The Hawk in the Rain

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Thomas Nagel, 'What is it like to be a bat?', Philosophical Review, 83 (1974), 428-439; but it can be found online in various places. In the light of the mention of anthropomorphism above, it might be interesting to chase up this classic essay about the differences between species and their consciousnesses and experiences. It is not a simple read, but it is rewarding. Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (London, 1993). Hughes himself interpreted literature in relation to the mother-goddess myth. His reading of Shakespeare is idiosyncratic but makes an interesting comparison with his poems. Time, April 5, 1971, Christopher Porterfield; February 16, 1998, review of The Birthday Letters, p. 101.

I haven’t read much poetry since my college days, but recently I’ve been keeping a copy of Leaves of Grass close to hand to peruse whenever words stop flowing from my fingers. Whitman’s word choices have a way of opening the closed avenues in my mind and jump starting the thinking process. So I read poetry for carefully composed sentences and the expanded lexicon. I love seeing unusual words or even perfectly normal words used in unusual ways. Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 10, 1980, Peter Clothier, review of Moortown; March 15, 1998, review of The Birthday Letters, p. 7. And author of introduction) William Shakespeare, With Fairest Flowers While Summer Lasts: Poems from Shakespeare (also see below), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1971, published as A Choice of Shakespeare’s Verse, Faber and Faber, 1971, introduction published as Shakespeare’s Poem, Lexham Press (London, England), 1971. I have a complex relationship with Ted Hughes, which is mainly due to the fact that my first glimpse of him was through the lens of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Adapter) The Story of Vasco (libretto; based on a play by Georges Schehade; produced in London, 1974), Oxford University Press, 1974.

National Museum Canberra

He does really fascinating things with internal rhyme, rhyme (non-rhyme) scheme, and matched consonants. He gets enormous power out of his lines, and he can flip things on their head in ways that you are entirely unprepared for. I am now very interested in getting a Complete, or at least a Selected, volume of his poems, and also his version of the Orestia. The denouement of the poem is the death of the hawk: once noble, it is smashed onto the ground like a child throwing a tantrum – again, by humanizing nature, it allows the reader to come to terms with the idea of a nature that has been twisted by the presence of humanity. Divinity exists in the description of the hawk (’round angelic eye’), even broken as it is.

The balance in nature in postwar Britain, to Hughes, only existed in nature –“poetry is … the record of how the forces of the Universe trying to redress some balance disturbed by human error.”

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Lucas Myers. Crow Steered Bergs Appeared: A Memoir of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Sewanee, Tennessee: Proctor’s Hall Press, 2001. 7. Hawk and Rain are the two operative words in the title. I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up Translator, with Harold Schimmel and Assia Gutmann) The Early Books of Yehuda Amichai, Sheep Meadow Press, 1988. Most characteristic verse of this English writer for children without sentimentality emphasizes the cunning and savagery of animal life in harsh, sometimes disjunctive lines. Myers, Lucas, Crow Steered/Bergs Appeared: A Memoir of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Proctor's Hall Press (Sewanee, TN), 2001.