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Unit 31: Hughes and T.S. Eliot

the White Goddess–is located within that world of frozen and sleeping vitality which is created by Notes
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 diminishes the imaginative
power of some of Hughes’s early poetry is precisely the way in which an acute conflict which is
central to his own poetic sensibility tends to be disguised or, suppressed. In Crow, which I take to
be Hughes’s most extraordinary poetic achievement to date, Hughes, almost for the first time,
assumes imaginative responsibility for the puritanical violence which is present in his poetry from
the very beginnings. In doing so he seems to take full possession of his own poetic powers. It is as

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