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Poem Of the Week: Wind By Ted Hughes (1930-1998)

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Ted Hughes has many detractors. Viewed as in a two-way mirror, his reflection is forever indivisible from that of Sylvia Plath, his legacy undermined by a connection of destructive antagonisms, and the value of his poetry besmirched by the very power that informs it. For the potency of elemental forces that he unleashes in astonishing metaphors, and syntactical arrangements as blunt as millstone grit, have become an integrated measure of the man: the taciturn exterior, perhaps even the desire to subjugate, is seen as an extension of the brute architecture of his poetry.

Maybe we should separate the man from what Larkin called the ‘myth kitty’ of his poetics, and remember the groundbreaking impact of Hughes’ poems on a generation of schoolchildren and embryonic young writers from the nineteen sixties onwards. In a relativistic age, we are doomed, otherwise, to equate his art with misogyny, as surely as Larkin’s with brown-paper parcels and serial philandering, and Francis Bacon's with a misanthropic taste for rough trade.

Buffeted along the West Cliff promenade at Whitby in a near storm last week, I was reminded of Hughes’ uniqueness of vision, and of the disquieting cataclysmic forces that render our tiny presences insignificant. The poet’s description of a moorland storm in his early poem ‘Wind’ is utterly convincing, his use of imagery so compelling as to place us in his tableau, as vulnerable to the blandishments of the elements as his narrator. Hughes’ images corroborate Gaston Bachelard’s belief in the primacy of metaphor to human thinking: at every turn in this poem of six quatrains, his figures exhale life into locators, into our sense of displacement and the synaesthesial shifting and flexing of colour and sound.

And like the wild North Sea, Hughes’ sustained metaphorical journey is one of shifting perspectives, of an inability to hang on to the horizon, as helpless in the face of such kinetic energy as the narrator’s struggle to ‘scale’ the house-side, like a mariner on a mountainous ocean. ‘Wind’ needs little explanation beyond an acceptance of its raw power, of its power to insinuate the reader into a maelstrom of the sublime. The primary urges the narrator invokes are lost in silence before the storm: the shattering of glass, the flexing of a mad eye, the crashing wood, are needles gone crazy, leaving the huddled group frail and profoundly sensitive to the force of Hughes’ final, transcendent lines.

'Wind’ is taken from The Hawk in the Rain, first published by Faber & Faber in 1957.

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