BIOGRAPHY
Ted Hughes (1930-1998) was born in Yorkshire, in the small village of Mytholmroyd. His father was a carpenter and later became a shopkeeper, but his disturbed memories of his experiences in World War I, when he was one of a handful in his regiment to survive the slaughter of the British troops at Gallipoli, were a haunting presence in the family's life. After finishing grammar school Hughes spent two years in the Royal Air Force, stationed at a lonely radio station in Yorkshire where he spent most of his time reading. Pembroke College, at Cambridge University, followed his military service. Although he switched from studying English to archaeology and anthropology, he continued to read voraciously, and his later writings showed the influence of books like The White Goddess, by the English novelist and poet Robert Graves, that he read at this time.
Following his graduation in 1954, he spent two years working a series of jobs in London, and then he returned to Cambridge to start an unsuccessful literary magazine with friends. At the inaugural party he met a young American college student who had recently come to England on a Fulbright scholarship. Her name was Sylvia Plath, and within a few months they were married. They spent two years at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, from 1957 to 1959, where he taught English and creative writing. Both Hughes and Plath spent every moment they could find writing poetry. As he said later, "It was all we were interested in, all we ever did." By the time they returned to England in 1959, he had already begun publishing successfully, which aggravated tensions that already existed in their marriage. Despite two children and a period of life in rural Devon, they became increasingly estranged, and when Hughes began an affair with another woman, Plath left him, moved to London with their children, and in 1963 committed suicide.
For American readers this seemed to sum up Hughes's career, but he went on to write dozens of books on a variety of subjects as well as a body of poetry that placed him among the most prominent poets of his generation. In 1981, he was named England's poet laureate. Often he was bitterly attacked for what many critics felt was his role in Plath's suicide, and as her literary executor he aggravated the situation by destroying portions of her personal diaries. It was not until the end of his life that he spoke out about their relationship, in a collection of poems that described their marriage and its tragic ending. The book Birthday Letters, published in 1999, became an international best seller, even if it didn't placate his enemies or entirely please his friends.
Full Moon and Little Frieda
.A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -
And you listening.
A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming - mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.
Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm
wreaths of breath -
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.
'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!'
The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.
Old Age Gets Up
Stirs its ashes and embers, its burnt sticks
An eye powdered over, half melted and solid again
Ponders
Ideas that collapse
At the first touch of attention
The light at the window, so square and so same
So full-strong as ever, the window frame
A scaffold in space, for eyes to lean on
Supporting the body, shaped to its old work
Making small movements in gray air
Numbed from the blurred accident
Of having lived, the fatal, real injury
Under the amnesia
Something tries to save itself-searches
For defenses-but words evade
Like flies with their own notions
Old age slowly gets dressed
Heavily dosed with death's night
Sits on the bed's edge
Pulls its pieces together
Loosely tucks in its shirt
The Thought-Fox
I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.
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.
Theology
"No, the serpent did not
Seduce Eve to the apple.
All that's simply
Corruption of the facts.
Adam ate the apple.
Eve ate Adam.
The serpent ate Eve.
This is the dark intestine.
The serpent, meanwhile,
Sleeps his meal off in Paradise -
Smiling to hear
God's querulous calling."
The Warm and the Cold
Freezing dusk is closing
Like a slow trap of steel
On trees and roads and hills and all
That can no longer feel.
But the carp is in its depth
Like a planet in its heaven.
And the badger in its bedding
Like a loaf in the oven.
And the butterfly in its mummy
Like a viol in its case.
And the owl in its feathers
Like a doll in its lace.
Freezing dusk has tightened
Like a nut screwed tight
On the starry aeroplane
Of the soaring night.
But the trout is in its hole
Like a chuckle in a sleeper.
The hare strays down the highway
Like a root going deeper.
The snail is dry in the outhouse
Like a seed in a sunflower.
The owl is pale on the gatepost
Like a clock on its tower.
Moonlight freezes the shaggy world
Like a mammoth of ice -
The past and the future
Are the jaws of a steel vice.
But the cod is in the tide-rip
Like a key in a purse.
The deer are on the bare-blown hill
Like smiles on a nurse.
The flies are behind the plaster
Like the lost score of a jig.
Sparrows are in the ivy-clump
Like money in a pig.
Such a frost
The flimsy moon
Has lost her wits.
A star falls.
The sweating farmers
Turn in their sleep
Like oxen on spits.
September
We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.
When kisses are repeated and the arms hold
There is no telling where time is.
It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:
Behind the eye a star,
Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell
Time is nowhere.
We stand; leaves have not timed the summer.
No clock now needs
Tell we have only what we remember:
Minutes uproaring with our heads
Like an unfortunate King's and his Queen's
When the senseless mob rules;
And quietly the trees casting their crowns
Into the pools.
A Woman Unconscious
Russia and America circle each other;
Threats nudge an act that were without doubt
A melting of the mould in the mother,
Stones melting about the root.
The quick of the earth burned out:
The toil of all our ages a loss
With leaf and insect. Yet flitting thought
(Not to be thought ridiculous)
Shies from the world-cancelling black
Of its playing shadow: it has learned
That there's no trusting (trusting to luck)
Dates when the world's due to be burned;
That the future's no calamitous change
But a malingering of now,
Histories, towns, faces that no
Malice or accident much derange.
And though bomb be matched against bomb,
Though all mankind wince out and nothing endure --
Earth gone in an instant flare --
Did a lesser death come
Onto the white hospital bed
Where one, numb beyond her last of sense,
Closed her eyes on the world's evidence
And into pillows sunk her head.
Submitted by Andrew Mayers
The Seven Sorrows
The first sorrow of autumn
Is the slow goodbye
Of the garden who stands so long in the evening-
A brown poppy head,
The stalk of a lily,
And still cannot go.
The second sorrow
Is the empty feet
Of a pheasant who hangs from a hook with his brothers.
The woodland of gold
Is folded in feathers
With its head in a bag.
And the third sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the sun who has gathered the birds and who gathers
The minutes of evening,
The golden and holy
Ground of the picture.
The fourth sorrow
Is the pond gone black
Ruined and sunken the city of water-
The beetle's palace,
The catacombs
Of the dragonfly.
And the fifth sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the woodland that quietly breaks up its camp.
One day it's gone.
It has only left litter-
Firewood, tentpoles.
And the sixth sorrow
Is the fox's sorrow
The joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds,
The hooves that pound
Till earth closes her ear
To the fox's prayer.
And the seventh sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window
As the year packs up
Like a tatty fairground
That came for the children.
Ted Hughes
لینکستان تد هیوز :
به سایت دنیای شعر پارسی خوش آمدید. شما با انتخاب لینک های زیر می توانید اطلاعات دیگری درباره تد هیوز بدست آورید.خصوصا دوستی ها و دشمنی های تد هیوز با همسرش سیلویا پلات و جنجال مرگ سیلویا از مطالبی است که در لینک های زیر قابل جستجوست.
Ted Hughes Pages
http://uni-leipzig.de/~angl/hughes.htm
This is the place to begin research on the poet Ted Hughes. This site contains an extensive biography of the writer's life, a selected bibliography of works, and information on recent publications and projects by various scholars. The site's most notable features are the amazing Archives and Links sections, which connect to online texts and Web sites. This site should not be missed.
The American Academy of Poets Poetry Exhibits: Ted Hughes
http://poets.org/lit/poet/thughfst.htm
Housed by the American Academy of Poets, this site contains a brief biographical sketch of the poet Ted Hughes. His major works, use of symbolism, and marriage to Sylvia Plath are also discussed.
The Online News Hour discusses Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath
http://pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june98/plath_2-18.html
This site is a roundtable discussion with Elizabeth Farnsworth, Diane Middlebrook, and Bob Hass, hosted by The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. The discussion centers around Ted Hughes's last work, The Birthday Letters (1998), and Hughes's attempt to work through the death of Sylvia Plath as a poet and to defend himself to the world. The discussion contains biographical information, critical analysis, and excerpts from the book.
The Ted Hughes Homepage by Ann Skea
http://zeta.org.au/~annskea/Default.html
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