Figuring out the Crow

Due to the fact that we will be discussing Ted Hughes' use of the crow in class today, I thought it would be a good idea to find some more insight into this interesting character. The following ideas I will be presenting are coming directly from the web. I do not want to take credit for insight that is not mine.

Diving back into the poem "Theology", Hughes introduces his own interpretation of the Bible's God. For Hughes, this God is imperfect, is not all-knowing, and He does not appear as the powerful God responsible for all of creation. The snake in the poem seems to be unknown to Him, and through the snake's trickery, the snake appears to hold godlike power. After investigating "Theology", and doing a bit of research, Hughes has been likened to a mythic poet. "Through myth he had access to all the intensity and drama of life and death; to universally recognisable patterns of human behaviour; to the powerful energies of gods and devils; and to ritual frameworks which have been used for centuries to contain such powerful energies and emotions. Yet, for him, myth was more than a thesaurus, it was also a divining-rod, a tool for channelling and controlling the energies he worked with, whether they were conscious or subconscious energies, sacred or profane, good or bad" (Skea). Thus, enters the Crow.

"Hughes, for the first time, wrote a sequence of poems within a framework which took the form of a folk-mythology of his own construction. Through the quasi-human figure of Crow, he continued his own journey of exploration into the human psyche and, at the same time, his handling of the death/rebirth theme in his poetry began to be more complex. It took on the aspect of a quest, a Shamanic journey to the underworld, which Hughes believed to be the basic theme in many folktales, myths and narrative poems" (Skea).

Hughes spoke on the creation and development of the Crow on BBC:

"He was created by God's nightmare. What exactly that is I
tried to define through the length of the poem, or the
succession of poems" (Hughes).

"The first idea of Crow was really an idea of style. In folktales the prince going on the adventure comes to the stable full of beautiful horses and he needs a horse for the next stage and the King's daughter advises him to take none of the beautiful horses that he'll be offered but to choose the dirty, scabby little foal. You see, I throw out the eagles and choose Crow. The idea was originally just to write his songs, the songs that a Crow would sing. In other words songs with no music whatsoever, in a super simple and a super ugly language which would in a way shed everything except just what he wanted to say without any other consideration and that's the basis of the style of the whole thing" (Hughes).

This is interesting because his earlier (pre-Crow) poetry makes several references to horses, and I can see how this ties together, from the beginning of his writing, he was on the journey of developing Crow.

In conclusion, By adopting and developing this trickster figure of the crow, Hughes was extending his exploration into his own mind the human mind in general. In so doing, Hughes extended the death/rebirth theme of his poetry to include the idea of spiritual growth and rebirth for Man.

In Crow, Hughes redefines God, adopts Biblical language and style, recreates the Biblical Genesis story, perverts the message of the supreme power of God's love and cast Crow in the role of "crucified" and reborn hero (''Crow and the Sea'') and survivor of the Apocalypse. It has also been said that Crow was subjected to teaching and to tests, he was meant to learn humanity and wholeness, to develop a soul, but only in poems published in a later poetic sequence did he achieve real progress on his quest. "Crow is Everyman who will not acknowledge that everything he most hates and fears - The Black Beast - is within him" (Skea).