This poem is from the collection "Moortown Diary", sometimes just known

as Moortown, is a poetry diary which details the everyday life of a working farm,
that was first published in 1979.Ted Hughes married Carol Orchard, a farmer's
daughter, in 1970. Ted Hughes and his father-in-law, Jack Orchard, ran Moortown
farm in Devon. The book contains a moving tribute to Jack Orchard, who died in
1976. ‘Moortown Diary’ is the updated version of Ted Hughes's acclaimed Devon
farming sequence, written over a period of several years during which he was
spending almost every day outside, either gardening or farming.

So ‘Moortown Diary’ grew out of the journal notes, Hughes were making between
1972 and 1976. In 1972 he had fulfilled a long cherished dream of buying a patch
of land with his father-in-law and spent the following four years learning the
basics of farming from him. Jack Orchard’s stubborn figure is the presiding spirit
of the poems in ‘Moortown Diary.’ He's there in the background, keeping the
language honest, absorbed and swift. This poem ‘A Memory’ is dedicated to his
memory.

The poem is written in third person narrative and follows the pattern of free verse
with no regular rhyme scheme. It contains five stanzas that are irregular in length.
The poem appears to be quite disjointed and does not flow easily which could be
an emphasis on the strength and endurance to handle the sheep as the farmer is
exposed to heat and cold. ‘Moortown Diary’, in the words of its introduction,
"more or less excludes the poetic process" – and appears more like a process
involving recollection and then reshaping it to something more like a
documentary, more like the rapid jottings of a journalist which is very much
evident in ‘A Memory.’

In ‘A memory’, Hughes addresses devotion to hard farm work in his examination

of the man’s body. The direct address to the farmer as ‘Your’ suggests a close
relationship between the poet and the shepherd in a realistic and up-close
viewpoint. The poet’s observation of Orchard’s posture reveals his admiration for
the particular man and embeds that ‘memory’ within the poem. The simile of the
man being ‘Powerful as a horse,’ portrays the farmer’s energy and strength that is
characterised by a passion in his work. The emphasis on being ‘bowed’ creates
resistance to the earth’s pulling force in shearing and this reveals the human
strength devoted to the task and the power of language helps to create that
tension between the human and the animal. The unnamed farmer is initially
perceived with his ‘bony white bowed back’ exposed to cold and heat. The barn is
described to as dark as a cave where the harsh chilly wind coming from the ‘East’
door is ‘freezing’ but this freezing is contrasted with the sweating that is very
much evident on his face and body referring to the sheer strength and force
required in shearing the sheep that even the freezing wind is melted when
touched with the heat of the farmer’s body. The presentation of his body ‘bony
white’ is contradictory to the ‘Flame-crimson face’ that suggests the body in
struggle, resulting in curses. Hughes uses ‘drum-guttural African curses’ to signify
the aural sense which is generated by the body; and connecting the farmer to the
indigenous tribesmen of Africa making a relation of his raw energy and spirit with
the raw and indigenous forces of nature. Secondly, the farmer’s physicality is
integrated with the metaphor of a drum. Generally, a drum is associated with
music, steady rhythm, and repetition; however, it signifies an articulation of
sound through hard labour in this context. The hyphenated phrase, ‘cave-dark
barn’ constitutes hardship in sheering resulting in the ‘Flame-crimson face’. In this
light, Hughes depicts the human body influenced by heat in the dark barn to
suggest the power of poetry and environmental imagination. In ‘A memory’,
Hughes develops an organic metaphor of the farmer handling the animal. The
sheep is imagined as a bale of straw: ‘As you bundled the sheep/ Like tying some
oversize, overweight, spilling bale/ Through its adjustments of position’. The
comparison between the sheep and the bale produces an ecological connection
between the animal (an object of shearing) and the bale (an object of haymaking).
Mastering domesticated animals and tying the bale become a metaphor of work
which connects the farmer to the poet’s memory.

Another important point is the shepherd’s relationship with the animal. The
farmer’s handling of the sheep is a complex combination of care to harness the
creature as a commodity: ‘Through all your suddenly savage, suddenly gentle/
Masterings of the animal.’ Hughes’s play on the opposite meanings here, ‘savage’
versus ‘gentle’ is based on the linguistic dichotomy which reveals the famer’s
attentiveness and farming practice that requires the animal’s well-being as well as
control over its wild behaviour. The cigarette like the farmer is also personified as
‘bent’ preserving its pride even though it is being turned to ashes. The ‘glowing’ of
the cigarette is linked to the ‘Flame crimson face’ of the farmer as both are
involved in the intensive labour of their job.

In addition to mastering the sheep, Hughes compares the barn with the industrial
environment. ‘A memory’ considers the human attempt to harness nature both in
handling animals and exploiting the earth’s resources. The simile of the third
stanza powerfully describes difficult shearing in the dark barn; the collier’s work in
the mine requires similar patience and strength: The distinctive metaphor of the
barn and the mine pit places the farmer in a difficult environment. His endurance
in shearing can be compared to the collier’s working in the dark, ‘solid hour’. The
description of his body significantly suggests the signs of long and hard work in
farm life. When the farmer is heedless of his ‘own surfaces’, he is removed from
his body as a result of his labour. As the poem shows, the weather has certainly
transformed the farmer’s body: ‘Bald, arch-wrinkled, weathered dome bowed’.
Hughes’s poetry imagines the physical body to suggest strength and endurance of
the farming figure. Being bald and having wrinkles are signs of aging as well as
evidence of hard work. The repetition of ‘bow’ emphasises human strength in the
physical structure through the use of architectural language, the ‘dome’. In this
context, the shepherd’s body is influenced by nature; Jack Orchard is depicted as
resistant to, and shaped by the hostile weather in the barn environment. In fact,
the farmer becomes one with external nature. Hughes connects the cigarette in ‘A
memory’ with the metaphor of the collier working in the dark mine in which the
glowing light becomes a sign of time.

The hard labour of shearing the sheep is over by the fourth stanza and the bent
body is now erect but that too is signified by a ‘groan’ showing that the tedious
task is now over and even the straightening of the body requires some effort after
it has been in a bowed position for quite a long time. The sheep also has a
completely changed appearance and it now ‘peeled’ just like it has been peeled of
its soft woolly fur and its now bare skin exposed to the harshness of the weather.
For the shepherd, shearing seems to be timed by the banal and ordinary
temporality of smoking. Just like when shearing is over, the cigarette has also
been completely finished with only the truncated remnant of the cigarette
remaining as he quickly removes it from his lips and with his huge gloves that are
still shining with the grease that was the result of the shearing process, he lits
another cigarette and this time to relax and celebrate its victory as he has been in
his strenuous and exhausting task.

Hughes’s fascination with the body of the farmer throughout the poem
contributes to his development of an environmental consciousness. The farmer
becomes memorialised in poetry as being at one with the earth.