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Salient. Victoria University Student Newspaper. Volume. 34, Number 8. 1971

Poetry

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Poetry

Ted Hughes' Crow Poems

...and the next night going off with wedde here to see and hear ted hughes read from new collection of his called crow which I guess you've come across, this crowd of faggots and suckers at the Institute of Contemporary Art, and he is late of course, when he does finally make it he starts slowly, from older volumes, knowing everyone is sitting there muttering crow crow...and then he hits'it in his own way - o shit what beautiful lines and rhythms he is dealing in....reminds me of anglosaxon poetry: the formulae, chorus, above all the agony of the experience of just living, living in these times...it was real, realler than what I can say and you should have been there arthur, you should have been there. I went out into the night feeling it, keeping my tears to myself and frightened, frightened of going down to that hell, he was so agonised man, he went right into himself and the audience was transformed into crows terrifying.

- alan brunton

Crow is by far the blackest creature to emerge from Ted Hughes' private bestiary. A little like his Hawk, rehearsing perfect kills in his sleep. A little like his Jaguar, his Gog, or his Pig - chopping a half moon clean out and eating cinders and dead cats. Crow dwarfs all of them.

He is born from "a black doorway: the eye's pupil'.

An egg of blackness
Where sun and moon alternate their weathers
To hatch a crow, a black rainbow
Bent in emptiness
over emptiness
But Flying.

Crow reigns over a macabre world where the creation, the garden of Eden, the whole of civilisation is seen as little more than vaudeville. When God tries to teach Crow how to talk, Crow gags on the word love. When God sleeps, exhausted after the creation. Crow plays his "childish prank" and creates lust. Man wakes up to find himself being dragged across the grass; woman sees him coming but neither knows what is happening. God sleeps on and Crow laughs.

God tries to destroy Crow but fails -

When God said: "You win, Crow,"
He made the Redeemer.

When God went off in despair
Crow stropped his beak and started in
on the two thieves.

Crow Ted Hughes

Crow Ted Hughes

From the Life and Songs of the Crow

Crow survives because he has adapted to the Universe better than any other creature. He will devour anything. He eats grubs, crusts, serpents, cats, worms. Especially he eats man - the "walking abattoir". Crow even tears a mouthful from the sleeping God and, though appalled at what he has done, feels much stronger.

Everything is a battle. He fights God, Stone, the Sea. When words threaten to take over the world, the final adversary is Crow.

Words retreated, suddenly afraid
Into the skull of a dead jester
Taking the whole world with them -

And Crow yawned - long ago
He had picked that skull empty.

Even when the earth is hit by a (nuclear?) holocaust all that's left is:

...a brittle desert
dazzling with the bones of earth's people

Where Crow walked and mused.

Hughes has left the formal devices of rhyme, metre and stanza behind. Where he uses rhythm it is often in the form of a chorus or in the constant repetition of a word or phrase throughout the poem.

The language is simple, stark and ugly; the songs are! almost sculptural in their form and energy. In the most successful poems it is as if Hughes is only the transcriber of a myth - it is Crow who is singing.

With Crow, Hughes has created a universal symbol - a being who can survive every type of death, natural and unnatural. Man might survive the monstrous evils of the world he has created, but only by becoming a monster himself:

Man could not be Man nor God God,
The agony
Grew
Crow
Grinned
Crying: "This is my Creation,"

Flying the black flag of himself.