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The Department of English

The English and Foreign Languages University

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Destructive Love and Devouring Lust in Ted Hughes’ Crow Poems


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“The Lover and the Monster: Destructive Love and Devouring Lust in

Ted Hughes’ Crow Poems”

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First published in 1790 by Faber and Faber, Crow: From the Life and Songs of the

Crow is one of Ted Hughes’ most famous works. Known for the fascination and revulsion

evoked by the eponymous figure of the Crow, this is a collection that has lent itself to a wide

variety of interpretations, touching upon the themes of religion, creation, survival, and

savagery. This paper is concerned with the way the poems in Crow portray love and sex,

focusing on “Crow’s First Lesson”, “Lovesong,” and “The Lovepet”.

“Crow’s First Lesson”, as the title suggests, is about a lesson, or an attempted one, in

which God tries to teach the Crow to talk. The poem is written in five stanzas of irregular

lines without any rhyme scheme. The first four describe each of the Crow’s attempts to speak

and their undesired consequences. The final stanza is only a single line, showing the Crow’s

hasty escape from the mess it has caused, guilty but unwilling to take responsibility. This is

consistent with the amoral, inhuman figure Hughes builds up in the Crow. The fact that it

feels guilty at all is a minor miracle, while its complete inability to comprehend love is only

as expected.

The first word God desires the Crow to say is ‘Love,’ and not only does God fail to

succeed, his efforts result in rather disastrous consequences for his favourite creation –

mankind. Crow’s first attempt to vocalize “love” sends a shark crashing to the sea, sinking

deep and discovering its own depths while the second attempt pulls parasitic insects down to
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inviting strips of flesh. But neither of these is as visceral as the effects that Crow’s last two

attempts produce:

Crow convulsed, gaped, retched and

Man’s bodiless prodigious head

Bulbed out onto the earth, with swivelling eyes,

Jabbering protest – (Hughes, “Crow’s First Lesson” 10-13)

The horror of this is not complete until the next stanza where we have the lines, “And

Crow retched again, before God could stop him. / And woman’s vulva dropped over man’s

neck and tightened. / The two struggled together on the grass.” (14-16). Even God is unable

to separate them, helpless in the face of such a strong, deformed bond.

One does not miss how Crow, in its quest to comprehend love, only spawns terrible

things. The white shark is a dangerous predator while mosquitoes, blueflys, and tsetse flies

are all parasites that feed on blood and flesh. The implication that man being strangled by

woman’s vulva is on the same level as the aforementioned creatures only emphasize the

repulsive and destructive nature Hughes attributes to love. The imagery here is both erotic

and terrible, evoking both death and sex, the two inextricably intertwined. This is a pattern

that repeats in “Lovesong” and “The Lovepet”, where both romantic and sexual love are

swallowed up by fatal passion.

Unlike in “Crow’s First Lesson”, the Crow doesn’t personally appear in “Lovesong”

and “The Lovepet”. But they are connected to the figure of the Crow as part of the long,

multi-faceted history Hughes weaves for this creature that is man and animal and death and

divinity all rolled into one. Both poems are answers to an old woman’s questions, but they’re
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also the Crow’s fumbling attempts at learning to love. In the words of Hughes himself during

a poetry reading at the Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week in 1976:

All the questions relate back to his encounters and his experiences with this

being that he’s been looking for. So they are all questions about the

relationship between man and women – or Man and Woman. So they’re all

really love questions. And they’re all dilemma questions, because they don’t

have an answer. So, this is one of his answers. And the question is “who paid

most?” So he begins with the river running past his mouth. And he’s only a

half creature, so he’s completely unmusical. He begins to try and chip little

bits of her weight off him.

“Who paid most, him or her?” asks the old woman, and “Lovesong” is the answer.

“Was it an animal? Was it a bird? Was it an insect? Was it a fish?” she asks again, and thus,

“The Lovepet” is born.

“Lovesong”, a poem of forty-four lines in five uneven stanzas, is a vivid, brutal

exploration between a man and a woman, or rather, Man and Woman, as there is something

about the poem that suggests a certain sort of disconcerting universality. “He loved her and

she loved him,” begins the poem, and this first line is the only bit of gentleness present in the

entirety of it. All that follows are visceral descriptions of an intensely sexual relationship that

devours the two lovers. He kisses to suck out her soul, she bites to swallow him whole, and

the marks they leave on each other are shackles that bind them to each other and a future of

seductive violence. It’s not hatred or anger that prompts them to love so violently, but honest

desire that has spiralled out of control like a forest fire. She does not give him a spider’s bite

in order to hurt him, but only so that he’ll stay safe and still at her pleasure forever. He does

not hollow her out and bind her tight because he wants to imprison her but rather because the
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only future he wants is one where they’re intertwined so tight that they’re deep in each

other’s flesh.

The love here is obsessive, savage, and all-encompassing. It leaves no room for

tenderness, for gentle caresses, whispered words, or any such romantic notion. In fact,

romance is entirely lacking in the whole affair, its absence all the more marked by the fact

that the relationship portrayed is still obviously and genuinely a form of love. But it is toxic

and has perhaps always been so, born of some great emotion that was never meant to tamed

into something sweet and quaint. The man and the woman are a candle burning at both ends,

glorious as they hurtle in fiery harmony towards a future of shapeless nothingness. Yet, that

is precisely what the male persona desires:

He gripped her hard so that life

Should not drag her from that moment

He wanted all future to cease

He wanted to topple with his arms round her

Off that moment’s brink and into nothing (Hughes, “Lovesong” 10-14)

What is expressed here is not a desire for death but for eternity, except that the

eternity he wants is that perfect moment of love frozen in time. But that is impossible and he

knows it, so the best he can have is for both of their lives to freeze in that moment, killing any

possible future that might take them away from each other. This is only wishful thinking, for

time is merciless and untameable, and throughout the poem, the lovers’ desperation speaks

volumes about how they know that their relationship will eventually sputter out like a flame.
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The female persona is no less possessive than the male one nor is her desire to seek

refuge in a world where they’re together forever any less intense. However, she does not

want the future to cease to be or for time to stop. Instead, she tries to take the man deep into

herself until he’s fused with her bones and sinews. She wants to poison him with her love so

he’ll lie sweetly there and never leave her.

Her embrace was an immense press

To print him into her bones

His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace

Where the real world would never come

Her smiles were spider bites

So he would lie still till she felt hungry (Hughes, “Lovesong” 16-21)

The recurrent idea of crafting a place just for the two of them, where the rest of the

world or even time itself shall never interfere, shows clearly that the lovers are quite aware of

the transience of their bond. Perhaps it is the violence of it that spells its end because words

that are “occupying armies” (22) and laughs that are “assassin’s attempts” (23) do not

promise a bright future for the lovers but rather hints at annihilation. And one can certainly

see the end of the poem as a kind of annihilation, one of identity and not life. They exchange

limbs, devour brains, and wake up wearing each other’s face, becoming a singular but twisted

entity occupying two bodies.

The union here is not sweet and harmonious, like one would expect from a typical

pair of lovers. Instead, it is greedy and wild, their love completely subsuming them both until
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they are stripped of individuality and become something monstrous and unnatural. The entire

poem, with its casual detailing of this process, is ripe with a quiet kind of horror.

“The Lovepet”, with forty-eight lines divided into ten stanzas of varying size, is no

less bleak in its portrayal of love. The poem describes love in a manner reminiscent of a pet,

easily justifying the title, except that the pet here is not something sweet and docile, but a

reckless thing with a voracious appetite for destruction. The man and the woman feed it,

generous in their offerings. They give it their voice, their blood, their spirit, their strength,

and even their future, but it only grows hungrier and hungrier, until nothing they have is

enough to appease its need.

It eats their dreams, their flesh, and their vows until all they have to give it are false

smiles and hollow silence. Still, it tears through them, gobbling up even the shouted

arguments that ring in their home, and it keeps taking until even their children are lost. And

when they scream that it has gone too far, it tries to leave, only to be lured back with the

promise that it can have everything. So, it devours all that they have until there’s nothing they

can offer, until they are both empty and flavourless. This time, when it leaves, they have

neither the voice nor the strength to call it back.

Unlike the viscerally sexual relationship in “Lovesong”, which lacks any kind of

progression until the very end, “The Lovepet” lovingly details how the relationship evolves.

The effect is all the more bittersweet because we can see how a bond that was once sweet and

pleasant degenerates into one that spreads only misery. In the beginning, the man and the

woman are happy to feed their pet, their love. Their affection for each other is clear in the

way they nurse the pet, giving it soft words and gentle strokes, feeding it happily and

wholeheartedly. They rejoice in its growth.

She stroked it. He spoke to it softly.


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She made her voice its happy forest.

He brought it out with sugarlump smiles.

Soon it was licking their kisses. (Hughes, “The Lovepet” 2-5)

However, it does not take long for things to take a darker turn. The pet turns vicious

and gluttonous, taking everything they can give and asking for more, dissatisfied no matter

what it’s fed. A pivotal moment in the poem is when the pet reacts to the lovers’ exasperation

and leaves. Rather than let it go, they beg for its return, saying it could have everything. Just

as in “Lovesong”, the toxicity of the relationship is obvious here. The best one can do for a

disintegrating relationship is to let it go, but here, even when aching from the loss of all that

love has taken from them, the lovers are desperate to have it back, willing to sacrifice even

more.

It went furiously off

They wept they called it back it could have everything

It stripped out their nerves chewed chewed flavourless

It bit at their numb bodies they did not resist

It bit into their blank brains they hardly knew (Hughes, “The Lovepet” 40-44)

The pain fades into numb resignation, until they cease to be aware of the ravages love

is inflicting on their hearts and bodies. In the end, the pet leaves anyway, only this time, the

lovers are left helpless, unable to move or even speak. The implications are clear. If they had

allowed their love to dissolve the first time instead of forcing themselves to stay together,

they might have overcome the whole experience eventually. The relationship would have

been destroyed, but as individuals, they would have survived. But their futile attempts to stay
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together ends so disastrously that they are both ruined and become mere shades of

themselves.

All three of these poems offer unique but connected interpretations of love. It is hardly

surprising that the Crow, whose fumbling attempts at speaking the word “love” brings forth

sharks and mosquitoes, can only offer stories that show its skewed comprehension of

romantic and erotic bonds. It is a creature that is greedy, crass, and amoral, and each of these

characteristics is present in the lovers featured in “Lovesong” and “The Lovepet”.

A biographical study might connect these poems to Ted Hughes’ explosive marriage

to fellow poet Sylvia Plath, but even taken in isolation, they are fascinating studies of all the

ways love can go wrong. Romantic relationships are idealised and glorified in societies, and

they have been a popular topic among poets from the days of the ballad. But while the

majority prefers to look at love with rose-tinted lenses, there are artists who choose to peer

into the dark side of it and dissect all the ways in which infatuation becomes obsession.

Hughes, at least in regard to these poems, is of the latter sort. Perhaps a poem like “Bride and

Groom lie Hidden for Three Days”, in which love is presented as something beautiful and

mutually delightful, might offer a different perspective, but even then, the images of the two

lovers literally building each other are more grotesque than is typical of love poetry.

In spite of the desolate pictures of romance these poems depict, their beauty is

undeniable. The same aspects that make them bitter and gruesome also make them sweet and

visceral, reaching deep into the reader with its frank depictions of eroticised violence. ‘Poetry

is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted’, said the Romantic poet Percy

Bysshe Shelley, and the statement is only too true in these lines where Man and Woman try

to kill each other with love while the dispassionate Crow struggles in vain to understand.
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Works Cited

Eliot, Charles William. English Essays From Sir Philip Sidney to Macaulay: Part 27

Harvard Classics. New York: Collier and Sons, 1909-14. Bartleby.com. Web. 23 Sep.

2018.

Hughes, Ted. New Selected Poems 1957-1994. London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 2010. EPUB.

Skea, Ann. “Ted Hughes and Crow.” The Ted Hughes Homepage. Ann Skea Homepage

(2015). Web. 19 Sep. 2018.

Skea, Ann. “Ted Hughes at the Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week, March 1976.” The Ted

Hughes Homepage (2015). Ann Skea Homepage. Web. 18 Sep. 2018.

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