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• Franz Tórrez

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Ted Hughes and Crow The Crow poems are mythological and parody the Bible. Through myth Hughes had access to all the intensity and drama of life and death; to universally recognisable patterns of human behaviour; to the powerful energies of gods and devils; and to ritual frameworks, which have been used for centuries to contain such powerful energies and emotions. God is portrayed as imperfect, fatherly, fallible and almost human contradicting yet paralleling the Bible The origin of Crow is well documented. In an article written in 1985 19, Hughes explained: Crow grew out of an invitation by Leonard Baskin to make a book with him simply about crows. He wanted an occasion to add more crows to all the crows that flock through his sculpture, drawings, and engravings in their various transformations. As the protagonist of a book, a crow would become symbolic in any author's hands. And a symbolic crow lives a legendary life. That is how Crow took off. In 1970, Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, was published by Faber and Faber, and it has since been reprinted several times, sometimes with additional poems Through the quasi-human figure of Crow, Hughes created his own journey of exploration into the human psyche and, at the same time, his handling of the death/rebirth theme in his poetry began to be more complex. Amazingly, Hughes once said that he began Crow as children's story but the eventual development of Crow's character, the sardonic, sometimes gruesome humour of the poems, and Hughes' sophisticated and heretical manipulation of Biblical stories, has made Crow very much a bird for adults. Hughes said: He was created by God's nightmare. What exactly that is I tried to define through the length of the poem, or the succession of poems. The first idea of Crow was really an idea of style. In folktales the prince going on the adventure comes to the stable full of beautiful horses and he needs a horse for the next stage and the King's daughter advises him to take none of the beautiful horses that he'll be offered but to choose the dirty, scabby little foal. You see, I throw out the eagles and choose Crow. The idea was originally just to write his songs, the songs that a Crow would sing. In other words songs with no music whatsoever, in a super simple and a super ugly language which would in a way shed everything except just what he wanted to say without any other consideration and that's the basis of the style of the whole thing.

The Crow is the most intelligent of birds. He lives in just about every piece of land on earth and there's a great body of folk lore about crows, of course. No carrion will kill a crow. The crow is the indestructible bird who suffers everything, suffers nothing... Crow is the bird of Bran, is the oldest and highest totem creature of Britain ... England pretends to a lion - but that is a late fake import. England's autochthonous Totem is the Crow. Whatever the colour of Englishman you scratch you come to some sort of crow. Examples of how Hughes manipulated the Bible are shown in many of his poem, most famously In 'Crow's First Lesson' where God attempts to teach Crow how to talk, but his efforts to teach him the word 'Love' result only in the creation of horror. Crow gapes, and vomits up his own devouring versions of love - "the white shark"; "a bluefly, a tsetse, a mosquito"; and man's bodiless head with woman's vulva dropped over it and tightening around his neck. God, defeated, goes back to sleeping, leaving Crow to his own devices and Crow takes advantage of God's slumber by inventing his own 'communion'.