Ted Hughes
Context and criticism
Hughes – ‘the first idea of Crow was really an idea of style… the songs that a crow would
sing. In other words, songs with no music whatsoever, in a super-simple and super-ugly
language’
- Crow records a ‘subjective event of visionary intensity’
Lomas – ‘[animals] are heavily anthropomorphized’ and become ‘excruciatingly lifelike
masks’
Greening – in Hughes’ poems there is a sense of ‘moving inwards as much as outwards’
New York Review of Books – ‘perhaps a more plausible explanation for the present
condition of the world, than the Christian sequence’
Bate – Hughes was ‘constantly torn between a mythic or symbolic and an elegiac or
confessional tendency’
Gill – ‘a journey to re-experience a de-idealized past’
Gifford – ‘his belief in the imagination as a tool for healing the errors of culture’
Cash – Hughes is often ‘a solitary observer of human nature’
Spacey – ‘nature often portrayed as a battle ground’
Morrison – Hughes ‘imagines what it is to be a landscape’
Hart – ‘Hughes identified with the predatory animals themselves’
Dyson – ‘for Hughes violence and power go together’
O’Connor – Crow allows Hughes to recount the loss of England’s soul and to reconstruct
her ‘mythic history’
Norton – Hughes through the eyes of the predator and Plath through the eyes
of the victim’
Adria – ‘While Plath sees death as the final destiny without return, Hughes
sees it as a starting point’
Personal context:
Hughes was born and raised in the Calder Valley in Yorkshire – personal experience of
mining communities and the forces of industrialization in the north
Hughes’ work often subverts and adopts elements of the pastoral genre
He completed National Service in the military which inspires works like Mayday on
Holderness
Keen interest in anthropology – completed his degree at Cambridge University
The March Calf
- twinning of life, creativity and procreation with the cyclical force of
death
, - ironic awareness about the use of humour in this poem – a glossy
upbeat language despite connotations of death and disrepair
- resemblance to a nativity scene – spiritual element to the birth of
the calf
- playing with a well-known range of metaphors - ‘topheavy oven’
depiction of the calf
- humorous language ‘dressed in his best’ – internal rhyme here to
create a sense of sentimental perfection and completeness
- ‘Little Fauntleroy’
o a neat, sweet, comforting image
o taking the mess of birth and turning it into a sanitise image
o ‘Sunday suit’ – evokes some sort of religious or spiritual ritual
role of the speaker
- third person observer and point of view
- we are aware of the speaker’s physical presence when they ‘block
the light’
- ambiguously ominous presence, enjoying his own power over the
calf
- draws attention to the fragility of the bond between mother and calf
- but also, self-deprecating, aware of his disruptive presence –
deliberate language of impediment (‘block’) suggests discomfort in
a maternal space
- Hughes cannot write about pregnancy and birth as a male poet, his
presence is metaphorically bulky, invasive and interrupting
ambiguous future of the calf
- ‘cobwebby’ – softening, diminutive form but also incredibly fragile
- calf appears to be wholly reliant on the mother
- trying to catch us in the act of allowing poetic language to conceal
our more elemental and actual relationship with the animal, ‘hungry
people are getting hungrier’, a base instinct for consumption
- commodity, transactional, economic language begins to enter the
poem – ‘butchers developing expertise and markets’
- ‘he is like an ember – one glow of lighting himself up’ – there is
potential for beauty in this new life but ultimately self-destructive,
will consume itself
- ‘plunge, scatter seething joy’ – wild and unrestrained excess, a
reckless intensity to these actions that feels naturally precarious
- find ‘himself, himself’ – coming into being, interaction with the
environment
The Jaguar
, - the speaker sets the primal and instinctive energy of the jaguar,
who is made mesmerizing by his uncompromising power and
majesty, against the lethargic and defeated zoo animals
o captivity has modified the behaviors of these animals
o they have been deprived of their power and presence –
communicated by end-stopped lines
- image of the poet and visionary embodied within the jaguar
presentation of the zoo
- ‘yawn and adore their fleas’ – lethargy, lack of intellectual
engagement, placated, docile and self-indulgent animals
o spectators are implicitly likened to the fleas
o perverse adoration of a parasitic invidious audience
- ‘shriek as if they were…’ – superficial and hyperbolic displays,
artifice
o ‘like cheap tarts’ – sense that they are somehow commodifying
or prostituting themselves
o violence and self-destruction in the image of the parrots on ‘fire’
o banal simile to suggest their degradation
- ‘fatigued with indolence, lion and tiger’ – reduction of these epic
beasts, personification is distorting their potential for greatness
- ‘the boa-constrictor’s coil is a fossil’ – still and transformed into a
passive spectacle, vacant life of these enclosed animals
- ‘lie still as the sun’
o striking enjambment over the line break
o animals are passive but there is a power in them nonetheless
o volatility implied in the fiery image of the sun
o we cannot violate these animal’s sense of wholeness
- ‘might be painted on a nursery wall’
o animals are seemingly domesticated, anthropomorphized, made
sentimental rather than savage
o personification seems to sanitise and diminish these animals
- ‘seem empty’
o Hughes introduced the opposition of perception and substance
presentation of the jaguar
- ‘But’ – signifies a change in the argument, acts a hinge in the poem
- use of monosyllabic words, the jaguar has not been crushed by the
system, increases the pace of the poem
- ‘where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized as a child at a dream’
o audience returned to a child-like state
o repetition of ‘at a’ – enchanting
o the visionary potential of the jaguar and this connection to
nature takes us to a pre-corrupted, pre-socialized state (the
romantic ideal)
o inversion of roles, ‘dream’ vision and creativity
- ‘by the bang of blood in the brain deaf’
o plosive ‘b’ sounds and monosyllables, aggressive sounds
