Keith Sagar, The Art of Ted Hughes, 1975.

"The first idea of Crow was really an idea of a style. In folktales the prince /
going on the adventure comes to the stable full of beautiful horses and he
needs a horse for the next stage and the king's daughter advises him to take
none of the beautiful horses that he'll be offered but to choose the dirty,
scabby little foal. You see, I throw out the eagles and choose the Crow. The
idea was originally just to write his songs, the songs that Crow would sing.
In other words, songs with no music whatsoever, in a super-simple and a
super-ugly language which would in a way shed everything except just what
he wanted to say without any other consideration and that's the basis of the
style of the whole thing. I get near it in a few poems. There I really begin to
get what I was after" (Hughes, London Magazine, Jan. 1971,20).

Why does Hughes choose a crow as his protagonist ? The pre-
valence of ravens and crows in folklore derives largely from the
real bird's characteristics. The crow is the most intelligent of birds,
the most widely distributed (being common on every continent),
and the most omnivorous ('no carrion will kill a crow'). Crows are,
of course, black all over, solitary, almost indestructible, and the
largest and least musical of songbirds. It is to be expected that the
Songs of the Crow will be harsh and grating. He kills a little him-
self, and, as carrion eater, is dependent on the killing of others and
first on the scene at many disasters.
Eskimo legend tells that in the beginning the raven -Has the
only creature and the world was, like him, black. Then came the
owl and the world became white like him, with the whiteness of
unending snow. Hughes' mythology of Crow is deeply rooted in
such legends. Within it are several little contradictory apocryphal
accounts of the creation of Crow. The most central goes like this :
God, having created the world, has a recurring nightmare. A
huge hand comes from deep space, takes him by the throat, half-
throttles him, drags him through space, ploughs the earth with
him then throws him back into heaven in a cold sweat. Mean-
while man sits at the gates of heaven waiting for God to grant him
audience. He has come to ask God to take life back. God is
furious and sends him packing. The nightmare appears to be
independent of the creation, and God cannot understand it. The
nightmare is full of mockery of the creation, especially of man.
God challenges the nightmare to do better. This is just what the
nightmare has been waiting for. It plunges down into matter and
creates Crow. God tests Crow by putting him through a series of
trials and ordeals which sometimes result in Crow being dis-
membered, transformed or obliterated, but Crow survives them
all, little changed. Meanwhile Crow interferes in God's activities,
sometimes trying to learn or help, sometimes in mischief, some-
times in open rebellion. It is, perhaps, his ambition to become a
man, but he never quite makes it.

The crow is prominent in many other mythologies from America to
China, and in alchemy. All these are ancestors of Hughes' Crow.
Crow could easily have been as overtly syncretic {syncretism: attempt to unify or reconcile differing schools of though}

as The Waste Land, a history of religion and ideology from Babylonian creation
myth, through Middle Eastern religions to the collision of Judaism
and its neighbours, the Manichees, the early Christians and the
Roman Empire, the Reformation and its impact in England,
Puritanism, down to the sickness of England now. It is not
syncretic because

"My main concern was to produce something with the minimum cultural
accretions of the museum sort -something autochthonous {autochthonous: orignal in earliest know inhabitants}
and complete in itself, as it might be invented after the holocaust and demolition of all
libraries, where essential things spring again -if at all- only from their seeds
in nature -and are not lugged around or hoarded as preserved harvests from
the past. So the comparative religion/mythology background was irrelevant
to me . . .. If I couldn't find it again original in Crow,
I wasn't interested to make a trophy of it" (Hughes).

The absence of 'music' and 'poetry' of the kind we are familiar
with in English verse since the sixteenth century does not in-
volve any lack of rhetorical force and vitality .The language and
poetic technique is more varied than before. And there is much
more use than ever before of the oldest poetic devices (such as
survive in nursery rhymes and ballads, folksongs and charms) -
repetitions and refrains, parallelism, catalogues and catechisms,
incantations and invocations.

Crow opens with a statement of the book's basic dichotomy, that
between blackness and light; and an introduction, as in an over-
ture, to several of the primary themes :

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, swelling, could not
Pronounce its sun. ('Two Legends' I)

A rainbow is a sign of creative interchange between heaven and
earth, of fertility , of all the varied colours of experience. It is the
token of the covenant between God and every living creature of all
flesh, for perpetual generations. But Crow flies over a universe
I empty of God, given over entirely to Death. Crow bends over the
world, under the weight of the world, like an unholy ghost.

But Crow's flying is at least a sign of life and selfhood ('flying the
black flag of himself'). Crow cannot be crushed whatever is done
to him. He is the unkillable urge to keep trying in spite of every-
thing. He is energy itself, infinitely corruptible, infinitely educable
and transformable. In that sense he is stronger than death.
In the beginning was not the Word, God, the light that shineth
in darkness. In the beginning was nightmare and chaos. Fear was
the mainspring of the evolutionary process which produced man.