Selected Poems 1957-1994 - Softcover

Hughes, Ted

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374528640 ISBN 13: 9780374528645

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002

Synopsis

Poems from every phase of the career of a great poet

This selection of Ted Hughes's poetry, made by the author himself in 1995, includes poems from every phase of his four-decade career. Here are poems from Hughes's first book, The Hawk in the Rain, and its successor, Lupercal, which introduced him as a major poet; from Wodwo, Crow and Gaudete, book-length poetic sequences in which the natural world is made into a thrilling and terror-filled analogue to our human one; and from six volumes of his maturity, here arranged thematically, in which the poet is at once rural chronicler and form-breaking modern artist. The volume also includes previously uncollected poems and eight poems later incorporated into Birthday Letters, Hughes's meditation in verse on his marriage to Sylvia Plath, which became an international bestseller the year after his death.

About this title

About the Author:

The masterful British poet and critic Ted Hughes (1930-98) wrote more than forty books, including, in the last decade of his life, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being; Tales from Ovid; verse adaptations of Aeschylus's Oresteia, Racine's Phedre, and Euripedes' Alcestis; and Birthday Letters.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

fromThe Hawk in the Rain

The Thought-Fox   I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
  Something else is alive
Beside the clock's 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 fox's 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 cloud's 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 moon's full hands, scattering waste,
  The sea's hands, dark from the world's breast,
  The world's decay where the wind's 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-constrictor's 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 there's 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.
  Over the cage floor the horizons come. 

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 man's 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. 

But all his efforts to concoct
  The old heroic bang from their money and praise
  From the parent's pointing finger and the child's amaze,
  Even from the burning of his wreathed bays,
  Have left him wrecked: wrecked, 

And monstrous, so,
  As a Stegosaurus, a lumbering obsolete
  Arsenal of gigantic horn and plate
  From a time when half the world still burned, set
  To blink behind bars at the zoo.   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.

Copyright ª 2002 Ted Hughes

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0374528640
• ISBN 13: 9780374528645
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 333