Wind
This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet
Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.
At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up --
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,
The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house
Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,
Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.
Commentary
From the arresting opening image of a farmhouse being tossed about like a
ship in a storm, right through to the tense, not-quite-resolved ending, this is a breathtakingly vivid poem. Hughes captures the power of the wind in phrases that ring with an elemental fury of their own, a wild and unquenchable energy. This effect is enhanced by his choice of words: ‘brunt’ is only the most obvious example of his eschewing pretty Latinate constructs for gritty Germanic equivalents. Indeed, the ancestry of this poem is very clear: “Wind” belongs to the tradition of Icelandic sagas and Norse mythology, poems which celebrate, with a mixture of awe and dread, the unimaginable power of Nature and the insignificance of Man.
— Thomas
Minstrels Links
Ted Hughes:
Poem #42, Hawk Roosting
Poem #98, The Thought Fox
Poem #417, Thistles
Poem #671, Lineage
Poem #723, Full Moon and Little Frieda
Poem #768, Theology
Sylvia Plath:
Poem #53, Winter landscape, with rocks
Poem #129, Ariel
Poem #366, Child
Poem #404, Daddy
Poem #612, Love Letter
Poem #678, Mirror
Poem #881, The Moon and the Yew-tree
Others:
Poem #109, The Viking Terror – Anon. (Irish, 9th century)
Poem #145, Ice – Anon. (Old English, 10th century)
Poem #326, The Seafarer – Anon. (Old English, pre-10th century
Show 4 commentsHide comments
From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Divya_Sampath · 3 September 2001
Hi Thomas,
Thanks for today’s Ted Hughes. Indeed, it is very powerful. Oddly, I’ve never seen this as a comparison of a house to a ship- it reads to me like a description of a a ship that a sailor thinks of as a house. So to my mind,
“the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet”
always referred to the wind tossed sea, “flexing like the lens of a mad eye.”
Fascinating to see how someone else interprets the peom!
Thanks again!
Cheers,
Divya
Margaret Winfield · 17 January 2002
Dear Sir,
Having read your website and finding the Ted Hughes poem “Wind”, I disussed this with my fellow intellects. They, as I, have seen the comments below, at the bottom of the page, and have taken these into hand, but believe that you have not fully understood the poem. We all agreed that this poem was written by Hughes to show in an extended metaphor his relationship with his wife, Syvia Plath. She, another poet, often fell into serious cases of the mental disease depression, and is seen in this poem as the wind, “stampeding the fields”, totally out of any sort of control, while Hughes himself is pictured as the house, “whose roots move” under the strain of the relationship. The couple grip each other’s hearts, trying to keep their marrige intact, although the foundations are “crying out for mercy”. Yours Sincerely,
Edward Winfield(12), London
Robert Koval · 12 December 2004
Thomas,
I believe that all of these views are correct. Hughes was definitely describing his hectic relationship with Sylvia Plath, but I believe that the element of nature is meant to signify something greater than merely his personal life. The insignificance of man is quite evident as is the troubled relationship.
Rob
Boyds · 9 May 2006
Hi Thomas,
Great poem, very moving and write some more.
Chris Boyd