Wind -- Ted Hughes

(Poem #882) 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

 From the arresting opening image of a farmhouse being tossed about like a
ship in a storm, right through to the tense, not-quite-resolved ending, this
is a breathtakingly vivid poem. Hughes captures the power of the wind in
phrases that ring with an elemental fury of their own, a wild and
unquenchable energy. This effect is enhanced by his choice of words: 'brunt'
is only the most obvious example of his eschewing pretty Latinate constructs
for gritty Germanic equivalents. Indeed, the ancestry of this poem is very
clear: "Wind" belongs to the tradition of Icelandic sagas and Norse
mythology, poems which celebrate, with a mixture of awe and dread, the
unimaginable power of Nature and the insignificance of Man.

thomas.

[Minstrels Links]

Ted Hughes:
Poem #42, Hawk Roosting
Poem #98, The Thought Fox
Poem #417, Thistles
Poem #671, Lineage
Poem #723, Full Moon and Little Frieda
Poem #768, Theology

Sylvia Plath:
Poem #53, Winter landscape, with rocks
Poem #129, Ariel
Poem #366, Child
Poem #404, Daddy
Poem #612, Love Letter
Poem #678, Mirror
Poem #881, The Moon and the Yew-tree

Others:
Poem #109, The Viking Terror  -- Anon. (Irish, 9th century)
Poem #145, Ice  -- Anon. (Old English, 10th century)
Poem #326, The Seafarer  -- Anon. (Old English, pre-10th century