THE CROW
TED HUGHES
Who owns the whole rainy,
stony earth? Death.
Who owns all
space? Death.
Who is stronger
than hope? Death.
Who is stronger
than the will? Death.
Stronger than
love? Death.
Stronger than
life? Death.
But who is
stronger than death?
Me, evidently.
Pass, Crow.
http://www.liceus.com/cgi-bin/aco/lit/02/110303.asp
The biographies of the two excellent poets, Ted Hughes
and Sylvia Plath, are linked, since they were a couple and had a life together,
it is unavoidable that, where there is life, then there is death too. The life
of Ted Hughes was marked by the tragic death of his wife, who committed
suicide. Death will become central in Hughes’ life and, of course in his writings.
One of the poetic manifestations of Hughes’ view of
death is The Crow. This symbolic animal has been used in different occasions to
make reference to the world of darkness, of death. “Hughes himself, was such a
mythic poet. Through myth he had across to all intensity and drama of life and
death; to universally recognisable patterns of human behaviour” TED HUGHES MOMEPAGE
This way Hughes, as once Poe did with his Raven, seeks in the roots of his
own culture to find a character that could express all the feelings, all the
dark thoughts that a human being could not.
In this poem Hughes makes a series of questions, of
transcendental questions that seem to have no answer in the real touchable
world, questions that will only find one answer: DEATH. Here we see how
obsessed the mind of a person can be by the repetition of the linguistic
structures, the same than in Poe’s poem. Death is one of the keys to understand
Hughes’ poetry. With those questions he transforms death as the most powerful
being in this world. It is stronger that any kind of feeling:
3 hope, 4 will, 5 love, 6 life.
This way he deletes humanity as independent thinking
subjects. He gives all the power to Death. He was so fearful, so afraid to that
unknown element, and his fear was justified by those tragic facts named below.
Making reference to the real world in the two first
verses, “earth and space”, death becomes the owner of the natural elements,
nature is under its control. Another important aspect we can take from his poem
is that he has a very symbolic and
mythological view of death. He sees it as a strongly powerful element that is
present through all of his life.
“Ted Hughes’ Crow presents an alternative theological
paradigm that rescues certain elements of Being – in particular the feminine
and the demonic – often repressed within the Christian tradition.” OXFORD
JOURNALS
The only character that can face the death is the
crow, which is more powerful and stronger. The crow is a symbol which is
between the world of the living and the death, that is why it is the owner of
both worlds.
In contrast to this, Sylvia Plath had a different view
of death. The poem chosen for analysis is DEATH. After reading this poem, the
reader gets a feeling of solitude, some kind of loneliness. It is a sad vision
of dead people who fight no more, who have ended their own way in the world.
The semantic field of the poem is clearly related to
that pessimistic vision of death: 2 couched, 4 lulled, 7 blunder, 7 bed, 9
cradled, ... this fills the mind of the reader with passivity, rest, like an
unavoidable end.
But the most important word is 8 Oblivion. Plath sees
death as the end of thought, and the eternal oblivion, a very sad vision if we
take into account that she ends her life by committing suicide. This bitterness
is expressed in all of her poetry .
But not only oblivion is important in the poem: “Plath
has been considered a deeply honest writer, whose ceaseless self-security has
given an unique point of view to psychological disorder and to the theme of the
feminist-martyr in a patriarchal society.”
In verse 5 we read: “ they want no proud paternal
kingdom to come” making direct reference to the paternal figure and stating
that, even in life after death, they don’t want to be in the hands of the masculine
symbols and rules.
This way Plath links to basic themes in her poetry as
in her life , which are Death and Feminism. She was one of the first female
poets which got fame during her lifetime as a writer.
The point
here is that she evokes death by describing an image of dead men, going to lie,
to rest, as defeated men who are going to end in oblivion, who will be
forgotten in time. It is a very sad end, nothing to do with Hughes’ description
or conception of Death, as an almighty being that is beyond the human forces,
beyond the natural world. It is a power which is stronger than anything, than
anyone, except for the figure of the Crow, an in-between animal which observe
this world, and the other.
While one writes a very sad expression of her most
intimate feelings an fears, advocating the expected solitude of the dead bodies
travelling to rest in total oblivion, the other one raises the power of that
fundamental and so important element in everyone’s life, which is Death.
Sure, we are all so different...