Abstract
Ted Hughes draws a number of images from external nature and natural things, religious lore, classical learning and cosmic concepts. Apart from religious, cosmic and natural imagery, Hughes also draws images from the world of man: from daily life such as war and domestic life and from the body such as suffering and death. Likewise, animals, myth and folklore and archetypes serve as source of symbols and objective correlatives of Hughes’s own feelings and ideas. Through his nature and animal imagery, Hughes attempts to suggest both the malevolent and nurturing aspects of nature and conveys his concept of the primal energies of the natural world that stress the absolute otherness of that world and the relationship between these energies and the divided nature of man.
Keywords: Ted Hughes, imagery, symbolism, nature poetry, animal poetry, Crow, biblical imagery
Nature and Landscape Imagery
Nature and its elements can become hostile when man is not in touch with them. Hughes himself records the value of landscapes in Poetry in the Making. The imagery of “Wind” (The Hawk in the Rain p.40) records the terror inspired in the observer by the immensity of the natural distances and the violence of the weather in the home country. Here, the ship is compared to a house, and the sea to the crashing woods, the booming hills and the stampeding fields.
Animal Imagery
Ted Hughes’s animals are the clear manifestations of a life force that is distinctly non-human or rather non-rational in its source of power. By exploring the animal energies of these animals, Hughes probably attempts to seek a re-alignment with the unknown forces governing the universe. S. Hirschberg points out that through his animal poems Hughes immerses himself in the dark, irrational forces around and within him in order to purge himself of the artificial social construct, the personality (p.12).
The bull in “The Bull Moses” (Lupercal, pp.37-38) inspires not only fear but also fascination in the poet. “Ghost Crabs” (Wodwo, pp.21-22) creates a sense of “weird phantasmagoria” (P.R. King p.124) in which crabs are the symbolic representations of destructive forces that lurk in our subconscious. Both “Ghost Crabs” and “Pike” (Lupercal, pp.56-57), for Hughes, symbolize the presence of dark, irrational forces at the edge of man’s awareness.
Crow as Symbol
“Crow” is Hughes’s highly complex and intricate personal symbol — an objective correlative or a mythical archetype for Hughes, through which he expresses his powerful emotions and complex ideas. In folk mythology the crow is an animal figure predominantly associated with the twin motifs of death and guilt. For Hughes, Crow functions on a number of levels: he is an elemental force in the universe as a projection of man’s instinctual nature scavenging on the dead constructs of his intellect and as a symbol for destruction and death.
Biblical Imagery
The Bible, especially the Old Testament, is one of the principal source books of Hughes’s imagery. Hughes draws a number of biblical images on the pre-Christian concepts like Creation and Logos, biblical god, Christ, Adam, Eve, Crucifixion and the serpent. In “Crow’s First Lesson” (Crow: His Life and Songs of Crow, p.20) the imagery conveys that even the all-pervasive, omnipotent God has failed to induce love into his self-created world which is full of malice and viciousness.
For Hughes, St. George is an image for twentieth century obsession with passionless facts and statistics. Crow’s St. George is a reversal of the archetype of the conquering hero who vanquishes chaos, evil and temptation.
War Imagery
Ted Hughes is not primarily a war poet in the sense that he, like Wilfred Owen or Keith Douglas, has not written his war poetry directly out of his personal experience in the war front. But he has written some poems on war out of his memory of war. In “Narcissi” (Flowers and Insects, p.9) the sound and movement of innocent narcissi are associated with the horrors of war.
Imagery of Suffering, Death and Regeneration
Ted Hughes is disenchanted with the western culture. His preoccupation with suffering, death and morbidity is similarly a preoccupation with the real. Hughes associates his home village Heptonstall with a centre of his pessimistic universe and a sound of decaying death. “The Green Wolf” (Wodwo, p.40) also contains the imagery of the hawthorn and the bean flower that have folklore associations with death.
However, counter pointing the imagery of disease, decay and death, those of birth and regeneration bring in a world where goddess Nature presides. For Hughes, the river is an image of continuity of life, renewing of life through healing.
Conclusion
Ted Hughes’s imagery and symbolism are spontaneously drawn from a wide variety of sources; yet the subtlety of his sole purport of self-analysis and self-expiation through suffering unites them all. There is inevitability about his obsessive squaring up to the problem of modern man’s self-alienation from nature and the consequent spiritual torpor.
Works Cited
- R.P. King, “Elemental Energy: The Poetry of Ted Hughes,” Nine Contemporary Poets, London, Methuen, 1979. pp.107-51.
- Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making (an anthology of poems and programs from listening and writing), London, Faber, 1976.
- Ted Hughes, The Hawk in the Rain, London, Faber, 1957.
- S. Hirscheberg, Myth in the Poetry of Ted Hughes; A Guide to the Poems, Country Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1981.
- Ted Hughes, Wodwo, Faber, London, 1967.
- Ted Hughes, Lupercal, Faber, London, 1960.
- Alan Bold, Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes, Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd Press, 1976.
- Ted Hughes, Crow: His Life and Songs, Faber, London, 1970.
- Ted Hughes, Flowers and Insects, Faber, London, 1986.
- Ted Hughes, River, Faber, London, 1983.