From Hawk To Wolf

I recently came across an old article on Ted Hughes in which the poet's work is described in terms of primitive energies, shamanism, spirit-journeys, and other related anthropological terms. I think that's what I would describe as 'literary primitivism' – the idea that we should look at poetry as something that can be trapped and described in terms of anthropological history. Robert Graves overdid it, and so do many others.

But that kind of jargon obscures the simple fact that poetry is just human language describing human feelings for other humans. Even if it is urban poetry or steampunk, it will come back to the naked eye, the naked heart, the sense of loss or of beauty or of exposure to the elements. The primitive can't be isolated by time ('it was long ago when we were living in caves') or space ('on a savage island far away') or both ('a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away'). It is in us, always, in the sense of it being the original material of the soul, the prima materia, the tissue of our basic needs and hopes and dreams.

When one reads a poem like Penelope Shuttle's "Three Lunulae, Truro Museum", one tends to think of something ancient, a hidden animistic or shamanistic past locked up and archived and put behind glass. But the female nature, the mysteries of beauty and of human touch across the years, these are always with us.

And here I sit, sometimes a hawk roosting, sometimes a wolf watching, sometimes even two ravens or a herd of goats – and yet, always human.

Wolfwatching

This is the title of the fourteenth anthology of Ted Hughes's poetry. The English poet laureate was always at his best looking into the deep mythical world of the animal kingdom, whether in short stories on the creation of animals and birds, or on the majestically indifferent solipsism of a hawk roosting. Hughes was, and remains, a source of my own writing inspiration. You will find direct echoes of his work in my online poetry cycle, Two Ravens, although of course he was not one much for the ravens, preferring other corvidae.

Wolfwatching, however has specific resonance for me. It was first published in 1989, around the time I finished my first year in the local university, and it immediately became the companion to my online life in the networks that existed at that time. Few people caught on, but the wandering wolf was a creature straight out of Hughes. The title poem hit me hard; it portrays an old wolf and a young one. The old one is already ruined by time in the zoo; the young one is confident of his powers, but he will be ruined too. Here are excerpts:

...     And here
Is a young wolf, still intact.
He knows how to lie, with his head,
The Asiatic eyes, the gunsights
Aligned effortless in the beam of his power...

He's hanging
Upside down on the wire
Of non-participation.
He's a tarot-card, and he knows it.
He can howl all night
And dawn will pick up the same card
And see him painted on it, with eyes
Like doorframes in a desert
Between nothing and nothing.

Reading that poem again and again, I knew that young wolf was who I was. To some extent, it is still that wolf I am sometimes, confined in a system that is slowly leaching the iron vitality from me. What use is the totipotent package that is the heritage of wolves, the nobility of the pack, the steel intelligence and the relentless vision? No use at all, the poet seems to say, and yet, perhaps between nothing and nothing, there is a solution – or an absolution.

=====

Note: Students of war poetry might want to compare and contrast Hughes's Anthem For Doomed Youth, also in this volume, with Wilfred Owen's poem of the same title. It is an interesting exercise.

Interlude 4: Self-Portraits

It is the curse of the man of books that when he tries to find words to express himself, he knows that many have expressed his sentiments with purer lines and better turns of phrase. Yet, there is a challenge in that which tempers the iridium-tipped quill and in the end makes it limn an image better.

But here is Browning first, from Andrea del Sarto, called the Faultless Painter:

I, painting from myself and to myself,
Know what I do, am unmoved by men’s blame
Or their praise either. Somebody remarks
Morello’s outline there is wrongly traced,
His hue mistaken; what of that? or else,
Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that?
Speak as they please, what does the mountain care?
Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for? All is silver-gray
Placid and perfect with my art: the worse!
I know both what I want and what might gain,
And yet how profitless to know, to sigh
“Had I been two, another and myself,
Our head would have o’erlooked the world!” No doubt.

It is very close to a sketch of myself, or at least the part that interfaces with my work. It has a self-mocking irony that comes with being confident. Such confidence is not the confidence of success, but the belief that failure diminishes the self by very little if at all - the glorious attempt or the truth of self are, either one, sufficient. And having made myself uneasy by the recollection, let us move on to Eliot's The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

This is the other side of me, the part that interfaces with the world. It has no irony at all; it is genuine self-deprecation, not of false humility, but of consciousness of role. I am no Hamlet, no great Dane. But I make good filler, and I write reports and documents that augment the presence and capability of my superiors. Perhaps the greatest unease is evoked by Ted Hughes, though. Here is an excerpt from his tragic poem, Wolfwatching:

But all the time
The awful thing is happening: the iron inheritance,
The incredible rich will, torn up
In neurotic boredom and eaten,
Now indigestible. All that restlessness
And lifting of ears, and aiming, and re-aiming
Of nose, is like a trembling
Of nervous breakdown, afflicted by voices.
Is he hearing the deer? Is he listening
To gossip of non-existent forest? Pestered
By the hour-glass panic of lemmings
Dwindling out of reach? He's run a long way
Now to find nothing and be patient.
Patience is suffocating in all those folds
Of deep fur. The fairy tales
Grow stale all around him
And go back into pebbles.

Sometimes, this too is part of me. It is an itch I can't scratch. And so, as we stagger towards completion and the end of all things, I pray a lot that the journey will feel worthwhile - for while intellect accepts worth as abstraction, emotion demands value as instantiation.