Work and Play by Ted Hughes
Work and Play by Ted Hughes The swallow of summer, she toils all the summer, A blue-dark knot of glittering voltage, A whiplash swimmer, a fish of the air. But the serpent of cars that crawls through the dust In shimmering exhaust Searching to slake Its fever in ocean Will play and be idle or […]
Wind by Ted Hughes
Wind by Ted Hughes 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, luminous black and […]
Tractor by Ted Hughes
Tractor by Ted Hughes The tractor stands frozen; an agony To think of. All night Snow packed its open entrails. Now a head-pincering gale, A spill of molten ice, smoking snow, Pours into its steel. At white heat of numbness it stands In the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness. It defied flesh and won’t start. […]
Thrushes by Ted Hughes
Thrushes by Ted Hughes Terrifying are the attent sleek thrushes on the lawn, More coiled steel than living; a poised Dark deadly eye, those delicate legs Triggered to stirrings beyond sense; with a start, a bounce, a stab Overtake the instant and drag out some writhing thing. No indolent procrastinations and no yawning states, No […]
Thistles by Ted Hughes
Thistles by Ted Hughes Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men Thistles spike the summer air And crackle open under a blue-black pressure. Every one a revengeful burst Of resurrection, a grasphed fistful Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up From the underground stain of a decayed Viking. They […]
The Warm and the Cold by Ted Hughes
The Warm and the Cold by Ted Hughes Freezing dusk is closing Like a slow trap of steel On trees and roads and hills and all That can no longer feel. But the carp is in its depth Like a planet in its heaven. And the badger in its bedding Like a loaf in the […]
The Thought-Fox by Ted Hughes
The Thought-Fox by Ted Hughes I imagine this midnight moment’s forest: Something else is alive Beside the clock’s loneliness And this blank page where my fingers move. Through the window I see no star: Something more near Though deeper within darkness Is entering the loneliness: Cold, delicately as the dark snow, A fox’s nose touches […]
The Owl by Ted Hughes
The Owl by Ted Hughes I saw my world again through your eyes As I would see it again through your children’s eyes. Through your eyes it was foreign. Plain hedge hawthorns were peculiar aliens, A mystery of peculiar lore and doings. Anything wild, on legs, in your eyes Emerged at a point of exclamation […]
The Minotaur by Ted Hughes
The Minotaur by Ted Hughes The mahogany table-top you smashed Had been the broad plank top Of my mother’s heirloom sideboard- Mapped with the scars of my whole life. That came under the hammer. That high stool you swung that day Demented by my being Twenty minutes late for baby-minding. ‘Marvellous!’ I shouted, ‘Go on, […]
The Harvest Moon by Ted Hughes
The Harvest Moon by Ted Hughes The flame-red moon, the harvest moon, Rolls along the hills, gently bouncing, A vast balloon, Till it takes off, and sinks upward To lie on the bottom of the sky, like a gold doubloon. The harvest moon has come, Booming softly through heaven, like a bassoon. And the earth […]
The Child Is Father To The Man by Ted Hughes
The Child Is Father To The Man by Ted Hughes ‘The child is father to the man.’ How can he be? The words are wild. Suck any sense from that who can: ‘The child is father to the man.’ No; what the poet did write ran, ‘The man is father to the child.’ ‘The child […]
Spring & Fall: To A Young Child by Ted Hughes
Spring & Fall: To A Young Child by Ted Hughes Margaret, are you grieving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leaves, like the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? Ah! as the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By & by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of […]
September by Ted Hughes
September by Ted Hughes We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold: No clock counts this. When kisses are repeated and the arms hold There is no telling where time is. It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still: Behind the eye a star, Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell Time […]
Pied Beauty by Ted Hughes
Pied Beauty by Ted Hughes Glory be to God for dappled things— For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings; Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough; And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; […]
Old Age Gets Up by Ted Hughes
Old Age Gets Up by Ted Hughes Stirs its ashes and embers, its burnt sticks An eye powdered over, half melted and solid again Ponders Ideas that collapse At the first touch of attention The light at the window, so square and so same So full-strong as ever, the window frame A scaffold in space, […]
Lovesong by Ted Hughes
Lovesong by Ted Hughes He loved her and she loved him His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to He had no other appetite She bit him she gnawed him she sucked She wanted him complete inside her Safe and Sure forever and ever Their little cries fluttered into the curtains […]
Lineage by Ted Hughes
Lineage by Ted Hughes In the beginning was Scream Who begat Blood Who begat Eye Who begat Fear Who begat Wing Who begat Bone Who begat Granite Who begat Violet Who begat Guitar Who begat Sweat Who begat Adam Who begat Mary Who begat God Who begat Nothing Who begat Never Never Never Never Who […]
How To Paint A Water Lily by Ted Hughes
How To Paint A Water Lily by Ted Hughes To Paint a Water Lily A green level of lily leaves Roofs the pond’s chamber and paves The flies’ furious arena: study These, the two minds of this lady. First observe the air’s dragonfly That eats meat, that bullets by Or stands in space to take […]
Hawk Roosting by Ted Hughes
Hawk Roosting by Ted Hughes 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 […]
God’s Grandeur by Ted Hughes
God’s Grandeur by Ted Hughes The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod? Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; And all is seared with […]
Full Moon and Little Frieda by Ted Hughes
Full Moon and Little Frieda by Ted Hughes A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket – And you listening. A spider’s web, tense for the dew’s touch. A pail lifted, still and brimming; mirror To tempt a first star to a tremor. Cows are going home in […]
Examination at the Womb-Door by Ted Hughes
Examination at the Womb-Door by Ted Hughes Who owns those scrawny little feet? Death. Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face? Death. Who owns these still-working lungs? Death. Who owns this utility coat of muscles? Death. Who owns these unspeakable guts? Death. Who owns these questionable brains? Death. All this messy blood? Death. These minimum-efficiency eyes? […]
Earth-Moon by Ted Hughes
Earth-Moon by Ted Hughes Once upon a time there was a person He was walking along He met the full burning moon Rolling slowly twoards him Crushing the stones and houses by the wayside. She shut his eyes from the glare. He drew his dagger And stabbed and stabbed and stabbed. The cry that quit […]
Crow’s Nerve Fails by Ted Hughes
Crow’s Nerve Fails by Ted Hughes Crow, feeling his brain slip, Finds his every feather the fossil of a murder. Who murdered all these? These living dead, that root in his nerves and his blood Till he is visibly black? How can he fly from his feathers? And why have they homed on him? Is […]
Crow’s Fall by Ted Hughes
Crow’s Fall by Ted Hughes When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white. He decided it glared much too whitely. He decided to attack it and defeat it. He got his strength up flush and in full glitter. He clawed and fluffed his rage up. He aimed his beak direct at the […]
Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days by Ted Hughes
Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days by Ted Hughes She gives him his eyes, she found them Among some rubble, among some beetles He gives her her skin He just seemed to pull it down out of the air and lay it over her She weeps with fearfulness and astonishment She has found […]
A Woman Unconscious by Ted Hughes
A Woman Unconscious by Ted Hughes Russia and America circle each other; Threats nudge an act that were without doubt A melting of the mould in the mother, Stones melting about the root. The quick of the earth burned out: The toil of all our ages a loss With leaf and insect. Yet flitting thought […]