A Ted Hughes Bestiary Quotes

“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.”
― Ted Hughes, A Ted Hughes Bestiary: Selected Poems

“But who runs like the rest past these arrives At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized, As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom – The eye satisfied to be blind in fire, By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear – He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him More than to the visionary his cell: His stride is wildernesses of freedom: The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.”
― Ted Hughes, A Ted Hughes Bestiary: Selected Poems

“Thumbs my eyes, throws my breath, tackles my heart, And rain hacks my head to the bone, the hawk hangs The diamond point of will that polestars The sea drowner’s endurance:”
― Ted Hughes, A Ted Hughes Bestiary: Selected Poems

“The Hawk in the Rain I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth’s mouth, From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.”
― Ted Hughes, A Ted Hughes Bestiary: Selected Poems

“So this conscious search for a ‘solid’ irrefutably defined basic (and therefore ‘limited’) kit of words drew me inevitably towards the solid irrefutably defined basic kit of my experiences – drew me towards animals, basically: my childhood and adolescent pantheon of wild creatures, which were saturated by first hand intense feeling that went back to my infancy. Those particular subjects, in a sense, were the models on which I fashioned my workable language.”
― Ted Hughes, A Ted Hughes Bestiary: Selected Poems

“Both Hawk and Pike (like the Bull) are motionless, or almost motionless. In a planned, straightforward way, I began them as a series in which they would be angels – hanging in the radiant glory around the creator’s throne, composed of terrific, holy power (there’s a line in ‘Hawk Roosting’ almost verbatim from Job), but either quite still, or moving only very slowly – at peace, and actually composed of the glowing substance of the law. Like Sons of God.”
― Ted Hughes, A Ted Hughes Bestiary: Selected Poems

“The luminous spirit (maybe he is a crowd of spirits), that takes account of everything and gives everything its meaning, is missing, not missing, just incommunicado. But here and there, it may be, we hear it. It is human of course, but it is also everything that lives.”
― Ted Hughes, A Ted Hughes Bestiary: Selected Poems

“In a way, I suppose, I think of poems as a sort of animal. They have their own life, like animals, by which I mean that they seem quite separate from any person, even from their author, and nothing can be added to them or taken away without maiming and perhaps even killing them. And they have a certain wisdom. They know something special … something perhaps which we are very curious to learn.”
― Ted Hughes, A Ted Hughes Bestiary: Selected Poems