All right, I've decided to experiment with a new activity, which will be randomly choosing a book of poems from my poetry collection, and randomly opening up to a poem and reading it. And then after reading it, maybe talking about it a little bit. So this one is by Ted Hughes.
It's from his Collected Poems. And this poem is from Flowers and Insects, a collection of poems published in 1986. It's in Ted Hughes's Collected Poems. This one is called “Saint's Island” for Barry Cook.
[note the following poem is not formatted as it originally was in the book]
This is a day for small marvels. The mayflies are leaving their mother.
Seven horsepower, our bows batter the ridgy lough. Weird womb, beneath us it gestates a monster. Monstrous, but tiny.
When it appears, we'll call it the green drake. At the moment, down there in the mud, it's something else. The dream of an alchemist.
The nightmare of the sunk pebble that feels the claws gripped lightly. But today it wants to be born. It's had enough of the mud.
At a brainwave, overpowered by it, does not know what. What is it doing on earth anyway? It kicks off from its burrow. It rises, fueled by the manias of space and inspiration that coil round the sun's mask.
It rises as if it fell towards that magnet core, where blindness glances the sun's water image, shivered by our shockwave as we bounce past. The mayflies are leaving their mother. I glimpse one laboring, a close-up in the brow of a wave.
I glimpse the midget sneeze. A dream bursts its bubble. As much machinery as the up-spurge of a big oak.
One time I found one had failed. It wallowed in the oil of light. I saw through my lens a tiny leech, corkscrewed onto its head.
Luckier in millions, a catkin green dragonish torso hauls from its sleeping bag. A yacht has a blown stubborn moment, falters, lifts from the low's melt. The mayflies are leaving their mother.
And there they go. The lough's words to the world. This is what it thinks.
This is what it aspires to, finally. This is the closest it comes to consciousness and the flight into light, into life. All morning leaving their mother, the mayflies spinning on their weak centers, poetic electrons with their vision of the sun's skirts, an idea faceted like a fly's eye, a rose window in blood cells, a holy grail of neurons, blow and dither downwind toward the island, toward the gray crumble of monastery.
They crowd in under the boughs, keels under every leaf, dangle on claws, cluster their ripenings, letting the sun touch them through chlorophyll. Spooky fruit. Spooky because this isn't their world.
Their world is over. Their feastings are complete. Their jaws are tied up.
That is their underworld, their beachhead in death, because they are already souls. So many they gauze and web the maybush bloom and leaf. As they digest their shock, the vision, it nourishes them, it consumes them, it peels off the last drudgery of the lough.
And they are creeping out of their lives. None resist or defer it, or settle for terms or evade it. Already they have dressed themselves in mayfly, a lace of blackish crystals, as if our lives were lichenous rock, or a sleep of roots, or a tin of sardines, an apple, a watch, a thermos.
Everywhere under the leaves you see their mummy molds, the refuse of their earthliness clinging empty, the blood chart in their wings still perfect, still waiting, already seeming dusty. But they've gone up into sunlight, a wet shimmer in their smudgy veils, sooty fairies. We watch them through binocs, on and off all day till evening.
They are dancing above the trees, rising and falling to windward airs, to woodwind airs, clouded or sunny, to bowings of thermometer or barometer. Over and over, a real unending and Irish. What time will they come out? Will they come out? No hurry.
The long-bellied females, pith-naked, tender two-inch snippets of live nerve cord, tipped with the three black fork-hairs even longer. And the males, darker, smaller, they are rediscovering each other, familiars of the ten billion years. They jig in a spin, in a column.
They are tossed and are tossed. Their happiness is to prolong this, to prolong it till the moment opens and it happens, and an escaping climax of the music lifts them over the top, and they are coming out. But now, like dervishes, truly they are like those touched by God, drunk with God, they hurl themselves into God.
They have caught the moment. Their dancing has found that fault in time, to break through, to break out, into beyond. They are casting themselves away.
They abandon themselves. They soar out of themselves. They fall through themselves.
Where can they go? Space can't hold them. The blue air is snowing. All around us, trickling giddily down, they try to pirouette.
The wind carries them out. Under the outer waves of the lough, the big trout wait. Under the island lee, anchored in the mirror between light and dark, on the skin of shivers, we wait.
What are we doing on earth? All around us, fanatics faint and wreck, shuddering gently onto the face of evening.
And that is the end of the poem. It's a long poem. One, two, four pages long. Many, many verses. It's a free verse poem. We're not looking for rhymes in this poetry. There are some internal rhymes, but it's more alliterations, boughs, batter, weird womb. It's more wordplay.
It's thick description. The focus is on these insects, these mayflies being born in huge proliferations. The mayflies are leaving their mother. I think that must be mother earth. So it's about the miracle of birth. It's the miracle of life. What are we doing on this earth is a question. It's a very religious poem. It's a close observation of nature. He's kind of teaching us how to observe carefully and closely the phenomena of nature, like to be a naturalist, but to capture it in the language of poetry, which kind of puts him in the same category in a way as other poets like Nemerov, like A.R. Ammons, very much a nature poet, using multiple perspectives and multiple ways of describing a natural phenomenon. Spooky fruit. Spooky because this isn't their world. Their world is over. Their feastings are complete. Their jaws are tied up.
This is their underworld, their beachhead in death because they are already souls. So it's kind of about the miracle, but also the ephemerality of life and death. He's watching this kind of birth struggle, but it's also a death struggle because at the very end, you know, what is waiting for them under the outer waves of the lough. Is it low or lough? I'll have to look that up. L-O-U-G-H. Obviously, it's a place name.
The big trout wait. So these mayflies have just been born, and yet, like most creatures that are born, insects and fish and so on, they're born in a great proliferation, but most of them are gobbled up. Right.
That's why insects and spiders and fish and other creatures give birth to a have multiple children, maybe thousands, hundreds, thousands of children, because maybe only a small fraction will survive long enough to proliferate. So again, it's kind of the questioning life. What are we doing here? Why is life so brief and fleeting for so many creatures? There seems to be a bigger picture here of nature, Mother Earth, of the network of nature, of creatures being born to feed other creatures, and this very rich, elaborate network of life.
Yeah, it's a very powerful and deep poem. I'm glad that I selected this one, even if randomly. And just as a little addendum, I did look up the word l-o-u-g-h.
It's a variation of loch, like the lochness monster, and it's pronounced loch. So it's somewhere between loch and lof, lough. So I'm not going to bother to read the poem again with that knowledge in mind, but just if you do read the poem again yourself, that's something to keep in mind.
Hope you found it interesting, and let's do this again sometime. Over and out.