Ted Hughes Quotes

Ted Hughes offers vivid, poetic glimpses of wildlife and the raw edge of nature.

30 quotes

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. Pike, three inches long, perfect Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold. Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.

4. The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs Not to be changed at this date; A life subdued to its instrument.

5. Stilled legendary depth: It was as deep as England. It held Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old That past nightfall I dared not cast.

6. I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

7. It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot. Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly - I kill where I please because it is all mine. There is no sophistry in my body: My manners are tearing off heads - The allotment of death.

8. No death outside my immediate family has left me feeling more bereft. No death in my lifetime has hurt poets more. He was a tower of tenderness and strength, a great arch under which the least of poetry's children could enter and feel secure. His creative powers were, as Shakespeare said, still crescent. By his death, the veil of poetry is rent and the walls of learning broken.

9. Hughes began (The Hawk in the Rain, 1957; Lupercal, 1960) as an elemental poet of power; he was inchoate, but fruitfully aware both of the brute force of creation and of the natural world. Then:he began to assume a mantic role; he has now turned into (Crow, 1970) a pretentious, coffee-table poet, a mindless celebrant of instinct.

10. The sky split apart in malice Stars rattled like pans on a shelf Crow shat on Buckingham Palace God pissed Himself.

11. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.

12. The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.

13. The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel. Over the cage floor the horizons come.

14. But who is stronger than death? Me , evidently .

15. You are who you choose to be.

16. As Popa penetrates deeper into his life, with book after book, it begins to look like a Universe passing through a Universe. It is one of the most exciting things in modern poetry, to watch this journey being made.

17. He could not stand. It was not That he could not thrive, he was born With everything but the will – That can be deformed, just like a limb. Death was more interesting to him. Life could not get his attention.

18. Do as you like with me. I'm your parcel. I have only our address on me. Open me, or readdress me.

19. The real mystery is this strange need. Why can't we just hide it and shut up? Why do we have to blab? Why do human beings need to confess?

20. So the self under the eye lies, Attendant and withdrawn.

21. So we found the end of our journey. So we stood, alive in the river of light, Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.

22. In the pit of red You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness But the jewel you lost was blue.

23. What happens in the heart simply happens.

24. 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.

25. What’s writing really about? It’s about trying to take fuller possession of the reality of your life.

26. Where white is black and black is white, I won.

27. The deeps are cold: In that darkness camaraderie does not hold: Nothing touches but, clutching, devours.

28. Nobody knew the Iron Man had fallen. Night passed.

29. I shall also take you forth and carve our names together in a yew tree, haloed with stars...

30. Before us stands yesterday.