August 17, 1930

I feel sorry for Ted Hughes (August 17, 1930 to October 28,1998). His life had more than a fair share of tragedy. Let us look at a poem of his titled ‘Lynx’ as prefaced by Samuel Graydon:

Simon Armitage said of Ted Hughes’s poetry that it was “a connecting rod between nature and humanity”. As Hughes wrote in Poetry in the Making, “my interest in animals began when I began”, but in some ways, his work shows how disconnected the human and animal worlds are. In a letter in 1990, he wrote that the “animal / spiritual being” lives a life of “bliss” that humanity has “fallen from . . . into ego-consciousness”. At a distance from humans, animals are “a divine life in a divine world”.

The relationship between the “divine life” and the “divine world” is explored in “Lynx”, first published in the TLS in 1981. It was later titled “A Lynx” in Hughes’s collection of children’s poems, Under the North Star (1981), and the inclusion of the indefinite article belies the importance he places on the individual.....

Here is the text of the poem:

The hushed limbs of forest,

Of clouds, of mountains, here

Take their hard-earned rest

Under the lynx’s ear.

In his sleep, they sleep –

As in a deep lake – deep.


Do not disturb this beast

Or clouds will open eyes,

Soundless the forest

Will fold away all its trees

And hazy the mountains

Fade among their stones.

And Graydon continues:

The sleeping “beast” is connected to everything else in its habitat – “in his sleep, they sleep” – as if nature is determined by his (un)consciousness. All is in order in sleep – all the rhymes – but in the second stanza, with the notion that the lynx may wake up, rhyme falters, and the clouds, forest and mountains are in tumult. For if one part is “disturbed” from its natural role, then all will “fold away”.

Neither the poem, nor the courteous posture of the critic, rise to a level which might deserve such reverential treatment.  How can you speak of the divine, without knowing what is the "human". As with much of Hughes' work, beneath a wallpapered surface, there is nothing but cobwebby and empty shelving.

Harder to understand is the honors this writer received.