UNIT 24 TED HUGHES

Structure
24.0 Objectives
24.1 Introduction
24.2 Ted Hughes (17 August 1930- 28 October 1998)
24.3 The Thought-Fox
24.3.1 Introduction
24.3.2 The Text
24.3.3 Analysis
24.4 Hawk Roosting
24.4.1 Introduction
24.4.2 The Text
24.4.3 Analysis
24.5 How to Paint a Water Lily
24.5.1 Introduction
24.5.2 The Text
24.5.3 Glossary
24.5.4 Analysis
24.6 Let Us Sump Up
24.7 Answers to Self-Check Exercises

24.0 OBJECTIVES
Having read the units you will able to:
• discuss Ted Hughes the poet
• demonstrate how Hughes is a nature poet of a different kind than the
romantic poets
• examine “Hawk Roosting”
• analyze “The Thought-Fox”
• analyze “How to Paint a Water Lily”

24.1 INTRODUCTION
In this Unit we will discuss Ted Hughes’s life in short, because Hughes’s life
experiences particularly his association with nature and world of animals and
birds in the rural England shaped his poetic sensibility. We will examine to what
extent this claim could find evidence in his poems.

The first poem is “Hawk Roosting.” It is a dramatic monologue spoken by the

hawk. The speaking voice uses precise imagery and a deliberate arrangement of
sounds to convey a sense of absolute dominion that bird of prey holds over the
world. You may read the poem slowly to discover the connection between the
words, imagery, sound and the consciousness of the speaking voice.

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The High Modernist, The second poem is the celebrated “The Thought-Fox.” It is a poem about the
Postmodenist and Recent
Poets
writing of a poem. The poet imagines a fox in the darkness of a cold night
outside, which becomes a metaphor for the poetic stirrings in the poet’s
imagination. You will discover in the poem the poet’s great felicity with creating
a moving image of the fox, and to leave an impression that the poem moves
towards its finality as the fox moves inside the mind of the poet. You will also
discover in this poem the exactness of imagery, and the relationship between the
movement of the thoughts and the movement of sound pattern.

The third poem in this Unit is “How to Paint a Water lily.” The poem is about the
painting of water lily although on the page of poetry. In this poem again, you will
discover the contrary aspects of nature symbolized by the water lily.

It is advised that you read the poems first, and then read the parts of the Unit.

24.2 TED HUGHES (17 AUGUST 1930- 28

OCTOBER 1998)
Edward James Ted Hughes was one of the most influential English poets of the
second half of the 20th century. He remained the poet laureate of England from
1984 till his death. He was also a writer of the books for children.

Ted Hughes was born on August 17, 1930 in Mytholmroyd, a small mill town in
West Yorkshire. For the first seven years of his life, he lived on the moorland of
that county. His early experiences of wind, rain, and hard stony hills shaped his
impressions about a harsh world of nature. From a very early age, he was drawn
to animals, and related to them. He observed in them tendencies of both being a
predator and a prey, and it is this respect that he used animals as symbols in his
poems such as “The Hawk Roosting.” He viewed birds and animals as having
unscrupulous instincts and menacing nature. In his poems, he associated the
human nature with the ferocious nature of animals and predatory birds.

Hughes’s father, who was a carpenter and a shopkeeper, had been a soldier in the
First World War. The memories of the war remained vivid to the poet since his
early life. His experience of Yorkshire was also governed by his consciousness of
the war, as he would later say that it was never possible for him to “escape the
impression that the whole region is in mourning for the First World War.”

Hughes studied English literature, Archaeology, and Anthropology at Pembroke

College, Cambridge, and graduated in 1954.

He had been writing poetry since his school days, but the university years came
as a long period of hibernation in his creative life. In 1955 though he came across
a Penguin book of contemporary American poets that left him greatly influenced,
and inspired to write verse seriously. In this anthology he admired the works of
John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Lowell among others. Some of his early
influences were Yeats, Hopkins, T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas.

In 1956, he came across Sylvia Plath who was studying at Cambridge on a

Fulbright scholarship. She fell in love with him, and thus began a very critical
fellowship in poetry between the two distinguished poets. They shared their
works, and encouraged each other. Soon they got married. In the same year, his
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finished composing The Hawk in the Rain that Plath sent to a contest, the prize Ted Hughes
was publication by Harper. The judges were W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and
Marianne Moore. Hughes won the first prize, and the manuscript was published
in 1957.

Hughes and Plath moved to the United States, and lived there for the next two
years. They involved themselves in teaching and writing. In 1959, they returned
to London. Their daughter Frieda was born on 1 April 1960. Their son Nicholas
was born in January 1962. In June 1962, Plath met with a car accident, which
was one of the many suicide attempts she tried, as she had been suffering from
severe depression. The couple separated in 1962over Hughes affair with Assia
Wevill. In 1963, Plath committed suicide.

Hughes devoted himself to writing for children in different genres, translations,

short stories, as well as poems.

Hughes published Wodwo in 1967. The poems were conspicuous for their precise
and simple diction, and his use of free verse. Crow got published in 1970. The
poems in this collection present a violent and a bloodier aspects of nature and
animal life. The poems produce a surreal impression of the wildness of the
predatory world of birds and animals in a language that is remarkably simple and
direct. Hughes later said that the poems were resulted from his thoughts about the
style of singing by a crow. He wondered that if a crow had to sing a song, its song
will be without any music, it would be purely simple and starkly ugly. The poems
present a world in which the moral universe has been subverted. The express
physical pain, torture and suffering as a result of the murderous instinct inherent
in the animals portrayed. But there is no moral dilemma. The murderousness of
the world is accepted as a bare fact, as something necessary and responsive to
basic instincts.

Moortown (1979) continue his poetic obsession with describing the life of
animals in their true physical aspects. The poem “Birth of a Rainbow,” for
example delineates the birth of a calf on a cold ridge in “razorish” wind. There is
a hail storm, and the poor calf suffers the cold while draped in the blood of
afterbirth.

Ted Hughes continued to describe the harsh and violent nature in his later
volumes.

Self-check Exercise I
1) How did Hughes’s childhood in West Yorkshire shape his poetry?
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The High Modernist,
Postmodenist and Recent 2) Who were the American poets that influenced Hughes’s poetry?
Poets
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3) Who was Sylvia Plath? What role did she play in the making of Hughes
as a poet?
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4) Apart from poetry, what else did Hughes write?
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24.3 THE THOUGHT-FOX

24.3.1 Introduction
“The Thought-Fox” appeared in the first collection of verse by Ted Hughes The
Hawk in the Rain (1957). The poems in this collection were typed by Sylvia
Plath, who thereafter entered the poems in a contest. The judges were W.H.
Auden, Stephan Spender, and Marianne Moore. Hughes’s manuscript won the
award, and the poet attained instant acclaim as the most original and exciting
young voice in contemporary British poetry. “The Thought-Fox”, however, has
been the most anthologized of not only the poems of this collection but of all his
poems. The poem’s success lies in the simplicity of voice, imagery and diction,
with which it unravelsthe secrets of poetic creation. In a brief moment of the
creative process, the poem tracks the movement of the imaginary fox from nature
into the mind of the poet, and then its impression on the printed page as a poem.
In its unification of the human and animal, the poempresents the oneness of man
and nature, human and animal, ferociousness and tenderness.

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24.3.2 The Text Ted Hughes

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 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 tress, 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.

24.3.3 Analysis
The setting of the poem is a room, and the time is midnight. The poet sits at his
writing desk by the open window; outside lies the starless and dark night. The
poet looks into the darkness into the forest beyond the clearings. This act of
looking into the external darkness propels the dark interiors of his imagination,
which in degrees of imaginative clarity fashions forth a fox. It is as sensual,
instinctual and bodily alive as the real fox. The fox of his mind, ‘the thought-fox,’
finally appears as the poem itself. The poem is about the writing of the poem
itself.

In a 1961 BBC broadcast, Hughes talks about the writing process as “the special
kind of excitement, the slightly mesmerized and quite involuntary concentration
with which you make out the stirrings of a new poem in your mind…. This is
hunting and the poem is a new species of creature, a new specimen of life outside
your own.” In this poem, it is the fox that the poet pursues; he starts with a vague
apprehension of its presence, but gradually there arrives clearer perceptions of its
figure and movements, till it transfers itself as a whole creature into the mind of
the poet, and appears on the page of the poem.

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The High Modernist, The poem opens in darkness on a “midnight’s moment.” There is utmost silence
Postmodenist and Recent
Poets
and loneliness all around, and is enhanced by the clock’s ticking. The poet sits
moving his fingers on a blank piece of paper searching for a poem in his mind.
The setting presents two contrary spaces. The poet sits inside his room, while
outside his window lies the forest defined by darkness. The darkness symbolizes
the inactivity of imagination before the beginning of the creative process.The
poetic creation takes its root in the natural landscape outside the mind of the
poet, somewhere in the forest, where the poet feels something is present.

However, as it becomes subsequently clear in the poem, the fox takes its shape
and movement inside the mind of the poet.

In the second stanza, the poet sees no star in the sky, the traditional symbol of
heavenly guidance:
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Entering loneliness
The poet has to search inwards for appropriate words to clearly realizethe figure
and movement of being still unidentified in the poem. However, there is more
clarity compared to the first stanza. From “something else is alive” in the first
stanza, the speaker notes the imagined animal as “something more near.” The
word “something” in the two stanzas connotes both creative inspiration as well as
the imagined animal.The unclear movement of the animal that the poet visualizes
in the outside works as correlative of the vague stirrings of a poem not yet clearly
formed. The poet avoids naming the animal at this stage, as wants to retain the
vagueness of the inspiration, until a true discovery of the poetic form.

In the third stanza, the figure of the fox is still not clearly seen. Its presence is,
however, more acutely felt:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow

A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;

The simile contains a visual and kinesthetic image. The poet has only see its dark
nose touching the twig and the leaf as snow looking dark in darkness of the night
falls touching them on the ground. The sense of coldness contained in this image
suggests metaphoric coldness of the world of nature and animal. Next the poet
sees the two eyes of the animal, now little clearer. The third and the fourth
stanzas are syntactically joined by the eye movements of the fox that make the
body of the fox appear more distinct:
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow

Between tress, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
The appearance of the two eyes within the deep darkness of the snow and trees
communicate an eerie feeling. The image serves to suddenly unfold the scary
reality of the animal lurking in darkness. The vagueness about it is turning into
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exactness of a fox. The last two lines of the third stanza and the first line of the Ted Hughes
fourth stanza convey through rapidness of rhythm the nervous movements of the
fox, and sudden excitement felt by the poet as he perceives the fox setting its
paw’s prints on the snow in between the trees. There is sudden twist to the
rhyme, rhythm and sound pattern to convey the discovery of the fox. The word
‘now’ appears twice as end rhyme suggests an attainment of clarity in the poet’s
consciousness about the fox. It also serves to introduce an element of surprise
involved in discovery the first true signs of the fox. The repetition of the phrase
“and now” provides speed to the rhythm of the poem as the poet almost correctly
the animal. The poet is almost certain of its figure as it lurks there in darkness.
The line

Sets neat prints into the snow

suggests by its short half-rhyming sounds of the first three words a suspense that
achieves clarity as the line settles finally in the vowel prominent sound of
“snow.” The phrase “lame shadow” in the next line provides the first fuller
picture of the fox, and “bold to come” suggests that the fox is lurking on the
outer edges of the forest ready to leap inside.

The phrase “across clearing” in the first line of the fifth stanza serves as a
definite breaking point in the poem as well as the scene outside imagined by the
poet. The fox breaks through to full realization with its leap and descends on the
imagination of the poet as well as the reader:
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness
Brilliantly, concentratedly
Coming about its own business

The lengthening of diction “widening, deepening, greenness” suggests how close

the fox stands to the poet and the reader. The two eyes of the previous stanzas
have merged into single “greenness” that has grown wider and deeper as the fox
comes near us as well as the poet.

The last stanza presents such close perception of the fox. It appears so close that
we along with the poet can smell its “sudden sharp stink.” Its sensuality is so
fully realized in us; its smell affects our consciousness. The fox almost literally
enters the head of the poet as if it was entering its den. And thereafter appears on
the page as poem. The fox is the poem. The long line of the poem finally finds a
full stop in the last line, as the picture of the fox becomes real in the page of the
poem.

The poem is about poetry, how the perception of the fox attained with powerful
immediacy attains its language, its form. The fox is in the mind of the poet rather
than outside it. The gap between the external and internal dissolves in the
consciousness of the poet. Ted Hughes wrote about this poem, “…long after I am
gone, as long as a copy of the poem exists, every time any one reads it, the fox
will get up somewhere out of the darkness, and come walking towards them”
(Poetry in the Making 1967)

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The High Modernist,
Postmodenist and Recent Self-check Exercise II
Poets
1) What does the fox symbolize in this poem?
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2) What does the darkness of the forest stand for in this poem?
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3) What is the theme of the poem “Thought-fox”?
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4) How would assessHughes’s poetic technique in this poem?
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24.4 HAWK ROOSTING

24.4.1 Introduction
The poem is a dramatic monologue delivered by the hawk, a bird of prey, who
remorselessly reveals its violent instinct and character in an arrogant tone. A
dramatic monologue is a form of poetry, in which a single speaker, who is not the
poet, presents the whole poem in the form of his speech. He speaks in a specific
context at a critical moment. The person who is spoken to in the poem is not
revealed. The reader can infer the responses of the listener from the speech of the
single speaker. The main interest of the poem lies in the fact that during the
84 course of his speech, the speaker reveals his character, behavior and attitude
almost unwittingly. The best practitioner of dramatic monologue in English Ted Hughes
poetry was the Victorian poet, Robert Browning, who wrote some memorable
poems in this form such as “My Last Duchess,” “Fra Lippo Lippi, “Porphyria’s
Lover” etc.

“Hawk Roosting” is one of the most celebrated poems of Ted Hughes, in which
the poet has used dramatic monologue to expose a despotic and murderous
nature symbolized by the hawk. The poem was first published in 1960. It is from
the volume Lupercal (1960).

24.4.2 The Text

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!

The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.

It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -

I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -

The allotment of death.

For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.

Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.

24.4.3 Analysis
As you will observe in the all three poems by Hughes, the experience contained
in the poems is spoken with a directness that surprises due to morally complex
nature of the content. In this poem, the hawk expresses no guilt about its
murderous instinct. It is proudly rapacious. Given its superior physical abilities, it
kills at will.

The first stanza begins the Hawk’s monologue in a plain voice. He is perched on
the top of the forest feeling self-possessed with his eyes closed in contemplation
of his absolute control of the world of birds and animals he preys upon. The
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The High Modernist, punctuation in the second line conveys a directness of tone that runs till the
Postmodenist and Recent
Poets
fourth line of the stanza, and conveys an unfazed murderous intent:

Inaction, no falsifying dream

……………………………………………..
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat

The hawk indulges in no false dream; it kills with precision and at will and eats
his prey. The visual imagery in the third line links the precision to kill which is
inherent in the instinct of the hawk with the precise make up of his body that
makes it possible to transform the instinct into murderous action:

…... no falsifying dream

Between my hooked head and hooked feet:

The use of the words “head” and “feet” makes personification implicit in the
poem, and so the poem may also be read as reflecting the guiltless murderous
instinct in the humans. The hawk uses its “hooked head and hooked feet”

In the second stanza, the hawk speaks about his firm grip over the earth; it can
choose to kill at will, as it possesses both the advantage of the height of the trees
as well as its natural power of menacing flight that can utilize both the “air’s
buoyancy” and “ the sun’s ray” to glide down and kill its victims. The stanza uses
a polysyllabic word in each line: “convenience,” “buoyancy,” “advantage,” and
“inspection.” As an abstract diction, these words convey ruthless ferocity of the
hawk beyond rational and moral constraint. He symbolizes nature in its full
nakedness of an urge to kill. The words also convey a militaristic attitude, as the
hawk exudes:
And the earth’s face upward for my inspection
The pride of the hawk attains its apotheosis in the third stanza, as it feels godlike
control over the earth. The first line of this stanza still presents the hawk perched
the tree like the first lines of the previous stanzas. The power of its “hooked feet”
is evident in their ability to be “locked upon the rough bark.” There is a rhetorical
declaration of supremacy, as the hawk declares:

It took the whole of Creation

To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

The hawk exudes with pride at being a special creation of Nature. In its coming
to being, in the making of its “foot” and “feather,” as if the whole “Creation”
participated. There is no hyperbole intended in this assertion of the hawk. There
is no ambiguity in its voice that it holds the Creation under subjection.

In stanzas fourth and fifth, the most pernicious aspect its power is unfolded. It
holds its sway over all creation, and kills at will, because all its own. There is no
refinement, not hint of civilization about the body and the behavior of the hawk:
There is no sophistry in my body
My manners are tearing off heads

The two stanzas are syntactically linked. The physical brutishness expressed in
the last line of the fourth stanza “tearing off heads” settles with the godlike
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decision of fate of the victim uttered in the first line of the fifth stanza: Ted Hughes

The allotment of death

The last three lines of the fifth stanza complete the merciless killing instinct of
the hawk:

For the one path of my flight is direct

Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:

The hawk is beyond the arguments of reason or moral law. It lives a life of
predation, and symbolizes the Darwinian law. It lives by killing in the most brutal
fashion.

The sixth stanza shifts the scene from the brutal killing to that of self-definition,
although the whole poem can be read as long self-definition. However, the last
stanza brings back the calm declarative tone of the first stanza. The sun is
reduced to play the background to the hawk. It rules the world with scary
calmness that hides its menacing and death-giving instinct. Since its creation, it
has not hold of the creation through the power of its ‘eye’:

Nothing has changed since I began.

My eyes has permitted no change.
I am going to keep thing like this.

The poem uses the same vocabulary as that of a typical nature poem. It contains
references to ‘wood,’ ‘trees,’ ‘air,’ ‘sun’ etc. It also refers to God, the creator of
nature. However, the poem is anything but a nature poem you can associate with
a romantic poet like Wordsworth or Keats. The poem presents a world of nature
shockingly antithetical to the benign image of nature expected in such a poem.
It’s a nature ruled over by the predatory power of the hawk, whose chief instinct
is to brutally kill and eat its prey, while subduing each aspect of nature to its
design as a God, although a god who allots death.

Self-check Exercise III

1) What does the hawk symbolize in this poem?
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2) What is the form of the poem?
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The High Modernist,
Postmodenist and Recent 3) How is Hughes’s “Hawk Roosting” a nature poem?
Poets
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4) Write some of the features of the hawk as described by Hughe in this
poem?
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24.5 HOW TO PAINT A WATER LILY

24.5.1 Introduction
The poem “How to Paint a Water Lily” was published in the year 1960. It is also
titled as “To Paint a Water Lily.” Both the titles express an artist’s struggle to
transmute nature, natural objects, birds and animals on to the page of a poem.
This struggle is central to so many of Hughes’s poem, such as the poem “The
Thought-Fox” that you have already read in this unit. The first title “How to
Paint a Water Lily,” the title that we have retained, reads as if the poet is advising
“how to pant a water lily.”

24.5.2 The Text

A green level of lily leaves
Roofs the pond’s chamber and paves

The flies’ furious arena: study

These, the two minds of this lady.

First observe the air’s dragonfly

That eats meat, that bullets by

Or stands in space to take aim;

Others as dangerous comb the hum

Under the trees. There are battle-shouts

And death-cries everywhere hereabouts

But inaudible, so the eyes praise

To see the colours of these flies
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 Rainbow their arcs, spark, or settle Ted Hughes
Cooling like beads of molten metal

Through the spectrum. Think what worse

Is the pond-bed’s matter of course;

Prehistoric bedragoned times

Crawl that darkness with Latin names,

Have evolved no improvements there,

Jaws for heads, the set stare,

Ignorant of age as of hour-

Now paint the long-necked lily-flower

Which, deep in both worlds, can be still

As a painting, trembling hardly at all

Though the dragonfly alight,

Whatever horror nudge her root.

24.5.3 Glossary
Spectrum : rays of color such as seen in a rainbow, but produced by
separating the components of light by their different degrees of
refraction determined by wavelength.

24.5.4 Analysis
The poem presents a set of pictures that evoke the beauty of nature both in its
violent activity and in calmness. Hughes’s main philosophy as a poet is not
simply to describe the outer beauty of nature, not even to uncover its life within
that corresponds with the human feelings, as the romantic poets such as
Wordsworth do in their poems. For him nature is as complex in its possession of
both beauty and terror, as a human being is deep within, and he seeks to portray
this essential duality of existence in his poems.

The speaking voice in the poem attempts to capture the visual image of a water
lily on a canvas, even as he encounters the wildness and violence of nature
surrounding the lily in the form of swift and warring flights and activities of the
dragonfly and other flies. The water lily suggests two contrary aspects of nature-
the surface of the pond on which a cluster of lily flower floats appears quiet,
soothing and peaceful, but beneath this quietness lie the disturbing activities of
nature symbolized by the battling flies. This duality of the nature is shown by the
division between the life associated with the lily flowers, and the strife involving
the flies surrounding them as well as under the water surface of the pond.

The poet is an artist, and is charmed about the beauty and serenity symbolized by
the water lily. However, his mind is distracted by the striking complexities and
‘war-like’ situation making the atmosphere that surround the water lily.

The poem contains thirteen two line-stanzas with irregular rhymes. The shortness
of stanzas suggests that the poem is a record of momentous thoughts as the poet
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The High Modernist, observes the water lily and the ambience around it. The irregularity of the rhyme
Postmodenist and Recent
Poets
suggests the diversity of experience marked by beauty and violence seen in
nature.

The poem begins with a precise visual image so characteristic of the style of
Hughes. The precision of the image produces a painting-like effect:

A green level of lily leaves

Roofs the pond’s chamber and paves

The flies’ furious arena: study

These, the two minds of this lady.

In these two stanzas, the poet perceives the water lily in splendor and beauty,
however soon intervened by observation of the “flies’ furious arena.” The poet is
so arrested by the beauty of a cluster of lily flowers that he sees them as one
“green level” roofing the surface of the pond, as if they were sheltering “the
pond’s chamber.” The water lily in itself symbolizes nature in its beautiful and
nurturing aspect. However, the mention of the ‘furious arena’ of the flies that the
water lilies help build introduce the terrifying aspect of nature that the poet will
develop subsequently.

What is remarkable here is the use of personification. The fourth line of the poem
personifies the water lily as a ‘lady’ with two minds. These “two minds” refer to
the two opposite aspects of nature as a creator as well as a destroyer.

The third stanza justifies the title of the poem. The use of the imperative “first
observe” serves as a direction for a painter:

First observe the air’s dragonfly

That eats meat, that bullets by
Or stands in space to take aim;

There is a similar direction suggesting “how to paint a water lily” in the eighth
stanza:

Think what worse

Is the pond-bed’s matter of course;

Though the poet is writing a verse and not making a painting; his poetry is
known for translating the images from the world of nature directly on to the page
of poetry. It is the complexity of nature that would make it extremely challenging
to achieve that end.

The next three stanzas make clearer why painting the water lily is going to be a
difficult task. The darker side of nature becomes more evident, and poses the
challenging of presenting a simple picture of nature as that of human beings.
Naturally, the abrupt change in thought is accompanied by a change in the tone of
the poem. The poet leaves behind the serene and gentle images of lilies, and turns
to the violent pictures of the dragonfly which “eats meat” and aims at insects to
kill them for its food. Like the hawk in the poem “Hawk Roosting, “the dragonfly
is a predator targeting victims. In these stanzas there is no description of the
water lily. The poem focuses entirely on war like activities of nature. Violence is
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aptly suggested by the poem’s diction. The poet’s brilliant use of the compound Ted Hughes
words such as death-cries’, ‘battle-shout’ as well as the use of nouns as verb such
as “bullets by” suggest rapid action of the battle-fields and the horror that they
evoke.

The cries and shouts of the battlefield of flies may be inaudible, yet the
heightened sensibility of the poet is able to perceive the activity produced by and
producing the violence prevalent in nature. Again, as if advising a painter, he
recommends seeing the changing colors of the flies forming the rainbow arcs and
sparkling- actions suggestive of violent activity. The poet employs juxtaposition
of images reminiscent of the metaphysical poets like Donne in the following
simile:
…or settle
Cooling like beads of molten metal

The juxtaposition of ‘molten’ and ‘metal’, fluid and hard metal again symbolizes
the dual aspects of nature- soothing and harsh.

The poet next suggests the even more sinister aspect of nature by indicating the
ruthless violence that takes place below the surface of the pond, which gets
linked to the mindless killings and wars across human history right from the
prehistoric times, marked by the Roman times, and continuing up to the present
moment in history- violence has been universal.

Prehistoric bedragoned times

Crawl that darkness with Latin names,

Have evolved no improvements there,

Jaws for heads, the set stare,

However, as art itself, the water lily has been oblivious of the moral distinction
between good and evil, the benign and malevolent. It exists symbolizing both
aspects of existence across time and history:

Ignorant of age as of hour-

Now paint the long-necked lily-flower

Which, deep in both worlds, can be still

As a painting, trembling hardly at all

The use of hyphenation in ‘long-necked lily-flower’ is suggestive of coexistence

of the two worlds-the world of beauty and fragility and that of violence. As
nature exists in its timelessness, so the water lily will exists in poem without any
fear of ‘trembling’.
The poem ends in duality as it had begun.
As you must have observed during your reading of the poem, and this analysis,
the poem makes good use of visual and auditory images. The sound pattern is
very rhythmic throughout, though there are necessary variations. The contrast
inherent in the very essence of the nature is very thoughtfully and imaginatively
captured by the poet in the image of the water lily, and presented in his
arrangement of words and sounds in the poem.
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The High Modernist,
Postmodenist and Recent Self-check Exercise IV
Poets
1) How does the poet describe nature in its simplicity and calmness?
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2) How does the poet depict nature in its violence?
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3) How does the poet portray the two worlds of the water lily?
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4) How do you find the language and the structure of the poem?
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24.6 LET US SUM UP

In this unit, you read about the life and works of Ted Hughes, and analyzed three
of his poems. All the three poems, “Thought-Fox,” “Hawk Roosting,” and “How
to Paint a Water Lily” suggest a definite break in the post-World War English
poetry. They suggest a return to nature and the rural life as subjects of poetry. But
they also introduce a new perspective. They present nature as violent, merciless,
and destructive echoing the baseness of human instincts. They also introduce
simplicity and directness to English poetry.

We hope you will more of Ted Hughes from anthologies of modern poetry or the
various collections of his poetry.
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 Ted Hughes
24.7 ANSWER TO SELF-CHECK EXERCISES
Self-check Exercise I
1) Growing up in the rural Yorkshire, as a young boy Hughes was fascinated
with the birds, animals, and the natural landscape, which shaped his poetic
sensibility. He was drawn towards the wild and predatory habits and
instincts of the animals, and the poet saw in them a reflection of the deeper
psychic realities of the human beings.
2) Among the American poets to influence to Ted Hughes were John Crowe
Ransom and Robert Lowell.
3) Sylvia Plath was a major American poet, who was married to Ted Hughes.
She played a major role in the making of Ted Hughes, especially in his
formative years. She typed the poems of his first collection The Hawk in the
Rain (1957), and made useful suggestions to improve his verse. She was
also instrumental in getting this work published.
4) Ted Hughes wrote literature for children, radio plays, as well as some
translations.

Self-Check Exercise II
1) The fox symbolizes the poem itself. It takes birth as a formless intuition in
the consciousness of the poet, but this consciousness is reflected in the
darkness of the night in the forest outside his room. Initially, the thought or
the idea of the fox appears formless and vague, but as the poem proceeds it
slowly starts taking shape and structure, and attains full and immediate
clarity in the last stanza.
2) The darkness of the forest outside the room of the poet stands for the
inactive state of the poetic imagination, just before the beginning of the
creative process. It suggests the potential stage of creative imagination.
3) The theme of the poem is coming into being of a poem itself. The poem
captures the moments of creative process by suggesting an analogy of the
‘thought-fox’- the idea of fox that stirs in the mind of the poet reflected in
the dark night outside the room of the poet. As the fox becomes clear in the
forest outside, the poem attains clarity in the poet’s mind, till it is finally
printed on the paper. The dark world outside and the poet’s room suggest a
connection between nature and man.
4) The poem is composed in a simple diction with directness of tone. The poet
has used common words such as ‘room’, ‘paper’, ‘forest’, ‘fox’, ‘tree’ etc.,
but they generate evocative meanings. The images are sharp and precise, for
example, the fox taking shape in the darkness, and the ‘eyes’ of the fox
staring in the dark that suggest beauty and terror at the same time.

Self-Check Exercise III

1) The hawk symbolizes nature in its savagery and brutality. The hawk is an
animal which is known for its predatory instinct. The hawk is proud of his
control over the lives of its preys, which makes him very superior and
arrogant.
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The High Modernist, 2) The poem is written in the form of a dramatic monologue. The use of this
Postmodenist and Recent
Poets
poetic form coheres well with the subject of the poem, which is to show the
authoritative and self-centered attitude of the hawk. Since dramatic
monologue is narrated by a single speaker, it gives the power of control to
the speaker who holds full command over his thoughts and ideas, as well as
the silent listener.

3) “Hawk Roosting” is a nature poem. The poem is full of natural imagery and
diction. Use of words like, ‘wood’, ‘tree’, ‘earth’, ‘sky’, ‘perch’, ‘air’, ‘god’,
‘creation’ all convey the naturalistic diction, tone and mood of the poem.
However, the poem is about nature in a very different way than the romantic
poems of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It portrays nature in
its savagery and violence.

4) Hughes portrays the hawk as arrogant, self-centered, and proud. Expressions

such as “I hold creation in my food”, “allotment of death”, “my eyes has
permitted no change” convey the despotic attitude of the Hawk. It is violent,
brutal, and merciless.

Self-Check Exercise IV

1) The poet describes the nature in its simplicity and calmness in the very first
stanza of the poem in the image of the ‘green lily leaves’ that provide shade
to the open surface of the pond’s water. The very use of the color ‘green’
indicates the nurturing and productive aspect of the nature.

2) The violent aspect of the nature is portrayed in the image of the dragonfly as
a predator running after its victims. The use of phrases such as ‘bullets by’,
‘battle-shouts’, and ‘death-cries’ shows nature as a battleground- very
gloomy, dark and furious.

3) The two worlds of the water lily is portrayed by the poet in the form of the
life above and below the water surface of the pond in which the water lily
grows, as well as the atmosphere surrounding it. On the surface everything
appears very quiet and calm, suggesting the outward simplicity of the nature
at first sight. On the other hand, beneath the water surface, as well as in area
around the flowers, things are very chaotic and menacing, suggesting the
destructive aspect of the nature.

4) The language as well as the structure of the poem reflects its content.
Hughes’s language is very sensitive in terms of its auditory and visual effect.
The use of new linguistic devices and punctuations brilliantly sets the tone
and the mood of the poem. Flooded with evocative images, symbols and
metaphors, the poem conveys the duality of nature in a very appealing and
thoughtful way. As far as the structure is concerned, the poem consists of 13
couplets with a regular rhyme, though with some exceptions to introduce
variations in meaning in tandem with the variation in the rhythm of the
poem.

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