'Wind' by Ted Hughes- Analysis

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,

The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,

Winds stampeding the fields under the window

Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky

The hills had new places, and wind wielded

Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,

Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as

The coal-house door. Once I looked up -

Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes

The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,

At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;

The wind flung a magpie away and a black-

Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note

That any second would shatter it. Now deep

In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip

Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,

And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,

Seeing the window tremble to come in,

Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons

Ted Hughes

Biography:

Often referred to as one of the greatest 20th century poets, Ted Hughes was born in Yorkshire in 1930. He began to write his first poems aged 15, before winning a scholarship to study English at Cambridge, although he switched to Archaeology and Anthropology in his third year there. His first published poem appeared in 1954, the year of his graduation, and his first book of poems, 'Hawk in the Rain', was published in 1957. The previous year he had met the American poet, Sylvia Plath, and they were married in four months. Over the next 41 years he would write over 90 books, winning numerous prizes and fellowships, and was appointed England's poet laureate in 1984, with his love of nature a key influence in his work. However, his personal life was less successful. His marriage to Sylvia Plath was a turbulent one, and they separated after seven years. She committed suicide in 1963, gassing herself in her kitchen a year after their separation, and many held Hughes responsible as a result of his affair with Assia Wevill. Six years later, Wevill killed herself and their four-year old daughter, Shura. His reputation was marred by these tragedies, and it was with great surprise that the literary world received 'Birthday Letters' in 1998, the year of his death from cancer. This volume was dedicated to Sylvia Plath, and paints a tender portrait of every aspect of his relationship with her. The intensity and beauty of his language is breathtaking, and every poem I have read contains fresh, striking imagery that perfectly encapsulates its subject.

Analysis:

‘Wind’ is one of Ted Hughes’ most formidable poems, showing an entirely different aspect to this element. Unlike many other poets such as John Clare (‘A Morning Breeze’), Hughes is not concerned with describing the beauty and serenity of a balmy breeze; his aim is solely to communicate the relentless, godly strength and power of the wind that he knows from stormy days on the moors of the Pennines, using pathetic fallacy as the main device to describe both the wind and its victims.

            
            In the first of six four-line stanzas, Hughes describes the tempestuous night that has passed. The opening line is both simple but striking, comparing a solid house to a flimsy boat that has been tossed and smashed in a sea gale, with the words ‘far out’ and ‘all night’ suggesting the house is marooned in isolation. Like terrified, panicked animals, the woods have been ‘crashing through darkness’ while the hills are ‘booming’ with the thunderous sound of the wind. Personification is used to convey its almighty, dangerous power: it was ‘stampeding the fields’ while the land was futilely ‘floundering’ in the ‘blinding wet’.  The oceanic metaphor continues, conjuring up an image of a night mastered by the storm that rages through the dark. However, the beginning of the second verse is misleading: ‘till day rose’ indicates that finally the storm is over, whereas, in fact, the ensuing chaos is almost more intense, undiluted by the rain that saturates the first four lines.

            
            No longer black, the sky has now adopted the unnatural, ominous colour of orange, and as a consequence of the previous night, the ‘hills had new places’: the wind is so powerful that it has the ability to alter the very landscape it rules. It is also armed and ready to do battle with the earth again with renewed vigour, demonstrated by the martial image ‘wind wielded blade-light.’ Imagining the wind as an Anglo-Saxon warrior, Hughes shows that it has harnessed the power of light to its weaponry, and conveys a crazed frenzy. It is as though the wind even has a face, with the ‘black and emerald’ the colours of its pupil and iris. However, they are ‘luminous’, and the light from its wild face is ‘flexing like the lens of a mad eye’: a surreal concept conveying brilliantly the strange light and unpredictability in the aftermath of a storm. 

           
            The third stanza opens with the line, ‘at noon, I scaled along the house side’, as Hughes continues with the metaphor of the house as a boat.  Inching along the wall for protection, he reaches ‘as far as the coal house door’; by starting a new line after ‘as far as’, Hughes creates an exaggerated climax before recording the small distance that he actually managed to navigate. This first-person perspective is most effective in conveying the poet’s vulnerability. Hunched and stooped, he dares to look up just once, and immediately the balls of his eyes feel ‘dented’ by the ‘brunt wind’. This shocking sensory image of an eyeball being violently assaulted by a hard object conveys the brute force of the wind. The internal rhyme of ‘dented’ and ‘tent’ adds to the harsh, metallic feel of the verse, continuing with ‘the tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope’. Not only is the physical shape of the curved landscape depicted, this metaphorical image of movement shows the inescapable wind as being almost within the earth, its formidable power nearly snapping the ropes that anchor the hills to the ground.

            
            In the literal and figurative ‘the fields quivering’, Hughes shows not only the rippling appearance of the land, but personifies it as well: previously, the fields were stampeded by the wind, now they tremble in submission and distress. The sky too is mastered by the wind, with an arresting description of the shape of the horizon as a ‘grimace’, wincing in fear and pain. This is followed by the onomatopoeic, ‘bang and vanish with a flap’: such is the nature of these words that they demand to be read quickly and suddenly, demonstrating the unpredictable state of the land at the merciless hands of the wind, and the upheaval and tension it causes. With careless ease, the wind ‘flung a magpie away’: it is personified as it hurls a bird as thoughtlessly as a human might a discarded object.  ‘Flung’ also indicates a temper.  In contrast to the rapid pace of this stanza, the reader is then forced to slow down with the monosyllabic ‘black-back gull bent like an iron bar slowly’, which links closely with the image being described, as the assonantal rhythm mirrors the meaning. Material is of no consequence to the wind, as it easily alters the shape of both metal and earth, and nature is helpless in the face of the wind’s demented onslaught.

            
            ‘The house’ is deliberately placed in the stanza above the rest of its sentence to create impact for the opening of the next verse, as it matches the harsh assonance of sounds of ‘iron’ and ‘slowly’. It also sits alone, perilously exposed. The wind has now reached a frequency so powerful that it could shatter Hughes’ home like ‘a fine green goblet’, showing that compared to the wind, mere bricks and mortar are extremely delicate and fragile. The wind has again reached inside its subjects: before, it threatened to burst from within the hills; now, it howls inside the house at a frequency that could shatter glass. There is a sense of urgency and tension in the words  ‘any second would shatter it’, with Hughes and his house now in immediate danger.

            
            Despite the reassurance of being ‘deep in chairs’ by a ‘great fire’, this is no match for the wind, and Hughes and his family are uneasy and unsettled by its presence. It has invaded their minds, for they ‘cannot entertain book, though, or each other.’ Instead, they sit brooding, watching the fire while they ‘feel the roots of the house move’. There is no security to be found, and again, the house is in danger of being hurled away, and shifts to rearrange its position in the earth. The windows not only tremble with the force of the wind that hammers them, but are personified as afraid, desperate to seek shelter within the walls of the house. In the concluding lines, they hear the ‘stones cry out under the horizons’: even the prehistoric stones are weeping in desperation at the cruel havoc caused by the wind.

            
            Hughes uses enjambement to create fluidity much like the flow of the wind, although there is no regular rhyme pattern, showing that its inexhaustible energy cannot be limited. Hughes portrays how its sheer elemental force masters the land, sky, light, fire and stones in an assault of sense images which reflect its immeasurable rage. However, the tone is not one of criticism, but of awe at its power. He also highlights the insignificance of man compared to such strength, with the personification serving to blur the line between nature and humanity, as all are helpless in the face of the wind. 

'To His Coy Mistress' by Andrew Marvell- Analysis

To His Coy Mistress

Had we but world enough, and time,

This coyness, Lady, were no crime.

We would sit down and think which way

To walk and pass our long love's day.

Thou by the Indian Ganges' side

Shouldst rubies find: I by the tide

Of Humber would complain. I would

Love you ten years before the Flood,

And you should, if you please, refuse

Till the conversion of the Jews.

My vegetable love should grow

Vaster than empires, and more slow;

An hundred years should go to praise

Thine eyes and on thy forehead gaze;

Two hundred to adore each breast;

But thirty thousand to the rest;

An age at least to every part,

And the last age should show your heart;

For, Lady, you deserve this state,

Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear

Time's wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found,

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song: then worms shall try

That long preserved virginity,

And your quaint honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust:

The grave's a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue

Sits on thy skin like morning dew,

And while thy willing soul transpires

At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may,

And now, like amorous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour

Than languish in his slow-chapt power.

Let us roll all our strength and all

Our sweetness up into one ball,

And tear our pleasures with rough strife

Through the iron gates of life:

Thus, though we cannot make our sun

Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Andrew Marvell

Biography:

Andrew Marvell was an English metaphysical poet born in March 1621 in Winestead, Yorkshire, the son of a clergyman. Educated at the Hull Grammar School, he was accepted into Trinity College Cambridge in 1633, where he published his first poems, written in Latin and Greek, before receiving his BA in 1639. In the ensuing years, he is said to have travelled extensively in Europe, before becoming the tutor of Mary Fairfax, the daughter of Sir Thomas Fairfax. At their Yorkshire residence, Nun Appleton House, he wrote many of his non-satirical poems, such as ‘Upon Appleton House’, as well as ‘To His Coy Mistress’.

            In 1653 he struck up a friendship with fellow poet, John Milton, and tutored Oliver Cromwell’s nephew, William Dutton, before being appointed Assistant Latin Secretary to the Council of State in 1657. In 1659, he was elected as MP for Hull, a post he retained until his death. During the final twenty years of his life, he participated in political activities and published political pamphlets and satires before his death in August 1678.

Analysis:

‘To His Coy Mistress’ takes the form of an eloquent appeal to a mistress, challenging her to succumb to the temptation of engaging in sexual activity. Using Horace’s ‘carpe diem’ as his main theme, Marvell argues that they should remember the fleeting nature of life, and seize the moment in all their youth to make love before they die.  ‘To His Coy Mistress’ is a metaphysical poem, embellished with some telling characteristics of such works, including wit and far-fetched, unique metaphors and similes. In this unconventional declaration of love, and proposition of sex, Marvell also meditates on the wider significance of the passing of time, and conveys a clear message that one should live for the present.

           

Marvell presents his argument logically in three separate verses. In the first stanza, he elaborates on a scenario that would exist if their love did not know the boundaries of time and space. He begins by introducing this idea in his first two lines: ‘Had we but world enough, and time/This coyness, lady, were no crime.’ He makes the point that they do not have unlimited time to wait for sex. Therefore, this woman’s coyness is verging on criminal. Using hyperbole and cunning flattery, and employing the conditional tense, Marvell then continues to depict the situation of limitless time. With such a luxury, he would court and pursue his mistress for eternity, beginning to love her ‘ten years before the Flood’. She could deny his affections until ‘the conversion of the Jews’, referring to Jesus’s return at the end of the world. These religious metaphors convey the infinite time scale Marvell wishes they possessed, but never can. He continues to toy with his mistress’s emotions, telling her that even physical separation and distance would not diminish his love. She could search for rubies by the Ganges, a glorified and exotic image that is juxtaposed with his placement by the Humber, dull and boring in comparison, where he does nothing but complain. This contrast is designed to inspire pity in the woman. An impression of the eternity for which Marvell yearns is conveyed by a series of time periods, each more extreme than the next, and showing the enormity of what he desires. He would spend ‘an hundred years’ alone just praising her eyes and forehead, ‘two hundred to adore each breast’, and dedicates ‘thirty thousand to the rest’. In one of the most striking and original comparisons of the poem, Marvell audaciously compares his love to a ‘vegetable’. Instead of choosing a safer simile, such as a rose, he chooses a vegetable to symbolise his emotions, which represents the natural, slow ripening of his love until it is ‘vaster than empires’, a line which is again adorned with exaggeration.

           

From the very beginning of the second verse, Marvell wrenches us back to reality, with the authorial pointer of ‘But’ hinting at the content of what is to follow. He talks of how he always hears ‘Time’s winged chariot hurrying near’: by personifying Time wielding this force, a sense of being hounded and pursued by the ticking tyrant of Time is created. His love growing ‘vaster than empires’ becomes ‘deserts of vast eternity’ stretching before them: a desolate, barren image. Appealing to his mistress’s vanity, he tells her that her ‘beauty shall no more be found’ in the ‘marble vault’ where she will lie once she is dead. Using gruesome and detailed imagery, Marvell warns her that worms will burrow into her until she is reduced to a skeleton, and offers her the choice between worms taking her virginity when she is a corpse, or experiencing the passion of sex with her lover now. He gently mocks her ‘quaint honour’: her antiquated, ridiculous hold on her virginity, and tells her that this will be of no consequence when she is dead, for she will ‘turn to dust’. He cleverly rhymes ‘dust’ with ‘lust’ to emphasise what a terrible fate it would be to go to the grave a virgin. The final couplet is wryly amusing and ironic, for Marvell speculates that ‘the grave’s a fine and private place/But none I think do there embrace’. This is a humorous finish to a morbid verse, as he writes as though he possesses an element of doubt regarding the sexual activity of skeletons. It is impossible for them to love, and so his mistress should seize the opportunity to make love to him while she is still alive.

           

The final stanza combines his two previous arguments, and Marvell begins to pursue another angle with renewed vigour. Having flattered and terrified his lover, he seeks to inspire and infect her with his urgency: he employs ‘now’ three times in twice as many lines in an attempt to galvanise her into making love. In the passion of their youth, he encourages her to relent (‘thy willing soul transpires/At every pore with instant fires’) and goes on to conjure up an arresting simile, comparing them to ‘am’rous birds of prey’. This image is laden with contrast: ‘am’rous’ implies gentle love, but birds of prey are savage and cruel animals. This hints at his wild, desperate lust, and echoes lines from Ted Hughes’s poem ‘Lovesong’ such as ‘she bit him she gnawed him she sucked/She wanted him complete inside her’ and ‘their deep cries crawled over the floors/Like an animal dragging a great trap’. Furthermore, the spirit of Marvell’s poem is captured by another line in ‘Lovesong’: ‘he wanted all future to cease.’

Marvell boldly continues to challenge his lover to ‘devour’ time with him: if they make love, then they will be able to conquer time, instead of yielding to its ‘slow-chapp’d power’. This is an exhilarating notion, as the reader has previously been informed of humanity’s incapacity in the face of time. In a combination of pain and indulgence, Marvell tempts her to ‘tear our pleasures with rough strife’, a violent thought, reinforced with the use of the word ‘iron’ to describe the ‘gates of life’. In the conclusive couplet to his argument, Marvell uses the sun as an emblem of time, which is a fitting image as it is often used to indicate the time of day, and is constantly moving and changing position. He ends on a philosophical note: if they cannot make time stand still for them, then they can at least try to defy it without fear, in the comfort of their passionate love.

The stylistic three-stanza argument employed by Marvell presents his persuasive case logically and clearly. Rhyming couplets are used, creating a graceful lyricism. Assonance and alliteration are also present in the first verse, in lines such as ‘long love’s day’, designed to captivate the reader by the portrayal of an ideal universe. However, alliteration does not resurface until the final two lines: ‘our sun/Stand still’, making this final point more memorable. Although there is an obvious iambic tetrametre throughout the poem, Marvell uses punctuation to influence the rhythm and pace of the poem, and to match the content it describes. In the first verse, the short sentences are frequently interrupted by commas and colons, mirroring the slow romancing that he imagines, and creating a gently sensual rhythm. In the second verse, the rhythm subtly begins to speed up, until the climax of his thoughts is expressed in the final section. The words rush from him, reflecting his urgency, and the hurried rhythm alludes to the pressing situation.

            In my opinion, this poem is not only an appeal to a mistress to sleep with him, but an elaboration on the ephemeral nature of mortality, and a plea to seize the moment. Marvell deftly weaves solemn seriousness with ironically comical black humour. He aims to convince his lover that she should shed her inhibitions and make love to him by showing her repulsive images of death, for time literally flies (‘Time’s winged chariot’) and she can never experience passion once she is dead. This poem resonates with me, especially the final couplet: we underestimate how precious time is and take it for granted, naïve to the fact that there are many who desire only an extra day to live. We should live life to the full, and its alarming brevity should serve only to spur us on.

'Death of A Naturalist' by Seamus Heaney- Analysis

Death of A Naturalist

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart

Of the townland; green and heavy headed

Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.

Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.

Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles

Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.

There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,

But best of all was the warm thick slobber

Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water

In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring

I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied

Specks to range on window-sills at home,

On shelves at school, and wait and watch until

The fattening dots burst into nimble-

Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how

The daddy frog was called a bullfrog

And how he croaked and how the mammy frog

Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was

Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too

For they were yellow in the sun and brown

In rain.

Then one hot day when fields were rank

With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs

Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges

To a coarse croaking that I had not heard

Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.

Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked

On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:

The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat

Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.

I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings

Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew

That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

Seamus Heaney

Biography:

Seamus Heaney is an Irish poet born in 1939, and is the eldest of nine children. Growing up on a farm, a theme that permeates much of his work, his adolescence was blighted by the tragic death of his 4 year-old brother Christopher in a road accident. This is reflected in several of his poems, including the poignant ‘Mid-Term Break’. He also faced the issue of being a Catholic in Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland. After graduating from Queen’s College, Belfast, with a First Class Honours degree in English Language and Literature, his poetry came to public attention with the publication of the critically acclaimed volume ‘Death of a Naturalist’ in 1966. By the end of 1979, he had published a further five volumes, and was appointed as the Professor of Poetry at Oxford University for five years. In 1995, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for ‘works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth’. After suffering a stroke in 2006, he published his twelfth collection, ‘Human Chain’ in 2010, and continues to work today.

Analysis:

‘Death of a Naturalist’ is both a description of Heaney’s experience with nature as a boy, and a metaphor for the loss of his childhood innocence, as he looks back wistfully at his youthful naivety. He is fascinated by the frogspawn and tadpoles of the flax-dam’, but becomes repulsed by a horde of croaking frogs in their maturity. It is similar to another of Heaney’s works, ‘Blackberry-Picking’ in subject and style, as both centre on the change in Heaney’s attitude to the natural world, scaling the heights of pleasure before a crucial mood-swing to plumb the depths of revulsion.

            The poem opens with a vivid, yet ambivalent description of a flax-dam that ‘festers in the heart of the townland’, much like a putrefying core would. He notes this, but is not disgusted by it, as he knows of the jewels of frogspawn that are concealed within. Using assonantal para-rhyme in the alliterative phrase ‘green and heavy headed flax had rotted there’, he harnesses their slow, substantial sounds to convey the decaying atmosphere. This is further enhanced by description of flax as being ‘weighted down by huge sods’, while the flax-dam is personified as it ‘sweltered in the punishing sun’.  Using pathetic fallacy to portray the sun, the poet imagines it as an oppressive, brutal ruler, and this authorial nudge hints at the negative mood swing that is to come. Appealing now to our sense of hearing, he employs striking auditory imagery such as the oxymoronic ‘gargled delicately’, before describing the bluebottles as weaving ‘a strong gauze of sound around the smell’. He achieves the effect of creating pleasant connotations of light, gentle fabric from a revolting source. The noise of the bluebottles is hazy anyway, but so intense is their presence at the flax dam that their dense sound has become embodied in a material.

            In a typical feature of Heaney’s narrative, he goes into character and adopts the voice of his boyhood self: a pure, untainted vessel, unaware of the monstrosities that are soon to corrupt his mind and alter his perception of nature. Beginning with the tinkling phrase ‘dragon-flies, spotted butterflies’, he captures the sense of wonder using childish expressions such as ‘best of all’. Heaney as a child imagines the frogspawn as ‘warm thick slobber’, the onomatopoeia subtly encapsulating the gelatinous texture of its subject. In two long, uninterrupted sentences, comprising unsophisticated clauses linked by ‘and’, he skilfully imitates his innocent enthusiasm, using enjambement to emphasize this. There is no description, only a simple, almost nostalgic recitation of his actions: he ‘would fill jampotfuls of the jellied specks’, before beginning to ‘wait and watch’ until at last, to his delight, the ‘fattening dots burst into nimble-swimming tadpoles’.

He relates how his teacher has taught them about the lifecycle of a frog, proudly demonstrating his knowledge about how the ‘daddy frog was called a bullfrog, and how he croaked’ (an premonition of what he will later experience) and how ‘the mammy frog laid hundreds of little eggs’, taking on the role of a keen naturalist. This awe is emphasised by the start of a new line for the word ‘frogspawn’, before an interest verging on scientific is expressed through the idea of forecasting the weather by the colours of frogs. However, the first section ends abruptly with the words ‘in rain’, indicating a forthcoming negative change.

            Even the opening word, ‘then’ signals a change in thought, an omen of what is to follow. The line ‘one hot day when fields were rank’ almost imitates the sound of marching footsteps, as we are introduced to the ‘angry frogs’ that have ‘invaded the flax-dam’. Throughout the remainder of the poem, a martial theme is apparent, demonstrated by ideas such as ‘poised like mud grenades’, ‘great slime kings’ and ‘gathered there for vengeance’: to Heaney, these animals appear like belligerent warlords, determined to retaliate over the earlier theft of their frogspawn. They have already conquered the air, which is ‘thick with a bass chorus’, a masculine threat contrasting both with Miss Walls’s gently portrayal of the frogs, and the gauze before. Using the striking simile, ‘their loose necks pulsed like sails’, he depicts their grotesque animation, showing to the reader how shockingly alive they appeared to him. In the concluding line, even the frogspawn itself is nightmarishly endowed in the imagination of the child. Previously, he had peacefully collected the frogspawn; now, he fears that if he dips his hand into the water, the ‘spawn would clutch it’: a monstrous image that must have served to terrify the young Heaney. Indeed, he then ‘sickened, turned, and ran’,  leaving the beasts behind. These lines echo ones from another of his poems, ‘An Advancement of Learning’ (‘my throat sickened so quickly that I turned down the path in a cold sweat’), which is also concerned with the less appealing side of nature, in this instance, rats.

            The reader sympathises with his disgust at the surprising scene that he is confronted by, and Heaney uses lavishly indelicate onomatopoeia such as the deliberately crude ‘cocked on sods’, and ‘slap and plop’, which are compared to ‘obscene threats’: to him, this assault on the flax-dam is both explicitly offensive and hideously nauseating. This is also indicated by his choice of words for the action and sound of their heads, which are described as ‘farting’, another rude, indecent comparison. There are also religious undertones, as the infestation of frogs appears almost to be a Biblical plague from the time of Moses.

            ‘Death of a Naturalist’ takes the form of two contrasting parts, set out in blank verse: the first section conveys his enchantment with nature; the second demonstrates his disillusionment, as he begins to see the frogs not as his playful allies, but as a menace. The previous security the poet feels changes into threat, mirroring the transition of the tadpoles into frogs, and his own self-development. The loss of innocence is a consequence of growing up, but mars a previously blissful existence, and ironically, it is the very abundance of nature that kills the budding naturalist within Heaney.