ice in ted hughes' poetry - j-stage

Sendai Shirayuri Junior College

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{thkAtiateraj(\fideeNo. 22, 15'28 (1993)

FIREAND ICE IN TED HUGHES' POETRY

Toshimi Horiuchi

Ted Hughes' poetry can be considered savage and harsh. As a boy, he collected

animals, birds, and fish. As a poet, he continued his fascination, regarding his poetry as

a sort of animal (he says this in Iloetry in the imking) possessing a vivid life of its own.

His absorption in animals and a sense of violence in the natural world appear in his first

volume, TVze Hdewk in the Rain (1957). Hughes (1930- ) is clearly interested in animals

both as actuality and symbel.

Hughes' stress on the physical, animal, and subconscious is in marked contrast to the

urbane tone of artistic style, His poetry, which is hailed as vital and original, has also

been excessively bruta] and violent. It contains in itself "fire"

(vehemency) and "ice"

(brutality), Some aspects of this "fire

and ice" will be disclosed through my perusal of

seven of Hughes' poems : "An

Otter," "Pike,"

"Six

Young Men," "The

Casualty," `CThe

Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar," [LHawk Roosting," and

"Wind."

AN 0TTER

I

Underwater eyes, an eel's

Oil of water body, neither fish nor beast is the otter :

Four-legged yet water-gifted, to outfish fish ;

With webbed feet and long ruddering tail

Ancl a round head like an old tomcat,

Brings the legend of himself

From before wars or burials, in spite of hounds and vermin-poles ;

Does not take root like the badger. Wanders, cries ;

Gallops along land he no longer belongs to;

Re-enters the water by melting.

Of neither water nor land. Seeking

Some world lost when first he dived, that he cannot come at since,

Takes his changed body into the holes of lakes;

As if blind, cleaves the stream's push till he licks

The pebbles of the source ; from sea

To sea crosses in three nights

Like a king in hiding. Crying to the old shape of the starlit land,

Over sunken faTms where the bats go round,



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16 Toshimi Horiuchi

Without answer. Till light and birdsong come

Walloping up roads with the milk wagon.

II

The hunt's lost him. Pads on mud,

Among sedges, nostrils a surface bead,The otter remains, hours. The air,

Circling the globe, tainted and necessary,

Mingling tobaccoLsmoke, hounds and parsley,

Comes carefully to the $unk lungs,

So the self undec the eye lies,Attendant and withdrawn The otter belongs

In double robbery and concealment-

From water that nourishes and drowns, and from land

That gave him his length and the mouth of the hound.He keeps fat in the limpid integument

Reflections live on. The heart beats thick,Big trout muscle out of the dead cold ;

Blood is the belly of logic; he will lick

The fishbone bare, And can take stolen hold

On a bitch otter in a field full

Of nervous horses, but linger nowhere.

Yanked above hounds, reverts to nothing at all,

To this long pelt over the back of a chair.

The poem "An

Otter" appears in LzipeTcat (1960). It is a contemporary poem of

absorbing interest centered around an animal. It was rare until the nineteenth century for

English poetry to even treat such subjects as birds, anirnals or insects in any scientific or

realistic way. The poeTns we remember of such living things before this period are : JohnSkelton's

"Philip Sparrow" and

"Speak Parrot" ; Thomas Gray's "On

a Favorite Cat,Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes";Blake's "Tiger";Keats'

"Ode

to a Nightingale";an

eagle in Tennyson ; sheep in Wordsworth ; Hopkins' "The

Windhover" ; Lawrence's poemson creeping things, birds, and insects. These poems delineated a phase of romantic

sympathy with the realm of wild nature, or a phase of strong vistial imagery of movement

or color.

Ted Hughes might be more of a remantic realist than a romanticist. "An

Otter"

proposes, for example, the precise structure of the otter's physical build yet the poet

maintains a constant number of syllables and strictness of poetic ferm. In fact, the poem

appears to express an otter's mind. Careful consideration of the verse form rnakes us fully

aware that this poern possesses a phase of great charm yet is neatly compact. The words

are straightforward rather than literary. The langtiage is ordinary, but we should be




FIRE AND ICE IN TED HUGHES, POETRY 17

attentive to the poet's brusque style. Hughes often oMits a personal pronoun as in the

beginning of the second stanza in Part I. Suddenly he shocks the reader by interjecting

unexpected words or very vigorous slang verbs like "walloping" or

"yanked." It is

interesting to ebserve a countryman's muscular, powerful, brusque words abruptly change

into a contemporary poet's idiorn.

This poern moves from life to death. It is a poetic study of an otter's life history or

life tale. The poem might well have been infiuenced by Henry Williamson's novel, Ilrrkcz

the Otter <1927), As the poem advances, expressions become condensed and the backbone

more powerful. As the poem approaches conc]usion, rhymes become full and sharp, which

increases the directness of thg poem's action. Where there is no rhyme, the otter's

movement seems fluid and fluent ; when rhymes become clear and sharp, we feel a certain

violent action approaching.

The otter is an arnphibious animal. It attacks animals on land as well as fish in water.

Thus the otter is a "double

robbery." "Blood

is the belly of logic" indicates that'this wild

animal's life finds its essential meaning in food ; that to eat is logical and to live requires

blood, "Belly" is the most important part of the otter's life.

"Belly" is not only the place

where food is digested, but also the darkest and deepest place of the animal's. Therefore,

the otter "will

lick/ The fishbone bare." It "can take stolen hold/ On a bitch otter in a

field" yet be "Yanked above hounds" and

"reverts to nothing at all." These descriptions

of the otter represent the animal's instinctive ferocity, and suggest that a carnivorous

animal like an otter has the duality of victimizer and victim. Such duality is expressed

even more vividly in the poem "Pike."

PIKE

Pike, three inches long, perfectPike in all parts, green tigering the gold,

Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin,

They danced on the surface among the flies.

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur

Over a bed of emerald, silhouette

Of submarine delicacy and horror.

A hundred feet long in their world,

In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads-

Gloom of their stillness :

Logged on last year's black leaves, watching upwards,

Or hung in an amber cavern ef weeds

The jaws' hooked clamp and fangsNot to be changed at this date;A life subdued to its instrument ;




18 Toshimi Horiuchi

The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals,

Three we kept behind glass,

Jungled in weed : three inches, four,

And four and a half: fed fry to them-

Suddenly there were two. Finally one.

With a sag belly and the grin it was born withL

And indeed they spare nobody.

Two, six pounds each, over two feet long,

High and dry and dead in the willow-herb-

One jammed past its gills down the other's gullet :

The outside eye stared:as a vice locks-

The same iron in this eye

Though its filrn shrank in death.

A pond fished, fifty yards across,

Whose lilies and muscular tench

Had outlasted every visible stone

Of the monastery that planted them-

Stilled legendary depth :

It was as deep as England. It held

Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old

That past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fished

With the hair frozen on my head

For what might move, for what eye might move.

The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods

Frail on my ear against the dream

Darkness beneath night's darkness had freed,

That rose slowly towards me, watching.

In this poem the poet describes the juvenile pike in a pond. Their appearance is"green

tigering the gold." They are "killers

from the egg," however, and victims of

evolution. They disp]ay a delicacy in their loveliness, and are horrible in their voracious-

ness. Their life is determined by "jaws'

hooked clamp and fangs" which are [`not

to be

changed at this date" ; neither their individual lives nor their inbred characteristics can be

altered. The killing teeth and jaws of the pike are their instrument and controlling

characteristic which grace and delicacy subserve.

In the course of the poem the pike become larger and larger. The poet describes the

cannibalism of the small pike ; being well fed, they kill one another as well as any other





fish. Their t`grin" hints of this cannibalism engaged in for food, for pleasure, or for sport,

Furthermore, as a chilling example of their limitless voracity, the poet depicts the fatal

attempt of a fully grown fish to swallow another of its own size.

In the final four stanzas, the setting is a pond with water lilies and tench that have

survived over 400 years outliving the men who had built the pond and even their own stone

structures. The depth of the pond reflects in image the age of England. As a fisherman,

the poet juxtaposes himself beside the world of the pike. He is fishing a pond fifty yards

across but is terrified by an imaginary pike so monstrous and ancient that he fears to cast

his line in after nightfall, The man just stands still watching for movements in the pond.

It is not really the pike but what the pike represents for him that he really fears, He fears

a dark dream released in the black depths, a dream of slowly-rising horror. The final

imagery combines the various observations of the action and disposition of the pike

suggesting that this voracious creature may lead human beings to discover their own

depths of darkness.

The image-like condensed expressions used in this poern, intensify the vividness, the

power and the primitive qualities streaming throughout. Some of Hughes' finest poems

come from this sharp awareness of the violence of animals; of the rele of animals as

victirn ; of humanity's place in the evolutionary process; of the difference between the

human and other animals, Hughes' artistic gift shines bri]liantly as he captures the

appearances and movements of each creature he describes in his poems.

As we have seen in the two poems, the fire burning fiercely in living things gushes out

te make other creatures' lives frozen. Such a fire becomes a most powerful supporter of

life while simultaneously an avaricious killer. In the latter case the fire becomes ice.

"Fire

and ice" are also recognized among men and nature as portrayed here in another

of Hughes' poems :

SIX YOUNG MEN

The celluloid of a photograph holds them well,-

Six young men, familiar to their friends,

Four decades that have faded and ochre-tinged

This photograph have not wrinkled the faces or the hands,

Though their cocked hats are not now fashionable,

Their shoes shine, One imparts an intimate smile,

One chews a grass, one lowers his eyes, bashful,

One is ridiculous with cocky pride-

Six months after this picture they were all dead,

All are trimmed for a Sunday jaunt.IknowThat bilberried bank, that thick tree, that black wall,

Which are there yet and not changed. From where these sit

You hear the water of seven streams fall




20 Toshimi Horiuchi

To the roarer in the bottom, and through all

The leafy valley a rumouring of air go.

Pictured here, their expressions listen yet,

And still that valley has not changed its sound

Though their faces are four decades under the ground,

This one was shot in an attack and lay

Calling in the wire, then this one, his best friend,

Went out to bring him in and was shot too ;

And this one, the very moment he was warned

From potting at tin-cans in no-man's land,

Fell back dead with his rifleJsights shot away.

The rest, nobody knows what they came to,

But come to the worst they must have done, and held it

Closer than their hope ; all were killed.

Here see a man's photograph,

The locket of a smile, turned overnight

Into the hospital of his mangled last

Agony and hours;see bundled in it

H･is mightier-than-a-man dead bulk and weight :

And on this one place which keeps him alive

{In his Sunday best) see fall war's worst

Thinkable flash and rending, onto his smile

Forty years rotting into soil.

That man's not more alive whom you confront

And shake by the hand, see hale, hear speak loud,

Than any of these six celluloid smiles are,

Nor prehistoric or fabulous beats more deacl ;

No thought so vivid as their smoking-blood:

To regard this photograph might well dement,

Such contradictory permanent horrors here

Smile from the single exposure and shoulder out

One's own body from its instant and heat.

In "Six

Young Men" the speaker reflects upon a particular group of men chosen for

violence; that is, forced to be soldiers. These men actualiy died forty years before the

writing of the poem. In the course of the poem, the speaker clarifies the meaning he finds

in the lives of these young men, telling of his associations with them, He first describes

vividly and precisely what "the

cellu]oid of a photograph holds." This powerfully conden-

sed expression contains an emotional impact or strong overtone of affection and pathos,

The photegraph preserves the likenesses of the six young men well enough for them

not to be buried in oblivion. The photograph is the only place "which

keeps him <them)alive." This fact intensifies the tragedy of their lives. The minds of the young men who

were alive in the photograph are clear]y reflected in the "faded

and echre-tinged" celluloid.





Memory fades like time ; grief fades like fashion.

In the second stanza the mood shifts to a pastoral one in which the speaker muses upon

the setting where the six young men were photographed, relating the place to his own

childhood remembrances. He knows the spot though his recollections are of days after the

men were killed in war, The place remains as beautiful as it was then while the men's

personal histories have tetally changed. The young men are gone ; the speaker himself is

different since he first enjoyed the beauty of the place.

The third stanza mirrors the speaker in his rnusings upon the moment of the innocent

young men's death, "His

best friend" echoes the phrase "familiar

to their friends" from

stanza one. Although "best friend" is a standard English term for someone's closest

friend, the word "best"

is used here unsentimentally to symbolize the supreme sacrifice.

The last three lines are about the poet's sense of his own mortality as he looks at the

photograph. These lines give the reader the impression that death was more real to the

six young men at the end of their lives than was hope.

After reflecting upon the pasts of these young men, the speaker returns to the present.

The fourth stanza defines more clearly what the photograph holds, Hughes respects the

dead, either victims or heroes of war. The dead are invested not only with greater-than-

life qualities but also with the ironies by which such permanence is defined. The photograph

also is a victim of war ; it is characterized both by the celluleid fading natural]y and by"war's

worst thinkable flash and rending." The word "thinkable"

means that associations

or thoughts restrict one's perceptions. The "iocket,"

a tender keepsake, becomes a "hospi-

tal";the smile of the dead is changed for the living. The phrase "forty

years rotting into

soil" suggests one reaction of the living to these young men's faces. Thus the trivial things

in the photograph become effective expressions of mental pain or agony. The "Sunday

best" is a reminder of their being ; the parenthetical "In

his Sunday best" is evocative of

this.

The last stanza concludes the "contradictory

permanent horrors" of the photograph,

In the first five lines the speaker comments about obvious opposites. In "the single

exposure," the moment of death is united with the moment when the photograph was taken.

The dead exce] the living in power. Here is definitely represented the immortality of the

dead which the photograph reveals well.

The meter in the poem has the effect of rugged, impressive immediacy. Precision and

economy lie in its expressive phrases ; complexity lies in emotional responses to a violent

situation or in emotional intensity which arises frem the properties of the photograph.Throughout the poem flows the milieu of humanity arising from the poet's contemplation

of war, and reflected also in Wilfred Owen's "Futility,"

Yeats' "Easter 1916," and Siegfried

Sassoon's "The

Child at the Window,"

Hughes' poem "The

Casualty" reflects in its limpid stream of words the ferocity which

causes war ; the barbarous brutality which exists deep within humankind that, although

marked off from the natural world by self-consciousness, is part of the predatory nature

of animals and shares many of their fundamental drives and impulses :




22 Toshimi Horiuchi

THE CASUALTY

Farmers in the fields, housewives behind steamed win

Watch the burning aircraft across the blue sky float,

As if a firefly and a spider fought,

Far above the trees, between the washing httng out.

They wait with interest for the evening news,

dows,

But already, in a brambled ditch, suddenly-smashed

Stems twitch. In the stubble a pheasant

Is craning every way in astonishment.

The hare that heps up, quizzical, hesitant,

Flattens ears and tears madly away and the wren warns,

Some, who saw fall, smoke beckons. They jostle above,

They peer down a sunbeam as if they expected there

A snake in the gloom of the brambles or a rare flower,-

See the grave of dead leaves heave suddenly, hear

It was a man fell out of the air alive,

Hear now his groans and senses groping, They rip

The slum of weeds, leaves, barbed coils ; they raise

A body that as the breeze teuches it glows,

Branding their hands on his bones, Now that he has

No spine, against heaped sheaves they prop him up,

Arrange his limbs in orcler, open his eye,

Then stand, helpless as ghosts. In a scene

Melting in the August noon, the burned man

Bulks closer greater flesh and blood than their own,

As suddenly the heart's beat shakes his body and the eye

Widens childishly. Sympathies

Fasten to the b]ood like flies. Here's no heart's more

Open or large than a fist clenched, and in there

Holding close complacency its most dearUnscratchable diamond. The tears of their eyes

Too tender to let break, start to the edge

Of such horror close as mourners can.

Greedy to share all that is undergone,

Grirnace, gasp, gesture of death. Till they look down

On the handkerchief at which his eye stares up.

At the beginning of "The

a violent death. His burningCasualty,aircraft

"

the doomed airman is caught in the loneliness of

plunges him away from the company of the indif




FIRE AND ICE IN TED HUGHES' POETRY 23

ferent living who watch from be]ow and admits him into the company of the more

meaningful dead. In falling "out

of the air alive" the airman becomes uniquely significant.

The price he pays is immediate death, the breaking of his body beyond repair : "Now

that

he has/ No spine, against heaped sheaves they prop him up." Yet it is the living, confront-

ed by his death, who stand "helpless

as ghosts," while the dead man, by virtue of his sudden

death, "Bulks closer greater flesh and blood than their own." The word

"alive," with its

serious, non-ironic application to the dead man falling, enables death to take on its full

ambivalence as an event both terrible and glorious,

The poem's cencreteness and sharpness flow from visual clarity, cempression, inten-

sity of tone, and from the remarkable vigor of vocabulary and syntax. Its irnagery is

original and striking, but its observation of life, both of .the human and animal kingdoms,

has the force of unanswerable truth. The theme of "The

Casualty" is violent death,

Violence is the occasion not for reflection but for being., It is a guarantee of energy and

life but paradoxically when it knows itself in moments of captivity, pain or death. We see

in this poem how violence as mockery, is brought about, how human beings become makers

of violence to themselves,

Substances secreted from a gland of human insanity concentrate around a core to form

diabolic concretion within the shell of life and become known as sin. Very sinful human

rninds are delineated vividly in Hughes' poem "The

Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar" :

THE MARTYRDOM OF BISHOP FARRAR

Burned by Bloody Mary's men at Caermarthen, "If

I flinch

from the pain of the burning, believe not the doctrine that

I have preached." (His words on being chained to the stake.)

Bloody Mary's venomous flames can curl :

They can shrivel sinew and char bone

Of foot, ankle, knee, and thigh, and boil

Bowels, and drop his heart a cinder down ;

And her soldiers can cry, as they hurl

Logs in the red rush:"This is her sermon,"

The sullen-jowled watching Welsh townspeople

Hear him crack in the fire's mouth ; they see what

Black oozing twist of stuff bubbles the smell

That tars and retches their lungs:no pulpitOf his ever held their eyes so still,

Never, as now his agony, his wit.

An ignorant means to establish ownership

Of his flock!Thus their shepherd she seized

And knotted him into this blazing shape

In their eyes, as if such could have cauterized




24 Toshimi Horiuchi

The trust they tumed towards him, and branded on

Its stump her claim, to outlaw question,

So it might have been : seeing their exemplar

And teacher burned for his lessons to black bits,Their silence might have disowned him to her,

And hung up what he had taught with their Welsh .hats :

Who sees his blasphemous father struck by fire

From heaven, might well be heard to speak no oaths.

But the fire that struck here, come from Hell even,

Kindled little heavens in his words

As he fed his body to the flame alive.Words which, before they will be dumbly spared,

Will burn their body and be tongued with fire

Make paitry folly of flesh and this world's air,

When they saw what annuities of hours

And comfortable blood he burned to get

His words a bare honouring in their ears,The shrewd townsfolk pocketed thern hot :

Stamp was not current but they rang and shone

As good gold as any queen's crown.

Gave all he had, and yet the bargain struck

To a merest farthing his whele agony,

His body's cold'kept miserdom of shrieks

He gave uncounted, while out of his eyes,

Out of his mouth, fire like a glory broke,

And srnoke burned his sermon into the skies.

The ice or fire within human beings seems to make it difficult to distinguish them from

other animals. The hawk in the poem "Hawk

Roosting" is identified with the human

person as we listen to the bird's voice sounding throughout the poem :

HAWK ROOSTING

,I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.

Inaction, no falsifying dream

Between my hooked head and hooked feet :

Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!

The air]s buoyancy and the sun's ray

Are of advantage to me;

And the earth's face upward for my inspection.




FIRE AND ICE IN TEDHUGHES, POETRY 25

My feet are locked upon the rough bark,

It took the whole of CreationTo produce my foot, my each feather :

Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fiy up, and revolve it al] slowly-

I kill where I please because it is all mine,

There is no sophistry in my body :

My manners are tearing off heads-

The allotment of death.

For the one path of my flight is direct

Through the bones of the living.

No arguments assert my right :

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,

The fiery ice or icy fire might be energy of life that exists far beyond reason. And so,

however merciless it is, its existence is an undeniable fact. Hughes faces this reality as it

is, and mirrors it in his poem clearly and calmly.

WIND

This house has been far out at sea all night,

The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,

Winds stampeding the fields under the window

Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose;then under an orange sky

The hills had new places, and wind wielded

Blade-light, 1uminous black and emerald,

Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noonIscaled along the house-side as far as

The coal-house door. OnceIlooked up-

Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes

The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,

At any second to bang and vanish with a flap :The wind fiung a magpie away and a black-Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house




26 Toshimi HQriuchi

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note

That any second would shatter it. Now deep

In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip

Our hearts and cannQt entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing, ,And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,

Seeing the window tremble to come in,

Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

The poem "Wind"

describes a house and the surrounding countryside during a hurri-

cane. The wind is accompanied by rain during the night ; the rain ceases with morning,

but the wind continues through the day. In the last two stanzas the peet and his compan-

ion sit before the fire, presumably that evening, but can concentrate on nothing but the

tremors of the house and the sound of the storm, The house represents the insulated

human world, the world of books, thoughts, and human relationships. The blazing fire on

the hearth creates a magic circle the beasts cannot enter. The house contains all human

bearings and assurance yet it is as tiny and flimsy as a ship in a storm that has been "far

out at sea all night." Wind, sea, darkness and "blade-light"

are images of what it cannot

contain er cope with. Throughout the poem the poet uses violent images to convey the

violence of this storm.

Many of the images used in "Wind" are sound images which are reinforced by the use

of onomatopoetic words C`crashing," "booming,"

"drummed,"

"bang,"

"flap,"

"rang,"

"shatter")

and the effective use of sound repetitions, In the first stanza, for instance, the

alliteration of w <"woods," "winds,"

"window,"

"wet")

is accompanied by a remarkable

series of repeated d's C`woods," "darkness,"

"winds,"

"stampeding,"

"field3'

"window,"

"floundering,"

"astride,"

"blinding"),

le's ("crashing," "darkness,"

"black"),

and b's ("boom-ing," "black,"

"blinding").

The w's are appropriqte to the swish of the wind, the d's, k's

and b's to the thudding, crashing, booming, and banging noises caused by the wind. In line

14 the onomatopoeia is reinforced by assonance ("bang," "vanish,"

"flap").

In lines 15-16

rhythm also contributes in a remarkable way, the series of stressed syllables in "black-

back gti11 bEnt like an iron bar s16wly" reinforcing the visual slowness. Similar effects

may be observed throughout the poem. The poem uses various kinds of rhyme, rnostly very

approximate, following the scheme a-b-b-a except in stanza 3, which is a-b-a-b. The

rhythm moves very freely around what is basically a five-beat line. Needless to say, these

acoustical devices work quite effectively in expressing the powerful violence of nature.

A sort of physical immediacy characterizes Ted Hughes' poetry, while the obsession

of violence features his poetic mind. Ted Hughes, an anguished contemplator of nature,

shows great feeling for nature in his verse, If he looks at nature, he finds there predators

and victims, His imagination whirls with increasing wildness. This nature he gazes on is

mechanical and pitiless. The subject matter he deals with is not a blank, featureless




FIRE AND ICE IN TED HUGHES: POETRY 27

landscape but a crushing, dangerous universe, Any form of violence-any form of

vehement activity or brutal activity-invokes the bigger energy, the elemental power

circuit of the universe. Once the contact has been made, it becomes difficult to control.

Hughes' intense realizing of animals and things is striking and ingenious. There is an

identification with an impersonal ruthlessness which denies the finer feeling. The thing he

admires in animals is not their beauty seen in Hopkins' "The Windhover," but their ability

to survive ; their fierce c]inging to life in all circumstances ; the fire and ice existing within

themselves,

Ted Hughes, one of the most prominent poets of this century, has an outstanding gift

for capturing the appearances and movements of creatures. He sees the world as violent

and himself as having a savage role to fill, and finds emblems of violence in the outer world

of animals. It may be that Hughes longs for both the burning thing to be touched and the

frozen thing to be touched. He speaks with great approval of Emily Dickinson's frighten-

ing vision of the sense of an icy chill, and alse the sense of the conflagration within her or

the sense of fiery heat. Some blend of fire and ice lurking in living things and nature is the

ideal admixture that Hughes has sought in his poems,

These qualities are rare in English peetry but Hughes, as their effective expofient, has

gripped a considerable audience. He is able to do so not only through his subject matter,

but also through his compression, his daring vocabulary, and his jarring rhythms,

TEXT

Tled Htrghes Selected Iloems 1957-1981. London : Faber and Faber, 1985.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appleyard, Bryan. CIIhe Pleasures of Ptace: Art and Imagination in Pbst-war Bn'tain. London:

Faber and Faber, 1989.

Barber, Charles, Ploettl, in Engtish : An inttoduction. London : Macmillan Education, 1983.Blackburn, John, ed. HZinly to Hlaanay. Edinburgh : Oliver & Boyd, 1986.

Cox, C,B, and A,E,Dyson. Modem R)etry : Sindies in Pmctical Cn'ticism. London : Edward Arnold

Ltd,, I984.

. The Prectical Cn'tiec'sin of Pbet,y. London: Edward Arnold Ltd,, 1983,Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'clair, eds, 7Vte ?Vbrton Anthology of Mbdlem I)betry, New York : W.

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Handley, Graham and Anne Dangerfield, English Coursework Mbdem Iloetop, London : Pan Books,

1991.Hughes. Ted, Iloetiy in the Mtzleing, London: Faber and Faber, 1986.Larrissy, Edward. Readi,rg 7leventieth-Centst,], Floedy: The Langz"ge of Gender and Objects.

Oxford : Basil Blackwell, 1990.

Perrine, Laurence and Thomas R. Arp. Sound and Sense : An introduction to Ibeti),. New York :

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Sagar, Keith, ed. Tlte Achievement of 7led Haghes. Manchester : Manchester University Press,



Sendai 　Shirayuri 　Junior 　College

28　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 Toshimi 　Horiuchi

　　 1983．

S α 寵競 θ∫ Of　Verse．　 Selected　and 　lntroduced　by　Anthony　Thwaite．　 London　：　Thames 　Methuen ，

　　 1984．

James　Kirkup ・徳永暢三共著「詩人の声・現代英詩の鑑賞的分析』研究社，1967，

金関寿夫・川崎寿彦・橋口　稔　共著『新しい詩を読む一現代イギリス・アメリカの詩一』研究社，1972．

N 工工一Eleotronio 　Library 　

ice in ted hughes' poetry - j-stage

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