Wodwo

Two-Headed Calf: Review of Jacob Polley’s ‘Jackself’

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Of those people I spoke to, many poetry readers were surprised and delighted that Jacob Polley’s Jackself recently won the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize against competition from the likes of Capildeo, Duhig, Oswald and Riley among others. Caught between a desire that prizes go only to the very best work and a wish that poetry’s few rewards be more equitably distributed, I was also delighted as this is a book which is bold and inventive, against the grain and successfully ambitious. (Apologies for some loss of formatting of any quotes that follow).

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The book’s novelistic aspects have been noted in reviews – they are easier to discuss than its poetic achievements. Jackself is a boy growing up in the rural north of England, befriended by Jeremy Wren who, within a few years, commits suicide, leaving Jackself to deal with the grief. As ‘novel’ material, both the opening and close of the book refuse to provide what a reader might be looking for but as poetry it delivers what Heaney characterised as the “superfluity of language’s own resources. It’s a kind of overdoing it. Enough is not enough when it comes to poetry” (Giving Their Word, 2002). Polley’s language is charged, improvisatory and colloquial. It is fluid and rhythmic (more modern, less ballad-like than some reviews have suggested). It has a crusted, superfluous quality to it that reminds me of Shakespeare, or what Hughes has described of Shakespeare’s excess, and Jackself is not thinned out by constant ironising, rather it’s thickened by a weight of language, history and imaginative hard work. It’s very impressive – but needs a few reads before it gives itself up.

It’s best to begin with Jackself’s birth poem, ‘Every Creeping Thing’, the second in the collection (I’ll return to the first, ‘The House that Jack Built’ later). The natural world is important to the boy and this book and his arrival “at the door / of the door of the door” is also a journey “by water mite / by the snail on its slick of light”. There’s a Hughesian feel to some of the poems (Crow’s ‘Examination at the Womb-door’ here?) but Jackself enters a childhood freshly and vividly caught in its exploration by mouth and “curatorial spit”, cat-watching, one-piece suits and sleep that ends by “mak[ing] / the world over again” (‘Jack Sprat’). All seems good and safe though by the sixth birthday party with its “six / goody candles” there is a noting of absence: “no wishing it wouldn’t be / or wasn’t or would better be / no wondering how so hard it hurts” (‘The Goodies’). This seems proleptic of darker questions to come and is also a good example of Polley’s vigorously colloquial style, full of dynamic sound patterning.

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It’s never easy to determine Jackself’s age in the book (occasionally I felt he was older than his responses suggested). I think Rimbaud suggests the detachment of self-consciousness kicks in around 7 years old so it’s perhaps at that age that Jackself is “afraid like snow he’ll wane or drift / before he can hold /  the road out front” (‘Jackself’s Quality’). He also explores “the lovely lofts / of Lamanby” – his house – showing a reflective, curiosity which is notably not catered for at school. ‘Lessons’ is great poem about the failures of education (I write as a teacher) with Jackself taken away to a corner, impelled to worship, to eat shit school dinners, to be humiliated before his parents. The thumbnail sketch of the Headmaster, Mr Workbench is worthy of Dickens as he “solemnly inclines / his one-thought- / at-a-time head”. Polley captures Jackself’s alternative headspace beautifully:

 

his mind a corner

of beehives

his fingers a box of matches

his nose the afternoon rain

[. . . ]

his tongue an earwig

before it hatches

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Where Jackself is at home is in the natural world. ‘Applejack’ has strong echoes of Hughes’ ‘Wodwo’ with its instinctual, open-minded, pre-language, exploratory movement:

 

by hedgehog path

and badger path, Jackself

happens with the clouds

into sunlight

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The book lights up differently with the appearance of Jeremy Wren, a more wise-cracking, cynical, entrepreneurial and ultimately more troubled young man than Jackself. The pair strike up a double act – they both respond powerfully to the natural world and their dialogues are both funny and poignant. In ‘Les Symbolistes’, getting drunk on “white cider and Malibu”, Jackself let’s slip for the first time an interest in poetry: “A POEM! Wren roars / you’re creepy as a two-headed calf”. This is also one of the early moments when we see Wren’s troubled side – his father beats him. The jigsaw pieces of the boy’s troubles are carefully placed by Polley. He and Jackself meet in a goose shed, as if both on the run from something; ‘It’ asks “tell us what’s wrong, Jeremy Wren”; in ‘Snow Dad’ Wren insists they make a replacement father snow-man but also recalls when he climbed into a chest freezer. He hangs himself in ‘Pact’. He “hangs thinking fuck I’ve left / no note until he’s fucking dead”. Maitreyabandhu has written of not dissimilar events in his sequence ‘Stephen’ in The Crumb Road (Bloodaxe, 2013).

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Jackself now becomes a study in teenage grief. ‘The Hole’ has Jackself contemplating Wren’s grave (this is one of the poems where the language seems less comfortably matched with the likely age of the boy). One way he tries to deal with the loss is by writing. ‘Jack O’Lantern’ is a deconstructed – or as they say of websites, still in construction – ballad with Jackself trying, then rejecting, lines in a fashion that is both humorous and touching (“no           again . . .  no          again”).

Polley’s achievement is to find a form and voice which can encompass all this . . . stuff. Long and short lines are scattered across the pages, poems often start in media res, often lack an explicit subject, dialogue is unmarked and the reader must sort things out. But this all adds urgency to the telling and a fluidity to the narrative perspectives. Polley’s Jackself often reminded me of David Jones’ protagonist, Private John Ball, from In Parenthesis (1937). The two share a mythic quality, representative but individualised. In ‘The Misery’ Jackself becomes/sees himself as a heroic dragon-slayer and the dragon he wishes to kill is his grief at the death of Wren. The disturbed psychological perspective implied by this is a result of his depression over the suicide of his friend – but the poem manages a marvellous mock-heroic tone:

 

from his weapon chest,

the sheath knife, Eglantine                      from his wardrobe,

his denim jacket, torch, tool belt, tin camping cup,

rucksack, horned hat and Gore-Tex breastplate

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What he kills in the end is just a rabbit but the ritualistic/symbolic nature of his action has an effect. It takes a while, during which he continues his (often hilarious) dialogues with the dead Wren and finds solace in the natural world but ‘Tithe’ indicates through its page lay-out, its vast white spaces, that Wren vanishes eventually, Jackself moves on.

Hard to end such a book and I confess I didn’t find the ballad-like ‘Jack O’Bedlam’ very satisfying, but perhaps I’m falling foul of the novel reader’s desire for narrative closure (though I thought we’d all grown out of that). This is in contrast to the opening poem of the book, ‘The House that Jack Built’, which I found powerful in its own right as a historical survey of the region in which Jackself’s brief story takes place. Polley writes of the trees being felled and used, re-growing through history, interactions with burgeoning human society, the Industrial Revolution, canal building, eventually to the construction of Lamanby itself. Critics will want to debate its relevance to the sequence of personal biography that follows it and concludes with no explicit ‘picking up’ of the opening poem’s themes. It is a problem; but the depth of history this opening poem implies, its focus on the natural world, its foregrounding of (for want of a better word) folk culture surely gains Polley permission for the way in which he tells Jackself’s tale, for it as a poem. Like Jones’ use of mythic, folkloric and Shakespearean materials in In Parenthesis, Polley raises the small-scale biographical to a type without losing anything of the minute particulars which enable its readers to read Jack as themselves.

They Will Have Their Rights: Ted Hughes’ ‘Her Husband’

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My AS level students are in the last throes of revising for exams coming in May. One question will be on a selection of Ted Hughes poems and what follows is an essay in the style required of them by the exam board (a single poem analysis of the Practical Criticism kind). ‘Her Husband’ first appeared in 1961 and then in Hughes’ 1967 collection Wodwo which mostly contained poems written before Sylvia’s Plath’s suicide in 1963 but also a few others (such as ‘The Howling of Wolves’) written after it. Hughes’ next major publication was Crow in 1970. Leonard Scigaj has noted how many of the Wodwo poems contain “recurring feuds and destructiveness” and ‘Her Husband’ is a domesticated, Lawrentian version of this.

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Her Husband

Comes home dull with coal-dust deliberately
To grime the sink and foul towels and let her
Learn with scrubbing brush and scrubbing board
The stubborn character of money.

And let her learn through what kind of dust
He has earned his thirst and the right to quench it
And what sweat he has exchanged for his money
And the blood-weight of money. He’ll humble her

With new light on her obligations.
The fried, woody, chips, kept warm two hours in the oven,
Are only part of her answer.
Hearing the rest, he slams them to the fire back

And is away round the house-end singing
‘Come back to Sorrento’ in a voice
Of resounding corrugated iron.
Her back has bunched into a hump as an insult.

For they will have their rights.
Their jurors are to be assembled
From the little crumbs of soot. Their brief
Goes straight up to heaven and nothing more is heard of it.

 

Introduction

Ted Hughes is more renowned for his portraits of animals and natural landscape than people. Especially early on, he is more interested in, as he expressed it, capturing animal and natural life in language as he does so brilliantly in poems like ‘The Jaguar’, ‘Wind’ and ‘Thrushes’. However, it’s not true to say Hughes does not write about human life and some would argue that a poem like ‘Hawk Roosting’ though on the face of it about a creature is really about human behaviour. In ‘Her Husband’ Hughes is clearly focussed on the human in a marriage which is full of bitterness and resentment.

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‘Her Husband’ is written in the third person, giving a distanced but vivid portrait of a marriage through the events of one evening. The title of the poem forms part of the opening sentence so the poem’s opening line, starting with “Comes home”, already gives the impression of the husband as an almost impersonal force, unnamed perhaps because already all too familiar to his wife. The thumping alliteration of the opening line (dull – dust – deliberately), reinforces the man’s brute entry into the house. As a working miner he spreads “coal-dust” about the house but Hughes emphasises his inconsiderate nature with the adverb “deliberately” and the forceful, unpleasant verbs associated with his arrival: “grime” and “foul”. This opening quatrain flows quickly, being unpunctuated from start to finish, evoking an arrival which is sudden, sweeping, unstoppable. The ugly internal rhyme of “foul towels” also contributes to the impression of his disruptive arrival and Hughes conveys the husband’s resentful attitude with the idea that he intends to teach his wife about the “stubborn character of money”. This personification of money as a person difficult to deal with, to persuade, cleverly conveys the husband’s own difficulties with the exhausting character of his day’s work. But he intends to impress this resentment on his wife who he wants to work (repetitively) with “scrubbing brush and scrubbing board”. This is not a relationship in which we see any love, compromise or mutual respect, though we have yet to be shown much of the wife’s perspective.

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In fact the second quatrain continues in much the same vein with a repetition of the phrase “let her learn”. All this repetition conveys the husband’s determined intentions. Lines 4-8 also introduce a vocabulary of a more moralistic kind. The narrative voice echoes what must be the husband’s thoughts about the way he has “earned” the “right” to go drinking in the pub before he returns home. He regards the earning of his wage as a physical and personal “exchange” of his physical “sweat” for cash and the hyphenated phrase describing money as possessing “blood-weight” particularly conveys the sense of his personal sacrifice as a working man, how he feels the day’s work metaphorically costs him “blood” (as a miner this might be sometimes literal too). I think Hughes goes some way here to encouraging sympathy from the reader for the husband’s situation but the quick return to his aggressive, even vicious, attitude to his wife in the heavily alliterated and emphatic phrase “He’ll humble her” (line 8) definitely lessens any sympathy I may be feeling.

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The simple metaphor of casting “new light” on his wife’s role is used in line 9. There is a sort of tired familiarity throughout this poem (on both husband and wife’s sides) and I suspect this sort of encounter is not the first of its kind so the idea of him casting/teaching “new” light probably really reflects his sense that however much he tries to do this she does not “learn” to behave as he expects by more obediently taking note of what he sees as her “obligations”. I doubt whether he himself would have used many of the moral terms that the third person narrative voice employs in these lines, so the distancing voice Hughes has chosen to use enables these more abstract points to be made. It’s only at line 10 that we get a sense of the wife’s “answer” to her husband’s demands. As has been implied already, her reply to his demands is not at all submissive. We are told “part of her answer” is the disgusting-sounding meal with its “fried, woody chips” though it’s partly unpleasant because it has had to be kept warm in the oven “for two hours” (the fact that he’s so late home increases our sympathy for his wife). But her fight back is sustained it seems; the other “part” of her answer to his demanding and bullying attitudes must be spoken to him or probably shouted. Interestingly, Hughes gives us none of this directly as it is only implied in the brief phrase “Hearing the rest” in line 12.

The husband’s corresponding response to his wife’s uncooperative (surely complaining) reply is immediate and violent. The husband’s vigorous determination causes Hughes to run-on sentences at the end of both stanza 2 and 3. Here, the violent verb “slams” shows how he disposes of her cooked meal in the fire and sweeps out of the house and “away round the house-end” all in one flowing, swift, uninterrupted sentence. The husband’s singing voice is described as “resounding corrugated iron” in a typical Hughesian metaphor (linking the organic with the metallic or industrial). Also the song he chooses to sing is full of irony and deliberately insulting as it is a romantic song of lost love. Line 16 gives us a brief last glimpse of the wife’s response, her body language suggesting her own stubborn resentment, “bunched into a hump”. Hughes adds a simile to make her antagonism even more clear: “as an insult”.

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The final quatrain now departs from the specific actions of the married couple and returns to the more moralistic and even legalistic language that I noted earlier in the poem. Here the narrator’s distance from the domestic argument is clear again. This poem was first published in Wodwo (Faber, 1967) and, as a relatively early Hughes poem, it is unusual in its focus on individual people though this distancing effect suggests he may be observing their behaviour in the same way as he does a jaguar in a cage or the power of the wind. Line 17 is the shortest sentence in the whole poem and declares, in firm monosyllables, that both sides in this conflict “will have their rights”. This makes it clear there is no room or desire for compromise. The final three lines introduce the language of the law court (a divorce court perhaps?) though the jury are “to be assembled / From the little crumbs of soot”. This soot reminds us of the coal-dust he brings into the house in line 1, but also of the burnt dinner thrown into the fire-back in line 12. These tiny black specks suggest to me that such a jury will never come to any clear conclusion in this dispute. They suggest the hopelessness of the couple’s situation. This rather depressing ending to the portrait of a marriage is confirmed in the final line and a half as we are told that the legal “brief” (a technical term for one side’s case in a law court) follows the smoke and soot up the chimney. This suggests that the arguments on both sides metaphorically go up in smoke. Hughes concludes in the plainest language: “nothing more is heard of it”. The way in which the events of the dismal evening vanish up the chimney suggest the likelihood that something similar may happen again tomorrow and the day after.

Conclusion

So Hughes’ portrait of a marriage is very bleak indeed. The narrative voice describes events at a distance and though there are occasions when the reader does feel sympathy for the people involved, the language of the poem itself is not at all emotional. The poem’s voice sees events from both husband and wife’s perspectives though it’s interesting that we are never given any actual dialogue in this domestic row. Hughes’ irregularly-lined and unrhymed quatrains suit the poem’s plain description in a mostly colloquial tone: this is not a poem or situation where any lyricism or poetically-charged language would really be appropriate.

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A Living Hanging Hemisphere: Ted Hughes’ ‘Meeting’:

martyn crucefix contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, teaching, writing , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

One of my most visited blog posts in recent months has been the discussion/analysis  of Ted Hughes’ poem ‘November’, The Month of the Drowned Dog: click here. The poem had been in my mind as we are studying it (along with a range of other poems by Hughes) in the Cambridge International Exam Board’s A level course for Literature in English. I suspect I am getting hits from students around the world also following the same course and – without wanting to become a major source of plagiarism – I thought this week I might discuss another poem from the same selection.

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‘Meeting’ was first published in The Hawk in the Rain (Faber, 1957) and is one of several poems in that collection to present what has been called “the central theme or event in Hughes’ poetry: the usurpation or invasion of the world that the rational intellect has constructed by a power that is represented as greater and ultimately more real” (Neil Roberts, Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (Palgrave, 2006). The poem ‘Egg-Head’ is a much less concise treatment of the same issue. The common meaning of ‘egg-head’ – an intellectual, probably arrogant, person (usually a man?) – operates in Hughes’ poem which intends to berate such characters for what they exclude from their life experiences. But the egg image also implies a fragility which suits the poet’s purpose of critiquing the limits of such attitudes. Egg-heads, like Humpty-Dumpty, are always in danger of being cracked open. So the ‘Egg-Head’ character peers at life (this latter word gathers to itself extraordinary power and significance in Hughes’ as in D H Lawrence’s work) “through his fingers”. He deploys methods of “defence”, is “walled in” and “shuts out” and he “resists”. All this is achieved, Hughes roars in an angry, flurried combination of chewy consonants and Latinate vocabulary (that is perhaps not as controlled as it might be):

 

By feats of torpor, by circumventing sleights

Of stupefaction, juggleries of benumbing,

By lucid sophistries of sight

 

This is the vitriolic tone of the attack on the rational mind’s defences. It is countered by not wholly convincing phrases intended to be representative of life such as a “leaf’s otherness, / The whale-monstered sea-bottom, eagled peaks / And stars that hang over hurtling endlessness” quickly supplemented by “the flash / Of the sun, the bolt of the earth”, then “the looming mouth of the earth” and finally “the whelm of the sun”. What does emerge from such phrases is the link of life with the natural world, with great power, with incalculable scale.

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All these ideas are better conveyed in ‘Meeting’ and a prose/short story version of Roberts’ “central theme or event” can be seen in ‘The Rain Horse’ (from Wodwo (1967); also found in the CIE Prose Anthology called Stories of Ourselves (p.271)). The young man at the start of this story has already come “too far” from the orderly “tarmac lanes” he had intended to walk. He had come hoping vaguely for “something, some pleasure, some meaningful sensation, he didn’t quite know what”. His encounter with the uncanny, threatening, apparently evil-intentioned horse of the title instead gives him a “fright and shame”. At the end he strips himself naked, sits staring at the ground “as if some important part had been cut out of his brain”. Roberts again interprets this sequence of events such that the horse is representative of un-delimited life, a “shamanic spirit” challenging the young man’s rational control and perception. So it’s less that something has been cut out of his brain (though he may feel the loss of self-constructed barriers as a loss) more that whole fields of experience, emotional and spiritual possibilities have been opened to him. This misinterpretation of the impact of life (in Hughes’ sense) is something also seen in ‘Meeting’.

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‘Meeting’ opens with another of Hughes’ straw-men, a self-regarding male whose “smile”, in the first phrase, suggests he is well-pleased with what he views in the “mirror”. But as with ‘Egg-Head’, it is the exclusion of all else, all otherness, that concerns Hughes. Even as he smiles, the man “shrink[s]” the rest of the world to a “trinket”, the tinkling consonants (t-k-t) here neatly suggesting the insignificant bauble all else becomes in his view. The word is then countered by the grand sweep of the poem’s key phrase intended to evoke the too-often unregarded universe beyond the rationalist’s view: “the whole / Sun-swung zodiac of light”. Here the wide open vowels (o-u-u-o-a-i) suggest breadth and scale, the sibilance suggests a dynamism, the zodiac evokes images of both night sky and astrological/mythic  elements, the light suggests the elusiveness of life on this scale. For all this to be reduced to a “trinket” feels both absurd and tragic (for Keith Sagar this is both “hubristic and solipsistic”, reducing the universe to the point where man can erroneously “feel himself to be a god in it”). To drive the reductive point home even more clearly the trinket shape is said to appear “On the rise of his eye” which I take to be the curvature of the man’s pupil, but describing it as a “rise” also reminds us of the man’s own arrogantly elevated self-image.

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After the colon/caesura of line 3, Hughes uses the metaphor of a dramatic “role” for the man’s behavior to stress both its importance and falsehood. The role Hughes gives the man (or the role the man imagines himself to be playing) is that of Dr Faustus, the arrogant over-reacher, so consumed with his own importance that (in Christopher Marlowe’s play) he barters his soul for earthly power and pleasure though clearly warned of the consequences. He simply doesn’t seem to think the ordinary rules apply to him. The image of flinging “a cape” suggests an Elizabethan stage scene and that word “life” reappears here in all its significance since this is what the actor/man feels he can “outloom”. That Faustus himself outloomed ordinary life and religious sanctions for 24 years is relevant here; as is the fact that he was dragged screaming to Hell at the close of the play. Hughes imagery contains within it the condemnation he intends in the poem.

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These opening four and a half lines set up the character of the young man. After the full stop in line 5 the “event” begins (and consists of one sweeping, irresistible sentence). Like the man in ‘The Rain Horse’, this man also wanders into the wilder realms of nature, to “an empty mountain slope”. To apply the adjective “empty” to this place is just one of the man’s errors, imagining a terra nullius where there is multifarious life and significance. What he actually encounters here is a “black goat”. It’s around here perhaps that a reader becomes more conscious of the poetic form Hughes is using. It’s terza rima, a form of triplets rhyming aba bcb cdc and so on. On the whole, Hughes manages this really well (line breaks at lines 5 and 8 perhaps turn more for form than sense and the rhyme word demanded in line 16 is awkward). The difficulty and complexity of this form might be a gesture to the rational man whose mind enforces order and organization, or contrastingly, the looping, self-involvement of the scheme might suggest Hughes’ own perception of the lived world’s interconnectedness.

The goat’s appearance has conventional features suggestive of threat and this means we are seeing it from the man’s perspective. Colours of “black” and “yellow-eyed” are ugly, as is the hyphenated phrase “square-pupilled”. Its onomatopoeic, assonontal and threatening movements (“clattered and ran”) are a challenge as is the position it takes up, “forefeet firm on a rock”, the sizzling fricatives and the ‘clatter’ of the monosyllabic “rock” further reinforce this. Of course, the goat’s placement “above” the man is significant of Hughes’ true valorization of this encounter. This is contrasted with line 11, as the “black devil head” is the man’s assessment of the creature, a designation that what lies beyond his usual comprehension must be categorized as evil.

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One reason why this poem is more successful than ‘Egg-Head’ is that Hughes, in the final 7 lines, takes us seamlessly into the man’s transformative experience as a result of the encounter. Images of startling differences in scale occur. In contrast to the earlier belittling of the universe as a “trinket”, the man’s experience is now likened to being gathered up in “gigantic fingers” and placed on a “bare / Palm” for examination. The man’s littleness is the point and the “eye” of the universe (via a simile in line 15) is likened to “a living hanging hemisphere”. This eye is like the whole visible sky above him; a powerful contrast to the way in which the whole “zodiac” was itself reduced to a flickering shape on the man’s own “eye”. The reversal from arrogance to a newly-realised humility is brilliantly conveyed.

But perhaps there are doubts about the man’s epiphany. He is studied (or feels he is being studied) by the vastness of the real universe. His littleness and vulnerability, as in the phrase “his blood’s gleam”, is being examined by the “ray” of the world’s eyebeam. The differences in scale between “gleam” and “ray” are accentuated in line 17’s cosmic simile, describing the ray’s gaze as “Slow and cold and ferocious as a star”, the polysyndeton slowing the phrase down to again evoke a sense of great scale and distance. The goat’s exit is rapid (and again onomatopoeic) and the final ray/away rhyme of the terza rima brings the event to a definite sense of closure. So the man does not have a moment like the young man in ‘The Rain Horse’ where actual changes in his mind are suggested but it’s hard to believe he will return to his mirror smiling in quite such a self-satisfied way. I’d like to think him more open to experiences of “world” such as Louis MacNeice describes (from a less primitivist, more political perspective) in his poem ‘Snow’:

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes–
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of your hands–
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

(read Olivia Cole’s discussion of ‘Snow’ from Magma Magazine. 

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Louis MacNeice

The Month of the Drowned Dog: Ted Hughes’ ‘November’

martyn crucefix contemporary British poetry, creative writing, poetry, Romantic poetry, teaching, writing , , , , , , , , , , ,

Though November has just transformed itself into December here, still Ted Hughes’ sodden, rain-soaked poem from Lupercal (1960) comes to mind as I watch the TV footage of floods in the North-West of England. I’ve never thought enough attention has been given to the role of the narrator in this poem. It’s one of the selected poems studied on the Cambridge International Examinations’ A-level. Students are asked to discuss one specific poem in detail or two poems from a more thematic perspective. What follows is a loose version of the first type of question (apologies for some loss of formatting in the poem itself). NB. For another close discussion of an early Ted Hughes poem – ‘Meeting’ – click here.

The month of the drowned dog. After long rain the land
Was sodden as the bed of an ancient lake,
Treed with iron and bird less. In the sunk lane
The ditch – a seep silent all summer –

Made brown foam with a big voice: that, and my boots
On the lane’s scrubbed stones, in the gulleyed leaves
Against the hill’s hanging silence;

Hughes opens the poem with a bewildering mix of images of motion and stasis. Flooding must account for the “drowned dog” (more literal than figurative or colloquial here) and the absence of a verb emphasizes the stillness of death, the burden of the month, the real entrance way to winter. The land is so sodden as to have suffered inversion to become “the bed of an ancient lake”. It’s an alien landscape – trees (as so often in Hughes) are now composed of industrial “iron” and inevitably “birdless”. Yet in contrast to such stillness, the ditch water (which in summer is a soothing sibilant “seep silent”) is now possessed of a “big voice” composed of brown foam and beside it, the narrator’s boots scrape along the lane. These two sounds are all that can be arrayed against “the hill’s hanging silence” and the contrasts of movement and stillness, noise and silence compose the greater world of this poem.

Mist silvering the droplets on the bare thorns

Slower than the change of daylight.
In a let of the ditch a tramp was bundled asleep;
Face tucked down into beard, drawn in
Under his hair like a hedgehog’s. I took him for dead,

But his stillness separated from the death
From the rotting grass and the ground. The wind chilled,
And a fresh comfort tightened through him,
Each hand stuffed deeper into the other sleeve.

His ankles, bound with sacking and hairy band,
Rubbed each other, resettling.

It’s this greater world that the narrator fears and the tramp entrusts himself to. To the narrator, the tramp sleeping in a let of the ditch, is comparable to an animal, a “hedgehog”. In the narrator’s world view, this is no compliment and indeed in the next phrase (line 12), he considers the tramp “dead”. To give the narrator credit he perceives his mistake and next sees the tramp’s vitality, though (in a reversal of our preconceptions) it is his “stillness” rather than animation that “separate[s him] from the death” all around. The animation of the “wind” evokes a corresponding movement in the tramp: “a fresh comfort tightened through him, / Each hand stuffed deeper into the other sleeve”. There is paradox here too in that the tramp’s movements are intended both to shield him from the elements yet also settle him more comfortably among them.

The wind hardened;
A puff shook a glittering from the thorns,
And again the rains’ dragging grey columns

Smudged the farms. In a moment
The fields were jumping and smoking; the thorns
Quivered, riddled with the glassy verticals.

Lines 18 – 23 seem to represent a moment in which the narrator looks away from the tramp. What he sees is a world he might once have been familiar with dissolving before his very eyes. This is partly a result of optical effects brought on by atmospheric conditions, but Hughes’s language systematically destabilizes the solid and still (the farms, the fields, the thorns) and solidifies the diffuse and shapeless (the wind, the rains). Such a renovation of perception is comparable to the stunned narrator at the end of Hughes’ story ‘The Rain Horse’ (from Wodwo, 1967) who, after the terrifying encounter with the horse, sits “staring at the ground, as if some important part had been cut out of his brain”. The poem’s narrator reports in line 24 that he “stayed on under the welding cold” and the colloquialism of the first two words here implies that any sane person might have retired to shelter; whatever transformative process Hughes is representing in the encounter between narrator and tramp is already under way. The narrator seems to surprise himself by staying as if he were watching the actions of another.

I stayed on under the welding cold

Watching the tramp’s face glisten and the drops on his coat
Flash and darken. I thought what strong trust
Slept in him- as the trickling furrows slept,
And the thorn-roots in their grip on darkness;

And the buried stones taking the weight of winter;
The hill where the hare crouched with clenched teeth.

In fact he stays to continue to watch the tramp becoming part of the landscape: “I thought what strong trust / Slept in him”. All the critics you’ll read agree this is the key idea; but as Keith Sagar asks: in what exactly does “the tramp trust?” The image of sleep links this trust also to the fields’ “furrows”, to “thorn-roots”, to “buried stones” and to the hill itself where the hare is “crouched with clenched teeth”. Is this merely a trust in a viable future? A sort of wishful thinking? A consolation? Perhaps it is if the furrows imply next year’s crop, the roots suggest the new year’s growth, the stones will be unearthed to build new walls, the hare will survive to unclench in the Spring. There is something Romantically attractive about this reading and we might remember Wordsworth’s encounter with the Leech Gatherer who also seems part of the landscape (“as a huge stone”). Wordsworth is equally uncertain of the man’s status: “not all alive nor dead, / Nor all asleep”. As their conversation continues, the Leech Gatherer’s voice becomes indistinguishable from “a stream” and in some low level psychic derangement Wordsworth imagines the Gatherer as “Like one whom I had met with in a dream; / Or like a man from some far region sent, / To give me human strength, by apt admonishment”.

Rain plastered the land till it was shining
Like hammered lead, and I ran, and in the rushing wood

Shuttered by a black oak leaned.
The keeper’s gibbet had owls and hawks
By the neck, weasels, a gang of cats, crows:
Some stiff, weightless, twirled like dry bark bits

In the drilling rain. Some still had their shape,
Had their pride with it; hung, chins on chests,
Patient to outwait these worst days that beat
Their crowns bare and dripped from their feet.

But Hughes’ tramp is far less consoling, far more frightening. In the concluding stanzas, the narrator runs away – on the face of it to shelter from the rain though earlier this had not troubled him. He runs into a wood in something of a panic as the breathless, long-delayed verb here suggests: “in the rushing wood // Shuttered by a black oak leaned”. It’s what the narrator encounters in the wood that provides the final piece of the jigsaw for this poem. He confronts death in the shape of a gamekeeper’s gibbet and it is really death in which the tramp trusts, as much as he trusts himself to life. This is the point of the poem’s many transformational oppositions, of stasis and movement, solid and diffuse, sleep and waking, dead and alive. As the “flash and darken” of raindrops on his coat suggest, the tramp’s instinct is to entrust himself to both life and death without making any clear, rational distinction between the two.

I think the narrator has preserved this distinction and perhaps does so even at the end. Of the bodies on the gibbet, some are fresh, others are like “dry bark bits” being twirled in the rainfall. The narrator seems inclined to focus on those retaining their living “shape”, those who he says retain “their pride”, those who seem (like Wordsworth’s Gatherer) to teach patience, and endurance against “these worst days”. But the incontrovertible fact is they are all dead and death is lesson 101 in Hughes’ work as can be seen in Crow’s ‘Examination at the Womb-Door’ (Crow, 1970). It is the denial of death’s reality that leads to delusion and a false consciousness of our own position in the world. The narrator of ‘November’ still hankers after the human scale of virtues such as patience and Wordsworthian endurance. It is the tramp – ironically rather forgotten by the end of the poem, lying foetal in the let of the ditch, still huddled against the month’s elements – who entrusts himself to the risks of exposure and death, but in doing so may hear (what the sheltered narrator will never hear) the reply that Crow gives to the final question he faces:

But who is stronger than death?

                                         Me, evidently.

Pass, Crow.

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