A blue-dark knot of glittering voltage,
A whiplash swimmer, a fish of the air.
Location
The visual sequences that accompany Hughes's reading of 'Work and Play' are taken from archive footage of swallows in flight, motorway traffic jams and crowded holiday beach scenes. Simon Armitage talks about the poem at Lumb Bank near Hebden Bridge.
Summary
'Work and Play' is taken from the same collection as 'The Warm and the Cold'; and the season in question is summer. The poem is built around a simple comparison between a swallow, which seems to play while it works, and human beings on their holidays, who seem to make their play hard work! The rhythms of the lines and the images created serve to heighten this comparison. The swallow has the long graceful lines and lyrical images - 'a blue-dark knot of glittering voltage', 'She scissors the blue into shapes and she sews it' - while the human beings are descibed in shorter jerky lines of unflattering images that are difficult to pronounce - 'To cringe in the sparkle of rollers and screech', 'Their heads are transistors / Their teeth grit on sand grains'.
What Ted Hughes Said
'I call the piece "Work and Play" because the swallow is supposed to be working - making its living and feeding its family - and the human beings are supposed to be playing but in fact the way it turns out, it seems to be the other way around!'
Ted Hughes - Passwords 1998
What Simon Armitage Said
'A lot of the poems in that book [Season Songs] are like songs. You can imagine singing them or chanting them or skipping to them.
'["Work and Play"] takes a very simple formula. The longer lines belong to the swallow, belong to nature and these lines in the poem are very free-flowing, they're very fluid, they're very graceful... The lines that he uses to describe the sort of mass trip to the beach by the human race are cut short - they're stunted, they're chopped up - and they end quite abruptly, and that's part of the device he uses for contrasting these two things.
'I think one of the reasons he writes about animals a lot of the time is that they're part of this great system of life that we're part of as well but we're pretty cut off from it. We're divorced from it by ideas, by technology and by arrogance quite often and I think what he sees in animals is an instinctive feel for the way things work.'
Simon Armitage - Passwords 1998
