Ted Hughes Poetry

Crow & Hawk: the Bird Spirit Poetry of Ted Hughes Poets and prophets from Aesop to Isaiah to Blake have traditionally used animal figures to convey a criticism of existing culture, endowing the natural with metaphoric import. In most preliterate cultures, animals were equally endowed with metaphoric importance more immediately interpreted into mythologies and shamanistic rituals that enabled people to address and interact with their world.

In the modern British and Irish context, it is common to use such animal characters to analyze or criticize society and moreover to redirect human attention to natural qualities within the human soul that in our civilization we have overlooked or purposefully disrespected. So when Ted Hughes focuses significant poetic attention on birds, one is not surprised by the parallels he draws between these winged creatures and the evolution of the soul.

What may seem surprising is the degree to which he subverts modern symbolic understandings of particular bird types by reverting to more arcane symbolisms and understandings both of the animal and human world. From looking at poems such as Poe's "The Raven" and the nearly omnipresent appearance of these black birds as harbingers of death, destruction, war and evil in the literature of the last thousand years, one understands that crows are symbolically loaded animals with very negative connotations.

Certainly some of this stems from the role of crows in Biblical prophetic texts as emblems of the fall of Israel and the aftermath of battles. Crows, which scavenge much of their food from the corpses of the dead, are very much out of favor in our modern antiseptic culture. So it is inherently shocking to the self-image to see Hughes slowly shape The Crow into a sort of prototype for evolved humanity representing both our worst and best traits.

In Hughes work, Crow serves as a sort of metaphor for humanity. He is explained as being that thing God created allowed to be created by his own nightmares after humans rejected life, but his experience in Hughes work appears to be that of a human being as experienced through the life of a raven-bird. He is a fallen creature, a trickster, and a graveyard for the body of all those he eats, "his every feather the fossil of a murder." (Hughes, "Crows Nerve Fails").

Yet he is also a survivor, a dreamer and creator of words, and a theologian obsessed with discovering the truth of art (such as Oedipus), sexuality, and life. As sort of a foil to the self-congratulating and self-flaggellating Crow, Hughes also describes the hawk. This hawk, far from being the noble and somehow sympathetic creature that romantic symbolism would try to make of him, is a cruel and willful tyrant who nonetheless has a sort of appeal about him that is very telling.

It is Hawk who holds the whole world in stasis while Crow tries to change it, and Hawk who enforces death while Crow seeks alternately to transcend it, becoming it, and escape it. Hawk too seems symbolic of the modern human mind, in its relentless push for power and control -- but of course Hawk is less conflicted and less perverted in his unhypocritical brutality. Enough of introductions and suggestions without evidence -- it is time to suggest the three main points of the discussion at hand.

First, that as a prefiguring of post-apocalyptic man, Crow may be designed to embrace the essentially human qualities that mankind has tried to deny. Secondly, that the universe of Crow and Hawk reflects a sort of Schonpenhaueresque vision of a dirty will and a dirtier sublimity, which is heightened and explicated by their animal forms. Finally, that Crow and Hawk may yet offer a possibility for salvation for humankind among the deep bleakness they survey, if mankind can also learn to embrace its nonhuman and noncivilized inner nature.

Crow is, according to Hughes, a somewhat post-apocalyptic and one might even say post-human figure. He is created after man has come and asked God "to take life back because men are fed up with it.

So God is enraged that man has let him down - so he challenges [his nightmare] voice to do better: given the materials and the whole setup, to produce something better than Man." (Hughes, in: Skea) So to a large degree, in trying to be better than humankind, it seems that the voice which creates Crow forms something which draws from all human characteristics in excess, including those which modern humans consider fearful or barbaric or strange. It also draws from features which are particularly modern in a post-holocaustal sense.

The Crow becomes a kind of Jungian shadow self, it seems, and this is made painfully obvious in poems such as Hughes' "Crow's Nerve Fails." Crow, feeling his brain slip, Finds his every feather the fossil of a murder. Who murdered all these? He cannot be forgiven. His prison is the earth. Clothed in his conviction, Trying to remember his crimes Heavily he flies.

One sees two entirely human traits in this poem -- first the sense of world-guilt, in which crimes committed by an entire race or people come to bear on the shoulders of a single individual, and secondly the entirely human sense that one's body may become a graveyard. Schopenhauer, who was admittedly a heavy influence on Ted Hughes, was also at times a committed vegetarian whose discussions of the graveyard a body becomes when it eats meat had some influence on many of his readers.

This kind of guiltiness over things eaten and crimes uncommitted is, it seems, uniquely human and seeing it here shows the Crow up for the kind of ultra-human scapegoat which he may become in some interpretations. Other human attributes which we may be repulsed at or turn away from are also present in Crow, such as the ability to kill and torture even one's own kind out of curiosity or senseless religious fervor: 'Crow crucified a frog under a microscope, he peered into the brain of a dogfish.

Where is the Black Beast? Crow killed his brother and turned him inside out to stare at his color." (Hughes, "the Black Beast") It is in this poem in particular that one understands how the Crow might be seen as the shadow-self of human kind. He destroys everything around him in an attempt to destroy the "Black Beast" that the reader at least is becoming aware is the Crow himself. It is quite possible that humanity is the only species which is its own worst enemy and predator.

The greatest threats to humankind come from our own people, as the World Wars would have blatantly shown to Hughes. Over and over again in the Crow poems, the bird looks at itself and its works in horror and sorrow. One can take examples from "The Black Beast" in which Crow hunts himself unknowingly in hunting the enemy, or from "Crow's Nerve Fails" in which he fully realizes the weight of murders that hang about his shoulders. Yet these are not the only examples.

One also sees that Crow's self-hatred develops into a kind of religious experience, and he uses his own human agony to attempt in an almost gluttonous attempt to force his way through suffering to a Christian-like redemption. In "Crow Blacker Than Ever," the bird attempts to form some sort of union between God and Man in an expiatory crucifixion he seems to hope will save himself, or perhaps the whole world. So man cried, but with God's voice. And God bled, but with man's blood. The agony did not diminish.

Man could not be man nor God. The agony Grew. Crow Grinned Crying: "This is my Creation," Flying the black flag of himself. As is obvious from this selection, Crow attempts to heal the world through religion, and instead only succeeds in making it less bearable. In the end Crow cannot find salvation in God or Man, nor in any junction of the two, but only in his own black flag-self. In trying to find morality and salvation elsewhere, he only creates more pain and suffering.

For like the humanity he apes, Crow is capable both of creating religion and morality and of quietly destroying it: Crow, the hierophant, humped, impenetrable. Half-illumined. Speechless. (Appalled.) ? (Hughes, "Crow Communes") Yet if Crow embodies the darkest of our human side, there is a degree to which he also encompasses our greatest aspirations. The Shadow self is, of course, not unrelated to the Freudian Id which is both repressed and necessary for the continuation of life.

So Crow which is so destructive and thus arguably worthy of human rejection is also that being which causes humanity to have its reproductive and animal life. In "A Childish Prank," it is Crow which forces the religious soul into the human body and simultaneously creates an uncontrollable and absolute sexual drive and connection between Adam and Eve.

A sex drive which transcends the need for reproduction and the cycles of estrus been considered one of the defining features of humans and the higher ape species such as bonobos, and this too is connected in our psyche to death and destruction which Crow incarnates. Crow, thus, carries all the so-called animalistic tendencies of humanity which are, in truth, not so much animalistic as they are exclusively human.

Yet if Crow embodies all the messy human tendencies to create and to destroy (Freud's eros-drive and thanatos-drive) that humans tend to reject, one can see in Hawk the antithesis of these devalued values. Hawk is in many ways more animal than is Crow, because he is less introspective. Where Crow is chaotic and represents a world in constant flux (not a trait much admired by steady civilization), the Hawk is static and represents a world governed by strict laws of life and 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. (Hughes, "Hawk Roosting") In as much as the Crow is a figure of revolt (and revulsion), and subversion of systems of predation, Hawk seems to feel he has risen above them all. Hawk says, "I kill where I please because it is all mine." (Hughes, "Hawk Roosting") In this he is human, asserting his dominion over all living creatures.

If, as has been suggested, the Crow can be interpreted as the Id, perhaps the Hawk can be interpreted as some form of the superego, that part of the self which has internalized the strict regulations of the parents and the god and the society under which the Id has been trained. Yet there remains something impassive about the Hawk which seems separate from the superego self, and it does seem strange that an animal would be used to represent that part of the human soul most desirable within society.

For the Hawk is more than just human -- he is almost fascist in his calm discussion of death, in claiming that his path must walk through the bones of the living. He is the perfect dominion and rationality of human kind distilled to a point where it is almost as revolting as the Crow's fascination with death and decay.

One must compare his serene sense of being at the top of the food chain with Crow's more philosophical, if threatening, understanding that death comes for all, and that the one who eats will also be eaten. For Crow says: Crow realized God loved him- Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.

.And what loved the shot-pellets That dribbled from those strung-up mummifying crows? (Hughes, "Crow's theology") This sense that the same God who loves us and declared us to have dominion over all we see is the same God who has declared we will be eaten by worms at death takes a sort of uncomfortable faith that most humans deny.

Visions of the afterlife and the body resurrected incorruptible all provide evidence to the theory that humankind wishes to reject its mortality and what Hamlet would call its progress through the guts of fish and worms. In short, Crow in his carrion and God-eating nature, mischief and all, is a good representation of those aspects of the self which society is trained to suppress and look down upon in ourselves and others.

To this degree it makes sense, one supposes, that Hughes would choose an animal which has been historically maligned (for doing the very important disease-preventing job of scavenging away rotting bodies, one might add) to signify his discussion of the inner shadow which is overlooked and repulsed by humankind. It is especially significant in light of the Crow's place in preChristian symbolism and lore.

According to Hughes and his later-day interpreters, the Crow serves a vital part in worldwide mythologies as the trickster and as a guardian and totem to the living and dead. "Crow is the bird of Bran, is the oldest and highest totem creature of Britain..." (Skea) writes Hughes. Meanwhile experts on Native American mythology point to the Crow's importance as a trickster. "He is comical, grotesque, stupid, cunning, ambiguous. He is sometimes part animal, and always part something else. The something else is what is so special.

He is the dawning godhead in Man." (Skea) The Trickster type seems to resonate through all old mythologies, appearing as Loki to the Norse, as Prometheus and Odysseus to the Greeks, and as Crow and Coyote to the Native Americans, and as Lucifer to early Christians. One of the important aspects of the trickster in his guise as Loki or Prometheus or a Miltonic Lucifer, of course, is his association in European Romanticism with the evolution of technology and the liberation of the human psyche from repression.

Following this series of links, and some pointers in Hughes own discussions of his poem cycle, own comes again to the philosophy of Schopenhauer (and to a lesser degree his disciple Nietzsche). Schopenhauer speaks in great length about the sublime and brutish forms of untamed nature balanced with the equally untamed human will. What Nietzsche would characterize as the will to power, this animal-based human drive to live and the subsequently radical exercise of choice, is as a concept a logical outcropping of the darker strains of romanticism.

Such will is capable of defining and controlling and overcoming the world, and it is enlightened primarily through interaction with the terrible and profound rawness of a nature unblunted by civilization. This sort of rawness runs throughout Hughes poetry, and there is a degree to which it can be experienced through his work, or at least his work can awaken one to the awareness that it exists to be experienced.

'The awe and terror evoked by the Hughesian sublime are produced not so much by the hawk, the jaguar, the predatory landscape on which a particular poem centers, as by the sense of close encounter with the primal energy - rapacious, unstinting, and totally indifferent to human concerns - that fuels existence." (Eddins) One of the traits of Schopenhauer that is relatively unique is the way in which he balances a sort of pantheistic deism with a concept of the horrors of reality.

He writes that the universe has a Will which is the "thing it itself" as it were, and this is the almost Platonic form that creates the world around us. Human will is often in opposition to this will, fighting against it because it does not wish to except the full spectrum of that Will. The true Will of reality, one understands, encompasses both gentle beauty and fierce sublime beauty that involved horror and death and decay and pain beyond imagining.

As the human will battles against this, it finds itself futile and unable to stand against that divine Will. All the suffering in the world comes from resisting pain and enlightenment from accepting its face of the sublime. (A thing which artists can package in acceptable dosages) Peace is found in embracing the Will of the world in all its horror. A very good artistic presentation of this idea is found in Hughes poem "Crow's Fall." But the sun brightened- It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.

He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black. "Up there," he managed, "Where white is black and black is white, I won." Of course, accepting this existential will and giving in to the profound peace that passes through suffering into transcendence is buried in the human soul even deeper than its shadows.

Hughes seems to be suggesting that the Jungian Shadow and the Id, which civilization might identify with the human will that must be sacrificed to make peace with the divine will, are paradoxically the only elements within us that are capable of embracing the sublime. Because the Shadow and the Id are not logical, (saying as they do, "white is black and black is white") they are capable of the grand chaotic illogic of accepting the sublime and the self-destructive Will of the universe.

One could very easily go through and translate all the Crow poems into a commentary on Schopenhauer, but that is beyond the purpose of the moment. Suffice to say that the part of the human soul that embraces self-destruction has only been welcomed by martyrs and decadents, and that popular civilization has never much held with such indulgent behavior. The thin line between martyrdom and suicide, between masochistic decadence and ascetic mysticism, lies through the metaphoric Crow's nest.

As for the Hawk, he represents both the human will unable to accept his finiteness within the Universal Will and -strangely- he also represents an aspect of that Universal Will, cruel and implacable and sublime to those it destroys. This line of thought leads one to the final aspect of Hughes' Crow poems -- in their nonhuman animal nature, they represent a possible path of salvation for the post-apocalyptic, post-holocaustal, post-nuclear generation of humans. "Where white is black and black is white, I won." The Crow reports.

In poems such as this one, where the Crow embraces its own death and subsequently manages to somehow survive and even transcend it, there is an intuition of the immortality and salvation that humans have always craved. It is there in the Hawk poem as well, in a different fashion -- at the point where.