I was struck by Ted Hughes’ poem “Crow’s First Lesson.” I spent my entire Sunday working on my novel for Nanowrimo and feeling a bit burnt out. I read through the first few of Crow poems that are featured in Ted Hughes’ Selected Poems 1957-1994. I confess that when I started out my reading, I was not reading closely or with gusto. I felt kind of brain-dead, but then I came to the poem “Crow’s First Lesson.” I am not entirely sure if it was the violence of the image of Crow purging and retching trying to say “Love” or if it was the man and woman image that snapped me awake and made me read the poem a few times over just to make sure that I wasn’t loosing my mind and hallucinating explicit things happening in the poem. I wasn’t. So, I was jolted awake by the explicit content, but I was also struck by Crow’s (debatable) guilt. I like the neo-Genesis concept Hughes has going on in the Crow poems. It sort of reminds me of Rock and Bullwinkle’s Fractured Fairy Tales, but significantly darker and actually sexual.

Crow has this unfiltered quality about him/it. He hasn’t developed that superego that prevents him from thinking, feeling, or reacting the way someone or something ought to in particular situation. Crow, to me, is less trickster and more child-like. It reminds me of something I read about the primitive brain that exists in birds in lizards, which the human brain also has, but of course we’ve evolved processing centers that keep our more primitive impulses in check, sometimes… There was something really refreshing about The Crow Poems, especially after the emotional heaviness of Plath’s Ariel poems. Hughes is more of a storyteller, there is more a reliance of narrative and not on emotion in his poems. I think that is really interesting considering that Plath wrote stories, novels, and poems whereas Hughes primarily stuck to poetry.