Poetry: At the memorial service for Ted Hughes, one of the poems read (by his friend and fellow-poet Seamus Heaney) was 'That Morning', a strange visionary bringing together of an American salmon river and the wartime drone of aeroplanes over the Yorkshire moors, writes Harry Clifton.
To many listening, for whom Hughes equals his early animal poems or his late birthday letters to Sylvia Plath, the choice might have seemed unfamiliar.
Solemn to stand there in the pollen light
Waist-deep in wild salmon swaying massed
As from the hand of God . . . As if the fallen
World and salmon were over. As if these
Were the imperishable fish
That had let the world pass away -
Yet in every way it was apposite. For 'That Morning', written, I would guess, in his early 50s, is Hughes's Paradiso, his vision of light and redemption that 'one wrong thought might darken'. It belongs, moreover, in a whole trajectory from Remains of Elmet (1979) through River (1983) to Flowers and Insects (1986) that gives the lie, for once, to the dictum that a poet's middle years are necessarily his most sterile. At a time when his reputation was more taken for granted, not to say neglected, than it is now, a perfect balance was achieved, as in 'The River', between his sacral leanings and his genius for physical evocation.
So the river is a god
Knee-deep among reeds, watching men,
Or hung by the heels down the door of a dam
It is a god and inviolable.
Immortal. And will wash itself of all deaths.
Dylan Thomas, an influence on some of the earlier work in this volume, was once described by T.S. Eliot as "the kind of poet who writes either a great poem or something approaching nonsense". Had he lived long enough, Eliot might have said the same about Hughes. Yet the unevenness is part of the greatness - the willingness to enlist anything and everything from the myth-kitty and fling it like a paint-pot at the Muse to get a reaction. The courage, in an age of dull-competent, pragmatic verse, to be, as Yeats put it, "for the song's sake, a fool" - that is the special heroism of Ted Hughes.
Unlike Hughes, however, Yeats left as his Collected Poems a piece of frozen architecture that speaks, premeditatedly, to the ages coming after. With the Hughes Collected, all the connective tissue has been left in - hundreds of poems printed between the published books but not included, for whatever reason. The effect is like entering the workshop of an artist just dropped dead, with his trial pieces lying about. Would Yeats, that consummate artificer, have started his Collected as follows?
I'll tell you a tale of Carson McReared,
Who, south of the 49th was feared
Greater than any man ever before,
And men went in fear of his .44,
For he'd shoot the ears from any man
From two-gun Ted to Desperate Dan.
Yet it is part of the deliberate provisionality of the enterprise that everything, even the juvenilia, is included. We are in the presence of a huge evolving biomass of materia poetica from which closed poems and volumes such as Lupercal emerge, as well as on-the-spot jottings like Moortown Diary and open sequences like Crow. The evolution, as Joseph Brodsky would have said, is in the prosody rather than the vision.
Not that certain stages cannot be made out. The first, the work of the 1950s and early 1960s, has Lupercal (1960) as its apex. A young Yorkshireman, Cambridge-educated, with a traumatised vision of deep England, is finding his themes - the buried religious and sexual self which is also the self of England, the 'National Ghost' that is the first World War, and above all, as in the night-fishing of 'Pike', the mediating presence of animals and plants between the human and the superhuman.
The still splashes on the dark pond,
Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night's darkness had freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching.
From Wodwo (1967) to Adam and the Sacred Nine (1979) the trauma, it seems to me, supplants the vision. The personal life of the poet in these years is well-documented, but one needn't look beyond the then-prestige of depth psychology, by which others too - Seamus Heaney's bog poems, Thomas Kinsella's "owlful, batful" presences - were being affected. Add to that the broken syntax and apocalyptic subject matter of translated poetry from Eastern Europe, with which Hughes was then involved, and Crow (1970) coalesces.
When God buried Crow in the earth
He made man
When God tried to chop Crow in two
He made woman
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.
The sheer fashionability of Crow ought, in retrospect, to have been its own warning-sign. The poet's real voice ('How Water began to Play') only rarely comes through the half-baked, the misappropriated and the gratuitously cruel. Something was in the air that hasn't lasted.
Thankfully, by the late 1970s, vision had once again replaced trauma, and the poet "drove down England" through that glorious middle period already mentioned. That it was an England of ruined industrial valleys and obsolete wildness does not alter the redemptive power of the vision. The fish, the salmon that has been through everything and is dying among old bicycle wheels in its natal pool, is now and henceforth the animal with Christian-stoical carrying-power.
All this too is stitched into the torn richness,
The epic poise
That holds him so steady in his wounds, so loyal to his doom, so patient
In the machinery of heaven.
The big reconcilements, in the 1990s, with a traumatised post-Elizabethan England and with the bright and dark sides of femaleness, are treated more comprehensively perhaps in a prose book, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, than in the poems, though Tales from Ovid (1997) and Birthday Letters (1998) are by turns oblique and direct attempts to address an erotic dilemma. Involvement with the monarchy brought, at times, hard words from younger poets, yet 'Rain Charm for the Duchy', with all Hughes's gifts on display, is its own vindication. Its influence on the successful and award-winning Dart by one younger poet, Alice Oswald, is generous and unmistakeable.
"There is some one myth for every man" Yeats wrote, "which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought". For Hughes, that myth surely is the civil war for the English soul after Elizabeth, a splinter from which had lodged itself inside him. He stands in spirit with Nicholas Ferrar and the "vigorous souls who Englished for Elizabeth" at Little Gidding, his own and his country's site of ruin and redemption.
Stones and grass
Have sealed our vows. Pig-sties, the earthen face
Drink November. And again the fire of God
Is under the shut heart, under the grave sod.
Harry Clifton's God in France: A Paris Sequence 1994-1998 is published by Metre Editions
Collected Poems By Ted Hughes Faber and Faber, 1,333pp. £40