generate metaphors that relate such creatures to forces underlying all animal and human experience. With Crow (1970) and Gaudete (1977) he abandoned at once the semblance of realism and the traditional metrical patterning of his early work, in the belief that 'the very sound of metre calls up the ghosts of the past and it is difficult to sing one's own tune against that choir. It is easier to speak a language that raises no ghosts.' Returning from the wilder shores of myth, Hughes showed in Moortmvn (1979), Remains of Elmet (1979), River (1983), and Flowers and Insects (1989) that he could render the natural world with a delicacy and tenderness as arresting as his earlier ferocity. In Tales from Ovid (1997) he brilliantly re-created?rather than translated?twenty-four passages from the Roman poet Ovid's Metamorphoses. In the poems of his last volume, Birthday Letters (1998), all but two of which are addressed to Plath, Hughes broke a silence of thirty-five years to lift the curtain on the tragic drama of their marriage. That same year he was appointed a member of the Order of Merit, having served as poet laureate of the United Kingdom since 1984. His Collected Poems was published in 2003.
Wind
This house has been far out at sea all night, The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills, Winds stampeding the fields under the window Floundering black astride and blinding wet
5 Till day rose; then under an orange sky The hills had new places, and wind wielded Blade-light, luminous and emerald, Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.
At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
io The coal-house door. I dared once to look up?
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,
.
PIKE / 2595
The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace, At any second to bang and vanish with a flap: 15 The wind flung a magpie away and a black- Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house
Rang like some fine green goblet in the note That any second would shatter it. Now deep In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip 20 Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,
Or each other. We watch the fire blazing, And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on, Seeing the window tremble to come in, Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.
1957
Relic
I found this jawbone at the sea's edge: There, crabs, dogfish, broken by the breakers or tossed To flap for half an hour and turn to a crust Continue the beginning. The deeps are cold:
5 In that darkness camaraderie does not hold:
Nothing touches but, clutching, devours. And the jaws, Before they are satisfied or their stretched purpose Slacken, go down jaws; go gnawn bare. Jaws Eat and are finished and the jawbone comes to the beach:
10 This is the sea's achievement; with shells, Vertebrae, claws, carapaces, skulls.
Time in the sea eats its tail, thrives, casts these Indigestibles, the spars of purposes That failed far from the surface. None grow rich
15 In the sea. This curved jawbone did not laugh But gripped, gripped and is now a cenotaph.1
1960
Pike
Pike, three inches long, perfect Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold. Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin. They dance on the surface among the flies.
1. Monument to the dead.
.
2596 / TED HUGHES
Or move, stunned by their own grandeur, Over a bed of emerald, silhouette Of submarine delicacy and horror. A hundred feet long in their world.
In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads?
Gloom of their stillness: Logged on last year's black leaves, watching upwards. Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds
The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs Not to be changed at this date; A life subdued to its instrument; The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.
Three we kept behind glass, Jungled in weed: three inches, four, And four and a half: fed fry? to them? young fish
Suddenly there were two. Finally one
With a sag belly and the grin it was born with. And indeed they spare nobody. Two, six pounds each, over two feet long, High and dry and dead in the willow-herb?
One jammed past its gills down the other's gullet: The outside eye stared: as a vice locks? The same iron in this eye Though its film shrank in death.
A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench1 Had outlasted every visible stone Of the monastery that planted them?
