332 PART THREE
But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,
Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness against night ’s darkness had freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching.Not a large pond, but more than meters deep “It was as deep as England,” some
pre-Christian place and time akin to childhood.
At this depth Hughes’s writing mutates from crude fragments into layers of
uncanny experience. A drawn-out sentence holds immense pike past nightfall,
through hypnotic casting and terrific alertness. Within this sentence a stanza
gap, a gaping between “I dared not cast” and “But silently cast,” deepens the
reluctance of a dream descent. Like the thought-fox’s “deepening” eye and the
hawk’s “still eye,” the pike ’s eye “watching upwards” and now simply staring
confronts a once-young angler.
Finally a quiet wildness seizes his language. Still splashes and owls hooting
actually deepen night ’s stillness into what looks like “dream Darkness.” But
this key line break compresses the sentence: not exactly “dream / Darkness,”
though the words say as much, but “the dream [that] Darkness beneath night ’s
darkness had freed.” Freed how, from where, and why? We ’re left in the dark
with an ongoing verb. Like the fox emerging “deeper within darkness,” a pike-
like poem-dream “rose slowly towards me, watching.”
“Pike” came out in Lupercal,named for a Roman fertility festival honoring
the wolf. Later Wodwo featured “some sort of goblin creature... half-man
half-animal spirit of the forests.” Then came Crow, a barbarous whimsical bird
indelible in Leonard Baskin’s drawings for the book. For children (first) Hughes
wrote Moon-Whales, Ffangs the Vampire Bat, andNessie, the Mannerless Monster.
In a jolly lunar exercise, The Earth Owl and Other Moon-People has foxes hunting
“that noble rural vermin,” a country squire. With Remains of Elmet (an ancient
Celtic place-name) Hughes goes back to the West Yorkshire moorland of his
childhood and its wildlife: weasel, cormorant, loach, snipe, curlew. Elegizing a
“spirit of the place” but without nostalgia, he conjures “mad heather and grass,”
“wild rock,” “misty valleys,” “crumbling outcrop,” “sour hills,” “blown water”
(and sometimes he sounds just a bit overblown).
Even as a child, Hughes felt this landscape polluted: “the only life” in the
River Calder was a “bankside population of brown rats.” He played “by the
River Don, which drained the industrial belt between Sheffield and Doncaster: a
river of such concentrated steaming, foaming poisons that an accidental ducking