By Robert Hass
March 22, 1998
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In 1972, nine years after the death of Sylvia Plath, and after the woman he
had left Plath for had killed both herself and her child, Ted Hughes
published a book called Crow. I think it's a more interesting book than his
Birthday Letters, which is now on bestseller lists because people are so
curious about the Plath-Hughes marriage and about his life, which has
looked to the world either cursed or culpable.
Here are a couple of poems from that earlier book:
Crow's Nerve Fails
Crow, feeling his brain slip,
Finds his every feather the fossil of a murder.
Who murdered all these?
These living dead, that root in his nerves and
his blood
Till he is visibly black?
How can he fly from his feathers?
And why have they homed on him?
Is he the archive of their accusations?
Or their ghostly purpose, their pining vengeance?
Or their unforgiven prisoner?
He cannot be forgiven.
His prison is the earth. Clothed in his conviction,
Trying to remember his crimes
Heavily he flies.
Lovesong
He loved her and she loved him.
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future
or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains
Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists
his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment's brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was
Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin's attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with
horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon's gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall
Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop
In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage
In the morning they wore each other's face
("Crow's Nerve Fails" and "Lovesong," from Crow by Ted Hughes.
Copyright 1971 by Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of
HarperCollins.)
Robert Hass, former U.S. poet laureate, is the author, most
recently, of the collection Sun Under Wood.
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