Full Moon and Little Frieda -- Ted Hughes

This week's theme: the Moon. We start with a guest poem submitted by Mike
Christie:

(Poem #723) 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. -- Ted Hughes

When I was fifteen I liked poetry, but for some reason I was under the
impression that if a poet didn't stick to rhyme and metre they were just
being lazy. I liked Keats, Byron, Rossetti, Housman; romantic verse in
traditional forms. Not too unusual for a fifteen year-old. Then, in English
class, I read an anthology of modern verse that included Andrew Motion,
Seamus Heaney, and Ted Hughes. None of it stuck at the time except the
Hughes, and I loved 'Pike', 'The Thought Fox', and 'Hawk in the Rain'. Right
at the end of the anthology was 'Full Moon and Little Frieda'.

I was completely taken aback. I can still remember reading it over and over,
trying to figure out why on earth I liked it so much when it didn't do
anything I had thought a poem had to do. It's no longer my favourite Hughes
poem -- that would have to be something in the Crow series; and Larkin has
since overtaken Hughes as my favourite modern poet. But I have a deep
affection for this poem; it taught me in a few seconds more than I knew
there was to learn.

I like the way the first line spreads a canvas: "a cool small evening": and
the rest of the poem shines a light only on selected, disconnected areas of
the canvas.  It's about as far as you can get from a judgmental work; the
poet contributes six or seven almost independent images but lets the reader
assemble them at will.  And the tenses are interesting, too: the poem is an
instantaneous snapshot, lasting only a second or so: all the actions are
either past, or present but captured as a moment.  The only action is the
cry of 'Moon!'.

Mike Christie.

Other Minstrels poems by Ted Hughes:
  Poem #42, "Hawk Roosting"
  Poem #98, "The Thought Fox"
  Poem #417, "Thistles"
  Poem #671, "Lineage"