posted on 05 Feb 2016

Winter Pollen

Reading poetry is an acquired skill, but one that needs to be kept up. If you don’t practice, you lose it. And regrettably, somewhere over the years, I have lost it and now rarely if ever read poetry. I will do again, but I recognise it is something that will need concerted effort: I have to remake an aptitude for it.

But I’m still interested in what poets think and still buy collections of poets’ prose writings whenever I happen to see them. Hence my buying Ted Hughes’ Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, edited by William Scammell and published by Faber in 1994. It is an exceptionally handsome Faber hardback and, at over 460 pages, a generous collection.

But rarely has a poet’s prose proved more disappointing. First, there is such a lot of it. And it isn’t just that there are too many pieces: the pieces contain too much. They need their own exegesis. Hughes’ mind seems to run riot, scrambling across vast tracts of time and arcane learning, stirring in vast quantities of religion and pre-religion, mysticism, myth, psychology and philosophy. But the biggest problem is that but for a handful of pieces Hughes’ extraordinary facility with language seems to have deserted him.

Nowhere is this highlighted more sharply than in one marvellous short piece called The Burnt Fox. There is nothing else quite like this in the whole book. In it Hughes writes about his struggle to complete weekly English essays while studying at Cambridge, and a dream he has in which a minatory figure – an incinerated fox as big as a wolf and walking upright like a man – steps quietly into his college room and, laying a bloodied, carbonised hand-paw on Hughes’ almost empty sheet of foolscap, says, “Stop this – you are destroying us.”

Hughes describes jumping from bed and rushing across to his desk, utterly convinced that he will see a bloody print on the paper he left there. It isn’t just the extraordinary imagery or the transparency of the warning – your dull, time-serving academicism is destroying whatever creative gift you have, as well as the creatures it can create – that sets this piece apart, it is the language. It crackles with electricity. It leaps off the page. It inhabits not just your head but the room. You can almost smell it.

Interestingly, when reviewing this book for the Independent in March 1995 Blake Morrison praised its “unpredictable insights” and also singled out The Burnt Fox for particular mention. But mostly, he concluded, Hughes is “far off, chasing spirit-hares with the dark gods and goddesses.” Similarly, writing in The Unexpected Professor John Carey recounts reviewing Hughes’ Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, “aghast”, he says, at Hughes’ reduction of Shakespeare to “tedious mythical mumbo-jumbo”. And yet he too found a footnote buried away in the text that had all the intensity of a “late Hughes prose poem”.

You may say this proves nothing except that my disappointment shares good company, but I think it goes deeper than that. Winter Pollen – or most of it, at any rate – tells us something not just about the different aptitudes required for poetry and prose, but also what they are respectively capable of. In his poems, Hughes’ ideas fly and swoop and stalk, as muscular and tangible as the raptors and predators that jostle there for space and attention; in his prose they sink lifelessly under their own weight. Hughes’ burnt fox emerges as the most prescient of creatures.

 

Alun Severn

February 2016