Personal anthology: Ted Hughes

By on January 24th, 2006

I half-remembered this poem several weeks ago, during a wind-storm so loud that at first I couldn’t even identify the sound when I stepped out of my front door. I looked it up, and it’s been rattling around my head ever since. I had forgotten the startling lines "Blade-light, luminous black and emerald, / Flexing like the lens of a mad eye," but not the image of the whole house ringing "like some fine green goblet in the note / That any second would shatter it."

Wind

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up —
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

— Ted Hughes (via the Wondering Minstrels)

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