Stilled legendary depth: It was as deep as England. It held Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old That past nightfall I dared not cast
But silently cast and fished With the hair frozen on my head For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,
Owls hushing the floating woods Frail on my ear against the dream Darkness beneath night's darkness had freed, That rose slowly towards me, watching.
1959, 1960
1. Variety of freshwater fish.
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OUT / 2597 Out 1 The Dream Time 510isMy father sat in his chair recovering Fro m the four-year mastication0 by gunfire and mud, grinding; chewing Body buffeted wordless, estranged by long soaking In the colors of mutilation. His outer perforations Wer e valiantly healed, but he and the hearth-fire, its blood-flicker On biscuit- bowl and piano and table leg, Moved into strong and stronger possession Of minute after minute, as the clock's tiny cog Labored and on the thread of his listening Dragged him bodily from under Th e mortised0 four-year strata of dead Englishmen firmly fixed He belonged with. He felt his limbs clearing Wit h every slight, gingerish movement. While I, small and four, Lay on the carpet as his luckless double, His memory's buried, immovable anchor, Amon g jawbones and blown-off boots, tree-stumps, shell-cases and craters, Under rain that goes on drumming its rods and thickening Its kingdom, which the sun has abandoned, and where nobody Ca n ever again move from shelter. 2 20 Th e dead ma n in his cave beginning to sweat; Th e melting bronze visor of flesh Of the mother in the baby- furnace? 2530Nobody believes, it Could be nothing, all Undergo smiling at Th e lulling of blood in Their ears, their ears, their ears, their eyes Are only drops of water and even the dead ma nSits up and sneezes?Atishoo! The n the nurse wraps him up, smiling, And, though faintly, the mother is smiling, An d it's just another baby. suddenly 35As after being blasted to bits Th e reassembled infantryman Tentatively totters out, gazing around with the eyes Of an exhausted clerk.
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2598 / TED HUGHES
3 Remembrance Day'
The poppy is a wound, the poppy is the mouth Of the grave, maybe of the womb searching?
A canvas-beauty puppet on a wire
Today whoring everywhere. It is years since I wore one.
It is more years
The shrapnel that shattered my father's paybook
Gripped me, and all his dead Gripped him to a time
He no more than they could outgrow, but, cast into one, like iron, Hun g deeper than refreshing of ploughs
In the woe-dark under my mother's eye?One anchor
Holding my juvenile neck bowed to the dunkings of the Atlantic. So goodbye to that bloody-minded flower.
You dead bury your dead. Goodbye to the cenotaphs0 on my mother's breasts. empty tombs
Goodbye to all the remaindered charms of my father's survival. Let England close. Let the green sea-anemone close.
1967
Theology
No, the serpent did not Seduce Eve to the apple. All that's simply Corruption of the facts.
5 Ada m ate the apple. Eve ate Adam. The serpent ate Eve. This is the dark intestine.
The serpent, meanwhile,
io Sleeps his meal off in Paradise? Smiling to hear God's querulous calling.
1967
1. Holiday (November II) commemorating sol-John McCrae's poem 'In Flanders Fields' (1915), diers who lost their lives in battle. The practice of which depicts the flowers growing between the wearing red poppies in honor of lost soldiers recalls graves on a battlefield.
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DAFFODILS / 2599
Crow's Last Stand
Burning burning burning1 there was finally something
5 The sun could not burn, that it had rendered Everything down to?a final obstacle Against which it raged and charred
An d rages and chars
Limpid0 among the glaring furnace clinkers0 clear / coal remains 10 The pulsing blue tongues and the red and the yellow Th e green lickings of the conflagration
