The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly…
— Ted Hughes, “Wind”
This poem is full of remarkable metaphors: a house “far out at sea all night,” the woods “crashing through darkness,” the “skyline a grimace,” the house ringing “like some fine green goblet in the note / That any second would shatter it.” My favorite image from this poem, though, is in the two lines above, a “black- / Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly.” The exaggerated alliteration of the b sound combined with the staccato rhythm of the short syllables seems to conjure the brutal strength of the wind, a tension that is released in the very different sound of slowly. Every time I read this poem I feel as though I can see the gull straining and straining against the storm’s winds, its wings extended, and then, when its strength is finally gone, its form slowly bending before it is swept away.
The Poetry Foundation’s brief biography of Ted Hughes contains this assertion: “The rural landscape of Hughes’s youth in Yorkshire exerted a lasting influence on his work. To read Hughes’s poetry is to enter a world dominated by nature, especially by animals.”
“The Wind” is one such poem in which the natural world does not merely appear; it dominates:
Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,Or each other.
Here’s the complete poem:
Wind
This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet
Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.
At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up –
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,
The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house
Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,
Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.
— Ted Hughes