New and Selected Poems
TED HUGHES
Title Page
from THE HAWK IN THE RAIN
The Thought-Fox
Song
The Jaguar
Famous Poet
Soliloquy
The Horses
Fallgrief’s Girlfriends
Egg-Head
Vampire
The Man Seeking Experience Enquires His Way of a Drop of Water
Meeting
Wind
October Dawn
The Casualty
Bayonet Charge
Six Young Men
The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar
Song from Bawdry Embraced
from LUPERCAL
Mayday on Holderness
February
Crow Hill
A Woman Unconscious
Strawberry Hill
Fourth of July
Esther’s Tomcat
Wilfred Owen’s Photographs
Relic
Hawk Roosting
Fire-Eater
To Paint a Water Lily
The Bull Moses
Cat and Mouse
View of a Pig
The Retired Colonel
November
An Otter
Witches
Thrushes
Snowdrop
Pike
Sunstroke
Cleopatra to the Asp
UNCOLLECTED
Recklings
Crow Wakes
from WODWO
Thistles
Still Life
Her Husband
Cadenza
Ghost Crabs
Public Bar TV
Kafka
Second Glance at a Jaguar
Fern
Stations
The Green Wolf
The Bear
Scapegoats and Rabies
Theology
Gog
Kreutzer Sonata
Out
New Moon in January
The Warriors of the North
Song of a Rat
Heptonstall
Skylarks
Pibroch
The Howling of Wolves
Gnat-Psalm
Full Moon and Little Frieda
Wodwo
from CROW
Two Legends
Lineage
Examination at the Womb-Door
A Childish Prank
Crow’s First Lesson
That Moment
Crow Tyrannosaurus
The Black Beast
Crow’s Account of the Battle
Crow’s Fall
Crow and the Birds
Crow on the Beach
The Contender
Crow’s Vanity
A Horrible Religious Error
In Laughter
Robin Song
Conjuring in Heaven
Owl’s Song
Crow’s Elephant Totem Song
Dawn’s Rose
The Smile
Crow’s Battle Fury
Crow Blacker than Ever
Revenge Fable
Bedtime Anecdote
Apple Tragedy
Crow’s Last Stand
Fragment of an Ancient Tablet
Lovesong
Notes for a Little Play
The Lovepet
How Water Began to Play
Littleblood
from CAVE BIRDS
The Scream
The Executioner
The Knight
A Flayed Crow in the Hall of Judgement
The Guide
His Legs Ran About
Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days
The Risen
from SEASON SONGS
A March Calf
The River in March
Apple Dumps
Swifts
Sheep
Evening Thrush
The Harvest Moon
Leaves
from Autumn Notes
A Cranefly in September
from GAUDETE
Collision with the earth has finally come –
Once I said lightly
This is the maneater’s skull.
I see the oak’s bride in the oak’s grasp.
A primrose petal’s edge
Waving goodbye, from your banked hospital bed,
The swallow – rebuilding –
The grass-blade is not without
I know well
Sometimes it comes, a gloomy flap of lightning,
Calves harshly parted from their mamas
A bang – a burning –
At the bottom of the Arctic sea, they say.
Your tree – your oak
from REMAINS OF ELMET
Football at Slack
Stanbury Moor
Leaf Mould
Moors
Chinese History of Colden Water
Rhododendrons
Sunstruck
Curlews
For Billy Holt
When Men Got to the Summit
The Canal’s Drowning Black
Cock-Crows
Mount Zion
The Long Tunnel Ceiling
Tree
Heptonstall Old Church
Widdop
Emily Brontë
from MOORTOWN DIARY
Rain
Dehorning
Bringing in New Couples
Tractor
Roe-Deer
Sketching a Thatcher
Ravens
February 17th
Birth of Rainbow
Coming Down Through Somerset
The Day He Died
A Memory
from EARTH-NUMB
Earth-Numb
A Motorbike
Deaf School
Life is Trying to be Life
Speech out of Shadow
from Seven Dungeon Songs
Tiger-Psalm
Orts
The Beacon
A God
UNCOLLECTED
Remembering Teheran
Bones
Do not Pick up the Telephone
Reckless Head
from Prometheus on His Crag
from FLOWERS AND INSECTS
A Violet at Lough Aughresberg
Two Tortoiseshell Butterflies
Where I Sit Writing My Letter
Tern
The Honey Bee
Sunstruck Foxglove
Eclipse
In the Likeness of a Grasshopper
from WHAT IS THE TRUTH?
New Foal
The Hen
The Hare
from RIVER
The River
Milesian Encounter on the Sligachan
Low Water
Japanese River Tales
Ophelia
Strangers
The Gulkana
Go Fishing
Salmon Eggs
A Cormorant
An Eel
Performance
Night Arrival of Sea-Trout
October Salmon
That Morning
from WOLFWATCHING
Astrological Conundrums
Dust As We Are
Telegraph Wires
Sacrifice
For the Duration
Walt
Little Whale Song
On the Reservations
from RAIN-CHARM FOR THE DUCHY
Rain-Charm for the Duchy
UNCOLLECTED
Old Oats
The Last of the 1st/5th Lancashire Fusiliers
Anniversary
Chaucer
You Hated Spain
The Earthenware Head
The Tender Place
Black Coat
Being Christlike
The God
The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother
The Other
The Locket
Shibboleth
Snow
Folktale
Opus 131
Descent
The Error
Lines about Elias
A Dove
INDEXES
INDEX OF TITLES
INDEX OF FIRST LINES
About the Author
Copyright
NEW SELECTED POEMS
from
THE HAWK IN THE RAIN
The Thought-Fox
I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.
Song
O lady, when the tipped cup of the moon blessed you
You became soft fire with a cloud’s grace;
The difficult stars swam for eyes in your face;
You stood, and your shadow was my place:
You turned, your shadow turned to ice
O my lady.
O lady, when the sea caressed you
You were a marble of foam, but dumb.
When will the stone open its tomb?
When will the waves give over their foam?
You will not die, nor come home,
O my lady.
O lady, when the wind kissed you
You made him music for you were a shaped shell.
I follow the waters and the wind still
Since my heart heard it and all to pieces fell
Which your lovers stole, meaning ill,
O my lady.
O lady, consider when I shall have lost you
The moon’s full hands, scattering waste,
The sea’s hands, dark from the world’s breast,
The world’s decay where the wind’s hands have passed,
And my head, worn out with love, at rest
In my hands, and my hands full of dust,
O my lady.