Ted Hughes’s Human Animals: A Critical Reading of the Expression of the Unconscious Through Violence in Animal Poems

        Twentieth Century Poetry

Term Paper

Ted Hughes’s Human Animals: A Critical Reading of the Expression of the Unconscious Through Violence in Animal Poems.

                Submitted by,

                Aruna Vimalan

                Sem II, English

                 School of Letters

Ted Hughes’s poetry displays an obsession with vigorous and violent images mostly drawn from the instinctual world of animals, which earned him the title ‘animal poet’. The vivid descriptions of animals and their vitality found in the poems are more than enough to prove the label apt.  The theme of violence is vividly expressed in the animal poems. These poems depict the cruelty, the fierceness and the violence which is inseparable from the world of nature. Hughes has broken a new ground by dealing with the dark and psychic violent forces latent in modern life. The images of animals described in Hughes’ poems helps to convey Hughes’s most important themes: heroism and survival, myth, attitudes to sexuality and the role and function of the poet.

Hughes was an ardent observer of nature. He explains the origins and development of some of his most famous animal poems such as ‘Thought Fox’ and ‘Pike’ in his short prose piece titled ‘Capturing Animals’ (1961). He found pleasure in capturing animals, following them through bogs and meadows. He says that poems are also like animals, with life and vigour just like them. He explains how his early interest in animals turned into capturing and keeping animals in the form of poems. He says: “Maybe my concern has been to capture not animals in particularly and not poems, but simply things which have a vivid life of their own, outside mine.” (Hughes, ‘Capturing Animals’). He found this vivid life in the animals he saw around him. He captured their vigor in his poems.

Ted Hughes has twenty eight animal poems which present his attempts to describe the animal identity in human beings. In many of these twenty eight poems, he glorified the instinctive, impulsive nature of vulnerable and sometimes exotic animals. He glorified the animal view of the surroundings. He presented animals as daunting, dominating and unafraid in any circumstances. Hughes’s animals are read as allegories of different kinds of human characters. In this light, the ‘Pike’, the ‘Jaguar’, the ‘Fox’, the ‘Crow’ all are thus different types of humans. While one represents cruelty or animosity, the other is an urge to break free from shackles. Hughes’s animals represent the human qualities which an ordinary man would hide from his fellow men, but badly wants to be expressed. This world of animals created by him is the one that would exist when moral restraints or social correctness was non-existent in the human world. Hughes’s animals reflect what human consciousness fails to identify.

As Walder says, Hughes appeals ‘to our yearning for a wild freedom which, in our highly complex, industrialized, mass society we feel we have lost, and that we might find in nature, and nature’s currents within ourselves.’ Hughes uses the violence in the animal world to express the very violence rooted deep beneath the human nature itself. Sometimes, he glorifies violence only to remind humans the impulsive, instinctive psyche of their own race. Ted Hughes hence presents his ‘Human Animals’ to the humans of the society to make them listen to their free spirit and the turbulent and energetic inner world.

The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal, Hughes’ first two collections of poems contain numerous evident of the poet’s use of animal imagery. Violence as an affirmation of life is evident in most of the poems of these two collections. The major poems in Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal deal with the infinite energy, agility and the violent activeness of animals like the hawk, the jaguar, the fox and the horse. This is at the expense of civilized humanity, who sacrificed their vitality and natural tendencies owing to social acceptance and leisurely life. This is as much an indictment of human life as it is a celebration of animal life.

‘Hawk Roosting’, a poem written in first person, creates a comparison in the readers mind, between the hawk and an egoistic dictator. In this poem Ted Hughes portrays the thought process that goes in the mind of the Hawk and relates it with the mind of every megalomaniac who considers other people around him as of no or little importance. The hawk lives according to the rules designed by him and "No arguments assert" his "right." This poem shows that this is a world where might is right. The Hawk says in an assertive tone, 'I kill where I please because it is all mine.' (Line 14). The tone implies the egotist tone of a dictator who wishes to hold down the world in his clutches. Yet the unstated theme lying underneath the hawk's soliloquy is this, that the hawk is a creation of Nature; its personality is framed and dictated by Nature. This Hawk is shown as a tyrant who does not listen to the people around. This has allegorical significance in reference to human beings that unrestrained power in human beings when twisted and deformed, leads only to tyranny and oppression. The poem ends with a prophetic tone; reminding the fate of a community that allows the growth of a tyrant:

The sun is behind me.

Nothing has changed since I began.

My eye has permitted no change.

I am going to keep things like this. (Hawk Roosting, Lines 21-24.)

        The hawk is here seen as vastly superior to man who is unable to accept Nature for what it is and, instead, tries to tame it by giving it philosophical names. The hawk’s mind and thoughts are unequal to man’s which weakens his  innate desires. Neither does it suffer man’s slavish obedience to rules. The hawk’s savagery is a part of the creative and destructive forces at work in the whole cosmos which is in the unconscious mind of mankind. This gives an insight into what can be called the psychological undercurrents of the poem.

“Crow Tyrannosaurus” is such poem where the animal represents the conscience of a person. The title itself is an irony because in this poem crow achieves the sublime he was searching for; he tries to become the light while man becomes an abattoir of innocents. The poem is about death and how the corpse gets eaten by insects. The narrator says:

Even man he was a walking  

Abattoir

Of  innocents

His brain incinerating their outcry.  

Crow thought ‘Alas

Alas ought I  

To stop eating

         And try to become the light?  (Crow Tyrannosaurus, Lines 17-24)