Poem of the day. I’ve already mentioned Hughes, but I came across this piece again flicking through his collected poems looking for Moortown Diary, the poems he wrote whilst running a farm in Devon. Many of Hughes’ poems are incidental, notational, and have that live, red glow of a metal forged just instants ago on the anvil of the present moment. (Not to be confused with Yeats’ anvil, where all the metals were cold-worked over many weeks, even months.) Hughes believed that a poem had to be written in one sitting, as a single, coherent discharge of energies not necessarily your own. Hughes always tried to breach the suprapersonal. He believed in the validity of Shamanism. What rescues his instantaneous poetics from becoming transient news and throwaway rubbish is his relationship to language, his acute, telepathic connection to it’s powers of description and calling into being, and his sense of the fundamental: mythic maps and archetypes underlying personal and surface experience. He trusted the darkness, because he trusted his senses, and the clairvoyance of language. There is a long tradition in the West of the blind seer, the blind poet. The greatest Greek seer was Tiresias, blind. The greatest Greek poet was Homer, blind. Hughes is not seduced by his own individuality, he recognises that the self, the ego, is a false lense, and he often deliberately tries to blind himself in search of a greater, less ego and species-centric vision. His initial aim, to capture animals in his poems, as he had once captured animals in his boyhood in Yorkshire, deepened and broadened into an environmental concern for the welfare of whole ecologies. And there is a sense that each of his poems, as incidental and immediate as they are, are conceived within a poetic ecology. He learned from Vasko Popa, and Yeats, never to ignore the whole body of your work when writing an individual piece. So, each flash-bulb poem is actually part of a greater collage, and has a deeper level of coordination. I know I’ve mentioned Sylvia Plath as a poet of the immediate, and she did try to sustain themes across multiple poems, but her coordination operated at a subjective, neurotic level. Her struggle with depression was intense. If she had survived, if she’d lived past the Ariel poems written in ’62 and ’63, she would have matured and deepened: she had come into possession of a style and language that was fantastically alive and open to psychological nuance. Maybe she could have went on to use that fictionally, rather than relentlessly autobiographically? Who knows. The poem I came across while flicking for the Moortown poems was one that Hughes wrote in the months following Plath’s death. He wrote that he used to lie awake at night, within earshot of London Zoo, listening to the wolves howl. The poem is a lament for Plath, written at that time of night when the emptiness is at it’s most threatening. That there are forces greater than us and operating without concern for us, is without doubt. That the wolves are representative of Plath herself, is probable.

The howling of wolves

Is without world.

What are they dragging up and out on their long leashes of sound
That dissolve in the mid-air silence?

Then crying of a baby, in this forest of starving silences,
Brings the wolves running.
Turning of a viola, in this forest delicate as an owl’s ear,
Brings the wolves running – brings the steel traps clashing
And slavering,
The steel furred to keep it from cracking in the cold,
The eyes that never learn how it has come about
That they must live like this,

That they must live

Innocence crept into minerals.

The wind sweeps through and the hunched wolf shivers.
It howls you cannot say whether out of agony or joy.

The earth is under its tongue,
A dead weight of darkness, trying to see through its eyes.
The wolf is living for the earth.
But the wolf is small, it comprehends little.

It goes to and fro, trailing its haunches and whimpering horribly
It must feed its fur.

The night snows stars and the earth creaks.