Our swifts returned two days ago – the 10th of May – now they are now installed, screaming around the terrace row, occupying the air over this little patch of north London. No better tribute to their speed, power, heroic journeying and the pleasure given by their return than Ted Hughes’ poem from Season Songs (Faber, 1976):
Swifts
Fifteenth of May. Cherry blossom. The swifts
Materialize at the tip of a long scream
Of needle. ‘Look! They’re back! Look!’ And they’re gone
On a steep
Controlled scream of skid
Round the house-end and away under the cherries. Gone.
Suddenly flickering in sky summit, three or four together,
Gnat-whisp frail, and hover-searching, and listening
For air-chills – are they too early? With a bowing
Power-thrust to left, then to right, then a flicker they
Tilt into a slide, a tremble for balance,
Then a lashing down disappearance
Behind elms.
They’ve made it again,
Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s
Still waking refreshed, our summer’s
Still all to come —
And here they are, here they are again
Erupting across yard stones
Shrapnel-scatter terror. Frog-gapers,
Speedway goggles, international mobsters —
A bolas of three or four wire screams
Jockeying across each other
On their switchback wheel of death.
They swat past, hard-fletched
Veer on the hard air, toss up over the roof,
And are gone again. Their mole-dark labouring,
Their lunatic limber scramming frenzy
And their whirling blades
Sparkle out into blue —
Not ours any more.
Rats ransacked their nests so now they shun us.
Round luckier houses now
They crowd their evening dirt-track meetings,
Racing their discords, screaming as if speed-burned,
Head-height, clipping the doorway
With their leaden velocity and their butterfly lightness,
Their too much power, their arrow-thwack into the eaves.
Every year a first-fling, nearly flying
Misfit flopped in our yard,
Groggily somersaulting to get airborne.
He bat-crawled on his tiny useless feet, tangling his flails
Like a broken toy, and shrieking thinly
Till I tossed him up — then suddenly he flowed away under
His bowed shoulders of enormous swimming power,
Slid away along levels wobbling
On the fine wire they have reduced life to,
And crashed among the raspberries.
Then followed fiery hospital hours
In a kitchen. The moustached goblin savage
Nested in a scarf. The bright blank
Blind, like an angel, to my meat-crumbs and flies.
Then eyelids resting. Wasted clingers curled.
The inevitable balsa death.
Finally burial
For the husk
Of my little Apollo —
The charred scream
Folded in its huge power.
Martyn Crucefix 
Hi Martyn, Yes great Hughes poem, thanks for that. And love your blog. Elaine 🙂
LikeLike
Lovely to hear from you Elaine – keep me up to date with your own writing!
LikeLike
Hi Martyn
Not sure how to send you the book,if you email me I can arrange! Elaine 🙂
LikeLike
Not sure I have your email address – can you send a hi to mcrucefix@sky.com and I will reply.
LikeLike
Despite Hughes deserved reputation for describing wild life from within and from without, I can’t help feeling that this poem is over-written and over-long. To me it reads as over-excited rather than properly celebratory. The images come tumbling in one after another, and instead of adding to the one before, succeed rather in cancelling it, to be cancelled in turn by the next one that has popped into his very inventive imagination. There are moments when the poem clearly wants to finish, only to erupt again. Yes, the swifts are swift and dynamic and their arrival is the advent of spring and summer, and I want to hear the poet’s enthusiasm; I only wish it was a little less manic.
For me less would have been more.
LikeLike
I don’t know, I just love it. The way it describes the wild birds flying with their mad energy.
LikeLike
[…] I also find reassurance in their predictability, their centuries-long patterns of behaviour. For Ted Hughes, the return of swifts meant ‘the globe’s still working’. For me, the fact that I […]
LikeLike
I said in my previous comment four years ago that I want to hear the poet’s enthusiasm. My views of poetry have matured since then. I would now say that the one thing I don’t want to hear in a good poem is the poet’s enthusiam. His job is to generate it; not feel it. That’s for the reader. (Tony Yates)
LikeLike
Great poem! I loved it!
LikeLike
[…] Ted Hughes wrote of swifts that “They’ve made it again, [w]hich means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s [s]till waking refreshed.” I know exactly what he means. It has taken an astounding, improbable world to permit these astounding, improbable birds to exist, zigzagging across continents over millions of years. And their decline has long been, for me, emblematic of humanity’s unforgiveable failure to understand, respect, and protect our natural environment. I want our skies to again dance with swifts. This desire is a foundational reason—though of course not the only one—that I engage on climate change in the way I do. […]
LikeLike
Hi
Having just discovered this poem for myself I love it – it entirely follows the thrill of swift-watching. You see them, hear them, are excited to know they are back, but ‘swiftly’ they go away right and just as you stand re-watching the spectacle they reappear stage left having been you know not where for those few minutes. The panting, shortness of breath produced by watching these birds is beautifully awakened by the poem. Without Hughes’ explicit say-so. What other way could he use
Maybe I’m not a mature enough poet. I came late to it so you could well be right. But maybe too our feelings about methods of producing emotion go round in circles. And do any of us ever achieve full maturity as we see fashions in poetry go round?
LikeLike