Wotan and Ted Hughes's Crow

Abstract

Ted Hughes has collected in Crow1 what appear to be the fragments of apocalyptic experience. Everything in the world into which Crow survives seems about to explode, compelled by intolerable internal pressures. The most trivial event might be cause for astonishing cruelties. But unlike the brutal naturalism frequently explored in the earlier animal poems, in Pike and Hawk Roosting, the violence in Crow has a martial character. The grass, even, camps in its tussock / With its spears and banners (p. 67). And Crow's are the warrior's traits: courage, cunning, the indomitable will to survive, and the sharpness of eye and talon. Battle, furthermore, provides metaphor for the two ideological conflicts dominating Crow's experience: first, Crow's aversion to the Christian myth and, second, Crow's struggle to find the words of song, of poetry in a culture loud (deafening) with the words of advertisements and life insurance policies. Nevertheless, Crow observes from a godlike remove, unhampered by moral concerns, reporting the ghastliest events with the emotionlessness of an immortal. He survives each of his own disintegrations without apparent harm. Hughes's Cambridge study of anthropology2 must have exposed him to numerous crow-gods and -heroes-a figure represented in the pantheon of every major mythology-after which certain features of Crow might have been fashioned. Raven, the trickster-god of the Bering Strait Eskimos, is a source undeniably spotlighted by the inclusion of Two Eskimo Songs. The influence of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a work with which Hughes acknowledges familiarity, is often discerned by commentators.3 These exotic intrusions notwithstanding, the mythic system from which Crow descends seems to be that of pre-Christian Teutonic culture. The most important model for Crow is the chief deity of Teutonic mythology, Wotan, lord both of battle frenzy and of