Ted Hughes: The Ancient Heroes and the Bomber Pilot

Length / Form 27 lines or 9 stanzas half/occasional rhyming (ABA).

Relationship to Classical text Generalised allusion to heroes of ancient epic and the bards who sang their stories (‘To hear some timorous poet enlarge heroisms’). Hughes contrasts their long lasting fame with modern wars and casts the archaeologist, rather than the poet, as the trigger to his thought (‘when archaeologists dig their remainder out / Bits of bone, rest - / The grandeur of their wars humbles my thought’).

Comment This poem is the last of six poems in The Hawk in the Rain (beginning with ‘The Casualty’) concerning war and the victims of such conflicts. Bringing to mind the verse of Sassoon, Owen and Douglas, these are Hughes’s first published poems using war (especially the First World War) as their locus.

The Hawk in the Rain was Hughes’s first book. It was published in the UK in 1957 after winning a poetry competition in America judged by (among others) W.H. Auden. Whilst more formal in typographic presentation than his later works, The Hawk in the Rain proclaims Hughes’s poetic agenda, one of energy, vitality and death. Here poems about nature, poetry and war announce themselves in sharp contrast to the verse of contemporaries such as Philip Larkin. Hughes returns to this subject in ‘Phaethon’ in Tales from Ovid (CP, 880).