Poems
Poem 2: 'The Warm and the Cold'
Extract
Freezing dusk is closing
Like a slow trap of steel
On trees and roads and hills and all
That can no longer feel.
But the carp is in its depth
Like a planet in its heaven
Location
The title board of the poem shows the house at Lumb Bank near Heptonstall, which Ted Hughes once owned and which he gave to the Arvon Foundation for its work promoting writing. The poem is read over archive footage of winter and autumn landscapes. After the poem is finished, we see boys from the Art Department at Queen Elizabeth School, Barnet talking about the poem and their own artwork inspired by it.
Summary
'The Warm and the Cold' is taken from Hughes's collection Season Songs - a diary of the seasons in a form of poetry that is very close to song. This particular poem has a structure that feels very musical, with alternating verse and chorus, or call and response, sections.
The four-line sections that set out the brutal power of winter, using industrial imagery - 'trap of steel', 'nut screwed tight' - are followed by eight lines with a definite rhythm and repeated structure - 'And the badger in its bedding / Like a loaf in the oven'.
The final seven lines of the poem are like the final coda in a piece of music - two short three-line stanzas sandwiching a single line all on its own - 'a star falls.' The sense of song is intensified by the frequent rhymes throughout the poem (steel/feel, sleeper/deeper, wits/spits) and the poem is deliberately laid out on the page to pick out the sections, just as a song would be. As the poem moves on, the images of the sheltering creatures move from beautifully simple comparisons - 'the butterfly in its mummy / Like a viol in its case' - to more unusual but effective ones - 'The hare strays down the highway / Like a root going deeper'. In the final eight-line section the comparisons become even more imaginative and poetic - 'The flies are behind the plaster / Like the lost score of a jig'. It is noticeable that the only reference to human beings in the poem - the 'sweating farmers' - is not particularly flattering and serves to point out the achievements of the animals.
What Ted Hughes Said
'This poem is one of a sequence of poems written for the four seasons of the year... for a children's festival... the idea I think was they would be set to music.
'It's made up of images of creatures in this very cold part of winter, which are enduring cold that many of them might not survive, and nevertheless in a way surviving happily... I always feel that animals must be in a sort of state of bliss to be able to go through what they go through and tolerate it...'
Ted Hughes - Passwords 1998
What Simon Armitage Said
(NB: In the programme we see some boys at Queen Elizabeth School, Barnet talking about 'The Warm and the Cold'. Simon Armitage also talked about it: here are some of the things he said.)
'A lot of the poems [in Season Songs] are very lyrical , they seem to have a particular melody and they use a lot of rhyme and this is true about this poem... it's more like a song.
'[It] seems to me to describe those nights... when it's incredibly cold and it feels like absolute zero and yet it's very very still and very very clear... and on those nights I think people do feel very poetic and feel as if they can see the world very clearly.
'He's describing all these forces that kill life... but what he seems to be saying is despite that or maybe in spite of it, these little parts of life can't help being lively... as if life can't be crushed...'
Simon Armitage - Passwords 1998
