Humanizing Hughes' Bestiary Megha Ghosh College

Ted Hughes is a significant modern poet. His poems about animals are among his best. He once revealed: “…my interest in animals began when I began.”1 The landscape of Yorkshire moor where Hughes spent most receptive years of his youth, and where he used to hunt small game with his brother, turned him an avid observer of the natural world. In his picture of natural life wild animals and birds have unusual importance and prominence. They appear frequently throughout his work as deity, metaphor, persona and icon. The first volume of his poetry contains poems like-“The Hawk in the Rain”, “The Thought Fox”, “The Jaguar” and in the second volume we have “Hawk Roosting”, “Thrushes”, “An Otter”. In these poems he stresses the vitality and vehemence of the animals. The animals possess the natural sufficiency denied to men. Hughes’s hawk, in “Hawk Roosting”, for instance, retains all its predatory qualities and symbolizes the Darwinian aspect of Nature, which is Nature “red in tooth and claw”2.

In “Pike”, Hughes describes the physical structure and the violent nature of the pike fish. He describes the fish as ‘perfect’. The word ‘perfect’, at least in the corporeal shape, best suits human beings. “Hawk in the Rain” reflects Hughes’s...