Hughes’ work has drawn up the old battle lines of poetic engagement between those who trust fictions of the everyday world and those who have been visited by truths unavailable to ordinary, jaded senses. It is important to analyze the poet’s own subjective relationship to his writing and the problems this presents to the reader. The dramatic relationship between two narrative voices1 – self and senses, body and spirit- which is typical of Hughes’ work, rests upon existential questions.
The sensuous world of ‘facts’, from Hughes’s early childhood, is assimilated, from the very beginning, into a world of struggle between opposing forces. Let us go back to the cliff incident2 in the Calder valley: the most striking thing about that passage is the …show more content…
Everything the dove breeder has carefully arranged is shattered.
4. Images of lesser physical world vs. superior self
Many poems in “The Hawk in the Rain” are concerned with presenting the special knowledge conveyed by intimidating eyes (“The Jaguar”, “The Thought-Fox”, “Law in the Country of Cats” etc.). One senses the problem of tension in the relationship between lesser self and the superior or visionary self, because the poet appears to align himself more with the superior self than with the inferior self. Instead of a psychodrama, the imbalance between two voices turns some poems into caricatures for the ordinary self.
In “Egg-Head”, for instance, Hughes’ goal is to show how this lesser self works. The Egg-Head swells with pride for having reduced all of sensual life into a mild-mannered, vicarious ‘Peeping through…fingers at the world’s ends,/or at an ant’s head’. But if we think of the heroic figures of energy-the jaguar, the black goat of ‘Meeting’- we sense here more an ironic and even ridiculing comparison than a credible exploration of the Egg-Head’s
The sensuous world of ‘facts’, from Hughes’s early childhood, is assimilated, from the very beginning, into a world of struggle between opposing forces. Let us go back to the cliff incident2 in the Calder valley: the most striking thing about that passage is the …show more content…
Everything the dove breeder has carefully arranged is shattered.
4. Images of lesser physical world vs. superior self
Many poems in “The Hawk in the Rain” are concerned with presenting the special knowledge conveyed by intimidating eyes (“The Jaguar”, “The Thought-Fox”, “Law in the Country of Cats” etc.). One senses the problem of tension in the relationship between lesser self and the superior or visionary self, because the poet appears to align himself more with the superior self than with the inferior self. Instead of a psychodrama, the imbalance between two voices turns some poems into caricatures for the ordinary self.
In “Egg-Head”, for instance, Hughes’ goal is to show how this lesser self works. The Egg-Head swells with pride for having reduced all of sensual life into a mild-mannered, vicarious ‘Peeping through…fingers at the world’s ends,/or at an ant’s head’. But if we think of the heroic figures of energy-the jaguar, the black goat of ‘Meeting’- we sense here more an ironic and even ridiculing comparison than a credible exploration of the Egg-Head’s