Ted Hughes’s Human Animals: A Critical Reading of the Expression of the Unconscious Through Violence in Animal Poems

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The crow hates himself when he comes to know about human voracity and eating other creatures. “Crow Tyrannosaurus”, reduces human beings to “a walking / abattoir / of innocents” and men with angst. In this poem the crow represents human consciousness as an absence of being, as fear of its own nothingness.

But his eyes saw a grub. And his head, trapsprung, stabbed.

And he listened

Ad he heard

Weeping

Grubs grubs He stabbed he stabbed

Weeping

Weeping

Weeping he walked and stabbed

Thus came the eye’s roundness the ear’s deafness. (Crow Tyrannosaurus, Lines 25-33)

The lament of the crow symbolizes a “being thrown into the world; Angst, the quailing of the mind whens it learns it is not the world; inauthenticity, the futile and febrile denial that death is the inmost potential of being”.

In the poem “Thoughts Fox”, Hughes is not concerned with the animal, but with the poetic energy and inspiration that comes out of darkness and from the image of fox which leaves is ‘footprints’ on the page. However, most significantly, “Thought Fox” embodies an abstraction, a thought coming to life on printed page, like a wild beast invading the speaker’s mind. The process is described in exquisite gradations –

I imagine this midnight moments forest:

Something else is alive

Beside the clock’s loneliness

But this blank page where my fingers move. (The Thought Fox, Lines 1-4)

After an interval, the living metaphor moves into the poem:

Cold delicately as the dark snow,

A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;

Two eyes serve a movement... (The Thought Fox, Lines 9-11)

And the movement is complete in the last stanza:

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The wind is starless still, the clock ticks,

The page is printed. (The Thought Fox, Lines 21-24)

Since the fox “enters the dark hole of the head” of man, Hughes is offering, through symbols, a contact with the inner reality which lies in man’s mind, like Freud’s unconscious. The fox, here, is used as a symbol for the unseen and the unfrequented world – a world beyond conscious physical existence which needs to be penetrated. The poet intends not only to capture the beast but to explore the hidden reality in human beings too.

‘Macaw and Little Miss’ is another poem which focuses on repressed desires and their violent release. The poem is about a macaw caged by an old lady and her granddaughter. Here the old lady, the representative of mankind, cages desires, represented by the macaw. The animal energy or natural impulses are presented as caged, suppressed and repressed by the human hand. Being imprisoned, the macaw is not able to experience sexual fulfillment and consequently gets enraged and furious. The enraged macaw,

…bristles in a staring

Combustion, suffers the stoking devils of his eyes.

In the old lady’s parlour, where an aspidistra succumbs

To the musk of faded velvet, he hangs as in clear flames,

Like a torturer’s iron instrument preparing

With dense slow shudderings of greens, yellows, blues,

Crimsoning into the barbs:

Or like the smoldering head that hung

In Killdevil’s brass kitchen, in irons, who had been

Volcano swearing to vomit the world away in black ash, (‘Macaw and Little Miss,’ Lines 2-11)

In the third stanza, the girl is shown making fun of the macaw and its natural desires. Although she pretends to live a chaste and moral life, she seeks sexual fulfillment under the disguise of romantic love. She romanticizes her basic need of sexual fulfillment. She

…lies under every full moon,

The spun glass of her body bared and so gleam-still

Her brimming eyes do not tremble or spill

The dream where the warrior comes, lightning and iron,

Smashing and burning and rending towards her loin:

Deep into her pillow her silence pleads. (‘Macaw and Little Miss’ Lines 19-24)

Man has always suppressed the life of instinct and impulse, owing to the moral principles he himself laid in the course of creating his civilized word. But the basic animal instincts are still not completely dead, as explained by Freud and others. It reappears causing disruption in the rational world of man. This is shown metaphorically through the macaw:

All day he stares at his furnace

With eyes red-raw . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Instantly beak, wings, talons crash

The bars in conflagration and frenzy,

And his shriek shakes the house. (‘Macaw and Little Miss,’ 25-32)

‘Strawberry Hill’ is another animal poem which presents the instinctive life or elemental energies as tamed or suppressed by the human hand. The animal that figures in the poem is a stoat which, like other animals, is a source of pure instinctive life or one that symbolizes the elemental energies. The title of the poem, ‘The Strawberry Hill’ was the name of the house which Horace Walpole bought in 1747 and converted into a monument

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