Animal imagery in poetry of Ted Hughes
If animals and birds have acquired significant literary personas anywhere outside the fables and a handful of symbolist poems, it’s in the poetry of Ted Hughes. The first English poet of the “Will to live”, Hughes gained international acclaim due to his animal poetry and his depiction is “remarkably vivid, startling and yet truthful”. His animal imagery covers a wide range and seems more spiritual and supernatural in comparison to D. H Lawrence’s natural imagery. His interest in the evolutionary chain, the live bodies of animals and the symbolic dimension of each animal and bird is quite explicit from his own statement :
“I wanted to capture not just live animals, but the aliveness of animals in their natural state… the ‘foxness’ of the fox and the crowness of the crow”.
This assembly of animal imagery constitutes an emblematic bestiary which conveys Hughes’ most important themes:heroism and survival , myth, attitudes to sexuality and the role and function of the poet. He considers animals superior to human beings since their strength lies in their freedom and their instincts and also due to the fact that animals are more adaptable to the environment than humans. Therefore , his animal imagery counts for the mythic presentation of metamorphosis as an image of indestructibility of life, and the doge-animal as a symbol for creative and destructive forces in nature.
THE JAGUAR
In his poem “The Jaguar ” he shows the zoo as the embodiment of earth. The vitality and strength of the jaguar is contrasted with lethargy of other caged animals, which symbolizes the laziness of man. Each cage has an animal but still there is an apparent emptiness. This void signifies the British colonial trauma after Indian independence and each animal epitomizes a continent : the lion represents Africa and the tiger signifies Asia and so on. Compared with the instinctual ferocity of the jaguar, all other animals look like painted beasts on a calendar on the nursery wall . But the jaguar, even if caged, mesmerizes the crowd with its unfettered sense of freedom and strength. It shows to the humans that their social and psychological restraints and limitations are stricter than the palpable confinement of the mighty jaguar. Humans learn from the effortless might of the jaguar that “four walls do not a prison make” . As Gifford and Roberts have noted, this poem “is not a poem of just observation but of longing and affirmation “and the mesmerized crowd unconsciously has discovered in the jaguar his own true, instinctive self, which it has drowned in its intellect:
“He spins from the bars, but / there’s no cage to him / More than to the visionary his cell: / His stride in wilderness of freedom “.
THE THOUGHT FOX
In his poem “The Thought Fox”, the emerging of an eponymous fox from a midnight forest and his coming closure to the poet is the symbol for the blossoming of a nascent idea into a full grown poem. The use of fox imagery and the extended metaphor, couple together to create a brilliant effect upon the reader’s mind. The darkness signifies the poet’s mind and the fox symbolizes the poetic idea. At the very outset the poet can sense that “something else is alive” and can see a “fox’s nose” and “two eyes”, which represents the gradual emerging of an idea. Then the fox “sets neat prints into the snow” which signifies the figuring out the first distinctive ideas or words in the blank sheet of the poet’s mind. Finally the fox cones so close that the poet can see the “widening, deepening greenness” of its eyes which denoted that the poem and the idea, like the fox, is very living and palpable. The change from describing visual images to describing a smell in the final stanza indicates the impression that the idea, like the fox, is a living, breathing creature:
“Till with a sudden sharp hot shrink of fox/It enters the dark hole of the head”.
THE HAWK IN THE RAIN
“The Hawk in the Rain” is another impressive poem with powerful animal determination and empathic language which presents the image of the speaker dragging himself through the mud in the heavy rain. The hawk, though not as ferocious as the hawk of poem “Hawk Roosting”, is unshaken by the harsh weather while the speaker is viciously affected by this ill-weather. Thus the poet shows in this poem that animals are not vitiated by spurious mortality or incapacitated by doubt like mortal humans. The helplessness of the speaker before a bird of prey is emphasized by the speaker’s impotent jealousy that the Hawk might be killed one day by this mighty storm : “the ponderous shires crash on him.. the round angelic eye/smashed, mix his heart’s blood with the mire/of the land”. The threadbare immunity of humans against Nature’s wrath is sharply contrasted with the adaptability and the untamed, wild force of animals at large and the Hawk’s “diamond point of will” at particular:
“His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet/steady as a hallucination in the streaming air”.
Therefore, Ted Hughes’ poetry is too striking to attract a natural reaction. His shamanist addiction to the superiority of animalistic instinct over human intellect has either earned him epithets like”voyeur of violence”or brought appreciation for “the scope and complexity of his mythic enterprise”(Carol Bere). Hischberg rightly remarks:
“…what Hughes admires about animals is this single-mindedness and self centeredness… qualities of security, stability and permanence that human beings simply don’t have”.
