"And he shivered with the horror of Creation."

As he approaches from deep space Crow sees the earth to
be composed entirely of living things -mountains pushing up to
each other and steaming like cows on a chilly morning, the sea like
a sea-serpent wound about the continents, the stars sowing their
baleful influences upon the world like mushrooms broadcasting
their invisible spores upon the air, sparks from the fire of God or
viruses from his diseased body. It all seems horrible to Crow; so
horrible that it must be a hallucination. But at least it is all vividly
alive and interrelated, if only as predator and prey or virus and
victim are related. But when Crow alights and sees what man has
done to himself and the living body of the earth he sees something
less dramatic and nightmarish, something so stark and common-
place and unchanging and unmistakably there that it must be
reality, but something more horrible because utterly drained of
life, utterly disconnected from the source, rootless, solitary ,
alienated.

"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."

The light fails at the window, heat fails in the hearth. Life burns
away like a smoking cigarette. Nothing is in a vital relationship
with anything else. Motionless hand cannot connect with blank
face even by lifting a cup to it. Without relatedness the human
being cannot function any more than a disconnected electrical
machine. He is as absurd as and redundant as a shoe with no sole
or a can with no bottom. But his garbage covers the earth and his
cigarettes pollute the atmosphere.

But for all that Hughes is compassionate. The man is an image
of loneliness and despair. The verse is moving in its bare scrupu-
lousness and objectivity, like Beckett's prose.