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Poetry since 1945
477
I kill where I please because it is all mine
My manners are tearing off heads, the allotment of death.
The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began;
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.
Many critics have equated this state of mind with the psychology of a
totalitarian dictator. The hawk’s words and actions relate to forces
underlying both human and animal experience. The word ‘hawk’ is applied
to politicians who believe in the use of force to resolve political problems.
In his later work, Hughes has become more preoccupied with myths
and legends. In Crow (1971) he retells the creation story from the point
of view of a violent, anarchic consciousness – the crow himself – who
emerges as a kind of anti-Christ. The poems in this volume, and in
Gaudete (1977), are sparse dramas in which traditional metrical patterning
and realistic presentation are abandoned. Ted Hughes’s poetry is often
contrasted with Larkin’s gentle, urbane and introspective manner.
Seamus Heaney is a poet who writes directly and obliquely about
politics, speaking in a clearly personal voice. As an Irishman, many of
his poems deal with the horrors which continue to afflict Northern
Ireland. In his early poems, Heaney writes of the countryside and the
natural world in ways which suggest the influence of D.H. Lawrence
and Ted Hughes. In one of his earliest poems, Digging, he establishes
a metaphor which recurs in different ways in several subsequent poems.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
He digs into his own memory, into the lives of his family, into the past
of Irish history and into the deeper levels of legend and myth which
shape the character of the people of his country. Heaney attempts to
go beyond the terrible daily events of life in Northern Ireland to discover
the forces beneath the history of that country which might restore
hope and comfort. But he does not hide the deep-rooted tribal passions
of revenge and honour which endure in contemporary society.