Ted Hughes and the Animal

Ted Hughes and the Animal Kingdom of Muses think of poems, writes the British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes in the preface of his posthumously Collected Poems, "as a sort of animal." (Hughes, v) Most of Hughes poetry, especially his early poetry, revolves around the symbolic use of animals and make use of animal images and metaphors. Eventually, Hughes was to center upon the figure of "Crow" as the ultimate expression of the human spirit embodied in nature. However, although Hughes may see the animal world and the poetic world as parallel or even fused, his animal poetry still lacks the sentimentality characteristic of much of animal-inspired poetic verse. Hughes does not see animals merely as representative of human feelings and human states, but as creatures in and of themselves, who are difficult to understand yet who have much to teach, by example, to their human counterparts. Thus, Hughes' statement that poems, like animals are "separate" from "persons," even the author of the poem. The human author may think he 'owns' the animal of the poem he writes, but he does not. (v) He merely creates a metaphor.

For example, in the poem, "The Thought Fox," the poet admits from the beginning that the furtive fox of the title is merely a creation of the woods of his poetic imagination." I imagine this midnight moment's forest," the poem begins, placing the reader squarely in the kingdom of the poet's imagination and metaphorical repertoire, not in reality itself. (21) True, the poet is not alone with his thoughts, for it must be in dialogue with another being, that of the fox of the forest he envisions in winter. "Something else is alive/Besides the clock's loneliness/and this blank page where my fingers move." (21) the image of the "winter" fox is alive in the poet's mind and on the page, and a real fox may even inspire the poem, but the truth of the fox is just as elusive as the process of writing poetry. (21)

The fox's progress in the poem "The Thought Fox," s paralleled to the act of writing, for the fox leaves tracks upon the snow, like the poet leaves letters and words upon a typed page, but the fox is only "coming about its own business," not the business of the authors. (21) Finally, "The window is starless still; the clock ticks, / the page is printed," but the fox itself of reality, escapes, only the poem becomes fixed upon the page. The printed page finally reads only "The Thought Fox," the actual fox elusively steals away and cannot be captured by the author's pen or even the author's complete imagination. And even, like an elusive fox, to extrapolate Hughes' earlier quote -- the poet has no control over the foxy interpretations of his or her readers. (21)

The fox, like another character of an entire series of Hughes' poems (one might say obsession) the figure of old "Old Crow," function a poetic muse. Animals for Hughes, especially like Crow, are forever "Flying your black bag of jewels/From chaos to chaos/Probe hard for those maggoty deaths/Which poison our lives." Unlike ethereal muses, Hughes' inspirational animals are earthy smelling like "The Thought Fox," or old and maggot-ridden scavengers like that of the Crow, providing jewels of inspiration and images of hideousness and rot. (208-220)

This muse-like relationship between poet and animals is not only true of poets who write, but even persons who are poetic in spirit like the young woman of "Macaw and Little Miss," enclosed in a cage "of wire ribs." (23) of "The Dove Breeder." "Love struck into his life Like a hawk into a dovecote," writes Hughes of a dove-breeder eaten alive by love, like a bird of prey eats a bird of peace. (26)

Thus, animals inspire humans to better conceptualize and philosophically understand their experience, like poets inspire humans, but a fixed interpretation of the animals in the real world eludes a final explanation, ultimately the reader only has his or her own thoughts, rather than the fox, crow, or the 'thing' itself. The animal helps the girl or the dove-breeder to understand his or her own heart, but the animal cannot be equated with the person. The poet and his various human creations may read themselves into nature, and see metaphorical parallels between themselves, birds, and forest-creatures, but this merely confirms the human's equally animal identity, not that the humans have the power to 'write' nature from the vantage point of an observer. Humans and animals are thus equal subject amongst the forest and trees of the natural world of foxes and birds.