Poems
Poem 1: 'Wind'
Extract
This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills
Winds stampeding the fields under the windows
Floundering black astride and blinding wet
Location
The poem is read by Ted Hughes over a series of images from the Hardcastle Crags and Crimsworth Dean area to the north of Hebden Bridge, an area well known to Hughes as a boy. The house shown in the programme is a local moorland farm. The house that Hughes was thinking of in the poem, as he mentions in Poetry in the Making, was a small house on the moortop above Heptonstall close to Lumb Bank.
Summary
'Wind' comes from the early collection of poems Hawk in the Rain (1957). It was this collection that first brought him to public attention. The poem is one of his finest - a sustained meditation on the forces of nature - a tremendous gale buffeting a moorland house and its occupants. It seems to document an apocalyptic transformation of the natural world - 'Winds stampeding the fields under the window', 'The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope' - with images that suggest that the wind is an enormous and powerful beast - 'Floundering black astride and blinding wet', 'Flexing like the lens of a mad eye' - hell-bent on changing the way things are, paying little heed to the human beings cowering insignificantly by their fireside. Things that we think of as solid and secure are pushed to the edge by this force - 'the hills had new places', 'the roots of the house move', 'stones cry out'. You can also hear the sounds of this terrific storm - 'booming hills', 'The house / Rang like some fine green goblet'.
There is a masterful control of language and imagery, sustaining the idea of this house 'far out at sea' and taking it through changes, always coming up with fresh and startling ways of picturing what is happening during the gale. The rhythms of the words - the way phrases and sentences are broken over lines and flow across stanzas - seem to have the same effect on the quite formal structure of the poem (six four-line stanzas) as the wind has on the solid structure of the house itself. The power of Hughes's craftsmanship as a poet is bursting out of this poem.
What Ted Hughes Said
'For quite a few years my parents lived in a house on top of a high ridge in West Yorkshire, over the Calder Valley. Either side of this ridge the valleys just dived away out of sight, right down into a gorge and trees and streams... and then on the other side the hillsides rose up very steeply to the moors...
'This is a poem about a gale that went on for a few days and if you've ever been in a gale like that for a while, it gets in your head, begins to affect you.'
Ted Hughes - Passwords 1998
What Simon Armitage Said
'He sees nature in those lines as one great big organic living entity... very chaotic... very unfathomable but massive... and all part of the same system of which we are a part as well...
'Ted Hughes isn't somebody who is content to sit in his armchair while the Universe rages outside the window. He wants a part of it... he wants to see it and he wants to think about it and he wants to write it down as a poem.
'He wants to make this connecting rod between nature and humanity and he thinks poetry can do it.'
Simon Armitage - Passwords 1998
