Ted Hughes: Fragment of an Ancient Tablet

Length / Form Series of couplets.

Allusion to Classical figure Allusion to a shard from the ancient world

Comment Series of couplets each line beginning ‘Above’ or ‘Below’ to explore the idealised and visceral perspectives on an ancient artefact representing women.

Like most of the poems in Crow, ‘Fragment of an Ancient Tablet’ uses black humour subversively contrasting idealism with grand guignol. Throughout Crow, Hughes takes myths, legends and folklore and rewrites them in this way as a means of creating his own mythical sub-species.

This is from a collection of poems called Crow: From the Life and Songs of Crow (1970). Accounts of Crow’s genesis seem to vary and its publication history (where omissions, additions and editions pull in several directions) is somewhat sporadic. The Collected Poems does a fine job of grouping all these disparate elements. With Crow, Hughes creates a modern myth and creature of folklore which interacts with biblical, classical and mythical traditions.  Cut with black humour and violence, the Crow poems are among Hughes’s most striking and instigated a technical reappraisal of his approach to writing poetry.

Further Reading

Stuart Hirschberg. Myth in the Poetry of Ted Hughes, Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981.