Quote #3

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

More from Ted Hughes

  1. 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 print…
  2. The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs Not to be changed at this date; A life subdued to its instrument.
  3. 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 Set…
  4. 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 ca…
  5. 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 pe…
  6. 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…
  7. 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 tender…
  8. 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 …

All Ted Hughes quotes