Ted Hughes

Crow, 1970

Criticism of the Crow poems, particularly Two Legends
Crow Blacker Than Ever
Examination at the Womb-Door
Crow's Theology
Two Legends
Crow's First Lesson
Crow Alights
Criticism of Crow Alight
Review of the book Crow

Birthday Letters, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1998.

The Bee God

Dream Life

Crow realized God loved him --

Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.

So that was proved.

Crow reclined, marvelling, on his heart-beat.

And he realized that God spoke Crow --

Just existing was His revelation.

But what

Loved the stones and spoke stone?

They seemed to exist too.

And what spoke that strange silence

After his clamour of caws faded?

And what loved the shot-pellets

That dribbled from those strung up mummifying crows?

What spoke the silence of lead?

Crow realized there were two Gods --

One of them much bigger than the other

Loving his enemies

And having all the weapons.

Black was the without eye

Black the within tongue

Black was the heart

Black the liver, black the lungs

Unable to suck in light

Black the blood in its loud tunnel

Black the bowels packed in furnace

Black too the muscles

Striving to pull out into the light

Black the nerves, black the brain

With its tombed visions

Black also the soul, the huge stammer

Of the cry that, welling, could not

Pronounce its sun.

II

Black is the wet otter's head, lifted.

Black is the rock, plunging in foam

Black is the gall lying on the bed of the blood.

Black is the earth-globe, one inch under,

An egg of blackness

Where sun and moon alternate their weathers

To hatch a crow, a black rainbow

Bent in emptiness

                over emptiness

But flying

God tried to teach Crow how to talk.

"Love," said God. "Say, Love."

Crow gaped, and the white shark crashed into the sea

And went rolling downwards, discovering its own depth.

"No, no," said God. "Say Love. Now try it. Love."

Crow gaped, and a bluefly, a tsetse, a mosquito

Zoomed out and down

To their sundry flesh-pots.

"A final try," said God. "Now, Love."

Crow convulsed, gaped, retched and

Man's bodiless prodigious head

Bulbed out onto the earth, with swivelling eyes,

Jabbering protest --

And Crow retched again, before God could stop him.

And woman's vulva dropped over man's neck and tightened.

The two struggled together on the grass.

God struggled to part them, cursed, wept --

Crow flew guiltily off.

Crow saw the herded mountains, steaming in the morning.

and he saw the sea

Dark-spined, with the whole earth in its coils.

He saw the stars, fuming away into the black, mushrooms of

the nothing forest, clouding their spores, the virus of God.

And he shivered with the horror of Creation.

In the hallucination of the horror

He saw this shoe, with no sole, rain-sodden,

Lying on a moor.

And there was this garbage can, bottom rusted away,

A playing place for the wind, in a waste of puddles.

There was this coat, in the dark cupboard,

in the silent room, in the silent house.

There was this face, smoking its cigarette between the dusk

window and the fire's embers.

Near the face, this hand, motionless.

Near the hand, this cup.

Crow blinked. He blinked. Nothing faded.

He stared at the evidence.

Nothing escaped him. (Nothing could escape.)

A review of Crow

Critic: Daniel Hoffman
Source: New York Times Book Review, April 18, 1971, pp. 6,
35-6. Reproduced by permission
Criticism about: Ted Hughes (1930-1998), also known as:
Ted (James) Hughes, Edward James Hughes, Edward J
Hughes



[(review date 18 April 1971) Hoffman is a poet and professor of English at
the University of Pennsylvania. In the following review, he analyzes
Hughes's Crow, calling it "a new version of the gospel."] 

"In the beginning was Scream," begins a poem revising the Book of
Genesis. Ted Hughes's substitution, on this early page in Crow, of
Scream for Word suggests the violent, primitive energy and the furious
assault upon despair which striate the nearly 80 poems in this book.
Reading Crow is a profoundly disturbing experience. This is no mere book
of verses, but a wild yet cunning wail of anguish and resilience, at once
contemporary, immediate, and as atavistic as the archaic myths it
resembles. 

In Crow, Ted Hughes, like Blake among others before him, has written a
new version of the Gospel. 

Crow realized there were two
Gods--

One of them much bigger than the
other
Loving his enemies
And having all the weapons.

And who is Crow? He is offered in the same relation to ourselves as the
totem bird or animal of an Indian tribe to the members who believe in its
myths. That is to say, sometimes Crow is literally a crow, but he is also a
protagonist, like man, in what Santayana called "this great disaster of our
birth." 

In the beginning, God begat Nothing-- 

Who begat Never
Never Never Never
Who begat Crow--

Screaming for Blood
Grubs, crusts
Anything

Trembling featherless elbows in the nest's filth

Crow's begetter, God, is his adversary. The needs of his body betray him.
To eat he must murder. Sex is the trap he is caught in. Language betrays
him; in "Crow Goes Hunting," words pursue but cannot catch his
thought's quarry. 

All this violence of birth and anguish of experience are clearly distillations
from the disasters of our public life, as well as from inner wounds. His
repertoire includes "Crow's Account of the Battle": 

Reality was giving its lessons,
Its mishmash of scripture and physics,
With here, brains in hands, for example,
And there, legs in a treetop.
There was no escape except into death.
And still it went on--

This nightmare of unending carnage and suffering animates every level of
the poet's mind. It is one reason why Crow "shivered with the horror of
Creation" after the Creation, just as, toward the end of the book, it
makes him foresee a ghastly mating-scene between two mutations,
survivors of the bomb, who "seem to be eating each other." 

Among British poets, Hughes is the most haunted inheritor, from Wilfred
Owen and Robert Graves, of the sensibility shaped by the appalling
slaughter in World War I. His father was gassed in the trenches in that
war; growing up in its aftermath, Hughes has come to see the cosmos as
a battlefield. His is the world-view of a betrayed Fundamentalist, who,
discovering that God has no care for man's fate, understands the
universe to be governed not by divine love but by power. In Hughes's
earlier books, Nature appeared as a field of violent struggle where only
the fittest survived. Such Darwinian determinism required its own
unforgiving theology. These views of life are not meliorated in Crow. With
a startling, composite myth, Hughes explores our fate in such a universe. 

Crow's life is a harrowing series of combats. He becomes Heracles,
wrestling Proteus the shape-changer. He becomes St. George also, and
the dragon is his monstrous nightmare. He "followed Ulysses till he turned
/ As a worm, which Crow ate"; "Drinking Beowulf's blood, and wrapped in
his hide, / Crow communes with poltergeists out of old ponds." Not
surprisingly (since Hughes has adapted Seneca's "Oedipus" for Peter
Brook), Crow becomes Oedipus in several poems, and in a ballad sings of
him: 

O do not chop his winkle off
His Mammy cried with horror
Think of the joy will come of it
Tomorrer and tomorrer
Mamma Mamma

These are some of the stations in Crow's adventure. "He cannot be
forgiven. / His prison is the earth." Crow tries "Nailing heaven and earth
together," but "Man could not be man nor God God." Yet "Crow / Grinned
/ Crying: 'This is my Creation' / Flying the black flag of himself." 

Is there no redemption on Crow's horizon? It would seem not. This is not
God's fault, for "He made the Redeemer." But "When God went off in
despair / Crow stropped his beak and started in on the two thieves." 

If God is usually a masculine principle of force, is there for Crow no
complementary feminine principle of love? Too much to hope for; "Love" is
a word in God's mouth (in "Crow's First Lesson"), but the world cannot
pronounce it. Woman is as much to be feared as is God, or any other
titanic force in man's or Crow's life: "Her smiles were spider bites / So he
would lie still till she felt hungry," runs "Lovesong." Yet, in "Crow's
Undersong": 

She has come amorous it is all she has come for
If there had been no hope she would not have come
And there would have been no crying in the city
(There would have been no city)

As these quotations suggest, Hughes's style is direct and violent, a plain
style for an Apocalypse. He uses simple, repetitive rhetorical patterns like
those in primitive incantations. He also adopts the surrealists' simulations
of dream-linkages, in which madly dissimilar objects rattle around in the
poem. Hughes's violent images are often in danger of centripetal
dissolution, a danger not always avoided in Crow. When objects are used
with insufficient conviction of their identity as themselves, there results
an indulgent, arbitrary violence which obscures rather than dramatizes
the theme, as in "Criminal Balled" and the middle lines of "Crow and
Mama." 

But mostly Crow's croaks crackle with terrible surprises. These poems are
resonant with the sufferings that have made them; they go off in the
reader's mind like time-bombs, one to a page. The poet has delved into
the deepest part of his unconscious as well as his conscious mind. What
he has discovered there is none of the conventional consolations; but
there is one solace. Although there's no Redeemer coming to save Crow,
he survives. Crow is a tough bird. Neither God nor man, wars nor words
can kill him off. He is moved, not by hope (for there's little of that) nor by
love (for it is denied him), but by the sheer resilience of the life-force.
The last word is sung by "Littleblood," who inhabits the gnat and the
crocodile: "Grown so wise grown so terrible / Sucking death's mouldy tits,
/ Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood." 

"Crow" was suggested as a theme to Hughes by the artist Leonard
Baskin. A providential conception, for Hughes had read anthropology
when at Cambridge, and some years ago he had come on a book which
served his needs as Weston's From Ritual to Romance had served
Eliot's--by clarifying the role to be played by the hero of his imagination.
In Mercia Eliade's Shamanism, Hughes found described the part enacted
in primitive cultures the world over by "technicians of ecstasy." Shamans
pass through initiations, ascend to the heavens or descend to the
underworld, encounter monsters and spirits of the dead, are instructed
by sacred beasts in hidden mysteries, and return under obligation to
chant their secrets to the uninitiated. Crow is such a sacred beast, and
the singer of his songs such a seer. 

For Hughes this role in a modern society is played by the poet, whose
sufferings and spiritual adventures provide the equivalents of the
shaman's vision. Such a view of the poet is both primitivist and romantic,
nor does it cover all cases. But where it may be applied, it is indeed true.

Clearly there is a vast range of emotions about which Crow's songs are
dumb. If Ted Hughes has offered, from his shamanic vision, only the most
minimal consolations, and no experiences of sensuous pleasure, of love,
or of spiritual delight; if the straightened path his Crow flies is as barren
of the relief of comedy as of the promise of redemption, well, what can
we say but so be it. In the irrational way of true poetry, we are
nonetheless enriched by his songs of cosmic terror and desolation. We
can but be thankful for what he has brought us of the experiencing of
deep fears, the human terrors which must be confronted and fully owned
before they can be mastered. 

In doing this, despite Crow's negative gospel, Hughes has redeemed his
universe from vacuity and endowed suffering with significance. For what
he acknowledges is vibrant with numinous energies. Where there is God,
if only in His might and not in His consoling gifts, our life participates in
the divine power. And Crow celebrates that life. That is what these
bleak crow-songs affirm.
Biographical/Critical Introduction to Ted Hughes

Source: Daniel Hoffman, A review of Crow, in New York Times Book
Review, April 18, 1971, pp. 6, 35-6. Reproduced by permission.

Source Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism