TED HUGHES CAPTURING PIKE 329a vixen” to fire the dissenting spirit in trying times. “For a human animal to
call for help / on another animal / is the most riven the most revolted cry on
earth /... it blurts / into the birth-yell of the yet-to-be human child / pushed
out of a female.”
A long trail of animals winds through British and American poetry. Some are
fabulous: Melville ’s Moby-Dick, Poe ’s Raven, Lewis Carroll’s Snark, Hughes’s
Crow. Most are capturings, seen then reseen: Clare ’s badger (a Hughes favor-
ite), Whitman’s hermit thrush and “beetles rolling balls of dung,” Dickinson’s
“narrow Fellow in the Grass,” Lawrence ’s snake, pike, mountain lion, mos-
quito (another favorite), Eliot ’s hermit thrush, Jeffers’s hawks, Kunitz’s raccoon
and Wellfleet whale, Oppen’s deer, Roethke ’s slug, Stafford ’s “sharp swallows
in their swerve,” Lowell’s skunk, Bishop’s moose, fish, armadillo, Swenson’s
butterfly, Kumin’s horses, Kinnell’s bear, Snyder’s Cougar and Coyote, and they
go on and on, a virtual Noah’s ark.
Why such fascination? Pure wonder and strangeness? Catching them in
words? They’re potent models, other than human yet not entirely so—and
that ’s their force as metaphors too. Animals wild or domestic compel us by dif-
ference and kinship both. As Hughes says, “they have a certain wisdom. They
know something special.”
Something special happens, a stunning poem, when Hopkins catches the
windhover “in his riding / Of the rolling level underneath him steady air,
and striding / High there.” As the hawk rebuffs the wind, “My heart in hid-
ing / Stirred for a bird.” Then like Christ this “Brute beauty” turns mortal.
Falling, it shines even more, the way “blue-bleak embers” when they break apart
“gash gold-vermillion.” Hopkins, nineteenth-century Jesuit priest, in his turn
spurred Hughes toward his first book’s title poem, “The Hawk in the Rain.”
I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up
Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth’s mouth,
From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle
With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk
Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.
His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,
Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air.
While banging wind kills these stubborn hedges,
Thumbs my eyes, throws my breath, tackles my heart,
And rain hacks my head to the bone, the hawk hangs
The diamond point of will that polestars
The sea drowner’s endurance: and I,
Bloodily grabbed dazed last-moment-counting
Morsel in the earth’s mouth, strain towards the master-