Ted Hughes, unreligious as he is, uses "blasphemous" imagery and "heretical" rhetorical in much of his poetry. In a few of his poems, he even recreates biblical accounts, forming them into (perhaps not anti-biblical, but) almost "de-biblical" accounts.
For instance, in "Theology," Hughes retells the story of "the Fall," which the speaker claims is "simply / Corruption of the facts" (3-4). In the biblical depiction, the serpent tempted Eve to the apple (who ate), who then tempted Adam (who also ate), all three of whom were found by God, naked and ashamed, and then cursed by God. Hughes' version, however, is not slightly altered:
Adam ate the apple.
Eve ate Adam.
The serpent ate Eve.
This is the dark intestine.
The serpent, meanwhile,
Sleeps his meal off in Paradise--
Smiling to hear
God's querulous calling. (5-12)
The Bible tells the Fall of man as the separation from God due to sin, and "Theology" also tells of a separation from God, but of a different kind. Here there is no sin, no "seduc[tion]" (2), no temptation whatsoever. The serpent merely ate the woman who had eaten the man who had eaten the apple: these are "the facts" (4). There is nothing else to it. Hughes expresses here that mankind has been separated from God from the beginning: there is no "Paradise" (1o) to which we can or should return. The place we find ourselves is "the dark intestine" (4), and not due to sin, but due to the facts, and God is a bumbling fool, several levels removed from us, in this garden we cannot reach, and in which we are nowhere to be found.
The themes of "Theology" (the poem which, in part, inspired Hughes' book, Crow) carry over into many of the poems of Crow. "Crow's First Lesson," for example, is another sort of reconstruction of the Fall, another version even further removed from the original story. In this rendering, God is attempting to teach Crow to say the word, "love." According to the Bible, the purpose for which all things were created is love: to love God and to love one another. So God, after this fashion, attempts to assimilate Crow into that created structure: but Crow is unable.
"Love," said God. "Say, Love."
Crow gaped, and the white shark crashed into the sea
And went rolling downwards, discovering its own depth. (2-3)
From the beginning, Crow can neither receive nor recapitulate this notion of "love." Instead, when he opens his mouth, voiceless descriptions of death come flowing out: vicious predators of the sea and disease-carrying insects, "Zoom[ing] out and down" (7). God attempts a third and final time to teach poor Crow, and this is where the most obvious connection to the Fall appears:
Crow convulsed, gaped, retched and
Man's bodiless prodigous head
Bulbped out onto the earth, with swivelling eyes,
Jabbering protest--
And Crow retched again, before God could stop him.
And woman's vulva dropped over man's neck and tightened.
The two struggled together on the grass.
God struggled to part them, cursed, wept--
Crow flew guiltily off. (10-18)
In this way, Hughes completely deconstructs both the story of man's creation and man's curse. Rather than God making man at all, man and woman were both "retched" out of Crow's innards, vomitted out of Crow's dark, distorted, dismembered, and defeated attempt to say, "Love." Crow who cannot create love, created man and woman, and in this, they were borne in strife and forced to love in the only way that Crow's own "dark intestine" can conceive: struggling forever. The sexual imagery of "woman's vulva" tightening around "man's neck" depicts sex as the concrete signifier of this struggle, as well as the perpetuation of that love (through reproduction) thereafter.
God, helpless to part them (as He was helpless to find them in "Theology"), gives up: He curses and weeps. God's curse here is not from the position of sovereign authority, as the biblical account described, but from the position of submissive futility. He breaks down and cries because He cannot make love (pun intended) in them as He desires, for the love from which they were borne was from the convulsive stomache of the Crow. "Crow," then "flew guiltily off" (18), knowing he had made a mistake (mankind), but unable either to remedy the situation or to console the now grieving God. So Crow leaves God behind, off to find something other than God or Love by which to define himself.
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