1. M.A English 4th
Section (A)
Mufeeza Rauf
Afsheen Akram
Ayesha sulamain
Mehreen Shahzadi
Q1. Ted Hughes’ conception of Nature is marked by recognition of violence and aggression
that corresponds general mode of his age. Discuss.
Ted Hughes was born in Yorkshire. It was ‘rugged country of bare moors and mountains,
often cold rainy and windy in summer and bleak and snowy in winter’. These were the
characteristics which were found in the people of that place. This place has wild and untamed
nature and mostly the laborer lived there. He was described as the poet of blood and violence.
He uses carnivorous animals in his poetry which are considered dangerous, like hawk,
and pike which has evil in his nature, fox which is supposed to be very clever and crow to which
many bad omens are associated. His poems reflect the problems of post war world man and his
alienation from the Nature. His poems are an attempt to unite human being with the Nature.
According to Ekbert Faas ,Ted Hughes, in his nature poetry, hints at modern man’s self-exile
from Mother Nature and of his last ditch effort to recapture some of her lost elemental force by a
poetic invocation of plants and animals. (The Unaccommodated Universe p.16).
These animals even though are very cruel in their nature but are connected to the Mother
Nature, but human beings who have sense of self have lost their contact with Nature. This is the
misery of modern man who is suffering not only from inner but outer loneliness and isolation
due to two consecutive wars, advancement in science and technology and then the emergence of
theory of existentialism, because people have lost belief on the existence of God.
If we see it with existentialist point of view, we found that the Nature is depicted in a
very negative way, as it is very cruel and everything related to it has been showed destructively.
It shows that people have lost their belief on the Nature. At one place in The Thought- fox he
says that, ‘the window I see no star’. It means that there is no light, no hope and no guidance
from the Nature. The people have lost their faith on everything. And he uses the words, ‘dark
hole of the head’. At another place in the poem Crow Alights, he uses the words ‘mushrooms of
the nothing forest, clouding their spores, the virus of God. And he shivered with horror of
creation’, here he puts the charge of spreading the viruses, which are very dangerous organisms,
on God. At that time, because people have lost their faith and so they considered God and Nature

2. responsible for their wreck and ruin. At another place he says, ‘with no sole’, means in this post
war world, human beings have lost their souls, and were without any religion and direction.
Unlike Wordsworth, who was pantheist, poet of Nature and the worshiper of the Nature,
Ted Hughes has employed very dark and negative connotation regarding the Nature. For
example in The Thought- Fox his use of juxtaposed vocabulary and images like cold, dark snow,
midnight moment, clock loneliness, no star create darkness, loneliness, hollowness. These were
the characteristics of men of his time. Time which was an important theme at that time was
shown through the ‘clock loneliness’. It creates alarm and fear.
Similarly Pike who is carnivorous, fresh water fish who eat dead things like vultures and
‘dance on the surface among the flies’, is very cruel in nature as he says, ‘killers from the egg’,
and even eat itself when it is hungry. He has used such cruel creature to highlights the beasts
nature of human beings. His this poem reflects the circumstances of his age when people became
vicious like Pike, begun to kill their fellow human souls in order to get power and control and
there was the concept of survival of the fittest, means who is stronger, has the power to survive
and to live as in the poem Pike who is huge in size, rule over the sea and other animals are afraid
of it. He uses the dark and the filthy imagery like ‘heat-struck lily pads’, ‘black leaves’, ‘amber
cavern of weeds’. These all show the negative and bad sides of the Mother Nature.
In the poem Crow Alights, he uses the words like ‘garbage can’- a container in which
waste materials are thrown away- and associates it with the condition of modern and man of post
war world, that people have very bad conditions, and broken away morally and spiritually .
In a nutshell it can be said that he uses the wild, ferocious, vicious aspects of the Nature,
and through it he has depicted the conditions of post war world man.
References:
ann.skea.com
www.languageinindia.com