Poet Ted Hughes had a short cut to human mind—ferocious animals and birds. Their cruelty and destructiveness never stopped exciting him. Not the way they do when they frighten us. Perhaps the ferocious beings he wrote about allowed him a rare insight into human mind and its destructiveness, obsession for power, and tyranny. They became symbols and images, mirroring the human mind.
History is full of tyrants. We have seen them a lot in fictions too. If you remember, one example is the protagonist Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. The young man in cold blood battered the head of a pawnbroker and wasn’t repentant for it.
However, poetry remained off-limits until Ted Hughes gave voices to violence, inbuilt in nature. He is not judgmental as he explores violent selves. The poem is a sort of internal monologue of a hawk. May be you know how ferocious these winged beings are, always on the move to kill and eat.
The bird goes very candid about its cruelties. Even in sleep, it rehearses ‘perfect kills and eat’. Yes, it looks much like poet William Blake’s ‘Tiger’, the great creation of God. A tiger, to Blake, is a magnificent creation, capable of exercising great power. Praising the tiger, Blake was in fact praising the creativity of God. Ted Hughes instead focuses entirely on his animals.
Hawk’s only goal is killing. The bird now holds ‘creation’ in its foot. Yes, between its claws is hapless bait waiting to die. There emerge the counters of a tyrant, much like those seen in history. They all had one face: the face of terror. Hawk fits well in the pattern. Look how power-obsessed it is: “My eye has permitted no change/ I am going to keep things like this”.
Edward James better known as Ted Hughes, born in 1930, ranked fourth in the 2008 TIMES list of 50 great poets since 1945. He was married to celebrated American poet Sylvia Plath. Hughes poetry was full of animal imageries. Thanks to having spent his time as a zoo manager. His first collection of poems The Hawk in the Rain (1957) earned him critical acclaim. He died on 28 October 1998.
