Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath "Lady Lazarus" Summary "Lady Lazarus" is a poem commonly understood to be about suicide. It is narrated by a woman, and mostly addressed to an unspecified person. The narrator begins by saying she has "done it again." Every ten years, she manages to commit this unnamed act. She considers herself a walking miracle with bright skin, her right foot a "paperweight," and her face as fine and featureless as a "Jew linen". She address an unspecified enemy, asking him to peel the napkin from her face, and inquiring whether he is terrified by the features he sees there. She assures him that her "sour breath" will vanish in a day. She is certain that her flesh will soon be restored to her face after having been sacrificed to the grave, and that she will then be a smiling, 30 year-old woman. She will ultimately be able to die nine times, like a cat, and has just completed her third death. She will die once each decade. After each death, a "peanut-crunching crowd" shoves in to see her body unwrapped. She addresses the crowd directly, showing them she remains skin and bone, unchanged from who she was before. The first death occurred when she was ten, accidentally. The second death was intentional she did not mean to return from it. Instead, she was as "shut as a seashell" until she was called back by people who then picked the worms off her corpse. She does not specifically identify how either death occurred. She believes that "Dying / Is an art, like everything else," and that she does it very well. Each time, "it feels real," and is easy for her. What is difficult is the dramatic comeback, the return to the same place and body, occurring as it does in broad daylight before a crowd's cry of "A miracle!" She believes people should pay to view her scars, hear her heart, or receive a word, touch, blood, hair or clothes from her. In the final stanzas, she addresses the listener as "Herr Dockter" and "Herr Enemy," sneering that she is his crowning achievement, a "pure gold baby." She does not underestimate his concern, but is bothered by how he picks through her ashes. She insists there is nothing there but soap, a wedding ring, and a gold filling. She warns "Herr God, Herr Lucifer" to beware of her because she is going to rise out of the ash and "eat men like air." Analysis "Lady Lazarus" is a complicated, dark, and brutal poem originally published in the collection Ariel. Plath composed the poem during her most productive and fecund creative period. It is considered one of Plath's best poems, and has been subject to a plethora of literary criticism since its publication. It is commonly interpreted as an expression of Plath's suicidal attempts and impulses. Its tone veers between menacing and scathing, and it has drawn

attention for its use of Holocaust imagery, similar to "Daddy." The title is an allusion to the Biblical character, Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead. The standard interpretation of the poem suggests that it is about multiple suicide attempts. The details can certainly be understood in this framework. When the speaker says she "has done it again," she means she has attempted suicide for the third time, after one accidental attempt and one deliberate attempt in the past. Each attempt occurred in a different decade, and she is now 30 years old. Now that she has been pulled back to life from this most recent attempt, her "sour breath / Will vanish in a day," and her flesh will return to her bones. However, this recovery is presented as a failure, whereas the suicide attempts are presented as accomplishments - "Dying is an art" that she performs "exceptionally well." She seems to believe she will reach a perfection through escaping her body. By describing dying as an art, she includes a spectator to both her deaths and resurrections. Because the death is a performance, it necessarily requires others. In large part, she kills herself to punish them for driving her to it. The eager "peanut-crunching crowd" is invited but criticized for its voyeuristic impulse. The crowd could certainly be understood to include the reader himself, since he reads the poem to explore her dark impulses. She assumes that her voyeurs are significantly invested - they would pay the "large charge" to see her scars and heart. However, she imbues this impulse with a harsh criticism by comparing the crowd to the complacent Germans who stood aside while the Jews were thrown into concentration camps. Further, the crowd ultimately proves less an encouragement than a burden when they also attend the resurrection. She despises this second part of the process, and resents the presence of others at that time. Whether this creates a vicious circle, in which that resentment is partially responsible for the subsequent attempt, is implied but not explicitly stated. Critic Robert Bagg explores the speaker's contradictory feelings towards the crowd by writing that Plath "is not bound by any metaphysical belief in the self's limitations. Instead of resisting the self's antagonists she derives a tremendous thrill from throwing her imagination into the act of self-obliteration." She can destroy her body, but her imaginative self remains a performer, always aware of the effect she has on others. The poem can also be understood through a feminist lens, as a demonstration of the female artist's struggle for autonomy in a patriarchal society. Lynda K. Bundtzen writes that "the female creation of a male-artist god is asserting independent creative powers." From this perspective, "Lady Lazarus" is not merely a confessional poem detailing depressive feelings, but is also a statement on how the powerful male figure usurps Plath's creative powers but is defeated by her rebirth. Though Lady Lazarus knows that "Herr Doktor" will claim possession of her body and remains after forcing her suicide, she equally believes she will rise and "eat men like air." Her creative powers can be stifled momentarily, but will always return stronger. The poem can also be understood in a larger context, as a comment on the relationship between poet and audience in a society that, as Pamela Annas claims, has separated creativity and consumption. The crowd views Lady Lazarus/the poet/Plath as an object, and therefore does not recognize her as a human being. Plath reflects this through her multiple references to

body parts separated from the whole. From this interpretation, Lady Lazarus's suicide then becomes "an assertion of wholeness, an act of self-definition, and a last desperate act of contempt toward the peanut-crunching crowd." The only way she can keep herself intact is to destroy herself, and she does this rather than be turned into commodities. Though "Herr Docktor" will peruse her remains for commodities, she will not have been defeated because of her final act. As has often been the case in Plath's poems, the Holocaust imagery has drawn much attention from critics and readers. It is quite profuse in this poem. Lady Lazarus addresses a man as "Herr Dokter," "Herr Enemy," "Herr God," and "Herr Lucifer." She describes her face as a "Nazi lampshade" and as a"Jew linen." As previously described, one effect of these allusions is to implicate the reader, make him or her complicit in passive voyeurism by comparing him or her to the Germans who ignored the Holocaust. However, they also serve to establish the horrific atmosphere than be understood as patriarchy, as a society of consumers, or as simply cruel humans. No matter how one interprets the crowd in the poem, they complicate the poem's meaning so that it is a sophisticated exploration of the responsibility we have for each other's unhappiness, rather than simply a dire, depressive suicide note. Form and Meter Free Verse Tercets Those three-line stanzas, right? Those are called tercets, and "Lady Lazarus" is made up of twenty-eight of them. The tercets themselves are made up of short, chopped lines with a fair mix of enjambment and end-stopped lines. When you read them out loud, they move quickly and forcefully. It almost sounds like our speaker is biting or spitting her words out onto us. Gross, but true. Rhymes and Repetitions But the formal elements don't stop there. We've also got our fair share of perfect rhyme (like that of "beware," "hair," and "air" in the poem's final lines), and a ton of slant rhyme, too. Plus, there's the anaphora of lines like "I do it so it feels like hell," and "I do it so it feels real." While these various kinds of repetitions of sounds occur all over the place in "Lady Lazarus," they do not occur in a set pattern (the way rhymes occur in a poem like asonnet, for example). The rhymes thus have an off-kilter feel to them. The poem is fast and freewheeling and you never know when a rhyme or some other kind of repetition is going to pop off and smack you in the face. And really, these are some harsh rhymes that will smack you in the face. Sylvia does not play around. She's wielding all her poetry powers to express Lady Lazarus's anger and despair, and to show that death is the one arena of her life over which she seems to have control.

Speaker

The speaker of "Lady Lazarus" is Lady Lazarus herself, and in that sense, this poem almost reads like a monologue. Here's the lowdown on the star of our show: (1) She's extremely depressed, disturbed, and suicidal. (2) Her name references the figure of Lazarus from the Bible—a guy who died and was resurrected by Jesus. But there's no Lady L in the Bible; our Lady is Plath's creation. (3) Lady L is a whole lot like Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide not long after writing the poem by sticking her head in a gas oven. (4) Despite her similarities to Plath, it's important to remember that poems are not real life, and that Plath has gone out of her way in this poem to speak in the voice of Lady Lazarus— not in her own voice. Thus, it's key that we talk about Lady Lazarus when we discuss this poem, not Plath. While the poem may give us a tiny little window into Plath's feelings, we can't assume that we know her just because we've read one of her poems. Or that we know Lady L, just because we've got a bit of Plath's autobiography under our belts. (5) Lady Lazarus is one powerful lady. Despite all of her suffering, she seems to have serious control over the one thing that matters most to her—her language. She may often feel like a victim, but her words have serious bits. She ends the poem by "eat[ing] men like air." Go get 'em, Lady L. Setting The poem takes place in an imaginary space; Lady L doesn't tell us where she's speaking from, what's around her, or even if she's in any place at all. But throughout the poem, she evokes two main settings: the circus (or carnival—it's not clear which), and the Holocaust's concentration camps. The circus atmosphere is creepy enough, with its "peanut-crunching crowd" that undresses our speaker, but the concentration camp makes this look like child's play. In "Lady Lazarus," Plath describes the crematoriums that the Nazis used to burn Jews to death. She doesn't provide long descriptions, but she gives us just enough information—the ash, the wedding ring, a gold filling—to instill in us a sense of horror. And rightfully so. These are the objects left behind in the crematoriums; these are all that's left of the victims who have been burned to death. In other words, to make a long story short, Lady Lazarus takes us to a really dark place in this poem. Sound Check As we discussed in the "Form and Meter" section, "Lady Lazarus" is a pretty intense sounding poem. While it doesn't have a set rhyme or metrical scheme, there are tons of repeated sounds (like rhymes) all over this poem. Combine these frequent erratic rhymes with super short lines and you get a poem that launches surprise attack after surprise attack. Read it out loud, and you'll get the poem's full effect.

"I do it so it feels like hell": POW "I do it so it feels real": POW Reading "Lady Lazarus" is a whole lot like being completely mismatched in the boxing arena. Pow, pow, pow, the poem says. The poem's also got tons of internal rhymes (in phrases like "the grave cave ate"). This is powerful, punching language that makes us feel weak in comparison to the speaker. As Plath's readers, we are left whimpering in the corner, while she rises, like a phoenix, from any punch we might throw back. What's Up With the Title? "Lady Lazarus" is a poem spoken by—yup, that's right—Lady Lazarus. Lady Lazarus is a figment of Plath's imagination. There never was a real Lady L, no matter how hard you Google. But Plath was a smart cookie, and she used the name of her speaker as an allusion to Lazarus (from the Bible). Lazarus is a character from the Gospel of John who died and was resurrected by the one and only Jesus. The Bible doesn't give much detail about exactly what he looks like when he is raised, but the idea of someone who's been dead for four days suddenly coming back to life is kind of creepy and miraculous at the same time—just like it is in this poem, "Lady Lazarus." And like Lazarus, Lady L experiences death and returns from it, but unlike Lazarus, Lady L accomplishes this feat all on her own. She is in control of her own destiny—even if that destiny is another death. That's a bragging right that the original Lazarus can't claim. For more on Lady L, check out what we've got to say about her in the "Speaker" section. Calling Card Brutal Metaphors Plath's poetry is known for its brutal metaphors. Her Lady Lazarus is depressed, disturbed, and suicidal. The most direct way for Plath to impart to us the horror of Lady L's scenario is to make references to the Holocaust, the most horrific event of the twentieth century. Again and again, Lady Lazarus compares herself to Jewish victims of the Nazis. It takes a brave (or some might say, crazy) poet to elevate her speaker's suffering to the level of Holocaust victim, but Plath doesn't hold back. These intense, brutal, and unforgiving metaphors are the hallmark of Plath's poetry. Her poem "Daddy" deals with vampires and communicating with the dead, her poem"Mirror" disturbs readers with an image of an old woman as a fish deep in the water, and her poem called "Tulips" describes the flowers not as beautiful, but like terrifying, angry animals. We can count on Plath to take the everyday world and twist it in some terrifying way. LADY LAZARUS THEMES

Little Words, Big Ideas Death If we had to sum up "Lady Lazarus" in just one word, what do you think we'd say? The speaker is obsessed with death, both literal and figurative. She's attempted to commit suicide in the past, and... Violence "Lady Lazarus" is an undeniably violent poem. It's filled with mangled bodies, fierce circus crowds, and murderous Nazis. The best way that Lady Lazarus (and, for that matter, Sylvia Plath) can com... Suffering "Lady Lazarus" is full of fun times, huh? Oh wait. The big, controlling metaphor of the poem is Lady Lazarus's comparison of herself with the fate of the Jews who were slaughtered (all six million... "Daddy" Summary "Daddy," comprised of sixteen five-line stanzas, is a brutal and venomous poem commonly understood to be about Plath's deceased father, Otto Plath. The speaker begins by saying that he "does not do anymore," and that she feels like she has been a foot living in a black shoe for thirty years, too timid to either breathe or sneeze. She insists that she needed to kill him (she refers to him as "Daddy"), but that he died before she had time. She describes him as heavy, like a "bag full of God," resembling a statue with one big gray toe and its head submerged in the Atlantic Ocean. She remembers how she at one time prayed for his return from death, and gives a German utterance of grief (which translates literally to "Oh, you"). She knows he comes from a Polish town that was overrun by "wars, wars, wars," but one of her Polack friends has told her that there are several towns of that name. Therefore, she cannot uncover his hometown, where he put his "foot" and "root." She also discusses how she could never find a way to talk to him. Even before she could speak, she thought every German was him, and found the German language "obscene." In fact, she felt so distinct from him that she believed herself a Jew being removed to a concentration camp. She started to talk like a Jew and to feel like a Jew in several different ways. She wonders in fact, whether she might actually be a Jew, because of her similarity to a gypsy. To further emphasize her fear and distance, she describes him as the Luftwaffe, with a neat mustache and a bright blue Aryan eye. She calls him a "Panzer-man," and says he is less

like God then like the black swastika through which nothing can pass. In her mind, "Every woman adores a Fascist," and the "boot in the face" that comes with such a man. When she remembers Daddy, she thinks of him standing at the blackboard, with a cleft chin instead of a cleft foot. However, this transposition does not make him a devil. Instead, he is like the black man who "Bit [her] pretty red heart in two." He died when she was ten, and she tried to join him in death when she was twenty. When that attempt failed, she was glued back together. At this point, she realized her course - she made a model of Daddy and gave him both a "Meinkampf look" and "a love of the rack and the screw." She promises him that she is "finally through;" the telephone has been taken off the hook, and the voices can no longer get through to her. She considers that if she has killed one man, then she has in fact killed two. Comparing him to a vampire, she remembers how he drank her blood for a year, but then realizes the duration was closer to seven years. She tells him he can lie back now. There is a stake in his heart, and the villagers who despised him now celebrate his death by dancing on his corpse. She concludes by announcing, "Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I'm through." Analysis "Daddy" is perhaps Sylvia Plath's best-known poem. It has elicited a variety of distinct reactions, from feminist praise of its unadulterated rage towards male dominance, to wariness at its usage of Holocaust imagery. It has been reviewed and criticized by hundreds and hundreds of scholars, and is upheld as one of the best examples of confessional poetry. It is certainly a difficult poem for some: its violent imagery, invocation of Jewish suffering, and vitriolic tone can make it a decidedly uncomfortable reading experience. Overall, the poem relates Plath's journey of coming to terms with her father's looming figure; he died when she was eight. She casts herself as a victim and him as several figures, including a Nazi, vampire, devil, and finally, as a resurrected figure her husband, whom she has also had to kill. Though the final lines have a triumphant tone, it is unclear whether she means she has gotten "through" to him in terms of communication, or whether she is "through" thinking about him. Plath explained the poem briefly in a BBC interview: The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. The father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other –she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it. In other words, contradiction is at the heart of the poem's meaning. Neither its triumph nor its horror is to be taken as the sum total of her intention. Instead, each element is contradicted by its opposite, which explains how it shoulders so many distinct interpretations. This sense of contradiction is also apparent in the poem's rhyme scheme and organization. It uses a sort of nursery rhyme, singsong way of speaking. There are hard sounds, short lines, and repeated rhymes (as in "Jew," "through," "do," and "you"). This establishes and reinforces

her status as a childish figure in relation to her authoritative father. This relationship is also clear in the name she uses for him - "Daddy"- and in her use of "oo" sounds and a childish cadence. However, this childish rhythm also has an ironic, sinister feel, since the chant-like, primitive quality can feel almost like a curse. One critic wrote that the poem's "simplistic, insistent rhythm is one form of control, the obsessive rhyming and repeated short phrases are others, means by which she attempts to charm and hold off evil spirits." In other words, the childish aspects have a crucial, protective quality, rather than an innocent one. "Daddy" can also be viewed as a poem about the individual trapped between herself and society. Plath weaves together patriarchal figures – a father, Nazis, a vampire, a husband – and then holds them all accountable for history's horrors. Like "The Colossus," "Daddy" imagines a larger-than-life patriarchal figure, but here the figure has a distinctly social, political aspect. Even the vampire is discussed in terms of its tyrannical sway over a village. In this interpretation, the speaker comes to understand that she must kill the father figure in order to break free of the limitations that it places upon her. In particular, these limitations can be understood as patriarchal forces that enforce a strict gender structure. It has the feel of an exorcism, an act of purification. And yet the journey is not easy. She realizes what she has to do, but it requires a sort of hysteria. In order to succeed, she must have complete control, since she fears she will be destroyed unless she totally annihilates her antagonist. The question about the poem's confessional, autobiographical content is also worth exploring. The poem does not exactly conform to Plath's biography, and her above-cited explanation suggests it is a carefully-constructed fiction. And yet its ambivalence towards male figures does correspond to the time of its composition - she wrote it soon after learning that her husband Ted Hughes had left her for another woman. Further, the mention of a suicide attempt links the poem to her life. However, some critics have suggested that the poem is actually an allegorical representation of her fears of creative paralysis, and her attempt to slough off the "male muse." Stephen Gould Axelrod writes that "at a basic level, 'Daddy' concerns its own violent, transgressive birth as a text, its origin in a culture that regards it as illegitimate –a judgment the speaker hurls back on the patriarch himself when she labels him a bastard." The father is perceived as an object and as a mythical figure (many of them, in fact), and never really attains any real human dimensions. It is less a person than a stifling force that puts its boot in her face to silence her. From this perspective, the poem is inspired less by Hughes or Otto than by agony over creative limitations in a male literary world. However, even this interpretation begs something of an autobiographical interpretation, since both Hughes and her father were representations of that world. Plath's usage of Holocaust imagery has inspired a plethora of critical attention. She was not Jewish but was in fact German, yet was obsessed with Jewish history and culture. Several of her poems utilize Holocaust themes and imagery, but this one features the most striking and disturbing ones. She imagines herself being taken on a train to "Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen," and starting to talk like a Jew and feel like a Jew. She refers to her father as a "panzer-man," and notes his Aryan looks and his "Luftwaffe" brutality. One of the leading articles on this

topic, written by Al Strangeways, concludes that Plath was using her poetry to understand the connection between history and myth, and to stress the voyeurism that is an implicit part of remembering. Plath had studied the Holocaust in an academic context, and felt a connection to it; she also felt like a victim, and wanted to combine the personal and public in her work to cut through the stagnant double-talk of Cold War America. She certainly uses Holocaust imagery, but does so alongside other violent myths and history, including those of Electra, vampirism, and voodoo. Strangeways writes that, "the Holocaust assumed a mythic dimension because of its extremity and the difficulty of understanding it in human terms, due to the mechanical efficiency with which it was carried out, and the inconceivably large number of victims." In other words, its shocking content is not an accident, but is rather an attempt to consider how the 20th century's great atrocity reflects and escalates a certain human quality. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that any of Sylvia Plath's poems could leave the reader unmoved. "Daddy" is evidence of her profound talent, part of which rested in her unabashed confrontation with her personal history and the traumas of the age in which she lived. That she could write a poem that encompasses both the personal and historical is clear in "Daddy." Symbols, Imagery, Wordplay NAZIS AND THE HOLOCAUST Symbol Analysis The speaker indicates that her German father is like a Nazi, and that she is like a Jew. This is a very powerful metaphor for how the speaker feels like she is a victim of her father, or perhaps for how she feels about men in general. But she doesn't come right out and call him a Nazi. Instead, she uses metaphors, imagery, and subtle wordplay to show us that he's like a Nazi. Lines 29-35: Here, the speaker uses a train engine as a metaphor for the German language, which her father speaks. The train is taking the speaker to a concentration camp, like the Jews were during the Holocaust, which is ametaphor for how she feels that she is a victim of her father. Line 42: "Luftwaffe" means air force in German, and specifically refers to the German air force of World War II. By using German, the speaker is remaining subtle in her metaphorical incrimination of her father as Nazi. She says that he is connected to the German air force, not that he's a Nazi straight-out. Lines 43-44: Here, the speaker uses imagery to build the metaphor that her father is a Nazi. The neat mustache is an allusion (a subtle reference) to Hitler's mustache. The bright blue Aryan eyes refer to the Nazi's ideal race of people. Line 45: The German word for a tank is "panzer," and the men who manned German army tanks were called "Panzermen," so this reference goes along with "Luftwaffe." The use of German subtly connects the speaker's father with Nazi Germany.

Lines 46-47: Here the connection with Nazis becomes more blatant. The speaker's father changes from one metaphor – being like God – to another – being a swastika, the symbol of Nazism. Line 47 is an example of hyperbole, or extreme exaggeration – the swastika is not just black, but so black it blots out the sky. Line 48: Fascists, including the Nazis, are known to be tyrannical and cruel. Doesn't sound like something anyone would love, much less something every women loves. Line 65: Here, we've moved from connecting the speaker's father to the Nazis to connecting the model of him – the speaker's husband – to Hitler. Mein Kampf is a book written by Hitler, so saying that this man has a Meinkampflook is an allusion to Hitler. VAMPIRES Symbol Analysis At the end of this poem, the metaphor for the speaker's father and husband, and potentially all men, shifts from Nazis to vampires. These men go from being depicted as living horrors to undead horrors. We know that the speaker's father is dead, so it's super creepy to think that he's come back to haunt her as a vampire. Lines 72-74: Here, the speaker blatantly calls her husband a vampire. At first, we think this is just a simple metaphor – if you're really angry at someone, using the word "vampire" would be mean, but not terribly creepy. But then the metaphor is extended. The vampire has sucked the narrator's blood for seven years, probably the length of their marriage. This is a vivid metaphor for the pain that their relationship must have caused the speaker. Lines 76-79: Here, the vampire metaphor is transferred from the model of the father to the father himself, who has died a vampire's death, with a stake through his heart. The metaphorical villagers, who probably stand for the speaker's friends or emotions, always knew that the father was a vampire, so they're dancing on his dead body. SIZE Symbol Analysis The speaker in this poem describes herself as small, and her father as immense. But for the most part she doesn't just come out and say so: she shows us with imagery and metaphors. This adds to the feel that the speaker is the victim in this poem, and makes her father seem more looming and scary. Lines 1-5: These lines contain a metaphor comparing the speaker's father to a shoe in which she lives. She doesn't really live in a shoe, but uses this metaphor to show us how trapped she feels by the memories of her father. The speaker, then, is small enough to live inside a shoe, and her father, as a metaphorical shoe, is big enough for someone to live in. Lines 9-11: These lines make the father seem huge. The speaker is using themetaphor of a statue to describe her father, but this is no ordinary statue – it stretches across the entire

United States! But the speaker doesn't say this plainly – she has to use lots of other figurative language within this metaphor. Saying that her father's toe is as big as a San Francisco seal is an example ofsimile, because of the use of the word "as." Then, she uses imagery to show us that the statue's head is all the way over in the Atlantic. COMMUNICATION Symbol Analysis If a fan of Cool Hand Luke, a classic movie starring Paul Newman, took a look at this poem, she'd probably quote the film and say, "What we have here is failure to communicate." As we have seen, the speaker has a hard time talking to her father, and eventually stops trying. Yet, this entire poem is addressed to the speaker's father; with 80 lines, it seems she desperately wants to say something to him. But, remember, her father is dead, so there's no way she could possibly get through to him. The knowledge that her father will never read this poem is probably what enables the speaker to write it. We won't analyze every time the speaker addresses her father because that would be the entire poem, but we'll take a look at specific instances where she expresses trouble communicating. Lines 6, 51, 68, 75, 80: The use of the name "Daddy" in these lines is an example of apostrophe, or direct address to a person who is absent. Line 14: Prayer, as shown in this line, is a way of communicating with God, which is what this speaker is trying to do to get her father back. But it doesn't work – she "used to" pray, but doesn't anymore. Lines 24-28: Here, the speaker tells us straight-up that she could never talk to her father – we're guessing she means while he was alive. We get a couple cool metaphors here. The first is that the speaker's tongue gets stuck in her jaw, which is a metaphor for being unable to talk. But then we get a metaphor for the metaphor – the jaw turns into a barbed wire snare. In line 27, "Ich, ich, ich, ich," is not just repetition, but onomatopoeia, which means the words sound like what they are trying to get across, which is stammering. This line sounds like someone who was trying to speak German while her tongue was in a snare. Lines 68-70: The communication has now been terminated. These lines picture communication in a pretty cool way, though. The metaphor here is comparing the telephone to a plant – the phone is cut off at the root, and voices are like worms. It's as if there's a metaphorical telephone plant growing on her father's grave, with roots instead of wires. But it's uprooted now.

Form and Meter Free Verse Quintains Free verse means that there is no set pattern of rhythm or rhyme, and a quintain is a five-line stanza. There are 16 quintains breaking up this long poem.

Even though there is no specific rhyme scheme in "Daddy," there are a lot of end and internal rhymes. The end rhyme started with the first line, which ended in "do," and is repeated often, all the way to the last line, which ends in "through." The oo sound is overwhelming; just look at stanza 10, which ends in these two lines: The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you. This poem is held together by sound as much as meaning, and rhymes and repetition can be found throughout. Just like rhyme plays a big part in this poem without having a specific scheme, rhythm is important here even though it doesn't fit into a specific pattern. There is a lot of iambic verse, which means that the line is patterned by unstressed syllables followed by stressed syllables. Let's look at line 1 as an example (the stressed syllables are bold and italic): You do not do, you do not do. While this iambic rhythm is not carried throughout the poem regularly, it pops up every now and then, making this feel lilting and rhythmic, but not over-the-top singsong-y. Speaker Usually we're super-strict about keeping the speaker of a poem separate from the author of a poem. After all, poets often create fictional personas who they imagine to be speaking their work – not everything they write down is what they personally believe. But the line between the real-life Sylvia Plath and the speaker of "Daddy" is blurry. Plath's poetry is usually considered to be part of the Confessional movement, and "Daddy" certainly reads like a personal confession. Plath's father was a German immigrant, like the father in the poem. He died when she was young (eight years old), though not quite the same age as in the poem (ten years old). Plath, similar to the speaker in the poem, tried to commit suicide. Plath was married to her husband for about seven years when she wrote this poem, and the speaker's husband sucked her blood for seven years. Despite these similarities, the speaker in this poem is different from Plath, as the characters of the speaker's father and husband are different from Plath's own father and husband. She has made herself, and them, into characters. Common sense and fact tell us that Plath's father was not really a Nazi, and her husband was not a vampire. We can guess how Plath may have felt about her husband and father, but we shouldn't take anything about her relationships with these two men as fact from this poem. Sure, this poem may reflect how Plath felt at the moment she was writing this poem, but it would be unfair to make generalized conclusions about her relationships from it. One of the main benefits of writing poetry rather than, say, a memoir, is that it doesn't have to be non-fiction. You can

stretch the truth in poetry, as Plath does in this poem. The speaker is a persona that Plath created so that she could write a poem that may be based on her life, but isn't trapped by having to stick to the literal truth. Besides, if this poem were simply autobiographical, we'd miss out on all the other cool meanings that it could have – like "Daddy" being a metaphor for men in general, or a symbol of evil in the world. So, now that we know the speaker is different from Plath, well, who exactly is she? She's a tortured woman, who lost her father when she was so young that he seemed huge and powerful, like God. Memories of him have caused her pain – they've made her want to die. When dying doesn't work, the speaker tries to find a husband just like her father. Her playful rhythm and rhyme juxtapose with the desperation and violence of her language, to make her words poisonous to these two men and their power over her. This poem is like a stake in the heart of her disturbing memories – by the end of the poem, she has killed them. Setting This poem shifts settings and most of them are metaphorical. So, instead of being in an actual place, we're taken from place to place in the speaker's mind. The setting in her mind starts out as the black shoe in which the speaker claims to live, but which is actually a metaphor for her father. Then it moves to encompass the whole of the United States, mentioning San Francisco seals and the beautiful waters of a Massachusetts beach. This setting seems like it should be beautiful, but then we remember that there's a statue of the speaker's dead father across the entire United States, and that's pretty creepy. Then we move to a place that is in Poland, but where German is spoken, that seems to be the place from which the speaker's father emigrated. We hear that this town has been destroyed by war, and the beauty of the beach from earlier in the poem is lost to the desolation of battle. But, since this town has a common name (which we never hear), we can't know which specific town the speaker is talking about. Then, the poem is in Germany, but jumps back in time to World War II, and the speaker is on a train across the German countryside. She's headed to a concentration camp. Perhaps on the train, she sees the mountains of the Tyrol range, at the border of Austria and Italy, and thinks of Vienna, in Austria. We hear a lot about World War II – there are air forces, tanks, and her father turns into a Hitler-like character. There's even a swastika that blots out the sky. This part of the setting is sinister. We get a brief break from the sinister setting, and are taken into the speaker's father's classroom. But just when we've caught our breath, we jump right back into a dark setting. This time, though, we're not just somewhere in history – we're somewhere mystical. There are devils, telephones with roots, and vampires. This is the kind of place where it's possible to put the bones of a dead person back together with glue.

By the end of the poem, we're in a village – which, potentially, is just a part of this same devilish place. The villagers are celebrating the death of a vampire, which gives us an idea of the kind of small town this is – full of suspicion and mysticism. So, courtesy of our speaker's dark imagination, we've journeyed from the US to Germany, then back in time to World War II, and then even farther, to a mystical time when villagers believed in vampires. Sound Check This poem sounds like a dark, disturbing nursery rhyme. Violence has never before sounded so playful. But the playfulness – the rhythmic lilting and over-the-top rhyme – makes the violence even creepier. This is the kind of nursery rhyme that the speaker's evil father would have sung to her. There's a lot of rhyme in this poem even though it has no formal rhyme scheme. Oosounds completely overwhelm this poem, but instead of being comforting, like they would be in a nursery rhyme, they're suffocating. They're so thick they drown the reader. Here's a quick tour of this poem's oo sounds: "do," "shoe," "achoo," "you," "blue," "du," "two," "root," "Jew," "true," "goo," "boot," and "brute" – and that's not even the whole poem, and it doesn't count repetition. All of this gushing oo makes this poem seem more disturbing than a nursery rhyme – it's not a bedtime story, but a howl in the night. What's Up With the Title? The title "Daddy" sets this up as an address to the speaker's father. Even though the word "daddy" is only used six other times in this 80-line poem, since the poem is titled "Daddy," we can guess from the start who "you" is in this poem. It's important, though, that the poem is titled "Daddy" and not "Father," or even "Dad." "Daddy" is an affectionate name, one that a child would call her father when she's being cute, or when she wants something, like ice cream, or soda, or a pony. Also, little girls who are their fathers' pets are often referred to as "Daddy's little girl." So it's ironic that he speaker uses the word "Daddy" to address the father that she has characterized as a Nazi, devil, and vampire. But the title isn't the only part of this poem that doesn't quite match the violent images of the speaker's father – the related "sound" of the poem is as contrast as well. It seems to us that the title "Daddy" fits with the singsong rhyme and other childish aspects of this poem, like the word "gobbledygoo" in line 42. But this playfulness, paired with the violence she describes, shows us the speaker's internal struggle between loving and hating her deceased father. Calling Card

Playful Violence Plath sometimes uses such playful language, rhythm, and rhyme that you'd think you were reading a nursery rhyme. But don't be tricked – her singsong writing is not about nursery rhyme topics, but about life, death, femininity, and depression – serious, tragic matters. Plath's not afraid to tackle disturbing topics, and the playfulness of her language makes the oftenviolent images in her poetry more shocking.

Ted Hughes “Wind” Overview As 'Wind' is about the power of the forces of the natural world it can be used in an essay with any other of the poems.It is an excellent poem to use because there is so much to say about it. In this poem, Hughes describes some extreme weather conditions; namely a wind that reaches toward hurricane force. The poem starts with the house,moves outside to describe how the landscape is affected by the wind, and then in the final stanza returns back to the house. Hughes manages to create in this poem a tremendous dramatic picture ofa landscape attacked by extreme weather. There are many images of the power and violence of the storm-wind. For instance, in the second stanza,Hughes imagines the wind as being like some huge AngloSaxon warrior: 'Wind wielded blade-light.' In our modern homes we can feel pretty protected and distant form nature. And perhaps this can make us a little arrogant about environmental issues. In this poem, Hughes tries to reconnect us to nature and show how vulnerable we actually are to environmental catastrophe. But as well as being frightening and awesome,the wind is also creative; it breaks things apart but this allows them tobe re-created, or seen afresh. Even the 'hills had new places.' If you have ever stood high-up somewhere exposed on a windy day you will know the feeling you get of a strong wind, clearing your head, blowing out the cobwebs and generally freshening things up. The wind in this poem has a similar effect. Its capacity to control, shape,change and create things makes it a possible metaphor for creativity, forwriting, for the inspiration that energises the poet. It is a terrific poem. So just enjoy listening to it, concentrating hardon hearing and feeling and seeing the images...

Many of the words and lines and images in the poem create a sense of danger. 'The woods crashing through darkness', for instance, makes us hear the panic and destruction unleashed by the storm-wind. 'The booming hills'may make us think of explosions, of bombs and detonations, or of a warning drum, perhaps. Either way, it is as if the hills are being blown apart in some kind of war. Poetic technics Hughes' poem is packed with imagery. Almost every line contains a vivid, dramatic image. For instance, the first line 'This house has been far out at sea all night', contains a sort of hidden simile or metaphor. If the house has been out to sea it must be like a boat. The simple words 'far out' and 'all night' are also powerfully suggestive in this context. A boat far out at sea during a terrible storm, is isolated and in considerable danger. 'All night' suggests that the house/boat has had to endure the worst of the storm-wind for what seemed to the occupants a very long time. Think of being awake 'all night' to get a sense of how long that can seem to be. The effect is to convey just how powerful, intense, prolonged and dangerousthis storm-wind must have been to make a solid house feel like a ship all at sea. A similar effect is worked in the line 'And feel the roots of the house move' in the final stanza. Here the house is compared to a tree to convey the fact that the wind seems to have got under Hughes' home and made it vulnerable, as if it might be ripped out, uprooted from its environment. The work of man is shown to be no more secure than any other part of nature. Hughes' sensual imagery makes us experience the poem. Drag and drop the three icons onto the relevant quotes in the poem: As well as the sensual imagery, there is a number of key metaphors and similes in the poem... In the exam you would only need to pick out a few of the key images.The bulk of marks go for your analysis of their effect. Form Like 'Hawk Roosting', 'Wind' is written in six, four line stanzas. However, the flow of the poem is very different. Where many lines in 'Hawk Roosting' stop at the end of the line, with a full stop, Hughes uses enjambment in Wind. Enjambment is when sentences, in poems,run over the end of one line and into the next one(s). In 'Wind' lines spill into each other and the end of one stanza runs into the start of the next.This effect is enhanced by Hughes's punctuation: In 'HR' Hughes uses 14 full stops or colons. Click the correct answer to the question below:

Together, the enjambment, punctuation and the varying line lengths create the sense of movement and energy in the poem, as if everything, even the poem, has become slightly unfixed by the power of the wind. The enjambment also allows Hughes to create effects such as the isolation of the words 'The house' at the end of the fourth stanza. These two small words seem to hang, exposed perilously, at the end of the line. The irregular rhyme scheme is like an attempt to order and control the poem, and the wind. But the wind is bursting with energy and cannot be restrained by either the order of the stanzas, or by the control of a rhyme scheme. Image:

Effect:

As in 'Hawk Roosting' Hughes uses here the device of changing the 'The tent of the hills size and scale of things. So in order to convey the force of the wind drummed and strained Hughes reduces something as massive and permanent as a range of its guy-rope.' 'hills' to something as flimsy and vulnerable as a 'tent'. 'The house/ Rang like some fine green goblet The same technique works here where a solid house is made to feel in the note/ That any as fragile as a fine glass. second would shatter it.' There is a lot going on in these two lines. First the wind is personified as a kind of casual God throwing away what it rejects (the magpie). 'The wind flung a In the second half of the line a simile is used to compare a gull to an magpie away and a iron bar. And the sound of the lines is muscular; the rhythm is like a black-/ back gull bent tongue twister. Working together they imitate the physical bending of like an iron bar slowly.' the gull. Alliteration, rhyme, and single syllables combine to create this physical effect. It is as if the line itself is being twisted and bent. The stones here are personified. As have been the woods, the fields (quivering), the sky (a grimace) wind, and the windows (tremble). It 'Hearing the stones cry is as if the whole landscape is alive and suffering from the ground to out under the horizons.' the sky. The personification also blurs the distinction between the human and 'natural' world?. It reconnects us with our environment.

Subject The poem is about how extreme weather can make even modern man feel frightened and vulnerable and part of the natural environment. The wind may be a metaphor for the power of creativity.

Attitude The wind is frightening, but the tone of the poem is one full of excitement, awe, and anticipation. Hughes isn't criticising the wind. Although perhaps he is a criticising human for forgetting how powerful nature can be. Style The poem is packed with sensual imagery, metaphor, simile, and personification. Every line has a strong, vivid image in it. The form of the poem, the fluid lines and stanzas matches the way the wind moves the landscape. Analysis: ‘Wind’ is one of Ted Hughes’ most formidable poems, showing an entirely different aspect to this element. Unlike many other poets such as John Clare (‘A Morning Breeze’), Hughes is not concerned with describing the beauty and serenity of a balmy breeze; his aim is solely to communicate the relentless, godly strength and power of the wind that he knows from stormy days on the moors of the Pennines, using pathetic fallacy as the main device to describe both the wind and its victims. In the first of six four-line stanzas, Hughes describes the tempestuous night that has passed. The opening line is both simple but striking, comparing a solid house to a flimsy boat that has been tossed and smashed in a sea gale, with the words ‘far out’ and ‘all night’ suggesting the house is marooned in isolation. Like terrified, panicked animals, the woods have been ‘crashing through darkness’ while the hills are ‘booming’ with the thunderous sound of the wind. Personification is used to convey its almighty, dangerous power: it was ‘stampeding the fields’ while the land was futilely ‘floundering’ in the ‘blinding wet’. The oceanic metaphor continues, conjuring up an image of a night mastered by the storm that rages through the dark. However, the beginning of the second verse is misleading: ‘till day rose’ indicates that finally the storm is over, whereas, in fact, the ensuing chaos is almost more intense, undiluted by the rain that saturates the first four lines. No longer black, the sky has now adopted the unnatural, ominous colour of orange, and as a consequence of the previous night, the ‘hills had new places’: the wind is so powerful that it has the ability to alter the very landscape it rules. It is also armed and ready to do battle with the earth again with renewed vigour, demonstrated by the martial image ‘wind wielded bladelight.’ Imagining the wind as an Anglo-Saxon warrior, Hughes shows that it has harnessed the power of light to its weaponry, and conveys a crazed frenzy. It is as though the wind even has a face, with the ‘black and emerald’ the colours of its pupil and iris. However, they are ‘luminous’, and the light from its wild face is ‘flexing like the lens of a mad eye’: a surreal concept conveying brilliantly the strange light and unpredictability in the aftermath of a storm. The third stanza opens with the line, ‘at noon, I scaled along the house side’, as Hughes continues with the metaphor of the house as a boat. Inching along the wall for protection, he

reaches ‘as far as the coal house door’; by starting a new line after ‘as far as’, Hughes creates an exaggerated climax before recording the small distance that he actually managed to navigate. This first-person perspective is most effective in conveying the poet’s vulnerability. Hunched and stooped, he dares to look up just once, and immediately the balls of his eyes feel ‘dented’ by the ‘brunt wind’. This shocking sensory image of an eyeball being violently assaulted by a hard object conveys the brute force of the wind. The internal rhyme of ‘dented’ and ‘tent’ adds to the harsh, metallic feel of the verse, continuing with ‘the tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope’. Not only is the physical shape of the curved landscape depicted, this metaphorical image of movement shows the inescapable wind as being almost within the earth, its formidable power nearly snapping the ropes that anchor the hills to the ground. In the literal and figurative ‘the fields quivering’, Hughes shows not only the rippling appearance of the land, but personifies it as well: previously, the fields were stampeded by the wind, now they tremble in submission and distress. The sky too is mastered by the wind, with an arresting description of the shape of the horizon as a ‘grimace’, wincing in fear and pain. This is followed by the onomatopoeic, ‘bang and vanish with a flap’: such is the nature of these words that they demand to be read quickly and suddenly, demonstrating the unpredictable state of the land at the merciless hands of the wind, and the upheaval and tension it causes. With careless ease, the wind ‘flung a magpie away’: it is personified as it hurls a bird as thoughtlessly as a human might a discarded object. ‘Flung’ also indicates a temper. In contrast to the rapid pace of this stanza, the reader is then forced to slow down with the monosyllabic ‘black-back gull bent like an iron bar slowly’, which links closely with the image being described, as the assonantal rhythm mirrors the meaning. Material is of no consequence to the wind, as it easily alters the shape of both metal and earth, and nature is helpless in the face of the wind’s demented onslaught. ‘The house’ is deliberately placed in the stanza above the rest of its sentence to create impact for the opening of the next verse, as it matches the harsh assonance of sounds of ‘iron’ and ‘slowly’. It also sits alone, perilously exposed. The wind has now reached a frequency so powerful that it could shatter Hughes’ home like ‘a fine green goblet’, showing that compared to the wind, mere bricks and mortar are extremely delicate and fragile. The wind has again reached inside its subjects: before, it threatened to burst from within the hills; now, it howls inside the house at a frequency that could shatter glass. There is a sense of urgency and tension in the words ‘any second would shatter it’, with Hughes and his house now in immediate danger. Despite the reassurance of being ‘deep in chairs’ by a ‘great fire’, this is no match for the wind, and Hughes and his family are uneasy and unsettled by its presence. It has invaded their minds, for they ‘cannot entertain book, though, or each other.’ Instead, they sit brooding, watching the fire while they ‘feel the roots of the house move’. There is no security to be found, and again, the house is in danger of being hurled away, and shifts to rearrange its position in the earth. The windows not only tremble with the force of the wind that hammers them, but are personified as afraid, desperate to seek shelter within the walls of the house. In the concluding lines, they hear the ‘stones cry out under the horizons’: even the prehistoric

stones are weeping in desperation at the cruel havoc caused by the wind. Hughes uses enjambement to create fluidity much like the flow of the wind, although there is no regular rhyme pattern, showing that its inexhaustible energy cannot be limited. Hughes portrays how its sheer elemental force masters the land, sky, light, fire and stones in an assault of sense images which reflect its immeasurable rage. However, the tone is not one of criticism, but of awe at its power. He also highlights the insignificance of man compared to such strength, with the personification serving to blur the line between nature and humanity, as all are helpless in the face of the wind. “Examination at the Womb-Door” Hughes' Styles of Writing Ted Hughes' creatively uses myths in his writing and descriptive animal life and nature. Hughes' attitude to animals was a direct and self-conscious one, and he did not see them as strange or alien as like creatures. A lot of his poetry reflects many of the things that have happened in his life, and expresses a lot of the feelings Hughes has felt. He was enchanted by the beauty of the natural world, frequently portraying its cruel and savage temperament in his work as a reflection of his own personal suffering and mystical beliefs. His poems express much intensity, precise observation, and power. Hughes’ early poetry is emotionally intense and features elaborate imagery and natural settings. He wrote the verse/drama “Orghast” in an invented language and expressed his increasing interest in mythology especially in his poems "Crow” (1970), “Cave Birds” (1975), and “Season Songs” (1976). He also mixed mythology with romance in“Wodwo” (1967). He was a large contributor and leader in mythical poems. He turned his real life feelings and situations into mythical poems especially when his first and second wife die. Ted Hughes’ poems usually reflected his life and what was going on in it at the time. This poem was clearly written after Ted’s wives had killed themselves. Ted Hughes used to write about love and compassion up until the loves of his life took their own lives. He became dark and dismal, and it reflected in his works. In this poem, Ted seems to be describing how death has taken over his life. He says death rules over every part of our body; it even rules over life itself. I think Ted was feeling in a state of great mourn when he was writing this. Ted, however, shows that he is strong when he says that he is stronger than death. He is alive, and has overcome the death in his life of his wives. Ted Hughes also throws in some things about nature which reflects in a great deal of his works. He talks about the rainy, stony earth, and space. In an analysis of this poem done by Oscar Fernandez Adria, however, it was said that it is important to look at Ted's beliefs and his created mythology. His concept of death was taken from Buddhism and Sufism, which believed that the soul was immortal. It believed in reincarnation and predestination. In reading this analysis, I feel like it is evident that Ted feels that one's soul revives another body. When he says that death takes over all of you, I think he is implying the rebirth of a person. Titles  Examination at the Womb-Door refers to a test and the place where it is taken. The Dead refers to those who do not live anymore.

Examination at the Womb-Door shows us, through a question-answer structure, that Death owns everything in life but man itself. The Dead presents how death acts on people and how dead people act when dead. Both poets, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, create each one his and her own view of this universal fact and explain it with particular different words. Ted Hughes in Examination at the Womb-Door uses – as said before – a questionanswer structure to create this poem because it is – as the title states – an ‘exam’. Here someone – maybe the author himself, maybe not – makes the examination asking for the one ‘who owns’ (line 1 to line 5; line 13 and line 14) all human aspects – see ‘feet’ (L1), ‘face’ (L2), ‘lungs’ (L3), ‘muscles’ (L4), ‘guts’ (L5), ‘brains’ (L6), ‘blood’ (L7), ‘eyes’ (L8) and ‘tongue’ (L9) – and who is also the one that possesses control over time and space, ‘who owns the whole rainy, stony earth?’ (L13) and ‘all of space’ (L14). This one human-like character is ‘Death’ (line 1 to line 10; line 13 and line 14). In The Dead, Death is not personified but it is the atmosphere that surrounds the whole poem’s situation. It is the settlement and the creator of the ‘dead men’ (L3) that are ‘lulled in the ample womb of the full-tilt globe’ (L4). Death appears to make men ‘want no proud paternal kingdom come’ (L6) and ‘They seek only oblivion’ (L8), instead of feeling ‘stronger that Death’ (L19) as it appears in Hughes’s poem. In Examination at the Womb-Door the one who is taking the exam seems to be a ‘Crow’ (L21) which ‘passes’ – see line 21 – the exam. This animal – the crow – has been considered by some critics as a symbol of mankind, which “has many characteristics in common with Man” (Skea) in Ted Hughes’ poetry. So Hughes considers men stronger than Death ‘evidently’ (L20). In this case, in Plath’s poem The Dead we find the image of the immortal men represented in the ‘spiritual Caesars’ (L5) which are none of the dead. So both poets deal with the consciousness of humanity and immortality in their poems and they do it so in different ways; Ted Hughes believes in the ‘superman’ who is stronger than Death whereas Sylvia Plath states that ‘these bone shanks will not wake immaculate to trumpettoppling dawn of doomstruck day’ (lines 10&11). They lay ‘forever in colossal sleep’ (L12). Both poets talk about immortality; Ted Hughes affirms that the ‘Crow’ (L21) is stronger than Death whereas Sylvia Plath assumes tht nothing can ‘cry them – the dead – up’ (L13) ‘from their fond, final, infamous decay’ (L14). Neither Ted Hughes nor Sylvia Plath uses the first person. They both talk about a third person – singular in Ted’s poem ‘owns’ (line 1 to line 6; lines 13 & 14) and ‘is’ (lines 15, 16 &19); and plural in Sylvia’s poem ‘they’ (lines 6, 7, 8 &12), ‘them’ (L13) and ‘their’ (L14). Ted Hughes uses strong, heavy hearing adjectives to describe Death, such as ‘scrawny’ (L1), ‘bristly scorched’ (L2), ‘unspeakable’ (L5) or ‘messy’ (L7) while, on the other hand, Sylvia Plath puts some soft, kinder hearing nouns and adjectives to describe the ‘ dead men’

(L3) – ‘in holy robes’ (L2), ‘render love’ (L3), ‘lulled’ (L4), ‘paternal’ (L6), ‘goodly loam’ (L9), ‘cradled’ (L9), ‘immaculate’ (L10), ‘loll’ (L12) and ‘angels’ (L13). There is only a moment in Ted Hughes’ poem where the first person appears. It is in line 20 with ‘Me, evidently’. The presence of this pronoun associated to what is said by the ‘crow’ – a male symbol – allows the reader to think that the writer of the text is likely to be a man. However, in Plath’s poem, the absence of pronouns such as ‘we’, ‘our’ or ‘us’ joined to the use of adjectives related to childhood – such as ‘lulled’ (L4), ‘cradled’ (L9) or ‘immaculate’ (L10) – may allow us to think the poet could be a woman. Finally, none of the poems has a rhyme scheme; both are free verses. Moreover, only Sylvia Plath uses the external structure of the sonnet to create her poem whereas Ted Hughes uses a complete free-dialogic structure. “Crow” Neil Roberts (Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield and Special Professor of D.H. Lawrence Studies at the University of Nottingham) introduces Ted Hughes's 'masterpiece'. Crow holds a uniquely important place in Hughes oeuvre. It heralds the ambitious second phase of his work, lasting roughly from the late sixties to the late seventies, when he turned from direct engagement with the natural world to unified mythical narratives and sequences. It was his most controversial work: a stylistic experiment which abandoned many of the attractive features of his earlier work, and an ideological challenge to both Christianity and humanism. Hughes wrote Crow, mostly between 1966 and 1969, after a barren period following the death of Sylvia Plath. He looked back on the years of work on Crow as a time of imaginative freedom and creative energy, which he felt that he never subsequently recovered. He describedCrow as his masterpiece (Hughes, BL 10200). This creative period was brought to an end by another tragedy: the deaths of Assia Wevill and her daughter Shura in March 1969. While he was working on Crow Hughes’s conception of the project was much larger than the eventually published book. He was trying to write what he called an epic folk-tale, a prose narrative with interspersed verses. When, after the deaths of Assia and Shura, he was unable to complete the project, he published a selection of the poems with the title Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow in 1970. This was the book that was received as Crow by its first readers, and that was more hotly debated than any other book of Hughes’s till Birthday Letters. But over the years it became clear that Crow was not a clearly-defined text like Hughes’s other books. In 1972 it was reprinted with seven additional poems. The following year a limited edition was published with three more poems. As late as 1997 he recorded a version that included several poems that had been published in other collections, and omitted several that had been published in Crow. This recording includes brief narrative links. Whenever he gave a public reading fromCrow Hughes would provide a narrative context, and several times he expressed a desire to complete the work as originally conceived. However, the narrative context that Hughes made

public is itself fragmentary and mostly desultory. There are only two fully developed episodes. One, which Hughes titled in draft ‘The Quarrel in Heaven’, is the beginning of the story. After completing his Creation God had a nightmare in the form of a Hand and a Voice. The nightmare mocks His Creation, especially God’s masterpiece Man. At the same time, an emissary comes from the world begging God to take life back, because it is unbearable. God’s response is to challenge the nightmare to do better, and the consequence is that the nightmare creates Crow, who becomes God’s companion, often trying unsuccessfully to improve on His Creation. Hughes describes Crow as wandering around the universe in search of his female Creator. In the second developed episode he meets a hag by a river. He has to carry the hag across the river while trying to answer questions that she puts to him, mostly about love. Hughes describes several of the poems, particularly ‘Lovesong’, ‘The Lovepet’ and ‘Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days’ (part of Cave Birds but included in Hughes’s recording of Crow) as Crow’s attempts to answer these questions. When he reaches the other side of the river the hag turns into a beautiful girl. For some critics, notably Keith Sagar, Crow is the abortion of a great work, and has been misinterpreted, mainly because, as the first edition stated, The Life and Songs of the Crow covers only the first two thirds of Crow’s journey, bringing him to his lowest point, whereas the narrative had been designed to conclude with Crow’s triumphant marriage to his Creator (Sagar, Laughter, xii). However, it is arguable that the published book owes much of its success to its unfinished, undecidable and provocative character. The jacket of early editions of Crow was illustrated by a striking drawing by Hughes’s friend, the American artist Leonard Baskin. Seeing Baskin’s drawings of crows had inspired Hughes to embark on the sequence but, in contrast to later books such as Cave Birds and Under the North Star, Baskin was not involved in the development of the project. The most important influence on Crow is Trickster mythology. Paul Radin says of the Trickster, ‘he became and remained everything to every man—god, animal, human being, hero, buffoon, he who was before good and evil, denier, affirmer, destroyer and creator’ (Radin, The Trickster, 169). This captures perfectly Crow’s own ambivalent identity. You can see his Trickster character in a poem such as ‘A Childish Prank’, where he remedies God’s failure to animate man and woman by biting the Worm in two: He stuffed into man the tail half With the wounded end hanging out He stuffed the had half headfirst into woman And it crept in deeper and up To peer out through her eyes… Is Crow’s invention of sexuality clever and resourceful, or crass and foolish? The shock that poems like this caused when first published was intensified by the style, epitomised by phrases

like ‘stuffed into man the tail half’, which Hughes at the time described as a ‘super-simple, super-ugly language’ (Faas, Universe, 208). He seemed to be assaulting religion and poetry simultaneously. By adopting this narrative style Hughes implicitly identifies himself with his protagonist. At the core of Crow is a group of poems, including this one, which re-accent the story of the Creation, the Fall (‘Apple Tragedy’), the Crucifixion (‘Crow Blacker than Ever’). But the book is not merely an attack on Christianity. The figure and style of Crow gave Hughes a means of ranging widely across Western civilisation within a loosely unified sequence. He placed himself explicitly in a tradition of primitive literature (Hughes, Letters, 296) especially through his use of Trickster mythology, but also by drawing of a wide range of folktales and oral devices such as repetition. But Crow is not merely a primitive pastiche: like much of the greatest modernist art, primitive motifs are combined with a vivid contemporaneity, often to powerful emotional effect: And mouths cried ‘Mamma’ From sudden traps of calculus, Theorems wrenched men in two, Shock-severed eyes watched blood Squandering as if from a drainpipe… (‘Crow’s Account of the Battle’) The other influence that Hughes acknowledged was that of contemporary Eastern European poetry, such as that of Miroslav Holub, Zbigniew Herbert, Janos Pilinszky and above all Vasko Popa, and its witness of the atrocities that defined much of the twentieth century. In Hughes’s own words these poets ‘managed to grow up to a view of the unaccommodated universe’ with ‘all their sympathies intact’ and ‘the simple animal courage of accepting the odds’ (Hughes, Winter Pollen, 222). In measuring himself by writers such as these he made his most important claim to be considered not merely a national but a European and even world poet. Neil Roberts is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield and Special Professor of D.H. Lawrence Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Ted Hughes: A Literary Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and co-author of Ted Hughes: A Critical Study (Faber, 1981). He has recently completed a biography of Peter Redgrove, to be published by Cape in January 2012. The poem, ‘Theology’(Wodwo p.l49), introduces into Hughes’ published poetry his own interpretation of the Biblical God. This imperfect, “fatherly” figure, however, had appeared already in How the Whale Became and other Stories22, a book of children’s fables somewhat similar to Kipling’s Just So Stories23. There, Hughes depicted God as a friendly character who manufactured the creatures of the earth out of clay which was then baked in the ovens of the sun (‘How the Tortoise Became’, HWB p.53). Yet this God is not responsible for all creation. The whale, for example, grows quite of its own accord in God’s “little back garden” (‘How the Whale became’, HWB p.23). Also, unknown to God, a demon with creative powers of its own

lives in the middle of the earth where it manufactures the bee and tricks God into breathing life into it (‘How the Bee became’, HWB p.60). From these children’s stories, came the God of the poem ‘Logos’ in Wodwo24, who is also the fallible, almost human God of the Crow poems which Hughes had begun writing in 1966. In Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, Hughes, for the first time, wrote a sequence of poems within a framework which took the form of a folk-mythology of his own construction. Through the quasi-human figure of Crow, he continued his own journey of exploration into the human psyche and, at the same time, his handling of the death/rebirth theme in his poetry began to be more complex. It took on the aspect of a quest, a Shamanic journey to the underworld, which Hughes believed to be the basic theme in many folktales, myths and narrative poems25. The poems included in Crow are part of a large number of poems which make up a “vast folk epic”26 which tells the story of Crow. Hughes began this story at the suggestion of American artist, Leonard Baskin, who wanted an accompanying text for some of his anthropomorphic bird engravings. Amazingly, Hughes once said that he began Crow as children’s story27: but the eventual development of Crow’s character, the sardonic, sometimes gruesome humour of the poems, and Hughes’ sophisticated and heretical manipulation of Biblical stories, has made Crow very much a bird for adults. Speaking on the BBC before the publication of Crow Hughes explained something of the Crow story and the nature of Crow: Nobody knows quite how he was created or how he appeared. He was created by God’s nightmare. What exactly that is I tried to define through the length of the poem, or the succession of poems28. More details of the Crow story were given by Hughes at his poetry reading at the Adelaide Festival in 197629: God is having a nightmare. This hand/voice – this thing arrives at the moment he falls asleep and grabs him round the throat, rushes him through the Universe, pushes him beyond the stars and ploughs up the earth with his face and throws him back into heaven. The moment he dozes off this hand arrives and it all happens again, and he can’t understand what there can be in his creation which is so hostile… Eventually this voice/hand speaks. An argument develops between God and his Nightmare about the adequacy of Man as a

creation. “God is very defensive of Man. Man is a very good and successful invention and given the materials and situation he’s quite adequate”. But whilst God is arguing with his nightmare, Man has sent up a representative to the gates of Heaven… to ask God to take life back because men are fed up with it. So God is enraged that man has let him down – so he challenges the voice to do better: given the materials and the whole set-up, to produce something better than Man. The Nightmare plunges back to “ferment and gestate in matter” and a little embryo begins. That is how Crow was created. As a creation which is better than Man, Crow is a failure, for Hughes also said that “maybe [Crow’s] ambition is to become a man”. However, Hughes made it clear that the actual Crow story is “not really relevant to the poems as they stand: … I think they have a life a little aside from it. The story brought me to the poems … (it) was a sort of machine that assembled them”.30 He went on to say: The first idea of Crow was really an idea of style. In folktales the prince going on the adventure comes to the stable full of beautiful horses and he needs a horse for the next stage and the King’s daughter advises him to take none of the beautiful horses that he’ll be offered but to choose the dirty, scabby little foal. You see, I throw out the eagles and choose Crow. The idea was originally just to write his songs, the songs that a Crow would sing. In other words songs with no music whatsoever, in a super simple and a super ugly language which would in a way shed everything except just what he wanted to say without any other consideration and that’s the basis of the style of the whole thing. This allegory of the folktale prince and his choice of horse is an interesting one, for it shows Hughes deliberately adopting the “wretched, black, horrible, little nothing”31 (which is Crow as God sees him when he first appears), as his vehicle and ‘mask’ for his new poetic journey.

Crow comes complete with all the mythological and folk-loric accretions which crows have gathered through their long existence, and, of course, all the natural characteristics of the crow species. Some of these attributes Hughes adverted to in his BBC talk when he said: The Crow is the most intelligent of birds. He lives in just about every piece of land on earth and there’s a great body of folk lore about crows, of course. No carrion will kill a crow. The crow is the indestructible bird who suffers everything, suffers nothing… 32. In a letter to A1an Bold33, he also wrote: Crow is the bird of Bran, is the oldest and highest totem creature of Britain … England pretends to a lion – but that is a late fake import. England’s autochthonous Totem is the Crow. Whatever the colour of Englishman you scratch you come to some sort of crow. Hughes, therefore, makes it clear that Crow has many characteristics in common with Man. Also, given the cheeky, interfering, amoral, destructive and sometimes constructive personality which emerges through the medium of Crow’s “life and songs”, plus Hughes’ own predilection for mythological archetypes, the comparison of Crow with the Trickster figure common in many mythologies is natural34. Paul Radin, an authority on the Trickster Cycles of the North American Indians, describes Trickster as being: … at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and is always duped himself. He wills nothing consciously. At all times he is constrained to behave as he does from impulses over which he has no control. He knows neither good or evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being …

Laughter, humour and irony permeate everything Trickster does … he is primarily an inchoate being of undetermined proportions, a figure foreshadowing the shape of man35. Here is the counterpart of Hughes’ Crow, who, laughing, singing and eating, displays his supreme egotism by “Flying the black flag of himself” (‘Crow Blacker than Ever’, C p.69) through the havoc and horror which he has helped to create. Trickster has never been restricted to one society. In European countries he appears in the guise of Jester or Fool, and his roots in the human psyche are deep. Alan Garner has collected Trickster stories from many countries in his book The Guizer and he writes: If we take the elements from which our emotions are built and give them separate names such as Mother, Hero, Father, King, Child, Queen, the element that I think marks most of us is that of the Fool. It is where our humanity lies. For the Fool is the advocate of uncertainty: he is at once creator and destroyer, bringer of help and harm. He draws a boundary for chaos, so that we can make sense of the rest. He is the shadow that shapes the light. Psychology calls him Trickster. I have called him Guizer. Guizer is the proper word for an actor in a mumming play. He is comical, grotesque, stupid, cunning, ambiguous. He is sometimes part animal, and always part something else. The something else is what is so special. He is the dawning godhead in Man36. In these quotations from Radin and Garner we can see the characteristics of Hughes’ Crow and his connection with Man, but the psychological implications of Crow’s character are broader still. Radin writes that the Trickster cycle “represents our efforts to deal with the problem of growing up”: that it is a “speculum mentis wherein is depicted man’s struggle with himself and with a world into which he had been thrust without his volition and consent … an attempt by man to solve his problems inward and outward”37. On a similar psychological level, C. J. Jung’s commentary on Radin’s collection of Trickster Cycles equates the trickster figure with “all the inferior traits of character in individuals”, and

he accounts for its persistence in man’s stories by the explanation that “since the individual shadow is never absent as a Component of personality, the collective figure can construct itself out of it continually”38. Crow, it appears was in many ways just such a self constructing figure, because Hughes has said that the poems: … were usually something of a shock to write. Mostly they wrote themselves quite rapidly … and several of them that seem quite ordinary now arrived with a sense of having done something … tabu39. By adopting and developing this trickster figure Hughes was, therefore, extending his exploration into his own mind and (if Jung is correct in his interpretation of Trickster)into the human mind in general. In so doing, Hughes extended the death/rebirth theme of his poetry to include the idea of spiritual growth and rebirth for Man, which is a most important part of the Trickster Cycle. This pattern has been traced in detail in the Crow poems by Sagar40 and Hirschberg41. In Crow, Hughes not only redefined God, he adopted Biblical language and style, recreated the Biblical Genesis story, perverted the message of the supreme power of God’s love and cast Crow in the role of “crucified” and reborn hero(‘Crow and the Sea’, C p.82) and survivor of the Apocalypse. Crow was subjected to teaching and to tests, he was meant to learn humanity and wholeness, to develop a soul, but only in poems published in a later poetic sequence (Cave Birds) did he achieve real progress on his quest. As Sagar noted, “Crow is Everyman who will not acknowledge that everything he most hates and fears – The Black Beast – is within him”42. Crow’s interference in God’s work begins with ‘A Childish Prank’(C p.l9). God, Hughes explained in his story43, is at first “rather indulgent” towards Crow. “He tends to show it the beauties and let it look on while he shows the marvels of the beginning”. Having made Adam and Eve, however, God has problems getting their souls into their bodies. “The problem was so great, it dragged him asleep”. Crow intervenes, and in so doing invents sex as an urge which man and woman cannot control or understand. Meanwhile: God went on sleeping Crow went on laughing The Trickster element in Crow’s behaviour is obvious, but Hughes, too, is breaking tabus. God tries to teach Crow human skills and human emotions - tries to change his amoral, selfish nature. In ‘Crow’s First Lesson’(C p.20), God attempts to teach Crow how to talk, but his efforts to teach him the word ‘Love’ result only in the creation of horror. Crow gapes, and vomits up his own devouring versions of love – “the white shark”; “a bluefly, a tsetse, a mosquito”; and man’s bodiless head with woman’s vulva dropped over it and tightening around his neck. God, defeated, goes back to sleeping, leaving Crow to his own devices and Crow takes advantage of God’s slumber by inventing his own ‘communion’. This is a devastating

parody of the Christian rite, in which Crow literally partakes of God’s body (‘Crow Communes’, C p.30). Nor is this all. Crow next invents his own Theology (‘Crow’s Theology’, C p.35) which includes a God who is … much bigger than the other Loving his enemies And having all the weapons. This sacrilegious reconstruction of Biblical lore, which is responsible for the stunning impact of some of the poems, is a clear indication of the way in which Crow resembles the Trickster Cycles, for Trickster is traditionally a “breaker of taboos and destroyer of the holy-ofholies”44. It also illustrates the extent to which Hughes has adopted the Crow ‘mask’ in these poems, and how he takes on himself the role of Trickster. In Crow, Hughes is doing just what Jung describes when he says that “there is something of the Trickster in the character of the shaman and medicine-man, for he, too, often plays malicious jokes on people”45 Crow may well seem to some like a malicious joke, and those critics who were convinced that Hughes enjoyed wallowing in violence and “the eager pursuit of blood and thunder46” certainly felt vindicated when Crow was published. Crow, however, is a very modern version of the Trickster Cycle fitting well with the surrealist and absurd sentiments of other twentieth century writers such as Kafka; of artists such as Francis Bacon; and of some of the Eastern European Poets whose works Hughes has helped to make available in translation. In it he succeeds, as Calvin Bedient commented, in joining “the twin nihilistic themes of the century – the Id and the Void – with witty and enormous invention”47. Hughes himself, however, seemed to feel that the Trickster Cycle had, in a way, taken him too far, too fast. He described the writing of the Crow poems to Faas as being like “putting [himself] through a process”, and when asked by Faas if he felt the process had come to a kind of completion, he said: In a way I think I projected too far into the future. I’d like to get the rest of it. But maybe it will take a different form.48 Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow ends with Hughes’ invocation to the creative/destructive energies of Nature which brought him Crow: “Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood”. Subsequently, he returned to the theme of the quest and of spiritual rebirth in Cave Birds and Gaudete, where he examined it again in two forms which are as different from each other as they are from Crow. “The Thought Fox” THE ‘THOUGHT-FOX’ HAS often been acknowledged as one of the most completely realised and artistically satisfying of the poems in Ted Hughes’s first collection, The Hawk in the

Rain. At the same time it is one of the most frequently anthologised of all Hughes’s poems. In this essay I have set out to use what might be regarded as a very ordinary analysis of this familiar poem in order to focus attention on an aspect of Hughes’s poetry which is sometimes neglected. My particular interest is in the underlying puritanism of Hughes’s poetic vision and in the conflict between violence and tenderness which seems to be directly engendered by this puritanism. ‘The thought-fox’ is a poem about writing a poem. Its external action takes place in a room late at night where the poet is sitting alone at his desk. Outside the night is starless, silent, and totally black. But the poet senses a presence which disturbs him: Through the window I see no star: Something more near Though deeper within darkness Is entering the loneliness. The disturbance is not in the external darkness of the night, for the night is itself a metaphor for the deeper and more intimate darkness of the poet’s imagination in whose depths an idea is mysteriously stirring. At first the idea has no clear outlines; it is not seen but felt – frail and intensely vulnerable. The poet’s task is to coax it out of formlessness and into fuller consciousness by the sensitivity of his language. The remote stirrings of the poem are compared to the stirrings of an animal – a fox, whose body is invisible, but which feels its way forward nervously through the dark undergrowth: Cold, delicately as the dark snow, A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf; The half-hidden image which is contained within these lines is of soft snow brushing against the trees as it falls in dark flakes to the ground. The idea of the delicate dark snow evokes the physical reality of the fox’s nose which is itself cold, dark and damp, twitching moistly and gently against twig and leaf. In this way the first feature of the fox is mysteriously defined and its wet black nose is nervously alive in the darkness, feeling its way towards us. But by inverting the natural order of the simile, and withholding the subject of the sentence, the poet succeeds in blurring its distinctness so that the fox emerges only slowly out of the formlessness of the snow. Gradually the fox’s eyes appear out of the same formlessness, leading the shadowy movement of its body as it comes closer: Two eyes serve a movement, that now And again now, and now, and now Sets neat prints into the snow

Between trees, and warily a lame Shadow lags by stump and in hollow. .. In the first two lines of this passage the rhythm of the verse is broken by the punctuation and the line-endings, while at the same time what seemed the predictable course of the rhymescheme is deliberately departed from. Both rhythmically and phonetically the verse thus mimes the nervous, unpredictable movement of the fox as it delicately steps forward, then stops suddenly to check the terrain before it runs on only to stop again. The tracks which the fox leaves in the snow are themselves duplicated by the sounds and rhythm of the line ‘Sets neat prints into the snow’. The first three short words of this line are internal half-rhymes, as neat, as identical and as sharply outlined as the fox’s paw-marks, and these words press down gently but distinctly into the soft open vowel of ‘snow’. The fox’s body remains indistinct, a silhouette against the snow. But the phrase ‘lame shadow’ itself evokes a more precise image of the fox, as it freezes alertly in its tracks, holding one front-paw in mid-air, and then moves off again like a limping animal. At the end of the stanza the words ‘bold to come’ are left suspended – as though the fox is pausing at the outer edge of some trees. The gap between the stanzas is itself the clearing which the fox, after hesitating warily, suddenly shoots across: ‘Of a body that is bold to come / Across clearings. ..’ At this point in the poem the hesitant rhythm of that single sentence which is prolonged over five stanzas breaks into a final and deliberate run. The fox has scented safety. After its dash across the clearing of the stanza-break, it has come suddenly closer, bearing down upon the poet and upon the reader: an eye, A widening deepening greenness, Brilliantly, concentratedly, Coming about its own business. .. It is so close now that its two eyes have merged into a single green glare which grows wider and wider as the fox comes nearer, its eyes heading directly towards ours: ‘Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox / It enters the dark hole of the head’. If we follow the ‘visual logic’ of the poem we are compelled to imagine the fox actually jumping through the eyes of the poet – with whom the reader of the poem is inevitably drawn into identification. The fox enters the lair of the head as it would enter its own lair, bringing with it the hot, sensual, animal reek of its body and all the excitement and power of the achieved vision. The fox is no longer a formless stirring somewhere in the dark depths of the bodily imagination; it has been coaxed out of the darkness and into full consciousness. It is no longer nervous and vulnerable, but at home in the lair of the head, safe from extinction, perfectly

created, its being caught for ever on the page. And all this has been done purely by the imagination. For in reality there is no fox at all, and outside, in the external darkness, nothing has changed: ‘The window is starless still; the clock ticks, / The page is printed.’ The fox is the poem, and the poem is the fox. ‘And I suppose,’ Ted Hughes has written, ‘that long after I am gone, as long as a copy of the poem exists, every time anyone reads it the fox will get up somewhere out of the darkness and come walking towards them.’[1] After discussing ‘The thought-fox’ in his book The Art of Ted Hughes,Keith Sagar writes: ‘Suddenly, out of the unknown, there it is, with all the characteristics of a living thing – “a sudden sharp hot stink of fox”. A simple trick like pulling a kicking rabbit from a hat, but only a true poet can do it’.[2] In this particular instance it seems to me that the simile Sagar uses betrays him into an inappropriate critical response His comparison may be apt in one respect, for it is certainly true that there is a powerful element of magic in the poem. But this magic has little to do with party-conjurors who pull rabbits out of top-hats. It is more like the sublime and awesome magic which is contained in the myth of creation, where God creates living beings out of nothingness by the mere fiat of his imagination. The very sublimity and God-like nature of Hughes’s vision can engender uneasiness. For Hughes’s fox has none of the freedom of an animal. It cannot get up from the page and walk off to nuzzle its young cubs or do foxy things behind the poet’s back. It cannot even die in its own mortal, animal way. For it is the poet’s creature, wholly owned and possessed by him, fashioned almost egotistically in order to proclaim not its own reality but that of its imaginatively omnipotent creator. (I originally wrote these words before coming across Hughes’s own discussion of the poem in Poetry in the Making: ‘So, you see, in some ways my fox is better than an ordinary fox. It will live for ever, it will never suffer from hunger or hounds. I have it with me wherever I go. And I made it. And all through imagining it clearly enough and finding the living words’ (p. 21).) This feeling of uneasiness is heightened by the last stanza of the poem. For although this stanza clearly communicates the excitement of poetic creation, it seems at the same time to express an almost predatory thrill; it is as though the fox has successfully been lured into a hunter’s trap. The bleak matter-of-factness of the final line – ’The page is printed’ – only reinforces the curious deadness of the thought-fox. If, at the end of the poem, there is one sense in which the fox is vividly and immediately alive, it is only because it has been pinned so artfully upon the page. The very accuracy of the evocation of the fox seems at times almost fussily obsessive. The studied and beautifully ‘final’ nature of the poem indicates that we are not in the presence of any untrained spontaneity, any primitive or naive vision. It might be suggested that the sensibility behind Hughes’s poem is more that of an intellectual – an intellectual who, in rebellion against his own ascetic rationalism, feels himself driven to hunt down and capture an element of his own sensual and intuitive identity which he does not securely possess. In this respect Hughes’s vision is perhaps most nearly akin to that of D. H. Lawrence, who was also an intellectual in rebellion against his own rationalism, a puritan who never ceased to quarrel with his own puritanism. But Lawrence’s animal poems, as some critics have observed, are very different from those of Hughes. Lawrence has a much greater respect for the integrity and independence of the animals he writes about. In ‘Snake’ he expresses remorse for the

rationalistic, ‘educated’ violence which he inflicts on the animal. And at the end of the poem he is able, as it were, retrospectively to allow his dark sexual, sensual, animal alter ego to crawl off into the bowels of the earth, there to reign alone and supreme in a kingdom where Lawrence recognises he can have no part. Hughes, in ‘The thought-fox’ at least, cannot do this. It would seem that, possessing his own sensual identity even less securely than Lawrence, he needs the ‘sudden sharp hot stink of fox’ to pump up the attenuated sense he has of the reality of his own body and his own feelings. And so he pins the fox upon the page with the cruel purity of artistic form and locates its lair inside his own head. And the fox lives triumphantly as an idea – as a part of the poet’s own identity – but dies as a fox. If there is a difference between ‘The thought-fox’ and the animal poems of Lawrence there is also, of course, a difference between Hughes’s poetic vision and that kind of extreme scientific rationalism which both Lawrence and Hughes attack throughout their work. For in the mind of the orthodox rationalist the fox is dead even as an idea. So it is doubly dead and the orthodox rationalist, who is always a secret puritan, is more than happy about this. For he doesn’t want the hot sensual reek of fox clinging to his pure rational spirit, reminding him that he once possessed such an obscene thing as a body. This difference may appear absolute. But it seems to me that it would be wrong to regard it as such, and that there is a much closer relationship between the sensibility which is expressed in Hughes’s poem and the sensibility of ‘puritanical rationalism’ than would generally be acknowledged. The orthodox rationalist, it might be said, inflicts the violence of reason on animal sensuality in an obsessive attempt to eliminate it entirely. Hughes in ‘The thought-fox’ unconsciously inflicts the violence of an art upon animal sensuality in a passionate but conflictridden attempt to incorporate it into his own rationalist identity. The conflict of sensibility which Hughes unconsciously dramatises in ‘The thought-fox’ runs through all his poetry. On the one hand there is in his work an extraordinary sensuous and sensual generosity which coexists with a sense of abundance and a capacity for expressing tenderness which are unusual in contemporary poetry .These qualities are particularly in evidence in some of the most mysteriously powerful of all his poems – poems such as ‘Crow’s undersong’, ‘Littleblood’, ‘Full moon and little Frieda’ and ‘Bride and groom lie hidden for three days’ .On the other hand his poetry – and above all his poetry in Crow – is notorious for the raging intensity of its violence, a violence which, by some critics at least, has been seen as destructive of all artistic and human values. Hughes himself seems consistently to see his own poetic sensitivity as ‘feminine’ and his poetry frequently gives the impression that he can allow himself to indulge this sensitivity only within a protective shell of hard, steely ‘masculine’ violence. In ‘The thought-fox’ itself this conflict of sensibility appears in such an attenuated or suppressed form that it is by no means the most striking feature of the poem. But, as I have tried to show, the conflict may still be discerned. It is present above all in the tension between the extraordinary sensuous delicacy of the image which Hughes uses to describe the fox’s nose and the predatory, impulse which seems to underlie the poem – an impulse to which Hughes has himself drawn attention by repeatedly comparing the act of poetic creation to the process of

capturing or killing small animals.[3] Indeed it might be suggested that the last stanza of the poem records what is, in effect, a ritual of tough ‘manly’ posturing. For in it the poet might be seen as playing a kind of imaginative game in which he attempts to outstare the fox – looking straight into its eyes as it comes closer and closer and refusing to move, refusing to flinch, refusing to show any sign of ‘feminine’ weakness. The fox itself does not flinch or deviate from its course. It is almost as though, in doing this, it has successfully come through an initiationritual to which the poet has unconsciously submitted it; the fox which is initially nervous, circumspect, and as soft and delicate as the dark snow, has proved that it is not ‘feminine’ after all but tough, manly and steely willed ‘brilliantly, concentratedly, coming about its own business’. It is on these conditions alone, perhaps, that its sensuality can be accepted by the poet without anxiety. Whether or not the last tentative part of my analysis is accepted, it will perhaps be allowed that the underlying pattern of the poem is one of sensitivity-within- toughness; it is one in which a sensuality or sensuousness which might sometimes be characterised as ‘feminine’ can be incorporated into the identity only to the extent that it has been purified by, or subordinated to, a tough, rational, artistic will. The same conflict of sensibility which is unconsciously dramatised in ‘The thought-fox’ also appears, in an implicit form, in one of the finest and most powerful poems in Lupercal, ‘Snowdrop’: Now is the globe shrunk tight Round the mouse’s dulled wintering heart. Weasel and crow, as if moulded in brass, Move through an outer darkness Not in their right minds, With the other deaths. She, too, pursues her ends, Brutal as the stars of this month, Her pale head heavy as metal. The poem begins by evoking, from the still and tiny perspective of the hibernating mouse, a vast intimacy with the tightening body of the earth. But the numbness of ‘wintering heart’ undermines the emotional security which might be conveyed by the initial image. The next lines introduce a harsh predatory derangement into nature through which two conventionally threatening animals, the weasel and the crow, move ‘as if moulded in brass’ .It is only at this point, after a sense of petrified and frozen vitality has been established, that the snowdrop is, as it were, ‘noticed’ by the poem. What might be described as a conventional and sentimental personification of the snowdrop is actually intensified by the fact that ‘she’ can be identified only from the title. This lends to the pronoun a mysterious power through which the poem gestures towards an affirmation of ‘feminine’ frailty and its ability to survive even the cruel rigour of winter. But before this gesture can even be completed it is overlaid by an evocation of violent striving:

She, too, pursues her ends, Brutal as the stars of this month, Her pale head heavy as metal. The last line is finely balanced between the fragility of ‘pale’ and the steeliness of ‘metal’ – a word whose sound softens and moderates its sense .The line serves to evoke a precise visual image of the snowdrop, the relative heaviness of whose flower cannot be entirely supported by its frail stem. But at the same time the phrase ‘her pale head’ minimally continues the personification which is first established by the pronoun ‘she’. In this way the feminine snowdrop – a little incarnation, almost, of the White Goddess – is located within that world of frozen and sleeping vitality which is created by the poem, a vitality which can only be preserved, it would seem, if it is encased within a hard, metallic, evolutionary will. The beauty of this poem resides precisely in the way that a complex emotional ambivalence is reflected through language. But if we can withdraw ourselves from the influence of the spell which the poem undoubtedly casts, the vision of the snowdrop cannot but seem an alien one. What seems strange about the poem is the lack of any recognition that the snowdrop survives not because of any hidden reserves of massive evolutionary strength or will, but precisely because of its frailty – its evolutionary vitality is owed directly to the very delicacy, softness and flexibility of its structure. In Hughes’s poem the purposeless and consciousless snowdrop comes very near to being a little Schopenhauer philosophising in the rose-garden, a little Stalin striving to disguise an unmanly and maidenly blush behind a hard coat of assumed steel. We might well be reminded of Hughes’s own account of the intentions which lay behind his poem ‘Hawk roosting’. ‘Actually what I had in mind’, Hughes has said, ‘was that in this hawk Nature is thinking … I intended some creator like the Jehovah in Job but more feminine.’ But, as Hughes himself is obliged to confess, ‘He doesn’t sound like Isis, mother of the gods, which he is. He sounds like Hitler’s familiar spirit.’ In an attempt to account for the gap between intention and performance Hughes invokes cultural history: ‘When Christianity kicked the devil out of Job what they actually kicked out was Nature. ..and nature became the devil.’[4] This piece of rationalisation, however, seems all too like an attempt to externalise a conflict of sensibility which is profoundly internal. The conflict in question is the same as that which may be divined both in ‘The thought-fox’ and in ‘Snowdrop’ , in which a frail sensuousness which might be characterised as , ‘feminine’ can be accepted only after it has been subordinated to a tough and rational will. The conflict between violence and tenderness which is present in an oblique form throughout Hughes’ early poetry is one that is in no sense healed or resolved in his later work. Indeed it might be suggested that much of the poetic and emotional charge of this later work comes directly from an intensification of this conflict and an increasingly explicit polarisation of its terms. The repressed tenderness of ‘Snowdrop’ or the tough steely sensibility which is expressed in ‘Thrushes’, with its idealisation of the ‘bullet and automatic / Purpose’ of instinctual life, is seemingly very different to the all but unprotected sensuous delicacy of ‘Littleblood’, the poem with which Hughes endsCrow: O littleblood, little boneless little skinless

Ploughing with a linnet’s carcase Reaping the wind and threshing the stones. .... Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood. But this poem must ultimately be located within the larger context which is provided by the Crow poems. This context is one of a massive unleashing of sadistic violence -a violence which is never endorsed by Hughes but which, nevertheless, seems to provide a kind of necessary psychological armour within which alone tenderness can be liberated without anxiety. In pointing to the role which is played by a particular conflict of sensibility in Hughes’s poetry I am not in any way seeking to undermine the case which can – and should – be made for what would conventionally be called Hughes’s poetic ‘greatness’. Indeed, my intention is almost the reverse of this. For it seems to me that one of the factors which moderates or diminishes the imaginative power of some of Hughes’s early poetry is precisely the way in which an acute conflict which is central to his own poetic sensibility tends to be disguised or, suppressed. In Crow, which I take to be Hughes’s most extraordinary poetic achievement to date, Hughes, almost for the first time, assumes imaginative responsibility for the puritanical violence which is present in his poetry from the very beginnings. In doing so he seems to take full possession of his own poetic powers. It is as though a conflict which had, until that point, led a shadowy and underworld existence, is suddenly cracked open in order to disgorge not only its own violence but also all that imaginative wealth and vitality which had been half locked up within it. The most obvious precedent for such a violent eruption of imaginative powers is that which is provided by Shakespeare, and perhaps above all by King Lear. Lear is a play of extraordinary violence whose persistent image, as Caroline Spurgeon has observed, is that ‘of a human body in anguished movement, tugged, wrenched, beaten, pierced, stung, scourged, dislocated, flayed, gashed, scalded, tortured, and finally broken on the rack’.[5] But at the same time it is a play about a man who struggles to repossess his own tenderness and emotional vitality and to weep those tears which, at the beginning of the play, he contemptuously dismisses as soft, weak and womanly. The same conflict reappears throughout Shakespeare’s poetry. We have only to recall Lady Macbeth’s renunciation of her own ‘soft’ maternal impulses in order to appreciate the fluency of Shakespeare’s own imaginative access to this conflict and the disturbing cruelty of its terms: I have given suck, and know How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you

Have done to this. (I. vii) The intense conflict between violence and tenderness which is expressed in these lines is, of course, in no sense one which will be found only in the poetic vision of Hughes and Shakespeare. It is present in poetry from the Old Testament onwards and indeed it might reasonably be regarded as a universal conflict, within which are contained and expressed some of the most fundamental characteristics of the human identity. Any full investigation of the conflict and of its cultural significance would inevitably need to take account both of what Mark Spilka has called ‘Lawrence’s quarrel with tenderness’ and of Ian Suttie’s discussion of the extent and rigour of the ‘taboo on tenderness’ in our own culture. [6] But such an investigation would also need to take into consideration a much larger cultural context, and perhaps above all to examine the way in which the Christian ideal of love has itself traditionally been expressed within the medium of violent apocalyptic fantasies. The investigation which I describe is clearly beyond the scope of this essay. My more modest aim here has been to draw attention to the role which is played by this conflict in two of the most hauntingly powerful of Ted Hughes’s early poems and to suggest that Hughes’s poetic powers are fully realised not when this conflict is resolved but when it is unleashed in its most violent form. In taking this approach I am motivated in part by the feeling that the discussion of Hughes’s poetry has sometimes been too much in thrall to a powerful cultural image of Hughes’s poetic personality – one which he himself has tended to project. In this image Hughes is above all an isolated and embattled figure who has set himself against the entire course both of modern poetry and of modern history .He is rather like the hero in one of his most powerful poems ‘Stealing trout on a May morning’, resolutely and stubbornly wading upstream, his feet rooted in the primeval strength of the river’s bed as the whole course of modern history and modern puritanical rationalism floods violently past him in the opposite direction, bearing with it what Hughes himself has called ‘mental disintegration … under the super-ego of Moses … and the self-anaesthetising schizophrenia of St Paul’, and leaving him in secure possession of that ancient and archaic imaginative energy which he invokes in his poetry.

The alternative to this Romantic view of Hughes’s poetic personality is to see Hughes’s poetry as essentially the poetry of an intellectual, an intellectual who is subject to the rigours of ‘puritanical rationalism’ just as much as any other intellectual but who, instead of submitting to those rigours, fights against them with that stubborn and intransigent resolution which belongs only to the puritan soul. In reality perhaps neither of these views is wholly appropriate, and the truth comes somewhere between the two. But what does seem clear is that when Hughes talks of modern civilisation as consisting in ‘mental disintegration. ..under the super-ego of Moses … and the selfanaesthetising schizophrenia of St Paul’ he is once again engaging in that characteristic strategy

of externalising a conflict of sensibility which is profoundly internal. For it must be suggested that Paul’s own ‘schizophrenia’ consisted in an acute conflict between the impulse towards tenderness, abundance and generosity and the impulse towards puritanical violence – the violence of chastity. It is precisely this conflict which seems to be buried in Hughes’s early poetry and which, as I have suggested, eventually erupts in the poetry of Crow. If, in Crow, Hughes is able to explore and express the internalised violence of the rationalist sensibility with more imaginative power than any other modern poet, it is perhaps because he does so from within a poetic sensibility which is itself profoundly intellectual, and deeply marked by that very puritanical rationalism which he so frequently – and I believe justifiably – attacks.

Philip Larkin “Church Going” ANALYSIS: SPEAKER The speaker in this poem is a guy who doesn't know all that much about churches and religion or any of that kind of stuff. You can tell this from the way he clumsily enters the church doesn't really seem to respect its sacredness of the church. He sees its holy objects inside as "some brass and stuff" (5). However, that's not all there is to this guy. He also hears a "tense, musty, unignorable silence" in the church, which tells us that the speaker does feel some sense of tension or awe inside the building. He knows he's supposed to do something to show respect, but since he's not wearing a hat, he chooses to "take off/ [his] cycle clips in awkward reverence" (9). In other words, the guy doesn't know much about church, but he's not just coming into the church to make fun of it. He just isn't all that smooth when it comes to dealing with all this holy stuff. In all, the speaker is someone who can't really get behind the whole religion thing, but he definitely has a hunger for some sort of spirituality. And maybe that's the best way to describe him: he's spiritual, but not religious. The speaker feels like church and faith might be declining in the modern world, and he's curious about what will happen to the church when the last of the believers are gone. While he doesn't come to any great conclusions, he figures that something of the church's influence will remain. He just doesn't know what. And you know what? He seems okay with that, really. As a whole, the speaker in this poem is characterized by his tendency to ask questions. In fact, the poem is almost allquestions between line 23 and 52. He doesn't seem to come up with many definitive answers, but that doesn't stop him from asking in the first place. ANALYSIS: SETTING Where It All Goes Down Throughout the poem, the speaker focuses very closely on his setting. The irony and wit of the

poem, however, comes from the fact that the speaker doesn't focus on any of the things he's supposed to when he's inside the church. Instead, he wonders about practical concerns like whether or not the roof's been cleaned or restored. Overall, the speaker's reactions to the setting of this poem (the church) symbolize the major theme of this poem, which is the gap between a person who's interested in religious faith and the deeper mystical meaning that only full-blown believers are familiar with. Setting up this relationship between the speaker and the setting shows us that the objects inside the church don't have any inherent meaning, but just the meaning that we give to them. But it also shows that the church does have a vague mystique that keeps the speaker coming back to check out the insides of churches. The speaker's meditations on what will happen to churches in the future conveys his sense of curiosity, but also his desire to find something he can take seriously about human life. The description of the church, for example, changing from a sacred place to a secular museum— where the "parchment, plate, and pyx [are in] locked cases" (25)—shows a world that the speaker would be more familiar with. Ultimately, Larkin uses the tension between the speaker's ignorance of church symbolism, and his grasp on the physical church itself, as a staging ground for the tension between religious faith and secular skepticism. Eventually the speaker lands somewhere in the middle, in a place of questioning. ANALYSIS: SOUND CHECK All in all, the poem sounds conversational, as though the speaker is just talking to us. Larkin is really good at making highly crafted language sound casual and almost spontaneous. He doesn't leave many obvious traces of the months of work that he would've put into writing this poem. He establishes this conversational sound from the very first line, having his speaker say, "Once I am sure there's nothing going on" (1). It's a broad, vague ("nothing going on") kind of way to conversationally introduce the poem. A later phrase in this same stanza has him talking about "some brass and stuff/ Up at the holy end" (5-6). It's hard to believe that a line like this is written in very strict iambic pentameter and is part of a larger stanza with a complex rhyme scheme. In this way, Larkin seems to use the contrast of sound and form in this poem to suggest that, even if we are casually non-religious in our daily lives, there might at times actually be a higher "plan" to these lives. It can just be difficult to recognize unless we look closely. ANALYSIS: WHAT'S UP WITH THE TITLE? "Church Going" seems like a very simple and straightforward title, just as the poem itself seems to be simple and straightforward. On the most literal level, it refers to the way that regular "church goers" attend mass every week. For the speaker of this poem, though, church going has a completely different set of meanings, because he's not connected to the official teachings of Christianity. Church going for him refers to the way that he continues to return to the church even though he can't find anything in it that's believable. This double meaning of "church going" helps to highlight the tension this poem explores between traditional religious meaning and the speaker's personal relationship to the church.

On another level, "Church Going" could refer to the fact that the speaker of this poem spends much of his time wondering about what will happen to churches once people's belief in religion has vanished from the Earth. In other words, the title also hints at the possibility that the church might "go" away someday and never come back. And guess what? That's exactly what a huge section of this poem is about. Pretty clever stuff, right? Gotta Love that Larkin Tone "Church Going" contains several features that have Philip Larkin written all over them. First, there's his witty, ironic way of approaching a very serious subject. There's also his conversational tone, which he uses in many poems and which gives us the sense that the speaker of Larkin's poems is very often Larkin himself. Despite the ironic tone and casual treatment of religion, Larkin shows a respectfulness in this poem that you might not get in something like "High Windows" (another Larkin poem—check it out). Also, Larkin's mixture of everyday speech and tight poetic forms is also something for which he is widely known. ANALYSIS: TOUGH-O-METER (4) Base Camp Getting at Larkin's deeper themes might take some digging, but on the level of language, there's not much in this poem to make you scratch your head. When you consider that Larkin's poetry was appearing shortly after the complicated work of modernists like T.S. Eliot or Ezra Pound, and that he wanted to write for more general audience, then you can totally appreciate just how accessible his poetry is. Exactly how steamy is this poem? Larkin is definitely not above talking about sex inside a church, but he doesn't happen to do it in "Church Going." There's not even so much as a sexy euphemism in this poem. Larkin's concerns here are almost entirely faith-based, except for the odd occasion when he's concerned with the condition of a church's roof. Nothing all that steamy.

RELIGION THEME If you really wanted to, you could say that "Church Going" is about the tension between religion and spirituality. Go ahead! Just say it. Religion here refers to the "official" answers that spiritual faith gives to those big life questions like, "Why are we here?" In contrast, "spirituality" tends more to ask questions. In this poem, you have a speaker who only has a slight knowledge of religion, yet this knowledge has a huge impact on him because he often wonders whether or not he's approaching spiritual questions in the "right way." Ultimately, it doesn't look like he can get behind religion, but he (and the poem as a whole) definitely admits to the appeal of religion, especially for people who want to find something in life that's worth taking seriously.

SPIRITUALITY THEME "Church Going" draws a pretty clear line between spirituality and religion. Spirituality is the part of the speaker that keeps drawing him back into churches, even though he doesn't find anything in organized religion. In this sense, spirituality refers to the basic human longing that leads people toward religion. The poem describes this longing as a profound desire to be serious and to have a serious meaning in your life. Otherwise, life is just a big joke. Not the funny kind either. More like an old, dusty, knock-knock kind. For this reason, the speaker implies, spirituality will always exist even if religion doesn't. Religion means knowing all of the customs and rules of a specific faith, while spirituality, as the speaker shows us, can be vague and "uninformed" (46). According to Larkin, religion provides hard answers to life's big questions, while spirituality is what keeps us asking these questions. In this sense, you might say that Larkin doesn't necessarily endorse religion, but he definitely finds something in the idea of spirituality. MAN AND THE NATURAL WORLD THEME While it might not be as big of a deal in "Church Going" as religion or spirituality, the relationship between humanity and nature helps Larkin explore the conflict between the sense of order that humanity tries to force onto the natural world, and the indifference that nature has to this sort of effort. At several points in this poem, the natural world serves as a foil to religion, since nature is a symbol of the inevitable decay that happens to everything that humans try to impose, whether it's something physical like a church, or non-physical like Christian beliefs. It may not seem like it—heck, we may not even want to admit it—but humanity is a fleeting thing, and so are its attempts to mold the world into its own image. Nature, on the other hand, will keep on living long after we're dead. For this reason, the images of nature in this poem often have almost a post-apocalyptic feel to them, reflecting a world in which humanity and human forms of meaning are totally gone. TIME THEME Like nature, time comes up as a theme in "Church Going" mostly for the purpose of showing how temporary humanity's time on earth actually is. In fact, Larkin's speaker suggests that it's because our time is so limited that we have a longing for some higher purpose, or for some sense that our lives will still be meaningful after we're gone. For this reason, we might believe we have immortal souls that'll go to heaven. Or maybe we believe that our time on Earth is best spent by treating others with compassion and kindness. In any case, the fact remains that all human beings will one day die (deal with it, people), and the inevitable passing of time is deeply connected to humanity's urge for spiritual significance. “Ambulance” Rather like ‘Aubade’, this poem is a portrait of Larkin’s fear and contemplation of death. Yet it manages to cleverly encapsulate the entire human story within just five verses. From ‘the exchange of love’ in conception to a summary of a life filled with ‘families and fashions’, he makes it perfectly clear that we will all end our days within a small, confined box, ‘unreachable

inside a room’ and the traffic of ongoing life will part and let the dead move through, as if flinching in denial of its inevitable consequence. The poem tackles the human need to ignore death in a ‘whisper at their own distress’, as if by offering sympathy, we can cheat death and push it away as someone else’s problem. Larkin also argues that ‘all streets in time are visited’, like in ‘Aubade’ when ‘Being brave …. Lets no one off the grave’. He reiterates that we cannot avoid it, but like an ironic lottery, we all hope that the ambulance will not come to our door, just yet. In the second verse, Larkin describes the aroma and pace of life, the ongoing population, the children ‘strewn’ and the women going shopping as if nothing had happened, the smells of food – but then the sick person is ‘stowed’ away, so as not to spoil the idyllic view of family life and its fragrant perpetuity. His own questions on faith emerge again with, ‘And sense the solving emptiness …. That lies just under all we do’. In these words, we feel the hopelessness in our meaningless existence that leads only to death. We feel dull in our own fragility, cut off by our own denial and frightened by the inevitability of what is to come. It is clear that Larkin’s ambulances are a one way ticket ‘closed like confessionals’ and they tell no secrets – rather like the mystery of death, with its precarious religious overtones, where nobody really knows whether there is eternal life or if it is simply something that ‘dulls to distance all we are’. Whilst some may feel this is a gloomy and pessimistic poem, it can also be viewed as an opportunity, not to fear but to seize the chance, make your mark on the world and leave a legacy that can be remembered within the sea of forgotten faces. As Philip Larkin grew older, he became more and more obsessed with the concept of death. Larkin was largely considered to be an atheist; so for Larkin death didn't mean passing through the pearly gates into heaven, instead death was an all-powerful entity that could take you at any time to some unknown terrifying abyss. In Larkin's poem Ambulances, he uses an ambulance to convey both the loneliness of age and death, and the fact that death comes to all, sooner or later. Ambulances are generally vehicles that are associated with help and rescue, but in this poem the ambulance is portrayed in an ominous light, in order to jar the reader's sense of security. In this poem, the ambulance is in effect like the Grim Reaper, who comes to collect souls and ferry's them into the afterlife. Larkin's uses the confessional to demonstrate the difference a generation makes; the previous generation would have gone to church to heal themselves, while the new generation with its new health care system went to hospitals; thus, the ambulance becomes the modern day confessional. Confessionals are enclosed stalls in a Roman Catholic Church in which priests hear confessions. "Closed like confessionals" is a simile; the closed door of the confessional is similar to the confined space of an ambulance when its doors are closed. Like a confessional, an ambulance can be a very vulnerable place for its inhabitants; you bear your soul in a confessional, and put your life/body in the hands of the paramedics. Ambulances thread-to make one's way through or between-the noontime rush-hour; they will also most likely have their siren on, which draws the stares of strangers. The ambulance doesn't stop to explain; it is on a mission, to save a life. Some are startled by the siren and the presence of the ambulance, while others are curious about what has happened. The appearance of the ambulance also tends

to frighten, because it means that someone out there, no one knows who, could be injured, dying, or even dead. The color of the ambulance is a "light glossy grey," and it has a plaque with the emergency services coat of arms on the side. It is fitting that the ambulance is painted grey, because ambulances often serve as the grey area between life and death; some who enter the ambulance alive leave it dead. The last two lines are particularly ominous; you never know when it will be your turn to die, but rest assured that one day it will be your turn to die. Death is inevitable and all-powerful. Everyone stops what they are doing to look at the ambulance. Children stop playing and stand strewn-scattered-on door steps and streets; women stop shopping; dinners are left on the stoves, all so that they can watch as the ambulance's newest victim be taken away. The person being put into the ambulance is void of any identity; he or she is simply described as having a "wild white face." The whiteness could be referring to two things: first, the person has grey hair, and from that we can infer that the person is older; and second, that all of the blood has gone from the person's face due to fear or illness. Wild probably refers to the patient being scared or having some psychosis, seizure, or other ailment that would require hospitalization. The person is carried into the ambulance/confessional on a stretcher and secured into place for the long journey to the hospital/afterlife. The men, women, and children standing around watching this spectacle all sense for a moment the solution for the emptiness that they all feel inside; the solution is death. Death lies under all we do; the fear of dying drives us to live and take chances. For a second they feel whole with the knowledge that death is permanent, blank, and true; death offers an end from all of their fears, worries, and obligations, but dying also means not being able to experience happiness and love anymore. Nothing is greater or more powerful than death; death is the ultimate truth. "Poor soul" is italicized to emphasis the doom felt by the spectators and the inevitably of the person's death; by referring to the person as a "soul" the narrator is telling us that that person will be dying soon. The spectators whisper as a way to calm their nerves, and in an effort not to attract death. They are sad for the person in the ambulance, but they are also happy that it wasn't their time, yet. The person in the ambulance is borne-carried-away to the hospital (or metaphorically to the afterlife), in the deadened air. The "deadened air" has a twofold meaning: first, there is death in the air, meaning someone is going to die soon; and second, the noontime noises have quieted down in reverence for the "poor soul" being taken away. The people, who were standing around watching the paramedics load the person into the ambulance and then drive off, is reminiscent of a funeral; the people at the "funeral" had a moment of silence for the person, as people do at traditional wakes and funerals. The person's life is "nearly at an end;" he/she will take with them the "unique random blend of families and fashions" that has made up their unique life. Happiness and love are fleeting, but death is the only thing that we can truly count on in life. The person's ties to their earthly existence are fading. Gone are the days of love with loved ones. He/she is now unreachable inside the ambulance. The traffic parts to let the ambulance through; the closer to the hospital they get, the further that person is from their life. These are his/her last moments. Who we are, no longer matters, death is all there is now.

“High Windows” "Swinging London" was a term coined by Time magazine, in their April 15, 1966 issue, in order to define the culture and fashion scene in 1960s London. Philip Larkin's poem High Windows was written in 1967 amidst the "Summer of Love," in London. The "summer of love" introduced drug use and "free" sex. During this summer, the Beatles released what a lot of people consider to be their greatest album: "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." Religion's hold on youth began to wan with this new generation of "free thinkers." Sex was both talked about and done indiscriminately, which challenged the Church's authority because until now sex before marriage was seen as whorish. The young took charge of their bodies and minds and revolutionized society's tendency to be conservative. Larkin appears to be envious of this generation, because it was everything that he had hoped for when he was their age. Larkin was a life-long bachelor; he had several sexual relationships, but was never married. This new generation brought sex into the forefront; no longer did people whisper about it in locked up rooms with the curtains drawn, participating in and enjoying sex was no longer shameful. The title of the poem High Windows has both a literal and metaphorical meaning. Literally, the high windows can be referring to a window that is on a second-floor of a building or higher, or the stained glass windows that are found in churches. "In symbology, [windows are] openings that admit supernatural light…Light from outside or from above corresponds to God's spirit, and the window itself to the Virgin Mary" (Biedermann 382). If you define each word individually you get: "high" is an elevated place, or exalted in character; "windows" are openings in walls where you can look out, or an interval of time during which certain conditions or opportunity exists. I believe that Larkin meant for the title to have a two-fold meaning: on the one hand, "high windows" is an image of religion and God; on the other hand, "high windows" described a period of time that superior to the times that came before it (e.g. summer of love). When I see a couple of kids And guess he's fucking her and she's Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise (lines 1-4) The speaker of this poem, who is most likely Larkin, sees some kids who he believes are sexually active, and he is happy. It is unclear whether the speaker is looking down on the kids from a high window or whether he just happened to pass them on the street. He calls them "kids" not because they are kids, but because they are a lot younger than him. Even if it is the "summer of love" I doubt that underage kids would be so open about their sexuality. Using birth control is a big slap in the face of the previous conservative generations, because the kids are rejecting the previous generation's morals. Conservatives were against birth control because it called into question: family obligation versus personal freedom, state intervening in private lives, religion in politics, sexual morality, social welfare, and the male role in society and

relationships. This period of time in history is like a paradise to the speaker, because it meant that he didn't have to be guilty about his own sex life. Larkin has always seemed anticonvention, which is probably one of the reasons why he never chose not to marry. Everyone old has dreamed of all their livesBonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide (5-8) The older generations had always secretly dreamed of a time when having sex and talking about sex wouldn't be so taboo; keeping in mind that the speaker is assuming that everyone thinks like him. "Bonds" refers to marriage or engagement, and "gestures" refers to the things men do when they are courting a woman (e.g. flowers, candy, opening doors, etc.). The speaker uses a simile to compare outdated "bonds and gestures" to an outdated "combine harvester." A combine is a machine that harvests and threshes grain while moving over a field; if it is outdated then it must be from the previous generation, and the premise of "swinging London" and the "summer of love" is out with the old and in with the new. A "slide" is something that you would find on a playground. Larkin uses the slide to show how young this new generation is, and how they are losing their innocence when they go "own the long slide." The slide represents a journey of self-discovery. The slide also represents a sort of baptism; when you slide down it you are reborn into someone who embraces their sexuality and doesn't apologize for having sex or using drugs. To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if Anyone looked at me, forty years back, And thought, That'll be the life; No God any more, or sweating in the dark (9-12) The slide leads the kids to lifelong happiness. "Happiness" could be a metaphor for having sex and experiencing an orgasm; sexual gratification. The speaker wonders if anyone ever looked at him forty years ago and thought to themselves that these kids had the right idea, opposing long standing traditions for newer ideals. Since the idea of God doesn't exist in this new generation then no one has to sweat in the dark, feeling guilty about not living up to God's plan. About hell and that, or having to hide What you think of the priest. He And his lot will all go down the long slide Like free bloody birds. And immediately (13-16) No longer do you have to worry about going to hell if you have sex premarital sex, nor do you

have to hide your improper thoughts about priests. Since God doesn't exist then priests no longer hold their significance; priests become regular people again, and can engage is normal sexual behavior. Priests will all go down the long slide and be reborn. "Like free bloody birds" is a simile, and it can have few meanings: first, "bloody" is British slang used as intensifier and is also a less offensive way of saying fuck; "birds" is also British slang for attractive women or promiscuous women. Using these definitions, the priests are free to be as fucking promiscuous as they want. Second, "the Holy Spirit is almost always portrayed in the form of a dove…doves also stand for the newly baptized" (Biedermann 101). Using the divine definitions, blood would refer to Christ's blood. God is dead and the priests are free to live as sinfully as they want in their new religion. Third, the priests are free like bloody (British slang: fucking) birds, who fly wherever they want, and copulate with whomever they want. Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless. (17-20) The speaker's mind shifts to thoughts of high windows. I believe that the high windows that the speaker is referring to here are those are the stained glass windows that you find in churches, but it is also possible that he is reminiscing about when he was a kid looking up at windows high off of the ground. Stained glass windows often depict biblical stories, and when the sun shines on them the images become illuminated. The sun understands their significance. These windows are from past generations; beyond these church windows there is a great big world waiting to be discovered and experienced.

Chinua Achebe THINGS FALL APART Context Albert Chinualumogu Achebe was born on November 16, 1930, in Ogidi, a large village in Nigeria. Although he was the child of a Protestant missionary and received his early education in English, his upbringing was multicultural, as the inhabitants of Ogidi still lived according to many aspects of traditional Igbo (formerly written as Ibo) culture. Achebe attended the Government College in Umuahia from 1944 to 1947. He graduated from University College, Ibadan, in 1953. While he was in college, Achebe studied history and theology. He also developed his interest in indigenous Nigerian cultures, and he rejected his Christian name, Albert, for his indigenous one, Chinua. In the 1950s, Achebe was one of the founders of a Nigerian literary movement that drew upon

the traditional oral culture of its indigenous peoples. In 1959, he published Things Fall Apart as a response to novels, such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, that treat Africa as a primordial and cultureless foil for Europe. Tired of reading white men’s accounts of how primitive, socially backward, and, most important, language-less native Africans were, Achebe sought to convey a fuller understanding of one African culture and, in so doing, give voice to an underrepresented and exploited colonial subject. Things Fall Apart is set in the 1890s and portrays the clash between Nigeria’s white colonial government and the traditional culture of the indigenous Igbo people. Achebe’s novel shatters the stereotypical European portraits of native Africans. He is careful to portray the complex, advanced social institutions and artistic traditions of Igbo culture prior to its contact with Europeans. Yet he is just as careful not to stereotype the Europeans; he offers varying depictions of the white man, such as the mostly benevolent Mr. Brown, the zealous Reverend Smith, and the ruthlessly calculating District Commissioner. Achebe’s education in English and exposure to European customs have allowed him to capture both the European and the African perspectives on colonial expansion, religion, race, and culture. His decision to write Things Fall Apart in English is an important one. Achebe wanted this novel to respond to earlier colonial accounts of Africa; his choice of language was thus political. Unlike some later African authors who chose to revitalize native languages as a form of resistance to colonial culture, Achebe wanted to achieve cultural revitalization within and through English. Nevertheless, he manages to capture the rhythm of the Igbo language and he integrates Igbo vocabulary into the narrative. Achebe has become renowned throughout the world as a father of modern African literature, essayist, and professor of English literature at Bard College in New York. But Achebe’s achievements are most concretely reflected by his prominence in Nigeria’s academic culture and in its literary and political institutions. He worked for the Nigerian Broadcasting Company for over a decade and later became an English professor at the University of Nigeria. He has also been quite influential in the publication of new Nigerian writers. In 1967, he co-founded a publishing company with a Nigerian poet named Christopher Okigbo and in 1971, he began editingOkike, a respected journal of Nigerian writing. In 1984, he founded Uwa ndi Igbo, a bilingual magazine containing a great deal of information about Igbo culture. He has been active in Nigerian politics since the 1960s, and many of his novels address the post-colonial social and political problems that Nigeria still faces. Analysis of Major Characters Okonkwo

Okonkwo, the son of the effeminate and lazy Unoka, strives to make his way in a world that seems to value manliness. In so doing, he rejects everything for which he believes his father stood. Unoka was idle, poor, profligate, cowardly, gentle, and interested in music and conversation. Okonkwo consciously adopts opposite ideals and becomes productive, wealthy, thrifty, brave, violent, and adamantly opposed to music and anything else that he perceives to be “soft,” such as conversation and emotion. He is stoic to a fault. Okonkwo achieves great social and financial success by embracing these ideals. He marries three women and fathers several children. Nevertheless, just as his father was at odds with the values of the community around him, so too does Okonkwo find himself unable to adapt to changing times as the white man comes to live among the Umuofians. As it becomes evident that compliance rather than violence constitutes the wisest principle for survival, Okonkwo realizes that he has become a relic, no longer able to function within his changing society. Okonkwo is a tragic hero in the classical sense: although he is a superior character, his tragic flaw—the equation of manliness with rashness, anger, and violence—brings about his own destruction. Okonkwo is gruff, at times, and usually unable to express his feelings (the narrator frequently uses the word “inwardly” in reference to Okonkwo’s emotions). But his emotions are indeed quite complex, as his “manly” values conflict with his “unmanly” ones, such as fondness for Ikemefuna and Ezinma. The narrator privileges us with information that Okonkwo’s fellow clan members do not have—that Okonkwo surreptitiously follows Ekwefi into the forest in pursuit of Ezinma, for example—and thus allows us to see the tender, worried father beneath the seemingly indifferent exterior.

Nwoye Nwoye, Okonkwo’s oldest son, struggles in the shadow of his powerful, successful, and demanding father. His interests are different from Okonkwo’s and resemble more closely those of Unoka, his grandfather. He undergoes many beatings, at a loss for how to please his father, until the arrival of Ikemefuna, who becomes like an older brother and teaches him a gentler form of successful masculinity. As a result, Okonkwo backs off, and Nwoye even starts to win his grudging approval. Nwoye remains conflicted, however: though he makes a show of scorning feminine things in order to please his father, he misses his mother’s stories. With the unconscionable murder of Ikemefuna, however, Nwoye retreats into himself and finds himself forever changed. His reluctance to accept Okonkwo’s masculine values turns into pure embitterment toward him and his ways. When missionaries come to Mbanta, Nwoye’s hope and faith are reawakened, and he eventually joins forces with them. Although Okonkwo curses

his lot for having borne so “effeminate” a son and disowns Nwoye, Nwoye appears to have found peace at last in leaving the oppressive atmosphere of his father’s tyranny.

Ezinma Ezinma, Okonkwo’s favorite daughter and the only child of Ekwefi, is bold in the way that she approaches—and even sometimes contradicts—her father. Okonkwo remarks to himself multiple times that he wishes she had been born a boy, since he considers her to have such a masculine spirit. Ezinma alone seems to win Okonkwo’s full attention, affection, and, ironically, respect. She and he are kindred spirits, which boosts her confidence and precociousness. She grows into a beautiful young woman who sensibly agrees to put off marriage until her family returns from exile so as to help her father leverage his sociopolitical power most effectively. In doing so, she shows an approach similar to that of Okonkwo: she puts strategy ahead of emotion.

Mr. Brown Mr. Brown represents Achebe’s attempt to craft a well-rounded portrait of the colonial presence by tempering bad personalities with good ones. Mr. Brown’s successor, Reverend Smith, is zealous, vengeful, small-minded, and manipulative; he thus stands in contrast to Mr. Brown, who, on the other hand, is benevolent if not always beneficent. Mr. Brown succeeds in winning a large number of converts because he listens to the villagers’ stories, beliefs, and opinions. He also accepts the converts unconditionally. His conversation with Akunna represents this sympathetic stance. The derisive comments that Reverend Smith makes about Mr. Brown after the latter’s departure illustrate the colonial intolerance for any kind of sympathy for, and genuine interest in, the native culture. The surname Brown hints at his ability to navigate successfully the clear-cut racial division between the colonizers and the colonized.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols Themes Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. The Struggle Between Change and Tradition As a story about a culture on the verge of change, Things Fall Apart deals with how the prospect and reality of change affect various characters. The tension about whether change

should be privileged over tradition often involves questions of personal status. Okonkwo, for example, resists the new political and religious orders because he feels that they are not manly and that he himself will not be manly if he consents to join or even tolerate them. To some extent, Okonkwo’s resistance of cultural change is also due to his fear of losing societal status. His sense of self-worth is dependent upon the traditional standards by which society judges him. This system of evaluating the self inspires many of the clan’s outcasts to embrace Christianity. Long scorned, these outcasts find in the Christian value system a refuge from the Igbo cultural values that place them below everyone else. In their new community, these converts enjoy a more elevated status. The villagers in general are caught between resisting and embracing change and they face the dilemma of trying to determine how best to adapt to the reality of change. Many of the villagers are excited about the new opportunities and techniques that the missionaries bring. This European influence, however, threatens to extinguish the need for the mastery of traditional methods of farming, harvesting, building, and cooking. These traditional methods, once crucial for survival, are now, to varying degrees, dispensable. Throughout the novel, Achebe shows how dependent such traditions are upon storytelling and language and thus how quickly the abandonment of the Igbo language for English could lead to the eradication of these traditions. Varying Interpretations of Masculinity Okonkwo’s relationship with his late father shapes much of his violent and ambitious demeanor. He wants to rise above his father’s legacy of spendthrift, indolent behavior, which he views as weak and therefore effeminate. This association is inherent in the clan’s language —the narrator mentions that the word for a man who has not taken any of the expensive, prestige-indicating titles isagbala, which also means “woman.” But, for the most part, Okonkwo’s idea of manliness is not the clan’s. He associates masculinity with aggression and feels that anger is the only emotion that he should display. For this reason, he frequently beats his wives, even threatening to kill them from time to time. We are told that he does not think about things, and we see him act rashly and impetuously. Yet others who are in no way effeminate do not behave in this way. Obierika, unlike Okonkwo, “was a man who thought about things.” Whereas Obierika refuses to accompany the men on the trip to kill Ikemefuna, Okonkwo not only volunteers to join the party that will execute his surrogate son but also violently stabs him with his machete simply because he is afraid of appearing weak. Okonkwo’s seven-year exile from his village only reinforces his notion that men are stronger than women. While in exile, he lives among the kinsmen of his motherland but resents the period in its entirety. The exile is his opportunity to get in touch with his feminine side and to acknowledge his maternal ancestors, but he keeps reminding himself that his maternal kinsmen

are not as warlike and fierce as he remembers the villagers of Umuofia to be. He faults them for their preference of negotiation, compliance, and avoidance over anger and bloodshed. In Okonkwo’s understanding, his uncle Uchendu exemplifies this pacifist (and therefore somewhat effeminate) mode. Language as a Sign of Cultural Difference Language is an important theme in Things Fall Apart on several levels. In demonstrating the imaginative, often formal language of the Igbo, Achebe emphasizes that Africa is not the silent or incomprehensible continent that books such as Heart of Darkness made it out to be. Rather, by peppering the novel with Igbo words, Achebe shows that the Igbo language is too complex for direct translation into English. Similarly, Igbo culture cannot be understood within the framework of European colonialist values. Achebe also points out that Africa has many different languages: the villagers of Umuofia, for example, make fun of Mr. Brown’s translator because his language is slightly different from their own. On a macroscopic level, it is extremely significant that Achebe chose to writeThings Fall Apart in English—he clearly intended it to be read by the West at least as much, if not more, than by his fellow Nigerians. His goal was to critique and emend the portrait of Africa that was painted by so many writers of the colonial period. Doing so required the use of English, the language of those colonial writers. Through his inclusion of proverbs, folktales, and songs translated from the Igbo language, Achebe managed to capture and convey the rhythms, structures, cadences, and beauty of the Igbo language. Motifs Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes. Chi The concept of chi is discussed at various points throughout the novel and is important to our understanding of Okonkwo as a tragic hero. The chi is an individual’s personal god, whose merit is determined by the individual’s good fortune or lack thereof. Along the lines of this interpretation, one can explain Okonkwo’s tragic fate as the result of a problematic chi—a thought that occurs to Okonkwo at several points in the novel. For the clan believes, as the narrator tells us in Chapter 14, a “man could not rise beyond the destiny of his chi.” But there is another understanding of chi that conflicts with this definition. In Chapter 4, the narrator relates, according to an Igbo proverb, that “when a man says yes his chisays yes also.” According to this understanding, individuals will their own destinies. Thus, depending upon

our interpretation of chi, Okonkwo seems either more or less responsible for his own tragic death. Okonkwo himself shifts between these poles: when things are going well for him, he perceives himself as master and maker of his own destiny; when things go badly, however, he automatically disavows responsibility and asks why he should be so ill-fated. Animal Imagery In their descriptions, categorizations, and explanations of human behavior and wisdom, the Igbo often use animal anecdotes to naturalize their rituals and beliefs. The presence of animals in their folklore reflects the environment in which they live—not yet “modernized” by European influence. Though the colonizers, for the most part, view the Igbo’s understanding of the world as rudimentary, the Igbo perceive these animal stories, such as the account of how the tortoise’s shell came to be bumpy, as logical explanations of natural phenomena. Another important animal image is the figure of the sacred python. Enoch’s alleged killing and eating of the python symbolizes the transition to a new form of spirituality and a new religious order. Enoch’s disrespect of the python clashes with the Igbo’s reverence for it, epitomizing the incompatibility of colonialist and indigenous values. Symbols Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. Locusts Achebe depicts the locusts that descend upon the village in highly allegorical terms that prefigure the arrival of the white settlers, who will feast on and exploit the resources of the Igbo. The fact that the Igbo eat these locusts highlights how innocuous they take them to be. Similarly, those who convert to Christianity fail to realize the damage that the culture of the colonizer does to the culture of the colonized. The language that Achebe uses to describe the locusts indicates their symbolic status. The repetition of words like “settled” and “every” emphasizes the suddenly ubiquitous presence of these insects and hints at the way in which the arrival of the white settlers takes the Igbo off guard. Furthermore, the locusts are so heavy they break the tree branches, which symbolizes the fracturing of Igbo traditions and culture under the onslaught of colonialism and white settlement. Perhaps the most explicit clue that the locusts symbolize the colonists is Obierika’s comment in Chapter 15: “the Oracle . . . said that other white men were on their way. They were locusts. . . .”

Fire Okonkwo is associated with burning, fire, and flame throughout the novel, alluding to his intense and dangerous anger—the only emotion that he allows himself to display. Yet the problem with fire, as Okonkwo acknowledges in Chapters 17 and 24, is that it destroys everything it consumes. Okonkwo is both physically destructive—he kills Ikemefuna and Ogbuefi Ezeudu’s son—and emotionally destructive—he suppresses his fondness for Ikemefuna and Ezinma in favor of a colder, more masculine aura. Just as fire feeds on itself until all that is left is a pile of ash, Okonkwo eventually succumbs to his intense rage, allowing it to rule his actions until it destroys him. Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook The Golden Notebook Summary & Study Guide includes comprehensive information and analysis to help you understand the book. This study guide contains the following sections: In a word, the novel "The Golden Notebook" by Doris Lessing can be best described as complex. It is structured in a complex form intended to mimic the complexity of the life of the main character, Anna. Although complex, the form is actually an attempt by Anna to simplify and compartmentalize what she sees as disorder and chaos in her world. The main plot focuses on Anna's quest for wholeness but at the same time addresses difficult issues such as gender relations, love and marriage, suicide, child rearing and politics. The novel is comprised of a frame story interrupted by excerpts from Anna's four notebooks. The frame story, Free Women, details a portion of Anna's life. The story begins shortly after Michael, Anna's married lover, ends their five-year relationship. Anna's friend Molly has just returned from a yearlong trip and is dealing with her son's lack of direction in life. Anna is attempting to deal with this loss as well as trying to raise a daughter on her own, deal with a friend's suicide attempt and overcome her blocked writing ability. This frame story is divided into five sections, each separated by excerpts from Anna's notebooks. These notebooks each details one section of Anna's life. Her black notebook contains information about the time period in which she lived in Africa. An experience in Africa where a black woman was impregnated by one of Anna's friends became the background for Anna's award winning novel. Anna's red notebook includes details of her membership in the British Communist Party. The next notebook, the yellow notebook, contains a partial manuscript of a novel as well as ideas for other short stories and novels. This novel, called The Shadow of the Third, closely mirrors Anna's own life. In the blue notebook, Anna attempts to keep a day-to-day factual record of her life. Anna makes a decision to stop separating her life into sections and integrates all of her life into one notebook - referred to as the golden notebook.

Fragmentation The main theme of this novel is the idea of that a person can become fragmented. Anna's fragmentation is evidenced by her four notebooks. Anna keeps these notebooks in an effort to keep these different parts of herself compartmentalized and sanitary. In reality, it is this inability to regard all her experiences as a whole that keeps Anna from being a healthy person. It is only after she is able to integrate these individual parts of herself in her final notebook, the golden notebook, that Anna is able to being the process of healing. In addition to Anna's personal fragmentation the idea of the division of a person is seen in other characters on a more general sense. Tommy, for instance, fights against being torn apart by the desires of his parents. His father wants him to be a businessman while his mother wants him to stay away... In reflecting the complexities and entanglements of contemporary life, Lessing offers a complete exploration of an individual trying to discover who she is in this ever-changing environment. The interior mindscape of the individual reflects the exterior world in which we live. Having written a successful novel that others misread, including individuals who will be creating a film version, Anna realizes that she herself mistakenly approaches her memories with nostalgia and colors the truth. Thus, she attempts to record events in diary form—to present the truth more accurately. Anna's attempts to meticulously record the "truth" in her notebooks, however, fail. Eventually, Anna realizes that no one approach or theory will allow an individual to recognize the whole person. Although Anna's state of mental disarray does not consume the bulk of the book, the disintegration provides a realistic portrayal of mental confusion. Such existential explorations will explore suicidal... Anna Wulf Anna is the main character of the novel. All events are seen through her eyes. She is a rather promiscuous, middle-aged woman living off the proceeds of a best selling novel she wrote based on time she spent in Africa. After becoming pregnant, Anna marries Max Wulf, whom she doesn't love. They are married less than one year. Anna raises her daughter, Janet, as a single-mother. After her marriage to Max, Anna becomes involved with a married man. She and Michael have a five-year affair. When this affair ends, Anna is heart-broken and disillusioned. Another facet that adds to Anna's disillusionment is the problems in the communist party, a political party of which she was a member. Anna admits to her friends she feels as if her life is cracking apart. She keeps a series of four notebooks. Each of these notebooks holds information about one particular... Although published simultaneously in the United States and Great Britain, The Golden Notebook did not gain wide readership until the 1970s when feminists embraced the novel for its realistic portrayal of the life of single women trying to raise their children outside the boundaries of tradition. Lessing's "free women" concept, in alignment with most feminist

beliefs, helped not only to redefine sexuality issues but also provided literary models of the now famous motto "the personal is political" that so many feminist critics have maintained. Since then, the academic world has recognized the postmodern themes, narrative, and structure of the novel. Having established herself as a writer interested in politics and recognized and self-defined as an author of realistic fiction, Lessing offers a different approach to novel writing in The Golden Notebook. The novel's structure, themes, and characters support a postmodern view. Not only the characters, but also the... Salman Rushdie The Prophet's Hair The Prophet’s Hair is based on story of the theft of a relic containing a hair of the Prophet Muhammad. The tale is a fantastic account of the miraculous but disastrous events befalling all those who come into contact with it. The stolen relic is found by a moneylender, Hashim. Instead of returning it to the mosque from which it was taken, he keeps it. Under its influence, this previously secular Muslim becomes orthodox to the point of extremism and hurt his family by adopting it. His son, Atta, tries to take the hair back to Mosque, but at the last minute he finds out that the hair is no longer with him because there is a hole in his pocket. Then Huma comes up with another plan, and decides that it will have to be stolen by hiring a thief who takes the hair amid a scene of carnage. However, she ends up with a disaster. At the end of story, Hashim accidentally kills his own daughter, but he does not realize what he has done until he turns the light on. Finally, the thief is hunted and shot by the police, but his four crippled sons and blind wife have miraculously been cured by their contact with the relic. Rushdie describes Hashim’s family as an insecure and frightened family. The story is concerned with an iconic object, the hair, and its relocation from a holy place, the shrine, to the profane space of the outside world, then to a secret hiding place in the moneylender¡¦s locked study, and finally back to the shrine again. Early in 19—, when Srinagar was under the spell of a winter so fierce it could crack men’s bones as if they were glass, a young man upon whose cold-pinked skin there lay, like a frost, the unmistakable sheen of wealth was to be seen entering the most wretched and disreputable part of the city, where the houses of wood and corrugated iron seemed perpetually on the verge of losing their balance, and asking in low, grave tones where he might go to engage the services of a dependably professional thief. The young man’s name was Atta, and the rogues in that part of town directed him gleefully into ever-darker and less public alleys, until in a yard wet with the blood of a slaughtered chicken he was set upon by two men whose faces he never saw, robbed of the substantial bank-roll which he had insanely brought on his solitary excursion, and beaten within an inch of his life.

Night fell. His body was carried by anonymous hands to the edge of the lake, whence it was transported by shikara across the water and deposited, torn and bleeding, on the deserted embankment of the canal which led to the gardens of Shalimar. At dawn the next morning a flower-vendor was rowing his boat through water to which the cold of the night had given the cloudy consistency of wild honey when he saw the prone form of young Atta, who was just beginning to stir and moan, and on whose now deathly pale skin the sheen of wealth could still be made out dimly beneath an actual layer of frost. The flower vendor moored his craft and by stooping over the mouth of the injured man was able to learn the poor fellow’s address, which was mumbled through lips which could scarcely move; whereupon, hoping for a large tip, the hawker rowed Atta home to a large house on the shores of the lake, where a painfully beautiful girl and her equally handsome mother, neither of whom, it was clear from their eyes, had slept a wink from worrying, screamed at the sight of their Atta – who was the elder brother of the beautiful girl – lying motionless amid the funereally stunted winter blooms of the hopeful florist. The flower-vendor was indeed paid off handsomely, not least to ensure his silence, and plays no further part in our story. Atta himself, suffering terribly from exposure as well as a broken skull, entered a coma which caused the city’s finest doctors to shrug helplessly. It was therefore all the more remarkable that on the very same evening the most wretched and disreputable part of the city received a second unexpected visitor. This was Huma, the sister of the unfortunate young man, and her question was the same as her brother’s, and asked in the same low, grave tones: ‘Where may I hire a thief?’ The story of the rich idiot who had come looking for a burglar was already common knowledge in those insalubrious gullies, but this time the girl added: ‘I should say that I am carrying no money, nor am I wearing any jewels; my father has disowned me and will pay no ransom if I am kidnapped; and a letter has been lodged with the Commissioner of Police, my uncle, to be opened in the event of my not being safe at home by morning. In that letter he will find full details of my journey here, and he will move Heaven and Earth to punish my assailants.’ Her extraordinary beauty, which was visible even through the enormous welts and bruises disfiguring her arms and forehead, coupled with the oddity of her inquiries, had attracted a sizable group of curious onlookers, and because her little speech seemed to them to cover just about everything, no one attempted to injure her in any way, although there were some raucous comments to the effect that it was pretty peculiar for someone who was trying to hire a crook to invoke the protection of a high-up policeman uncle. She was directed into ever-darker and less public alleys until finally in a gully as dark as ink an old woman with eyes which stared so piercingly that Huma instantly understood she was blind motioned her through a doorway from which darkness seemed to be pouring like smoke. Clenching her fists, angrily ordering her heart to behave normally, the girl followed the old woman into the gloom-wrapped house. The faintest conceivable rivulet of candle-light trickled through the darkness; following this unreliable yellow thread (because she could no longer see the old lady), Huma received a sudden sharp blow to the shins and cried out involuntarily, after which she instantly bit her lip, angry at having revealed her mounting terror to whatever waited there shrouded in black. She had, in fact, collided with a low table on which a single candle burned and beyond which a mountainous figure could be made out, sitting crosslegged on the floor. ‘Sit, sit,’ said a man’s calm, deep voice, and her legs, needing no more flowery invitation, buckled beneath her at the terse command. Clutching her left hand in her right, she forced her voice to respond evenly:

‘And you, sir, will be the thief I have been requesting?’ Shifting its weight very slightly, the shadow-mountain informed her that all criminal activity originating in this zone was well organised and also centrally controlled, so that all requests for what might be termed freelance work had to be channelled through this room. He demanded comprehensive details of the crime to be committed, including a precise inventory of items to be acquired, also a clear statement of all financial inducements being offered with no gratuities excluded, plus, for filing purposes only, a summary of the motives for the application. At this, Huma, as though remembering something, stiffened both in body and resolve and replied loudly that her motives were entirely a matter for herself; that she would discuss details with no one but the thief himself; but that the rewards she proposed could only be described as ‘lavish’. ‘All I am willing to say to you, sir, since this appears to be some sort of employment agency, is that in return for such lavish rewards I must have the most desperate criminal at your disposal, a man for whom life holds no terrors, not even the fear of God. The worst of fellows, I tell you – nothing less will do!’ Now a paraffin storm-lantern was lighted, and Huma saw facing her a grey-haired giant down whose left cheek ran the most sinister of scars, a cicatrice in the shape of the Arabic letter ‘S’. She had the insupportably nostalgic notion that the bogymen of her childhood nursery had risen up to confront her, because her ayah had always forestalled any incipient acts of disobedience by threatening Huma and Atta: ‘You don’t watch out and I’ll send that one to steal you away – that Sheikh Sin, the Thief of Thieves!’ Here, grey-haired but unquestionably scarred, was the notorious criminal himself – and was she crazy, were her ears playing tricks, or had he truly just announced that, given the circumstances, he himself was the only man for the job? Struggling wildly against the newborn goblins of nostalgia, Huma warned the fearsome volunteer that only a matter of extreme urgency and peril would have brought her unescorted into these ferocious streets. ‘Because we can afford no last-minute backings-out,’ she continued, ‘I am determined to tell you everything, keeping back no secrets whatsoever. If, after hearing me out, you are still prepared to proceed, then we shall do everything in our power both to assist you and to make you rich.’ The old thief shrugged, nodded, spat. Huma began her story. Six days ago, everything in the household of her father, the wealthy moneylender Hashim, had been as it always was. At breakfast her mother had spooned khichri lovingly onto the moneylender’s plate; the conversation had been filled with those expressions of courtesy and solicitude on which the family prided itself. Hashim was fond of pointing out that while he was not a godly man he set great store by ‘living honourably in the world’. In that spacious lakeside residence, all outsiders were greeted with the same formality and respect, even those unfortunates who came to negotiate for small fragments of Hashim’s great fortune, and of whom he naturally asked an interest rate of 71 per cent, partly, as he told his khichri-spooning wife, ‘to teach these people the value of money: let them only learn that, and they will be cured of this fever of borrowing, borrowing all the time – so you see that if my plans succeed, I shall put myself out of business!’ In their children, Atta and Huma, the moneylender and his wife had sought, successfully, to inculcate the virtues of thrift, plain dealing, perfect manners and a healthy independence of spirit. Breakfast ended; the family wished each other a fulfilling day. Within a few hours, however, the glassy contentment of that household, of that life of porcelain delicacy and alabaster

sensibilities, was to be shattered beyond all hope of repair. The moneylender summoned his personal shikara and was on the verge of stepping into it when, attracted by a glint of silver, he noticed a small phial floating between the boat and his private quay. On an impulse, he scooped it out of the glutinous water: it was a cylinder of tinted glass cased in exquisitely-wrought silver, and Hashim saw within its walls a silver pendant bearing a single strand of human hair. Closing his fist around this unique discovery, he muttered to the boatman that he’d changed his plans, and hurried to his sanctum where, behind closed doors, he feasted his eyes on his find. There can be no doubt that Hashim the moneylender knew from the first that he was in possession of the famous holy hair of the Prophet Muhammad, whose theft from the shrine at Hazratbal the previous morning had created an unprecedented hue and cry in the valley. The thieves – no doubt alarmed by the pandemonium, by the procession through the streets of the endless ululating crocodiles of lamentation, by the riots, the political ramifications and by the massive police search which was commanded and carried out by men whose entire careers now hung upon this single lost hair – had evidently panicked and hurled the phial into the gelatine bosom of the lake. Having found it by a stroke of good fortune, Hashim’s duty as a citizen was clear: the hair must be restored to its shrine, and the state to equanimity and peace. But the moneylender had formed a different notion. All about him in his study was the evidence of colletor’s mania: great cases full of impaled butterflies from Gulmarg, three dozen miniature cannons cast from the melted-down metal of the great gun Zamzama, innumerable swords, a Naga spear, ninety-four terracotta camels of the sort sold on railway-station platforms and an infinitude of tiny sandalwood dolls, which had originally been carved to serve as children’s bathtime toys. ‘And after all,’ Hashim told himself, ‘the Prophet would have disapproved mightily of this relic-worship: he abhorred the idea of being deified, so by keeping this rotting hair from its mindless devotees, I perform – do I not? – a finer service than I would by returning it! Naturally, I don’t want it for its religious value: I’m a man of the world, of this world; I see it purely as a secular object of great rarity and blinding beauty – in short, it’s the phial I desire, not the hair. There are American millionaires who buy stolen paintings and hide them away – they would know how I feel. I must, must have it!’ Every collector must share his treasures with one other human being, and Hashim summoned – and told – his only son Atta, who was deeply perturbed but, having been sworn to secrecy, only spilt the beans when the troubles became too terrible to bear. The youth left his father alone in the crowded solitude of his collections. Hashim was sitting erect in a hard chair, gazing intently at the beautiful phial. It was well-known that the moneylender never ate lunch, so it was not until evening that a servant entered the sanctum to summon his master to the dining-table. He found Hashim as Atta had left him. The same, but not the same: because now the moneylender looked swollen, distended, his eyes bulged even more than they always had, they were red-rimmed and his knuckles were white. It was as though he was on the point of bursting, as though, under the influence of the misappropriated relic, he had filled up with some spectral fluid which might at any moment ooze uncontrollably from his every bodily opening. He had to be helped to the table, and then the explosion did indeed take place. Seemingly careless of the effect of his words on the carefully-constructed and fragile constitution of the family’s life, Hashim began to gush, to spume streams of terrible truths. In horrified silence, his children heard their father

turn upon his wife, and reveal to her that for many years their marriage had been the worst of his afflictions. ‘An end to politeness!’ he thundered. ‘An end to hypocrisy!’ He revealed to his family the existence of a mistress; he informed them of his regular visits to paid women. He told his wife that, far from being the principal beneficiary of his will, she would receive no more than the seventh portion which was her due under Islamic law. Then he turned upon his children, screaming at Atta for his lack of academic ability – ‘A dope! I have been cursed with a dope!’ – and accusing his daughter of lasciviousness, because she went around the city barefaced, which was unseemly for any good Muslim girl to do: she should, he commanded, enter purdah forthwith. He left the table without having eaten and fell into the deep sleep of a man who has got many things off his chest, leaving his children stunned, his wife in tears, and the dinner going cold on the sideboard under the gaze of an anticipatory bearer. At five o’clock the next morning the moneylender forced his family to rise, wash and say their prayers; from that time on, he began to pray five times daily for the first time in his life, and his wife and children were obliged to do likewise. Before breakfast, Huma saw the servants, under her father’s direction, constructing a great heap of books in the garden and setting fire to it. The only volume left untouched was the Quran, which Hashim wrapped in a silken cloth and placed on a table in the hall. He ordered each member of his family to read passages from this book for at least two hours per day. Visits to the cinema were also forbidden. And if Atta invited male friends to the house, Huma was to retire to her room. By now, the family had entered a state of wild-eyed horror; but there was worse to come. That afternoon, a trembling debtor arrived at the house to confess his inability to pay the latest instalment of interest owed, and made the mistake of reminding Hashim, in somewhat blustering fashion, of the Quran’s strictures against usury. The moneylender, flying into a rage, attacked the fellow with one of his large collection of bull-whips. By mischance, later the same day a second defaulter came to plead for time, and was seen fleeing Hashim’s study with a great gash on his arm, because Huma’s father had called him a thief of other men’s money and had tried to cut off the fellow’s right hand with one of the thirty-eight kukri knives hanging on the study walls. These breaches of the family’s laws of decorum alarmed Atta and Huma, and when, that evening, their mother attempted to calm Hashim down, he struck her on the face with an open hand. Atta leapt to his mother’s defence and he, too, was sent flying. ‘From now on,’ Hashim bellowed, ‘there’s going to be some discipline around here!’ The moneylender’s wife began a fit of hysteria which continued throughout the night and the following day, and which so provoked her husband that he threatened her with divorce, at which she fled to her room, locked the door and subsided into a raga of sniffling. Huma now lost her composure, challenged her father openly, announced (with that same independence of spirit which he had encouraged in her) that she would wear no cloth over her face: apart from anything else, it was bad for the eyes. On hearing this, her father disowned her at once and gave her one week in which to pack her bags. By the fourth day, the fear in the air of the house had become so thick that it was difficult to walk around. Atta told his shock-numbed sister: ‘We are descending to gutter-level – but I know what must be done.’ That afternoon, Hashim left home accompanied by two hired thugs to extract the unpaid dues from his two insolvent clients. Atta went immediately to his father’s study. Being the son and heir, he possessed his own key to the moneylender’s safe, which he now used, and removing

the little phial from its hiding-place, he slipped it into his trouser pocket and re-locked the safe door. Now he told Huma the secret of what his father had found in Lake Dal, and cried: ‘Maybe I’m crazy – maybe the awful things that are happening have made me cracked – but I am convinced there will be no peace in our house until this hair is out of it.’ His sister instantly agreed that the hair must be returned and Atta set off in a hired shikara to Hazratbal mosque. Only when the boat had delivered him into the throng of the distraught faithful which was swirling around the desecrated shrine did Atta discover that the relic was no longer in his pocket. There was only a hole, which his mother, usually so attentive to household matters, must have overlooked under the stress of recent events ... Atta’s initial surge of chagrin was quickly replaced by a feeling of profound relief. ‘Suppose,’ he imagined, ‘I had already announced to the mullahs that the hair was on my person! They would never have believed me now – and this mob would have lynched me! At any rate, it’s gone, and that’s a load off my mind.’ Feeling more contented than he had for days, the young man returned home. Here he found his sister bruised and weeping in the hall; upstairs, in her bedroom, his mother wailed like a brand-new widow. He begged Huma to tell him what had happened, and when she replied that their father, returning from his brutal business trip, had once again noticed a glint of silver between boat and quay, had once again scooped up the errant relic, and was consequently in a rage to end all rages, having beaten the truth out of her – then Atta buried his face in his hands and sobbed that, in his opinion, that hair was persecuting them, that it had come back to finish the job. Now it was Huma’s turn to think of a way out of their troubles. While her arms turned black and blue and great stains spread across her forehead, she hugged her brother and whispered to him her determination to get rid of the hair at all costs: she repeated this last phrase several times. ‘The hair,’ she then declared, ‘must be stolen. It was stolen from the mosque; it can be stolen from this house. But it must be a genuine robbery, carried out by a real thief, not by one of us who are the hair’s victims – by a thief so desperate that he fears neither capture nor curses.’ Of course, she added, the theft would be ten times harder to pull off now that their father, knowing that there had already been one attempt on the relic, was certainly on his guard. ‘Can you do it?’ Huma, in a room lit by candle and storm-lantern, ended her account with this question: ‘What assurances can you give that the job holds no terrors for you still?’ The criminal, spitting, stated that he was not in the habit of providing references, as a cook might, or a gardener, but he was not alarmed so easily, not by any children’s djinn of a curse. The girl had to be content with this boast, and proceeded to describe the details of the proposed burglary. ‘Since my brother’s failure to restore the hair to the mosque, my father has taken to sleeping with his precious treasure under his pillow. However, he sleeps alone and very energetically: only enter his room without waking him, and he will certainly have tossed and turned quite enough to make the theft a simple matter. When you have the phial, come to my room,’ and here she handed Sheikh Sin a plan of her home, ‘and I will hand over all the jewellery owned by my mother and by myself. You will find ... It is worth ... You will be able to get a fortune for it ...’ It was clear that her self-control was weakening and that she was on the point of physical collapse. ‘Tonight,’ she burst out finally, ‘you must come tonight!’ No sooner had she left the room than the old criminal’s body was convulsed by a fit of coughing: he spat blood into an old tin can. The great Sheikh, the ‘Thief of Thieves’, was also

an old and sick man, and every day the time drew nearer when some young pretender to his power would stick a dagger in his stomach. A lifelong addiction to gambling had left him as poor as he had been when, decades ago, he had started out in this line of work as a mere pickpocket’s apprentice: in the extraordinary commission he had accepted from the moneylender’s daughter he saw his opportunity of amassing enough wealth, at a stroke, to leave the valley and acquire the luxury of a respectable death which would leave his stomach intact. As for the Prophet’s hair, well, neither he nor his blind wife had ever had much to say for prophets – that was one thing they had in common with the moneylender’s clan. It would not do, however, to reveal the nature of this, his last crime, to his four sons: to his consternation, they had all grown up into hopelessly devout fellows, who even spoke absurdly of making the pilgrimage to Mecca some day. ‘But how will you go?’ their father would laugh at them, because, with the absolutist love of a parent, he had made sure they were all provided with a lifelong source of high income by crippling them at birth, so that, as they dragged themselves around the city, they earned excellent money in the begging business. The children, then, could look after themselves; he and his wife would be off with the jewel-boxes of the moneylender’s women. It was a timely chance indeed that had brought the beautiful bruised girl into his corner of the town. That night, the large house on the shore of the lake lay blindly waiting, with silence lapping at its walls. A burglar’s night: clouds in the sky and mists on the winter water. Hashim the moneylender was asleep, the only member of his family to whom sleep had come that night. In another room, his son Atta lay deep in the coils of his coma with a blood-clot forming on his brain, watched over by a mother who had let down her long greying hair to show her grief, a mother who placed warm compresses on his head with gestures redolent of impotence. In yet a third bedroom Huma waited, fully dressed, amidst the jewel-heavy caskets of her desperation. At last a bulbul sang softly from the garden below her window and, creeping downstairs, she opened a door to the bird, on whose face there was a scar in the shape of the Arabic letter ‘S’. Noiseless now, the bird flew up the stairs behind her. At the head of the staircase they parted, moving in opposite directions along the corridor of their conspiracy without a glance at one another. Entering the moneylender’s room with professional ease, the burglar, Sin, discovered that Huma’s predictions had been wholly accurate. Hashim lay sprawled diagonally across his bed, the pillow untenanted by his head, the prize easily accessible. Step by padded step, Sin moved towards the goal. It was at this point that young Atta, without any warning, his vocal cords prompted by God knows what pressure of the clot upon his brain, sat bolt upright in his bed, giving his mother the fright of her life, and screamed at the top of his voice: ‘Thief! Thief! Thief!’ It seems probable that his poor mind had been dwelling, in these last moments, upon his own father, but it is impossible to be certain, because having uttered these three emphatic words the young man fell back on his pillow and died. At once his mother set up a screeching and a wailing and a keening and a howling so ear-splittingly intense as to complete the work which Atta’s cry had begun – that is, her laments penetrated the walls of her husband’s bedroom and brought Hashim wide awake. Sheikh Sin was just deciding whether to dive beneath the bed or brain the moneylender good

and proper when Hashim grabbed the tiger-striped swordstick which always stood propped up in a corner beside his bed, and rushed from the room without so much as noticing the burglar who stood on the opposite side of the bed in the darkness. Sin stooped quickly and removed the phial containing the Prophet’s hair from its hiding-place. Meanwhile Hashim had erupted into the corridor, having unsheathed the sword inside his stick; he was waving the blade about dementedly with his right hand and shaking the stick with his left. Now a shadow came rushing towards him through the midnight darkness of the passageway and, in his somnolent anger, the moneylender thrust his sword fatally through its heart. Turning up the light, he found that he had murdered his daughter, and under the dire influence of this accident he found himself so persecuted by remorse that he turned the sword upon himself, fell upon it and so extinguished his life. His wife, the sole surviving member of the family, was driven mad by the general carnage and had to be committed to an asylum for the insane by her brother, the city’s Commissioner of Police. Sheikh Sin had quickly understood that the plan had gone awry: abandoning the dream of the jewel-boxes when he was but a few yards from its fulfilment, he climbed out of Hashim’s window and made his escape during the awful events described above. Reaching home before dawn, he woke his wife and confessed his failure: it would be necessary, he said, for him to vanish for a while. Her blind eyes never opened until he had gone. The noise in the Hashim household had roused their servants and even awakened the nightwatchman, who had been fast asleep as usual on his charpoy by the gate; the police were alerted and the Commissioner himself informed. When he heard of Huma’s death, the mournful officer opened and read the sealed letter which his niece had given him, and instantly led a large detachment of armed men into the light-repellent gullies of the most wretched and disreputable part of the city. The tongue of a malicious cat-burglar named Huma’s fellow conspirator; the finger of an ambitious bank-robber pointed at the house in which he lay concealed; and although Sin managed to crawl through a hatch in the attic and attempt a rooftop escape, a bullet from the Commissioner’s own rifle penetrated his stomach and brought him crashing messily to the ground at the feet of the enraged uncle. From the dead man’s ragged pockets rolled a phial of tinted glass, cased in filigree silver. The recovery of the Prophet’s hair was announced at once on All-India Radio. One month later, the valley’s holiest men assembled at the Hazratbal mosque and formally authenticated the relic. It sits to this day in a closely-guarded vault by the shores of the loveliest of lakes in the heart of the valley which is closer than any other place on earth to Paradise. But before its story can properly be concluded, it is necessary to record that when the four sons of the dead Sheikh awoke on that morning of his death, having unwittingly spent a few minutes under the same roof as the holy hair, they found that a miracle had occurred, that they were all sound of limb and strong of wind, as whole as they might have been if their father had not thought to smash their legs in the first hours of their lives. They were, all four of them, very properly furious, because this miracle had reduced their earning powers by 75 per cent, at the most conservative estimate: so they were ruined men. Only the Sheikh’s widow had some reason for feeling grateful, because although her husband was dead she had regained her sight, so that it was possible for her to spend her last days gazing once more upon the beauties of the valley of Kashmir.