See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/318866138

Animal Imagery in Ted Hughes' Poetry

Article · May 2010

CITATIONS READS

0 28,874

1 author:

Sahar Abdul-Ameer Al-Husseini

University of Al-Qadisiyah
25 PUBLICATIONS   1 CITATION   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

The Middle-Eastern Mythology in Gwendolyn MacEwen’s "The Nine Arcana of the King" View project

The Issue of Race in Post-Colonial African American Poetry View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Sahar Abdul-Ameer Al-Husseini on 02 August 2017.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

‫‪Animal Imagery in Ted Hughes' Poetry‬‬
‫صورة الحيوان في شعر تد هيوز‬

‫‪Sahar Abdul Ameer‬‬

‫جامعة القادسية ‪/‬كلية التربية‪/‬قسم اللغة االنكليزية‬

‫‪1‬‬
 Abstract

The first thing to be encountered in Ted Hughes' poetry,

who is one of the great modern poets in English literature, is his
preoccupation with animals like horses, foxes, otters, crow, jaguar
and deer that are included as title subjects for his poems. His
poems deal with animals and nature and the savagery of both. And
at the same time he uses animals to show the beastly ways of
human beings. He creates in his poems senses of both anarchy and
surrealism to make clear and safe the distance between the fantasy
he creates and reality.
Hughes admires the positive qualities in the animals he
describes because he has sympathy for the more violent and
elemental human impulses. His writing about animals and birds is
due to the fact that he finds in them the unsophisticated vitality
than urban man who is in danger of losing it. Also the animals he
describes try to survive the murderous attacks of man that
symbolizes the attempts of beauty, passion and natural instincts to
survive in an artificial society.

2
 ‫المقدمة‬

‫إن من أهم ما يمكن إيجاده في شعر تد هيوز الذي يعد واحدا من أهم شعراء العصر‬
‫الحديث في الشعر االنكليزي هو اهتمامه بالحيوانات مثل األحصنة و الثعالب‬
‫والقضاعات و الغراب و النمر االستوائي و األيائل و التي يمكن إيجادها كعناوين‬
‫لمواضيع في قصائده و ذلك الن قصائده تعنى بالحيوانات والطبيعة ووحشية كل منهما‪.‬‬
‫و في الوقت ذاته فانه يستخدم الحيوانات في شعره لتوضيح الطرق الحيوانية للبشر‪.‬‬
‫ذلك انه يخلق في قصائده أحاسيس لكل من الفوضوية و السريالية أو الفوواقعية من‬
‫اجل توضيح وكذلك تامين المسافة بين الخيال الذي يخلقه وبين الواقع‪.‬‬
‫إن تيد هيوز معجب بالخصائص االيجابية للحيوانات التي يصفها‪ ،‬وذلك ألنه يمتلك‬
‫تعاطفا مع دوافع العناصر البشرية األكثر عدوانية‪ .‬إن كتاباته عن الحيوانات و الطيور‬
‫جاءت نتيجة لحقيقة انه يجد بهم الحيوية غير المعقدة أكثر منها في اإلنسان المدني‬
‫الذي هو في خطر فقدانها‪ .‬كذلك تحاول الحيوانات التي يصفها إن تبقى على قيد‬
‫الحياة ضد الهجمات الخطرة التي يقوم بها اإلنسان ضدها‪ ،‬األمر الذي يمثل محاوالت‬
‫الجمال و العاطفة و الغرائز الطبيعية الحيوية إن تبقى و تستمر ضد المجتمع الغير‬
‫طبيعي أو المصطنع‪.‬‬

‫‪3‬‬
 Animal Imagery in Ted Hughes' Poetry

Ted Hughes is one of the great English poets of modern

times. He is an animal poet using animals to express his insight
into the enduring spirituality of nature. Through animal imagery,
he exalts the instinctive power of nature that he finds lacking in
human society. For he sees in them a clear manifestation of a life-
force that is distinctly non-human or non-rational in its source of
power.1
One of the most important themes of Hughes poetry is the
use of animal character for number of reasons. To demonstrate the
savage epic struggle between good and evil that occurs in nature
everyday, to portray nature and its occurrences, and to use the
wildlife as metaphor for human existence.
Hughes' "The Jaguar" is about a trip to the zoo made by
Hughes himself. In it Hughes attempts to convey his own views
about human behavior by relating it to animals. With the use of
varied lexical choice, he depicted the scene greatly:

The apes yawn and adore their flees in the sun

The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence; tiger and lion
Lie still as the sun.2

In these lines Hughes began talking about the harmlessness

and inactivity of these animals he is visiting in the zoo and
expressing his disapproval of these things in an implied way by
using phrases like "The apes yawn, and adore their fleas in the
sun" The suggestion made by Hughes is that these apes had
become so bored that their grooming of each other was almost a
religion. It is only a way of giving those apes something to do.

4
The idea of disapproval then continues by going to the description
of the parrots as they: "shriek as if they were on fire, or strut like
cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut." Being brought to a
level where they will show off just to get food and attention
further more the idea of disapproval.

The boa –constrictor's coil is a fossil

Cage after cage seems empty, or Stinks of sleepers from
The breathing straw
It might be painted on a nursery wall.3

In these lines Hughes comments on the many cages in the

zoo, and how he walks past them all believing them to be empty,
then he discovers that the cages are infact harbor-sleeping animals
who have decided to just sleep during the day instead of
impressing the zoo visitors.
Hughes' use of a skilful metaphorical language is very clear
here as he compares the boa constrictor a fossil. In this way, he
shows that what he sees before him is as a snake coiled up literary
looks like a fossil. But, metaphorically, he is suggesting that the
snake is almost dead like a fossil. He feels cheated, and talks about
how these animals could be painted on a nursery wall. Saying so,
he means that those animals are so harmless that they remind him
of the cartoon animals on a nursery wall: "all softened up, and not
ferocious looking."4

But who runs like the rest past these arrives

At a cage observed by a crowed which
Stands, stares, mesmerized.5

These lines show Hughes' sudden change of heart towards

the animals in captivity, and begins to contrast what he has said
previously to this new found interest: the jaguar. To show this
change of tone, Hughes begins the third verse with a simple "But"
going on in his description of a passer by as he runs to the
5
surrounded cage. Instead he observes the crowd and follows them
as they stand, staring, and "mesmerized." Using this word, the
poet makes apparent the influence this active jaguar had on the
crowd around his cage. "…at a jaguar hurrying enraged through
prison darkness after the drills of his eyes"6 The use of the word
enraged, Hughes makes, the reader feels how angry the jaguar
actually is. This is to suggest that the jaguar is much more than
just fairly annoyed, and emphasizes the extent of his anger. The
'prison darkness after the drills of his eyes' suggests that he is so
annoyed that the jaguar has lost all other reason, and is
concentrating on his anger at being captive, relentless need to be
free. Also "the prison darkness" further enforces the idea that he is
being held captive, and his anger at this. The reason that the crowd
is mesmerized by this scene is the jaguar's rage as he paces back
and forth around the cage: "On a short fierce fuse" is a suggestion
that the jaguar could explode in a complete fit of rage." He spins
from the bars, but there's no cage to him." The jaguar seems
refusing his captivity, and why this is apparently so is to be
summed up in the final verse where Hughes sums up his feelings
about this jaguar by saying what is thought to be pity for the
jaguar:

More than a visionary to his cell: his stride is wilderness

Of freedom. The world rolls under long thrust of his heel
Over the cage floor the horizons come.7

This shows the jaguar's apparent lack of physical restrictions and

how in mind he is still back in his natural habitual. The jaguar's
belief is that one day he escapes his captors, and return to the
jungle. Hughes admires this, for the whole poem is to show his
own idea of human behavior. The ordinary working population is
compared to the boring animals; Hughes shows something that is
unable to break the bounds of his captors. In this poem, Hughes
sees a free mind, someone who has managed to look beyond his
shackles and free himself. He suggests that physical restrictions
6
are not what keep many people far from achieving what they want,
but it is the mental restrictions that keep us far from reaching one's
goals.8

"The jaguar" as one of the poems included in his volume

Hawk in the Rain (1957) implies a revolutionary intent. The
images in this book whether overt or implied of poet, poem, and
audience add up to a neo-romantic manifesto. Thus, "The Jaguar",
at one level attacks poets and critics who would limit poetry's
'horizon'.

The zoo-visitor, is not affected by dozy animals that "might be

painted on a nursery wall", is a representation of the reader who
rejects inferior poetry for the real 'visionary' thing.9

In his "Crows' First Lesson", Hughes gives us the character

of crow as a mythical figure that appeared throughout an entire
volume of poems entitled Crow (1970).
Crow is somewhat cartoonish figure that is receiving lessons
from God on how to speak. God starts with the word love but each
time Crow attempts to say it, nothing but a gape is heard, a sort of
horrible, retching sound that sends certain things in nature awry.
During the first attempts, a shark in the ocean crashes and sinks. In
the second, a few bugs are conjured and zoom through the air,
while in the third; the horrid squawk raises the head, as "Man's
bodiless prodigious head/ Bulbed out onto the earth, with
swiveling eyes/ Jabbering protest."10 Then the two lovers forced
into convulsions. It is easy to imagine the woman convulsing after
hearing Crow's awful squawk, her vulva tightening around the
man's throat. It is also easy to see man's irritated and protesting
head protruding from the ground. It is a dark and violent image the
poet uses to show the struggle between good and evil, even if evil
sometimes conquers good. Thus the unsuccessful angry God
struggles, then, helps the lovers while the Crow is flying off in a
cloud of guilt.11
7
 So, God defeated, goes back to sleeping, leaving Crow to
his own devices and Crow takes advantage of Gods' slumber by
inventing his own 'communion' This is a strong parody of the
Christian rite, in which Crow literary partakes of Gods' body as in
"Crow Communes":

"Well," said Crow, "What first?"

God, exhausted with Creation, snored.
"Which way? Said Crow, "Which way first?"
God's shoulder was the mountain on which Crow sat.

"Come," said Crow, let's discuss the situation."

God lay, agape, a great carcass.

Crow tore off a mouthful and swallowed.

"Will this cipher divulge itself to digestion

Under hearing beyond understanding? "

(That was the first jest.)

Yet, it's true, he suddenly felt much stronger.

Crow, the hierophant, humped, impenetrable.

Half-illumined. Speechless.

(Appalled.)12

8
 This is not all for Crow next invents his own Theology
as in "Crow's Theology" which includes a God who is:

…much bigger than the other

Loving his enemies
And having all the weapons.13

This is a sacrilegious reconstruction of Biblical lore, which

is responsible for such great impact of the poems is an indication
of the way in which Crow resembles the Trickster cycle, because
Trickster is traditionally a "breaker of taboos and destroyer of the
holy-of-hollies."14It is also an illustration in which Hughes
adapted the Crow 'mask' in these poems taking on himself the role
of the trickster.
What is intended by the use of the caricature like the figure of
the Crow is to lampoon the idea of religion and free thought. The
idea is successful and dangerous; God tries to make Crow the
something that he is not. By trying to teach Crow how to say
Love, God is hiding behind the guise of a helper, but instead is
simply trying to make Crow more palatable. The idea clearly is
backfires.15

It seems that Hughes criticizes in this poem, the idea of love

as well. For certain unhappy events related to his life and his
relationships with women one decade before the publishing of this
volume that is the year 1970.His first wife Sylvia Plath had
committed suicide in 1963 leaving him with two young children to
raise on his own. The unhappy event was followed less than five
years later with the suicide of Hughes' second wife and two-year-
old daughter in 1969.Also his mother died at around the same
time. In this same poem Hughes' method of dealing with all those
deaths was black humor and surreal situations. Thus, the crow is
such an omnipresent literary figure and symbol for dark subject
matter that represents Hughes' dismal days.16

9
 By using a bird as a subject and not writing in the first
person, Hughes is separating the poet from the poem by which he
accomplishes number of things. It creates more mystery around
the mysterious and private persona of Hughes for he was silent
around his personal life, and it allows great accessibility for the
reader. To use the dryad dark humor and the character of the crow
to express his grief, he wants to create interesting poetry to
anyone.17

In his "The Horses" Hughes not only mentioning horse but

he presents a great deal of description. The poem starts with the
narrator's description of the sunrise with an extreme attention for
detail. The poet not only enables us to see the striking imagery
through the narrator's breath leaving "tortuous statues in the iron
light" and "blackening dregs of the brightening grey"18 of the
skyline. But the reader can even hear the sounds that the narrator
is hearing, from the intense, overpowering silence at the first half
of the poem to the eventual and stomps of the horses as daylight
overtakes the night.

"An Otter" is a myth-like poem in which Hughes describes

the mammal in fable-like terms: "an eels'/ Oil of water body,
neither fish nor beast is the otter: / Four-legged yet water-gifted, to
outfish fish;"19 Hughes then, continues his description of the otter
as a sort of tragic existence saying that he no longer belongs to
either the water or the land, and his continuous dives into the
depths of the sea are in search of "some world lost when first he
dived, that he cannot come at since."20Hughes sees that the dual
existence of this animal as something bad and not good, prevents
the otter from having a real home. Hughes also describes the
hunters who kill this interesting but sad creature only for a belt to
hang "over the back of a chair"21 :

On a bitch otter in a field full

Of nervous horses, but linger nowhere.
11
 Yanked above hounds, reverts to nothing at all
To this long belt the back of chair.22

Such is to show through animal imagery the struggles of

nature as described in mythological terms.

Amongst Hughes' best works that achieved through his vivid

descriptions and the placement of everyday battles in terms of
mythological proportions and still the feature of animal imagery is
his "Buzz in the Window". It depicts the battle between a fly
caught in the web of a spider. The reader through the striking
description presented by Hughes gains strong description of the
events occurring and an emotional intensity that is both powerful
and moving as well:

In the window corner, with a dead bee,

Wing-petals, husks of insect-armor, a brambled
Glad of dusty web. It buzzes less
As the drug argues deeper and deeper23

Then the climax comes:

…The bluefly,
Without changing expression, only adjusting
Its leg stance, as if to more comfort,
Undergoes ultimate ghastliness.24

Finally, he agrees to it and the new expression of the words

makes the opposing argument of "they are just bugs." Becomes
illiterate and ignorant. At the end the spider releases the insect but
after making the reader witnesses an epic struggle between the two
insects that proves emotionally overpowering.25

Animal image, then became one of Hughes' most famous

images like in his "The Thought Fox", the image was an emblem
11
of the ferocity of his own poetry: an idea entering the head with
the violence of an animal, the 'sudden sharp hot stink of fox."26
"
The Thought Fox" is about composing poetry or it is about
being visited by the muse. To be precise enough in Hughes' case,
the muse is an animal; a fox.27The external action of the poem
takes place in a room late at night where the poet is sitting alone at
his desk. Outside the night is starless, silent, and totally black. But
the poet senses a presence which disturbs him:

Through the window I see no star:

Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness.28

The disturbance is not to be made by the darkness

outside, because the night is a metaphor for the deeper and more
intimate darkness of the poet's imagination in whose depths an
idea is mysteriously stirring. At the beginning his idea is with no
clear outlines. It is not seen but felt; frail and not clear. Hughes'
task is to grasp it out of formlessness into consciousness by the
sensitivity of his language.29 The very far stirrings of the poem are
compared to the stirrings of an animal, a fox whose body is
invisible, but which feels its way forward nervously through the
dark undergrowth:" Cold, delicately as the dark snow, / A fox's
nose touches twig, leaf;"30 The poem carries also a reference to
Puritanism of Hughes ' poetic vision of the conflict between
violence and tenderness which seems to be directly engendered by
this Puritanism.31

In "Crow Black Than Ever" the poem summarizes the role

of Crow and its original mythic purpose on earth. Creation is
coming a cropper, God and Man have turned away from each
other in mutual disgust, but Crow stops in and nails them together
forever:

12
 Then heaven and earth creaked at the joint
Which became gangrenous and slank-
A horror beyond redemption.32

And having carpentered our impossible Judea- Christian

union of divinity on earthly flesh in his role as borecole Crow
exults: "This is my creation."33

Hughes uses the wolf symbol in his poetry which is

almost unique in its power of attraction to him, in its ambiguous
nature as Hughes describes it, and in the way in which he extends
the scope of its symbolism from personal to universal. Hughes'
wolves embody contradictory qualities of the natural energies:
They have beauty of form, an economical directness of function
and the cunning quality that allowed them to survive in the
harshest of environments.34

Hughes' Wolf Watching deals with the natural energies

in all their complexity, and it shows the distortion of these
energies which humans have brought about in animals and in
themselves. In "February", Hughes celebrates the sort of wild,
primitive energies that his dream-wolf represents, but the type of
energy that have been caged, suppressed or modified by our
society until they only appear in an indirect, sterile form in stories
or pictures. Just as the wolf-spirit in "February" becomes a
dangerous disembodied spirit which searches the world for its
vanished head and "for the world/ vanished with the head." For
"February" is about a wolf-energies where a ravening dream-wolf
is conjured into his protagonist's world by a photograph of "the
hairless knuckled feet/ Of the last wolf killed in Britain." For
Hughes to use the wolf as a mask enables him, safely, to allow
expression to the powerful energies which fuel his imagination.35
So, Hughes believes that our own brute energies, suppressed by
the dictates of the society. Sooner or later, like the spirit-wolf, will
re-emerge with potentially dangerous consequences.
13
 Such savage imagery with such implication is found also
in Hughes' "A Modest Proposal" and it was inspired by the new
and intense relationship between him and Sylvia Plath. He writes:
"There is no better way to know us/ Than as two wolves have for
to a wood."36 The desire which these wolves have for each other
creates a terrifying atmosphere of danger; it is a consuming
distraction in which each competes against the other for "a mad
final satisfaction" which will be achieved by making "the other's
body and the whole wood…its own."37

The proposal that the lovers 'wolf' natures may be

tamed, controlled, and put to productive use by submission to an
artificial but socially acceptable ornate language of Hughes' last
stanza and through the romantic chivalric conventions that
underlie the subject and content of his "picture"38 At the same time
the word "proposal" hints at one's ritual through which this may be
achieved namely, marriage.
Another poem with the wolf imagery is "The Howling
of Wolves". The poem is full of bleaks and anguish. The initial
image of this poem is "dragging" their long leashes of sound "up
and out" of themselves into a freezing and silent forest, is cold,
mournful and eerie, and at the closeness between 'word and word'
in the first line shows the enormity of their pain .39

There is a contrast between the wolves' instinctive,

driven behavior and their cold "mineral" innocence, with the
gentle, innocent warmth of the baby's cries; the delicacy of the
violin's notes, and the urgency of the wolves' hunger for such
warmth is emphasized by the repletion of the word "running" :
"Then crying of a baby, in this forest of starving silences/Brings
the wolves running/ Turning of a violin, in this forest delicate as
an owl's ear,/ Brings the wolves running."40 In these lines,
Hughes suggest the paradoxes of the wolves' existence, through
the howling which "dissolves" in the silence; the "furred" steel;
14
the swell, gentle sounds which bring the wolves running-jaws
"clashing and slavering" ; and the attribution of innocence to these
steely instruments. This is because it is barely to control the wolf-
energies and that is part o the human condition.

In the second half of the poem, the focus narrows from

that of the wolf back to a view of a single wolf hunched and
shivering in the wind. The observer might notice the wolf's howls
could equally well be of joy or agony. But this wolf is driven by
the "dead weight" of the powerful forces which inhibit its body,
and which rely on that body for existence so that the wolf must
"feed its fur".

As part of the cycles of Nature, "small" but necessary,

"comprehending little" and miserably subservient to its
compulsions, the wolf survives through momentous events. The
picture of the night showing stars and the sound of the earth's
creaking gives a vivid impression of the workings of all-powerful
natural forces, and the unwilling nature of the wolf's survival is
suggested by the "dead weight" of the earth which it bears. It is
"living for the earth," the earth is "under its tongue" and "trying to
see through its eyes," and eventually it will come to nourish the
earth through death and decomposition. These images of death,
compulsion, pain and bleakness, together with onomatopoeic
words like 'slavering', 'creaking', 'whimpering' and' howling', leave
the reader with the overriding impression of misery and
helplessness, and this surely must have been Hughes' own
emotions at this time.41Hughes here is using the wolf symbol as a
self-portraiture.

The wolf in Hughes's poems might plays the role as a

symbol in mythology and folklore, where it has a rich and varied
history through its ambivalent nature and the mixed feelings of
attraction and fear which the wolf arouse. A particular
mythological association is used in "The Green Wolf"42
15
 The Green Wolf was a central figure in the
midsummer ceremonies that took place in Normandy in the early
part of the century. During these ceremonies a man clad all in
green, who bore the title of the Green Wolf, was pursued by his
comrades, and when they caught him they feigned to fling him
upon the midsummer bonifire.43The Green Wolf here is associated
with vegetation gods which were ritually burned each year to
ensure fertility in the coming season.44It is this ability of Nature to
unmake and remake the dying man, a cyclical aspect of death and
rebirth, which is the subject of Hughes's poem. The record of "The
Green Wolf" and the abundance of Nature fills the last four
stanzas of this poem:

The blood clot moves in "through" a "dark heaven"

with the inevitability with which "the punctual evening star is the
Star-Son of the Moon-Goddess, who is responsible for birth,
fertility and death, and the wolf-itself is linked with her because of
its habit of howling to the moon, and because it feeds on corpse-
flesh. The white masses of hawthorn blossom with their heavy
palls of "deathly perfume" are traditionally associated with the
Goddess in her destructive form, and are banned from the house in
many parts of England lest they bring bad luck. The bean is her
flower, and its "badged" jet markings, "like the ear of a tiger,"
suggest dangerous and deathly powers. The Green Wolf, in this
poem, is the goddess herself, and these symbols of her deathly
powers also have a fertile warmth and beauty. They "unmake and
remake you"; just as the midsummer fires once devoured the
Green Wolf in "one smoldering annihilation" to bring renewed
fertility to the earth. So, "old brains, old bowels, old bodies," are
devoured to make way for the new in a process which "you cannot
fear" because of its natural inevitability. And, despite the powerful
presence of death which pervades the summer abundance of this
poem, Hughes's final images are moist, gentle once which capture

16
the cadences of farewell to a spirit "frozen" in a frail, crude,
failing body.45

Hughes's series of poems, "Seven Dungeon Songs"

draws on Manichean symbolism to deal with the creation of
mankind, with the human struggle against the darkness in and
around man in general, and with man's frustrated straining towards
the healing power of light. Manicheanism is a Persian religion
founded by Mani in 3A.D. in which the fundamental symbols are
driven from the "identification of moral will, order, life and love
with Light, evil, chaos and hatred with Darkness"46 This
symbolism, which has survived in Christian teachings of the
Western world, also incorporates ideas of "illumination" and
emergence from darkness and imprisonment to enlightened
freedom.

The first of these "songs" is a vivid illustration of

Hughes's belief in the wolf-component in human nature. In it, the
"gangrenous breath" of a spirit wolf is shown as clouding the
"tabula rasa" of human nature from birth. The babe of the poem, in
its innocence, is attracted by the wolf and reaches towards it in
"soft-brained" ignorance of its own position of danger. And all the
time the wolf's blood drips "On to the babe's hands", suggesting,
from the first, mankind's murderous potential.

Behind the image of the last six lines of the poem

there lurks the shadow of the mythical she-wolf which suckled
Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome and sons of
the god, Mars, to whom the wolf was also sacred. The milky tits
of Hughes's wolf also feed and nourish a human babe but,
although she can transport this babe from its earthly home and run
with it "among the stars", the journey is perilous with "precipices".
So, Hughes suggests the succour and the danger which derives
from the Universal wolf in human nature.47And the wolf's bloody
wound, linked as it is with blood on human hands; just as was the
17
last wolf in Britain destroyed and just as the society tries to
destroy any wild animal energies in its people.

Being the first poem in the series, it deals with the

mankind's struggle with darkness and light, shows the influence of
the wolf to be fundamental and unavoidable. Hughes believes in
the supernatural powers of poetry, that's why he makes his own
attempt to control the power of the wolf by constructing a poetic
charm to contain its predatory energies with the poem "Amulet"
first published in Moon Bells and Other Poems48:

Inside the wolf's fang, the mountain of heather.

Inside the mountain of heather, the wolf's fur.
Inside the wolf's fur, the ragged forest.
Inside the ragged forest, the wolf's foot.49

While the wolf in this poem is a symbolic representation

of Wolf-nature everywhere, Hughes has made its surroundings a
realistic duplication of the natural Wolf habitats which are, also,
the natural surroundings of mankind.

In the poem "Moon Marriage" Hughes describes

powerful dream animals whose arrival and 'marriage' to the
dreamer is "nothing you can arrange," and whose influence
survives into the dreamer's waking life, "maybe a smiling wolf
comes up close/ While you doze off, in your chair; and gives you a
kiss/ A cold wet doggy kiss,"50 Hughes here is describing an
ambiguous fairy-tale wolf. And the nature of this wolf soon
becomes apparent, for the dreamer becomes a captive: "you have
been CHOSEN, and it's no good failing awake bawling "No!'/
Where the wolf is, she just goes on smiling."51 In this poem, the
"only offspring" of the involuntary possession of the dreamer by a
dream animal "are poems".

18
 NOTES
1
Ted Hughes, "The Poetry Foundation"
2
"The Jaguar" by Erazangel, Planet papers.com.
3
Ibid.
4
Ibid.
5
Ibid.
6
Ibid.
7
Ibid.
8
Ted Hughes, Collected Poems, ed.Paul Keegan.
9
Mark Mizaga, "The Poetry of Ted Hughes".
10
Richard Ellmann and Robert O'clair, The Norton
Anthology of Modern Poetry, 2nd edition (London: W.
Norton&Company, 1988), p.1402.
11
Mark Mizaga, "The Poetry of Ted Hughes".
12
The Poetry of Ted Hughes-on "The Beckoning"
13
Ibid.
14
P.Radin, The Trickster (New York: Greenwood, 1969),
p.35.
15
Ibid., p.52.
16
Mark Mizaga, "The Poetry of Ted Hughes".
17
Ibid.
18
Richard Ellmann and Robert O'clair, p.1395.
19
Ibid. , p.1397.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid.,p.1398.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid., p1404.
24
Ibid.
25
Mark Mizaga, "The Poetry of Ted Hughes".
26
Richard Ellmann and Robert O'clair, p.1397.
27
"The Thought Fox", Ted Hughes.
28
Ibid., p.1396.
29
Richard Webster, "The Thought Fox"
30
Richard Ellmann and Robert O'clair, p. 1397.
19
 31
Richard Webster, "The Thought Fox"
32
The Poetry of Ted Hughes-on "The Beckoning"
33
Ibid.
34
Ann Skea, "Critical Essays of Ted Hughes" (New York:
G.K. Hall & Co., 1992), p.1.
35
Ted Hughes, Luperical (London: Faber and Faber,
1960), p.13.
36
The Poetry of Ted Hughes-on "The Beckoning"
37
Stuwart Hirschberg, Myth in the Poetry of Ted Hughes
(Dublin: Wolfhound press, 1981), p.220.
38
Ted Hughes, The Hawk in The Rain (London: Faber and
Faber, 1957), p.25.
39
The Poetry of Ted Hughes-on "The Beckoning"
40
Ibid.
41
Keith Sagar, The Art of Ted Hughes (London:
Cambridge University press, 1978), P.22.
42
Ibid.
43
Ann Skea, p.5.
44
Ted Hughes, Wodwo (London: Faber and Faber, 1967),
p.40.
45
James G. Fraser, The golden Bough: A Study in Magic
and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1974), p.854.
46
Ibid. ,p.870.
47
Ann Skea, p.7.
48
A.C.Smith, Orghast at Persepolis (London: Eyre and
Methuen, 1972), p. 38.
49
Ted Hughes, Moon Bells and Other Poems (London:
Chatto and Windus, 1978),p.150.
50
Ibid.
51
Ibid.

21
 CONCLUSION

Ted Hughes symbolically uses animals in his poetry to show

that he sees animals not as a mere representation of human
feelings and human states but as creatures in and of themselves,
who are difficult to understand and who have much to teach by
examples to their human counterparts.

21
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'clair. The

Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, 2nd edition. London: W.
Norton& Company, 1988.
Fraser, James G. The golden Bough: A Study in
Magic and Religion .London: Macmillan, 1974.
Hirschberg, Stuwart. Myth in the Poetry of Ted
Hughes .Dublin: Wolfhound press, 1981.
Hughes, Ted Collected Poems, ed.Paul Keegan.
Luperical .London: Faber and
Faber, 1960.
Moon Bells and Other Poems.
London: Chatto and Windus, 1978.
The Hawk in The Rain. London:
Faber and Faber, 1957.
"The Poetry Foundation".

Wodwo .London: Faber and Faber,

1967.
Mizaga, Mark "The Poetry of Ted Hughes".

Radin, P. The Trickster. New York: Greenwood,

1969.
Sagar, Keith .The Art of Ted Hughes .London:
Cambridge University press, 1978.
Skea, Ann "Critical Essays of Ted Hughes" .New
York: G.K. Hall & Co., 1992.
Smith, A.C. Orghast at Persepolis .London: Eyre
and Methuen, 1972.
Webster, Richard "The Thought Fox".
"The Jaguar" by Erazangel, Planet papers.com.
The Poetry of Ted Hughes-on "The Beckoning"

22

View publication stats