SEQUENCE AND SURVIVAL

Towards the end of Ted Hughes's discussion of the tragedies in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being he makes a remark literally in parenthesis, and it is as though the parenthesis licenses the lapse from the impassioned but analytical tone of mythical speculation which is the dominant mode of that book to something more nakedly private and possibly more self-involved: ‘Presumably in these works,’ he says, ‘[Shakespeare] was fighting towards his own salvation and inner survival’ (G, p. 325). It is hard not to hear the poet of the trilogy of long poetic sequences which Ted Hughes published during the 1970s – Crow (1970), Gaudete (1977) and Cave Birds (given small press publication in 1975; revised into its Faber edition in 1978) – behind this observation; and the sequences include, occasionally and fitfully, Shakespearean references. ‘The Battle of Osfrontalis’ in Crow, for instance, in which Crow is persecuted by words, culminates in an allusion to Yorick in Hamlet, as Crow wins yet another temporary victory:

This has that weary melancholy, an exhaustedly posthumous but still combatively critical spirit, which is the mood of some poems in the sequence; and its reference to Hamlet enforces the literary nature of the melancholy – paradoxically, it may be, in this sequence so bent on seeming ‘super-ugly’, in Hughes's (ugly) formulation.