Ted Hughes

 

I'm not much for poetry and I've never felt fully confident in my reading. But for whatever reason, I picked up Crow, the celebrated collection of Ted Hughes's poetry from the early 1970s. Again, I won't offer much by way of analysis here, but I will say that a few themes are clear: the world in this collection is a broken place, but not that emptiness is less the product of war than it is of isolation and decline. Several poems in Crow chart the this idea, taking idea of blackness as their guide. There's a memorable line about the "still-warm, stopped brain of a just-dead god." That sentiment seems to define much of the Hughes's collection, which reserves a special place, oddly, for whose have have never "been killed." The inevitability of death hangs over Crow: indeed, that sense of decline becomes pronounced that it functions as an unspoken assumption, as an entry into the poems. With that darkness comes moments when there is "no weeping left" -- when water, like people, "lay at the bottom of all things." Water, continues Hughes, was "utterly worn out" and yet, with a glimmer of hope, "utterly clear." In Hughes's world, that clarity seems the best we can hope for: and when we find it, we ought to channel its effects, lest we become -- as in a poem about Oedipus -- "the rag" of ourselves.