SOURCE: "Is There Life After Crow? Ted Hughes's Poetry Lately," in Poetry, Vol. CXXXVIII, No. 5, August, 1981, pp. 297-304.

[In the following review, Moynahan analyzes the quality and nature of Hughes's poetry since Crow.]

Among the moderns, Ted Hughes has aspired to go farther than any other in following up on the great Anglo-Irishman's tip: farther than Eliot with his Sweeney, Pound with his macho-man "Sestina Altaforte," Lawrence with his "Birds, Beasts and Flowers," Jeffers with his Monterey Peninsula hawks and rocks, Doc Williams with his "Elsie" from the Ramapo Range of North Jersey. Frost with his cackling "Witch of Coös," Maine. Of course, the search to renew poetry's energies from brutal, brutish, or primitive sources was not new to the twentieth century. It is a distinct current in nineteenth-century Romanticism. Think of Wordsworth's Leech-gatherer, a saurian figure amid the rocks and water pools of a far-off geological era. Think of Heathcliff, showing his teeth like a dog, in life and in death, in Emily Brontë's exquisite distillation of Brutal Romanticism, Wuthering Heights. Presumably the Leech-gatherer, if he had at last forgone his virtual mutism and turned poet, would have disappointed us. Surely this "grave liver" would have come on sounding like a born-again Christian. But what if Heathcliff had turned poet, instead of settling for a career of farming, land and money-grabbing, and brutal misanthropy, before starving himself to death for love of Catherine Earnshaw Linton? Is it possible that Hughes as poet is Heathcliff redivivus?

Well, not really. Actually Ted Hughes has much more in common with Emily Brontë. They were both raised in the same rugged district of the East Riding of Yorkshire and developed the same deep attachment to its wildest features. In both the attachment to wilderness is colored by mysticism of a gnostic character: i.e., at the heart of the natural and brute creation, wailing in the winds, glinting off from the vivid and vigorous life of the animals and birds there are forlorn, trapped demonisms, to be riskily searched out, lumped together, and released so that Spirit, or spirits—it's never clear whether gnostics are mono-, poly-, or pan-theists—may once again permeate the earth and irradiate the skies.

A final and important point of resemblance between Emily Brontë and Ted Hughes is that their entire creative undertaking may entail the facing, and facing down, of a diffuse fearfulness. There is a riveting description in Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë of how the sisters liked to take walks on the rough pasture-land at the top of the town of Haworth where they were occasionally set upon by fierce, half-wild dogs and mastiffs. It was always the physically slight and often ailing Emily who stood her ground with these animals, bringing them under control through sheer force of will and a willed courageousness that she probably developed in reaction to the bad conditions at home. These bad conditions include the clergyman father—that gloom spreader!—preferring to eat his suppers alone in the dark after the death of his wife, and his horrible habit of silently breaking up the parlor furniture when he through his daughters had done or thought something disobedient or merely disagreeable.

Noting the obsession in Hughes's poetry with the more strenuous aspects of parturition—blocked birth canals, torn vaginas, trailing afterbirths, and the like—it's tempting to trace Hughes's fearfulness to a problem with female gender characteristics and sexuality. But there could be other influences at work. One hears that his war-invalided father filled him up with horror stories about trench warfare in World War I. Also, Hughes belongs to the generations of British children who suffered extreme anxiety from the German bombing and rocket raids of World War II. He was ten in 1940, only fifteen when the war ended. We tend to forget that the V-2 rockets were still coming over within a few months of V-E Day.

Hughes's poetry often does appear to entail an imaginative exploration and working through of fearfulness. Crow, that low-life mystical bird, with his distinct resemblance to the mad, indestructible birds of the 1940's Looney-tune and Disney cartoons, and his specific trick of surviving annihilating explosions, may have first visited the boy poet in the dark during an air or rocket raid. The reader has already been exposed to Crow, and to the brutalities, beauties, and occasional downright badness of Hughes's earlier volumes. The question becomes, What has this black and fearful bard out of Yorkshire done for us, and to us lately?

Gaudete is novel-length, and is preceded and summarized by a prose "argument." and it's composed, like early Irish sagas, which Hughes gives evidence of having read around in, in a mix of verse and prose. The story is very sordid, once one strips away the mythic, pseudo-religious and magical hocus-pocus accompanying its telling. As certain events transpire—the seduction, impregnation, and degradation of an entire village of English women by a tireless, prepotent clergyman ; the fatal knifing of a drugged young girl at an orgiastic witches' coven where all the local mums and girl friends are on hands and knees, knickerless, and wearing badger, fox, and other animal pelts—the sinister and tawdry figures of Manson and the Reverend Jim Jones may visit the reader's mind. Gaudete however, derives less from the newspapers than from two popular English sources or traditions. The first is Village Gothic, the type of spook story of which John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos, called in its cinema version. The Village of the Damned, is a fair specimen. The second is simply the immemorial English tradition of the randy vicar.

I would like to take seriously but cannot Hughes's portentous epigraphs from Heraclitus and Parzifal (Book XV, forsooth), or his claim in the "Argument" that the protagonist, the Reverend Nicholas Lumb, is really a log filled with "elemental spirit life" which other "elemental spirits" have put in place of the original clergyman, who has been "spirited" away and will reappear in due course, only way off in the West of Ireland, where he will roam about "composing hymns and psalms to a nameless female deity." These things really aren't much there in the story as told and must be written off as mere poetic license. Blame the poet's license also for the fact that Hughes's village contains no police constables. This becomes rather crucial when the local men, at last twigging on to what the log-lover has been doing with their women-folk, run him down, shoot, stab, and hammer him to a pulp and immolate him, along with a few other victims of murder and mayhem, in his own church.

As for the quality of the verse, well, what is one to say? I've never been able to abstract a style for scrutiny when the content seemed despicable or absurd. The man can write—and does—on and on. Here is a specimen, no more perfervid than any number of other passages in a narrative two hundred pages long.

     But he has drunk too much.
     And the finality of that dead girl lies at the centre of the day
 
     Like an incomprehensible, frightful dream.
     And her live sister is worse—all that loose, hot, tumbled softness,
 
     Like freshly-killed game, with the dew still on it,
     Its eyes still seeming alive, still a strange with wild dawn,
     Helpless underbody still hot.
     For minutes, driving in third gear. Westlake forgets where he is.
 
     While what she said about Lumb goes on and on in his head
 
     Like a taunt.

This is pretty slack, if not slack-jawed, writing when you look at it closely: the heavy-breathing epithets ("loose, hot, tumbled," etc.); the parade of loose similes; the manipulation of the line spacing to suggest emotions, scruples, and a drama that aren't really there. Let it be said, however, that Hughes shows some novelistic skill in rendering his sordid account from the viewpoint of various men and women of the village—blacksmith, barmaid, "country" people, et al.—and keeping it moving briskly along towards the final violent scenes. For the statistically minded, Gaudete's "Anglican Clergyman" copulates with either twelve or thirteen women in a single day. Hail to thee, log-spirit! indeed.

In 1971 Hughes was quoted in London Magazine as saying, "Any form of violence invokes the bigger energy, the elemental power circuit of the Universe." One of the worst things about Gaudete is that it is composed upon the premise of this shoddy notion.

Up next is The Birds: an Alchemical Cave Drama. In the book's own words, it may best be described as "a huddle of oracles." There are twenty-nine page-length poems matched with the same number of Leonard Baskin drawings of imaginary monstrous birds, some of whom appear predatory and pathetic at the same time.

Though designated a "drama" there is no "argument"; conflicts, recognitions, and reversals are lacking; and there are only hints of a progression in time or mood, or understanding (realization,). However, an early poem such as "The Scream" seems to refer to child life, whereas a later one, "The Knight" may be about a quest, in early maturity, into a type of wasteland situation. These are only guesses. For sure the poems are "oracular," meaning they make weighty pronouncements in language that is sonorous, all-knowing, and frequently incomprehensible.

My notes divulge an approving check for "Something Was Happening." This poem appears to be about how the speaker lost someone close to him, that person having been burnt up (in a car accident?) while he went on doing the usual things, unaware. The matching drawing shows a sort of hawk with greatly exaggerated legs and outspread talons stooping for a kill.

Later poems suggest rituals of interrogation, initiation, and baptism into the ways, such as they are, of the cave environment. The cave itself figures life, or death, or perhaps the sum of the two. In "A Green Mother," we are asked to assent to the claim that death leads on to organic rebirth through earth-magic. The cadaver comes alive again, perhaps in "the heaven of the tree," or in the gut of worm or bug, for "the earth is a busy hive of heavens." Hardy also liked to play around with this paradox of organic dissolution as rebirth, courtesy of the nitrogen transfer cycle, but, unlike Hughes, knew it for the mere conceit it was.

"As I Came, I Saw a Wood" is the "Paradiso" of the sequence, conflating the Dantean wood with ineffable vision through Hughes's invention of a naturalistic religious rite calling for earth-creatures, animals of some sort, to walk with "holy steps" and "in the glow of fur which was their absolution in sanctity." There are a few more poems to come, of which "Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days" is easily the best, but that last bit about the glow of fur, so woozy-pretentious, so vatic-vapid, so Dylan Thomas-warmed-over, has taken the heart out of me for tracing the sequence further. I will leave Cave Birds to its intended audience—working alchemists one presumes—with just a word about the drawings.

God they are ugly! Many depict creatures that are feathered men, right out of the Philadelphia Mummers parade, only more feral because of the cruel huge talons and great tearing beaks. There is some variety: "The Interrogator" is a vulture; "The Judge" is swollen with fat and nearly featherless; "The Executioner" is black and rooky-looking. The graphic gifts deployed are impressive, the general effect unpleasant.

With Moortown Ted Hughes returns to his strong suit, which is to write compellingly about English nature and animals. This is a wonderful collection of poems, the best of them up to the standard set by such anthology pieces as "Skylarks," "Hawk Roosting" and "Pike." The sequence is actually about the Devonshire farm on which the poet raised sheep and cattle during twenty years. It roughly follows the agricultural year, from late autumn through the rigors of early to late winter, into the genuinely magical renewals of spring, the sultry burgeonings of high summer, to end approximately at hay-gathering time—except that at the very end Hughes introduces some poems about a hired man and his death from lung cancer which go back to earlier months of the cycle ("The Day He Died"). I surmise that this man, a South African who chainsmoked at work and at rest, though he seldom rested, is the "Jack Orchard" to whose memory the volume is dedicated.

But only at the end does the human element become prominent. Before that the animals—cows and ewes, calves, rams, bulls, and lambs in their outdoor world—are at center stage—while the hardworking farmer-poet and his laborers are there but relatively invisible. Moortown celebrates the pain, stupor, glory, intensity and monotony of large-animal life. It is full of primary ordeals which are country necessities (viz., "Feeding Out-Wintering Cattle at Twilight," "Snow Smoking as the Fields Boil," and "Dehorning," which has been salvaged from one of the better sections of Gaudete). Beyond the domestic animals, there are the equally impressive lives and poignant ordeals of the field and hedgerow birds, the deer, a fox. Nothing is abated of the harshness of natural life, but there is no cruel dwelling on pain for its own sake, or almost none. At the opposite pole, there is no animal sentimentalism of the "All Creatures Great and Small" variety. Hughes teaches us that the brute creation is at least as mysterious and as charged as any other order of being. His is a home-grown religious vision without any of the difficulties raised by Christian theological claims such as Hopkins's "the world is charged with the grandeur of God."

Yet Hopkins is a strong influence on this volume:

     Rain. Floods. Frost. And after frost, rain.
     Dull roof-drumming. Wraith-rain pulsing across purple-bare woods
     Like light across heaved water. Sleet in it.
     And the poor fields, miserable tents of their hedges.
     Mist-rain off-world. Hills wallowing
     In and out of a gray or silvery dissolution. A farm gleaming,
     Then all dull in the near drumming. At field corners
     Brown water backing and brimming; in grass.
     Toads hop across rain-hammered roads.

If this isn't sprung rhythm, it's getting there. The very frequent use of present participles (which so well define the everlastingness or ever-recurringness of farm life), of close alliteration, of compounded Anglo-Saxon monosyllables ("mist-rain off-world") tell us that the great Jesuit is a frequent visitor at Moortown, arriving perhaps disguised as a windhover on a wimpling wing.

From my notes: "Feeding Out-Wintering Cattle at Twilight" is a good one from the title on, gets two checks. In it a battle is engaged between terror and joy. Hughes is so good on the emotionalism of healthy animals under particular conditions:

      … Night-thickness
      Purples in the turmoil, making
      Everything more alarming. Unidentifiable, tiny
      Birds go past like elf bolts.
      Battling the hay bales from me, the cows
      Jostle and crush, like hulls blown from their moorings
      And piling at the jetty.

Whereas "Tractor" is not for me. Something of an after-poem to Whitman's "Locomotive in Winter," it seems the thing won't start because it was left out and got frozen up. The animals can survive cold, the engine can't. What else is new?

Beautiful poems about an unexpected calving ("Surprise"); a ewe's vigil by her dead twins ("Last Night"); about the carrion birds which attack a still-born lamb ("Ravens"); about a lamb that "could not get born" ("February 17th"). And a wonderful, blowy poem about a calf that could and did ("Birth of Rainbow") under "this morning blue vast clarity of March sky." Births keeping pace with deaths, growth with decay, change mirroring permanence and the other way around, as the seasons slowly revolve.

"Little Red Twin," with its lovely summery close, and "Teaching a Dumb Calf" are about young animals in great distress but managing to pull through. As said before, it is greatly appealing in Moortown that the animals are the citizenry, the human actors merely their discreet, serviceable, rarely foregrounded attendants.

"Coming Down Through Somerset," however, is different, not really part of the Moortown sequence. It's worth pausing on because it seems to be an important poem for studying Hughes's morbidity or death-cult. The speaker, who is driving through England at night, spots a killed badger in his head lamps, stops to carry the corpse home with him. The rest is reflection and it goes something like this:

The dead animal is beyond change, for the changes of corruption will deposit an unchangeable remnant—skull, teeth and claws—a "something" that "has to stay." Possession of these remains becomes the poet's "stay," as in the familiar Frostian signification of the term. It gives him something with which to "block time," and to nourish his "moment of life."

There were other badgers before this one but he lost them all—the poet has had a lot of losses in his life. Now this one "has to stay." It's being dead helps, for otherwise it could get up and run off.

At the end, in contemplation, the poet deliberately confuses his identity with the badger's. "Watching his stillness, like an iron nail / Driven, flush to the head, / Into a yew post," he feels himself become the nailed up skull. The nailed up skull of a badger might do as a general emblem of the Hughesian oeuvre, Leonard Baskin should be informed.

The last poems of Moortown, from "A Monument" to "Hands," round off the sequence by writing about the farm laborers—shearers, handymen, dairymen—with intense, open-eyed affection and care. The highest praise, even love, are for the man who died, yet in "The Formal Auctioneer" we find Hughes watching his neighbors, who are in turn watching the cattle auctioneer:

     All eyes watch.
     The weathered, rooty, bushy pile of faces,
     A snaggle of faces
     Like pulled-out and heaped-up old moots,
     The natural root archives
     Of mid-Devon's mud-lane annals …

"Moots," of course, were the early English assemblies of freemen. I like it that here the not very clubbable bard, Ted Hughes, seems to acknowledge, if just barely, that there is a community, beyond the animals, and beyond the poets, of mere men in which he might claim membership if he chose.

The balance of the volume is taken up with three collections of poems which seem to me to represent a fall-back to Hughes's vatic or oracular manner. Since I am out of sympathy with this aspect of his work, I shall merely quote the jacket description:

There are three other sequences of poems here. "Prometheus on his Crag" developed from the background material of "Orghast"—the now historic drama Hughes invented with Peter Brook and the actors of the International Centre of Theatre Research, at the Shirza Festival in 1972. "Earth-Numb" is a consequence of occasional poems on the theme of that title. "Adam and the Sacred Nine" is a "magical" poem, in which the nine muses, as birds, raise fallen Adam.

To-wit, tu-whoo. Jug jug. Over and out.