cornelia d. j. pearsall
alone creep into the dead bird and thus cease to exist. Although the poet seeks to
entera likeness to the bird as extreme as Adams’s, in the end it is the poet and the
Adamic man who are superimposed on one another.
Reading ‘Adams’ again in 1988, Hughes is drawn to compare the poem less to
‘The Sea Bird’ than to another work, a list drawn up by Douglas in March 1944
enumerating the qualities of what he called his ‘Bete Noire’, or the beast on hisˆ
back. Hughes asks Scammell,
Don’t you think there’s something about
Adams is like a bird
he does not hear you, someone said
in appearance he is bird-eyedreminiscent of
He is a jailer.
Allows me out on parole
brings me back by telepathy
is inside my mind.^59Although Adams and the ‘Bete Noire’ are clearly both ominous figures, mostˆ
striking in both texts, as Hughes’s ear discerns, are the strong rhythms of their linear
structures. Hughes pulls lines out of context from ‘Adams’, thus demonstrating how
autonomous each line is, though so densely entrenched in the poem itself. Musing
in his 1988 correspondence with Scammell on his 1987 Douglas ‘Introduction’,
Hughes admits that he struggled and may have failed ‘to define something’,
explaining, ‘This something is whatever it is that inhabits the curious electrified
inflection of his each line.’^60 Hughes suggests that the most distinctive feature of this
verse is a lineal force whose electricity might itself seem a function of what Hughes
in 1964 called the poet’s ‘energy, his impatient, razor energy’. With each return to
them, Douglas’s lines seem to have appeared to Hughes (to paraphrase Douglas)
like the limbs of a man whose movements and appearance he knew, ever capable of
moving into alignments that for a moment he can hardly believe a position of the
limbs, or lines, he knows.
‘Strange figure, that Adams,’ Hughes writes to Scammell; ‘Odd how he sticks
in the mind, so jagged and disturbing—Douglas’s old Adam!’^61 While ‘Adams’
in 1988 seems to him unshakeable, Hughes had omitted ‘Adams’ from his 1964
edition of Douglas, a decision regretted by Geoffrey Hill, who in a review of the
volume calls it ‘by far the finer of the two poems’. Hill posits: ‘It is conceivable that
Douglas composed ‘‘Adams’’ first; and, for reasons best known to himself, decided
later to break this almost-perfect poem down.’^62 If he is right, Douglas in essence
(^59) Hughes, ‘Postscript 2’, 217. (^60) Hughes, ‘Postscript 1’, 216.
(^61) Hughes, ‘Postscript 2’, 219.
(^62) Geoffrey Hill, ‘ ‘‘I in Another Place’’: Homage to Keith Douglas’,Stand, 6/4 (1964/5), 11 and 12.