Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

TED HUGHES CAPTURING PIKE 333

was said to be fatal.” One day nearby “I saw all the fish in this lake bobbing their
mouths at the surface.” Anger surfaces, always in sensuous speech, when he
revisits the fishing grounds of Tarka, England ’s much-loved fictional otter.

The river is suddenly green—dense bottle green.

Hard in the sun, dark as spinach.

Drought pools bleach their craters.

The river’s floor is a fleece—

Tresses of some vile stuff

That disintegrates to a slime as you touch it

Leaving your fingers fouled with a stink of diesel.

Thunderbolts flush through, “But never a flood enough to scour a sewer, / Never
enough to resurrect a river.”
Remembering his forebears’ saying, “Back to the land in three generations,”
Hughes and his wife in the 1970s bought a farm in Devon, where ancient ways and
“high-banked, deep-cut lanes” survive and “the financial nightmares, the techno-
logical revolution and international market madness” were only just beginning
to devastate local farming. There they practiced animal husbandry, raising sheep
and cattle. At night Hughes would note down details in “improvised verses,”
staying “close to what is going on.” He published these as Moortown Diary.
Many have to do with nursing and birthing cows and calves, ewes and
lambs—not a famous subject for lyric poetry. The pages bristle with life and
death too. They’re so steeped in earthy pastoral, that when someone staying
at Moortown cottage left behind his copy of the book, Hughes sent it along
inscribed, “The sheep that was lost is found again.” Without an ounce of fakery
or self-regard, he wields exact lingo for what ’s going on and for his hand in
all that, thanks to a muscling Anglo-Saxon word hoard. A “dumb calf ” can’t
manage the “tight hard bag of stiff teats.”

He nuzzled slobbering at their fat sides

But couldn’t bring one in. They were dripping,

And as he excited them they started squirting.

I fumbled one into his mouth—I had to hold it,

Stuffing its slippery muscle into his suction.

Like Maxine Kumin on her New England farm, Hughes’s animal touch shapes
his verse lines too.
On “17 February 1974,”
A lamb could not get born. Ice wind
Out of a downpour dishclout sunrise. The mother
Lay on the mudded slope. Harried, she got up
And the blackish lump bobbed at her back-end
Under her tail. After some hard galloping,