Customer Reviews

Lupercal

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Having established himself as a poet with the acute and unique gift in description of animals of woodland England, Hughes went on to continue this in his second volume of poetry, 'Lupercal', a word resembling the ancient fertility festival. In this volume, Hughes not only shows us his anthropological academic background, as is evident in his poems preoccupied with the making of his personal mythology such as 'Lupercalia' and 'Crag Jack's Apostasy', but also his gentler lyricism e.g. 'To Paint A Water Lily', and his matter-of-fact, farmer-like bluntness, as in 'View of a Pig'. But it is in poems like 'Hawk Roosting' that could convince the reader that the poet may just have experienced what it is to be a hawk. Sometimes bleak, intense and always beautiful, this volume should be considered among his greatest work. But be warned: not for light-hearted reading!

This is Hughes second volume and reveals many of the same qualitiies exhibited in the first. A rich metaphoric imagination, a closeness to the world of nature, a feeling for animals' experience, a harsh, bleak , fierce at times connection with the world around- and too as in 'Wilfred Owen's Photographs' a connection with the First World War, and the experience his father's generation went through in it. I have a difficulty with Hughes' poetry simply because I neither know the world of nature as deeply as he does, or feel the same kind of closeness and connection to it that he does.
Here is a sample the first two stanzas of the poem 'Pike'. They well exemplify his writing.

"Pike , three inches, long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world."