Ted Hughes (1930-1998)

Ted Hughes(1930-1998)

Animals, Man and Nature • ---A study on Ted Hughes’s animal poems from the poem “Hawk in the Rain” • By 胡澎

Contents I. Introduction to Ted Hughes II.Literature Review . International review . Domestic review III.Animal poetry to Hughes and its Features . Exposure of violence and anthropocentrism . Ecological Consciousness in Hughes’s Poetry . Taoist thought in Hughes’s Poetry IV.Analysis of the poem“Hawk In the Rain”. . Animal Figures in“Hawk In the Rain” V. Conclusion VI.Bibliography

I.Introduction to Ted Hughes Ted hughes,a British poet with great reputation,is universally recognized as one of the most remarkable and outstanding composers in the contemporary world. He was born on 17 August 1930, in Mytholmnyed, a small town in the West Riding district of Yorkshire. His full name, which he has never during his writing career, is Edward James Hughes. He was the youngest of the three children in his family. His father, William Hery Hughes, used to be a carpenter who had seen in person the cruelty of war in world War I.Though not old enough to take part in the war itself but greatly influenced by his father’s experiences, Hughes no doubt came to equip his mind with complex feelings toward warfare composing his poems.Hughes developed in childhood an acute sensitivity to his surrounding enviroment, especially his birthplace, Mytholmroyd. Other childhood memories have also left some traces in the poems,like memories of the minor violence ,of hunting small game with his elder brother,and of hearing from his father tales of the immense violence of war.

When Hughes was seven, the family moved to the town of Mexborough, in South Yorkshire, where his father kept a new agent’s and tobacconist’s shop. Hughes had his schooling there, and with the encouragement of his teachers he became interested in reading and writing. At fifteen he began his first try on the composition of poems. Awarded a scholarship to Cambridge in 1948, Hughes choose to do his national service before continuing his education. Assigned to a remote Royal Air Froce radio station during the service time, he worked as a ground wirless mechanic for two years. With large amount of free time, he had nothing better to do but to read and reread Shakespeare. In 1951 he went up to Pembroke College, Cambridge, to go on his eduction majoring English literature. Quite astonishingly, he only continued this major for his first two years, and, in his third and final year he switched to archaeology and anthropology as he felt that the academic study of English literature conflicted with his search for poetic creativity. During his later career of composition, his studies in these field had been of immense importance.

During the next two years he held a variety of jobs, working as a rose gardener,a schoolteacher,and a zoo attendant. He spent most of his time in London and Cambridge, where he maintained literary friendships and published a number of his early poems in literary periodicals. It was at a literary pary in Cambridge in 1956 that he met the young American poet Sylvia Plath, and within four months and actually on 16 June 1956, they were married. With Plath’s introduction to the poetic world as well as her encouragement for his writing,Hughes started his manuscript for The Hawk in the Rain, and his career as a poet had been launched auspiciously on both sides of the Atlantic since 1957. By the middle of 1962,the marriage was in trouble.Hughes had affair with another person and, shortly afterwards, Sylvia attempted to commit suicide. Later she died by gas asphyxiation in February 1963. Since the publication of his first book,Hughes had never stopped his trying at poems and had produced a lot, including collections such as Lupercal in 1960,Wodwo 1967, Crow in 1970, Moortown in 1979. To name a few awards by his works, Hawk in the Rain won the first Publications Award in New York in 1957. Hughes won the Guinness Petry Award in 1958 and Somerset Maughan Award in 1960. Besides,he was slso a children’s poet, publishing Meet My Folks in 1961,TheEarth-Owl and Other Moon People in 1963.He was named poet laureate in 1985. After suffering from cancer for nearly 18 months, Hughes died at his home in North Tawton, England,on October 28, 1998.

II.Literature Review .International review • According to Skea,Hughes’s poetry can be interpreted through the ecological perspective,for Hughes,in his poetry, has done a lot to analyze the relationship between man and nature. Besides,Skea also ascribed Hughes’s special perspective to nature to his Yorkshine background, holding it is because Hughes has lived close enough to nature that Hughes could, at first hand, feel in person the cruelty that exists beneath the beautiful surface of nature.Accordingly, the exact descriptions of nature free from any distortion may account for violent and blood elements in his poetry.

Another scholar Shaw saw Hughes’s concentration on animals as his attempt to clarify his feelings on the human condition.“Stated in the broadest possible terms,” noted Shaw,“Hughes’s enterprise is to examine the isolated and precarious position of man in nature and man’s chances of overcoming his alienation from the world around him.In pursuit of these interests Hughes focuses frequently(and often brilliantly) upon animals.”(literature Review,1981)According to P.R.King in Nine Contemporary Poets: A Critical Introduction, Hughes’s emphasis on wild creatures is not so much evidence of his concern for them as it is a clue to the importance the poet reserves for what animals symbolize in his work.Through animal imagery, Hughes exalts the instinctive power of nature that he finds lacking in human society ,“He sees in them,”King wrote,“the most clear manifestation of a life-force that is distinctly non-human or,rather,is no-rational in its source of power.Hughes observes in modern man a reluctance to acknowledge the deepest, instinctual sources of energy in his own being,an energy that is related to the elemental power circuit of the universe and to which animals are closer than man.”(King,1979)

King believed that Hughes’s poetry written since 1970“ has moved on to express a sense of sterility and nihilism in modern man’s response to life, a respose which he connects with the dominance of man’s rational,objective intellect at the expense of the life of emotions and imagination.”(King,1979) In King’s opinion, Hughes doesn’t worry much about man’s wrong deeds to nature, he attempts to manifest his concern for the inactivity, indifference, and the lack of creativity of man in front of nature.

.Domestic review Some scholars have pioneers in his animal poems,especially Hawk in theRain. Professor Li Zeng from Northwest Normal Univereity hasendeavored to appreciate Hughes’s poetry from the ecological perspective.From his point of view, Hughes’s poems mark the parth of his quest for harmonious relationship between man and nature.In the first volume The Hawk in the rain, Hughes breaks down the so-called anthropo-centricism.(li zeng,2004) ChenHong from Central China Normal University maintains, it is through his vivid depiction of animals that Hughes manages to speak out his heart-felt ecological consciouness. Animals should never be blamed for the violence because violence seems a necessity for their survival in front of the tyrannical man .Instead,man is sure to be punished for his ruthlessness and indifference to nature.(Chen Hong,2006) There still exist other views on Hughes poetry. Profressor li Chengjian,as an example, holds that Hughes takes the from of animal fable to unfold human instinct in the contemporary civilized society and thus makes a dissection upon human nature.The Hawk in the Rain,in her opinion,stands the most representative pieces for this theme.(Li Chengjian,2000)

Our paper will contributions to further arousing human race’s ecological consciouness and calling on us to protect the physical environment by all ways and means and to take the road of sustainable development in order to realize the harmonious relationship between man and nature.

III.Animal poetry to Hughes and its Features • Exposure of violence and anthropocentrism Violence is the explosion of repressed energy when there is no way to turn it to good and keep it under control, for the old religion-Christianity-has lost credit and distintegrated, and no new rituals and dogmas have beeb formed. Violence will be the only of energy release in distorted if energy is suppressed too much and too long. Ted hughes is one of the most important poets in the contemporary world. His first three major volumes of published poetry,The Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal and Wodwo, have frequently been characterized as “the poetry of violence” in critical response. He exposed it through them. He wanted to arouse people so that they could sense the possible danger of violence-the explosion of repressed energy.

Ted Hughes realized that the core of Western Civilization-Christianity had lost its power in his time and sensed that its invalidity meat hidden danger. Although Hughes asserted that his early poems were not about violence but about “the war between vitality and death”.Ted Hughes’s first collection of animal poems, The Hawk in the Rain shows the hidden danger and it is an indirect exposure of violence. It is believed to be the beginning of his violent animal poems. Calvin Bedient’s accusation that Hughes is a “voyeur of violence” is a little bitter, but the majority of his poems in his first poetry sequence are undeniably the exposure of violence.As Hughes himself said in a 1960 BBC radio talk,”Usually , in a poem that seems to be a bird, animal or fish, it is evident that the poet is in fact writing about some element of human nature in the guise of a creature”. Hughes’ bird , animals or fish are symbols of human instincts. The title poem of The Hawk in the Rain is the illustrative examples of violence .The persona “Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth’s mouth/From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle/with the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk/Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye/His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet”.Here we find the contrast between the persona and the hawk, between invitality and vitality.

The persona is any postmodern western man suppressed by industrial rationalism and the hawk is the symbol of the inner nature of man, the dormant energy boiling beneath the surface. For Ted Hughes,“violence is the occasion not for reflection, but for being,it is a guarantee of energy, of life, and most so, paradoxically, when it knows itself in moments of captivity,pain or death,”Hawk in the Rain seems to include those animal figures with closer relationship with human being such as rat, wolves, gnats and the like. By putting these animals on the surface, Hughes in his poems aims to give a biting satire on human beings’ corrupted world and to question the truth of the so-called anthropocentricism. In Christianity, the relationship among God, man and nature follows the order of “god mannature”, and therefore destruction of nature is inevitable. With a long history of the emphasis on man’s dominance over nature and neglect of natural environment, the failure to balance man and nature has all the time brought human kind some catastrophic destruction like population explosion, reduction of forest coverage, contamination of water resources, expansion of desert, extinction of species, greenhouse effect and so on. Such ecological crisis has caught the attention of some literary scholars and manages to make its way into certain literary creations.Ted Hughes with no doubt ranks among those to whom the environmental influence can never be denied.

.Ecological Consciousness in Hughes’s Poetry • Ever since early time of his career, Hughes has already indicated his sharp sensitivity to the issue of environmental protection.In 1970, Hughes published a very enthusiastic review of Max Nicholson’s The Environmental Revolution. Hughes writes:“ The fundamental guiding ideas of our western civilization are against conservation.They derive from Reformed Christianity and from Old Testament Puritanism.This is generally accepted. They are based on the assumption that the earth is a heap of raw materials given to man by God for his exclusive profit and use. The creepy crawlies which infest it are devils of dirt and without a soul, also put there for his exclusive prpfit and use”(Hughes,1970) In it, Hughes has ascribed the deteriorating situation of the earth to Christian roots of western civilization, which have forged into man’s mind that the earth is treasure-like gift by God to man and it is under absolute sovereignty of man. Hughes’s heart-felt understanding of worsening status of the ecological environment.

Due to Hughes’s deep understanding of poetry’scontributions to his sharp sensitivity to the ecological status in the current society, together with his sincere respinsibility as a poet to arouse the public ecological awareness, he takes the images of animal, a most respresentative spokesman for nature, to convey his own ecological consciousness and to evoke the one in others. His poetry reattaches man to vital natural rhythms and expresses the necessary balance between the needs of man and the limits of nature.The environmentalist Paul Shepard thought that writers must convey“a deep sense of engagement with the landscape,with connections to surrounding and the natural processes central to all life.In such literature one experiences the self as constantly drawing on and influencing the surroundings, whose skin and behavior are soft zones contacting the world instead of excluding it”.(Shepard,1969) and maintained that to develop an ecological awareness in their readers.

Hughes is all the time filling his poems with animal images so that his readers are personally conceiving their world view when having their feet in the real natural world. With more efforts on reading his animal poems,it is clear that the majority of the poems are not simply about animals;that many of the references to animals are metaphorical and thought-provoking, for these poems are also connected with human experiences. In nearly all his poems Hughes strives to spark more thoughts on the typical stresses and contradictions of human nature and of nature itself. To some degree, Hughes’s animal poetry has marked the path of the course of his establishment of ecological between man and nature. Roughly speaking, in Hughes’s early poems such as in those in Hawk inthe Rain and Lupercal, animal figures are used to make implications on Hughes’ kinship with animals and his fuse with Nature’s vital energy.In his later works like Season songs, Wolfwatching, Hughes on the one hand laments on the ecologically deteriorating world and on the other speaks out his positive and optinistic attitudes towards the ecological future of the earth.

In his poetry Hughes time and again celebrates the natural energies, shows how they exist in mankind, and points out that human wholeness depends on an acceptance of all aspects of our nature. During a prolific writing career, Hughes has been regarded as a poet who writes about the natural world rather than the society, but his “animal poems” are not only about the natural world, they also reflect human life.

. Taoist thought in Hughes’s Poetry Taoism represented by Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu is an exploration into the way of nature and the universe and cultivation of man’s kind. Lao Tzu is generally considered to be the frounder of Taoism, Tao Te Ching(Lao Tzu), the only monograph by Lao Tzu. Based on “being and nothingness” and “achieving effectiveness through inaction(wu wei),” Lao Tzu examplifies extensively dialectical thinking in the “unity of destiny and freedom” and “unity of aim and principle” for a balance between the need of self and the limit of nature. Owing to the effort of another representative Chuang Tzu, Taoism is further explored and developed into maturity. Chuang Tzu shares similar understanding with Lao Tzu and further expores the extension of Tao and dialectical thinking with artistry in humorous language, preach “keeping to stillness” and “inaction(wu wei)” for an ultimate “uinty of man and nature” and true freedom.

Hughes conceives similar Taoist concerns in his nature while his understanding of life and nature deepens with his personal experience, both of which pave ways for his final acceptance of Taoism.Hughes is well aware of the trepidation of western civilization,especially that in the last three hundred years since the emergence of industrialization.Industrialization oriented in rational analysis has greatly promoted the well being of human condition and the development of society;however,it has thrown us into the vast emptiness and meaninglessness simulaneously. In his poetry, Hughes’ interest is not narrowly in presenting the scenic qualities of landscape, destructiveness of wars, or brutality of animal world, but in the laws of the universe. Hughes,with his instict for natural harmony and his sense of responsibility as a poet, raises doubt about rational analysis in his early poem collections Hawk in the Rain(1957) and Lupercal(1960),and appeals for a return to nature based on instinct and intuition which account for the basis of Taoism.Moreover, Hughes shows great reverence for energies of nature and vitality of creatures in it.

Hughes’ focus on Being Itself embodies the wisdom that “ Heaven and earth were born at the same time I was, and the ten thousand things are one with me” shared by ChuangTzu. Water and Valley are considered as the symbols that are closest to Tao in Taoism, yet they do not scramble and are connent with the places that all men disdain. River(1981) and Remains of Elmet(1979) display profound wisdom of Taoist thought,such as “Tao of water”,“Valley Spirit”,“achieving effectiveness through inaction （wu wei)”.Drawing on his life experience, Hughes gradually gains insight into the interaction between Bing and nothingness, and the paradox in the “effectiveness achieved through inaction(wu wei)” in Taoism.Therefore, Hughes presents in the poem of River a harmonious communication between man and nature following the law of nature. With his practice of the Taoist“achieving effectiveness through inaction （wu wei)”.Hughes regains harmony with the outer natural world, moving towards a final “ unity of man and nature”.

V. Conclusion • Ted Hughes is one of the most important poets in the contemporary world.He enjoys a worldwide reputation not only for his unique poetic achievements,but also for his direct and violent style and his long-lasting influence upon his younger contemporaries.What’s more,he is a brilliant poet,a conscientions wrier.In western world today, the ecological crises are becoming more and more serious .When people paid little attention to ecological crises,Hughes wrote violence into his poems,with the aim of waking up and warning the public so that they would keep their eyes on the ecological issues.When people had some sense of ecology,Hughes began to seek for the root of ecological crises and think about how to close ecological rifts, thus solving the crises and finally realizing harmony between man and the word.

Nature is Hughes’s companion throughout his life while he never parted with compassion.Lots of his animal poems aim to provke readers’ thoughts of the current natural world, thus to encourage their responsibility in protecting our current environment. Ted Hughes, by his poetry, especially his animal poems, sets an outstanding sample for us to find out better ways for a green and bright future. His poem,Hawk in the Rain, the animal figure comes from those brutal and powerful predator in nature.It is showing nature’s irresistible power and thus highlighting nature’s unshakable status in the biosphere on the earth.our paper aims to warn people to build up a kind of hamonious man-and –nature through analysis about his animal poems.We must improve the ecological environment !!We should love and protect our nature!!

VI.Bibliography • 李艳，2008 ，上善若水—泰德.休斯以水悟道的诗歌探索之路，《科技信息》，第27期 • 区鋐，李子丹，2006 ，泰德.休斯诗歌中的道家思想倾向《外国文学研究》，第2期 • Lao Tzu,Tao Te Ching,Trans.Arthur Waley.Beijing:Foreign language Teaching and Reasearch Press,1998 • King,P.R. Nine Contemporary Poets:A Critical Introduction,Methuen:Routlege,1997 • Skea,Ann. “Ted Hughes:An Introduction,in English In Australia”, No.74,1985. Mazel,David,A Century of Early Ecocriticism,Athens:U of Georgia Press,2001 • Kesse,Erich. Literary Review(spring,1981) • 陈红，2006 ，《人与兽，孰为暴力—再议泰德.休斯的动物诗》《当代外国文学》第4期 • 李成坚，2001，《论塔特.休斯的‘雨中鹰’与‘牧神集》，《外国文学研究》，第1期 • 李增，刘国清，2004 《痴迷的自然情结—论泰德.休斯的自然观与自然诗》，东北师范学报（社科版），第2 期 • 岸根卓朗，1999 ，《环境问题与文明问题》跨文化对话2，上海文化出版社，第6期 • Shepard,Paul. “Introduction:Ecology and Man-A Viewpoint,”in Shepard and Daniel Mckinley,eds.The Subversive Science, Houghton,Mifflin,Boston:1969

I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth's mouth, From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk 我淹没在鼓点逢逢的耕地里，我把脚跟一下又一下从大地之口的吞咽里拔出，从紧握我每一步乃至脚踝的带着坟墓死硬脾性的泥浆里拔出，而鹰 The Hawk in the Rain

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye. His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet, Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air. While banging wind kills these stubborn hedges, Thumbs my eyes, throws my breath, tackles my heart, And rain hacks my head to the bone, the hawk hangs The diamond point of will that polestars The sea drowner's endurance: and I, 毫不费力地在高处悬着他静止的眼睛。他的双翅将万物维系在失重的宁静里，一如热浪中的幻视那般恒定。当怦然大作的风杀戮顽固的篱笆，揿住我的双眼，扔出我的呼吸，扭翻我的心脏，当雨砍向我的头直至骨，鹰悬起金刚石头的意志犹如北极星指引溺海者的坚持不懈：而我，

Bloodily grabbed dazed last-moment-counting Morsel in the earth's mouth, strain towards the master- Fulcrum of violence where the hawk hangs still. That maybe in his own time meets the weather Coming the wrong way, suffers the air, hurled upside down, Fall from his eye, the ponderous shires crash on him, The horizon traps him; the round angelic eye Smashed, mix his heart's blood with the mire of the land. 血淋淋，头昏眼花，成了失控于大地之口最后紧要关头的一小口食物，竭力拼向万能之主的暴力支点，鹰的静悬之处。他也许在自己从容之际遭遇风云不测，受气流折磨，被扔得上下颠倒，从他的眼睛跌落，大片沉重的郡县撞向他，地平线绊住了他；滚圆的天使之眼支离破碎，将他的心血和大地的泥泞搅和在一起。

谢谢！ 敬请指导！

Ted Hughes (1930-1998)