THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

poems with the Elizabethan title ‘Come Death’. Both avoid echoes of Elizabethan melancholy and of the fraught
mortal ambiguities of John Donne. The first, published in 1938, expresses a longing for extinction with an admixture
of archaism and easy modern frankness (‘Who would not rather
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die | And quiet lie | Beneath the sod | With or without a god?’). The second, written in the poet’s final illness, has a
far more lyrical form and a far more punchy simplicity:
I feel ill. What can the matter be?
I’d ask God to have pity on me,
But I turn to the one I know and say:
Come, Death, and carry me away.
Ah me, sweet Death, you are the only god
Who comes as a servant when he is called, you know,
Listen then to this sound I make, it is sharp,
Come Death. Do not be slow.
The poetry of Ted (Edward James) Hughes (b. 1930) plays a much more wolfish and unfriendly game with
mortality. Hughes’s first two volumes, The Hawk in the Rain (1957) and Lupercal (1960), express a rapt fascination
with animal energy and independence and an awareness of the affinities between animal and human life, between
human aspirations to freedom and power and the instinctive animal achievement of both. A caged jaguar in a zoo, ‘on
a short fierce fuse’, is compared to a solitary visionary pacing his cell. A macaw in ‘a cage of wire ribs | The size of a
man’s head’ is provoked into ‘conflagration and frenzy’ by a little girl’s caresses and tantrums. The intense
physicality of ‘The Bull Moses’ is recalled in ‘the warm weight of his breathing, | The ammoniac reek of his litter, the
hotly-tongued | Mash of his cud’, but the bull’s gait as he is returned to his stall suggests that he was not named
‘Moses’ idly: ‘something deliberate in his leisure, some beheld future | Founding in his quiet.’ Hughes’s otter ‘brings
the legend of himself’, his pikes swim in a pond ‘as deep as England’, and his ‘terrifying’ thrushes, with their ‘singlemind-sized
skulls’, possess an ‘automatic purpose’ parallel to that of a Mozart or to ‘the shark’s mouth | That hungers
down the blood-smell even to a leak of its own | Side and devouring of itself’. Strikingly, Hughes compares his own
creative purpose to a vulpine visitation in ‘The Thought-Fox’. The poem opens with an insistent act of imagination
and with a ‘blank page’. The fox approaches with stealth:
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Cold, delicately as the dark snow,
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints in the snow,
Between trees ...
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.
When, in his most anthologized poem, ‘Hawk Roosting’, Hughes represents the consciousness of an animal, the hawk
expresses its animal single-mindedness with an unmistakably human arrogance (‘There is no sophistry in my body: |
My manners are tearing off heads’). Hughes’s language seems more taut in the interspersed prose and verse of Wodwo
(1967) (a volume named from the wild men of the woods of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), but his earlier
experiments with the violent meshes of animal and human sense culminate in the gnomic sequence of poems Crow: