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Elective English–II
Notes by its frail stem. But at the same time the phrase ‘her pale head’ minimally continues the
personification which is first established by the pronoun ‘she’. In this way the feminine snowdrop
– a little incarnation, almost, of the White Goddess – is located within that world of frozen and
sleeping vitality which is created by the poem, a vitality which can only be preserved, it
would seem, if it is encased within a hard, metallic, evolutionary will.
The beauty of this poem resides precisely in the way that a complex emotional ambivalence
is reflected through language. But if we can withdraw ourselves from the influence of the spell
which the poem undoubtedly casts, the vision of the snowdrop cannot but seem an alien one.
What seems strange about the poem is the lack of any recognition that the snowdrop survives
not because of any hidden reserves of massive evolutionary strength or will, but precisely
because of its frailty – its evolutionary vitality is owed directly to the very delicacy, softness
and flexibility of its structure. In Hughes’s poem the purposeless and consciousless snowdrop
comes very near to being a little Schopenhauer philosophising in the rose-garden, a little
Stalin striving to disguise an unmanly and maidenly blush behind a hard coat of assumed
steel. We might well be reminded of Hughes’s own account of the intentions which lay behind
his poem ‘Hawk roosting’. ‘Actually what I had in mind’, Hughes has said, ‘was that in this
hawk Nature is thinking … I intended some creator like the Jehovah in Job but more feminine.’
But, as Hughes himself is obliged to confess, ‘He doesn’t sound like Isis, mother of the gods,
which he is. He sounds like Hitler’s familiar spirit.’ In an attempt to account for the gap
between intention and performance Hughes invokes cultural history: ‘When Christianity kicked
the devil out of Job what they actually kicked out was Nature. ..and nature became the devil.’
This piece of rationalisation, however, seems all too like an attempt to externalise a conflict
of sensibility which is profoundly internal. The conflict in question is the same as that which
may be divined both in ‘The Thought Fox’ and in ‘Snowdrop’, in which a frail sensuousness
which might be characterised as, ‘feminine’ can be accepted only after it has been subordinated
to a tough and rational will.
The conflict between violence and tenderness which is present in an oblique form throughout
Hughes’ early poetry is one that is in no sense healed or resolved in his later work. Indeed
it might be suggested that much of the poetic and emotional charge of this later work comes
directly from an intensification of this conflict and an increasingly explicit polarisation of its
terms. The repressed tenderness of ‘Snowdrop’ or the tough steely sensibility which is expressed
in ‘Thrushes’, with its idealisation of the ‘bullet and automatic / Purpose’ of instinctual life,
is seemingly very different to the all but unprotected sensuous delicacy of ‘Littleblood’, the
poem with which Hughes ends Crow:
O littleblood, little boneless little skinless
Ploughing with a linnet’s carcase
Reaping the wind and threshing the stones.
. . . .
Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood.
But this poem must ultimately be located within the larger context which is provided by the
Crow poems. This context is one of a massive unleashing of sadistic violence -a violence which
is never endorsed by Hughes but which, nevertheless, seems to provide a kind of necessary
psychological armour within which alone tenderness can be liberated without anxiety.
In pointing to the role which is played by a particular conflict of sensibility in Hughes’s poetry
I am not in any way seeking to undermine the case which can – and should – be made for
what would conventionally be called Hughes’s poetic ‘greatness’. Indeed, my intention is
almost the reverse of this. For it seems to me that one of the factors which moderates or
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