TEDHUGHES:
INTERNALIZATION AND
DEINTERNALIZATION OF
EXTERNALS
Chapter I
INTRODUCTION
I
Twentieth
century’s social commitments and Hughes’s poetry
Poetry has been identified with various types
of forms, down the ages. A major change came over the Twentieth Century poetry
as it broke away from old traditions. In
1932 F.R.Leavis wrote in ‘New Bearings in English Poetry’ that poetry did not
matter much to the modern world. His argument was that the then contemporary
intelligence did not concern itself much with poetry. Leavis says, “For it
seems unlikely that the number of potential poets born varies as much from age
to age as literary history might lead one to suppose. What varies is the use
made of talent. And the use each age makes of its crop of talent is determined
largely by the preconceptions of ‘the poetical’ that are current, and the
corresponding habits, conventions and techniques. There are, of course, other
very important conditions, social, economic, philosophical and so on”(Leavis,
p.193). Leavis’s prescription for poetry fits the poetry of Ted Hughes. The age
in which Hughes lived determined his poetic attitudes and images. His
involvements with the factors of life prepare his poetic material giving it a
special quality. The poetic talent is shaped by the conditions of the society
and its various pressures on individuals. A social and historical approach
seems to be necessary to read and interpret the poems of Hughes that open up
great possibilities of meaning then.
In 1957,
Theodor Adorno in ‘On Lyric poetry and society’ wrote, “My thesis is that the
lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism. But
since the objective world that produces the lyric is not simply that of the
expression of subjectivity to which language grants objectivity. Not only does
the lyric subject embody the whole of all the more cogently, the more it
expresses itself; in addition, poetic subjectivity itself indebted to
privilege: the pressure for survival allow only a few human beings to grasp the
universal through immersion in the self or to develop as autonomous subjects
capable of freely expressing themselves…A collective undercurrent provides the
foundation for all individual lyric poetry ”(Adorno, p.348 - 349). A social
approach to lyrics will reveal the ‘collective undercurrent’ of the society
feeding the imagination of the poet and will present to us the mode of the
poetic inspiration on which the poems are built. Hughes’s poems are the written
record of his subjective responses to the social conditions of his society. The
conflict and similarities between him and the social, political, economic,
psychological and even academic circumstances around him constitute the theme
of his poetry. Society’s pressure on him with its expansion of the mass media
and its engagements with power along with the establishment of democracy with a
free press has given him the suitable ambience to produce a poetics of force
and intensity.
In 1968
Barbara Herrnstein Smith in ‘Poetic closure: A study of How Poems End’ said
that the contemporary poetry is a position of ‘stylistic pluralism’. She says
further, “The developments and crises I speak of are the commonplaces of our
literature, sermons, political speeches, and lives. The stylistic pluralism of
contemporary poetry reflects a broader pluralism of values in an age that is
the heir to perhaps too many revolutions, what Nathalie Sarraute has called
“the age of suspicion”. We know too much and are skeptical of all that we know,
feel, and say. All traditions are equally viable partly because all are equally
suspect. Where conviction is seen as self-delusion and all last words are lies,
the only resolution may be in the affirmation of irresolution, and
conclusiveness may be seen as not only less honest but less stable than
inconclusiveness.
What is particularly significant for
poetry, as opposed here to art and music, is the suspicion of language. It is
an age where linguistics is a branch of almost every discipline and almost
every discipline is a branch of linguistics. Language is the badge of our
suspect reason and humanity. It is the lethal trap sprung for truth” (Smith,
p.403). The pluralism of contemporary poetry, the product of a society growing
in various fields of knowledge simultaneously is the social background to the
poems of Hughes. Different types of sciences have come up in the terrain of
languages too making the analysis of language a serous issue. Free verse,
imagism, symbolism and other such developments have also put a strain on the
poet to experiment with new styles of writing. Hughes’s language is also under
suspect for its force and strength and his use of animals to impress human
thoughts and attitudes on them. His violent imagery is now being questioned and
traced for its source.
The social conditions prevailing in the twentieth century influenced the style and form of Hughes’s poetry. It had to compete with technology and accommodate the political changes that were happening in society. The electronic entertainment forms posed a major challenge to the poet. What are the consequences of the expansion of entertainment forms in the twentieth century on art is still to be understood.
Marjorie Perloff analyses the situation in her first chapter of her book, ‘Radical Artifice’: “The impact of electronic technology on our lives is now the object of intense study, but what remains obscure is the role, if any, this technology has in shaping has the ostensibly private language of poetry” (Perloff, p.548). Ted Hughes’s language with packed emotions creates a separate identity. His poetic language goes close to real life, trying to express it directly and forcefully competing with the camera as the poems of Hughes shows.
Czeslaw Milosz discusses about the changes in society’s
values in the Twentieth century in his essay, ‘On Hope’: “The exceptional
quality of the twentieth century is not determined by jets as a means of
transportation or a decrease in infant mortality or the birth-control pill. It
is determined by humanity’s emergence as a new elemental force; until now
humanity had been divided into castes distinguished by dress, mentality, and
mores. The transformation can be clearly observed only in certain countries,
but it is gradually occurring everywhere and causing the disappearance of
certain mythical notions, widespread in the past century, about the specific
and presumably eternal features of the peasant, worker, and the intellectual.
Humanity as an elemental force, the result of technology and mass education,
means that man is opening up to science and art on unprecedented scale…Citizens
in a modern state, no longer mere dwellers in their village and district, know
how to read and write but are unprepared to receive nourishment of a higher
intellectual order” (Milosz, p.498).
This is the social context in which Hughes was writing up against the forces of mass media catering to millions of people. He had to acquire a different idiom from the current language of the popular poetry. Hughes goes close to life in all his poems and gets a new way of saying things powerfully and forcefully. His words wring out experiences with strong emotions from objects. His perception of things goes beyond the normal level of seeing.
Marjorie Perloff continuing her discussion on postmodern poetry takes the example of ‘deep image’ poems where the poem is conceived as an act of witnessing. She says, “The speaker-observer must capture the exact nuance of the moment, beginning with the long documentary title that tells us just where and when the recorded experiences took place” ( p.554). In the case of Hughes if this formula is applied it suits quite well except that suddenly from nowhere his war images crop up and change the tone of the poem. He notices the fundamental force in nature as a reflection of life a result of these images intervening in his poetry.
When he tries to see the same survival ethics of nature in man, with the introduction of the crow to heal the wounded society as a positive force, it looks as if he is trying to justify qualities of amoralities in man himself and the crow ends up becoming the caricature of mankind. On the other hand he shows extreme sensitivity to the pain of man as well as animals suffering - The pain of man because of technologically advanced wars and the pain of animals in mere living. He has internalized the experiences of the wars in his memory and his poems burst with these violent and painful images from his mind. Internalization emerges as a counter method to establish an individual character to his poetry as well as bringing forceful images of the period recorded in his poetry.
In his book, ‘The Poetry of Ted Hughes’ published in
1998, Paul Bentley discusses the East European influence on the poetry of
Hughes and thereby fixing Hughes’s poetics as a poetry born out of the
externals of the twentieth century. Bentley says: “Finding no allies in the
Movement, with Wodwo (1967) and Crow (1970, 1972) in particular Hughes begins
to draw on the example of East European poetry (Vasko Popa, Miroslav Holub,
Zbigniew Herbert, Janos Pilinszky), a poetry born out of the experiences
of the second world war, the concentration camps and post-war totalitarianism
which adopts a tentative and distrustful stance towards what can be said to be
‘real’, as well as what the self can be said to be” (Bentley, p.3). Further Bentley argues that whatever Hughes
says about the method of Vasko Popa can also apply to his own method too. The responses of artists to the Jewish
holocaust have been one of silence. The
situation is not apt for poetry with fine feelings and sensuousness. It is possible
only to create caricatures of humanity and hope for survival. Hughes’s poetry
has both these elements in them. His internalized pain comes out released as
poetic energy.
Hughes’s anger
The violent
externals went into the inner consciousness of the poet and coloured his mental
process. When the poetic expressions came out, they carried all these
impressions of the externals with them. Language becomes the vehicle of his
thought as to any writer, and he uses it to express his anger with the modern
scientific civilization and its technological weapons reducing mankind to mad
and nervous people, running away, laughing, screaming and then becoming totally
silent. He blames the western thinking traditions for this result. Monotheism
and the ideologies of self-righteousness have led man towards science and man’s
need to dominate has resulted in the bomb. Man’s capacity for destruction in
massive scales shocks Hughes and he lashes out at humanity become slave to
scientific tendencies in poem after poem.
Poets are
worried about the future of humanity in the world of technological wars as the
polish poet Czeslaw Miloz puts it further: “The fate of civilization - the only one, for the others have lost
their game – is not comforting, and that’s why some poets are now zealous
readers of Nostradamus’ apocalyptic prophecies. When looking for hope, we must
turn to the internal dynamic responsible for having brought us to this precise
point… It is possible that the Western branch of civilization disintegrates
because it creates, and creates because it disintegrates. The fate of
Kierkegaard’s philosophy may serve as an example. It grew out of the
disintegrations occurring within Christianity, in any case within
Protestantism; in turn, his reading of Kierkegaard seems to have influenced
Niels Bohr, creator of the quantum theory of the atom” (Czeslaw Milosz, p.497).
Hughes expresses similar concerns as to the future of humanity in his poems.
The use of poison gas in the Second World War made the people get scared of a
future atomic war. Hughes’s poetry expresses the fear of the people and tries
to take them away from it with his introduction of trickster literature,
guiding them to take things cool.
In the poem, ‘The last of the 1st/5th
Lancashire Fusiliers’, which is described by him as a souvenir of the Gallipoli
Landings, he presents the postwar depression the society went through. He
describes an old man who has become mentally disturbed after taking part in the
war. The old man has become a ‘bird’. He is ‘bow – backed’. His sons are not
able to understand why he laughed and Hughes is furious with wars calling them
‘senseless huge wars’. He says,
“ War is an idea in the
muzzled caliber of the big guns.
In the grey, wolvish outline.
War is a kind of careless
health, like the heart – beat
In the easy bodies of
sailors, feeling the big engines
Idling between
emergencies”
(Hughes,
p.291).
The impact of war machines in the mind of poets
Apart from his exposure to the violent wars
and their impact, Hughes also came under the influence of the westerner’s interest
in primitive religions, quite popular in the twentieth century, as a changed
model of thinking against the monotheist thinking. Artistic vocation found the
twentieth century much more difficult than it used to be, says W.H.Auden in his
essay “The poet and the city”. He diagnoses four aspects for the same:
“1.The loss
of belief in the eternity of the physical universe …
2. The loss
of belief in the significance and reality of sensory phenomena...
3. The loss
of belief in a norm of human nature which will always require the same kind of man – fabricated world to
be at home in...
4. The
disappearance of the public realm as the sphere of revelatory personal deeds..”
(Auden, p.380).
Technology has completely changed man’s life style and
poets have a tough time coping with the sudden and ever changing
transformations. The ‘advent of the
machine has destroyed the direct relation between a man’s intention and his
deed’ says Auden. He analyses and wonders what would happen if St.George ‘drops
a bomb on the dragon from an altitude of twenty thousand feet’. Though his
intention would be to slay it, ‘his act
consists in pressing a lever and it is the bomb, not St.George, that does the
killing’. The role of man in the world wars is highly questionable which made
poets think about the machines with caution and even anger.
Twentieth century is the transition period as far as
weapons are concerned and whenever weapons change their role in the world,
concepts undergo a lot of changes. Now with the introduction of the bomb, a new
weapon capable of powerful destruction, we have come to a period of change.
Exposure of the warfront
Was there a warfront, as the bomb fell on
civilians and cities? The bomb shattered the ethical standards of humanity. In
the written history of the past five thousand years, we have read about cities
being burnt as a form of punishment by the victorious king or war general. But
that seems to pale into insignificance with the dropping of the bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The radioactivity continues even now destroying future
generations mindlessly and cruelly. The war is not over for these people from
that particular region. This experience alone can shatter the faith of any
thinking man on humanity and its systems of thinking.
In
‘National Ghost’, Winter Pollen, Hughes writes: “The war provided Owen and
Sassoon with material their special gifts might not have found elsewhere, but
it was disastrous for most of the others…We have to remember how they were
taken by surprise. It’s that surprise which makes all the difference between
the human measure of the first world war and of
the second. Four years was not long enough, nor Edwardian and Georgian
England the right training, nor stunned, somnambulist exhaustion the right
condition, for digesting the shock of machine guns, armies of millions, and the
plunge into the new dimension, where suddenly and for the first time Adam’s
descendents found themselves meaningless” (Hughes, p.72). This is the external
against which the poetic talents of the poet were pitched. The wars were fresh in human memory all the
more because of the massive expansion of the media in all its forms.
Questions left in the mind of
the poet as revealed by his poems
1.
What is meant by the so-called progress?
2.
What is the role of religion in shaping the character
of mankind?
3.
What can a poet sing about these wars?
4.
Can a poet sing the glory of the winners?
5.
How to write about these wars?
6.
Is there any future for mankind?
7.
What is good and what is evil?
8.
What is so great about the western achievements?
9.
Is there no limit to human greed?
II
New knowledge systems creating expanded consciousness of mankind
Anthropology and archaeology have destroyed man’s sense of isolation
caught in his culture, says Auden in the earlier quoted essay. The artist has
lost his secluded sense of identity as belonging to one race or country that is
better than other races or countries. The world has been extended to the poet
as well as made small. A poet has to accommodate the world of animals and the
concerns of the universe in the poetry of modern times. Public life has been
enlarged to unimaginable extent because of the mass media.. Science without
animistic religions has destroyed man’s capacity to understand the other
species and thus has started destroying the universe is one of the main
intellectual commitments of the early Twentieth century in the western
countries. With his background in anthropology Hughes came under the influence
of the thinking models that were and are looking at man a part of the universe
along with other creatures. Worshipping nature that was in human practice
before Christianity, should be brought back is his message and he offers the
same in his poetry as a solution to the crisis brought by science.
Hughes
talks about the role of print media and electronic media in shaping the mind in
the twentieth century in ‘Poetry and Violence’:
“…all sacred texts, all mythological compilations and studies, all
repositories of folk lore, all commentaries and histories of religions and
occult movements, all biographies of saints, sages, prophets, holy men, with a
huge volume of new, related material dug out from previously inaccessible
manuscripts or other languages, have become near-popular publications in a mass
market. During the same period, books and more recently television programmes
about wildlife and natural history have become virtually a craze, throughout
much of the world” (Hughes, p.266). This revolution in publication and the
power of the electronic media posed a huge problem to creative artists as now
they had to compete with popular media to get attention. At the same time it
expanded the consciousness of the writer and the reader, broadening their
concerns of thinking. Environmental concerns have become the themes of modern
thinking and they influence writers getting inside their mode of presentation
of life. The scope of writing is larger than the previous centuries, probably as
never before in the history of humanity
Responsibility of saving nature
In ‘Ted Hughes and Ecology: A Biocentric
Vision’, Leonard M. Scigaj analyses the importance given to environmental
studies in the twentieth century. Hughes had read Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’, in 1962. His background in
anthropology and his study in tribal societies and oriental philosophy
developed a sensitivity towards nature, argues Scigaj. Tribal societies gave a lot of
importance to nature forming a part of their theologies. Nature’s vital
energy and its inner spiritual unity are
emphasized by Hughes in his poems. Scigaj further argues that the early poems
of Hughes accentuates the actualities of survival struggles as well as the energies
shared by humans and animals.
Interest in primitive religions in
society influencing Hughes
Mircea Eliade’s book in 1964 created a lot of
new interest in the field of primitive religions. Intellectuals started
wondering if these religious systems worshipping the mother goddess would be an
alternative to the patriarchal Christianity. As the bomb brought down the
respect for western thinking traditions, human mind started finding ways to
explain life from a new perspective. Leonard M. Scigaj in his introduction to
‘Critical Essays on Ted Hughes’ tells us that “…Hughes in the sixties developed
a nonrealistic style wrought from an amalgam of Kafkaesque and Tibetan
surrealism, combined the responses of Christian catechisms with invocations and
metaphysical meditations from the Upanishads, and borrowed the formal
extravagances, fantastical events, and instantaneous perceptual changes
from Zen Buddhism, shamanistic and trickster folklore, …” (Scigaj, p.4).
III
Hughes’s poetic commitments
Firstly, his poems show the various responses
he makes to the technological world around him. Secondly, he poses the problems
of this knowledge society and analyzes the role of violence in everything –
animals, flowers, birds, insects and man that constitutes only one vein of
thought warns man of his future. Thirdly he presents an alternative model of
looking at life, with the introduction of his ‘crow’. Fourthly, he uses violent images, to alert
the memory of the war in the mind of the reader.
Fifthly his poems show his anger and pain. Sixthly, his symbols are symbols are
degeneration. And finally, and above all there is a vein of hope running
through his poems.
All these factors are packed with enormous intensity much
different from the regular method of writing. This intensity and the slipping
of certain pictures into the poems show a kind of internalization. Certain
images are internalized in the memory of the poet that he records them in his
poetry. The externals influence him so thoroughly giving him commitments that
his thoughts revolve around the following factors.
Hughes’s movement of thought
Hughes thinks about these externals creating
his points of view, coming to his own conclusions, analyzing them from various
points if view, showing anger at times and wondering how we can come out of
these manmade problems. His movement of thought involves:
1.
Sensitive responses to war technologies esp. the bomb and its impact,
destroying cities.
2. Visual
media that was keeping the violent pictures alive as it released pictures of
people running away, making the viewer’s mind alert with painful pictures helping him store memories. Television provided with close up shots of victims.
Later, movies came up based on extensive researches making them very authentic.
3. Print
media that made painful pictures more stable by publishing them in big print
and fixing them up in human memory. Close up shots of these pictures showed the
victim’s fear and horror very closely. No previous war in human history would have
been given such extensive exposure with newspapers, documentary reels,
magazines, novels, interviews, pictures, books, and real life accounts.
4. Seeing
people around him collapsing with nervousness and fear.
5.
Listening to chilling stories of suffering and pain.
6.
Visualizing the same pain and violence in nature.
7. Thinking
if new forms of thinking are possible with going back to primitive religions or
some other new form of approach to life.
A process
of internalization directs all these movements.
Hughes’s poetic process:
Internalization of externals – intense poetry with
forceful images – deinternalization
The internalized images of Hughes that were revealed in
his poetry as violent forces are later deinternalised by the poet in an effort
to look at life from a neutral point of view. He consciously moves away from
his involvements and tries to present models of hope in the forms of symbols
like the river.
Externals and their influence on the
poetics of Hughes
Hughes works within the framework of
society, constantly revaluing, questioning, commenting and resisting the forces
of life around him. Its facets move him immensely influencing his creations and
directing his thought. The external conditions affect him at every stage of his
life acting as his inspirations to write. Certain situations affect his
imagination totally that we can see their influence in every word he utters.
Not all situations have to create a vocabulary of softness and gentleness.
Gerard Genette in ‘Poetic Language, Poetics
of Language’, firmly asserts, “that not every kind of motivation corresponds to
the deep poetic wish, which is, in Eluard’s words, to speak “a sensuous
language” (Genette, p.411). Certain motivations are in need of a different kind
of language. The material of pain provides Hughes’s source of thought that it
cannot while away itself with soft and gentle expressions. The externals decide
his poetics.
He is at the mercy of the world, not able to
break away from its powerful influence over him. He diagnoses the problems of
the western civilization and prescribes medicines, like a doctor. The stronger
the sensitivity is, the deeper the influence goes into the mind of the poet. It
stays there never leaving his memory resulting in various responses. There are
multiple reactions in the mind of Hughes because of his internalizations. He is
angry, upset, philosophical, and violent and tries to offer a solution to the
problems perceived by him. All the while he is poetic and highly imaginative.
The wars and technology provide his poetic material to him.
The technologies are the substance on which he
builds his poetic constructions, attacking them, using them to give him
insights and giving himself the opportunity to look at the other parts of
nature to see if there are similarities. The wars give him a new vocabulary of
modernity creating pictures of modern wars.
They condition his poetry. Even nature poems bring out strong pictures
of violence either consciously or unconsciously. Violence becomes his language
of expression.
Imagery of pain: record of externals
Violence
and shock are the methods Hughes employs in his poems. Here is no passive
record of life praising the glory of living as the blessing of God. Rather the
poems shock the reader out of his lethargy, making him wonder what the poet is
trying to say. In ‘Cave Birds’, Hughes writes about the ‘scream’. He is
familiar with its nature. He says,
“Then I, too, opened my mouth to
praise –
But a silence wedged my
gullet.
Like an obsidian dagger, dry,
jag-edged,
A silent lump of volcanic
glass,
The scream
Vomited itself” (The scream,
p.121-122)
This is a
description of a postwar man’s neurotic fears that reads like a nightmare.
Expressions of fear are not passive evoking pity. Instead, violent instruments
are brought to our mind – wedge, dagger, and volcanic glass. And then the
nausea – vomiting. This presentation of violence is under suspicion. We wonder
why such terrible images have to be present when the information or the same
feelings could have been evoked without the use of such violent images at all.
The neurotic fear is a violent emotion. What the poet has witnessed is
something violent and terrible and he uses the images of weapons to describe or
represent those feelings. In the
representation of reality what is the contribution of the poet in the forms of
images and what is the contribution of the experience itself is the question.
The next question that automatically emerges is why the poet prefers certain
images to others. What is the reason for Hughes’s preference of the dagger and
volcanic glass as images to describe the neurotic fear of the westerner? Is it because of the loss of the glory of
imperialism of his countrymen? Is it the
anger of failure? Is it because the poet
is trying to recreate the pictures of war? Or is it simply the poet as part of
a period has recorded the thoughts and images of the times?
Edward
Larrissy talks about the use of mechanized world by Hughes to describe the
world of nature: “The ambivalence of Hughes’s response to Nature is clear from
any sensitive reading. There is a partial identification with an impersonal
ruthlessness which denies the finer feelings and, as we shall see, implicitly,
and sometimes explicitly, chastises the ‘feminine’. Hughes’s very vitalism,
with its roots in Romantic organicism, expresses itself in terms of the imagery
of machines. In this he shows himself to stand in a line of descent that runs
from Hardy through the poets of the First World War and certain areas of the
work of D.H.Lawrence” (Larrissy, p.126). Larrissy lists the poets who have this
tendency to industrialize their images and they are the products of the
nineteenth and Twentieth century and have lived close to the wars. (Hardy wrote
‘The Dynasts’ (1910) a huge poetic drama of the Napoleonic Wars. It shows his
interest in the war). The vocabulary of the war has started entering the
consciousness of the English writers by the end of the nineteenth century.
The poet is
submitting to the forces of history and geography. Historical forces change the
use of language, words, expressions and the poet records it. He is not outside
the circle of experience, but inside it. The ‘scream’ itself sounds so violent
and powerful calling attention to it. It is the perception of the poet – how he
looked at the people screaming in fear, may be after a bomb. The screams are
terrible to his ears and he tries to choose apt metaphors to describe their
intensity. What he finally chooses depends on his nature and the nature of his
language. The ‘dagger’ and ‘volcanic glass’ with their sharpness and their
capacity to bring pain remind us of the pain associated with them and the poet
decides that these would be the apt examples to explain the torture his people
went through. At the surface level it looks very violent. At the deeper level
it refers to pain. He wants the reader to experience the pain or at least
imagine the pain caused if some one is cut by a volcanic glass or dagger. That
is the kind of pain people went through he says. To explain violence he uses
violence. The questions that emerge are: Can soft and gentle words express such
extreme pain of humanity? What are the options of a poet handling similar
themes?
In ‘Moortown Diary’, Hughes describes the
onslaught of rain:
“They look out sideways
from under their brows which are
Their only shelter. The
sunk scrubby wood
Is a pulverized wreck,
rain riddles its holes
To the drowned roots. A
pheasant looking black
In his waterproofs,
bends at his job in the stubble.
The mid – afternoon dusk
soaks into
The soaked thickets.
Nothing protects them.
The fox corpses lie
beaten to their bare bones,
Skin beaten off, brains
and bowels beaten out.
Nothing but their
blueprint bones last in the rain,
Sodden soft” (Rain).
As we read
the intense account of the rain lashing at the land and animals, slowly
questions creep into our mind: what does the rain refer to? What does ‘shelter’
refer to? Why does the poet say ‘nothing protects them’? – From what? Is Hughes
quite unconsciously slipping into a description of an air raid? – A double
vision? Or is the lashing rain suddenly reminds him of an air raid and he
consciously uses words to create similar painful pictures? When the poet starts
writing one thing it grows into something else that resembles the original
thought. The mind curiously has recorded events with certain pictures and any
small reference to it triggers of memories, in the forms of pictures. Now two
pictures overlap each other, may be one intended and the other unintended. The
deeper or the unintended pictures are more powerful as they come from the
innermost recesses of the mind. Internalizations of experiences result in
creating pictures similar to real life. A poem becomes the record of merging
two, three or many pictures, depending upon the poet’s sensitivity and wide
experience. His poems have recorded a period that was difficult and that left
permanent scars in the westerner’s mind and changed common perspectives at the
creative and the critical levels.
Hughes’s poetic perception and violence
Aime Cesaire says in ‘Poetry and Knowledge’
that “Poetic knowledge occurs when a man showers an object with all his
activated riches” (Cesaire, p. 286). Hughes ‘showers’ all his attention and
focus completely, thoroughly on the object that comes under his vision. The quality of his observations is that he sees
the same violence, he saw or visualized because of the wars around him, and in
whatever he observes and writes about. Pictures of violence seen by him and
what he heard from others about war and the post war sufferings he witnessed in
his life probably changed his poetic perception totally. Even when he offers a
new model of thinking in the form of crow, still these images of war intervene.
When Hughes
presents animals they become the symbols of the dominating humanity of the
period. In ‘Poetry and Violence’, Hughes analyzes the power of poetic imagery
as created by W.B.Yeats and Blake. Blake’s Tyger stood for the psychic energy
that accompanied the French revolution Hughes says. And Yeats’s rough beast in ‘The Second
Coming’ refers to ‘an upsurge of psychic energy’ that would transform society.
Hughes writes: “Yeats’s symbol is politically more complicated than Blake’s
though in the end – as a spiritual symbol – amounting may be to the same thing.
But in the case of this poem too, whether the Rough beast truly was in a
confined sense connected to Irish Nationalism, or in a wider sense to forces
moving in Asia and Europe, one can hardly suppose that if Yeats had suppressed
the poem anything would have happened more quietly or kindly” (Hughes,
p.264-265). Poetry reflects the social life around the poet and creates ‘an
image of events’. If we take this way of looking at poetry as per the analysis
of Hughes, we can interpret the wild animals as representing or creating images
of the animal like energy let loose during the twentieth century. Energy can be
used both positively and negatively but Hughes argues that his poetry is
talking only about positive energy and not the negative energy.
IV
Internalization
In his
essay, ‘Early Hughes’ (1967), M.L. Rosenthal discusses the style of Hughes : “
The second volume, Lupercal (1960) includes a half – dozen or more poems that
fulfill the first book’s promise superbly. No poet of the past has quite
managed to ‘internalize’ the murderousness of nature through such brilliantly
objective means, and with such economy, as Hughes in poems like ‘Esther’s
Tomcat’, ‘Hawk Roosting’, ‘To Paint a Waterlily’, ‘View of a Pig’, ‘An Otter’,
‘Thrushes’, and ‘Pike’. Like Lowell, he has the gift of presenting image and
thought in a context of hurtling action; there is a strong narrative and
dramatic element in all his projections, and the pacing is of the varied,
shifting kind employed by a skilled narrator impatient of any description or
comment that is in any way inert.
A tomcat sprang at a mounted
knight,
Locked round his neck like a
trap of hooks
While the knight rode fighting
its clawing and bite.
After hundreds of years the
stain’s there
On the stone where he fell,
dead of the tom……
Or the
hawk, characterizing itself:
I kill where I please because it
is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my
body;
My manners are tearing off
heads….
Or the poet
contemplating a dead pig:
Once I ran at a fair in the noise
To catch a greased piglet
That was faster and nimbler than a
cat,
Its squeal was the rending of the
metal.
Pigs must have hot blood, they feel like
ovens.
Their bite is worse than a horse’s
-
They chop a half moon clean out.
They eat cinders, dead cats.
Distinctions and admirations such
As this one was long finished
with.
I stared at it for a long time.
They were going to scald it,
Scald it and scour it like a
doorstep.
A passage
like the one just quoted would have been less likely to appear before the last
war. Its bloodymindedness is a reflex of recent history, the experience of the
Blitz, the bomb, and Auschwitz – an expression of them, a recoiling from them,
an approach to experience by way of their implications. Hughes resembles Sylvia
Plath closely in such a passage. His nature is Nazi, not Wordsworthian” (
Rosenthal p.125 – 126).
Rosenthal
says that Hughes has internalized the murderousness of nature. The
internalization of nature is possible because the externals have made Hughes
internalize the war experiences. The poet to describe the character of the
living things around him uses this quality acquired from his period. Rosenthal
emphasizes in the poet’s capacity for getting inside the essence of things –
the ability to present images and thoughts in a dramatic and active manner and
refers to Hughes as a skilled narrator. This is quite true. Rosenthal later
discusses about the reflex of history on the mind of Hughes. It is that which
has gone into the mind of the poet and internalized his thoughts. The word ‘internalized’
is used in a sense of extreme sensitivity. That is, a sensitive mind receives
external expressions and records them quite well in its mind without being able
to forget them. The expressions are usually recorded in the mind as pictures or
images.
Philip
Larkin in his work, ‘The Pleasure Principle’, tells us his opinion on the
simpler aspect of writing a poem. He says it consists of three stages: “the
first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree
that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does is the second
stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional
concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, anytime. The third stage is
the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the
device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it. The
stages are interdependent and all necessary. If there has been no preliminary
feeling, the device has nothing to produce and the reader will experience
nothing…What a description of this basic tripartite structure shows is that
poetry is emotional in nature and theatrical in operation, a skilled recreation
of emotion in other people, …” (Larkin, p.338). Poets invest in emotions as
their foundation of writing. Emotional responses to life’s facets are their
poetic occupation. As Leavis said, the
poet’s talent comes into contact with his period’s experience and responses to
it in a poetic manner.
Internalization
of memories and internalization of observations:
When a poet of extreme sensitivity writes
poetry, he records stored pictures deriving from experienced emotions from his
memory into his poetry with or without his knowledge. When Rosenthal says that
the nature of Hughes is Nazi, it brings out a negative picture of the poet that
may not be what he deserves. The nature of Hughes seems to be very sensitive
that he is able to imagine the pain nature inflicts on others as well as what
pain it goes through. Whatever he saw in the life of mankind was the same thing
he saw in nature, as he did not differentiate between nature and man. In the
terms of Larkin the poet is compelled to recreate the world as he has seen it.
His verbal devices are constructed by his attitude to the life he saw around him.
The obsession with the pain offered by the twentieth century found in Hughes’s
poems show the involvement he had with similar emotional states. His obsession
is a kind of rare internalization of images of certain externals that seems to
disturb and change his poetic mode completely. It is an internalization of memories
and an internalization of observations.
Adorno
calls this presence of the society in poems as a universal quality. He says,
“The universality of the lyric’s substance, however is social in nature. Only
one who hears the voice of humankind in the poem’s solitude can understand what
the poem is saying; indeed, even the solitariness of the lyrical language
itself is prescribed by an individualistic and atomistic society, just as
conversely its general cogency depends on the intensity of its individuation.
For that reason, however, reflection on the work of art is justified in
inquiring, and obligated to inquire concretely into its social content and not
content itself with a vague feeling of something universal and inclusive”
(Adorno, p.343-344). Intensity becomes
the mode of poetic vacation to Adorno. It is the result of the reflection of
the conflict in society. Strong emotional states are necessary to produce
poetry. The intense emotions found in the poems of Hughes are also the result
of the conflicts in his mind responding to society.
In the
essay, ‘Hughes, History and the World in which We Live’, Rand Brandes discusses
Hughes’s quality of internalization, his special way of imagination: “The war
poems of Wolfwatching tap some of the same power of Hughes’s earlier poems such
as ‘Out’ or ‘Scapegoats and Rabies’. What resembles Eliade’s ‘Terror of
History’ has been internalized to the extent that the person feels helpless not
simply in the face of present emptiness but, more importantly, in the face of
the irreversible past” (Brandes, p.151). Brandes rightly points out that the
poet internalizes the knowledge derived from reading. Things go to the deep
core of his mind. They affect him more. Can we use the existing word
‘sensitivity’ to explain the quality of his mind? When we say hypersensitivity,
the word acquires a negative connotation, which cannot be used to describe his
mind, as Hughes fine sharpness of imagination is able to pick up the feelings
of nature, making him an eco-poet. He presents to us the strength of nature.
The projection shows nature as a formidable force, which cannot be sidelined by
man. Nature with or without reason is the same as man who is supposed to have
the powers of reason that instead of restraining him have pushed him further
down the road of selfishness. Like man nature is also violent and dominating.
He also sees what he saw in society around him in nature. His judgment of
nature is based upon his experience of the western society, strong in
aggression. It is his personal conclusion, that he sees the qualities in the
men around him also in nature. He sees and feels the suffering of animals
around him just as he feels the pain of men in his society. Force and pain i.e.
the ability to give pain as well as suffer pain are the two contrasting
qualities he finds in nature. Man is also part of nature, that in spite of his
reason he also has the contradictory qualities.
In 1962,
Hughes wrote in London Magazine, later published in ‘Winter Pollen’ as
‘Context’, that the gift of writing is an unobliging thing. He says a poet can
“study his art, experiment, and apply his mind and live as he pleases. But the
moment of writing is too late for further improvements or adjustments. Certain
memories, images, sounds, feelings, thoughts, and relationships between these,
have for some reason become luminous at the core of his mind: it is in his
attempt to bring them out, without impairment, into a comparatively dark world,
that he makes poems. At the moment of writing, the poetry is a combination, or
a resultant, of all that he is – unimpeachable evidence of itself and,
indirectly, of himself – and for the time of writing he can do nothing but
accept it” (Hughes, p.2-3). The poetic insights come as a flash and the poet is
under a kind of compulsion to record it in his writing. Larkin refers to this
experience as an obsession.
Hughes
explains how to make poetry in his essay, ‘Poetry in the making’: “in bad
poetry …words kill each other. Luckily, you do not have to bother about it so
long as you do one thing.
That one
thing is to imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it. Do not
think it up laboriously, as if you were working out mental arithmetic. Just look at it, touch it, smell it, listen
to it, turn yourself into it. When you do this, the words look after
themselves, like magic. If you do this you do not have to bother about commas
or full-stops or that sort of thing. You do not look at the words either. You
keep your eyes, your ears, your nose, your taste, your touch, your whole being
on the thing you are turning into words”, (Hughes, p.13). This experience of
looking at things at the closest range possible is what is being termed as internalization
of observations.
Internalizing
externals as a result of frustrated poetic energy not released in narrative
poetry
When Hughes wrote his poems it was from
a different position from the present situation of too much exposure of
violence through the media and the weapons were new to his generation shocking
him beyond the limits. Now media has desensitized the viewer that he may not
react at all to violent experiences captured through cameras and presented in
newsreels. Hughes also must have viewed Television shots of violence, violent
action movies, read a lot about the wars and the nuclear and Jewish holocausts
and all these externals must have left a permanent mark in his mind and the
most important thing is that he witnessed the pain of his father suffering
after the First World War and also he himself was a part of the Second World
war, as he lived witnessing the whole catastrophe. The media, both the print
and the visual, covered the war extensively and it only would have enhanced his
awareness of the war and the disasters it brings. As a poet coming from a
generation which was not desensitized by too much of exposure of violence,
Hughes reacts freshly to every bit of violence and force that he sees and shows
extreme understanding of the violence in the mind of man that causes pain to
fellow beings, and he reveals it in all his poems. If he had been situated in
times, which allowed narrative poetry, he would have expressed the violence
directly. The intellectual habits and conventions of his period restrict his images
that they come out in unexpected places.
The effect
Twentieth Century’s technology has had on the mind of man is a natural
phenomenon of life, but with a difference. When epics were sung describing the
wars mankind remembered them for thousands of years by repeating them again and
again. The last five hundred years have witnessed so much of scientific changes
that epics written for the first and second world wars have not become
established as the Mahabharatha or the Odyssey.
The modern epics in English were created in the form of cinemas, real
life stories and books. They discussed the matter from the point of view of the
Allied forces making them the heroes.
These stories had a short span of life compared to the ancient epics due
to mass communication where multiplicity of entertainment forms has flooded the
market. In the past the human mind satisfied its needs to remember by retelling
the stories again and again. Images have taken this role in this modern
society.
The images
of Ted Hughes are these kinds of images. They retell the past. As retelling the
war stories had been taken charge by the media and popular fiction the poet’s
mind invents excuses to bring back the pictures of war and suffering to the
surface. It sees the forceful nature and the capacity to suffer in a pike or a
pig. The violent pictures that are actually pictures evoking painful reactions,
stored in the poet’s mind influence his thoughts and his poetic imagination
sees and feels the force and pain in nature too, just what he witnessed and was
exposed through the media about the life of man. When it mixes with poetic imagination, poems
are born with extreme force and violence.
Epics,
technology and globalization and internalization
Epics dealt
with so much of violence and made extensive descriptions of the wars that
continued for days together. The epic reader is caught in the interest of the
story that he does not pause and visualize each weapon and feel depressed. The
violence is taken for granted. The same experience is repeated in the case of
the modern weapons too. They shocked people initially and then they lost their
capacity to shock any more. Appearance of weapons in modern poetry is in a
different form as epics are not possible in modern days with global geographic
outlook changing. Epics needed the
concept of concrete enemies geographically defined to build their stories.
Modern poetry’s binary opposition comes from ideologies. Hughes opposes rationalism and man’s greed
for power against the natural forces of life. Democracy with its insistence on
press freedom has created the modern irony resulting in writers commenting and
criticizing instead of eulogizing one nation against the other. Publishing has
become an institution in itself. Technology and globalization along with global
migrations has taken away concepts of enemy hood. The modern weapons have
destroyed the ethics of war that poets cannot sing epics for their countries
any more. All these changes have put tremendous pressure on the poet. The
images of the war have been absorbed and internalized and released in the
socially accepted form of poetry. The war images that stayed in the mind of
Hughes came out in flashes in his poetic works. Images of pain never left his
mind and intervene his poetry.
In
‘Birthday letters’, many poems deal with the panic and terror felt by people in
the twentieth century. The pictures supplied by the media had its impact on the
people who internalized the images. Hughes says,
“Hackings-off of real limbs
Smoke of the
hospital incinerator,
Carnival
beggars on stumps,
The
gas-chamber and the oven
Of
the camera’s war – all this
Was
the anatomy of your God of sleep,
His
blue eyes – the sleepless electrodes” (Hughes,p.142)
Hypnosis is necessary to calm the nerves of people who
witnessed the pain of war presented in an intense manner by the media. Death
camp atrocities and mass amputations came to the mind of them killing their
sleep. It is a kind of swelling terror bursting out. The camera’s war brought
home this pain that no one could escape these experiences. Internalization as a
mental process takes place through these social changes. Direct interactions with these images offered
by the media created certain reactions. It affected and induced changes in the
mind of the viewer. These external effects created a lot of responses from the
human mind. It created nervousness and fear in the viewer’s mind and activated
the existing pain to a higher level. It paved the way for the viewers acquire
values and attitudes. They constructed views of the externals based on the
environment provided by the images and contents of the camera and the
accompanying material. Internalization leads to represent the externals in
particular attitudes.
Intense images from nature and the
camera
Poems
creating a separate identity from the mass media are created by getting
into the consciousness of animals – treating them like human beings, getting
into their psyche imposing a point of view, something a camera could not have
done with the finest lenses. He gets inside the consciousness of animals and
birds and projects them as powerful forces, giving separate identity to their
character.
In ‘Moortown Diary’, Hughes describes how he
teaches the calf. The poem is named, ‘Teaching a dumb calf’. Hughes starts the
poem in a dramatic manner:
“She came in
reluctant. The dark shed
Was too webby with
reminiscences, none pleasant,
And she would not go
in.”
The
emotions found in man also found in nature – the poet sees emotions, which
exist in his mind in nature, making a real life presentation of the animal
world, throwing a challenge to the popular expressions. He instills emotions on
nature, in the tradition of Lawrence. The poet uses his extreme sensitivity to
project the minds and feelings of fellow creatures. Again in ‘Moortown Diary’
in the poem, ‘The day he died’, Hughes
describes facets of nature as if they are human beings:
“The bright fields
look dazed.
Their expression
is changed.”
The
sensitivity that makes Hughes hate war also gives him the ability to describe
things in minute details. The sensitivity with his gift of powerful imagination
creates poems of deep observations. His gaze is strong and opinionated.
In his book ‘Reading Twentieth – Century
Poetry’ Edward Larrissy defines the imagination of Hughes: “The accent is
always on the individual poet’s solitary but powerful imagination,
reconstituting the external world by means of striking and ingenious figures,
but able to find there no meaning save the reflection of the poet’s own
activity. As Martin Dodsworth says, ‘most of Hughes’s poems’ embody
‘fundamentally isolated experience’. As we have seen, Hughes’s intensive
figures and obsession with control help to constitute his own characteristic
form of prejudice” (Larrisy, p.125 – 126).
Intense
expressions are a method to try a descriptive style different from and
determined by technological narrations. The poet tells us the feelings of
animals, as he perceives them. The painful birth of animals into the world is
described so sensitively. They are represented feelings transported from their
original modes as fantasized by the poet. When Hughes writes about animals one
can sense the love he has for them whether he is describing the arrogance of
the hawk or the sharpness of a pike or the suffering of the calf. He is writing
about them as if they are his friends he had known for ages. Why not he seems
to say for they have all the qualities of human beings and have
characteristics.
Not only
animals and birds but even the wind and the rain have qualities to him and he
tries to describe them. The new foal is “a star dived from outer space – flared
and burned out in the straw” (new foal). The foal is compared to Christ. The
world puzzles foal. He feels a great numbness. Slowly he pulls himself
together. Light shocks him. It has many questions in its head – “what has
happened? Where am I? His ears keep on
asking, gingerly”. The foal thinks like a fellow grownup individual. Hughes sees the thoughts on the ears of the
animal. As his ears reveal thoughts his legs also convey more thoughts. He is
impatient and his legs show them with restless movement.
The mass
media throws challenges to his poetic medium as they present the world as it
is, forcing the poet to look for different ways of expressions to keep his
authenticity. The violent emotions in his nature poetry, expressions of human
consciousness imposed on nature by the poet, are also methods to shock the
reader by giving the people a deeper experience that can’t be presented on
screen or in photos. Cameras cannot
bring out the inner force in a thrush or a hen. To him a hen’s eye is fierce.
“She is a hard bronze of uprightness”, Hughes says in the poem ‘The Hen’. The
hare to him is an elf. He says in the poem, ‘The Hare’, that its bones are like
‘light glass’. When it meets with an accident it cries with ‘human pain’. His
poems have outsmarted the camera and the cinema by presenting life in a totally
different manner. His poetry is the last word art can have against the media,
challenging its limitations. Machines
cannot show the inner consciousness of the world of animals and nature her
self. The poet is victorious as he is able to invent new methods to express
life with the help of sharper pictures and images taken from the externals of
his period and submit detailed analyses, though he is challenged by popular
cultures.
In ‘Poetry
and Violence’, answering the questions posed by Ekbert Faas, Hughes discusses
the violet imagery in his poetry and argues that he is presenting the positive
energy of the world in his poems through the forceful imagery. He says, “My
poem ‘Thrushes’ is an attempt to bring one aspect of that strong, specific,
positive violence into focus, an attempt to provide a carefully defining
context for it and to make some comment on it. In aligning the Thrush and the
Shark, the poem is trying in its way to isolate and reveal the Paul in the
Saul. And then to make a comment on our human reaction to that kind of
revelation…A good many of us are upset by scenes – on television, perhaps – of
animals killing and eating each other. And most of us will condemn such scenes,
in some way, as ‘violent’ – violent in an aura of cruelty. Here we are using
the word at the weak, loose extreme of the graph of seriousness: the behaviour
of animals in their societies cannot be said to have any spiritual or moral
consequences for us in ours. Nevertheless, our feelings about those scenes are
not feigned: the revulsion, the pains of compassion, can be acute” (Hughes,
p.255). He further argues that the
critics and the readers look at the media representations of animals killing
each other and bring the same reaction to interpret his poems as violent.
Filmed scenes create strong reactions in the minds of the viewers and those
attitudes are brought to while reading poems on animals. He questions the
violence present in every day’s life in killing animals and eating them. Hughes
comes to the conclusion that we would like to look at ourselves as saintly
human beings but “we have to accept what history repeatedly demonstrates on the
large scale: that the alternative to the rule of ‘sacred law’ is not universal
brotherhood but anarchy, massacre, the ultimate negative violence”. Hughes has
clearly discussed the role of media in modern lifestyles and the bringing home
experiences of the outside world with the help of close up shots of the
electronic media. When his words do what the camera does, along with certain
attitudes, he is throwing a challenge to the images brought by the camera. He
not only must have used his eyes for observing nature but also the camera’s
close up shots and documentaries on animals and birds to give him details of
nature.
The camera
presents pictures in an objective manner. Hughes says in, ‘Myth and Education’:
“The body, with its spirits, is the antennae of all perceptions, the
receiving aerial for all wavelengths.
But we are disconnected. The exclusiveness of our objective eye, the very
strength and brilliance of our objective intelligence, suddenly turns into
stupidity – of the most rigid and suicidal kind. …A perfect mechanism of
objective perception has been precipitated: the camera. Scientific objectivity, as we all know, has
its own morality, which has nothing to do with human morality. It is the
morality of the camera” (Hughes, p.146). The strength of science is its purity.
The photographer clicks away photographs without bothering about the emotions of
the beings captured in his machine.
Camera provides us with mechanical pictures and the poet in contrast is
trying to give us pictures with emotions and feelings and even characters.
V
The note of
healing in Hughes’s poetry
Rosenthal’s
definition of Hughes’ poems cannot explain the note of healing and hope in
Hughes’ poetry. Hughes refers to a river
as a symbol of hope. In the poem ‘River’, Hughes says,
“After swallowing death
and the pit
It will return stainless
For the delivery of the
world.
So the river is a god
Knee-deep among reeds,
watching men,
Or hung by the heels down
the door of a dam
It is a god, and
inviolable.
Immortal. And will wash
itself of all deaths.”
The river
washes away the sins of mankind; an eastern concept is put forward by the poem
and becomes highly hopeful.
Another poem, ‘Life is trying to be life’
deals with death as the sperm of life. Death is a kitten and it mews. It tries
to be life and plays with dolls, wears baby clothes. Learns to talk, laughs,
listens and stares at people’s faces. It weeps to be life. It wants to live
like the shout in joy and the glare in the lightening. Hughes says: “death only
wants to be life”. The title of the poem equates death to life putting
tremendous faith in the movement of life. The poem is an antidote to the
western mind suffering from post nerves of the wars.
Giving hope
by justifying violence and suffering in nature
Instead of put off by the pictures of
disintegration that he himself creates for us, Hughes tries to put pictures of
hope in front of us instead of considering life absurd. The pictures of hope
come to us in a contradictory manner, from the pictures of nature he presents –
though they are pictures of violence, as if to tell us that nature itself is
violent. Many streaks of thoughts are thus going on in the mind of the poet,
one side trying to justify man’s nature and on the other side questioning man’s
thoughts and actions, and suggesting changes for tomorrow. In the same poem
‘The hare’, Hughes describes a ‘lank, lean hare’ with leaping legs and ‘Power-
Thighs’ shocked and terrorized as she is grabbed ‘with a bang’ at her ears. An
oven door opens and ‘a barking bursts of onions’ that attack her and her heels
kick and kick along with turnip to feed some one who will continue his
existence ‘into tomorrow’. The poem brings to our attention of the violence in
the kitchen of which we are not sensitive to most of the times. Hughes projects
humanity as a violent species in such poems.
Rosenthal’s analysis of the poem,
‘pig’
The poem,
‘View of a pig’ that is discussed by Rosenthal leading to the conclusion that
Hughes is a poet of violent tendencies is actually a good example of
sensitivity and the empathy the poet feels for fellow beings, man or
animal. The pig has lived like a lord.
After it died, “its last dignity had entirely gone. It was not a figure of
fun”. The poet is reminded of other piglets running faster and nimbler than
cats and squealing like metals having hot blood, as hot as ovens. However
hot-blooded the pigs are ultimately they are meant for the ovens, the poet with
a gentle ironic tone points out. They are powerful creatures that their bite is
worse than the bite of the horse. Such
powerful and forceful animals are going to be scalded in the end in the kitchen
the poet mourns in sadness. The scalding will be very hard as they will be
scalded like the door step and the poet is so upset that he is not able to move
away and stands staring at it for a long time.
In ‘New
Selected Poems’, a few poems are published as ‘Uncollected’. ‘Small Events’, a
poem in the collection, shows the poet describing a grey, aged mouse:
“I picked it up. It
was looking neither outward nor inward.
The tremendous music of its
atoms
Trembled it on my
fingers. As I watched it, it died.”
The heart of the
mouse beats and the poet hears the music of the atoms. The music cannot be
sweet as it is hinted along with the mention of death and not life. The
combination of death and atoms makes the imagery violent. The imagery takes us
to the sensation of pain. The small
events are also very painful and difficult as the big events the poet seems to
say.
When Rosenthal says that ‘no poet of the past has quite
managed to ‘internalize’ the murderousness of nature’ he makes the statement
from the point of earlier history where such severe experiences have never
happened at least as for as written history is concerned. As for as human
memory goes we have not had bombs or land mines killing millions of people or
poisonous gasses killing them in mass. Poets did not have this huge an
experience of violence to tackle where taking sides becomes difficult. The bomb
has shattered the human ethical standards. The epical wars have shown humans
breaking laws to win. Modern wars have not broken rules, they have behaved as
if there have been no laws at all. Such a situation leaves no opportunity to
any poet to sing the glory of the winner. Instead the poet now feels bitter,
frustrated and angry at a civilization that has brought in such a disaster on
humanity.
The
‘murderousness of nature’ that is referred to here, by Rosenthal refers to the
quality of toughness in nature. It is similar to the murderousness of man. In
fact, man is part of nature. If science is considered as manmade, then man is
nature made. If man has created the bomb, then there is something in the nature
of man that must have led to the development of it. Something in the nature of
man that is violent and selfish leading him towards destruction. Poets have not internalized this earlier as
they did not have the opportunity to do so. Two thousand or more years of
steady moving towards knowledge has finally resulted only in the inhuman
bombing is an idea that cannot be easily accepted as the right movement by any
sensitive individual. The political happenings in the twentieth century in the
western society make thinkers and intellectuals question the earlier established
models of thinking. As a predominant phenomenon, rationalism becomes suspect
under the eyes of the poet. Therefore to the sensitive poet science becomes the
villain who has tempted man’s (just like nature’s) basic violent nature. The
binary opposition present in the poems is between sciences vs. man as good vs.
evil.
VI
The twenty
first century reader and the poems of Hughes
The images
of heroes and villains bombing each other have reduced the intensity of the
picture of the bomb. The modern, i.e. the twenty first century reader can
respond in a similar mild manner to the war images and miss the violence
totally after reading the poem, ‘Leaves’
of Ted Hughes found in Season Songs where the apple is either a bomb or a
cannon ball creating an artistic effect of brightness and shine hanging on the
leaves:
“Who’s killed the leaves?
Me, says the apple, I’ve
killed them all.
Fat as a bomb or a
cannonball
I’ve killed the leaves.
Who sees them drop?
Me, says the pear, they
will leave me all bare
So all the people can
point and stare.
I see them drop.
Who’ll catch their
blood?
Me, me, me, says the
marrow, the marrow.
I’ll get so rotund that
they’ll need a wheelbarrow.
I’ll catch their
blood”. (Hughes, p. 142-143)
The
wheelbarrow catches the blood of the leaves. The scene is a warfront where
bombing takes place and blood is dripping. The amount of blood is so huge that
it needs a wheelbarrow to collect the whole thing. But the violence receded
into the background as the aptness of the images tell us that the dead leaves
are collected and the apple looks red and round reminding the cannon ball or
the bomb.
These are
the modern images, images taken from the world of technological wars. But the
sharpness of the images is lost as we think of the leaves and visualize them
and their dropping down from the trees and the bombing takes a backseat as the
present reader doesn’t visualize the bomb with the same intensity as the poet.
The image of the bomb is now familiar to readers as the visual media supplies
it. With the help of the TV such severe images have entered the parlour. The
bomb may no more be considered a violent image and such a view is possible from
a generation of readers, who are not closely associated with the World wars,
and who are used to the modern violent movies. A Twenty first century reading
of Ted Hughes poems would not take the violence present that seriously and
intensely as it is used to seeing the visual media’s extensive coverage of real
as well as imaginary wars. Violence has come to the drawing rooms in the form
of clear pictures visible to the eyes, at only two feet distance, that it has
lost its capacity to shock any more just as the ancient weapons that cannot
shock with their appearance in the stories familiarized by the epics and
imagined by the readers and listeners.
Effects of
mass communication have to be reflected on to place the poems of Hughes in its
historical context. The Mass media left nothing for imagination. It supplied
the viewer with too many images. These images had their toll on sensitive
minds. They never took away the mind from the war. Newspapers published these
pictures in their front pages and strengthened the impact. No one can forget
the pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The children running away from the bomb
have been part of our memory. Similarly the Jewish holocaust also left a lot of
memories reinforced by images in the media. The print media took these pictures
home along with television. When one’s family was involved with war the impact
would be even greater as the mind would be already alert with such pictures.
The modern poet having the tremendous job of recording the present is in a fix,
as he doesn’t know who the good man is and who is not. Any one watching the
disaster of the wars come to the conclusion that science is the villain.
.
VII
Responses
Hughes’
poetry consists of subjective responses to the world and its ideologies around
him. The poet is caught within a fixation of ideology. This ideology is the
result of his own experiences, and perspective that are again decided by
divisions he is caught with
Reactions
to the externals are recorded as poems of war discussing the qualities of
nature and analyze its natural force and try to visualize the violent facet in
it. The model of crow is presented as a
new way of looking at life. They also present symbols of degeneration and
warning pictures of nervousness, madness and silence.
Pictures of degeneration and warning
Hughes’ images
present pictures of degeneration: madness, laughter, scream, nothingness,
running, silence, blood, rottenness, nerves, burning, disintegration, crashing, lunatic,
emptiness, colliding, shock, ghost, dead frogs, solar waste, monster, numbness,
panic terror and massacre. He asks in ‘Tales from Ovid’,
“And you
philosophers,
Metaphysicians,
where are your systems?
What happened to the
great god Reason?‘
And to the stone
table of law
That you fitted back
together
Out of the
Absolute’s shattering
anger
Against backsliders’
[Hughes, p.187.]
The great God of Reason has led man to the
invention of the nuclear bomb, devastating millions of innocent people and what
are the great philosophers doing about it, is the question of the poet. He
attacks mankind’s growth in the same poem:
“Last comes the Age
of Iron
And the day of Evil dawns.
Modesty,
Loyalty,
Truth,
Go up like a mist –
a morning sigh of a graveyard.
Snares, tricks,
plots come hurrying
Out of their dens in
the atom.
Violence is an
extrapolation
Of the cutting edge
Into the orbit of
smile.
Now comes the love of
gain – a new god
Made out of the
shadow
Of all the others.
A god who peers
Grinning from the
roots of the eye – earth.
Now sails bulged and the
cordage cracked
In winds that
bewildered the pilots.
And the long trunk
of trees
That had never
shifted in their lives
From some mountain fastness
Leapt in their
coffins
From wavetop to
wavetop
Then out over the
rim of the unknown.
Meanwhile the ground,
formerly free to all
As the air or
sunlight
Was portioned by
surveyors into patches,
Between boundary
markers, fences, ditches.
Earth’s natural
plenty no longer sufficed.
Man tore open the
earth, and rummaged in her bowels
Precious ores the
Creator had concealed
As close to hell as
possible
Were dug up – a new
drug
For the criminal.
So now iron comes
With its cruel
ideas. And gold
With crueler.
Combined, they bring war –
War, insatiable
for the one,
With bloody hands
employing the other.
Now man lives by
plunder. The guest
Is booty for the
host”.
[Hughes, p.11 – 12 ]
Humanity’s growth in the last
four centuries is responsible for the present problem of violence and greed, he
says, and therefore attacks it mercilessly. He mocks at the Age of Reason that
is the mother of science. The poetic warnings flash in anger:
“Drowned mankind,
imploring limbs outspread
Floats like a
plague of dead frogs”.
[Hughes,
p. 23]
This is
what will happen to humanity, if they do not mend their ways, the poet strongly
warns. They will die like frogs in multitude without any dignity. In ‘Gaudete’,
the same imagery occurs when the dead body of Lumb is compared to a ‘stunned
frog’:
“Lumb
Poised for his swimming
plunge
Smacks face – down
Hard, like a flat hand on to the water.
The hunchbacked bullet
has already escaped among lily roots.
Lumb floats, splayed like
a stunned frog, face downwards”.
Earlier in the poem also the minister is
compared to a frog:
“The minister sprawls face downward, as
if murdered,
Between slender white legs, which are
spread like a dead frog”
[Hughes, p.61.]
People
lying on their stomach with their hands and legs spread, lying dead on the ground
is the image after a bombing that reminds Hughes of a dead frog. He repeats the
picture to symbolize the degeneration of humanity. The frog becomes his symbol
of failure of the western society, which had become very materialistic.
Projection of failure is the
warning Hughes to the reader. He throws pictures of the future across, so that
one can visualize the impact of the whole thing. Simultaneously the poet
presents hope, in the form of going into the depth of living things, and seeing
violent tendencies there too as if to reassure the reader that this phase of
violence is quite natural to nature and man would continue his existence. This violence is the violence of survival. It
involves giving pain and taking it too. It is the instinct of living from which
no one can escape. Accepting this violence is the way for hope as it paves way
to look at life with an understanding. As the poet always emphasized on the
nature of poetry, as something that can heal the mind, the poems lead the
reader towards a kind of an acceptance of life with all its various
qualities.
His poems
are reactions to the problems he noticed and act, as a warning to us, telling
us what will happen to the universe if we don’t wake up and stop our
exploitation of other creatures and other creations of this world for our own
benefit.
In
‘Rain-charm for the Duchy’, in ‘A masque for three voices’, written in
1990, Hughes writes about the events of his century about which he thought a
lot about. He says:
“Einstein bent
the Universe
To
make war obsolete
Ford swore his
wished – for wheels would rush
The century
off its feet.
The Soviet
Butcher Bird announced
The
new age with a tweet.
………………….
An atom
none could see
Opened its
revolving doors
Into
infinity.
Pictures,
amazed at motion, talked.
…………..
Warship after
warship out
Into the North Sea mist.
…………….
I died those
million deaths. …….
…………….
I only know
what ghosts breathe in my breathe-
…………….
War took off,
like a black sun,
And everything went black.
………………
For the riddle of
the machine-gun
That stumped the First World War
Was nothing
to the stupor
That saw the Death – heads pour
Out over
earth, cloned by the Satan
Murder – gear they wore.
………………
Eyes in the round glow
of the burning earth
Saw what
mattered, and how much it was worth.”
Later in the
poem he talks about Hiroshima cloud blooming as if ‘the whole creation had
struck a match to find god’s face’. These lines show the power of the violent
externals that left a permanent mark in the mind of the poet who recreates
those pictures to warn humanity. It’s a kind of a flexible mark that always
lent itself in the forms of pictures photocopied many times by his poetic
imagination into poetry.
VIII
Deinternalization
In ‘Tales
from Ovid’, Hughes presents a scene of future. He says,
“ In this universal new religion
All are fanatics – suckled
Not by the sweet wisdom of heaven
But by a wolf. All adore, all worship
Greed, cruelty, the Lycon
In themselves. All are guilty.
Therefore all must be punished. I have spoken’.
As he ended, one half of the gods
Added their boom of approval
To his rage. The other deepened it
With solid and silent assent.
All were quietly appalled
To imagine mankind annihilated.
What would heaven do
With a globe full of empty temples?
Altars attended
Only by spiders? Was earth’s beauty
Henceforth to be judged
Solely by the single minded
Palates of wild beasts
And returned to the worm
Because man has failed?” (P.19).
If man does not heed his ways earth will become a place
for wild beasts, says Hughes. In these lines he does not bring any internalized
pictures of animals seeing them with powerful qualities usually attributed to
human beings. The wild beasts are simply wild beasts standing for their
traditionally accepted qualities of violence and force. Hughes deinternalizes
here to move away from his otherwise intensity. In narrative poetry there is
scope for expressing pain and suffering directly. Emotions can be expressed
with real force in narratives by making some one else speak. The poet’s thoughts can be easily put in the
mouth of some one else. The form gives various personas to express a variety of
thoughts, which is not possible in short lyrics.
CHAPTER II
The
crow poems
Internalization
of pain creating the caricature of crow to symbolize humanity of the twentieth
century who will survive through the difficulties like a crow.
Suffering opens up new avenues of thinking to the poet’s mind and the
question now is, could there be an alternative method of looking at life to
replace the existing model of rationalism that has led to the production of the
bomb. Hughes keeps examining various traditions. He considers the present
civilization as something that is not healthy. In his review of Philip
o’Connor, Vagrancy (London:Penguin, 1963), published in New Statesman, 6
September 1963, Hughes says, “Civilization is horribly sick, and vagrants undergo
the hardest pains of it” ( Winter
Pollen, Hughes, p.37). In the same essay he says later, “…Modern western
society has made an outcast of much in the human soul..”(p.38). Like many
others he is also trying for a solution. He appreciates the graphic images of
Leonard Baskin. He sees the deeper life in them. “It is elect and consecrated.
One hesitates to call it religious. It is rather something that survives in the
afterglow of collapsed religion” (winter pollen, p.84). Baskin wanted an
occasion to add more crows to all the crows.
Hughes took the invitation and the symbolic crow was born. The crow
becomes the symbol of 150 million years of human optimism. In his essay, ‘crow
on the beach’, Hughes tells us that he presents the crow as the ‘spirit of the sperm’,
‘demon of phallic energy’ and ‘deathless’. The crow as a trickster works ‘to
resurrect’ human beings during ‘bad times’. The times are bad and as a poet
Hughes wants to provide a solution in the form of his crow poems. This is what Hughes intended but his poetry
does not reflect the optimism. The language of the crow is shocking to an
ordinary reader. He wonders whether the crow is a demon of energy or whether
Hughes is satirizing. The things that are done by the crow do not create any
positive feeling as human mind can response only to certain types of emotions
in a positive manner. The crow creates a kind of grotesque feeling in us. The
trickster in these poems is loaded with the frustration of the society’s mood.
Hughes might have wanted to create a positive being in the crow, but it ends up
as a true picture designed by his times. Individuals who are highly gifted also
are not able to escape the power of society as the poems show us. This is due
to the internalization of emotions that take place at the bottom of their minds
quietly influencing their language and presentation. Therefore though Hughes
had the grand aim of making a crow myth trying to offer some solution to the
depression and gloom in his society, is not able to achieve his aim, as forces
that control his creative energy dominate him. This is the force of experience
settling down in human mind as thoughts and images. The images of pain and
suffering are scattered throughout the poems. The crow is set against this
background of violence. It seems to have
the qualities of a caricature of a man become a slave of technology but who is
also a survivor.
The crow poems published in 1970 and 1975 project the blackbird as the
symbol of energy to revitalize the western mind devastated by the wars
according to the author. In 1977 when ‘Gaudete’ was published, Hughes writes
about the crow again in the epilogue:
“And the
blackbird
Sleeking
from common anything and worm – dirt
Balances a
precarious banner
Gold on
black, terror and exultation.
The grim
badger with armorial mask
Biting
spade – steel, teeth and jaw – strake shattered.”
(Gaudete, p.189)
What the serious badger is not able to achieve, the crow is able to
achieve. But the crow poems do not talk of facing life with similar detachment.
They discuss ‘death – struggles’, ‘brain incinerating’, roasting of earth, deep
groans, high screams, cartridges, bullets, explosion of shingles, ‘atoms and
decay’, ‘burning gulfs’, people’s arms and legs flying off, wails stunned with
fear, flesh torments, jumping blood, blood blasting, ghostly weeping, glaring furnace
clinkers, green lickings of the conflagration, scorched fort, blood – knot,
bullets daggers of revenge, and other such nuclear glares. As in his other
poems the images from the world of suffering enter or intervene with his plans
of writing and we have these images commanding our attention. They disturb his
visions of a myth of optimism. The internalized experience lends a strong
colour to his poetry making it become different from what the artist intended.
The war pictures make the crow poems as powerful satires on Western systems of
knowledge and religion.
The
Crow has an established position or attitude in human memory. Man has allotted
the bird certain human characteristics looking at its smartness and competitive
spirit. He has defined its character as cunning and street smart. Trickster
literature, relating to the Crow, focuses on the optimism and creative joy of
life, says Hughes in his essay, ‘Crow on the Beach’. “In Trickster literature…
the attempts to live, and to enlarge and intensify life, however mismanaged,
fill up at every point with self-sufficient meaning” (Hughes, p.239)
Hughes
differentiates between black comedy and trickster literature. Black comedy,
fashionable in post-war Western Europe, resembles the latter. He says, “Black
comedy is the end of a cultural process, Trickster literature is the beginning.
Black comedy draws its effects from the animal despair and suicidal nihilism
that afflict a society or an individual when the supportive metaphysical
beliefs disintegrate. Trickster literature draws its effects from the
unkillable, biological optimism that supports a society or individual whose
world is not yet fully created, and whose metaphysical beliefs are only just
struggling out of the dream stage. In Black comedy the despair and nihilism are
fundamental, and the attempts to live are provisional, clownish, meaningless,
‘absurd’. In Trickster literature the optimism and creative joy are
fundamental, and the attempts to live, and to enlarge and intensify life,
however mismanaged, fill up at every point with self-sufficient
meaning”(Hughes, p.239). With his Crow poems Hughes tries to give new support
metaphysical beliefs extending the present framework.
David Porter in his
essay, “Beasts /Shamans/ Baskin: The Contemporary Aesthetics of Ted Hughes”,
says the crows are, “the caught wonderment and possibilities of life that still
photographs and carcasses cannot hold. Hughes’s crow moreover has qualities
that Baskin’s rarely suggest, less weighty and heroic attributes that expand the
suggestiveness of this figure that now inhabits contemporary poetry. They are
the aspects of crow-god-man-poet that are crass and trivial, the lesser
additions caricatured in the inanities of TV animated cartoons. Hughes’s crow
is all of these, the best heroics men can manage despite the flaws” (porter,
p.53).
“It
is easy to confuse” black comedy with Trickster literature, “because
historically they sometimes coexist, and psychologically they often do so - or
at least they do so up to the point where the negative mood finally crushes out
all possibility of hope, as often, demonstrated in our own day, so that the
biological processes of renewal and reproduction simply give up and cease.
Black comedy expresses the misery and disintegration… But Trickster literature
expresses the vial factor compressed beneath the affrication at such times –
the renewing, sacred spirit, searching its depths for new resources and
directives, exploring towards new emergence and growth. And this is how the
worst moment comes closest to the best opportunity” (Ibid, p.239-240). Though Hughes sounds so positive in his
introduction of the crow the ‘negative mood’ appears in these poems of Crow
quite often. Trickster literature seems ‘irresponsible’, refuses to be daunted
by ‘opposition’. It corresponds to the ‘infantile, irresponsible naivety of
sexual love, as if it were founded on the immortal enterprise of the sperm’. It
has a ‘positive accent’. Its laughter is ‘defiant and creative’…. “The optimism
of the sperm still battling zestfully along after 150 million years’. (p.240).
Hughes defines the role of Trickster: it is a ‘play-full savage burlesque’,
‘intrinsic human realism’, ‘folk-note of playfulness…of affection and
fellow-feeling’, ‘spirit of the sperm’, ‘master plan’, ‘deep biological
imprint’, ‘one of our most useful pieces
of kit’, ‘a tool’, ‘a path to the God-seeker,’ ‘a series of Tragicomedies’,
‘demon of phallic energy’, repetitive and indestructible’, ‘full of
opportunities ideas for sexual samadhi’, ‘unevolved for spiritual ecstasy’,
‘too deathless for tragic joy’, ‘biological glee’ and ‘infantile’.
Hughes
presents his poems with the framework of Trickster literature with a purpose:
“to redeem us, to heal us, and even, in a sense, to resurrect us, in our bad
times” (Ibid, p.241). He reacts and responds to the political situation of his
times through his poetry. The Crow becomes his ‘guiding metaphor’.
This trickster
metaphor opens up more new contexts for him in meaning and style. He tries to
write ‘the language of the Crow’. Hughes uses this acquired knowledge of the
Trickster Literature to express his perceptions of Twentieth Century. We can
fit such uses of folk traditions within a post-modern perspective.
Post-modernism goes in search of stories, images celebrating differences,
pluralities and paradoxes and Hughes’s poems as a product of the post-modern
age also question Western metaphysics, Christian messianism, Enlightment Reason
and Marxian and Hegelian dialectics, as it is defined by Lyotard.
Hughes
is the poet as well as the interpreter telling us how to read his poems. When
we read his poems and try to conceptualize we realize that the persona emerging
out of his poems show the mind, which produced those poems, must have been very
sensitive that it has internalized its experiences.
Though the poems reveal certain black moods, which are
refused by the poet the sensitive reader feels the horror in these poems and
wonders what the purpose of the poems is other than as expressions of the
poetic self. The crow instead of appearing as a symbol of optimism seems to be
the creation out of despair of the western psyche. The painstaking explanations
given by the poet seem to be only his own personal opinions. The crow’s
peculiar language specializing in ‘nothing’ and ranging between being grotesque
and ironic creates or recreates the nervousness of the post-war period.
Paul Bentley
quotes Kristeva extensively to argue that the depressed mood in the poems is
moving close to the mood of despair.
Bentley sums up: “The type of awkward, mangled language to be found in
Crow might be the only authentic way of articulating this pain”, (Bentley,
p.54).
The neurosis that
he was familiar with as the poems in ‘Birthday Letters’ reveal makes him come
to the conclusion that the crow’s amorality is better than nihilism. We cannot
totally ignore the author’s interpretation of his own works as well as we can’t
come to totally different conclusions about the poem. Though the theories of
the trickster literature cannot be ignored do they really represent themselves
in the poems is a question. And now, let us get into this new world that Hughes
creates, where Crow steals the main show.
In ‘Crow’s first Lesson’, we see God trying to teach the crow
how to talk. God tells the crow to say ‘Love’. The crow is unable to do so. It
gapes. And, the white shark crashes into the sea and goes rolling downwards,
discovering its own depth. Hughes brings the picture of shame through the
shark. It not only buries its head in shame but also buries itself under the
water. We should notice the colors also here – Shark is white and the crow is
black. Without interpreting the colors from a racial angle black can stand for
evil and white for good. Evil is not able to say the word ‘Love’, as the word
is the symbol of universal brotherhood and Christianity and goodness. The crow
doesn’t want to repeat it as it might trap him into the practicing of
Love. The poet presents the scene like a
story and speaks like a storyteller narrating the incident. The scene is built
like a drama and has all the effects of a theatre. The image of ‘crashing’
brings to our minds, the dramatic picture of a shark crashing like an airplane
in to the waters – a very modern imagery, reminding us of the wars. The oral
imagery of ‘crashing’ is loud and the visual imagery of ‘rolling downwards’ is
aesthetically pleasing. Like in a musical drama Hughes uses sight effects,
sound effects along with a script. The poem reads like a monologue where only
God speaks and every one else is silent.
What is the location of this
superhuman drama? It seems to be in a tropical region as there is found a blue
fly, a tsetse (An African fly) and a mosquito. When God repeats his teaching to
the crow these insects and birds zoom out and go to the fleshpots, places of
sexual entertainment with food and fun. The drama takes the tone of a satire as
the secondary image of sexuality crops up at the mention of the fleshpot. This
second sign appears like a coloured and transparent screen changing the mood
and content of the poem. So, all the while Hughes had been talking about human
beings in a particular format. A lot of questions emerge slowly: Who are these human beings? Africans? The
presence of tsetse as a sign leads the meaning to another aspect of reality, to
a particular region. Does the poem contain any political over tones? Let us
also take the earlier sign of colors-black and white. Is the crow an African?
The blue fly, tsetse and the mosquito ignore the teaching and go in search of
physical pleasure. The white shark disappears trying to discover more.
Discovering what? To who is the word ‘discovery’ would relate to - the white or
the black? The spatial metaphor of ‘zoom’ denotes the speedy movement the
African insects to the fleshpots not being interested in dry spirituality.
Hughes so vividly builds the character of the crow, the shark and the flies and
insects. What is the character of God here? Who is he? What color-black or
white? God sits there like a patriarch, so sure of His rightness and is aware
of the crow’s inferiority. God is teaching the word, only the word. Say, ‘Love’
He commands. The teaching is emphatically logo centric in content. It is the
word, which is important, thinks God or the God like consciousness. The air of
superiority surrounds God and His message.
God tries the third time. ‘A final try’ he says. He is loud
as he is getting angry and can’t understand why the crow cannot repeat Him. He
refuses to accept that the crow is different and cannot change its own natural
self to something else. God badly wants the crow to think and speak like Him.
The poor crow convulses gapes and retches. It is so scared that its body is
shivering. It continues to look at God with an open mouthed wonder but fear
mounts along with extreme anxiety that it feels like vomiting. It is not able
to adapt to the ways of God. The language with its new meaning is difficult for
the crow to understand. It has no complicated notions of metaphysics as it is
used to lead the simple life of living.
And now enters the next character of this drama – man. The
prodigious head of man, extremely great in ability and strength, bulbs out into
the earth with swiveling eyes which can look at all directions. Man disapproves
of the scene he sees and says something quickly in a way that it is difficult
to understand his reason for protest. Hughes has by now put Man’s head or
intelligence on par with God keeping the rest of the creation away. Looking at
man the crow gets much more scared and starts retching once again. God is not
able to stop it. And then God’s attention is diverted as man is caught by a
woman’s sexuality. The woman’s domination is thorough as she tightens the neck
of man. They struggle together on the grass. God curses man, and weeps, unable
to take the man away from the grip of the woman.
This climax of the
drama is the concept of original sin enacted once again. Very easily the scene
can be the Garden of Eden, Adam, Eve and Satan. The malicious Satan is not in
the form of a snake, but a crow. The bird emerges victoriously, beating God to
the ground but is not enjoying the victory. It has a mind like the human beings
and feels guilty as it flies away. Is it the guilt that is in the western mind?
The trickster throws a challenge to the western Judaic
traditions winning in the end, though feeling guilty about its victory. Hughes
presents the crow as the symbol of ordinary life without any metaphysical
shaping. Life is victorious and is stronger than the concepts created by man.
It goes on without being affected by theories of life. Abstract ideals of
mankind do not touch the reality of existence.
David Porter in his essay, ‘Beasts/Shamans?Baskin: The
contemporary Aesthetics of Ted Hughes’ analyses how Hughes conceives poems as
hard and predatory, discussing the ‘practical difficulties of survival’. He
mentions the dead men sculptures of Leonard Baskin that reveal the ineradicable
residue of man with qualities of courage, patience and grace. Baskin’s birds
have been described as sinister forces and similarly some of the crow poems
compel a similar view says Porter.
The dignity of the
bird is in its capacity to survive any pain and get over it. The crow comes out
as a survivor, dignified in his own way, nevertheless symbolizes the twentieth
century’s hope, dignity, frustration, survival tendencies, pain, horror,
cunningness and failure from the westerner’s perspective. Both Baskin and
Hughes have put forward the bird as a sign of getting over the past. Its ways
are nauseating at times but still it is alive and not dead. A live crow is
better than a dead badger as Hughes suggests in Gaudete. All these points do
not change the fact that in his effort to create a crow myth, Hughes has not
succeeded much.
Leonard M. Scigaj refers to the crow as ‘the stunted everyman
of a deprived culture’ who is born with the ‘Western man’s hyperactive urge for
action and adventure encoded upon his genetic memory’. He says further: “What
Hughes considers to be the enraged instinctual depravation of Western
empiricism is assimilated into Crow’s genetic heritage. Hughes often brooded
over Freud’s concept of phylogenetic inheritance, of a genetic residue of
violence passed on from the primal horde to each subsequent generation”
(Scigaj, p.165). The question often in the mind of the poet was the reason for the
violence in the westerner’s life. Scigaj says, “Crow may be the indestructible
trickster figure of folklore who attests to man’s indomitability and energy,
but the failure of his attempt to achieve a consciousness of selfhood in our
technologically advanced culture must give us a pause. At the time of the
publication of Crow, Hughes wrote in an essay that our neurotic civilization
‘is the direct result of the prohibition of imagination, the breakdown of all
negotiations between our scientific mental attitude and our inner life.’ In
Crow Hughes affirms that the longer our culture is permeated with the empirical
tradition, the longer our inherited memories of inert objectivity will narrow
our perceptions, inhibit our psychological development, and cause periodic
explosions of libidinal energy” (p.170).
In another poem, ‘The Black Beast’, the crow is in search of
the black beast. It hides itself in its bed, sits in its chair. Out of
frustration in not finding the black beast, the crow pounds the wall with ‘a
last’. It shunts. It imagines splitting the enemy’s head. In anger it
‘crucifies’ a frog under a microscope, it peers into the brain of a dogfish
after killing the same. It roasts the earth and charges into space. It decamps
the silences of space and the space flits in every direction. The crow finally
flails immensely through the vacuum and screeches after the disappearing stars.
But it is not able to find the black beast.
As usual Hughes gives colors (black and black, this time) to
his characters, as we have to call the members of his poems. This poem is also
so dramatic and forceful like the previous one. The poet uses the ballad
technique of repetition and the question is consistently repeated: ‘Where is the black beast?’. To Hughes the
crow is not just a bird. It can think, plan, get angry and take revenge
–qualities belonging to humanity. The world of the crow is three-dimensional –
it includes a home with a house (wall), bed and chairs; a laboratory
(microscope) or working place; the world in general including ground and space.
Like in the previous poem the Christian imagery crops up in the middle of the
poem. The frog is ‘crucified’ and not cut into parts. The crow is screaming,
going after the enemy, searching for him everywhere- images of a war where the
all powerful General is marching up and down screaming in stentorian voice,
ordering this battalion to run after enemies to the East and that battalion to
the West. A self – righteous general he is, that he is sure his enemy is an
evil man unlike himself. It is institutionalized Goodness parading itself. The poem reads as if Hughes is laughing
bitterly at wars. The conqueror looks funny going after vacuums and screeching
after stars. ‘Crow’ is the caricature of a war General who is victorious, and running
after his enemies who have lost their way and are in hiding .The crow wants to
destroy the enemies totally, completely. It wants to wipe them out. Can anyone
wipe out anything created by Nature? Hughes is laughing, thinking about this
prospect. The crow is so sure of its intelligence and greatness and we are so
sure of its stupidity. That is the bend, Hughes gives to the poem – The crow is
telling loud lies, shouting at midnight, pounding the wall, splitting the
enemy’s head in his imagination, crucifying a poor frog and searching its
intestines through a microscope, roasting the earth with it’s fire of anger,
charging into empty space like a knight on horse with it’s sharp sword,
creating noise in every direction of space alone, screaming at the stars – all
images of frustration, failure and stupid haste and misdirected anger - the
anger of a half –mad creature. The crow is this meaningless, irrational element
wasting its time after nothing. Life or nature or world goes on as usual
without being disturbed by the idiotic behavior of the crow. The poor bird is
lost in the vastness of the universe, as no one responds to the crow or even
takes it seriously. The poem reads like a farce.
Charles v.
The poem, ‘Crow’s fall’ gives us
the background of crow – how the crow became black. Once again the poem uses
colors – now it is black and white. Using black is quite natural as the hero is
a crow, but the use of white along with always poses a problem in these crow
poems. Once upon a time the crow was white. It became jealous of the sun
because it felt the sun was whiter than itself. It thought the sun glared ‘much
too whitely’. Therefore, it decided to attack and defeat the sun. In full
glitter and strength the crow clawed and fluffed its rage. It went near the sun
and aimed its beak at the centre of the sun. The arrogant crow laughed at its
own importance and attacked the sun. There was a fierce battle and both of them
cried their battle cries. Hearing the noise the trees suddenly became scared
and tired and looked old. Even shadows
got so scared of the battle that they lost their shape and got flattened. But
the sun brightened itself. The sun became bright and bright, the crow became
black and black. The crow returned and its body looked charred black. It did not
want to accept its defeat. It said, ‘up there where white is black and black is
white, I won’. The poem is strongly Christian or Judaic, as it seems to be
talking about Lucifer and his fall. The last lines remind us of the Macbethian
witches saying fair is foul and foul is fair. After his great fall the crow
loses its sense of right and wrong. Right becomes wrong and wrong becomes
right. Its conceptual power, or rationalist thinking is badly affected, but its
ego becomes stronger. The self-willed crow doesn’t want anyone to know its own
inner insecurity. It hides its inner emptiness, a spiritual emptiness with
words-meaningless words. Speech is used as a code to hide its sense of loss.
Hughes is mocking at the self-importance of the crow and its false sense of
bravery. He is laughing at the crow in this poem also. The loss of ‘white’ and
the gain of black is a symbolic reference to the goodness of soul which becomes
blackened with evil. But the dark thoughts of inappropriate jealousy, false
ambition, greed for power are there in the crow’s mind, even when it is white.
The loss and the failure make these qualities become sharper and more focused
than earlier, Hughes tells us. The poem celebrates the victory of God over
Satan and the victory of good over evil. Religious slants make these crow poems
richer in meaning than they actually are. By referring to the fall of Satan in
an indirect and subtle manner, the poet suggests more meanings in the poem.
With or without the permission of the poet, the crow becomes the symbol of evil
in the crow poems. In Jungian terms we can refer to it as the archetypal evil
versus the archetypal good in the western consciousness.
‘Crow’s Vanity’ is a poem presenting the arrogance and
haughtiness of the bigheaded crow. It doesn’t approve of the existing
civilization. It is not happy with the social organizations, culture and the
way of society. It looks closely in the evil mirror and sees towers, gardens
and battles. Unable to bear the achievement of man it wipes the glass clean of
the images. But immediately other images begin appearing on the mirror – images
of modernity - skyscrapers, webs of cities, factories that send out steam,
‘misting’ the glass. We can visualize the irritation of crow as it hurriedly
wipes away the scene.
And now pictures of nature appear on the evil mirror. There
are fronted swamp ferns and trickling spiders. The crow is unable to find a
glimpse of the usual grinning face. The tension in its heart is too much and it
starts fuming vehemently. It releases hot air from its angry mouth, which again
creates the ‘misting’ on the mirror. His breathing is fast and heavy. Against
this hot-blooded crow, space comes out as cool as a cucumber. It is too cold
and is not at all affected by the anger of the crow. In the now clean mirror,
once again images of ballerinas, and hanging gardens are appearing – signs of
yet another civilization.
Hughes presents four landmarks to mark the different
civilizations in the poem – Towers, Skyscrapers, Swamp ferns and burning gulfs.
The Towers, tall narrow structures, often square or circular either forming
part of a building or standing alone, is a sign of European civilization. We
have the leaning tower of Pisa and the Eiffel Tower as fine and famous examples
this kind of architecture. European castles had towers at each corner of the
castle walls. And then there are Church towers and Watchtowers. ‘Tower of
strength’ – as an idiom is European in character. The crow reduces the
importance of European civilization, but life comes out with something else in
the form of skyscrapers.
From towers, life has moved on to modern, tall buildings. It
can mean two things – Firstly, the fact of traditional, feudalistic,
countryside based economy changing into a modern, city based knowledge society,
building high, pencil like, multiple storied buildings in the cities as
commercial centers. The shift is from tradition to modernity. Secondly it
denotes the shift of power from Europe to America after the Second World War.
It signifies America’s emergence as a super power. And the world trade centre,
a skyscraper in a true sense, becomes a symbol of American supremacy over
Europe, is denoted by Hughes here. The intricate arrangement of these tall
buildings has become the metaphor for globalization dominated by the American
economy.
The third landmark – swamp ferns – takes us to a different
continent – Africa. The wet, soft land brings pictures of alligators and
evergreen ferns – fresh, virgin countryside. Here we don’t see constructed
towers and skyscrapers, but spiders moving around freely without the fear of
being killed. Here are no battles and webs of cities. Images of towers, gardens
and battles are used to describe Europe, images of skyscrapers and webs of
cities are used to describe America, but for Africa the images used are from
nature and not manmade.
These pictures are about the First, Second and the Third
worlds, as per the western perception. The crow that wants to run the show in
the world is scared of the quality of life, which can never be putdown by any
unnatural force. Life is naturally powerful and cannot be suppressed by any one
factor. If a certain element is destroyed, then something else grows up instead
– an essential law of nature. The fourth picture is the ‘burning gulf’ –
denoting the Persian Gulf – Asia. ‘Burning’ qualifies the noun of Gulf. The
reference is to oil and Petroleum. This modern image is contrasted with an old
image of Babylonian hanging gardens to give a sense of vast space and time. It
is a reference to the modern gulf countries as well as the ancient civilization
in Persia. The image of ballerinas evokes the picture of Russian ballet
dancers. The three images bring the vastness of Asia and its ancient and
modern, social and cultural signification. It is too much for the crow to see
these signs of life, which keep springing up again and again. It is eerie and
mysterious and the crow gets very frightened of life. It is cured of its
self-importance and vanity.
The poem moves within a moral framework: don’t be too sure of
yourself – others may be smarter than you and therefore learn to respect
everyone. Now, the question is – who is the crow here? Evil, definitely as the
poet puts the word in the poem openly. Evil what?- Evil man? Or evil supernatural power? Satan or Man? Is it the same archetypal theme
of Satan Vs God’s creation? Can we think of the four represented worlds
referring to the Garden of Eden and the crow with its evil mirror to the snake
Satan? Is the effort to wipe away the civilizations an effort originally put up
by the fallen angel? The attitude of the poet definitely is Christian and
Judaic, looking at life as a great war between Satan and the creation of God –
Mankind and the great civilizations. Hughes uses words like ‘evil’ to describe
the mirror and the word sends negative pictures to the mind of the reader who
has not read about Hughes’s explanation on trickster literature. The poem
becomes an example of the black comedy that Hughes wants to avoid so badly. If
there is any comedy it is really too gloomy.
‘A Horrible religious error’ is a poem discussing the concept
of Original sin, once again. The serpent emerges from an atom. It’s earth-bowel
brown in color. It has an alibi self, an excuse for being bad, which is twisted
around its neck. It can’t help being itself – evil. What is interesting is that
it is not created by God, but by life. Hughes separates God from life – it is a
typical Descarthian division of thinking and being. ‘God’ represents an
ideological tradition of thinking while life is the natural ‘being’. By
differentiating God from life, Hughes expresses a thought – Evil is a natural
aspect or presence in life. The word ‘atom’ creates an aura of science and
objectivity to the hatching of the snake. If lifts its long neck and stares,
balancing its head so high. It is a ‘deaf and mineral’ stare. The eyes do not
move and anyway the snake can’t hear. The word ‘mineral’ can be linked with the
word in the first line of the poem, ‘earth-bowel brown’ and the picture of
earthiness emerges. The snake sits like a sphinx, an ancient imaginary creature
with a lion’s body and a woman’s head. According to ancient Greek legend, the
sphinx set a riddle which no one before Oedipus was able to answer.
Legendarily, it is difficult it tell what she is thinking. In the desert near
Cairo in Egypt, huge stone statues with a lion’s body and a person’s head are
found. What has to be looked at deeply is the reference to ‘human head’ in the
sphinx. The Snake is like the sphinx, which can think and command as if it is
the final authority, the ‘final act’. Its ‘double flame flicker tongue’ is able
to utter syllables. The words spoken by the serpent are like the ‘rustling’ of
the spheres. The ‘rustling’ brings two pictures to our mind .One, the rustling
of papers, and the other, the rustling of leaves in the bushes due to some
movement. The pictures overlap one another and we see the knowledgeable serpent
flicking its tongue – double flame, moving with small quick shaking movements.
Why double? Again two images come to our mind – the tongue that can speak
something in the front and something at the back as well as the divided tongue
of the Snake. The animal is bending and ‘flexing’ its tongue like a human
being. Shots of human imagery are put along with the animal imagery by the poet
giving an extension of meaning to the concept of evil as Satan. Thus it evolves
that the Snake is now a symbol of mankind.
God is not happy with this development. He grimaces and
writhes in pain and unhappiness. He takes a strong dislike to the Snake. His
face is twisted in an ugly way. He is burning in anger like ‘a leaf in a
furnace’. Seeing the anger of God, the first parents of Judaic tradition, Adam
and Eve, collapse. Their knees and neck-muscles melt. They supplicate and kneel
down and bow their heads unable to face the furnace like anger of God melting
their individuality. God doesn’t give in. And then, the man and the woman fall
flat at the feet of God asking for forgiveness. Their brows bump the ground.
Unashamedly, they cry openly. Their tears are tears of fear as the word
‘evacuation’ brings images of fear and panic to our mind as it tells there is
danger around. Unable to speak loud and clear, they whisper, “your will is our
peace”. It is a total surrender to the higher will of God.
The next stanza introduces the crow that is never mentioned
in the previous stanzas. The crow emerges as a powerful competitor to the
sphinx like Snake. It peers at the Snake, looks at it carefully and understands
the situation. It decides to kill the Snake and so takes a step or two forward,
grabs ‘this creature’ by its neck, beats the hell out of it and eats it.
What is the position of the crow in the poem? Is Hughes
creating a different and new concept of survival instinct in the form of Crow?
If we use the information provided by the poet, we can look at the crow as the
symbol of energy. It kills evil so easily. It is able to do something that
could not be done even by god himself.
If we interpret God as the symbol of morality, the crow becomes the
symbol of life itself. It has this quality of toughness to survive in any
situation.
Bentley calls this cartoon like presentation of crow ‘as
carnivalesque literature’. He quotes Bakhtin in the process of this argument
and says: “Given the plurality of
discourses that inform Crow – biblical narratives, myth, the
cartoon-strip, science, psychoanalysis – and bearing in mind the slapstick way
in which these discourses are thrown together, the book might be ‘justified’
after Bakhtin as carnivalesque literature. According to Bakhtin, within the
carnivalistic text: ‘A free and familiar attitude spreads everything: over all
values, thoughts, phenomena, and things. All things that were once
self-enclosed, disunified, distanced from one another by a noncarnivalistic
hierarchical world view are drawn into carnivalistic contacts and combinations.
Carnival brings together, unifies, weds, and combines the sacred with the
profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise
with the stupid’” (Bentley, p.40).
The poem ‘Conjuring in Heaven’ is almost like a new biblical
beginning. Instead of ‘in the beginning’ it is ‘finally’ – the poem begins: “so
finally there was nothing.” The poet introduces the concept of nothing as the
final catastrophe. Nothing loses its nothingness and becomes the ‘it’ in the
next line and thus becomes something – ‘Nothing’ else is added to this nothing.
To prove ‘nothing’ does not exist, it is pressed forcefully, crushed and
squashed flat. It is chopped up roughly with another ‘nothing’ and shaken in a
nothing. The nothing is turned inside out like a pouch and scattered over yet
another nothing. Everybody saw that it was nothing and realized that nothing
more could be done with it. So it was dropped from heaven amidst prolonged
applause. It ‘hits’ the ground like an egg and breaks open and the immobile
crow is born. Hughes is launching the concept of crow an existence living much
before the birth of religions. Life came earlier and prophets were born later.
If life could have continued without messiahs, then it would have been
perfectly alright. Religions have brought morality curtailing the span of
humanity. The crow poems are great intellectual exercises discussing ethical
questions. The qualities the bird is supposed to symbolize according to the
poet are qualities that would not have directed thinking towards science is how
the poet develops the argument.
Hughes to explain the abstract concept of nothing uses only
concrete, vigorous and energetic images evoking figures of harsh actions from
real life. Squashing, chopping, shaking, turning, scattering and dropping from
a great height, are seasoning of nothingness. The nothing has an invisible
shape with a tough strength and therefore all practical softening efforts are
made to lose its hidden Will, it’s embedded, ingrained Power. To subdue its
power various physical measures are taken to no avail. When it is dropped from
heaven it is not destroyed. It has a shell that is harsh but flexible, which
has a foam pillow quality that is crushed but never loses its inherent
toughness. But, the shell is broken and there the crow lies on the ground in a
cataleptic state and alive. The crow doesn’t die even after being dropped at
from such a height. It shows the deathlessness of the bird. It has a flexible
shell, specially designed with foam to absorb the shock of falling. This poem
suits the theory presented by Hughes. Nothing can destroy the power of the
crow. It has a natural toughness combined with softness. When the shell is
broken we expect the crow to die, but the crow is born and is kicking alive. It
is irresistible life that cannot be restrained by any act of anybody. Hughes
continues to present the survival tendencies of humanity in the crow poems just
like his rest of the poetry collection.
Rand Brandes analyzes the poetic vocation of Hughes:
“Throughout his career, Hughes has attempted to suppress Clio and to write his
own Saga of the Soul in terms of the history of a degenerating Western
civilization. The absence of history in Hughes’s work has several possible
sources and equally as many aesthetic, philosophical and political
repercussions”. He proposes certain perspectives within which, he says the
poems of Hughes can be fitted:
“1. He is obviously
a Nature poet interested in horizons not history;
2. He
consistently measures time by natural cycles, and disregards linear human time;
3. He has
been called a writer of ‘visionary’ poetry, thus he focuses on the great
intangible of existence and on moments of revelation;
4.he has also been described as, in relation
to Gaudete, a devotional poet writing to the Earth-Mother;
5. He
relies heavily on mythical, not historical, allusions and structures as
reference points in the past;
6. He has
immersed himself in Oriental philosophies that challenge Western concepts of
history;
7.
‘Reality’ for Hughes is not social institutions, political ideologies, or
religious dogma; reality is related to the ‘sacred’ as it appears in the
non-human world” (Brandes, p.142-143).
The anthropocentric attitude that is present in Hughes’s poetry resists
history says Brandes. Though Hughes resists history consciously ‘contemporary
issues are in the margins of many of Hughes’s poems – nuclear war, violence in
the streets and, perhaps most importantly, the destruction of the environment’,
states Brandes in the same essay. War is always around the corner stepping
inside the content as in the discussion of the following poem.
‘Crow’s Elephant Totem Song’ praises the elephant as a
religiously favoured animal. Only the title tells us that it is the Crow that
is singing the totem song. Otherwise the Crow is kept out of the scene. The
Elephant, delicate, small and not at all freakish or melancholic, appears in a
graceful manner. The hyenas call it ‘beautiful’. As a contrast to the elephant,
the hyenas have ‘scorched heads’ and ‘grinning expressions’ that look like
‘half-rotted stumps of amputations’. The violent image is from war: soldiers
walking or running get their legs blasted by hidden landmines. The landmines
kill innocent civilians too. The hyenas want to escape from this violent world.
They say:
“We
envy your grace
Waltzing
through the thorny growth
O
take us with you to the Land of Peaceful
O
ageless eyes of innocence and kindliness”.
The elephant is treated as a God and the song becomes a
hymn of prayer. The hyenas know the pain of war and realize how fortunate the
elephant is. They are ‘blackened’ by the ‘furnaces’ of factories. It is a hell
for an industrial worker who writhes in pain behind the bars of his own teeth.
The worker is a slave of his stomach and the teeth are the prison bars where he
is imprisoned forever. His life is an hourly battle with death. Asking for
salvation, the hyenas with their scorched heads of ambition run after the
elephant. They expect the elephant to lift them from their damnation. When that
doesn’t take place their frustrations and anger is directed towards the
elephant. With fire in their months, they tear him off and eat his entrails:
“They divided
him among their several hells
Swallowed
and inflamed
Amidst
paradings of infernal laughter”
The animals are from Asia or Africa. But still the
dialectics is between Europe and Asia or Africa. It is a geophysical argument.
It is the politics of nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The imperialistic
laughter of the hyenas shows the greed of European nations. They compete with
each other and show off their acquisitions as prizes with an infernal laughter.
After eating the elephant, the hyenas are in full spirit talking incessantly,
noisily and taking their share of food. Their enthusiasm and desire are
inflamed.
The
elephant learns its lessons after dying. It is resurrected and has become
smarter. Now it has ‘deadfall feet’, ‘tooth proof body’ (like a bullet proof
vest) and bull dozing bones along with wicked and wise eyes. It has ‘completely
altered brains’. The Asian countries underwent a major change, says
Hughes. European languages have changed
the language structures and thinking patterns of Asians. Therefore, the
elephant is a walking sixth sense, a creator of reason, and loses its mythical
importance. Through the ‘orange blaze and blue shadow of the afterlife’, the
elephant goes his way as it also has learnt bomb making. The orange flame
stands for the technological progress that was made by the eastern countries
influenced by the west.
The
hyenas are still sleepless and run fast like roofs of oven after a leafless
skyline. Their flags are now ‘shame flags’. Their laughter is putrefying and
‘blotched black’. Like an old ship with seeping and leakages, Imperialism
returns back. Ships, the symbol of European power, have become useless. They
leave behind, “graves of fever”. European children dying of fever in tropical
countries are buried there itself and left behind. It is a pathetic scene
Hughes evokes here. The Westerners are going back to their countries from Asia,
getting seasick on the way having only memories of their dead children. The
elephant continues to sing, in the deep forest, about stars, which no
astronomer can ever find. The reference is probably to India where science and
traditional mysticisms still live in co-operation. This poem is supposed to
have been sung by the crow. It plays a neutral role making its comments on the
Europeans and their greed. It sees the
suffering of the Europeans also. The poem is a historical account of the
colonial past. The crow plays the role of a spectator in the poem.
In
‘Crow and the Birds’ Hughes makes the eagle soar, curlew trawl, swallow swoop,
swift flick, owl sail, sparrow preen, heron labour, bluetit zipp, woodpecker
drum, peewit tumble, bullfinch plump, goldfinch bulb, wryneck crook, while the
crow spraddles head-down in the beach-garbage guzzling a dropped ice-cream. The
crow does not work hard like the other birds. It has no pride or prestige. It
doesn’t mind heading down into the garbage to eat an ice cream that has been
dropped. The crow as an alternative model of thinking lives life so simply
without any expectations. It doesn’t mind living of the food available freely
at garbage. Hughes by making the crow survive is also laughing at the serious
people making life too hard for them.
Nick Bishop states that early poetry of Hughes is ‘based
on the self- contained’ and asserts a ‘strenuous use of language’ and the
‘perfection of the verbal artefact’. Hughes has ‘an obsessive preoccupation
with words-as-words, with the expressive resources of language’. He calls the
language of the crow poems as ‘super-simple’ and ‘super-ugly’. He says, “Crow in fact provides my next
example of the ‘death poetry’ at a more advanced stage of development…it is as
if Hughes wishes systematically to identify the exact moment at which language
ceases to be transparent instrument and becomes reflexive world-unto-itself,
producing not ‘instances of reality’ but ‘instances of (pure) discourse’, to
adapt Barthes’ words. The moment of the aesthetic transition is located, then
purged ruthlessly in the last line of the poem. There the cluttered surface of
language is wiped clean, and its obligation to matter ‘lowest down’
renewed”. He quotes the poem ‘Crow and
the birds’, and continues his analysis of Hughes’s language saying, “Both poet
and reader start the poem gazing upward, at birds in flight, ‘above’; and yet,
in that first stanza, just at the point where the verbs in each line encourage
us to focus in on their subject-‘matter’, the lens of the clear expectation is
hopelessly diffused by the sentimental aesthetic additions which complete the
line.
Hughes
describes the nuclear bomb in ‘Notes for a little play’, found in the
collection ‘crow’. The sun of bomb comes closer and tears people’s clothes off.
They have no time to say good-bye to each other as the devouring heat simply
evaporates them into the thick black smoke. Faces and eyes disappear leaving no
trace. Brains, hands, arms, legs, feet, neck, chest and belly vanish along with
rubbish. Flames demolish everything. The pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as
seen in print and electronic media, flash in the readers’ mind. Like the
narrative poetry that revived war memories in their epics, these images
recreate the pictures of the war with a difference. In an epic the poet had to use long similes
to describe the pictures to recreate it in human mind. In modern technological
societies those long similes are not necessary as the war pictures are already
created by the media and publishing houses with crystal clarity in the minds of
the readers and the viewers. Hence, short words are enough to help reliving the
past and the poet is using them. Technology has thus decided the kind of
language a poet has to use and the type of poem that he has to write. Reviving
the past is a human aspect, creating literatures serving the purpose of
recording the events as well as healing the mind by constant recapitulations.
The bomb is the
crystallization of Western Knowledge system. When he visualizes the nuclear
bombings, pictures of animals comes to the mind of the poet.
“The
demolition is total
Except
for two strange items remaining in the flames –
Two
survivors, moving in the flames blindly.
Mutations
– at home in the nuclear glare,
Horrors
– hairy and slobbery, glossy and raw.
They
sniff towards each other in the emptiness.
They
fasten together. They seem to be eating each other.
………..
Without
guest or God.” (p.116)
Human beings have become animals dancing the dance of
death. God disappears and the sun darkens. In the nuclear glare, humanity loses
its sight and becomes blind. The couple is not able to see each other and sniff
towards each other. The metaphor of
cannibalism appears to the mind of the poet. The couple looks as if they are
about to eat each other. Raw horror is
present without any dilution. Mutations are quite comfortable and belong to
this home of a nuclear war. People are no more hospitable. They have become so
selfish. They do not have any faith in God. There is a spiritual emptiness in
the society. This is the world created
by science contrasted with the world of the crow happily eating ice cream in
garbage. The poet in frustration prefers the life lived in the fashion of the
crow to the life of the westerner, living a life well organized by rationalism.
The crow poems as part of his master – narrative are tracing the decline of
Western civilization.
‘Lineage’,
a poem reading like bullet points in a PowerPoint presentation, traces the
beginning of the world. In the beginning there was scream and then, blood, eye,
fear, wing, bone, granite, violet, guitar, sweat, Adam, Mary, God, Nothing, and
then Never. Finally the crow is born. But the crow is screaming for blood,
grubs, crusts and anything and lives an amoral life outside the models of
establishment. The scream was the beginning of life. From that various things
are born, all practical things necessary for living. The crow screams for blood
or anything. As a constant movement from internalization to deinternalization,
Hughes’s poetic process sometimes stops its intense responses to life and tries
to present ideas of hope, coming out of a particular frame of mind of total
involvement with painful memories. As a result of this intellectual movement,
he tries to justify to himself and the readers that these difficult periods are
a part of life and in fact life begins in pain.
In ‘Examination at the womb-door’, Hughes presents his
argument that the crow is stronger than death. There are a series of questions:
“Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth? Death.
Who owns all of space? Death.”
(Hughes, p.91)
Death dominates the world. It is present in all walks of
life. It has scrawny little feet, scorched-looking face, still-looking lungs,
utility coat of muscles, unspeakable guts, questionable brains, messy blood and
wicked little tongue. Poems like these show the internalizations of the poet
affected by the pictures of the war. The crow poems become to a certain extent
a metaphor for the wars. It comes to stand for the amoral events that took
place during the war. Though the crow may be the figure of optimism, the poems
in the collection represent the Warfield. Pain and suffering dominate these
poems not leaving the mind of the poet. The carelessness of crow looks like a
thin veneer put on to hide the frustration inside the human mind. However much
the reader tries to remove the mind away from the scenes of pain, they come
back as they are evoked again and again. The energy of the crow is lesser
compared to the pain it evokes.
In
‘Bed time Anecdote’, Hughes fixes his protagonist in ‘nothing’. He gets up from
‘no bed’, pulls on clothes that are no clothes, wears shoes that are no shoes,
ties his shoelaces tighter and tighter, and walks over floors that are no
floors. Hughes’s universalization sharpens the contrast between mankind and the
bigger consciousness of the universe. The poem continues. The man reads news that is no news. He stops
reading as he feels the weight of his hand in the hand that was no hand. He is
totally lost. He stretches his month open to laugh, but no laughter comes out.
Years later, a leopard finds his body on a rainy day in a ruinous mountain. And
this poem balancing on nothing is entitled, ‘Bedtime Anecdote’. Why, it is more
like watching a horror move. But this horror really took place. Hughes is
actually reminding us of what happened. Is the poem a warning?
The
poem, ‘Lovepet’ mocks at the Greco – European concept of Love. Hughes asks
himself about the ‘pet’:
“Was
it an animal, was it a bird?” This pet is ferocious. It is not an animal, but
really a monster. The couple who have it give to it everything – blood,
steadiness, strength, calendars, sleep, muscle, vows, double smiles, blank
silence, logic, argument, shouting, photograph albums, thousand letters,
screams. Like Frankenstein, the monster becomes the master. It makes their bodies
numb and brains blank. It is a poem
mourning the animal force in reason.
‘How
Water began to play’ describes water’s searching for life. It goes to the sun,
trees, flowers and the womb. It is shocked to see a knife in the womb. It also
meets blood, maggot, and rottenness there. The weeping water continues its
search in the space. Again it is met with disappointment and cries and wants to
die. It cries so much that there are no tears in its eyes – water having no
water in the eyes. Utterly worn out of the search it realizes there is no
meaning in searching and therefore remains utterly clear at the bottom of all
things. The imagery is of Earth – the crystal clear water found beneath earth –
and the whole cycle of seasons. Water going to the womb and meeting knife is a
contrast between traditionality and medical modernity.
‘Little
blood’, is a beautiful song, narrating its story. The poet addresses the drop
of blood:
“O
little blood, hiding from the mountains in the mountains.”
‘Hiding’ became a political necessity in the Twentieth
Century. The Jews, Austrians, Russians – the list can go on. Narratives
describing Nazism, Fascism, Stalinism and the Great Wars always discuss
‘hiding’. When Hughes starts his invocation ‘O little’ we expect a bird, not a
drop of blood. He shocks us by using a common device with a little twist. The
‘little blood’ is eating the medical earth – that is, blood ran like water on
the ground. It is a monster devouring earth that has the smell of a hospital.
It is, “grown so wise grown so terrible”.
‘The
apple tragedy’ is a poem laughing at the Judaic myth. God is the interloper
here. People are so affected by life that religion irritates them. Pain has
numbed their spirituality. ‘Everything goes to hell’ is the last line of the
poem.
Pain
is again the theme of the poem, ‘Crow’s Battle Fury’. A soldier is ‘shining’ in
pain and the crow starts laughing. Looking at the well lit night city and the
earths’ blue bulge it starts laughing and laughing till tears come out. But,
the soldier continues to roll in pain. The memories of war haunt him. He is
terribly wounded: one of his eyes sinks into his skull, temple – veins gnarl,
heart and liver fly in his throat, and blood blasts from the crown of his head.
Such an experience cannot be in this world, sums up the poet.
All
these poems are war poems in written in a warlike manner. ‘War’ is a very
narrow term. Twentieth century redefined the concept of war and rewrote it. It
is no more war – but horror. How does a poet write about it? Can the existing
language of poetry, narrating bad experiences in a beautiful manner, explain
and describe ‘horror’? What would be the method chosen by a creative artist?
Whatever Barthes may say, an artist is a human being, and when he writes, he
writes his own story, perspectives and reactions. Barthes’s judgment itself is
a perspective based on reaction. That is, the mass scale on which the exposed
the war experiences, the holocaust, the nuclear bomb, the iron curtain, German
nationalism, etc. familiarized these experiences and made them public. Everyone
knows about it. Whatever has to be said has been said by thousands of
journalists, correspondents in a dramatic manner reinforced with black and
white and colour photographs. Moves have shown the people the horror of the
war. Novels have been written, researching well into the archives of history
which have resulted in the multiplication of human memory. The experience is so
huge, so all encompassing, that no single author can claim his own personal
attachment. The experience becomes Universal, and the author loses his
individuality. The author’s personality doesn’t come into focus, as it is
everyone’s trauma. In this world of ‘Economimesis’ as described by Derrida,
what is the role of poetry, one wonders. Like art that hid behind abstraction
as a response to multiplication and photography, poetry too goes in search of
abstraction. Hughes’s poems are philosophical poems discussing a philosophy
that is trying to justify life with its horrors, all the time questioning Judaic
and European logo centrism from a western point of view.
The
poems talk as if the language of Europe has been jolted by the political
changes during the Twentieth Century. Hughes writes about ‘black blood’, ‘black
brain’, ‘tombed visions’, ‘stammer of the cry’, ‘emptiness’, ‘scream’ ‘bodies…
without souls’, ‘pistol muzzle oozing blue vapour’, ‘body… on the gravel’,
‘abandoned world’, ‘quaked voices’, cortege of mourning and lament’,
‘death-struggles’, ‘sorrow on sorrow’, ‘filterbag of all the deaths’, ‘screeching
finales’, ‘shapeless cry’, ‘brain incinerating their outcry’, ‘screams higher
groans deeper’, ‘eardrums burst’, ‘tearing deafness’, ‘deadliness’, ‘blood …
like water’, ‘cries… like silence’, ‘blasting… to bits’, ‘gaping of brain’,
‘nothing, ‘wails stun with fear’, ‘meteorite crashes’, ‘jumping blood’, ‘smiles
that stole a bone’, ‘star of blood, ‘ghostly weepings’ ‘ticking bomb of the
future’, ‘screams stuck in the wall’, etc. etc. The dominant image is screaming
- People screaming in pain.
Edmond
Jabes shows similar violence in his metaphors. He writes in ‘The Moment After”:
“The
eye captures what it will destroy. It can’t perceive what escapes death, what
is invisible, he said.
‘The
eye is human. It made Adam mortal.
‘When
Adam opened his eyes God trembled.
‘Adam’s
fall is the triumph of the eye’
‘God
is eyeless,’ he also said. God knows. He is blind. Man comes to know what his
eyes destroy. All knowledge passes through choice. Choice guarantees murder.
“Thom
shalt not kill’, commands God. Did he hope that man would turn blind again?”
(Edmond Jabes, p.80)
Let
us look at some more of his metaphors: “A drop of blood, the book’s sun”…. To
the incendiary letter we have granted the right to set fire. The word is a
world in flames” Fire and ash are the major engagements for Jabes. He talks
about, “wall of fire”…. ‘conflagration to conflagration’, “time.. written in
the ashes of time” and ‘mad flames of our books” (ibid, p.81-82).
Writing
in the 20th century could not involve spontaneous feelings and
tranquil emotions. The age has presented the people a crisis in thinking and
believing. The perspectives move in an in fluxed manner from the past to the
present. Creativity is not able to break away from the margins set by times.
Its critique is from within.
Julia
Kristeva in ‘The malady of Grief: Duras’ analyses this situation: “If military
and economic realms, as well as political and social bonds, are governed by
passion for death, the latter has been revealed to rule even the once noble
kingdom of the spirit. A tremendous crisis of thought and speech, a crisis of
representation, has indeed emerged, one may look for analogues in past
centuries…. Nonetheless, never has the power of destructive forces appeared as
unquestionable and unavoidable as now, within and without society and the
individual… While political and military cataclysms are dreadful and challenge
the mind through the monstrosity of their violence (that of a concentration
camp or of an atomic bomb), the shattering of psychic identity, whose intensity
is no less violent, remains hard to perceive. That fact already struck vatery
as he compared the disaster affecting the spirit …. One of the major stakes of
literature and art is henceforth located in that invisibility of the crisis
affecting the identity of persons, morals, religion, or politics… The actuality
of the Second World War brutalized consciousness through an outburst of death
and madness that no barrier, be it ideological or aesthetic, seemed able to
contain any longer. This was a pressure that had found its intimate,
unavoidable repercussion at the heart of psychic grief… what those monstrous
and painful sights do damage to are our systems of perception and
representation.’ (Ibid, p.457-458).
Edmunds’
‘eyes’ refer to the experience of ‘sights’ as described by Kristeva. Eyes
cannot see the invisibility of the experience. Perceptions are dulled by too
much of exposure. The ‘crow’ is introduced to us by Ted Hughes to help us with
our visions of right and wrong. It makes us question the ‘tombed visions’.
Kristeva continues: “… the poets – doubtless diminished in the modern world by
the ascendancy of politics – turn back to language,.. and .. unfold its
resources rather than tackle innocently the representation of an external
object. Melancholia becomes the secret mainspring of a new rhetoric…” (ibid,
p.458) The lamenting of life’s main force, water in Hughes’ poetry, and the
‘apple tragedy’ fit within the framework of Kristeva. The violent pictures of
war evoked by Hughes well packaged in the costume of Trickster Literature are
images conveyed through word of mouth, actual seeing, watching television and
movies, reading newspapers and magazines. There is a lot more links between
seeing and talking. Even when our perceptions appear to be blunt without
responding to the pain in the images, the knowledge behind these images does
get into our biological system. The images are transformed into corresponding
words influencing our speech and writing. In many cases we see and hear the use
of war words in ordinary speech. The violence in Hughes’ images is the violence
in the human soul bursting out in an unheard of manner, due to weapons of
science.
The
pluralities that are discussed by the postmodern ethics is a desire to break
away from the gloom off the then present sense of destruction. Hughes tries to
crate the form of crow to tell the people that it is possible to be different
and still be all right. It hits upon the western sense of self-righteousness.
The present achievements of our culture and religious attitudes have led the
people towards the atomic bomb and there fore let us learn to incorporate other
cultures and traditions into our thinking traditions, he tells his people. The
crow becomes a grotesque and comical figure claiming its importance in life and
demanding attention.
To read these social meanings into the poems on crow by
fixing them in history makes the crow a caricature of the twentieth century
westerner, though Hughes had different intentions altogether. Helen Vendler questions
this way of looking at lyrics from the historical and social point of view in
her book, ‘Soul Says’. Discussing the abstraction in lyrics she questions why
lyrics are most of the time abstract. When Hughes says ‘Black like me’, the
reader takes the word ‘black’ and reads it from the point of view of race
without taking into consideration of the possibility of interpreting the word
as referring to a black path. The abstract qualities in a lyric are ignored in
such readings. Vendler says,” Readers read with design. The historically minded
read socially mimetic literature as a source of information retrieval: What can we learn from the novels of Dickens
about notions of criminality in nineteenth-century England? How did working
women describe themselves in their journals? For such readers, no lyric source
can seem as rich as a novel. The psychologically minded read literature read
literature as a source of culturally coded discourse on the passions; for such
readers, the novel offers a multitude of characters interacting in highly
motivated ways, impelled by a variety of interests and feelings. The lyric
might seem, by contrast, impoverished, existing as it does without much of a
plot, and without any significant number of dramatis personae” (Vendler, p.578).
To Vendler poems are felt emotions of the soul. They should not be read from
their origins of social and psychological level.
The crow poems force historical pictures and social
thoughts in the mind of the reader. To treat them as pieces of abstraction
would expect tremendous intellectual powers of subtlety on the part of the
reader.
CHAPTER III
INTERNALIZED PICTURES RELEASED AS VIOLENT IMAGERY
The internalized imagery of violence
as a condition of society along with biocentric visions
Season Songs, Insects and Flowers
If we take up the dominant question that emerged from the
previous chapter – Why has Hughes used such a violent imagery bringing pictures
of horror to our mind? – We have to go back to the political philosophy of the
twentieth century. David Gauthier in his essay, “The Social Contract an
ideology”, writers a ‘critique of understanding social relationships as if they
were contractual” His ‘basic thesis presupposes…. The existence of a common
structure… for modern western Europeans and their descendants and off shoots’
(Gauthier, p.28). Gauthier uses the theory of Hobbes which, he says,
“affords…larger scope to contractual relations. Indeed, for Hobbes, relations
among human beings are of two kinds only: relations of hostility… and relations
of contract… the result is the state of war ‘where every man is Enemy to every
man’. To bring this self-defeating condition to an end, every man is supposed
to contract with his fellows… The family is itself a miniature common wealth….
And the children are supposed to contract with their parent … in the way in
which the vanquished in war contracts with the victor. And this latter
contract, of vanquished with Victor, which establishes sovereignty by acquisition,
is explicitly stated by Hobbes to constitute the relation between servant and
master. The contractual relationship among men, in establishing political
society, is thus the model on which all other human relationships are
interpreted” ( p.29). Gauthier argues that according to Hobbes, ‘only the
relation of hostility is excluded from the scope of the contract, and only it
is natural to man’. So the ideology of contract is the surface reflection of a
need to create an artificial agreement built on deeper conflicts of
individuals. Gauthier further tells us how the radical contractarianism of a
Hobbist kind has ‘unequivocally dominated’ the western ‘thoughts and
practices’… ‘Gradually increasing its influence’ on western thoughts and
leading them, ‘to abandon earlier ideas of human relationships as natural or
supernatural rather than as conventional”, …’moving towards a more Hobbist
position’ ( p.30).
Against
this political framework we can try to place the violence in the poems of
Hughes. What is the link between political philosophy and a poet’s language
Gauthier guides us in this matter too. He says in the same essay, “… man is
social because he is human, and not human because he is social. In particular,
self-consciousness and language must be taken a conditions, not products of
society’ (p.31). The conditions of
society decide the language of the poet.
Language
reflects society. Arts in the good old Aristotlean sense imitate life. The
violent images are the images from twentieth century. What are images, but
records of concrete, real experience? Life dies and becomes crystallized as
thought is human memory. Mind stores pictures like a modern computer or a
cellular phone, which is its basic nature. In condenses facts and pastes them
in the forms of pictures, here and there adding sound effects. Once scenes
enter human mind, it takes quite some time for the scenes to disappear. Or it
may not disappear at all, as we can take our traditional stories, myths and any
such cultural factor as the continuation of past impressions and images. The
poet using language as his tool only becomes more alert of his own minds’
impressions and images and how they influence the way he thinks and speaks and
his fellow men’s similar experiences. Like a labourer knowing his machine in
and out, the man of letters knows and is aware of the changes in thinking
styles and languages around him. If he ignores that, such a writer becomes an
utopian writer not facing issues in front of him, facing unreal facts and
addressing unreal people. The human enmity to each other, the ambition, the
competence and the quality of fighting with each other noticed by Gauthier is
highly European in character. Hughes has to face this issue. And He does.
In
‘Flowers and Insects’, a collection of poems on nature written not in the
romantic style of Wordsworth but in a realistic manner like a philosopher with
a complete command of modern imagery – a war like imagery – Hughes presents us
a world, much similar to mankind. ‘Daffodils’, describes the flowers:
“…Suddenly
I saw what I owned. A cauldron of daffodils, boiling gently”. Unlike the Crow
poems, these poems of nature have the poet one among them. He is talking to us
directly. ‘A cauldron of daffodils’ as an image is intended to bring the
Macbethian witches to our mind. The image has a rooted thought – a deal simile
– and Hughes gives it fresh life. Don’t we say bewitching beauty? We don’t
think of the witches here, as the phrase has sided down the ages and lost its
original vigour and sharpness, acquiring a soft, mellowed quality of
smoothness. As if mentioning the cauldron is not enough, the poet has to tell
us, that it is also ‘boiling’ – boiling gently’. ‘Gently’ is the modifier he
gives to the picture, as they are flowers that are being boiled. The petals
are, six-bladed screws’ – a machine with six blades centered – an image from a
factory. The poet is so frank and opens his heart:
“My
life was still a raid.
………………….
My
own days!
Hardly
more than a hallucination!”
Both the lines are
meant to be exclamations, showing the surprise of times. Compare to the
experiences of the past, the 20th century’s political onslaughts
were colossal and unimaginable to Europe. Any one trying to understand European
art and culture cannot be so without understanding the political conditions of
the nineteenth century and the 20th century. When Hughes says,
‘hallucination’ he refers to the human response to these political climates
changing society’s outlook drastically and thoroughly from traditional
attitudes and language expressions. Totalitarianism, well polished in Europe
and extended to various, other countries is a hallucinating experience
culminating in a nuclear war. Mental disorientation and madness result and
these images occur again and again in Hughes’ poems. The daffodils are getting
wet ‘behind the rainy curtains of that dark April’. The poet, heightened in his
awareness to pain, thanks to his immediate social presence of war, understands
the pain the flowers must be undergoing in the torrent of rain:
“I
became intimate
With
the soft shrieks
Of
their jostled stems –
The
wet shocks shaken
Of
their girlish dance – frocks - ”
The
flowers are dancing girls attacked by a shower – a shower of bombs, air raids?
– And shriek. Screams and shrieks are common images in Hughes’ poems. He heard
them during the Second World War and couldn’t forget. ‘Scream’ becomes a
metaphor for pain, fear, shock, madness and hysteria let loose in those
difficult years of the 1940’s.
Along
with fear, guilt for the anthropocentric tendencies of man also appears as a
major theme of his poetry. When his early poetry showed tendencies of kinship
with animals and a desire to fuse with the forceful energy of nature, the
gradual development takes place taking him towards moments of ‘bio-centrism’ as
discussed by Scigaj. ‘Flowers and Insects’ is published in 1986 and the concept
of environmental ethics is strong in the poet’s consciousness. From the 1960s
Hughes’s poetry has been concerned with ecological issues writes Scigaj. The poet’s daffodils spring up in the month
of March, in a patch of wild ground that he had bought. The flowers grown in a natural manner. But he cuts the flowers and sells them.
The poet says,
“To
each scared, bright glance
I
brought a defter cruelty.
……………………
The
souls of all those daffodils, as I killed them,
Had
gone to ground inside me –
……………………
They
began to alarm me.
……………………
It
was Resurrection!
The
trumpet!
The
earth – weight of nightmare!”
He presents a persona that stands for the anthropocentric
tendencies of mankind. He is sure he would live forever. He had not learned the
value of the ‘fleeting glance’ of the ‘everlasting daffodils’. He did not
recognize the ‘nuptial flight’ of his ‘own days’, which is ‘hardly’ more than a
‘hallucination’. He thinks the daffodils
‘were a windfall’. They are ‘girlish’
and dance wearing ‘frocks’. He feels guilty of killing the daffodils and sees
the souls of flowers in his dreams. He tries confessing to relieve himself of
his guilt, but with no success, and is reminded of ‘Resurrection’. Overwhelming
guilt of the intelligential of the era is passionately pictured here. The
flowers symbolize humanity, which lives on other species. The poem offers a
critique on anthropocentric thinking of humanity. It attacks man for
appropriating nature for selfish purposes. It is a shift in perception
recognizing the intrinsic values of all components of earth. The Western
concept of egocentric individuality is to be replaced, says Hughes. Also Hughes
in his review of Nicholson’s book characterized Nature in traditionally
feminine ways. Scigaj says the attempt
of the crow is to ‘recover Nature’ as his ‘intended bride’ beginning a
‘movement towards biocentrism’ that ‘continued in his major works of the
mid-1970s, Gaudete (1977) and Cave Birds (1978)’.
Rousseau’s
‘Social Contract’, if we look from Gauthier’s perspective, strengthens the fact
“contract as the foundation of all society is required only by men who are not
inherently sociable” (p.31). The critique that Gauthier offers is how twentieth
century looks at the previous era that laid more emphasis on political power
and domination. Gauthier says about Rousseau, “Although the contractarian
cannot represent man as a social being, he need not deny, as Hobbies may seem
to, that human beings as we know them, within society, do display sociable
characteristics.” (p.31). Different experiences have chiseled the philosophical
arguments in politics in the 20th century. Gauthier believes in
human relationship and qualities like friendship and love. Considering society
as a ‘battlefield’ where the members fight with each other is not the way he
looks at society. He warms his fellowmen: Hobbs’s argument for the competitive
drive for power is of fully convincing drive for power is not fully convincing.
For if goods of desire are in sufficient supply in the state of nature, so that
the real threat of scarcity is slight, them the cost each person incurs in
embarking on the search for ever greater power – the cost of being a party to
the war of every man against every man – will be greater than the risk each
runs in being satisfied with his present means to pressure himself (p.34).
Gauthier knows the consequences of combatant qualities. Political events have
taught the intelligentsia to be sensitive about the impact of their theories –
justifying the conditions of society and have changed their role in society.
Now, scholars take their position as teachers trying to correct the mistakes in
thinking. Art does the same thing.
Hughes’s ‘Daffodils” tells us about the violence in human
nature, explicitly expressed by Gauthier, as revealed from earlier political
writings (as politics expresses once again the conditions of society and
language is part of it) that uses every other creation for its own survival.
The poem speaks out for kindness to plants, as they are also human beings.
Every day murder takes place in the world of nature. Only when man is affected,
he is moved; otherwise his sensitivity is quite dull. Gauthier describes, along
with other political theorists that man has, “an appetite for unlimited
approbation” (p.34) Hughes questions this quality, like Gauthier whose concern
is “to establish their further connection… and to introduce appropriative
activity as that which naturally leads to hostility among men, yet which also
affords scope for mutually beneficial cooperation, thus affording sufficient
rationale for coercive society” (p.35). Hughes goes one step higher and tries
to establish that man is also hostile to nature and gives the scope for a
society kind towards its environment. Coercion is needed to curb the spirit of
appropriation is a political theorists solution to totalitarian tendencies. The
artist turns to other solutions – he appeals to the human heart.
The
poet uses direct speech empowering his stand. His experience becomes so well
pronounced that it transforms itself and becomes our experiences. Drawing
parallels to an atomic war, Hughes sensitizes the human mind to an ordinary
fact. Picking Flowers is a concept well established in human mind to enhance
the beauty of surroundings or as in India to wear or offer to God. This
conventional practice is looked at from an atomic perspective. Juxtaposed with
religion, the poem accommodates questions of science and morality in itself. A
society, which doesn’t believe in being kind to each other, (man to man and man
to nature) will have a very short life. Environmental protection and protection
of fellow beings, thus becomes a necessity for the survival of man as a
species. Gauthier warns us: “… the triumph of radical contractarianism leads to
destruction… of our society…” (, p.42).
The
Western society with its profound contributions to modern civilization with
science has come to a crisis, pointed out by Julia Kristena (as mentioned in
the previous chapter), that is a crisis of its spiritual and materialistic
survival. What is unfortunate is, as Hughes points out in his ‘Crow’s Elephant
Totem Song’, that the way the other countries got influenced by Western
rationalism. Hughes’ Elephant is totally changed with altered brains – Asian
countries with Science Institute churning out bombs – and wicked eyes. The
thought process engulfs an entire era of science, that appropriated scientific
knowledge for destructive purposes. In ‘Daffodils’ the poet calls the flowers
(when they give him guilty feelings) ‘awful, like the idea of atoms’. The
streak of thought running across his Crow poems and nature poems is the same.
That is, as Gauthier points out, the benefits of a competitive society has been
immense; Even, economics which came under the banner of self-interest,
justifying free trade ignored ethical perspectives (as exemplified by Ruskin in
his ‘Unto this last’), and went all over the world and made Europe a rich
continent. “Instead of repressing self-interest, our society has harnessed it”,
Gauthier mourns. (ibid, p.39). This is modernity or post-modernity mourning for
the death of concepts of selfless love and sacrifice. The costs of
self-interests have been overlooked is the moral argument in Gauthier’s essay,
and Hughe’s poetry.
II
The
concept of memory is a major theme in Hughes’s poetry. The poems deal with the
memory of events and used it for imagery. As it is said earlier, experiences
become solidified as language expressions, why those violent experiences are
repeatedly found in his poetry, irrespective of their function. In ‘season
songs’ Hughes tries to give us snapshots of nature scanned with violent colours
of red and black. The poem, ‘Leaves’ discusses the funeral of leaves. It is a
question answer session and mature answers all the questions. The poem begins:
“Who’s
killed the leaves?
Me,
says the apple, I’ve killed them all
Fat
as a bomb or a cannonball
I’ve
killed the leaves”.
The apple has killed the leaves as it resembles a bomb or
a cannonball. The leaves fall dead, blood splashing across and the narrow
catches the blood. The swallow makes their shroud, the river digs the grave,
the crow (having read the bible to the bone) is the parson, the wind becomes
the chief mourner, the sunset carries the coffin, the tractor (singing through
his throttle) sings the psalm and the robin rings the funeral bell in the
Church – a scene from a modernized agricultural set up. The image of bomb is
only misfit contrasted against the tractor – The presentation of negative and
positive forces of science. The bomb or cannonball’s role in the poem doesn’t
seem to signify the contrast. Instead it is just there deliberately put there
‘The funeral of leaves’.
This
poem, read in the twenty first century loses its violence, as visual media has
taken away the originatlity in the experience of bombs and cannons by exposing
the people to too much of similar pictures in the cinema and news. Half a
century is in between the Second World War and us. Hollywood movies have
legitimized violence and have exported them all over the world. Bullets an
death have become part of everyday usage. A popular Tamil songs, if translated
goes like this: ‘kill me for some time’ which of course means ‘love me for some
time’ where death becomes the metaphor for sensual love. Fed Hughes’ war images
bulging, scream, madness, nothing and crashing, found even in season songs, a
collection of lovely songs – may not really strike a strong discord to the
present reader. The poem ‘A March Calf’ gives penetrating insights into the
world of animals where the poet treats the calf just like a fellow being
understanding its struggles and difficulties of being born. ‘The River in
March’ sums up the life of the river as a woman. There is a beautiful line:
“The brassy sun gives her a headache”. The live is fresh and takes the reader
away from the brutalities of the war for a while. ‘Apple Dumps’ discuss the
emergence of the fruits, who are ‘a straggle of survivors, nearly all ailing”.
‘Swifts’ is a poem with a lovely metaphor, ‘butterfly lightness’, which is
other wise talking about, ‘Shrapnel – scatter terror’, ‘long scream’, ‘lunatic
limber’, and all kinds of screams. ‘Sheep’ is a mirror epic, where Hughes’
descriptive and narrative gifts are displayed. A lamb is born but
“Death
was more interesting to him.
Life
could not get his attention”.
Neat and precise lines, thus are summing the lack of will
of the new born lamb. Even the previous two lines are rhythmic and appeals to
our mind and ears.
“…
he was born
With
everything but the will –
That
can be deformed, just like a limb”.
The sheep are sheared. Their woe “is like a battlefield”.
The last stanza of the long poem sums up:
“Their
anguish goes on and on, in the June heat.
Only
slowly the hurt dies, cry by cry,
As
they fit themselves to what has happened”.
The
idea of acceptance, an idea that can be looked at as his efforts to break away
from the influence of the painful scenes from his mind, is one of the themes of
Hughes’ poetry. He deliberately uses a conversational tone and tries to form a
philosophical perspective of the violent, painful experience of the past. Poems
like these can be classified as the poetics of survival. David Porter refers to
this as ‘survival aethetics’.
The
‘Evening Thrush’ is described in a half-serious and half-comical mode. It,
“Gossips
in a mundane code of splutters
With
Venus and Jupiter. Listens-
Motionless,
intent astronomer.
Suddenly
launches a soul”.
The
thrush with its song launches not a rocket but a song stirring the soul.
Finally it is so tired like a ‘long distance lorry driver”. It is a scientist
talking to planets understanding their language.
‘The
Harvest Moon’ is a poem bringing us a ‘flame-red moon’ rolling like ‘a vast
balloon’, ‘gold doubloon’, and a ‘bassoon’. The moon is now caught in the war
imagery:
“….while
she swells
Filling
heaven, as if red hot, and sailing
Closer
and closer like the end of the world”.
So the red-hot moon is the orange ball with the black
cloud of the Crow poems. The atomic bomb and the cannon balls are so similar to
the sun and the moon in shape and colour that they are irresistible to the poet
as comparisons. The poet is not able to move out of their powerful influence.
Anything round, spherical and circular reminds him of the bomb. Instead of
resisting the temptation, as a particular reading expectation would be, he
gaily sails along enjoying his own use of such imagery. Sometimes he means it,
and sometimes it is just there. He is dominated by the force of similarities.
In ‘Harvest Moon’ the heat produced during a bomb explosion is described as a
parallel to the heat of the moon:
“….
while she swells
Filling
Heaven as if red hot and sailing
Closer
and closer like the end of the world.
Fill
the gold fields of stiff wheat
Cry,
‘We are ripe, reap us!’ and the
Sweat
from the melting hills”
The red and golden world evoked here has mountains melting
(not the snow) and rivers sweating in its heat. The enormity of the heat to a
European used to chiller climates is well described here.
Can
one call such a description beautiful? The Twentieth Century has refused to
give art any space by making victories horrible and man’s achievement a sign of
gross error. It has made traditional poetry to move away from the centre. How
can anyone aesthetically evoke the beauties of a bomb or a concentration camp?
What can the poet describe or narrate? Hughes’ gifts lie in narrative poetry
where he mixes a style of mild humour, a world view and powerful insights of
the characters he handles. But the age to which he belonged did not give him
the space to narrate.
In
his essay, ‘The Ideology of Modernism’ Geörgy Lukács, analyses the role of art
in the Twentieth Century. Art needs personalities to narrate. ‘The dissolution
of personality’, originally the unconscious product of the identification of
concrete and abstract potentiality, is elevated to a deliberate principle in
the light of consciousness” (Lukács, p.226), says Lukács, when the analyses the
principle behind Eliot’s poetry. Scientific wars negate not only heroes, but
individual identities. Nuclear bombs signify total negation of individuality.
Their wiping out of humanity is complete and total irrespective of any social
dimensions. Man becomes ‘nothing’. Hughes often evokes pictures of fire and
ash. It is now, a world of ‘ambush of clumsy body-leaves, ‘electric shock
waves’, ‘cool flame – tongue’, and ‘spectre flower of the lungs’ as described
in his poem, “Cyclamens in a bowl”. Analyzing in the same vein, Lukács, quotes
Alfred Kerr, who writes: “Morbidity is the legitimate poetry of naturalism. For
what is poetic in everyday life? Neurotic aberration, escape from life’s dreary
routine. Only in this way can a character be translated to a rarer clinic and
yet retain an air of reality.” (Lukács,, p.227) Looking at the poet from
Gauthier’s perspective (language reflects the conditions by society), Hughes’
poetic self is conditional by the nightmarish experiences of the wars and other
scenes of totalitarianism and it colours whatever he writes about. He
deliberately turns away from men and chooses to write about animal. Allegory
becomes an escapist route to an artist who is unable to write about the
pathological reality. Lukács, says, “what at first was no more than dim anticipation
of approaching catastrophe developed, after 1914, into an all-pervading
obsession. And I would suggest that the ever-increasing part played by
psychopathology was one of the main features of the continuity. At each period
– depending on the prevailing social and historical conditions –
psychopathology was given a new emphasis, a different significance and artistic
function. Kenr’s description suggests that in naturalism the interest in
psychopathology sprang from an esthetic need; it was an attempt to escape from
the dreariness of life under capitalism.” (Lukáes, p.227). Hughes tells us that
his introduction of Trickster Literature is his movement and mood of his
century for Black comedy. But the Crow doesn’t take away the dreariness of
life, in fact it adds more morbidity. The Crow framework ill fits his poems as
artificial and natural manner in his other poems. His natural rhythm in lost in
his Crow poetry. It is, nevertheless, and artist’s effort to face the
nihilistic tendencies of the period. Lukács, suggests certain perspectives to
interpret similar artworks:” What must be avoided at all costs is the approach
generally adopted by bourgeois – modernist critics themselves: with questions
of style and literary technique” (Lukács, p.222) Lukács, creates space for
looking Hughes’ Crow poems which merge content and form. Lukács, argument is.
“What determines the style of a given work of art? How does the intention
determine the form? (… intention realized in the work…) … it is the writer’s
attempt to reproduce this view of the world which constitutes his ‘intention’
and is the formative principle underlying the style of a given piece of
writing. Looked at this way, style ceases to be a formalistic category. Rather
it is rooted in content; it is the specific form of a specific content”
(Lukács, p.223).
This
quotation from Lukács, is a very good example for the grammar of 20th
century poetry written by 20th century critics. Both the writers and
the critics work from within the framework of a particular social condition.
Intellect tries to comprehend practical life and forms dialects with it. An
artist takes up questions of the age as well as tries to be outside the
framework of society looking at it from beyond. Writers wanting to become
universal always tried to break out of their immediate social ‘conditions’. But
all the while the necessity of interpreting the immediate presence is in front
of them. Hughes’ violent imagery is the ‘condition’ of the 20th
century – The age which had some special character, a violent spurt of energy,
terrible force, probably the denouement of the huge Western energy mounting in
a steady growth from the 16th century and climaxing in the 20th
century – the end of a historical force culminating in wars and other war like
political events. The energy which gave a distinct character to the Westerner
right from Plato’s time, in fact given a shape by Plato in his Republic grew
into a monster in 2000 years killing people mindlessly. Plato says, “we must be
brave and do our best… Have you never observed how invincible and unconquerable
is spirit and how the presence of it makes the soul of any creature to be
absolutely fearless and indomitable”….. Then he who is to be a really good and
noble guardian of the state will require to unite in himself philosophy and
spirit and swiftness and strength? (Plato, p.319-320). Further Plato encourages
qualities of courage, love of order, bravery, right, nobly ordered mind and a
hatred for dreams and visions. All these ‘right’ values do not have any space
for amoral qualities which Hughes’ Crow has.
In
his ‘Hawk in the Rain’ published in 1957, Hughes describes the collapse of
reason, projected by Plato as a moral value to the Greek. In the poem, “Bayonet
Change’, a man suddenly wakes’ up and starts running – after a night mare. He
is in ‘hot khaki’ his ‘sweat’ is ‘heavy’ and stumbles across a field of clods’.
The field dazzles with rifle fire. Bullets smack “the belly out of the air”. He
luggs a rifle that is as ‘numb as a smashed arm’. The centre of his chest
sweats like molten iron and his patriotic tears brimming in his eyes reflect
its heat. He stops in bewilderment.
“In
what cold clock work of the stars
and
the nations
Was
he the hand pointing that second”,
Hughes asks the readers. ‘second’ with its connotations,
questions the reason for the war. The man continues running listening between
his footfalls “for the reason of his still running”. He plunges “past with his
bayonet towards the green hedge”. The madness associated with modern warfare
has no place in Plato’s republic. Such a poem cannot spare time for
well-structured smoothness, with lovely metaphors evoking grassland, evening
sky and lilies. The poem merges content and form as Lukáes’ vision of modern
poetry puts it. The condition of war is the language. The same language touches
all his poetry – the language of war. Hughes sums up the collapse of
traditional European values crystallized in Greek thought:
“King,
honour, human dignity, etcetera
Dropped
like luxuries in a yelling alarm
To
get out of that blue crackling air
His
terror’s touchy dynamite”.
Qualities put across by Plato – fearkessness, indomitable
spirit, mobility of mind, and bravery – collapse and turn into terror stricken
alarm. ‘yelling’ becomes the older of the day. Therefore ‘scream’ is one of the
main themes of Hughes’ poetry. Dropping of luxurious values later gives birth
to the Crow.
The
poem, “Six Young Men” describes a photograph taken before forty years that is
faded and ochre-tinged. The faces remain young and do not have wrinkles. The
men look casual, smiling, sky, proud – like typical teenagers. Immediately
after telling about their looks Hughes tells us:
“Six
months after this picture they were dead”.
Hughes mourns their death. The boys are supposed to go to
a picnic on that Sunday, they were photographed. It is a river bank, with a
thick tree, and black wall. The place is there yet intact and not changed. We
can hear the water of seven streams fall and air murmuring through the leafy
valley. In the picture their faces look as if they can still listen to the
sounds of nature.
“And
still that valley has not changed its sound
Through
their faces are four decades under the ground”,
Hughes sighs saying these words, talking to us directly.
He continues to tell us how each one of the young men died; one was shot in an
attack, and lay fatally wounded after wiring the message to his friends, who
when went out was also shot at. And ‘this one’ died at the very moment he was
warned about landmines died of one such landmine explosion unexpectedly. ‘The
rest’, of the boys died in ways no body knows how. The concepts of courage and
bravery become meaningless in this killer war.
The
poet is angry and comments:
“…see
fall war’s wost
Thinkable
flash and rending, onto his smile
Forty
years rotting into soil.
……………………..
Such
contradictory permanent horrors here
Smile
from the single exposure and shoulder out
One’s
own body from its instant and heat.”
Now, to the poet, the photograph with the smiles of six
young men becomes a symbol of the permanent horrors of modern warfare.
“The
Martyradom of Bishop Farrar” is a poem moving to the past to give us a picture
of violence and horror. The poem describes the burning of the priest at the
stake. ‘Bloody Mary’s Venomous flames’ are curling. The flames can shrived
sinew and charbone of foot, ankle, Anee and thigh and boil bowels”. The people
hear the cracking of bones in the mouth of the fire. Blood oozes and bubbles
with a smell retching their lungs. Even when he delivered his sermons at the
pulpit; the people did not their eyes so still as now they witnessed his agony
in absolute silence without moving their eyes here and there. The priest had
tried to establish ownership of his flock through an ignorant method. So, she seized
the Shepherd and tied him to ‘this blazing shape’. The people seeing their
exemplar and teacher burned alive to black bits could have considered him as a
‘blasphemous father’. But as they saw his body burning his words gained meaning
of honour to them:
“Out
of his month, fire like a glory broke,
And
smoke burned his sermon into the skies”.
The poem celebrates the power of spirituality while
mourning the burning of the Bishop. The poem, put along with the other poems in
‘Hawk in the rain’ gives us a sensitive insight into past.
III
By
thus placing Hughes’s poems in a historical framework we can try to justify the
use of violence in his expressions. Theodor Adorno in his essay ‘Aesthetic
Theory’, though dismisses such an approach as a cliché, still admits its
importance. He says, “The manner in which art communicate with the outside
world is in fact also a lack of communication, because art seeks, blissfully or
unhappily, to seclude itself from the world. This non-communication points to
the fractured nature of art. It is natural to think that art’s autonomous
domain has no more in common with the outside world than a few borrowed
elements undergoing radical change in the context of art. But there is more to
it than that. There is some truth to the historical cliché which states that
the developments of artistic methods, usually lumped together under the term
‘style’, correspond to social development. Even the most sublime work of art
takes up a definite position vis-à-vis reality by stepping outside of reality’s
spell, not abstractly once and for all, but occasionally and in concrete ways,
when it unconsciously and tacitly polemicizes against the condition of society
at a particular point in time… to view them (works of art) as being subject to
a dynamic or immanent historicity and a dialectical tension between nature and
domination of nature, a dialectic that seems to be of the same kind as the
dialectic of society….the dialectic of art resembles the social dialectic
without consciously imitating it….art has a two fold essences, being both an
autonomous entity and a social fact…” (Adorno, p.245).
Violence
in Hughes’s imagery can be fitted within this method described by Adorno. As
argued earlier, the violence of the era, in that particular civilization is
real presence Hughes’ poetry. Adorno continues to talk about the link between
Art and society: “Works of art do not lie; what they say is literally true.
Their reality lies in the fact that they are answers to questions brought
before them from outside. The tension in art therefore has meaning only in
relation to the tension outside. The fundamental layers of artistic experience
are akin to the objective world from which art recoils” (p.245-246)
Apart from the
aggressive violence of Western societies culminating in a war of bombs, Hughes’
poems have one more social presence – the world of animals. ‘Origin of Species’
made a breakthrough in the 19th and 20th centuries making
man looking at animals as fellow beings. Archaeology and biology changed man’s
perspective totally. These knowledge systems also became a social reality. We
find the presence of these new views in Hughes’ poetry in the next chapter.
CHAPTER IV
Internalization of thoughts reacting to THE NEW GOD OF
PROGRESS in Hughes’s society
The human
race has become industrialized waging its battle to subjugate nature even more
fiercely. Terence Dixon and Martin Lucas discuss the significant events in the
book ‘Story of the Human race’. They say, “To many people, as the belief that
the ideas of the past offered any guidance to the actins of the present finally
disappeared, the real authority that religion once had was displaced by the
authority of the new god: Progress, and his twin lieutenants Science and
Technology… To the new materialists of the twentieth century, there was no
longer any Father in the sky-or anywhere else-to rely on. There was just a set
of pretty myths which they taught to their children and expected them to
discard as adults. In this spiritual freefall, all they could rely on was their
own technological ability to master and control the world. They would no longer
attempt to appease the god; they would simply ignore them in favour of
Progress. This new god has demanded considerable sacrifices; in pursuance of
scientific truth, millions of animals have been mutilated and subjected to
outrageous treatment; technology has been applied to agriculture and animal
husbandry; eco-systems have been destroyed; species have been wiped out; and
stable human communities have been destroyed to be replaced by vast anonymous
cities of consumers.” (Dixon & Lucas,
p.198). Hughes is equally concerned with environmental ethics. He wants
to change the perceptions of humanity regarding nature. The
anthropocentric, hierarchical domination of nature has to be changed is
the modern concern of the scholars that has also been taken up by the poet.
After
summing up twentieth Century’s achievement in a sarcastic tone, the writers go
on pointing out the greatest moral responsibility by realizing that Nature and
Man are all part of one system. The book, published in 1982, tells us that, “in
recent years, however, the Pyrrhic quality of …victory over Nature has slowly
come home to us, and many inhabitants of our vastly successful technological society
are now deeply anxious as they examine the despoliation which their way of life
has created all around them and recognize their own spiritual emptiness”
(ibid).
Almost
all the kinds of poems written by Hughes can be comfortably fitted within this
framework. Even in Tales from Ovid, Hughes describes ‘the age of Iron’. It is
the ‘day of Evil’ values like ‘modesty’, ‘Loyalty’ and ‘truth’ ‘go up like a
mist’. Hughes says in this Iron Age, ‘violence is an extrapolation”. A new God is born, the poet says:
“Now
comes the love of gain – a new God
Made
out of the shadow
of
all the others. A god who peers
Grinning
from the roots of the eye-teeth”.
(Tales
from Ovid, p.11)
Progress builds ships using trunks of trees from some
mountain that move ‘from wavetop to wavetop’ reaching ‘unknown’ lands. And the
land surveyors into markets, fences and ditches now portion of that earlier
‘free to all as the air or sunlight’. ‘Earth’s natural plenty’ is no longer
‘sufficed’ and Man tears the earth open and rummages in the ‘bowels’ of the
same. Whatever ‘the creator’ had concealed as ‘precious ores’ buried so deep as
‘close to hell’ are dug up. And the findings are the ‘new drug for the
criminal’. Hughes makes the next bitter comments:
“…..
so now iron comes
with its cruel
ideas. And gold
with crueler.
(Combined, they bring war –
War, insatiable for
the one,
with bloody hands
employing the other.
Now man lives only by plunder.
……………………..
……………………..Astraea,
The
Virgin
Of
Justice – the incorruptible
Last
of the immortals –
Abandons
the blood-fouled earth.” (ibid)
The
lines are a moral outcry against Wars and the ambience that is given by society
to such violence in Man. Decrying the God of Progress Hughes turns to myths.
Dixon and Lucas tell us how Jung “decided that patients had often become
mentally ill because ancient and powerful forces within them were actually
trying to correct basically unsound and unhealthy adaptations made to
artificial and unhealthy circumstances….. These forces had evolved in human
beings over millions of years” (Dixon & Lucas, p.198-199).
To achieve inter tranquility, western society turned to
mystical integrating powers within the human psyche. The wounded hearts of the
people needed heating and mental health. It became a “key principle in those
several schools of psychotherapy which followed Jung, particularly those
developed in the United States. Over the years, they have evolved a variety of
techniques, which include…. Deep breathing… and encounter and argument groups. Many
of these procedures looked suspiciously like the discredited rituals of
traditional and primitive society” (ibid p. 199).
In
‘Little Whale Song’, Hughes questions ‘global brains’, from ‘Wolf watching’.
The first line itself shocks the reader in a direct style like Donne:
“What
do they think of themselves
With
their global brains –
The
tide-power voltage illumination
Of
those brains?…”
The scientists with their ‘x-ray all dimension’ have
grasped the structure of the world and have re-imagined the world perfectly
with ‘tuned receivers and perceivers’. The little whales make fun of learned
scientists. They say:
“We
are beautiful. We stir
Our self-colour in the pot
of colours
Which
is the world. At each
Tail-stroke we
deepen
Our being into
the world’s lit substance,
And our joy
into the world’s
Spinning
bliss, and our peace
Into
the world’s floating plumed peace.”
Being
aware of their harmonious link with the world, the whales criticize the role of
Man in the world. Man has,
“The
loftiest spermiest,
Passions,
the most exquisite pleasures,
The noblest
characters, the most God like
Oceanic
presence and poise”
Homo sapiens
as a species have achieved quite a lot. How long will the situation continue is
the question of Hughes. With all kinds of sophisticated war materials we wonder
whether humanity will collapse. Hughes makes the whales say something which act
like a warning to the Globe, because after all the success after the ‘oceanic
presence and poise’ comes the last line of the poem, a single line, slightly distanced
from the previous lines:
“The
most terrible fall”.
Unlike
the whales, which live, rhythmically parallel to the movement of the world, man
has created deep discords in fellow men’s soul as well as in Nature. ‘Walt’ is
another poem from ‘Wolf watching’ giving us an intense description of the
pathological conditions of humanity after a war. It is the story of an English
man shot at by a German, and like a ‘worm’ he gets inside a ‘shell-hole’ and
lays there throughout the day after being wounded in the ‘groin’ and
‘forehead’. His mind ‘walks’ along visiting his past, and roads and valleys.
Now when he goes to the place where the prisoners are enclosured, the man is
reminded of that deadly day.
“I
knew the knot of scar on his temple”,
says the poet, commenting on the permanent mark of pain on
the man’s forehead. Even at the age of eighty four the man is still telling the
tale. ‘Night after night’ he would sit there and remember the pain. He had a
‘huge thirst for anesthetics’ and wished he would die. That story telling also
stops one day. The only word coming out of his mouth, now, is, ‘Aye’. ‘Over and
over’, he says ‘aye’ ‘Mountains of dissolution’ torture him. He is given
‘tranquilizers, steroids, and a whole crateful of escapist Madeira’. ‘Dumbness
like a bone struck in his throat’ and he becomes totally silent. Hughes’ war
world is contrasted with screams and silences. His description of the war
survivor describes the spiritual emptiness of the sufferer:
“Why’? he’d cried. ‘Why can’t I just die’?
His memory was so sharp – a potsherd.
He raked at his skin, whispering ‘God! God!”.
The old mans’ suffering ‘tossed my boyhood the baffling
coin ‘guilty’ says the poet. The memory of the war lays like a wound at the old
man’s heart which ‘he dare not touch’. No one wanted to discuss war. Let the
wounds heal themselves, was the latent thinking of the people. Why rake the
past, became the attitude. Therefore the pain became internalized. It affected
everyone – the ones who took part actively and survived and the ones who were
only passive onlookers. The poet sums up this attitude.
“………….I bury it
Hugger – mugger anyhow
Inside my shirt”.
Burying the pain inside the shirt or heart is the only way
for the common man. Hughes seems to disagree with this social code of not
talking. Instead poem after poem he faces war, and describes the aftermath of
war and its attitudes to humanity. Violently he attacks man’s war like
qualities and the scientific weapons contrasting mankind with the peaceful
world of animals. Man’s violence to fellow men is unnatural whereas animals’
violence justified as they kill only to eat.
Poetry
has ethical and political obligations and Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Redress of
poetry” emphasizes the role of poetry in the world. During a war, which side
should a poet take, is the question Heaney analyses:
“Engaged
parties…will always want the redress of poetry to be an exercise of leverage on
behalf of their point of view; …. So if you are an English poet at the Front
during World War I, the pressure will be on you to contribute to the war
effort, preferably by dehumanizing the face of the enemy … In these cases, to
see the German soldier as a friend and secret sharer… is to add a complication
where the general desire is for a simplification…And in the activity of
poetry…there is a tendency to place a counter-reality in the scales-a reality
which may be only imagined but which nevertheless has weight….and can therefore
hold its own and balance out against the historical situation. This redressing
effect of poetry comes from its being a glimpsed alternative, a revelation of
potential that is denied or constantly threatened by circumstances….such a
revelation…..remains as a standard for the poet….bearing witness in his…..life
to the plane of consciousness established in the poem.” (Heaney, p.569)
Hughes’
‘Wolf Watching’ was published in 1989 and the poem ‘Walt’ fixes the
consciousness of the poet as English, whereas generally Hughes keeps his
consciousness neutral. In 1989, almost half-a-century after World War II, still
the consequences of war are loud and the poet doesn’t want to generalize
anymore and aims at particularization making the impact more intense and
strong. War poems have this problem of identity, that Heaney pointed out and
poets handle the problem in their own way.
A
poem by Sasson can tell us, (and give us a sense contrast), more about
identity. The poet has to take the sides and during and after the First World
War poets took the stand of their Englishness.
Siegfried
Sassoon in his poem ‘The Kiss’ evokes an atmosphere of family with a war
background. He trusts in ‘Brother Lead’ and ‘Sister Steel’. The Brother ‘Splits
a Skull’ while the sister kisses the enemy and kills. Sassoon considers
soldiers marching as something noble. He has accommodated modern weapons and
merged them in the traditional method of romanticizing qualities of courage. In
another poem, “The rank stanch of those bodies haunts me still”, he tells us
how difficult it is for him to forget war. The images he evokes are: “battering
guns’, ‘snoring men’, ‘radiant water’, ‘floating sky’, ‘dark, shivering trees’,
‘thoughts of home and hours of sleep’, ‘gun-thunder leaps’, ‘spouting shells’,
‘fields of death’, ‘wounded men…moaning in the woods’, and young men drinking,
smoking and dreaming of girl friends, stretching ‘their limbs in tired
consent’. And then Sassoon describes a dead Prussian, killed by his army, whose
‘decent face’ looked ‘young, fresh and pleasant’ who ‘no doubt would have’
loathed the war and longed for peace’. Love of the enemy is the theme of the
poem moralizing on the evils of war.
We
can take a poem, ‘Scapegoats and Rabies’ by Hughes where he calls the first
part as ‘a haunting’, just like Sasson
who said, “the rank stench of those bodies haunts me still”. The pictures
evoked by Hughes are: “soldiers… marching singing down the lane”, who are
looked at by “fixed eyes of girls”, and become, “armed anonymity”; Their
heroism looms from the ‘statue stare of old women’, ‘trembling chins of old
men’, ‘napes and bow legs of toddlers’, ‘absolute steel of their automatic
rifles’, ‘lizard spread of their own fingers’ and ‘their bird stride’, the
soldiers get their facelessness ‘from the blank, deep meadows and the muddling
streams’, ‘the hill’s eyeless outlook’, ‘the babel of gravestones’, and “the
mouldering of …citations on rubbish dumps’; Their movements get their energy
from ‘the drumming engine of their boots’, ‘eyeless, earless… brainless
hearts’; They get their bravery from ‘millions of ghosts’, themselves ‘marching
in their boots’; The ghosts cumber their bodies, ‘staring from under their
brows’ and directs them ‘toward a repeat performance’ of death; their situation
is hopeless; Millions of future soldiers are going to march in their boots,
blindfolded and confused, Hughes foretells; The soldiers will have ‘rotten
heads on their singing shoulders’, their hands would be blown off just as their
legs would become stumps and look scorched, helpless ‘in the terrible engine of
the boots’; The soldiers continue to march ‘singing down the deep lane’ like
wraiths into the afternoon sunlight which looks as if bombarded and are
overwhelmed by the fields of barley which flashes brightly so violently that it
is like an onslaught; They enjoy the honeysuckle which arrests their eye, strangling
them; They move away and only their
voices are heard (bodiless voices) and then settle down like dust under the
ancient hill which is a burden.
When
Sassoon keeps the identities of the soldiers giving them geographical colours,
Hughes removes their identities, not belonging to any country. There is no air
of patriotism and courage in Hughes’ poem. They soldier becomes the mindless
engine of the war operated by unknown forces. The poem blatantly attacks modern
warfare not mining words.
The
two poems, ‘Walt’ and ‘Scapegoats and Rabies’ by Hughes tell us how the poets’
consciousness is bifocal. He represents the experiences of his fellow men
identifying with their woes as well as decrying against this entire modern
system of scientific wars using atomic energy misusing man’s intelligence and
hard work. Apart from this role of poetry, Seamus Heaney says, there is one
more element – the language. “Poetry cannot afford to lose its fundamentally
self-delighting inventiveness, its joy in being a process of language as well
as a representation of things in the world. To put it in W.B. Yeats’ terms, the
will must not usurp the work of the imagination”, says Heaney. The ‘will’ of
Hughes is against the modern God of ‘Progress’ and his language is highly imaginative.
Imagery
The poems are
scattered with pleasing phrases and lines packed with meaning. Some of this
lines are like maxims. His imagery, and the way he looks at things is
different, though violent. In ‘Hawk in the Rain’ published in 1957, we come across
a song. The poet says,
“O
lady, when the tipped cup of moon blessed you
You
became soft fire with a clouds’ grace
The
difficult stars swam for eyes in your face;
You
stood, and your shadow was my place:
You
turned, your shadow turned to ice
O
my lady.”
‘The tipped cup of moon’ is a sensuous image along with
the other similar ones – ‘soft fire’, ‘clouds’ grace’. ‘The difficult stars’ is
a reference to the expression on the woman’s face which is difficult to be
interpreted. The man, who is only her shadow, turns to ‘ice’ looking at her
‘soft fire’ and ‘difficult stars’. The antithetical meaning sharpens the
picture and makes the woman more powerful.
Hughes
sums up the power of a poet in the poem, ‘Famous Poet’:
“Stars
at the monster:….
……………………….
…………the
demeanour is of a mouse,
………………………….
……………
a lumbering obsolete
……………….
From
a time when a half the world still burned, set
To
blink behind bars at the zoo”
The entire poem moves within a fixed framework of
‘monster’ as a metaphor. The world is ‘burning’ and the helpless poet stares at
the world like a monster ‘behind bars at the zoo. The description is accurate,
as the monster doesn’t really look like a monster, but a great mouse. It is the
description of the middleclass intelligentsia. ‘Very ordinary appearance’,
Hughes says about the poet reducing the importance of the poet. There is
nothing great about the poet as he is actually not involved in the political
affairs of the day.
The
poem, ‘Egg-Head’, talks about ‘eagled peaks’, ‘wide-eyed deafnesses’, ‘lucid
sophistries of sight’, and ‘Dewdrop fraility’. Using noun to sense the purpose
of a verb seems to a quality of Hughes’ language. Like ‘eagled peaks’, we have
‘whaled monstered sea bottom’, in the same poem. This poem also uses a war
vocabulary: ‘better defense’, ‘militant pride’ ‘freebooting crass veterans of
survival’, ‘champions forgetfulness, madness’.
“The
Man Seeking Experience Enquires His way of a Drop of Water” has a lonely
phrase. ‘Water droplet, charity of the air’. The noun cathedral is used to
describe a brain which is highly organised as, ‘Cathedralled brain’. Water for
Hughes is a symbol of cleansing. River, rain, well, are some of the water
sources he uses as symbols cleansing and clarity of mind. Washing is used by Hughes
in the traditional sense of washing away sins or perhaps as a Christian symbol
of baptism.
‘Wind’
is a poem describing the power of nature. The wind ‘stampedes’ the fields and
the woods crash in the night. The trees are uprooted and Hughes says,
“….under
an orange sky,
The
hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light,
luminous black and emerald
Flexing
like the lens of a mad eye”.
The colours evoked are bright and contrasting creating a
brilliant picture: Orange, black and green. ‘Blade-light’ is lightning moving
fast like the lens of a madman’s eye. Nature is mad like a human being, says
the poet.
A.E.Dyson in ‘Ted
Hughes’, compares Hughes with Donne in utterance. He calls it as an ‘imagery
which is developed intellectually, but assimilated at every point to the
central emotional experience; vividness and even grotesqueness of phrase and
metaphor; metre which twists and turns in its wrestling with meaning’ (Dyson,
p.125). The poet is totally identified with some moment of power and violence
in some poems. He realizes a moment fully, ‘but remains a human and time –
bound intelligence outside the experience, aware of the unbridgeable gulf
between and fact, eternity and time’, in some other poems. Dyson divides Hughes’s poems into two categories
of total involvement and detachment. The
poems of total involvement do not contain any comments from the poet and he
categorizes ‘Hawk roosting’ as one such poem. ‘The hawk in the rain’, is
categorized as a poem with certain detached attitudes containing some
comments. Dyson refers to this quality
as ‘ambivalence’. Hughes poems move within the thought movement of deep
involvement and critical observation – internalization and deinternalization.
While the former quality involves bringing back pictures of war’s emotions and
images and thus creating attitudes of force and violence and putting them
amidst the poems, the latter quality uses intelligence to move away from the
immediacy of the present and fix it elsewhere questioning the same experience. The
wind having a mad eye is a picture from the violent external the poet
witnessed.
The last line of
the poem, “stones cry out under the horizons’, suits the earlier statement –
‘The hills had new places’ – as the personification of hills that are crying to
human beings is apt. ‘The horizons’ becomes a symbol of patience.
In the poem ‘Horses’ the last lines are,
“In
din of the crowded streets, going
among
the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in
so
lonely a place
Between the streams and the red
Clouds,
hearing curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure”
The ‘horizons’ are given a human character – patience –
and they endure.
In the poem,
‘Jaguar’, the last stanza goes like this:
“His stride is wilderness of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come”.
The world comes to him on the cage floor. The horizons are
again personified as human beings or life itself. Like the hawk, in ‘Hawk
Roosting’ and ‘Hawk in the Rain’ the Jaguar reigns supreme is the meaning
conveyed by ‘The world rolls under …his heal’.
In
the poem ‘Wind’ the stones cry out lonely under the horizons, giving a sense of
space, and fixing the size of stones under the vast horizon. Hughes gives human
characters to time, climates, seasons, temperature, space, almost every
phenomenon in the world. In ‘October Dawn’ he says,
“October
……
…………….
Has
dreamed a premonition
Of
ice across its eye ….
…………..
Ice
Has
got its spearhead….
First
a skin…
………..
…….
…..
a fist of cold
Squeezes
the fire ……..
…………………
at the core of the heart”
To
approach poems, one can avoid looking at the world in the traditional manner.
Human species are at the top of the hierarchical order while other species have
their lesser importance. The poems may become obtuse if our stand is so.
Instead the readers’ imagination has to visualize every little thing as
something with life, and movement equally important as man. ‘October Dawn’ has
to be visualized as a powerful element of life, thinking, and dreaming to
occupy more. It treads over lawns and destroys the shrubbery. Soon it becomes
powerful that it locks the rivers. Winter is a violent monster or creature
intervening with routing life changing its course. Again Hughes evokes the
power and force in Nature with these poems on animals, birds, seasons and any
other symptom of life.
‘May
day on Holderness’ a poem from ‘Lupercal’ describes summer as ‘motherly
summer’. The hills begin melting and taking the ores with them the waters go to
the North Sea. ‘As the incinerator, as the sun, as the spider, ‘the poet had
the whole world in his hands. ‘Flowerlike’ he loved nothing. Depression enters
his soul and he says,
“Dead
and unborn are in God comfortable”
Lupercal is published in 1960, and Hughes’ poetry can be
fixed in a particular historical situation. The poet is evoking a subjective
response to the affairs of the world and it changes the summer mood into
unhappiness. The summer is the ‘mute eater’. His imagination is disturbed by
war memories and he uses it as images. ‘The North sea lies soundless’ and
underneath life is at full swing. Hughes uses war imagery to describe active
life:
“…………..
Beneath it
Smoulder
the wars: to heart-beats,
Bomb,
bayonet.
‘Mother, mother’! cries the pierced helmet. Cordite oozings
of Gallipoli.”
It is the picture from the First World War, chosen to
describe the multitudes of lives under the sea.
II
GAUDETE
‘Gaudete’,
a narrative poem, published in 1977, tells the story of an ‘Anglican
Clergyman’, abducted by spirits into the other world. The spirits creates a
duplicate of him to take his place in this world. This is the thin excuse given
by the poet for the secular life led by the protagonist Reverend Nicholas Lumb.
The duplicate Lumb’s activities are described in a dramatic fashion, using
modern scenes, images and pictures. It is the north of England. Reverend Lumb
is walking hurriedly over a cobbled street. Instantaneously, Hughes evokes a
war scene, probably a scene after an air raid:
“All the length of the street, dead bodies are piled in
heaps and strewn in tangles everywhere between the heaps”.
Incredulous, he touches hands and faces.
He looks for wounds
The jaws loll, as he lifts strengthless heads,
Which
drop back slack-necked.
Layered, interlocked, double-jointed, abandoned,
The corpses stare up into the purpled sky
Or at the black walls, or deeply into each other
As in the bottom of a mass-grave.
A mass-grave! The whole street is a mass-grave!
They were herded in here, them all killed together.
As they embraced each other, or fought to be free of each
other,
Babies he, tumbled separate, like refugee bundles”.
(Gaudete,
p.11-12)
“Herded in here, then all killed together ‘– takes our
memories to Auswitchz. It looks like a description of the Jewish holocaust.
Reverend Lumb’s feelings are the feelings of the European:
“But what about these corpses? What about these dead
people all over the town? What happened?………..……….. ………..……….. ………..
In a firelit, domed, subterranean darkness
Lumb stands, numbed.
…………………
…………………
Who are these watchers?
…………………..
And
the animal mane
The
animal cheekbone and jaw, in the fire’s flicker
…………………..
Who
is this woman
And
who is the ancient creature………?
………………….
He
stands in confusion
An
looks round at the shadowed hollow faces
Crowding
to enclose him
Eyepits
and eye glints
He
declares he can do nothing
He
protests there is nothing he can do….”
(ibid,
p. 13, 14-15)
The
scene is familiar to us – a scene from T.S. Eliot’s poems. It is the
Westerner’s crisis in the twentieth century. The repeated images of scream,
running, laughter, nothing, nerves occur in ‘Graduate’ too. Why does a writer
repeat certain ideas? I.A. Richards says in his Appendix B in ‘The Principles
of Literary Criticism’: “When a writer has found a theme or image which fixes a
point of relative stability in the drift of experience, it is not to be
expected that he will avoid it. Such themes are a means of orientation.” (I.A.
Richards, p.70)
In
‘Gaudete Reverend Lumb runs and shouts. Hagen’s nerve is flickering. Pauline
Hagen is preparing a ‘scream’. She wants to ‘scream straight forward’.
Jennifer’s blasting music strikes her father ‘with derisive laughter and
contemptuous shouts…It is shouting something impossible, incomprehensible,
monstrous. He senses ‘some truly gloomy horror’ – some kind of
‘death-dawn—emptiness fear’ ‘A Scream’ in the head of Estridge ‘amplifies’
itself in pain – ‘A repeated approaching scream, then a silence.’ Lumb is ‘surrounded
by still-empty, never-used limitless freedom’. Lumb is,
“…afraid
As
if he were sleep and dreaming the first
Warnings
of smoke-smell
In
a burning room, where everything is already
spluttering
and banging into flames,
cores
of fury drumming flames,
The
flames swarming up, leaping like rats,
A
torrent of devils twisting upwards above the tops of everything.
As
if everything—
The
whole world and day where he
Stands,
trying to awake,
Were a giant aircraft out of control, shaking
Itself
to pieces, already losing height,
Spinning
slowly down in space.
Scattering burning chunks,
The air sprayed with blazing fuel,
Full
of an inaudible screaming,
Sprayed
with fine blood—“
(Gaudete,
p.52)
The image of a crashing aircraft with ‘fine blood’ is a
scene of pain evoked by Hughes. The poet creates a gruesome picture with the
sarcastic note of ‘fine’.
Later,
Mrs. Walsall is shown as becoming jealous of her barmaid and wanting to control
it. She,
“…lets
the cold tap water
Numb
her hands, and escapes thinking.
She
tries to let the water
Numb
her body. She fixes her mind
Under
the numbing water.
She
stands at the sink, numbed.” (Gaudete p.55)
Pain
and numbing of it are part of the Twentieth Century experiences. It has been a
spectacularly painful era where every one at some point or other felt it. How
to get out of the pain is the major engagement of Hughe’s poetry. Pain and
emptiness are his constant, highly repetitive themes. ‘Laughter’ and ‘scream’
are signs of hysteria or madness where as ‘silence’ is the sign of repressed
madness. Either some one laughs or screams or becomes completely and totally
quiet.
Dr.
Westlake notices ‘insanity’
‘between
the inflamed eyelids’ of Jennifer.
“He
is scorched by the hard fieriness,
A
jagged, opposite lighting
Running
along the edge of it
Like
an insane laughter—
Something
in his narrow shrivels with fear”
(Gaudete,
p.57)
‘Insane
laughter’ is an image having a solid figure of a madman creates ‘fear’ in the
mind of the doctors. Neurotic fear becomes a challenge in Modernism. Such a
theme, so modern, as it is a modern experience. Eliot evokes it with his narrow
skylines. Modern and postmodern poetry have focused their attention on this
‘fear’ resulting from nuclear families, cubicle houses, concept of privacy,
loss of family system, loss of traditional social setup and Ofcourse vast
technological progresses that moved men away from their natural position to an
unnatural white collared mechanical poems, where this neurotic fear becomes the
major issue.
In
Gaudete, Reverend Lumb’s housekeeper is looking at a magical ball to read the
future. She sees,
“Lumb’s
face
Contorts,
transforming
To
a grotesque of swollen flesh
A
glistening friar-fat
Gargoyle
of screaming or laughter”
(ibid.
p.63)
Screams
during a nightmare is also a part of this pattern of fear that Hughes designs.
Estridge’s younger daughter Jennifer has a nightmare:
“She
starts to howl out over her
dead
sister who lies in the snow
A
wolf crying and snarling jumps
up
on to her bed suddenly
And
she screams and jumps upright
In
her empty room”
(ibid
p.69)
These
surface words and pictures are the key to the deeper issues of a poet’s mind.
The issues questioned by Gaudete are: the modern loss of spirituality, the primitive
forces of human sexuality against morality, the importance of military,
suppressed will of humanity, nature vs nurture, the limitations of established
institutions and the underlying insane fear running through the human mind.
Reverend
Lumb (a perfect name to rhyme with Lump and numb) is contrasted with military
men as a man of great physical vigour in trivial matters. There is a slight
mockery of British Imperialism running throughout the poem.
Major
Hagen, ‘a frontal Viking weatherproof drained of the Janities, pickled in
mess-alcohol and smoked dark’, is watching his wife through a binocular. His
‘nerve is flickering under the exemplary scraped steel hair on the bleak skull!
But his poise doesn’t change and it absorbs the tremor’. His ‘under lip, so
coarsely wreathed And undershot… is not moved’. Hughes says the general
symbolizes, ‘Forty generations from the freezing salt and the long ships’.
Major Hagen is British Imperialistic tendencies that began forty generations
ago with the launch of a strong British Tudor Navy. His face is ‘nerve –
harrowed’. His fingers are ‘horny’ (with its double meaning). His laughter is
‘machine laughter’. His grin is like the grin of a patient after a
mouth-operation’. His fingers, using another image, now are, ‘carapaced’. His
face is a ‘face-crust’.
“….He
is yelling
An
avalanche is on the move.
It
will have to come
There
is so much he must not fail
Humiliation
of Empire, a heraldic obligation
Must
have its far-booming say.”
(Gaudete,
p.34)
‘Far-booming say’, says Hughes analysing the consequences
of violent tendencies in the European character which made them dominate the
world and internalize violence in their own home ground as post colonialism
suggests.
III
Birthday letters
Hughes’s poems reveal the era of neurosis in which the
poet lived. ‘Birthday Letters’ show his passionate involvement in the condition
of human degeneration. The collapse of nerves of his society is frankly
expressed as the themes of this collection, recognized as having
autobiographical elements in them. Hughes creates metaphors for fear and
frustration, facing the questions of times. No more does he try to justify the
violence. Instead he looks at the immense tragedy happening around him, the
collapse of nerves of the people and tries to describe the emotions, watching
the symptoms closely and keenly. What begins in the earlier collections of
poems as a strand becomes intensified now. The persona he evokes now is full of
understanding and upset with the way life has turned out. In ‘9 willow
street’, a poem appearing in ‘Birthday
letters’, Hughes writes about neurotic fear:
“…..your Panic Bird chipping at an old egg,
…………..You
In a paralysis of terror –
flutters
………And your
heart
Jumped at your ribs,……
…….an airy Hell!
Your
typewriter,
Your alarm clock, your new sentence
Tortured you, a cruelty computer
Of agony niceties,
……..
Strokes of a hallucinating fever
In some heaving dimension
of chemical horror”
(Hughes,p.72).
The phrases Hughes presents create a world of mental pain
and suffering. ‘Chemical horror’,
‘hallucinating fever’, ‘paralysis
of terror – flutters’, ‘Panic Bird’, ‘inflamed nerves’, ‘dream – maimed and
dream – blind’ are the images offered by the poet. They paint the dark
interiors of the mind in the colours of gloom. Fever, terror and horror are the
emotions created in the mind of people. Panic flutters in their heart. They
have no hope as their dreams are either maimed or blind. They have lost their
capacity to hope as dreams fail them. Chemical horrors are dominating the
world. Modern weapons are spreading pain and horrors. These are the experiences
of the population and the poet is no exception that he can ignore all this pain
in him and others.
The panic bird appears in another poem, ‘The Bird’. Under its glass dome, the panic bird is
alive. Behind the cool exterior, the mounting anxiety is caricatured as the
panic bird. Its life is throbbing in its throat as if it stood on ether. The
bird finally turns out to an eagle – ‘Germany’s eagle bleeding up
through…American eagle in a cloud of Dettol’.
The bird jabs its talons at the glass. It wants to be born and is
pecking at the glass. The aggressive tendency of countries is picturised as a
bird that is a bird of prey as well as a bird of nervousness. Aggression and
nervousness are presented as the contradicting qualities of the humanity. Its
moods swing from one extreme to another. It is a human condition that Hughes
witnessed in individuals and therefore in countries. Later in the poem Hughes
concludes:
“Like
crumbs of the old, slabbed snow
That
all but barricaded London
The
day your bird broke free and the glass dome
Vanished – with a ringing sound
I
thought was a telephone
I
knew the glass had gone and the bird had gone
Like
lifting an eyelid I peered for the glass –
But I
knew it had gone. Because of the huge
Loose
emptiness of light
Wheeling through everything.
As if
a gecko
Fell into empty light”
(Hughes, p.78)
The autobiographical lines also have one more layer of
meaning. After the aggression and
nervousness there is nothing left except ‘emptiness’. It is a huge, loose light
of emptiness. The emptiness brings an image to the mind of the poet – the
picture of a small lizard in empty light. Like the frog which is spread wide
this gecko also is usually clinging to the wall looking almost like a miniature
frog, when spread flat. That is how all this aggression is going to end Hughes
says.
In the poem
‘Badlands’, lightening grips humanity which comes ‘out of the sun’s
explosion over Hiroshima, Nagasaki’. It grips
people by the roots of hair and holds them down on the bed. It stretches
across their retina which is the global map of nerves in blue flames. The mind
sees a land that is empty, horrible and archaic. Here again, the panicky bird
flutters seeing a tiny terror – a maniac midget hurtling in top-gear uncontrol
– bouncing and clashing. Hughes sums up
in the end:
“This emptiness is sucking something out of us.
Here where ther’s
only death, maybe our life
Is terrifying. Maybe it’s the life
In us
Frightening the earth, and frightening us”
(Hughes, p.86).
Life that nourished us is earlier with all its achievement
is now threatening us the poet is worried. A civilization that gave great
prospects to its people is now threatening the same people. Its emptiness is
stifling. It is sucking the spirit out of the people making them nervous.
People find only death everywhere and not hope and life. The people need
healing. Hughes’s emphasis on healing can be understood well only from this
context. When he presents the crow as an alternative model of thinking, it is
only as an alternative to this emptiness that is sucking humanity day by day.
Amorality is better than neurosis, he seems to say. The spiritual emptiness
symbolized by Lumb in ‘Gaudete’, dominates the society around the poet, and his
poems are his personal responses to the way he looked and interpreted the life
around him. The poet is conditioned, seasoned and limited by his perceptions.
To him life appears empty and he tries to prescribe medicines to clear out of
the emptiness. In his poem, ‘Fishing
Bridge’ a voice speaks:
“Find your souls….
Find your true selves. This way. Search, search.
……………………………
Find the core of the labyrinth”
(Hughes, p.88).
The search for the core had been in the mind of the westerner for quite sometime.
Hughes’s interest in shamanism and occult philosophy come under this framework
of interest. We should remember T.S.Eliot’s interest in Hinduism that he
presented as a guiding model of living in ‘The Waste Land’. The First World War gave the working material
to Eliot. Similarly, we find the wars and the holocaust giving the content to
Hughes. About the base from which Eliot worked has been discussed by Hughes in
his essay, ‘The Poetic Self: A Centenary Tribute to T.S.Eliot’. Hughes says in
the essay that the starting point of Eliot was emptiness. The First World War
gives to Eliot a new terror: the meaninglessness, Eliot “brought the full
implication of that moment into consciousness. It formed the features of his
genius. It determined the novelty and scope of his greatness. And it decided
his unique position in the history of poetry. That desacralized landscape had
never been seen before. Or if it had
been glimpsed, it had never been real. Eliot found it, explored it, revealed
it, gave it a name and a human voice.”
(Hughes, p.270)
In the above mentioned essay, a shamistic study of Eliot’s
poetic self Hughes reveals two things:
his deep involvement with the wars and shamanism. It looks like he was aware of
the fact that his own poetic self was formed in his deep thinking about the
wars and their impact on humanity like Eliot’s. When Hughes compares W.B.Yeats
with T.S.Eliot, he analyses the interest the former had in the study of occult
and says:
“For
him, the methodical work of magic had the kind of importance that accurate
nuclear physics had for the makers of the Bomb..”
(Hughes, p.270)
Hughes’s comparison of the interest in magic to the
development of the bomb, tells us the about the workings of his mind.
Technically both interests are the same as the purposes of the ‘Thrushes’ and
‘Mozart’ or the brilliance of ‘The Honey Bee’ and ‘Einstein’. The bomb is
constantly reminding the poet of his role in this universe. He is compelled by
a need to revitalize his world with some kind of spiritual energy. In the same essay he discusses the attitudes
of his fellow human beings:
“Even in
the 1940s and 1950s it was common to hear poets lamenting the futility, the
irrelevance and above all the obsolence of their art in the modern world”
(Hughes, p.274)
It is obvious Hughes has decided to write about the
presence available than whimper about contents that are not possible. Hence it becomes important that his poems are
historically placed rather than left alone without any physical identity.
Instead of evading the issues, he expresses his violent anger, sees
immeasurable violence in man and frustratingly turns to animals and birds and
meets the same violence there too. Ultimately he realizes the death of species
only end in birth. It is a realistic approach to life trying to accept the pain
of life as inevitable. Attitudes may help and therefore one can try to laugh at
the recklessness of life and its comical aspects. Living is much better than
thinking of dying, even if you are forced to live like the crow. And what is
wrong in the life of the crow, he asks. We have developed certain prejudices
against the crow. We have labeled the
crow with certain characteristics and take pride in our self-righteousness. We
have decided we are right and the crow is wrong. If we are so right why have we
dropped bombs on cities or killed millions of people in the name of race, is
the question of Hughes. Living like the crow eating things out of dustbins is
much better than living like the heron and the other birds with so much of
purpose and commitment. Animals are in no way lesser than humanity, even the
best of them. Mozart or Einstein is just like animals and birds. In no way have
we mastered nature and become bigger than her. Hughes is putting humanity in
its place with his poems. The wars are the base of his poetic genius.
Hughes’s poems have to be read in a group as in the case
of poets in general. For one poem nay talk about the pride of the hawk and the
other poem nay compare animals to humanity and some other poem may express his
anger and violence and another poem may reveal his fine sensitivity, empathy,
deep hurt by life, sense of failure, and yet another poem may show his
yearnings to accept life as it is.
His poems are records of a particular period in life for
the western society. In the poem ‘Karlsbad Caverns’, a piece on bats, the storm
flashes and crawls like a ‘war’. Internalized experiences which gave him
permanent and stamped pictures in his mind, jump up suddenly from their deep
embedded state and move into the present moment of inspiration demanding
attention. Therefore we have the unusual comparison of a bat moving like a war.
The wars with their correlatives keep coming to the forefront of his poetic
imagination of the poet getting recorded in his poems with more frequency.
In another poem ‘Stubbing Wharfs’, Hughes is describing a
‘gummy dark bear’. Suddenly a definition of America crops in as –‘America,
pioneer in the wrong direction’. The reference is to the cities bombed by the
Americans. Further in the poem he says:
“…………..Where I saw so clearly
My
vision house, you saw only blackness
Black nothing, the face of nothingness”
(Hughes, p.108)
The content of the poem is a house, a place to live in.
there are two perspectives presented in the poem – one positive and the other
negative. Hughes builds the qualities of negative thinking and what it leads to
in ‘The Birthday Letters’. The persona
he projects takes the positive role while the other is presented as negative.
When this context is depersonalized, it reveals his society’s two opposing
perspectives present. ‘The Birthday Letters’ contrasts optimism with pessimism.
It describes the emotional movement of negative thinking. The negative persona
sees only blackness. It is a black nothing. A face of nothingness. A mind
equipped with such emotions is weighed by dark memories. These thoughts chase
the person and torture him.
‘A Short Film’ is a poem, which discusses the power of
such memories. Hughes says,
“Now it
is a dangerous weapon, a time-bomb
Which
is a kind of body-bomb, long-term too
………………….
And
how that explosion would hurt
Is not
just an idea of horror but a flash of fine sweat
Over
the skin-surface, a bracing of nerves,
For
something that has already happened”
(Hughes, p.134)
The memory of war experiences cannot get away that easily
and we have the bomb once again in an unusual comparison. Now the bomb is
compared to memory. Like the ticking time-bomb memory keeps ticking in the mind
always foretelling disaster, some terrible future misfortune totally negative.
The unusualness of the comparisons shows how he is taking his poetic material
from the world of wars or to be extant the experiences associated with war.
When memory is contained it affects the nerves of the body. To him a poet, the
tension is released in poetry. It is here the comparison of a shaman to a poet
creeps in. constantly Hughes brings in the comparison between a poet and a
shaman.
Healing the world is major intellectual commitment and
Hughes writes about his interest in various systems of thinking. he takes
serious effort in his essay ‘Shakesphere and Occult Neoplatonism’ to prove the
importance it played in Europe, especially in literature. Goethe, Blake and
Yeats came under its influence he says. International current of metaphysical
systems evolve in Shakesphere’s own
radical plays. His search for a
substitute for rationalism that gave birth to the bomb is visible in his essay.
He gives the list of the four ethical aims fundamental to Cabbala:
“The first is to achieve harmony between the fixed and the free, between
the severe formal powers of Judgment and the flowing spontaneous powers of
Mercy; the second is to achieve the sacred marriage, the conjunction of
masculine and feminine; the third is to redeem the Shekina from the abyss of
the demons where the Shekina is the Divine Spirit (originally the soul of
Israel (Ariel), imagined as female, the soul as god’s bride) immersed in
material existence; and the fourth is to attain mastery over – or defense
against – the demonic powers of the abyss. These four principles are also the
cornerstones of the Gnostic myth of Sophia which rises so forcibly into the
substructure of ‘romances’ ”
(Hughes, p.309)
To a memory hurt by violent experiences metaphysics is offered
as an antidote. Hughes justifies how great poets themselves have come under the
influence of metaphysics. In the
poem ‘Beach’, we find a conversation:
“……………………………why
were English cars all black – to hide the filth?
Or
to stay more respectable, like bowlers
And umbrellas? Every vehicle a hearse
The traffic procession a hushing leftover
Of
victoria’s perpetual funeral Sunday –
The
funeral of colour and light and life!
London a morgue of dinge – English dinge
Our sole indigenous art – form – depressionist!
And why were everybody’s
Garments so deliberately begrimed?
Grubby – looking, like a camouflage? ‘Alas!
We have never recovered’, I said, ‘from our fox – holes,
Our trenches, our fatigues and our bomb – shelters”
(Hughes, p. 154
– 155)
The persona he undertakes is still under the influence of
his externals. He symbolizes his people and is not recovered really from the
shock of the wars. The loss of the empire that ruled for one or two centuries
coming to an end in such a sudden and violent manner giving pain and suffering
to people is something that cannot be overcome in a few days or years. Apart
from the losing of the empire the reign of the Nazi and the holocaust and
finally the Japan bombings are stored in the mind of the British. Depression
rules the minds of the people. It has
even affected the arts.
Placing the poems of Hughes in the framework of society is
just one way of reading his poetry. Theodore Adorno discusses similar
perspectives:
“The universality of the lyric’s substance, however, is social in
nature. Only one who hears the voice of humankind in the poem’s solitude can
understand what the poem is saying; indeed, even the solitariness of lyrical
language itself is prescribed by an individualistic and ultimately atomistic
society, just as conversely its general cogency depends on the intensity of its
individuation. For that reason, however, reflection on the work of art is
justified in inquiring, and obligated to inquire concretely into its social
content and not content itself with a vague feeling of something universal and
inclusive….Such thought, however – the social interpretation of lyric poetry as
of all works of art – may not focus directly on the so – called social
perspective or the social interests of the works or their authors. Instead, it
must discover how the entirety of a society, conceived as an internally
contradictory unity, is manifested in the work of art, in what way the work of
art remains subject to society and in what way it transcends it.”
(Adorno, p.343-344)
What Adorno says about the relevance of society in lyric
poetry can be generalized, extended and applied to any art form. Art is born
out of society but has the responsibility of going beyond the narrow
limitations of that society’s thinking borders. Movement of thought from the particular to
the universal should be the quality or nature of art. The embedded meanings
other than the particularized ones a text can give into, decides its
universality after a close reading. Art
has to exceed boundaries of thinking.
Hughes attacks the western man’s movement away from the
concept of God:
“your heart,
mid-Sahara, raged
In
its emptiness.
Your
dreams were empty.
You
bowed at your desk and you wept
Over
the story that refused to exist,
As
over a prayer
That
could not be prayed
To
a non-existent God. A dead God
With
a terrible voice.
You
were like those desert ascetics
Who
fascinated you,
Parching
in such a torturing
Vacuum
of God” (Hughes, p.188)
The ‘vacuum of God’, sucks goblins out of the ‘blank rock
face’. A kind of sterility becomes God with a gagged prayer. The panic of
emptiness also becomes a God. The
reference to the desert ascetics reminds us of Zarathustra and tells us the
reference is to Nietzsche and his philosophy of the death of God. Hughes blames
western society for moving away from faith. The bird of panic chases the ones
without faith. It tortures them giving
them sleepless nights.
CHAPTER 5
Conclusion
Holocaust poetry
Antony Rowland in
his ‘Holocaust Poetry’, discusses the
qualities of Hughes’s poetry as part of post-holocaust poetry in chapter 4
titled as ‘Ted Hughes, Peephole Metaphysics and the Poetics of Extremity’.
Rowland writes: “However, as opposed to the other post-Holocaust poets
discussed in this book, Hughes declares in his prose statements that Britain
remained relatively unaffected by the events of world war II, and that world
war I had a much more profound effect on settlements that (allegedly) lost
their entire male population in one day of trench conflict. Hughes’s apparent lack of interest in the
holocaust is belied by the poems that do engage with the camps, such as ‘Lines
about Elias’….However, unlike the aesthetics
of awkwardness in Geoffrey Hill’s The Triumph of Love, the Crow sequence does not self-consciously
discuss the possibility of aesthetic culpability within the texture of the
poems themselves. The poems form ‘barbaric’ depictions of war’s barbarism, but
not critiques of the critique of war” (Rowland, p.142-143). War creates forceful feelings in the minds of
the people and lyrics take a slap across
the face as the subjective feelings they are supposed to be writing about are
now not fine feelings of appreciation, but terrible feelings of pain and
violence. It is possible to narrate
these violent experiences that was done by the print and electronic media. Irony and satire alone cannot explain theses
horrors of the wars as these literary techniques are too subtle to handle such
major ethical issues arising out of technological wars with advanced
weapons unimaginably huge in their
repercussions.
Rowland says
further ‘There is certainly a troubling,
but not fascistic, concept of the self at work in much of Hughes’s
writing’. A reflective philosopher
studying the dissolution of the subject in Hughes’s work would be unsettled by
it argues Rowland quoting Susan Gubar: “the ironic friction between the lyric’s
traditional investment in voicing subjectivity and a history that assaulted not
only the innumerable sovereign subjects but indeed the very idea of sovereign
selfhood” (p.145). The destruction of
individual valour and courage reducing it to a medium operated by machines is
an onslaught to human will and sense of achievement. The poet sees the conflict
between the self of humanity and the machines. There is an ‘activity’ that runs
through the works of Hughes. This
activity is something that could not have been presented by any camera. It is
an artistic achievement responding to the challenge of the camera. The ‘Nazis produced
much of the newsreel arising out of the holocaust, the writer and the cinema
operator can only feign to be interested when viewing representations of the
vicarious past’. The post-holocaust generation that receives history primarily
through visual media had difficulties responding to these experiences. The movement of action in the poems of Hughes
is ‘metaphysical’. The poet put in a conclusive situation is now
trying to recapture certain thought processes in a different form using
metaphors and images and at this point has an artistic crisis as the images
provided by the era is an era of pain and suffering. The movement of
metaphysics is an effort to see beyond the present, as the present is only
death and torture.
Hughes conceives a
‘poetics of extremity’ which is ‘sharpened’ by the poems of Pilinszky whose
‘fusion of near-death experiences and creativity – a conflation registered so
controversially in Alvarez’s introduction to The New Poetry – led to the
lamentable Hughes poem ‘Lines about Elias’’ . Rowland calls ‘Your Paris’ as a
‘more successful post-Holocaust poem’.
The poem analyses the conceptions of ‘post- war capital’ by America and
Europe as suggested by Rowland. The
extremity that is suggested by Rowland, reflecting the historical substance and
responding to it also is operated by him in a conscious manner of moving away
as a process of deinternalization takes place in his mind. The movement of
thought in the mind of Hughes is as discussed earlier between internalization and deinternalization, moving
across painful memories of the war and the post war depression and an effort to
heal the mind from the effects of pain and gloominess.
Deinternalization
If internalization is looked at as moving closer to
particulars to be influenced by them as well as forcing intense attitudes on
things, deinternalization is the poet’s effort to move away from the impact of
the externals to arrive at a kind of consensus.
‘The
current of human passion” is the current Ovid divines and follows in each of
his tales, says Ted Hughes in his introduction to ‘Tales from Ovid’ published
in 1997. In a way, the same theme is attempted in Gaudete, published in the
same year. The concept of believing in the strength of primitive forces in
humanity is strongly reinforced by these narrative poems. The same theme takes
a trickster shape in his crow poems and animal poems emphasizing on the primary
violence and passion in life. He creates a broad framework of Energy, Passion,
amorality, violence, Force, Nothingness and Emptiness out of which is born a
smaller framework of civilization with morality, religion, justice, goodness
etc. The clash between these two frames is Hughes’ poetry. The frames are
interdependent and one thrives from the other. The poet is outside the frames
sometimes passing his neutral comments what is termed by this thesis as
deinternalization and is also inside the frames most of the times caught in the
consciousness of his era of pain reacting to it and trying to heal it. His
poetic consciousness moves to and fro like a pendulum in a clock moving from
the particular to the Universal.
In his essay ‘Ted Hughes and the death of poetry’, Nick
Bishop argues “the only aid in the effort to recover the fundamental
psychological pattern of literary development to which the poet owes primary
allegiance. Hughes, both in his own critical prose and in his poetic mythology,
unearths with remarkable consistency the overweening need for ‘death and
rebirth’, whether it is in the shamanic form of ritual dismemberment,
stripping-to-the-bones and subsequent clairvoyant return, or the Sufic
annihilation of self in the ‘living body of Allah’ or the myth narratives that
so clearly underpin Gaudete and Cave Birds” (Bishop, p.2).
His compassion is for his fellow human beings and he
blames science and technology for modern neurotic fear and rear. At the same
time the sharpness in a pike and the arrogance of a hawk is described. The poet
is a nomadic being shifting from one consciousness to another resulting in a
kind of multiple consciousnesses. He tries to justify amorality and also needs
morality.
These
ethical questions engage post-modern thinking at large. Zygmunt Bauman, in his
book ‘Postmodern Ethics’ discusses the moralities of difference published in
1993, Bauman sums up the postmodern ethical questions and calls his last
chapter, ‘In the End is the Beginning’ – a major thought process of Hugh’s
poems. Bauman says, ‘…I believe that the frustration of certainty is morality’s
gain. Not the kind of gain we would wish, perhaps, and have been looking for –
but the greatest gain that one can reasonably hope for, while remaining a moral
person.”
(wrongs
bound Bauman, p.223)
Hughes’s poems are an influx, if we look at them from
Bauman’s angle. By questioning morality’s certainty, Hughes sensitizes the
reader to his position in the Universe – it also strengthens morality itself.
Bauman continues to say:
“It
is a general feature of social change that while it puts right or attenuates
the wrongs of yesterday, it also ushers in new to become a target of curative
efforts tomorrow” (Bauman p.223). This is how society moves on as today’s right
becomes tomorrow’s wrong, and therefore artists who wanted to make their works
immortal wanted their works to break away from the immediacy. But it is a
paradoxical situation as shown in Hughes’s poetry. The poet’s themes and
language are the reflection of the immediacy as he is speaking to a particular
listening consciousness that itself constitutes of immediacy. His knowledge is from
the learned and experienced past and the living present. The violent imagery
from the world of Hughes (experimental through listening to war accounts and
seeing the after effects of war in him and his family and friends), the Wars,
Nazism, Fascism and the Jewish holocaust along with sophisticated technologies,
is bound in its own historical context and is not able to break away from its
vital influence.
The
Postmodern ethics of Bauman and the poetry of Hughes is born out of its
immediate experience. Now and then when Hughes tries to come out of his
immediacy and makes statements of justification on violence and force it seems
to be a kind of universalization, a kind of deinternalization getting out of
the influence of the embedded pictures in his mind. His attacks on European
imperialism and sense of self-righteousness have created vigorous poems. He
bashes Science and technology up mercilessly.
When he takes sides without bothering about the attitude of the future
generation on his poems, he comes out authentic and powerful and very angry.
And these poems come within the framework of morality and religion.
Talking
about the moral stand of the Westerner, Bauman says, “The dead will not be
awakened, the smashed will not be made whole. The pile of debris will go on
growing. Those who suffered did. Those who got killed, will stay dead…what we
want is to get away from here. Where we hope to land…is a ‘there’ which we
thought of little and knew of even less…Of what life would be like without
shackles or wounds, the Grand Idea of Emancipation tells little and knows less
still. That life after emancipation has been lodged, after all, in the
future—the absolute other, the ungraspable and the ineffable…. so the vision
may stay unblemished forever, preening itself on its untarnished – untried.
Innocence. …. Suffering was no more a trial of piety; it was now an act, an act
with a purpose and a function…. with one stone of rationality, modernity killed
two birds. It managed to recast as inferior and doomed all those forms of life,
which did not harness their own pains to the chariot of Reason. And it obtained
a safe conduct for the pains it was about to inflict itself.” (Bauman, p.224-226)
‘Post-modern
ethics’ thus sums up the entire attitude of Hughes poetry moving between the
spheres of intensity of the pain of the period and also trying to move out of
the pain reaching out for the next level of experience trying to heal the
wounded mind. In the epilogue of ‘Gaudete’, Hughes writes:
“Having
first given away pleasure—
Which
is hard—
What
is there left to give?
There
is pain.
Pain is hardest of all
It cannot really be given.
It can only be paid down
Equal, exactly,
To what can be no part of falsehood.
This payment is that purchase.”
(Gaudete,
p.192)
Written in 1977, these prophetic lines are giving the
Westerner the way out of the European moral crisis. The Epilogue puts across a
series of visions:
“Every day the world gets simply
Bigger and bigger
And smaller and smaller
Everyday the world gets more
And more beautiful
And uglier and uglier
Your comings get closer
Your goings get worse.”
(Gaudete,
p.198-199)
The poet ‘sees’ a world coming out in future too with its
contradictions. His poems show the impact of bomb on human psyche. As a weapon
the bomb has terrified the twentieth century and the emotions are recorded in
the poetics of Hughes. It is the record of humanity coming to terms with
modernity. The poems move between man’s internalized pain and wisdom coming out
of his effort to detach himself from it. They are the poems of the atomic age.
New ethics are born out of experience. Hughes draws his poetic material from
the war that finally it becomes a metaphor for life to him. War and the bomb
become the symbol of life’s difficulties, a metaphor for life itself. Every bit
of life that he sees around is going through similar wars to survive. Hughes
asks a drop of water, which to him is a source of healing the wounded hearts,
hurt in the fight for survival, in the poem, ‘The man seeking his experience enquires
his way of a drop of water’,
“Venerable elder!
Let us learn of you.
Read us a lesson, a
plain lesson how
Experience has worn or made you anew”.
The poet moves away from internalized emotions and tries
to learn from nature to learn to tackle life as it is. It is a conscious effort to detach oneself
from experiences. This world is a ‘mesh of sense’ which helps grow attitudes
that are ‘world – shouldering monstrous ‘I’’. The celebration of self is
monstrous. The same poem if read along
with ‘Hawk roosting’ will explain what Hughes thought about the arrogance of
the hawk or man. We can sense a mild note of sarcasm running throughout the
latter poem where the poet is laughing at the confidence of the hawk.
Deinternalization is closely associated with the earlier
thought movement of internalization. We understand the pain of humanity and we
are insensitive to the pain of fellow creatures around us, the poet says. ‘To
paint a water lily’ is a poem discussing the inaudible suffering of nature:
“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
Rainbow their arcs, spark, or settle
Cooling like beads of molten metal
Through the spectrum.”
The water lily and the surrounding appear very beautiful
to human eyes as we lack the ability to actually see what is happening inside
and around the pond. When he visualizes the scene and recreates a scene with
his attitudes overwritten on it, Hughes also is trying to disengage himself
from his immediate thought flow of realizing the violence in the society.
Internalization helps him to move away from the epicenter of pain by talking
about other similar pains in the world.
The sea has achieved shells, vertebrae, claws, carapaces and skulls,
says Hughes in the poem, ‘Relic’. Time in the sea has eaten its tail and has
cast these ‘indigestibles’ into the sea. Nobody can become rich in the sea as
time levels everything. The ‘curved jawbone’ is now a ‘cenotaph’. Not only the
pond but also even the sea is a Warfield to him. ‘Time and a world’ are ‘too
old to alter’ he consoles in the poem ‘Cat and mouse’. A snowdrop pursues her ends with ‘brutal’
self interest ‘as the stars of this month’ with ‘her pale head heavy as metal’
in the poem, ‘Snowdrop’. The brutality in nature is also human beings and
therefore there is nothing to worry seems to be the note in the poem. The
wisdom he is projecting is possible because of the way he is forcing his
imagination on nature. When the mowing machine works on the grassland it
appears to the poet as if the machine is eating the field of grass. Its
‘frightening the blood in the tunnel’ he says in the poem, ‘Sunstroke’. To him
the ‘Thistles’ ‘spike the summer air’ every one of them ‘a revengeful burst of
resurrection, a grasped fistful of splintered weapons’. The imagery is from the
world of wars. The sensitivity he gave to the real war experiences is also lent
to nature where his embedded pictures of the war get inside the creations of
imagination as images. An orchestra ‘explodes’ to him. In the poem, ‘Cadenza’
he says,
“Blue with sweat, the violinist
Crashes into the orchestra, which explodes”
Giant crabs remind him of ‘a packed trench of helmets’ in
the poem, ‘Ghost crabs’. The hawthorn blossoms have ‘deathly perfume’ in ‘Green
wolf’. The larks ‘with long cutting screams buckling like razors’ are plunging
into the earth in search of food on grass in ‘Skylarks’. The same poem also
talks about trees that struggle to make leaves ‘drinking the sea and eating the
rock’. Hughes tries to come out of his own embedded images by thinking about
the suffering in the world where even growing a leaf is a difficult job. A
‘river’ is ‘a gutter of death’ to him.
In ‘Salmon eggs’, he says,
“Something else is going on in the river
More vital than
death”
Hughes total involvement with death in most of his poems
now takes a new meaning in this poem where the importance of death is
underplayed. Death does not matter the
poem says and ‘only birth matters’ it emphasizes. The river his symbol of
healing the world, silences everything ‘in a leaf – mouldering hush’. The
‘savage amusement of life’ is discussed in the poem, ‘October salmon’. ‘This
chamber of horrors is also home’ says Hughes. The fundamental realistic
approach to life considers darkness and light are the same. It argues for a philosophic detachment from
the horrors of living.
The internalization of Hughes is opening the doors of
animal world to the poet. In ‘Astrological conundrums’ he says,
“As I heard her story I dissolved
In the internal powers of tiger
And passed through a dim land
A sudden cry of fear, an infant’s cry –
Close, as if my own ear had cried it.”
This ability to imagine so closely with other creatures
could have been the result of a mind made alert with pain. Suffering makes
senses alert and he uses it in his poetry. So in a way the wars are responsible
for the development of his peculiar characteristic of getting inside creature’s
consciousness as a part of his poetic genius. Dissolving into the consciousness
of animals opened new avenues of thinking to him. The internalization takes him
to the violence of war as well as the violence of animals.
‘Anniversary’ discusses the logic of life:
“…..The work of the cosmos,
Creation and destruction of matter
And of anti –
matter
Pulses and flares,
shudders and fades
Like the Northern
Lights in their feathers”.
Acceptance of life is possible only when the opposite
forces of right and wrong are recognized.
Hughes’s concept of healing through poetry as a movement
away from internalization:
Hughes consciously makes an attempt to heal his society
through his poems. He moves away from the painful pictures of his period and
builds concepts to heal the readers, as he says in ‘Crow on the Beach’:
“Beneath the Her-tale, like the satyr behind the Tragedy, is the Trickster
Saga, a series of Tragicomedies. It is a series, and never properly tragic,
because Trickster, demon of phallic energy, bearing the spirit of the sperm, is
repetitive and indestructible. No matter what fatal mistakes he makes, and what
tragic flaws he indulges, he refuses to let sufferings or death detain him, but
always circumvents them, and never despairs. …The Trickster, the Hero, and the
Saint on the Path meet in the Holy Fool. …And each of them, true to that little
sperm, serpent at the center of the whole Russian Doll complex, works to redeem
us, to heal us, and even, in a sense, to resurrect us, in our bad times”
(Hughes, p.241). The crow as a model of
the sperm or human energy, something that cannot be destroyed, also becomes a
caricature of the westerner who will live through this trauma of these bad
times is the message the poems give, though Hughes wanted to present the crow
as the model of optimism.
The universal energies have been tapped by the poetry of
Hughes throughout his creative life. His sequences of poetry work towards this
end to achieve wholeness and harmony through the imaginative, healing processes
of his art. He takes the role of a priest or shaman and takes the
responsibility seriously. Ann Skea presents this thesis and argues that Hughes
is aware of both the creative and destructive powers of energies. Accordingly,
Crow, Gaudete, and Cave Birds show the skill of the poet in putting complex
themes together in a dramatic manner. The forces of nature can never be
suppressed by anything. This new ability to weave myths into the fabric of each
poem is a special quality of his imagination. The metaphysical aspect of his
poetry is a part of his conscious attempt to move away from his internalized
memories of pain. It is his deinternalization of thought process. Skea says “So, taking all that remains of the
old Celtic-British Kingdom of Elmet, in the physical reality of the West
Yorkshire moors with their changing skies and their fickle weather, Hughes has
poetically transformed the death of the Calder Valley society into a spiritual
rebirth” (Skea, p.127). Experience of
intense pain has to be healed as a natural process. The myths are in response to the process of
internalized experiences of the century.
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