Ted Hughes - New and Selected Poems, 1957–1994

The Thought-Fox

I imagine this midnight moments forest: Something else is alive Beside the clocks loneliness And this blank page where my fingers move. Through the window I see no star: Something more near Though deeper within darkness Is entering the loneliness: Cold, delicately as the dark snow A foxs nose touches twig, leaf; Two eyes serve a movement, that now And again now, and now, and now Sets neat prints into the snow Between trees, and warily a lame Shadow lags by stump and in hollow Of a body that is bold to come Across clearings, an eye, A widening deepening greenness, Brilliantly, concentratedly, Coming about its own business Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox It enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed.

Song

O lady, when the tipped cup of the moon blessed you You became soft fire with a clouds grace; The difficult stars swam for eyes in your face; You stood, and your shadow was my place: You turned, your shadow turned to ice O my lady. O lady, when the sea caressed you You were a marble of foam, but dumb. When will the stone open its tomb? When will the waves give over their foam? You will not die, nor come home, O my lady.

O lady, when the wind kissed you You made him music for you were a shaped shell. I follow the waters and the wind still Since my heart heard it and all to pieces fell Which your lovers stole, meaning ill, O my lady. O lady, consider when I shall have lost you The moons full hands, scattering waste, The seas hands, dark from the worlds breast, The worlds decay where the winds hands have passed, And my head, worn out with love, at rest In my hands, and my hands full of dust, O my lady.

The Jaguar

The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun. The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut. Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion Lie still as the sun.

The boa-constrictors coil Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw. It might be painted on a nursery wall. But who runs like the rest past these arrives At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized, As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom The eye satisfied to be blind in fire, By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear He spins from the bars, but theres no cage to him More than to the visionary his cell: His stride is wildernesses of freedom: The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.

Famous Poet

Stare at the monster: remark How difficult it is to define just what Amounts to monstrosity in that Very ordinary appearance.

Famous Poet

Stare at the monster: remark How difficult it is to define just what Amounts to monstrosity in that Very ordinary appearance.

Neither thin nor fat, Hair between light and dark, And the general air Of an apprentice say, an apprentice house Painter amid an assembly of famous Architects: the demeanour is of mouse, Yet is he monster. First scrutinize those eyes For the spark, the effulgence: nothing. Nothing there But the haggard stony exhaustion of a near Finished variety artist. He slumps in his chair Like a badly hurt man, half life-size. Is it his dreg-boozed inner demon Still tankarding from tissue and follicle The vital fire, the spirit electrical That puts the gloss on a normal hearty male? Or is it women? The truth bring it on With black drapery, drums and funeral tread Like a great mans coffin no, no, he is not dead But in this truth surely half-buried: Once, the humiliation Of youth and obscurity, The autoclave of heady ambition trapped, The fermenting of the yeasty heart stopped Burst with such pyrotechnics the dull world gaped And Repeat that! still they cry.

Soliloquy

Whenever I am got under my gravestone Sending my flowers up to stare at the church-tower, Gritting my teeth in the chill from the church-floor, I shall praise God heartily, to see gone, As I look round at old acquaintance there, Complacency from the smirk of every man, And every attitude showing its bone, And every mouth confessing its crude shire; But I shall thank God thrice heartily To be lying beside women who grimace Under the commitments of their flesh, And not out of spite or vanity.

The Horses

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.

The Horses

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.

Evil air, a frost-making stillness, Not a leaf, not a bird, A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light. But the valleys were draining the darkness Till the moorline blackening dregs of the brightening grey Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses: Huge in the dense grey ten together Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move, With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves, Making no sound. I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.

Grey silent fragments Of a grey silent world. I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge. The curlews tear turned its edge on the silence. Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun Orange, red, red erupted. Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud, Shook the gulf open, showed blue, And the big planets hanging I turned Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards The dark woods, from the kindling tops, And came to the horses.

There, still they stood, But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light, Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves Stirring under a thaw while all around them The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound. Not one snorted or stamped, Their hung heads patient as the horizons High over valleys, in the red levelling rays In din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the faces, May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing curlews, Hearing the horizons endure.

Fallgriefs Girlfriends

Not that she had no equal, not that she was His before flesh was his or the world was; Not that she had the especial excellence To make her cat-indolence and shrew-mouth Index to its humanity. Her looks Were what a good friend would not comment on. If he made flattery too particular, Admiring her cookery or lipstick, Her eyes reflected painfully.

Yet not that He pitied her: he did not pity her. Any woman born, he said, having What any woman born cannot but have, Has as much of the world as is worth more Than wit or lucky looks can make worth more; And I, having what I have as a man Got without choice, and what I have chosen, City and neighbour and work, am poor enough To be more than bettered by a worst woman. Whilst I am this muck of man in this Muck of existence, I shall not seek more Than a muck of a woman: wit and lucky looks Were a ring disabling this pig-snout, And a tin clasp on this diamond. By this he meant to break out of the dream Where admirations giddy mannequin Leads every sense to motley; he meant to stand naked Awake in the pitch dark where the animal runs, Where the insects couple as they murder each other, Where the fish outwait the water. The chance changed him: He has found a woman of such wit and looks He can brag of her in every company.