I never thought that I'd be posting a poem on the Environment/Energy board . . .

[hatrack]

Even so, it's striking to find a piece of work that says in fewer than 100 words what I've been trying to lay out in nearly 20,000 posts to date. Weird.

Revenge Fable

There was a person
Could not get rid of his mother
As if he were her topmost twig.
So he pounded and hacked at her
With numbers and equations and laws
Which he invented and called truth,
He investigated, incriminated
And penalized her, like Tolstoy
Forbidding, screaming and condemning.
Going for her with a knife,
Obliterating her with disgusts
Bulldozers and detergents
Requisitions and central heating
Rifles and whiskey and bored sleep.

With all her babes in her arms, in ghostly weepings,
She died.

His head fell off like a leaf.

Ted Hughes
From the collection "Crow", 1970

[glitch]

1. Wow, 20000 posts. Amazing. You've done good work here Hatrack.

Wonderful poem.

[hatrack]

2. I only wish I'd written it!

But then I would have been married to Sylvia Plath and all that. Not. Fun.

[glitch]

3. Lol! and sad. nt

[NNadir]

4. Now. Now. Let's not offend the Plath fans.

I have always thought that Ted was mostly a famous husband.

Plath's poem "The Elm" - ostensibly about the problem of introduced species - is for my money one of the finest poems ever written in this language.

We, the Plath fans, will always blame Ted for everything, including the bubonic plague, cholera, the American Civil War, the deforestation of Haiti, World War I, the Chinese Boxer Rebellion, and the "election" of George W. Bush, but the worst thing Hughes ever did was that he burned some of Plath's writings. It's as if Halley had burned Newton's Principia sight unseen and all we could do today was to speculate what might have been in it.

We get prickly when Ted's name is mentioned.

Frankly your 20,000 posts have been somewhat more poetic than Ted could ever hope to be. ;)

Sylvia said, "I know the bottom" and that's what I've been trying to say for however many posts I have written.

http://www.angelfire.com/punk2/themosquito/index49.elm.html

[hatrack]

5. I will refute your kind words (bad move, I know!) with another excellent Hughes poem!

Relic

I found this jawbone at the sea's edge:
There, crabs, dogfish, broken by the breakers or tossed
To flap for half an hour and turn to a crust
Continue the beginning. The deeps are cold:
In that darkness camaraderie does not hold:
Nothing touches but, clutching, devours. And the jaws,
Before they are satisfied or their stretched purpose
Slacken, go down jaws, go gnawn bare. Jaws
Eat and are finished and the jawbone comes to the beach:
This is the sea's achievement; with shells,
Vertebrae, claws, carapaces, skulls.

Time in the sea eats its tail, thrives, casts these
Indigestibles, the spars of purposes
That failed far from the surface. None grow rich
In the sea. This curved jawbone did not laugh
But gripped, gripped and is now a cenotaph.

[NNadir]

6. I think I know that one.

Didn't the film version star Richard Dreyfus and Roy Scheider?

;-)

None of your poems have been made into movies, but you're a better poet than Sylvia's husband, even if Sylvia's husband got all that attention from the Queen.

[XemaSab]

7. Though there are no doubt many suitable poems, if you want sheer despair at the human condition

Robert Frost brings it.

Fire and Ice

SOME say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

[NMDemDist2]

8. Trees by Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.