Books: Demons and Victims

CROW by Ted Hughes. 84 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

When the eagle soared clear through

a dawn

distilling of emerald When the curlew trawled in seadnsk

through

a chime of wineglasses . . . Crow spraddled head-down in the

beach-garbage, guzzling a dropped ice-cream.

No romantic flights for English Poet Ted Hughes. Let others waft upward in attenuated dawns and high-blown rhetoric. Hughes stays below, foraging over a gritty landscape, battening onto whatever is starkly elemental. For him, poetry is “the record of how the forces of the universe try to redress some balance disturbed by man.” In his taut, compulsive poems, both the error and its redress are usually violent, sometimes disgusting, occasionally awesome. From a bullet-pierced soldier’s helmet come “cordite oozings of Gallipoli.” Giant crabs, “God’s only toys,” tear each other apart. Even a thistle is “a grasped fistful of splintered weapons.” Hughes sees a grim beauty in all this. His ability to make the reader see it too has placed him, at 40, among the handful of essential poets that Britain has produced since the war.

Although Crow offers no letup in the agony and gore, it should win Hughes a new and wider following. In it he parcels out human history and legend in a succession of charnel-house episodes. The Garden of Eden, Oedipus, St. George, all our prototypes of beauty, heroism and love, are reduced to so much pulsing, thrashing sinew, murderously intent on survival. A harsh and one-sided view, to be sure, yet difficult to deny. The headlines are on its side. Hughes is too cunning a craftsman to try to convey his vision in headlines or rant of any kind. Instead of giving it full vent, he gives it narrow vent —through 66 short, spare poems cast as tales or fables, like fragments of some folk epic. The effect is like that of a torrent forced through a narrow nozzle: cutting intensity and tremendous, controlled force.

The central figure in most of these fragments is Crow himself, a scraggy, scavenging creature:

Screaming for Blood Grubs, crusts Anything.

To all the horror, Crow brings a note of jaunty irony, even whimsy, as the titles of his adventures show: Crow Tyrannosaurus, Crow Improvises, Crow’s Last Stand. Crow is a sort of cosmic Kilroy. Alternately a witness, a demon and a victim, he is in on everything from the creation to the ultimate nuclear holocaust. At various times he is minced, dismembered, rendered cataleptic, but always he bobs back. In his graceless, ignoble way, he is the lowest common denominator of the universal forces that obsess Hughes.

He is a symbol of the essential survivor, of whatever endures, however battered.

When God hung Crow on a tree He made fruit

When God buried Crow in the earth He made man … When God said: “You win, Crow” He made the Redeemer. When God went off in despair Crow stropped his beak and started in on the two thieves.

It is no accident that Hushes uses an animal image to frame his fearful message. Born in the bleak Yorkshire countryside, the son of a carpenter, he has always been fascinated by the amoral fierceness and energy of animals. Like another countryman, D.H. Lawrence, he tried to use that energy in his writing to shrus: off what he regards as a dead civilization. He wants to break through to a life that is hooked into “the elemental power-circuit of the universe.” Such a life sometimes seems a long way from ours. Actually, it isn’t at all, as Crow flies.