
Steve Whitaker
Literary Editor
1:00 AM 20th January 2025
arts
Opinion
Poem Of The Week: October Dawn By Ted Hughes (1930-1998)
October Dawn
October is marigold, and yet
A glass half full of wine left out
To the dark heaven all night, by dawn
Has dreamed a premonition
Of ice across its eye as if
The ice-age had begun its heave.
The lawn overtrodden and strewn
From the night before, and the whistling green
Shrubbery are doomed. Ice
Has got its spearhead into place.
First a skin, delicately here
Restraining a ripple from the air;
Soon plate and rivet on pond and brook;
Then tons of chain and massive lock
To hold rivers. Then, sound by sight
Will Mammoth and Sabre-tooth celebrate
Reunion while a fist of cold
Squeezes the fire at the core of the world,
Squeezes the fire at the core of the heart,
And now it is about to start.
![Image by Albrecht Fietz from Pixabay]()
Image by Albrecht Fietz from Pixabay
In a poetry world of revision and reappraisal, and a retrospective tendency to confuse the relationship between personal integrity and artistic mandate, it is increasingly easy for what was once held as a beacon of originality to be overwhelmed in the cacophonous recessional of postmodern discourse.
I am thinking, here, particularly of Ted Hughes and I chose his fine poem, ‘October Dawn’ as an example of the kind of mood, and tone, that broke a creative mould when it first emerged into the drab light of postwar austerity. There is nothing drab about this poem. Infused with a dynamic energy that is ironised into stasis by its silent ministrations, Hughes’ ‘vision’ of first autumnal ice, its achingly slow build and iron grip, is utterly convincing; the metaphors within its compass transform meaning by alchemy, imposing plates and rivets, ships’ chains, on a passive landscape, on the ornamental delicacy of ‘shrubbery’, in an act of subjugation that is both stealthy and brutal.
The narrator’s terrain is subject to a slow, painful erosion of resistance to ice’s ‘spearhead’, as gradual and inexorable a process as the silting of Socrates’ veins by hemlock. Hughes’ figures are military: the ‘fist of cold’ and the presence of the ‘Mammoth and Sabre-tooth’ insinuate raw power into an imagination that is cognizant, also, of primordial inheritance, and of ice-ages that ‘squeeze’ the very heart of earth and humanity’s ‘core’, in one crushing counterpoint.
The ‘premonition’, a sense of the necessary and the inevitable, is answered in Hughes’ final line as the poet declares his own wonder at the sublime tableau.
‘October Dawn’ is taken from The Hawk in the Rain, published by Faber and Faber (1957)