Creating Something

I'm now deep in Ted Hughes's River poems and drowning in the wonder of them. Even in the one or two poems I've struggled to come to terms with, the language has been super-charged with fluid brilliance. Put simply, it's easy to pick out killer lines.

And when a poem works in its entirety the result is extraordinarily powerful, akin to the casting of a deep, dark spell. Case in point: Creation of Fishes. In some ways this is TH at his simplest - I checked just now if it had featured in one of the books for younger readers, but it hadn't. And to my surprise it didn't feature in the version of River contained in Three Books. So something that knocked me sideways was later omitted by the poet, presumably because he didn't think it was up to snuff. (Or perhaps he thought of it as a poem for kids and, therefore, out of place in this very adult collection.)

I'll just quote three lines as an illustration of what sends shivers down my spine. These lines are developing the storyline, detailing what the Sun does having been fooled by the Moon into drowning his intolerably beautiful children: The raving Sun fished up his loveliest daughter / To set her again beside him, in heaven, / But she spasmed and stiffened, in a torture of colours.

If I ever managed to write anything as good as that, especially the final phrase, I'd consider myself genuinely creative, even if I never wrote anything else.