Ted Hughes

I was pretty sure that after we were done with Auden (who I didn't really enjoy at all) I would be able to enjoy poetry again. So when I read Ted Hughes, I was at first confused. I didn't really understand his poetry and it seemed to be all over the place; a mixture of word vomit, strewn all over the page. But after I continued reading, poem after poem, I started to appreciate this so-called word vomit. It turned into more of a melting pot of words. And then I could finally start to extricate some kind of meaning. (Even the poems that I still don't understand, I can now appreciate for their aesthetic value).

The Crow poems were probably my favorite. Hughes takes Crow and puts him into unusual situations. The first Crow poem I read was "Crow's First Lesson" and I was amused by this re-telling of the birth of Man and Woman. The more Crow poems I read, the more Crow became a character. I can see Crow as starting out as a children's character, but turning rogue, so that now his stories should only be read by adults. As we read more and more, we learn more about crow. For example, in "Crow's Theology," Crow realizes that he only exists because God loves him. "The Door," could be an explanation of where Crow comes from, "A black doorway:/ The eye's (earth's) pupil." "Crow's Fall" describes how Crow got to be black.

All of those little anecdotes about Crow help to build him as an actual character and I was kind of reminded a little of Aesop's fables. (of course, without a moral) But because these simple stories sounded kind of childlike, almost like the way mythology tries to explain, for example, where the sun goes at night (or something like that). I'm having trouble putting my finger on the correct terminology and phrasing for what I'm trying to relate Crow to, but that's the best I could come up with.