He forced my mouth wide,
Plucked out my own cunning
Garrulous evil tongue,
And with bloody fingers
Between by frozen lips
Inserted the fork of a wise serpent.
He split my chest with a blade,
Wrenched my heart from its hiding,
And into the open wound
Dropped a flaming coal.
I lay on stones like a corpse.
There God’s voice came to me:
‘Stand, Prophet, you are my will.
Be my witness. Go
Through all seas and lands. With the Word
Burn the hearts of the people.’
after the Russian by ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
Acknowledgements
I’m grateful to Carol Hughes and Paul Keegan for their help in assembling this book and to Martha Sprackland for overseeing its production.
ALSO BY TED HUGHES
Poetry
The Hawk in the Rain
Lupercal
Wodwo
Crow
Gaudete
Flowers and Insects
Moortown
Moortown Diary
Wolfwatching
Rain-Charm for the Duchy
Three Books: Remains of Elmet, Cave Birds, River
Elmet (with photographs by Fay Godwin)
New Selected Poems 1957–1994
Birthday Letters
Collected Poems
Translations
Seneca’s Oedipus
Wedekind’s Spring Awakening
Lorca’s Blood Wedding
Tales from Ovid
Racine’s Phèdre
Euripides’ Alcestis
The Oresteia of Aeschylus
Selected Translations (edited by Daniel Weissbort)
Selections
Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson
Selected Verse of Shakespeare
A Choice of Coleridge’s Verse
The Rattle Bag (edited with Seamus Heaney)
The School Bag (edited with Seamus Heaney)
Prose
Poetry in the Making
A Dancer to God
Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being
Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose
Difficulties of a Bridegroom
Letters of Ted Hughes (edited by Christopher Reid)
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ted Hughes (1930–1998) was born in Mytholmroyd, England, and produced more than forty books of poetry, prose, drama, translation, and children’s literature. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957, and his last collection, Birthday Letters, was named the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1998 and won the Forward Prize and the T. S. Eliot Prize. He was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1984. You can sign up for email updates here.
A NOTE ABOUT THE EDITOR
Alice Oswald lives in Devon with her husband and three children. Dart, her second collection of poems, won the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2002. Her most recent collection, Memorial, was awarded the 2013 Warwick Prize for Writing. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Introduction
Four prose excerpts
from THE HAWK IN THE RAIN (1957)
The Hawk in the Rain
The Jaguar
The Thought-Fox
The Horses
Meeting
from LUPERCAL (1960)
February
Esther’s Tomcat
Hawk Roosting
The Bull Moses
View of a Pig
An Otter
Thrushes
Pike
from RECKLINGS (1966)
Stealing Trout on a May Morning
The Lake
from WODWO (1967)
Thistles
Ghost Crabs
Second Glance at a Jaguar
Song of a Rat
Skylarks
The Howling of Wolves
Gnat-Psalm
Wodwo
from CROW (1970)
That Moment
Crow and the Birds
Crow Tyrannosaurus
Two Legends
Lineage
Examination at the Womb-Door
Crow’s Fall
Owl’s Song
Crow’s Elephant Totem Song
Littleblood
from PROMETHEUS ON HIS CRAG (1973)
‘Prometheus … Began to admire the vulture’
UNCOLLECTED (1975)
The Lamentable History of the Human Calf
from SEASON SONGS (1976)
Swifts
Mackerel Song
Work and Play
A Cranefly in September
The Stag
from GAUDETE (1977)
‘Calves harshly parted from their mamas’
UNCOLLECTED (1978)
A Solstice
from ORTS (1978)
‘The white shark’
from CAVE BIRDS (1978)
Only a Little Sleep, a Little Slumber
The Owl Flower
The Risen
from ADAM AND THE SACRED NINE (1979)
And the Falcon came
The Skylark came
The Wild Duck
The Swift comes the swift
The Unknown Wren
And Owl
The Dove Came
The Crow came to Adam
And the Phoenix has come
from REMAINS OF ELMET (1979)
Curlews
The Weasels We Smoked out of the Bank
The Canal’s Drowning Black
The Long Tunnel Ceiling
Cock-Crows
from MOORTOWN DIARY (1979)
Feeding out-wintering cattle at twilight
Foxhunt
Roe-deer
February 17th
Coming down through Somerset
While she chews sideways
Sheep
from EARTH-NUMB (1979)
The Lovepet
UNCOLLECTED (1980)
Mosquito
from A PRIMER OF BIRDS (1981)
Cuckoo
Swans
Buzzard
Snipe
The Hen
Mallard
Evening Thrush
Treecreeper
A Dove
UNCOLLECTED (1982–3)
Sing the Rat
Swallows
from RIVER (1983)
Under the Hill of Centurions
Milesian Encounter on the Sligachan
That Morning
A Rival
Performance
An Eel
October Salmon
Visitation
UNCOLLECTED (1984)
The Hare I–III
from FLOWERS AND INSECTS (1986)
Two Tortoiseshell Butterflies
In the Likeness of a Grasshopper
from WOLFWATCHING (1989)
A Sparrow Hawk
Wolfwatching
from TALES FROM OVID (1997)
from Arachne
from BIRTHDAY LETTERS (1998)
The Owl
The Chipmunk
Epiphany
from SELECTED TRANSLATIONS (2006)
from The Boy Changed into a Stag Cries Out at the Gate of Secrets
The Prophet
Acknowledge
ments
Also by Ted Hughes
A Note About the Author and Editor
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2014 by The Estate of Ted Hughes
Introduction and selection copyright © 2014 by Alice Oswald
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2014 by Faber and Faber Ltd., Great Britain
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2016
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hughes, Ted, 1930–1998, author. | Oswald, Alice, 1966– editor.
Title: A Ted Hughes bestiary: poems / Ted Hughes; selected by Alice Oswald.
Description: First American edition. | New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. | “2014
Identifiers: LCCN 2015048668 | ISBN 9780374272630 (softcover) | ISBN 9780374715434 (ebook)
Subjects: | BISAC: POETRY / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh.
Classification: LCC PR6058.U37 A6 2016 | DDC 821/.914—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/201504866
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