{"id":2016,"date":"2018-07-02T11:59:09","date_gmt":"2018-07-02T11:59:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2016"},"modified":"2018-07-12T16:27:28","modified_gmt":"2018-07-12T16:27:28","slug":"torn-richness-the-poetry-of-ted-hughes-2-exploiting-the-gap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2016","title":{"rendered":"Torn Richness \u2013 the Poetry of Ted Hughes 2 “Crow Tyrannosaurus”: Exploiting the Gap"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hughes\u2019s earlier books are much possessed by a vision of what he called \u201cthe war between vitality and death\u201d. In later books the same sense appears more positively in terms of an acceptance of the interdependence<\/em> of creation and destruction. His concern with these wider ideas means that the animals in his poems often become symbols, archetypes, and characters of myth. Sometimes this works marvellously. Sometimes it fails, at least for me. For me, failure happens when the symbolic meaning takes over from the reality of the individual animal and when the projection of a \u201cvision of life\u201d becomes blustering, overblown, and melodramatic. At the opposite extreme, there are poems that might not seem symbolic at all \u2013 poems of vivid, naturalistic description and factual record. Here Hughes seems to be simply registering and transmitting immediate experience. Larger ideas seem to suggest themselves almost spontaneously. That makes the best of these poems quite marvellous. Many in Moortown Diary<\/em> are like that. Between the extremes, there are poems that bring together the naturalistic and symbolising sides of Hughes\u2019s imagination, so that the animal or thing he\u2019s describing does seem to be vividly alive in itself at the same time as he makes big symbolic ideas shine through or hover round it. Here, the symbolism seems an extension of the natural perception rather than a contradiction of it. The example I\u2019ll discuss is \u201cOctober Salmon\u201d from River<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Before that, though, I want to look at \u201cCrow Tyrannosaurus\u201d, a poem in which the gap between naturalistic portrayal and symbolism is itself a reason for success. It\u2019s from a book called Crow<\/em>, which describes the adventures and misadventures of a creature sometimes vividly imagined in terms of a crow\u2019s body and movements and sometimes in terms of a human mind as it grapples with life, death and the nature of the created universe. The startling impact of these poems, their ability to get under our skins and catch us off balance, often depends on unexpected switches between the two ways of seeing Crow himself. I think the result in \u201cCrow Tyrannosaurus\u201d is both deadly serious and wildly funny. Comedy arises both from the substance of the poem and from the nimbleness with which Hughes switches between different kinds of language. In doing so he buffets us between different ideas and ways of seeing things. The very title seems to me to involve a darkly comical collision of ideas. Following on from that, the first stanza starts out swollen with a parody of hyperbolical gloom. This tone is abruptly punctuated by a cartoonish description of Crow\u2019s nervousness as he hears it:<\/p>\n

Creation quaked voices \u2013
\nIt was a cortege
\nOf mourning and lament
\nCrow could hear and he looked around fearfully.<\/p>\n

What Crow sees is not a cortege \u2013 a funeral procession \u2013 but a nightmarish world of predatory pain. Language is violently physical. Horror is increased by the way the devoured prey seems alive and in agony in the bellies of the predators:<\/p>\n

The swift’s body fled past
\nPulsating
\nWith insects
\nAnd their anguish, all it had eaten.<\/p>\n

The final twist is that though the predators move so energetically they themselves seem to be in hell, the swallow fleeing, the cat writhing and gagging, the dog uttering shapeless cries.<\/p>\n

And yet I\u2019ve said this is a funny poem! Return to comedy in the last stanzas comes as a surprising twist, not as escape from the nightmare but as acceptance that there is no escape. Appalled at the cruelty of the world and his own place in it, Crow absurdly wonders whether he should starve himself to become the light \u2013 in other words, fly off into some sort of religious purity that is a denial of his very nature.<\/p>\n

Naturally, as he\u2019s a crow, instinct takes over. He sees a grub and reacts with the unhesitating suddenness of a mechanical release \u2013 \u201chis head, trapsprung, stabbed\u201d. However, he\u2019s still hopelessly divided.<\/p>\n

And he heard
\nWeeping<\/p>\n

Grubs grubs He stabbed he stabbed
\nWeeping
\nWeeping<\/p>\n

Weeping he walked and stabbed<\/p>\n

Both the grubs and Crow weep as he slaughters them, and Crow seems at least as much man as crow, not only because of the way his thoughts are voiced but also because \u201cwalked\u201d rather than \u201chopped\u201d suggests a human gait. Altogether, the poem can be seen as a savagely comic satire on our refusal to accept the universe as it is, to face up to our own inherently predatory nature. However, I think it\u2019s also a deeply felt poem about the dilemma of having to live in the world as it is while having capacities for compassion and aspiring to live by moral principles. I think it\u2019s the volatile way different feelings swirl round each other that makes this poem so powerful as it reflects fundamental contradictions in the way we have to live our lives. And I think the comic element is essential to releasing this anarchic swirl.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hughes\u2019s earlier books are much possessed by a vision of what he called \u201cthe war between vitality and death\u201d. In later books the same sense appears more positively in terms of an acceptance of the interdependence of creation and destruction. His concern with these wider ideas means that the animals in his poems often become […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ted-hughes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2016"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2020,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2016\/revisions\/2020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}