cornelia d. j. pearsall
(rumbled me as an eyeless corpse)—(as Adams, in fact) even
andstepped from a black rock into the air(stepped out of a sarcophagus—like a ghost)
Iturnfromthedeadbirdtowatchhimfly(I shift focus from the vision of him as a corpse to the vision of him as a live bird, though
still watching the same bird).^54
Pursuing a line-by-line reading that proceeds for a few more lines of this poem,
Hughes interrupts Douglas’s words with his own riff on each line, producing a
rhythmic syncopation that seems in effect to create another poem. Hughes observes
that ‘so many of the lines superimpose the two’ birds, even as he moves into a
superimposition of his own lines that is also, given their placement in parentheses,
a subordination of them. This letter is reprinted inWinter Pollen, although Jane
Feaver, the volume’s editor at Faber, suggested that it be omitted and instead
published some day in a collection of Hughes’s correspondence. But Hughes saw
the value of what he himself considered an unusual exchange, less between himself
and Scammell than between himself and Douglas, and indeed between himself and
the birds. Writing to Feaver from Court Green in a letter of 23 April 1993, Hughes
explains, ‘really, I would like to keep [it]. And no, I don’t usually go on like that in
letters: those were lucky moments where I caught a bird or two as they went over.’^55
Hughes’s spontaneous interlineal commentary underscores the linear superim-
position that constitutes one of Douglas’s most distinctive formal signatures: in a
sense, his lyric front lines. The superimposition of the birds upon one another is
an ocular effect achieved by the superimposition of one line upon another. Hughes
comments on the ‘turn’ (appropriately, given the poem’s opening image of a sea
that ‘turns in sleep’) by which we ‘shift focus’ while ‘still watching the same bird’,
and this applies to the form of the poem itself, in which a line might modify the
line before, yet also turn or shift focus to modify the line that follows. The alternate
meanings are superimposed upon one another, like mortized strata, which leads
Hughes to marvel: ‘Interesting to see how the same binary system strobes away
down through almost all the lines—fascinating how tightly and precisely he brings
it off.’^56 And we must ourselves be struck by the way in which, in the mortized
strata of Douglas’s and Hughes’s lines, the dead poet and the living poet, like the
dead and living birds, become also confounded.
‘The Sea Bird’, as an autonomous text, is itself confounded by the poem ‘Adams’,
to which in some respects it bears close resemblance. Though both follow the prints
(^54) Hughes to William Scammell, 8 May 1988, ‘Postscript 2: ‘‘Adams’’ and ‘‘The Sea Bird’’ ’, in
Winter Pollen 55 , 217–18.
Hughes to Jane Feaver, 23 Apr. 1993, Ted Hughes Papers (MSS 644).
(^56) Hughes, ‘Postscript 2’, 218.