330 PART THREE
Fulcrum of violence where the hawk hangs still.
That maybe in his own time meets the weather
Coming the wrong way, suffers the air, hurled upside down,
Fall from his eye, the ponderous shires crash on him,
The horizon trap him; the round angelic eye
Smashed, mix his heart ’s blood with the mire of the land.So much charges these words, exciting every visceral verb and noun. Where
Hopkins reels with Catholic spirit, Hughes struggles for sheer survival.
Instinctually he mimics the alliteration in Old English poetry, such as the
Anglo-Saxon “Seafarer” (Ezra Pound ’s version): “Hung with hard ice-flakes,
where hail-scur flew, / There I heard naught save the harsh sea.” Half the lines
in “The Hawk in the Rain” go that way—“drown... drumming... drags,”
“clay... clutches,” “height hangs,” “wings... weightless.” This archaic vision
thrusts back and forth from drumming plowland to quiet height, streaming air
to stubborn hedges, diamond polestar to earth’s mouth, lurching between “I”
and the hawk till its “angelic eye” mires in earth.
Despite a speaker, all the poem’s passion comes from earth, sky, weather.
Then a mayhem of syntax at the end, all “I” gone, hurls the hawk upside down
and he feels the air “fall” from his eye as England ’s shires crash against him.
The poetry itself strains our grasp and jars complacence, barely poising still-
ness against violence.
Wildlife encounters don’t usually explode this way, in mind or in fact, but
they carry a sense of risk. A “sudden sharp” fox enters the head, a hawk hangs
above the dazed speaker. As a “very keen angler for pike,” Hughes tells how
once, unable for a while to go fishing, he dredged up memories of his childhood
fishing hole, a deep pond holding more than he knew. For him, poems can outdo
life, they’re “continually trying to displace our experience.” So “Pike” got him
fishing again—with a vengeance. “One of my prize catches,” he calls this poem.
Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.
Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.
In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads—
Gloom of their stillness:
Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards.
Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds.