POETS Day: Crow, by Ted Hughes

The NFL season is over. College (real) football is self-immolating, buying and transferring talent as teams vie for one of the fitty-leven shiny new slots or the inevitable newer ones in the regular season diffusing expansion of the playoffs. Half the teams in the NBA make their playoffs, so there’s no point in watching that feigned drama. College basketball was visionary. They shed non-March interest long ago, and even that doesn’t kick in until post Ides. European soccer is in stasis. The beginning of the season is exciting. The cutthroat ending is exciting. What happens now won’t matter for a while.

Thank God for baseball. Spring training is here, consequence free but heraldic. I put on the Dodgers at the Padres yesterday. Didn’t even watch it. Just background. Baseball’s magic that way. It’s a comforting presence in an uncertain world. Today, I think I’ll put on KC v Texas. The big prize is tomorrow: Red Sox at Orioles. I’ll have a hard time not watching that.

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Skip out of work a few hours ahead of schedule and ignore a ball game. First pitch at 2:05 Central. Happy POETS Day.

***

You’d think the most interesting thing about one of Great Britain’s Poet Laureates would be his poetry, but Ted Hughes first wife killed herself. She turned on an unlit oven and passed. At the time of her suicide, Hughes had moved out and was living with another woman. He would continue living with the other woman until six years later when she too killed herself; also by turning on an unlit oven.

The wife was Sylvia Plath. She’d tried taking her own life at least twice before meeting Hughes in 1956. There are letters released in 2017 suggesting he was violent towards her, possibly causing her miscarriage in 1961. That he’s a brute and responsible for her death is a tenet among feminist essay aggregators and Plath devotees. The word “Hughes” on her headstone marked “Sylvia Plath Hughes” is a popular target of the enchiseled. There’s no lack of material should you want to read about what a shit he was.

Should you want to read about Plath’s troubles and that she was prescribed a new anti-depressant right before her death that may have had an effect other than intended or if you want many who knew him including his trend bucking second wife defending Hughes, refuting charges of mistreatment, there’s plenty of that to read as well.

The other woman was named Assia Wevill. When Plath killed herself, she prepared by making sure that the children had snacks enough to get them through the day and sealed herself off in the room with the oven, taping the doors shut so that no gas would harm them. Wevill was not so kind. She gave Alexandra Tatiana Elise Wevill, her four-year-old daughter by Hughes, the same sleeping pills she took herself, letting her to be murdered daughter drift off with her, not shrieking amid her poisons.

There are questions about Wevill’s sanity. She took to using Plath’s things and there’s a sense that she was burdened by perceived or real comparison. I hope Wevill was batty. If not, one or both – she or Hughes – was a monster. If she was rational, her final statement wasn’t desperate. This is what you do, Ted. You will never be loved. If Hughes was cruel, he was thorough.

He didn’t produce any poetry in the two years plus after Plath’s death. Then, in 1966, he began work on what would become the book, Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow. According to Ted Hughes biographer Neil Roberts, “He looked back on the years of work on Crow [The bulk from 1966 until 1969, the year Wevill followed Plath] as a time of imaginative freedom and creative energy, which he felt that he never subsequently recovered.” Roberts also writes that Hughes considered Crow his masterpiece.

I hold contradictory opinions on what constitutes poetry and free verse’s place. I hold meter dear but am loath to excommunicate the likes of Eliot, Pound, and others. Crow is free verse, triumphantly so. It doesn’t fit my preferred definitions of poetry but if it isn’t poetry, I can’t imagine what else it would be. It is magnificent, stunning, and musical. It’s hobgoblin bane.

The central metaphor is Crow. He’s a cosmic carrion, creator of gods but not God, with whom he interacts and from whom he tries to wrest the authorship of creation. He is at times Hughes, railing against Christianity. The setting is primordial with degrees of an Italo Calvino like magical realism.

Crow Alights

Crow saw the herded mountains, steaming in the morning.
And he saw the sea
Dark-spined, with the whole earth in its coils.
He saw the stars, fuming away into the black, mushrooms
of the nothing forest, clouding their spores, the virus of God.

And he shivered with the horror of Creation.

In the hallucination of the horror
He saw this shoe, with no sole, rain-sodden,
Lying on a moor.
And there was this garbage can, bottom rusted away,
A playing place for the wind, in a waste of puddles.

There was this coat, in the dark cupboard, in the silent room, in the silent house.
There was this face, smoking its cigarette between the dusk window and the fire’s embers.

Near the face, this hand, motionless.

Near the hand, this cup.

Crow blinked.   He blinked.   Nothing faded.

He stared at the evidence.

Nothing escaped him. (Nothing could escape.)

The images are stark, often with one defining characteristic, like the face above; important but flat, an ember distracting from its features. I’m reminded of Frank Miller’s Sin City; color against silhouette.

The most remarkable thing about Sylvia Plath’s Ariel is her creation of a contained mythology. Objects, forces, attributes, without universal antecedent are repeated, appearing in a poem here and there, collecting significance. Arrows, horses, electricity, blue, hospitals. All pick up meaning they don’t have anywhere else.

Hughes may have borrowed this from her or her from him. It may have been the subject of dinner conversations or of evenings by the fireplace. It’s not a device exclusive or original to either, but it is employed by both, a shared aesthetic. That seems intimate.

In Crow, we get sharks, leopards, impermanent things that morph into other things, cancelation, eyes, and leaves woven throughout. A favorite of mine is a misfit grin, repeated but most memorably introduced in this excerpt.

from A Grin

There was a hidden grin
It wanted a permanent home. It tried faces
In their forgetful moments, the face for instance
Of a woman pushing a baby out between her legs
But that didn’t last long the face
Of a man so preoccupied
With the flying steel in the instant
Of the car crash he left his face
To itself that was even shorter, the face
Of a machine-gunner a long burst not long enough and
The face of a steeplejack the second
Before he hit the paving, the faces
Of two lovers in the seconds
They got so far into each other they forgot
Each other completely that was O.K.
But none of it lasted.

Hughes is unmoored. He’s looking at our philosophies and religion as failed, false. Here he faces an existence stripped from all that. He’s pondering his rejection.

Crow Frowns

Is he his own strength?
What is its signature?
Or is he a key, cold-feeling
To the fingers of prayer?

He is a prayer-wheel, his heart hums.
His eating is the wind –
Its patient power of appeal.
His footprints assail infinity

With signatures: We are here, we are here.
He is the long waiting for something
To use him for some everything
Having carefully made him

Of nothing.

Throughout, he attacks Christianity. He’s venomous about it. I’ve read that it was shocking at the time, but anti-Christian messaging’s become part of the chic ensemble since. It’s hard to be a rebel while in concert with artistic background noise.

Apple Tragedy

So on the seventh day
The serpent rested,
God came up to him.
“I’ve invented a new game,” he said.

The serpent stared in surprise
At this interloper.
But God said: “You see this apple?”
I squeeze it and look—cider.”

The serpent had a good drink
And curled up into a question mark.
Adam drank and said: “Be my god.”
Eve drank and opened her legs

And called to the cockeyed serpent
And gave him a wild time.
God ran and told Adam
Who in drunken rage tried to hang himself in the orchard.

The serpent tried to explain, crying “Stop”
But drink was splitting his syllable.
And Eve started screeching: “Rape! Rape!”
And stamping on his head.

Now whenever the snake appears she screeches
“Here it comes again! Help! O Help!”
Then Adam smashes a chair on his head,
And God says: “I am well pleased”

And everything goes to hell.

My intent was to show a few works from Ted Hughes’ career. I picked up some of his books from the library to sift through and make selections, but I started with the first poem in Crow and couldn’t put it down. It’s unexpected.

Next up for me is Birthday Letters, Hughes’ last work, a collection of poems written about and addressed to Sylvia Plath roughly twenty-five years after her death. I doubt I’ll see Hughes the beast or Plath the lunatic. The opening is fond and reminiscent. Promising and completely different.

from Fulbright Scholars

Where was it, in the Strand? A display
Of news items, in photographs.
For some reason I noticed it.
A picture of that year’s intake
Of Fulbright Scholars. Just arriving –
Or arrived. Or some of them.
Were you among them? I studied it,
Not too minutely, wondering
Which of them I might meet.
I remember that thought. Not
Your face. No doubt I scanned particularly
The girls. Maybe I noticed you.
Maybe I weighed you up, feeling unlikely.
Noted your long hair, loose waves –
Your Veronica Lake bang. Not what it hid.