Ted Hughes: Phaetons

Length / Form 10 lines of 4 stanzas. First/last stanzas of three unrhymed lines, second/third of two unrhymed couplets.

Allusion to Classical figure Helios

Relationship to Classical text To the son of Helios, the Sun-god and the Oceanid Clymere. Phaeton asked to drive his father's farm horse chariot across the sky for just one day. Out of control, he set the heavens and earth on fire so Zeus hurled him from the chariot with a thunderbolt and his blazing corpse fell into the River Eridanus where his sisters, the Heliades (see Aeschylus' tragedy The Heliades.1.750-2.380 elaborates the story) grief transformed themselves into Poplar trees. Euripides' tragedy Phaeton survives only in fragments. 'The Fall of Phaeton' was also represented by Michelangelo (drawings), Tintoretto, Rubens. See also Euripides' Hippolytus 737-41; Virgil  Aeneid 10. 187-93. Hughes uses the incident to convey the effect of poetry on 'The gentle reader in the silent room' (see also ‘Phaeton’ in Tales from Ovid, CP pp 880-96).

Comment 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)