Ted Hughes – “Theology”, “Crow’s Last Stand”, “Daffodils”

“Theology” is a short poem which gives Hughes’s own version of the Eden story: Adam ate the apple, Eve ate Adam, the serpent ate Eve.

The serpent, meanwhile
Sleeps his meal off in Paradise —
Smiling to hear
God’s querulous calling (ll. 9 – 12)

Leonard M. Scigaj has this very sophisticated reading linking it with Hinduist and Buddhist thought. I have to accept it at face value, knowing much less about the subject. But the poem, when read on its own, in the context of Hughes’s previous poems in the selection, obsessed with predators, seems to me like a flippant rejection of Christian teaching on nature and embracing its predatory aspect which includes also humans.

In the 1960s Leonard Baskin, an American artist and friend of both Sylvia Plath and Hughes, suggested Hughes could write poems to accompany his drawings of crows. Although the project was not eventually realized, Baskin’s offer inspired Hughes to write a cycle of poems published as Crow (1970), probably his most famous collection of poems until Birthday Letters (1998), Hughes’ Crow is a summary of all archetypes and symbolic meanings ascribed to this bird in cultures from all over the world, from the crows in the Tower of London to the trickster Raven figure from the Native American myths. “Crow’s Last Stand” starts with the word “burning” repeated three times and depicts the crow as ultimately invincible in face of the raging sun, looking brazenly out of “the tower of its scorched fort”, even in the middle of the fire.

And finally, ‘Daffodils’ from Birthday Letters, the rare collection of poems that became a bestseller, although admittedly it owed its success not so much to Hughes’s poetic talent (great as it was) as to the rubbernecking of readers who were excited that, after more than thirty years, Hughes had finally decided to break his silence about his relationship with Plath after enduring without complaint (at least in public) the odium of being widely perceived as “the man who drove Sylvia Plath to her grave” (fairly or not, that’s another story). The poems were written during this long period of silence, until Hughes finally decided to publish them after being diagnosed with terminal cancer (although this was not publicly announced at the time).

Daffodils have been the emblematic poem of English poetry since Wordsworth, and Hughes’s poem rises to the occasion. The daffodils he describes are the ones he and Plath collected on their farm in Devon. They sold them to the local grocer. It sounds like “sacrilege”, but the local grocer, who would die the same winter as Plath, persuaded them to do it. He is not even sure that they needed the money that much, but rather links it to their still-hungry feeling “to turn everything into profit”, and the daffodils seemed like an unexpected windfall, a gift from above. The description of the two of them working to collect the daffodils is a mixture of delicacy and melancholy – they did not know that it was Sylvia’s last spring, and the beauty of the daffodils is juxtaposed with the prosaic nature of their ‘oval, fleshy buttocks’ and the fact that they were sold for seven pence a bunch. But the daffodils kept growing and eventually they were overwhelmed and lost their wedding present of scissors somewhere. Now, every March, when they spring from the same bulbs, “ballerinas too early for music, shivering / In the draughty wings of the year”, they remind Hughes of his dead wife, and he thinks of those scissors rusting somewhere, sinking deeper into the ground each year, “an anchor, a cross of rust”, and perhaps also the symbol of his lifelong wound.