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TED HUGHES, NATURE AND CULTURE
EDITED BY NEIL ROBERTS, MARK WORMALD, AND TERRY GIFFORD
Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture
Neil Roberts · Mark Wormald
Terry Gifford
Editors
Ted Hughes, Nature

and Culture
Editors
Neil Roberts Mark Wormald
School of English Literature, Pembroke College
Language and Linguistics University of Cambridge
University of Sheffield Cambridge, UK
Sheffield, UK
Terry Gifford
Bath Spa University
Bath, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-97573-3 ISBN 978-3-319-97574-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97574-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950414
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Contents
Part I Hughes and Environments
1 Ted Hughes’s ‘Greening’ and the Environmental

Humanities 3
Terry Gifford
2 The Nuptial Flight: Ted Hughes and the Mayfly 21

Mark Wormald
3 Ted Hughes’s Paradise 39

Neil Roberts
4 Why Look at Animals? 53

Danny O’Connor
5 Coetzee’s Hughesian Animals 69

Claire Heaney
6 The Nature of Ted Hughes’s Similes 87

James Castell
7 The Nature of Englishness: The Hybrid Poetics of

Ted Hughes 107
Vidyan Ravinthiran
v
vi Contents
8 Imagination Alters Everything: Ted Hughes and Place 125

Janne Stigen Drangsholt
Part II Hughes’s Cultural Connections
9 ‘Our Chaucer’: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the

Politics of Medieval Reading 143
James Robinson
10 ‘The Remains of Something’: Ted Hughes and

The Mabinogion 161
Katherine Robinson
11 Ted Hughes’s Apocalyptic Origins 177

John Goodby
12 Spectral Ophelia: Reading Manuscript Cancellations

Contextually in Ted Hughes’s Cave Birds 195
Carrie Smith
13 The Influence of Ted Hughes: The Case of Alice Oswald 215

Laura Blomvall
14 Hughes and Urbanity 231

Seamus Perry
Index 245
Notes on Contributors
Laura Blomvall researches lyric theory at the University of York, with

previous degrees from Cambridge and UCL. She archived the Olwyn
Hughes Papers of Pembroke College, Cambridge, in 2013, and her arti-
cle ‘Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: biography, poetry and ethics’ appeared
in The Ted Hughes Society Journal in 2014.
James Castell is a Lecturer in English Literature at Cardiff University
and teaches Romantic and twentieth-century poetry. He has writ-
ten chapters for The Oxford Handbook to William Wordsworth and The
Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature and is cur-
rently completing a monograph entitled Wordsworth and Animal Life.
Janne Stigen Drangsholt is an Associate Professor at Department of
Language and Culture Studies, University of Stavanger. She is the author
of four novels, among other critical and creative works. Forthcoming
publications include ‘Migrating Across the Mediterranean: T. S. Eliot’s
Language of Being’ in the anthology Multiple Mediterranean.
Terry Gifford is the author/editor of seven books on Ted Hughes
including Ted Hughes in Context (2018), New Casebooks: Ted Hughes
(2015), The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (2011) and Ted
Hughes (2009). A Feast of Fools (2018) is his latest poetry collection.
He is Visiting Research Fellow at Bath Spa University and Professor
Honorifico at the University of Alicante, Spain.
vii
viii Notes on Contributors
John Goodby currently holds a personal chair at Swansea University.

He is a critic, poet and translator, the author of Irish Poetry Since
1950: From Stillness Into History (MUP, 2000) and The Poetry of Dylan
Thomas: Under the Spelling Wall (LUP, 2013), and edited the Collected
Poems of Dylan Thomas (Orion, 2014). His most recent poetry collection
is Illennium (Shearsman, 2010).
Claire Heaney gained a Ph.D. from Queen’s University, Belfast in
2012. She has published on J. M. Coetzee and is currently develop-
ing a book exploring questions of ethics and imagination in his work.
Recent work on Hughes and his biographers is included in Ted Hughes
in Context (CUP, 2018).
Danny O’Connor teaches twentieth-century literature at the University
of Liverpool. His first book, Burning the Foxes: Ted Hughes and Trauma,
addresses the poet’s work alongside the literary theory he dismisses as
‘the tyrant’s whisper’. He is currently researching humour in Modernism
from Alfred Jarry to B. S. Johnson.
Seamus Perry is a Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford;
Fellow of Balliol College, Fellow Librarian, and Fellow for Charity
Matters. He is Editor, with Christopher Ricks and Freya Johnston, of
Essays in Criticism: A Quarterly Journal of Literary Criticism (Oxford
University Press). www.eic.oxfordjournals.org
Vidyan Ravinthiran is a Senior Lecturer at the University of
Birmingham. Elizabeth Bishop’s Prosaic (Bucknell UP, 2015) won
both the University English Prize and the Warren-Brooks Award for
Outstanding Literary Criticism. Grun-tu-molani (Bloodaxe, 2014) was
shortlisted for several first collection prizes, and poems towards his next
book won a Northern Writers Award. He helps edit PracCrit, the online
magazine of poetry and poetics.
Neil Roberts is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the
University of Sheffield, where he organised the Seventh International
Ted Hughes Conference in 2015. His work on Ted Hughes includes
Ted Hughes: A Literary Life, Ted Hughes: A Critical Study (with Terry
Gifford), Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected (co-edited with Mark
Wormald and Terry Gifford) and Reading Ted Hughes: ‘New Selected
Poems’. Other recent publications include A Lucid Dreamer: The Life of
Peter Redgrove and Sons and Lovers: The Biography of a Novel.
Notes on Contributors ix
James Robinson currently teaches in the Department of English

Studies, Durham University. He is the author of Joyce’s Dante: Exile,
Memory, and Community (CUP, 2016) and a number of articles on
Dante, on James Joyce and on Ted Hughes. He is working on a new
book, Ted Hughes and Medieval Literature: ‘Deliberate Affiliation’, aris-
ing from the research conducted during the tenure of a Leverhulme
Early Career Fellowship.
Katherine Robinson is a Ph.D. candidate at Cambridge University
where she is writing about the influence of the Welsh Mabinogi on Ted
Hughes. She has published essays about Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and
Robert Duncan, and her poetry and fiction appear in Poetry Wales, Poetry
Ireland, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry
from Johns Hopkins University.
Carrie Smith is a Lecturer at Cardiff University. Her research focuses
on the literary manuscripts of Ted Hughes tracing the development of
his composition techniques throughout his career. Her published work
focuses on his poetry readings and recordings, and his partnership with
Leonard Baskin. She has co-edited a collection The Boundaries of the
Literary Archive: Reclamation and Representation.
Mark Wormald is a Fellow and Director of Studies in English at
Pembroke College, Cambridge. He was the co-editor, with Terry
Gifford and Neil Roberts, of Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to Collected
(2013), and is the editor of the Ted Hughes Society Journal. His book The
Catch: Fishing for Ted Hughes will be published in 2019.
Abbreviations
All references are to the British first editions of Faber and Faber unless
otherwise indicated. So the abbreviation SGCB refers to the first 1992
edition of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Editions of
Winter Pollen and of Jonathan Bate’s biography vary between edi-
tions, but all quotations from these books are from hardback first edi-
tions, unless endnoted otherwise. If poems are published in Collected
Poems they are referenced therein. When referencing the two major Ted
Hughes archives, ‘Emory’ refers to the Stuart Rose Rare Books and
Manuscript Collection at the Robert W. Woodruff Library, University of
Emory, Atlanta, Georgia, USA and ‘BL’ refers to the Ted Hughes collec-
tions at the British Library, London, UK.
Abbreviations Actually Used

CP Collected Poems
DB Difficulties of a Bridegroom
G Gaudete
LTH Letters of Ted Hughes
MD Moortown Diary
O The Oresteia
PM Poetry in the Making
SGCB Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being
W Wodwo
WP Winter Pollen
xi
Introduction
‘Every new child is nature’s chance to correct culture’s error’, Hughes

wrote in his 1976 essay, ‘Myth and Education’ (WP 149). No reader of
his poetry can doubt that this allegiance to ‘nature’ and suspicion of if
not hostility to ‘culture’ (at least the culture that he and almost all his
readers inhabit) is a powerful—perhaps the most powerful—motivating
energy in his work. It is blatant in the contrast between the ‘attent sleek’
birds ‘Triggered to stirrings beyond sense’ and the man ‘Carving at a tiny
ivory ornament/ For years’ of ‘Thrushes’; between the impotent words
and the shape-shifting hare in ‘Crow Goes Hunting’; or the ‘bunching
beast-cry inside’ Mrs Hagen and the ‘Barren perspectives/ Cluttered
with artefacts’ of her home in Gaudete (CP 82–83; CP 236; G 32).
‘Nature’ and ‘culture’ are, according to Raymond Williams, among
‘the two or three most complicated words in the English language’.1
He gives three broad definitions for each word, but for the purpose of
thinking about Hughes’s poetry one of these definitions, in each case, is
clearly most relevant: culture as ‘a general process of intellectual, spiritual
and aesthetic development’ and nature as ‘the inherent force which
directs either the world or human beings or both’.2
However, this does not dispose of all the complexity. In particular, it
has become increasingly evident that the divide between nature and cul-
ture is, in the words of the Finnish ecologist and philosopher Yrjö Haila,
‘a conceptual prison’.3 The stronger the evidence that humankind is
inescapably a part of the natural world (a position Hughes undoubtedly
espoused) the more difficult it is to position ‘culture’ outside nature.
xiii
xiv Introduction
Conversely, ‘nature’ itself is a concept that is profoundly culturally deter-

mined. The two concepts, then, are subsumed into each other, but in
a way that leaves them both unstable. It might be a useful oversimplifi-
cation to say that for the ecologist nature subsumes culture and for the
cultural theorist the reverse pertains. But none of us exclusively occupies
either of these positions, so that the two terms, if not binary, are una-
voidably relational.
The essays in this book originated in the seventh international Ted
Hughes conference, ‘Dreams as Deep as England’, held at the University
of Sheffield in 2015. The chapters vary greatly in their approach from
the contextual to the ethical, intertextual, textual scholarship and close
reading, The editors chose the title Ted Hughes: Nature and Culture
because they were struck by how, for all the range of approach, this rela-
tion is, in one way or another, unavoidable for nearly all the contributors.
Terry Gifford argues that despite performing poorly in scientific sub-
jects at school, Hughes overcame the ‘two cultures’ divide to become
impressively scientifically informed in the field about which he cared
passionately: environmental protection. Drawing Hughes into the ‘envi-
ronmental humanities’, Gifford invokes recent concepts that encode the
inseparability of nature and culture, such as biosemiotics and psychoge-
ography, quoting Wendy Wheeler’s insistence that science should ‘be
part of a “poetic” developmental dialogic relation with nature’.4 Mark
Wormald takes up the theme of Hughes’s scientific interests and com-
bines it with textual scholarship, tracing the progress of Hughes’s pre-
occupation with the mayfly in parallel with his developing entomological
knowledge. For Wormald, the outcome is ‘the intricate and intimate rela-
tionship between an extraordinary exemplar of the natural world and an
equally elaborate human sub-culture’: fly-fishing.
Neil Roberts explores the ethical tensions within Hughes’s habi-
tation of the natural world through the contradictions in his writing
about the hunting of animals. Focusing on ‘A Solstice’, a poem about
the shooting of a fox, Roberts contrasts Hughes’s felt need to ‘inhabit’
the dynamism of predator and prey with his remarkable late suggestion
that animals should be incorporated into human culture as ‘fellow citi-
zens’ (LTH 691). The ethics of human–animal encounters also inform
Danny O’Connor’s constructive critique of John Berger’s argument in
About Looking, that the mutually recognising ‘look’ between humans
and animals has been irredeemably erased, especially in zoos, leaving
us isolated in nature. Focusing on Hughes’s poems about zoo animals
Introduction xv
O’Connor writes: ‘if we can see something “natural” (though anthro-

pomorphised) in animal life, an animal’s look restores our animal sta-
tus, since a hawk or a jaguar or a fox does not see in us culture, but
nature’. Claire Heaney’s chapter similarly engages with the animal ethics
of J. M. Coetzee, or more precisely of his fictional character Elizabeth
Costello, who discusses Hughes’s poetry approvingly in her eponymous
novel. Heaney argues that Costello desires to ‘connect with an external
reality, to express something that is “not just an idea”’, and that ‘both
Coetzee and Hughes make visible the possibility of a world that exists
independently of our conceptions of it’, even while enacting the failure
of this ambition.
James Castell’s focus on Hughes’s use of simile might seem remote
from these considerations, but he reminds us that in Hughes’s Poetry in
the Making poems are ‘like animals’ (PM 15) and that a poem such as
‘Second Glance at a Jaguar’ not only consists almost entirely of similes
but also, in doing so, ‘responds to something both elusive and vulnera-
ble in both the nature of this particular animal and the nature of poetic
language’. The word ‘organic’ is hard to avoid when thinking about
Hughes but, at this particular frontier of nature and culture, we encoun-
ter ‘openness, elusiveness and rupture rather than the closed perfection’
of New Critical organicism epitomised by Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-
Wrought Urn.
‘Culture’ presents a more specific political edge in Vidyan
Ravinthiran’s chapter, which perceptively and judiciously examines
Hughes’s engagement with multiculturalism on the basis of hints in the
final line of his early poem ‘Strawberry Hill’, which begins with a stoat
dancing on the lawn of Horace Walpole’s gothic fantasy, and ends with
the same creature emerging ‘in far Asia, in Brixton’ (CP 63). Ravinthiran
traces the way Hughes’s radical-reactionary politics questions myths of
cultural uniformity concerning ‘England’, and finds that diversity is gen-
erated by ‘an atavistic, baseline vitality, which is both a matter of sur-
vival essentials and … artful, creative of cultures’. In a different approach
to the notion of ‘England’, in the last chapter in this section, Janne
Stigen Drangsholt returns to broader questions about Hughes and envi-
ronment, specifically the relations between the culturally based tempo-
ral dimension of landscape and the actual dwelling of a body in a place.
Drangsholt finds in Hughes’s poetry a ‘preoccupation with place and
identity, humans and non-humans, nature and culture, art and the world,
xvi Introduction
referring to a landscape that comprises both a mythical or spiritual hin-

terland and an actual scape’.
In the second section the focus shifts towards the cultural pole and
particularly to Hughes’s relationships with other writers, from Chaucer
to Alice Oswald—though, as the latter name suggests, the problem
of nature and culture is rarely out of sight. James Robinson is the first
scholar to critically examine Hughes’s ambiguous attitude to Chaucer,
who was part of his ‘sacred canon’, whom he claimed to read every day
at Cambridge, who was ‘Our Chaucer’ to him and Sylvia Plath, yet is
cast as ‘the belated cultural accompaniment to what had been a bru-
tal military suppression and occupation’ through his naturalisation of
French metres.5 In contrast (and misleadingly) Hughes represents the
alliterative non-metropolitan poetry of Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight as ‘the poetry of the people’ (WP 366). By the
time he wrote ‘Myths, Metres, Rhythms’, the essay in which he made
this claim, Hughes had himself become a ‘Court poet’ like Chaucer who,
Robinson argues, helped Hughes to negotiate between his ‘poetic self’
and his public role as Laureate. Another frequently mentioned but little
explored medieval intertext is the collection of Welsh tales known as the
Mabinogion. Katherine Robinson convincingly demonstrates its impor-
tance for Crow and Cave Birds in particular. Crow is, for Robinson, a
figure who ‘never masters language’, who ‘embodies the inchoate part
of the psyche, not gifted with bardic eloquence’—in other words the
pre-cultural psyche—like Morfran in the story of Taliesin, the hideous
‘sea-raven’ who is deprived of the potion of inspiration.
There follow three chapters on Hughes’s relations with twenti-
eth- and twenty-first-century poets. John Goodby makes a vigorous
case for the importance not only of Dylan Thomas (a frequently cited
but rarely examined influence), but the whole historically marginalised
‘Apocalyptic’ school of poetry that dominated the period of Hughes’s
formation. In Goodby’s account, Thomas exemplified for Hughes the
problematic of nature and culture, grasping ‘that he is one with the cos-
mos, equally driven by the “force” that animates it, but simultaneously
understands his paradoxical inability to communicate this insight to the
natural world itself, and hence his dissociation from it’. Unlike the case
of Dylan Thomas much has been written—including books by Marjorie
Uroff, Diane Middlebrook and Heather Clark—about the literary rela-
tionship of Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Carrie Smith offers an original
approach through a complex intertextual web, focusing on Hughes’s
Introduction xvii
major, but under-valued, collection Cave Birds, by also taking in Plath’s

poetry, Hamlet, Leonard Baskin’s drawings, Millais’s ‘Ophelia’ and the
gender implications of ekphrasis. Starting with the significance of two
deleted lines referring to Hamlet looking at Ophelia’s dead body, Smith
explores the spectral character of the poetry, and ‘the force of the sur-
rounding poetic, biographical and cultural context’.
With Laura Blomvall’s chapter we turn from the influence of others
on Hughes to his influence on others, specifically Alice Oswald. Blomvall
examines Oswald’s discomfort with the issue of Hughes’s influence, con-
cluding that this is not a question of Bloomian ‘anxiety’—that Oswald
is comfortable with the influence in itself—but rather a resistance to
being drawn into a narrow narrative of Anglophone nature poetry. The
importance of Hughes for Oswald is, rather, at the level of composition
and of poetics. Comparing Oswald’s ‘Poetry for Beginners’ with Poetry
in the Making, as well as the verse of the two poets, Blomvall elucidates
‘a belief that the disappearance of the subject is not only a condition of
writing, but also a condition of ethical authorship’. The book concludes,
appropriately, with a chapter that originates in the keynote lecture at the
conference, in which Seamus Perry talked provocatively but fascinatingly
about ‘Hughes and Urbanity’. Ranging across the verse and prose, Perry
finds examples of a variety of social tones that do not correspond to the
popular image of Hughes as the unsocial shaman. This social manner, or
urbanity, is necessary, Perry argues, to, in Hughes’s own words, negoti-
ate ‘between the powers of the inner world and the stubborn conditions
of the other world, under which ordinary men and women have to live’
(WP 151). This is, we might equally say, negotiation or ‘management’
(another favourite Hughes word on which Perry focuses) between nature
and culture.
Neil Roberts
Notes
1. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1976): 87, 219.
2. Ibid.: 90, 219.
3. Yrjö Haila, ‘Beyond the Nature-Culture Dualism’, Biology and Philosophy,
15 (2000): 158.
xviii Introduction
4. Wendy Wheeler, Expecting the Earth: Life, Culture, Biosemiotics (London:

Lawrence and Wishart, 2016): 94. Emphasis in the original.
5. Emory, Mss 644, Box 108, ff. 2.
PART I
Hughes and Environments

CHAPTER 1
Ted Hughes’s ‘Greening’

and the Environmental Humanities
Terry Gifford
At the end of his first year at Mexborough Grammar School, Ted

Hughes was placed fifth in his class. His strength in English Composition
was recognised, but he was ‘weak at Physics’.1 Was there a structural
or subliminal expectation in the Grammar Schools of the time that an
eventual specialisation in English must be accompanied by an intrinsic
‘weakness in Physics’? In a consideration of the trajectory of Hughes’s
engagement with science—with the Natural Sciences of the physi-
cal world—viewed from the perspective of what is now called ‘the
Environmental Humanities’, these are questions that lead towards the
debate about educational and social post-war divisions that is known
as ‘The Two Cultures’, as characterised by C. P. Snow. At the end of
that first year, Hughes was also ‘mediocre in Maths’ and this contin-
ued to be his worst subject each year until his fifth year report recorded
that his excelling in English Composition was accompanied by an
T. Gifford (*)
Bath Spa University, Bath, UK
e-mail: t.gifford2@bathspa.ac.uk
T. Gifford
University of Alicante, Alicante, Spain
© The Author(s) 2018 3

N. Roberts et al. (eds.), Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97574-0_1
4 T. GIFFORD
almost predictable assessment that his weakest subjects were Maths and
Science.2 It is perhaps no surprise that Mexborough Grammar School
student records examined by Steve Ely note that on 8 June 1944,
Hughes was placed in Imposition (Friday detention) for ‘reading in a
Maths class’.3 Expected or not, there could not be a clearer indication
of Hughes’s attitude towards the more quantitative aspects of the cur-
riculum. With his educationally ambitious family, and encouraged by the
example in the same school of his older sister Olwyn’s academic success
in moving from Sixth Form to university, Hughes would have been look-
ing forward to a specialism in English within an Arts Sixth Form with the
knowledge that he would be dropping the study of Science. Indeed, this
separation was formalised by the designations of Arts Sixth and Science
Sixth at Mexborough Grammar School.4 This educational career was
almost determined by Hughes’s first report at secondary school. In no
other comparable country, observes Stefan Collini, have ‘both the final
stages of school education and all of undergraduate education been more
specialised’.5
The debate about the separation of science education dates back to
around the time of the establishment of English as a discipline. In an 1880
public lecture, the biologist T. H. Huxley ‘denounced the resistance to
the claims of scientific education by the defenders of the traditional classi
cal curriculum’.6 The reply came from his target, Matthew Arnold, who
argued that ‘literature’ should actually include scientific classics like The
Origin of Species in addition to the Classics that were essential reading for
any fully educated person. Arnold’s argument could be thought of as an
early form of environmental humanities, in that the discourse of evolu-
tion might be viewed in relation to ancient European literary modes such
as pastoral. But by the period of Hughes’s education, the discourses of the
Sciences had become so specialised, and the Arts subjects so alienated from
them, that C. P. Snow’s famous phrase struck a cultural chord. ‘The Two
Cultures’, first published in essay form in the New Statesman in 1956, was
the 1959 Rede Lecture at Cambridge University and was published as The
Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.7 The dichotomy it described
will have pertained during Hughes’s time studying English at Pembroke
College Cambridge, which he left in 1954. Snow’s characterisation of the
gulf between ‘literary intellectuals’ and ‘physical scientists’ to the detriment
of the latter was effectively only endorsed by F. R. Leavis’s combative reply
to Snow in 1962.8 Hughes, like his later critic and supporter, Keith Sagar,
attended Leavis’s lectures at Cambridge. This is not the place to elaborate
1 TED HUGHES’S ‘GREENING’ AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES 5
upon the much over-simplified and misrepresented arguments on either side

of this debate, but it is significant to note that, although in defending the
humanity of literary study, Leavis attacked Snow personally as a novelist—
‘as a novelist he doesn’t exist’9—he did later clarify that ‘My concern for
“English literature” implies no slighting of the sciences’.10 The most strik-
ing legacy of this debate for the later development of the environmental
humanities is that the defender of scientific materialism, Snow, was actually
also a novelist and that Leavis’s critique of social and scientific materialism in
favour of the human values and enrichment of life available in the best liter-
ature also recognised the value of the sciences as creative explorations. Even
if Snow’s analysis was true for education and for the post-war culture at
large, there were individuals who were able to respect both sides of the divi-
sion and, indeed, both Snow and Leavis were, to a certain degree, among
them. In the latter part of his life, Ted Hughes could also be counted
among them as a poet who took inspiration partly from his reading of scien-
tific papers and from New Scientist and Scientific American. Indeed, as Poet
Laureate Hughes made a case for including New Scientist in his expenses as
‘relevant to my job’ and essential for ‘the business of writing poems’.11
But in the same year as the publication of Crow, Hughes made an
attack on what he called ‘the scientific style of mind’ that he felt had
come to dominate the education system in terms that sound very similar
to Snow’s Two Cultures:
Our school syllabus of course is the outcome of three hundred years of

rational enlightenment, which had begun by questioning superstitions and
ended by prohibiting imagination itself as a reliable mental faculty, brand-
ing it more or less criminal in a scientific society, reducing the Bible to a
bundle of old woman’s tales, finally murdering God. And what this has
ended up in is a completely passive attitude of apathy in face of material
facts. The scientific attitude, which is the crystallisation of the rational atti-
tude, has to be passive in face of the facts if it is to record facts accurately
[…] It is taught in schools as an ideal. The result is something resembling
mental paralysis.12
In the later Winter Pollen version of this essay, Hughes calls this ‘scien-
tific objectivity’ (WP 146) as he makes the case for the subjective inner
life of the imagination as a space for making ethical and psychological
explorations of ‘material facts’. Obviously drawing upon his own educa-
tion, in a polemic that argues for the place of myth and storytelling in
6 T. GIFFORD
education, Hughes suggests that this mode of ‘the scientific attitude’ is

not only dangerously incomplete, but untested by a moral imagination.
It might appear that Hughes was, at this stage of his work, anti-science,
but that would be an over-simplification. ‘I’m uneasy with the labelling
Ted’s work “anti-science”, ever’, writes his close university friend Daniel
Huws.13 What is clear, however, is that Hughes’s education took place
within a culture that not only separated out certain forms of knowl-
edge, but made it structurally difficult for a poet to maintain an interest
in science. This also worked in reverse. Hughes’s friend Peter Redgrove
became a celebrated poet in his final year and failed his degree in
Natural Sciences, although he maintained a lifelong interest in science.14
Hughes’s friendship group also included the medical student Than
Minton, so it can be argued that student friendships overcame structural
separations.
In fact, Hughes’s work eventually came to be a significant subject for
the relatively recent multidisciplinary study of environmental humanities
in which a wide range of humanities disciplines are informed by envi-
ronmental science to produce the focus of new studies such as environ-
mental ethics, environmental history, psychogeography and ecopoetry.
Like Ted Hughes, the environmental humanities regard the environmen-
tal crisis as a cultural crisis in the sense that culture includes both the
arts and the sciences. Ursula Heise, in her Introduction to The Routledge
Companion to the Environmental Humanities (2017), puts it thus:
The environmental humanities […] envision ecological crises fundamen-

tally as questions of socioeconomic inequality, cultural difference and
divergent histories, values and ethical frameworks. Scientific understanding
and technological problem solving, essential though they are, themselves
are shaped by such frameworks and stand to gain by situating themselves in
this historical and sociocultural landscape.15
Greg Garrard, in his contribution to this Companion, offers, as a defi-

nition of the work of environmental humanities, ‘the chiasmus “ecol-
ogizing humanity/humanizing ecology”’. Garrard regards these two
projects as moving towards the same aim: ‘these distinct projects—which
are deliberately framed in dynamic, transitive terms—actually coalesce as
we approach the most radical implications of the environmental human-
ities’.16 One way of characterising the trajectory of Hughes’s work, this
chapter will argue, is to see it reversing Garrard’s chiasmus by shifting
from ‘humanizing ecology’ to ‘ecologizing humanity’. Underlying this

trajectory is the story of Hughes’s engagement with different construc-
tions of science from empirical science to objectivist science, to ecologi-
cal science, to what he called the ‘hired science’ of vested interests, to a
holistic sense of science as essential research for his poetry.
In a recent essay in Ted Hughes in Context, I outlined what I argued
to be the six stages of the ‘greening’ of the writer. I was at pains to
emphasise that ‘of course, these stages are not as sharply defined as the
sequencing of them here might suggest, often having their gestation
in earlier manifestations’.17 These six stages were described under the
headings of ‘Walking the fields’, ‘Capturing rather than shooting ani-
mals’, ‘America and after’, ‘Your Environment’, ‘Hunting and conserva-
tion’ and ‘Your World’. Running behind and through this succession of
changes in Hughes’s notions of nature is a shift in his attitudes towards
different forms of scientific knowledge and practices that is evident in his
published poetry, essays and letters, but also in unpublished material in
his archives at Emory University in the USA and at the British Library in
London. That brief essay simply outlined the stages in the enlargement
of the notions of nature that constituted the greening of the poet. What
is attempted here is a contextualisation of those shifts from the perspec-
tive of the environmental humanities and the writer’s changing concep-
tions of scientific knowledge, practices and their implications.
In that essay, Hughes’s earliest conception of nature, as described in
his 1963 memoir ‘The Rock’, represented the psychogeography of the
small boy’s mood changes in walking up the fields opposite his front
door in Mytholmroyd.18 The term ‘psychogeography’ was first pro-
posed by Guy Debord, who was the leading member of the Situationists
International in the 1950s and defined it as ‘the study of the precise laws
and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously
organised or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’.19 The
rock in question was Scout Rock which dominated the opposite side of
the valley. ‘The oppression cast by that rock was a force in the minds of
everyone there’, wrote Hughes.20 But the climb up the fields onto the
moors offered a series of escapes from that oppression as, field by field,
‘new sensation’ by new sensation, an increasingly ‘bird-like’ lightening
of spirit took place. The holograph draft of the latter part of this memoir
in the archive at Emory University contains unpublished comparisons of
this experience to ‘some intense revelation in a dream’ and ‘a religious
awakening’.21 This sense of the intense capacity of mind and mood to
8 T. GIFFORD
be affected by landscape is the focus of Hughes’s earliest poems about

living amongst the elemental forces of nature. In The Hawk in the Rain
(1957), one has only to think of the people in the poem ‘Wind’ gripping
their hearts as they are ‘Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons’
(CP 37), or the force of ice-age cold in ‘October Dawn’ that ‘Squeezes
the fire at the core of the world // Squeezes the fire at the core of the
heart’ (CP 37). What happens in the material world affects the human
heart so that humans can even hear the cry of stones under elemental
stress. In these poems, ecological processes might be said to be ‘human-
ised’ in Garrard’s sense by the poet’s exploration of psychogeography.
Those scientific materialists who might doubt these revelations as irra-
tional, unmeasurable, or unprovable could be represented by the stereo-
typical ‘egg-head’ intellectual (who could well be a scientist) in the poem
of that name who ‘resists receiving the flash / Of the sun, the bolt of the
earth’ through ‘braggart-browed complacency’ with the result that he
is merely able to ‘Trumpet his own ear dead’ (CP 34).22 The sustained
metaphor of the fragile vulnerability of a life that is only lived through
what the rational mind can comprehend is forensically deconstructed and
dismissed.
The early animal poems, on the other hand, deploy the attention of
the empirical scientist in their observation of not only particular forms
of vitality but also characteristic shortcomings. There is no doubt that
Hughes’s attentiveness to the natural world was trained by his early
interest in shooting, first as his older brother’s retriever and then as a
schoolboy for whom shooting was listed as one of his interests in his
records at Mexborough Grammar School. When, after a long lapse, he
took up a gun again for just a day in later life, he said, ‘I realised what
I had completely lost since I stopped shooting was that automatic see-
ing everything in the landscape. It was quite a shock.’23 Neil Roberts
discusses Hughes’s complex attitudes towards hunting in a later chap-
ter, but in Poetry in the Making, Hughes talks about a youthful shift
towards trapping animals and uses the metaphor of ‘hunting’ for animal
poems. Of the animals he had been shooting, he said, ‘I began to look
at them […] from their own point of view’ (PM 17). The animal studies
branch of environmental humanities would regard such empathy as a first
step towards considering questions of ethics, which is a route that Neil
Roberts will take. But this statement can be deceptive; all of Hughes’s
animal poems have implications for their human readers, some more
explicit than others. In ‘The Hawk in the Rain’, the ‘drowning’ speaker
finds language to celebrate the hawk’s ‘diamond point of will’, although

the poem ends by rather exaggerating the risk to the bird (CP 19). The
self-deception of that will in the last line of ‘Hawk Roosting’ is ironi-
cally balanced by the earlier evocation of evolution as the true reason
why things are ‘like this’ so that the poem acts as an ironic reflection
of human arrogance (CP 69). The limitation of a ‘bullet and automatic
purpose’ in ‘Thrushes’ is clear, although not quite balanced by human
limitations of the slow, reflective action of ‘carving at a tiny ivory orna-
ment’ which is surely preferable. But it is surprising that some critics still
miss the ironies of the ending of ‘The Jaguar’ in which its blinding inten-
sity appears to give it a visionary freedom from its cage, that nevertheless
remains its imprisoned reality, whilst at the same time admitting the pos-
sibility of visions, if not actual physical freedom.24
Omitted from publication in ‘The Rock’ was a comment in the hol-
ograph notes that anticipated the poem ‘Wodwo’, a poem of ecological
and philosophical enquiry. The high moorland, Hughes wrote, hav-
ing just compared his experience there as a child to some people’s ‘reli-
gious awakening’, was a place ‘where the rocks, the birds, the silence,
the flowers, wait […], full of something wonderful, if only one could
learn to interpret their sounds or their signs’. This is a yearning for a
fully humanised ecological understanding of biosemiotics—not just the
meaning of bird sounds, but also the signs in the silence of rocks, or the
potentially wonderful messages in flowers. They wait and the poet waits
with utmost attention. In her book Expecting the Earth: Life, Culture,
Biosemiotics (2016), Wendy Wheeler discusses the work of Ted Hughes
as an intuitive interpreter of signs in ‘The Thought-Fox’, for example.
‘Most modern scientists’, Wheeler writes, ‘remain within the Baconian
model of conscious mastery in avoidance of error. They remain deeply
suspicious, or even contemptuous, of the idea that the scientists might
more fruitfully be part of a “poetic” developmental dialogic relation with
nature.’25 Hughes’s poetic language, Wheeler suggests, represents an
evolved ‘grasp of the semiotic scaffolding’ such that he ‘is able to unlock
the deep evolutionary and semiotic layers of animate and even geological
time-consciousness within himself in order to free the associated semiotic
energies’.26 It is indeed his relation with nature that the Wodwo ques-
tions, is disturbed by, seeks to take identity from, in a semiotic dialogics
(‘Do these weeds / know me and name me to each other / have they
seen me before, do I fit in their world?’ (CP 183). This is, I think, what
Wheeler means by ‘this Coleridgean and Goethean creative processual
10 T. GIFFORD
knowing in being and attending’.27 The Wodwo’s being leads him to go

on questioning what is ‘very queer but I’ll go on looking’.
In America, during the third stage of his greening, Hughes came
across many things that were very queer: the real world ‘sterilised under
cellophane’ (LTH 105), food ‘10,000 miles from where it was plucked
or made’, and bread ‘fifty processes’ away from ‘original wheat’ (LTH
106). But it was a combination of the discovery of the marine biologist
Rachel Carson’s writing about sea life and that toxic waste was being
dumped into it off Cape Cod that made Hughes aware of both the posi-
tive and the negative aspects to the work of science. Earlier, Sylvia Plath’s
letters from Smith College indicate that she had been anxious about the
atomic bomb and the Cold War since 1948.28 It seems likely that the
threat created by atomic scientists, which was very much at the forefront
of public consciousness during the Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s,
had contributed to the strength of feeling around the Two Cultures
debate as apparently dispassionate, amoral scientists were viewed critically
by scholars in the humanities. In particular, the widespread anxiety about
imminent nuclear war in the Western world during the Cuban missile
crisis of 1962 should not be underestimated.29 In 1959, whilst living
in America, Hughes was aware of Cold War anxiety and had published
there the poem ‘A Woman Unconscious’ which begins, ‘Russia and
America circle each other’ threatening ‘A melting of the mould in the
mother’ (CP 62). Although held in check by an abba rhyme scheme, the
poem voices the possibility of ‘Earth gone in an instant flare’ (CP 63).
If this recalls ‘the flash / Of the sun, the bolt of the earth’, it represents
the unintended consequences of theoretical scientific research that might
have been undertaken by the ‘egg-head’ of that poem. It was in the
spring of 1959 that a national debate was launched by Rachel Carson’s
letter to the Washington Post about the effects of DDT use in agriculture,
resulting in the spectre of ‘the silencing of birds’, which preceded Silent
Spring (1962).30
When Hughes returned from America and later began working on
the Crow poems the implications of a reductionist objectified science
found their way into many of the poems in the sequence. In 1981, Neil
Roberts and I noted that ‘“Crow’s Account of the Battle” attacks the
surrender of responsibility implicit in scientific determinism’.31 Recently,
Yvonne Reddick identified in Crow wider linkages between the scien-
tific technology of nuclear warfare and environmental destruction by
drawing attention to Hughes’s preoccupation with nuclear waste and
environmental pollution throughout the sequence.32 Reddick argued

that ‘the blueprint for destructive technology’ by which ‘From sudden
traps of calculus, / Theorems wrenched men in two’ in ‘Crow’s Account
of the Battle’ (CP 222) is actually the Word of ‘A Disaster’ which results
in ‘its excreta poisoning seas’ (CP 226). ‘I cannot recall conversation
about the environment at Cambridge’, writes Daniel Huws, but when
he returned from America, ‘Ted was full of it. Rachel Carson had made
a big impact and industrialised farming was already a frequent topic.’33
Huws takes the view that ‘Ted, I would say, was always an “environ-
mentalist”, latently if not manifestly’.34 The word ‘latently’ is necessary
here because during the 1960s in Britain, the ‘countryside’ was in the
process of turning into the ‘environment’, just as, later, Hughes’s early
‘nature poetry’ was to metamorphose into the ‘ecopoetry’ of Reddick’s
book title.35 Carson’s work (which included work on warming oceans)
contributed to a growing public alarm that the military and commercial
applications of science had been proceeding without public debate or
control. What was needed was the evidence of the damage being done
and a counter science that would become environmental science in its
diverse branches.
The fourth stage of Hughes’s greening is signalled by his role in the
founding of the explicitly named magazine Your Environment, hav-
ing persuaded his friends David Ross and Daniel Weissbort to edit with
him a magazine, the first of its kind in the UK (just a year ahead of The
Ecologist), that would publicise the counter science. The range of new
science that Hughes was engaged with through Your Environment is
remarkable. This includes, for example, the work of Dr F. J. Simmonds
whose paper on ‘The Economics of Biological Control’ had been pub-
lished in the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts. The revealing irony
of that publication informed Hughes’s subsequent review of Max
Nicholson’s book, The Environmental Revolution. It was actually in the
third issue for Your Environment that Hughes reviewed Nicholson’s
book.36 What is remarkable about this review is that it makes a call for
what would now be called ‘the environmental humanities’, first in criti-
cising scientific over-specialisation and demanding ‘a total knowledge’ in
which scientific disciplines speak to each other, and secondly, by iden-
tifying the need for a publicly voiced debate about a vision for conser-
vation that would redirect the attention of ‘Politicians, Sociologists,
Economists, Theologians, Philosophers and the rest [who currently] pick
over the stucco rubble of a collapsed civilisation’ (WP 133–34). It is at
12 T. GIFFORD
this fourth stage that Hughes begins his efforts to ‘ecologize human-
ity’, in Greg Garrard’s terms, through work that is exemplified by two
significant collections of poetry: the bioregional merging of human and
natural history in Remains of Elmet (1979), followed by the elegies for
family and ‘familiars’ (Hughes’s word) of several species in Wolfwatching
(1989).37
From ‘The River Cleaners’ by John Whale in very first issue of Your
Environment there were regular articles about river pollution.38 The
chemist Dr David E. H. Jones, who had been writing a column in New
Scientist since 1964, contributed two articles to Your Environment con-
cerned with river pollution: ‘Hazards of Enzymes and Detergents’39
and ‘Modern Farming and the Soil’.40 Hughes was to follow closely
the scientific papers on river pollution in particular as he introduced his
young son to his own passion for fishing. Hughes himself had harboured
a desire to pursue a part-time degree in Zoology at the University of
London, although a combination of poverty and a young family made
this almost impossible, as Sylvia Plath explained to her mother.41 So, it
would have been no surprise that his encouragement of his young son’s
interest in animals and fish would result in Nicholas studying Zoology
at Oxford and undertaking an undergraduate research project in 1983.
Hughes went along as research assistant for his son’s investigation of the
effects of the introduction of Nile Perch into Lake Victoria (LTH 465),
the resulting paper from which was published in Nature.42 From this
point onwards, Hughes was to follow his son’s research interests at the
University of Alaska at Fairbanks as the father of a scientist as well as tak-
ing a close interest in research into the pollution of the rivers of North
Devon on his doorstep.
In his Emory archive are four folders of scientific papers from the
National Rivers Authority with titles like ‘Discharges of Waste Under the
EC Titanium Dioxide Directives’.43 Also in this archive is a twenty-five
page typed draft of Hughes’s statement to a public enquiry on behalf
of the Torridge Action Group. The Torridge Action Group had been
formed in 1983 when the South West Water Authority (SWWA) lodged
a planning application for a new fine screen sewage plant at Bideford that
would remove only 15% of solids going into the river that was so pol-
luted by sewage that the local chemist shop had its own remedy for sick
tourists swimming in the river each summer. Hughes was confronting
scientists in the pay of the SWWA in his presentation: ‘[…] Dr Barrow,
the Authority’s Consultant in Microbiology [states…] that the effect of
Fine Screening is in his words, “not likely to be measurable epidemio-

logically” […] I do not know what this means unless it means that just
as many holidaymakers will get just as sick.’44 Although Hughes and the
Action Group failed to defeat the SWWA on this occasion, it did lead
to Hughes and his fishing friends forming the Westcountry Rivers Trust
to conduct scientific monitoring of water quality in the rivers of Devon.
When in 1994 I wrote to Hughes questioning his rationale for fishing,
as an environmentalist he not only offered me his Jungian justification
and anecdotal evidence, but he referred to a scientific paper in making
his case (LTH 659). There is no space to document all the ways in which
Hughes’s reading of New Scientist informed his environmental thinking.
Yvonne Reddick has given four examples in quick succession on just one
page of her book.45 Reddick notes that ‘Less than a month before his
death, he wrote to the Westcountry Rivers Trust asking for details of the
scientists and the scientific papers referenced in the article [‘A Glimmer
of Hope for Salmon’ in the Trust’s newsletter]’.46
The fifth stage of Hughes’s greening concerns the complexities and
contradictions of his case for conservation hunting which he had prob-
ably harboured throughout his life, but which came to be expressed in
a series of statements late in life that were rather at odds with the ear-
lier negative representations of hunting in poems and stories for adults
and for children. In his major public statement in The Guardian titled
‘The hart of the mystery’, there is a sense that Hughes recognised that
he was making a difficult judgement ‘on balance’ in favour of conser-
vation hunting against what he believed would be the extermination of
Exmoor’s deer by poachers.47 So, there is a sense of compromise in his
argument that implies that it may be flawed. Perhaps more clearly, the
sport of fishing can be seen as both deeply connecting as personal experi-
ence and deeply flawed from the perspective of animal rights. This might
be seen as an unconfessed ‘self-wounding’ of the poet—a point to which
I will return. What is interesting is that in concluding his justification of
fishing in his letter to me, Hughes believed that he had been making an
evidence-based argument. He returned to Jung’s therapy of ‘putting the
individual back in contact with the primitive’ and asked, ‘Does it fit the
evidence, do you think?’ (LTH 660). Further, Hughes seems here to be
building on the approach of his Nicholson review to invite a dialogue
concerning the validity of different forms of scientific and psychological
evidence.
14 T. GIFFORD
From his 1970 review of Nicholson’s The Environmental Revolution,

Hughes had recognised the need for a global dimension to conserva-
tion which would come to dominate the sixth stage of his greening. Max
Nicholson, he wrote, ‘puts the whole globe into our hands, as something
now absolutely in our care’ (WP 134). Hughes’s sense of that global
care was alarmed by his reading of John Elkington’s The Poisoned Womb
in 1982 about toxics in the food chain and water supplies causing a
decline in human fertility. Despite the multiple drafts to be found in the
Hughes archive at Emory University, his poem about this issue, ‘Lobby
From Under the Carpet’ (CP 837), published in the Times in 1992, he
regarded, correctly, as a poetic failure.48 One of the reasons for this is
his attempt to poetically include scientific data in his text as he had in
the earlier public intervention of his Laureate’s poem requested by the
Times, ‘First Things First’, for the election in June 1987. The later poem
included reference to more recent research by the Danish physician
Professor Niels Skakkebaek which indicated that male virility ‘Is down
not forty but fifty per cent / i.e. half its life’ (CP 838). I would argue
that the explicit strategy of loading the reader with data, like the river,
makes its point appropriately in the poem ‘1984 on “The Tarka Trail”’
(CP 841), but that in a poem such as ‘Waste’ (CP 687) the reference to
the research conducted by Geiger-counter into radiation levels in blue-
eyed sand-fleas on the North Carolina coast by Dr David Raup might
be more difficult for the reader to comprehend.49 It seems that neither
the strategy of a rousing, but rhetorically crude, engaging verse form
in ‘Lobby From Under the Carpet’, nor the evidence-based poetry of
‘Waste’ could work as public engagement. But, for Hughes, the effects
of worldwide pollution upon the human species, as well as others, were
of huge significance and needed to be communicated. As he wrote to
me: ‘What else falls when the sperm count falls? […] If the human race
fails to survive all this it will be because it can’t get interested in its own
annihilation.’50
This global concern took on increasing importance for Hughes in
later life. In The Observer magazine of 29 November 1992, Hughes
published a review titled ‘If’ of a book of photographs, Your World,
published by HarperCollins for the United Nations Environment
Programme with speeches made at the recent Earth Summit. Hughes
recalls a remark by the Duke of Edinburgh to the effect that ‘many spo-
radic local recoveries and advances do not reverse the cloudier, global,
deterioration. Resonant promises from politicians and the glossy
environmental brochures of industry seem to miss the mark’.51 In ‘If’,

Hughes recounts his own experience of the power battles between the
scientific arguments of the establishment (SWWA) and the evidence
of local conservationists, and concludes that the organisation Arts for
Nature has the potential for deeper penetration into public consciousness
as environmental activism. For Hughes as a poet and storyteller informed
by science, his writing in these modes might have greater cultural pene-
tration and a longer lasting effect than his practical activism or his prose
essays. In notes in the British Library for a speech he made in 1997 for a
dinner in honour of Prince Philip’s 75th birthday celebrating his involve-
ment in Arts For Nature, Hughes wrote: ‘His long experience in the
Environmental Movement had given him a realistic sense of the colossal
opposition set against it. The endless futility of the endless talk, vested
interests of government and commerce neutralise every inconvenient
argument with their hired science.’52 In ‘If’, he calls this ‘Government
Science’—that is the ‘other kind of science’ from that which is dispas-
sionately seeking the truth.53 At this point, the wheel has come full circle
from his early implicit criticism of objective science in Crow. Hughes, the
ever curious poet, needs to be informed by environmental science of an
objective kind, wherever it leads, including the defence, on balance, of
the conservation benefits of hunting and fishing.
There are dangers in the literalism with which the case for Hughes in
the environmental humanities has necessarily been made here. It privi-
leges his prose statements over his poetics. It can lead to exaggerations.
It can read contemporary environmental issues as being addressed in the
most oblique references. It can neglect the shamanic mythic masterpieces
in his work because they might lack explicit references to science, despite
their subject being the problem of human relationship with the natural
environment. It will certainly have difficulty in accepting the iconic, but
apparently essentialising, image of the Goddess of Complete Being. It
could lead to the suggestion that ‘patriarchal science’ in The Iron Woman
is represented by the Chief Chemist and the Chief Engineer of the Waste
Factory who say, ‘We follow good industrial practice. We stick to the
rules. We spend our lives cleaning up other people’s muck’ (IW 44). This
characterisation, it could be pointed out, echoes ecofeminist Carolyn
Merchant’s analysis of the history of the Scientific Revolution in the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries that enabled the subjugation of nature
and women together.54 Merchant opposes historical ‘mechanistic science’
to the ‘holistic approach’ of ecology, and that is, indeed, the underlying
16 T. GIFFORD
message of The Iron Woman.55 But this would be to miss the point
of the story. It would be to abstract the message from the force of its
medium as a children’s story that celebrates the empowering image of
the Goddess of Complete Being in fictional guise.
I have recently argued that Hughes’s work might be seen as that of a
wounded shamanic mythologiser who is seeking healing for both him-
self as a writer and his tribe of readers.56 So, I want to end by taking
seriously the apparently dismissive characterisation of modern culture
(‘Reality was giving its lesson’) in Crow as a ‘mishmash of scripture and
physics’ (CP 222) by reasserting a balance of religion and science, of
spiritual aesthetics and material reality, of myth and nature. River is not
a work of conservation activism, but the closely observed entry into a
material element seeking spiritual connection through an ethically flawed
and passionately felt engagement with water and language and creatures
of light and of darkness. Those scholars in the environmental humani-
ties who take an interest in ‘material ecocriticism’ would have much to
say about the agency of water, land and fish in River.57 Cave Birds is
a pivotal masterpiece of humbling the human ego and reconnecting it
with its home amongst the beetles, the worms and the hawks. Its con-
clusion is not clearly redemptive, despite the final poem’s title, ‘The
Risen’—the arrogant cockerel now become hawk; there is a ‘But’ that
is a question without a question mark: ‘But when will he land / On a
man’s wrist.’ (CP 440). Those final two lines represent therefore both
danger and promise, hubris returning and a yearning for reconnection.
Environmental anthropologists would be able to provide further insights
into Cave Birds.58 The playful part-satire on shamanising in Gaudete
could also be neglected in the approach which this chapter has been
adopting and there would be no place to contemplate the hymns to
the goddess that emerge from the narrative. Still less to find in Orts a
moment to see ‘This planetary rawness’ anew, or to feel its combination
of ‘aimless elation / And stone-dullness’ that sinks so deeply into the
speaker to produce a remarkable state of disconnection that is actually
a profoundly respectful connection: ‘That empties me every instant //
Pulses your fullness (CP 406). Environmental religious studies could also
offer new readings of both the narrative of Gaudete and the vacanas of its
Epilogue and of Orts.59
Looking back from the final stage of Hughes’s greening over the
complete works of Ted Hughes, it is clear that from the early poems
of animals, landscapes and human inadequacies, to the mythologising
sequences, to the realism of Moortown Dairies and the ‘social ecology’

of the Elmet volumes, Hughes has been pursuing the holy grail of the
environmental humanities—a vision of human integration with nature
such that there would be ‘No Nature’ as the ecocritic Timothy Morton
puts it,60 or that there would be one word—‘nature-culture’ as the
anthropologist of science Bruno Latour proposes.61 That Hughes,
in his comments on Arts For Nature, returns to the discourse of ‘art-
speech’62 as D. H. Lawrence called it, might be seen as an endorsement
of the shamanic role of the contemporary poet and storyteller, scientif-
ically informed and with an environmental, or ‘nature-culture’, agenda
in the broadest sense. This was, of course, the original function of the
shaman, as Jung would have understood. It is perhaps one of the rea-
sons for the continued interest in Hughes’s work, now being read in the
context of the Anthropocene. In 1970, on the cusp of moving from the
curious Wodwo to the trickster Crow and all that was to follow, Hughes
wrote: ‘Science, it has been said, which began by deposing every primi-
tive idea, will end by reinstating them as the essential conditions for life’
(WP 132).
Notes
1. Steve Ely, Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire: Made in Mexborough (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2015): 114.
2. Ibid.: 115–116.
3. Ibid.: 135.
4. Thanks to Steve Ely for a copy of Hughes’s school record which indicates
that he was in form V1. Arts.
5. Stefan Collini, ‘Introduction’, C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998): xvi.
6. Ibid.: xiv.
7. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1959).
8. Guy Ortolano, The Two Cultures Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009): 66.
9. F. R. Leavis, Nor Shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism, Compassion and
Social Hope (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972): 44.
10. F. R. Leavis, English Literature in Our Time and the University (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1969): 3.
11. Sam Solnick, Poetry and the Anthropocene (London: Routledge, 2017),
p. 16, n. 8.
18 T. GIFFORD
12. Ted Hughes, ‘Myth and Education’, Children’s Literature in Education 1

(1970): 56.
13. Daniel Huws, Letter to TG, 1 December 2017.
14. Neil Roberts, A Lucid Dreamer: The Life of Peter Redgrove (London:
Jonathan Cape, 2012): 84.
15. Ursula Heise, Jon Christensen, and Michelle Niemann (eds.), Routledge
Companion to the Environmental Humanities (Abingdon: Routledge,
2017): 2.
16. Ibid.: 463.
17. Terry Gifford, ‘Hughes and Nature’, in Terry Gifford (ed.) Ted Hughes in
Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 275–282: 273.
18. Ibid.
19. Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, in Ken
Knabb (ed.), Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley: Bureau of
Public Secrets, 2007): 5.
20. Ted Hughes, ‘The Rock’, The Listener, 19 September 1963: 421.
21. Emory, MSS 644, Box 115, ff. 8.
22. This poem recalls Walt Whitman’s poem, ‘When I Heard the Learned
Philosopher’, Leaves of Grass (New York: Signet Classics): 226.
23. ‘So Quickly It’s Over’, Interview with Thomas Pero, Wild Steelhead and
Salmon 5 (2) (Winter 1999): 55.
24. ‘It is visionary because Hughes sees it as lacking a human, hyper-rational
intellect, and it is thus able to access a state of creaturely bliss.’ Yvonne
Reddick, Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2017): 113.
25. Wendy Wheeler, Expecting the Earth: Life, Culture, Biosemiotics (London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 2016): 94. Emphasis in the original.
26. Ibid., emphasis in the original.
27. Ibid., emphasis in the original.
28. The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume I: 1940–1956, Peter K. Steinberg and
Karen V. Kukil (eds.) (London: Faber and Faber, 2017): 136.
29. At least two popular songs of 1963 and 1964 can only be under-
stood in relation to the threat from nuclear fallout. See Terry Gifford,
Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry (2nd ed.,
Nottingham: CCC Press, 2011 [1995]): 6.
30. See Gifford, ‘Hughes and Nature’: 276.
31. Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts, Ted Hughes: A Critical Study (London:
Faber and Faber, 1981): 133. See also Chapter 11.
32. Reddick, Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet: 163–164.
33. Daniel Huws, Letter to TG, 1 December 2017.
34. Ibid.
35. See Terry Gifford, ‘From Countryside to Environment’, in Kate McLoughlin

(ed.), British Literature in Transition, Volume 2, Flower/Power: 1960–1980
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). See also Neil Astley
(ed.), Earth Shattering: Ecopoems (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2007) for the ‘reclassifi-
cation’ of ‘nature poetry’ as ‘ecopoetry’.
36. 1.3 (Summer 1970): 81–83. As I noted in ‘Hughes and Nature’, William
Scammell has this wrong in Winter Pollen. Thanks to Ann Skea for point-
ing this out to me.
37. See Terry Gifford, ‘Ted Hughes’s Social Ecology’, in Terry Gifford (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to Ted Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011): 81–93; Terry Gifford, Ted Hughes (London:
Routledge, 2009): 60–64.
38. 1 (Winter 1969).
39. 1.2 (Spring 1970).
40. 2.1 (Spring 1971).
41. Sylvia Plath, Letters Home (London: Faber and Faber, 1976): 388.
42. C. N. D. Barel et al., ‘Destruction of Fisheries in Africa’s lakes’, Nature
315 (6014) (May 1985): 19–20, referenced in Reddick, Ted Hughes:
Environmentalist and Ecopoet: 320.
43. Emory, MSS 644, Box 164, ff. 2–5.
44. Emory, MSS 644, Box 170, ff. 1.
45. Reddick, Ted Hughes: Environmentalist and Ecopoet: 253.
46. Ibid.: 311.
47. An appendix to Keith Sagar, Poet and Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes
and Keith Sagar (London: The British Library, 2012): 320–325.
48. Hughes said in a radio interview, ‘I’ve tried to write sort of semi-protest
pieces of verse about this sort of thing, but I don’t think it works’.
Gifford, Green Voices: 132.
49. See Gifford, ‘Hughes and Nature’: 277.
50. Hughes Letter to TG, 17 December 1993.
51. Ted Hughes, ‘If’, Observer Magazine, 29 November 1992: 36.
52. BL, Add MS 88916/6/12.
53. Hughes, ‘If’: 34.
54. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific
Revolution (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1980).
55. Ibid.: 291.
56. Terry Gifford, ‘Hughes’s Notion of Shamanic Healing’, Ted Hughes
Society Journal VI (2) (November 2017): 7–23.
57. For an introduction, see Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (eds.),
Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).
20 T. GIFFORD
58. For an introduction see Sian Sullivan, ‘What’s Ontology Got to Do

With It?: On the Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in
Environmental Anthropology’, in H. Kopnina and E. Shoreman-Ouimet
(eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Environmental Anthropology
(London: Routledge, 2016): 155–169.
59. For an introduction, see Kate Rigby, ‘Religion and Ecology: Towards a
Communion of Creatures’, in Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (eds.),
Environmental Humanities: Voices from the Anthropocene (London: Rowman
and Littlefield, 2017): 273–293. On Hughes’s use of vacana form, see
http://ann.skea.com/THVacanas.html.
60. Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2007).
61. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1993): 7.
62. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2014): 14.
CHAPTER 2
The Nuptial Flight: Ted Hughes

and the Mayfly
Mark Wormald
On 17 January 1981, Leonard Baskin wrote to Ted Hughes summa-

rizing their discussion over dinner the evening before about their ‘next
book’. The letter contained two lists, of twenty flowers and fifteen
insects. The insects began: ‘1. Mayfly. 2. Damselfly. 3. Caddis fly’.1
Of course, Flowers and Insects (1986) was not the two friends’ next
book: a more immediate concern was A Primer of Birds, the first produc-
tion of Baskin’s ‘new Gehenna [Press] at Tiverton’.2 Produced that June,
it appeared in July. Hughes’s fishing diary of a trip with his son Nicholas
to Ireland in March and April reveals that he was ‘tinkering with pieces
for Leonard’ at the end of March.3
Those weeks in Ireland also saw Hughes advance on another publish-
ing project, this time with Nicholas, his companion in printing as well as
fishing, which displaced the third in that original trinity of aquatic flies
from Flowers and Insects. Hughes finished his extraordinarily detailed
illustrations of two adult flies and three larvae for ‘Caddis’; along with
‘Catadrome’, about the eel, and ‘Visitation’, prompted by his discov-
ery at dawn of otter prints in the margins of the Keel River in County
M. Wormald (*)
Pembroke College, Cambridge, UK
e-mail: mrw1002@cam.ac.uk
© The Author(s) 2018 21

N. Roberts et al. (eds.), Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97574-0_2
22 M. WORMALD
Mayo,4 ‘Caddis’ was one of ‘Three River Poems’ broadsides Nicholas set
and printed for his Morrigu Press at the end of April, and published in
May. Eventually, in the revised text of River Hughes assembled for Three
Books (1993), ‘Caddis’ joined the second of the items in Baskin’s list of
insects, ten years after its own appearance, as ‘Performance’, in River’s
first edition. And, in fact, when Hughes met Baskin for their discussion
that January evening, he had already published his damselfly poem as
‘Last Act’ in Quarto magazine in October 1980, three months before.
The intimate connection between River and Hughes’s experiences as
a fisherman helps to explain the peculiarly compelling attraction of the
damselfly, the caddis and—my subject here—the mayfly for Hughes as
poetic material. Hughes was a fly fisherman, and fly fishermen aren’t just
interested in the trout they catch. Introducing his poem ‘Go Fishing’
in December 1982, Hughes observed: ‘the fascination’ of fishing ‘isn’t
what one might expect: in other words, it isn’t simply the fish’.5 They
must also know their quarry’s diet, and since trout depend on aquatic
flies as well as terrestrials and crustaceans, their hunters should be ento-
mologists, alive to those changes of atmosphere, temperature and light
that condition the behaviour and development of insects and the fish’s
interest in them.
As that ‘isn’t what one might expect’ suggests, this is also specialist
knowledge. And Hughes recognized that his own heightened response
to insects—in this case, the drama of the ‘sulphurous… tragedienne’
(CP 673) of the species of damselfly still found on the Torridge in high
summer—depended on insights that others may not share. Sending
Keith Sagar the text of ‘Last Act’ in 1980, Hughes asked:
Do you know Agrion Splendens? Do you distinguish male from female?

I have a poem about a female rôle in an archaic insect drama… the point
being that it’s being performed by the male, as in Noh etc. – but who’ll
know what I’m talking about? Is that too fine a point?6
That anxiety about his work’s calibration with the expectations or

capacity of his readers was to recur, even as his determination deepened
to develop his knowledge and justify his imaginative use of it, whatever
its cost. In Ireland, in March 1981, he records typing up:
a justification of charging expenses on my fishing trips…. a subtle exercise

in arguing my case as a writer who researches in detail all he writes – to a
2 THE NUPTIAL FLIGHT: TED HUGHES AND THE MAYFLY 23
tax inspector who has heard I’m a poet + insists that poets live on “seeds of
inspiration”!7
But he also complained about the effects on his own writing of an ‘audi-
ence’ he had come to imagine as ‘decultured, degenerate’. The taxman
was not the only one to rely on hazy stereotypes. A fear of not being
understood, the need to provide ‘explanatory additions + asides for the
decultured’, ‘brings the journalist to his banalities’, and Hughes detected
‘more than a touch’ of this tendency in some of his own ‘recent writ-
ings’.8 Compare his frustration, twelve years later, with the loss of that
‘pool of shared understandings’, without which a poem about a wren
becomes incomprehensible (WP 313–16).
While such comments reflect his ongoing struggles with River and his
worries that, distracted by Peter Keen’s photographs, readers may simply
not read, let alone understand, his own verses, Hughes’s writing contains
much earlier evidence of the tensions between a dominant contemporary
culture and the nature it suppresses or neglects, and the role that fish
and flies play in them. ‘Fallgrief’s Girlfriends’ is one of the poems that
appeared in St Botolph’s Review in February 1956 and then in The Hawk
in the Rain. Whether or not Fallgrief is ‘a projection of Hughes him-
self’, as Jonathan Bate has suggested,9 the poem does include a striking
endorsement of the dark and timeless truths of the creaturely beneath
and beyond the human realm:
he meant to break out of the dream

Where admiration’s giddy mannequin
Leads every sense to motley; he meant to stand naked
Awake in the pitch dark where the animal runs,
Where the insects couple as they murder each other,
Where the fish outwait the water. (CP 30)
While, as Bate points out, Fallgrief’s ‘rather dim view… of sexual con-
gress’ represented in this passage’s penultimate line ‘is changed by
finding “a woman with such wit and looks / He can brag of in every
company”’, we should pause before saying the same for Hughes.10
Consider ‘Performance’, with its own fascinated regard for ‘this
dainty assassin / Still in mid-passion’ (CP 672). In this archaic insect
mystery,
24 M. WORMALD
Everything is forgiven
Such a metamorphosis in love!
Phaedra Titania
Dragon of crazed enamels! (CP 673)
At least, that is, until the poem’s quieter final parenthesis, when the male
poet switches his attention as she had switched hers to the male, and
finds his body a post-coital husk, discarded.
‘Daffodils’ is the most disturbingly brilliant of the flora in Flowers and
Insects. It would appear in revised form in Birthday Letters, but was first
published in the London Review of Books in March 1984. Here, Hughes
looks back to his first marriage’s last spring, and Court Green’s abundant
harvest of flowers. But it contains its own insect drama, albeit of a much
more tender order than his earlier murderous couplings. Hughes looks
back across the years, trying to understand what he could not recognize
at the time:
I was still a nomad.

My life was still a raid. The earth was booty.
I knew I’d live forever. I had not learned
What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
Daffodils are. Did not recognise
The nuptial flight of the rarest ephemera –
My own days!
Hardly more body than a hallucination!
A dream of gifts – opening their rustlings for me! (CP 711)
In what follows, I reveal what prompted this belated recognition,

and trace its poetic consequences. These lines contain their own fleet-
ing glance of a particularly focused fascination that marked Hughes’s
poetry for ten years, and which, like that poetry, deserves to be bet-
ter understood, as a central aspect of his identification with those ‘rar-
est ephemera’. This goes well beyond species recognition. Knowing
why the daffodils reminded him of the largest and most beautiful of the
Ephemeroptera, the mayfly, Ephemera Danica, itself renowned for its abun-
dance and its fragility, helps us to recognize the intricate and intimate rela-
tionship between an extraordinary exemplar of the natural world and an
equally elaborate human sub-culture at a key moment in the development
of Hughes’s ecological imagination.
*
I first encountered ‘The Mayfly’, the first of three poems Hughes

devoted to this insect, in March 2012. Devon’s daffodils were ablaze as
I visited the Arundell Arms hotel in Lifton. I was looking for a copy of
Hughes’s essay ‘Taw and Torridge’, commissioned by the hotel’s propri-
etor Anne Voss Bark for the book she was editing on West Country Fly
Fishing. The book appeared in 1983, and Hughes knew its prime pur-
pose was ‘to encourage visiting anglers’.11 But as its extensive drafts at
Emory confirm, Hughes’s essay was also, as Terry Gifford was the first
to suggest, an early example of the kind of environmental intervention
which was soon to involve Hughes in urgent scientifically informed and
closely argued campaigning on behalf of the Torridge Action Group of
fishermen, riparian owners and other local people for the river’s water
quality, in the face of devastating pollution from sewage at the river’s
mouth at Bideford, and agricultural fertilizer and run-off throughout
its catchment.12 Voss Bark’s nephew, Adam Fox-Edwardes, now runs
the hotel, and hearing of my interest in Hughes presented me with a
copy, still warm from the Xerox, of a manuscript of ‘The Mayfly’, dated
Xmas 1983, three months after its publication that October in London
Magazine. It was Hughes’s Christmas gift to Anne and her husband
Conrad, and it still hangs in a frame in the hotel office.
‘The Mayfly’ is a poetic curiosity. It is not just the poem’s attempts to
balance the minuscule with the cosmological, a fierce and awe-inspiring
strength with its atmospheric fragility—it is, the poem begins, ‘a frail
accompaniment / The way Aurora Borealis is frail’ (CP 685). It is also
for the fact that its parts—individual lines and images—seemed to have
become more than its sum. The poem was never collected: it may, then,
be thought of a larval poem, ephemeral, with ‘unearthly ideas’, whose
every-which-way-strivings from shadowy demon under the river to the
Shakespearean fairy king and queen whose dance rises and falls over tree-
tops ‘In The Midsummer Night’s Dream / Of the lungfish’ risk remain-
ing obscure to all but the initiated.
In exploring this obscurity, one might begin by asking what, then,
initiated Hughes? I have discovered three stages in that process. The
part-published Children’s Encyclopedia [sic] he read in his father’s news-
agency in Mexborough in his early teens and later credited for his discov-
ery of folklore (LTH 624) contains an article on the Devonian period,
‘when fishes were the highest and dominant form of life’. It identifies
the lungfish of contemporary Australia, Africa and South America as the
direct descendants of Devonian fish whose development of lungs and
26 M. WORMALD
consequent ability to leave the water (surviving periods of drought by

burying themselves in mud) gives a clue to man’s ascent from the first
life forms.13 Second, in the autumn and September of 1983, Hughes
spent three weeks with Nicholas on Lake Victoria, where his son was
conducting research on the stomach contents of the predatory Nile
perch, and encountered at least one lungfish in a fish market in a nearby
town.14 And as an Oxford undergraduate in zoology, Nicholas him-
self would already have encountered the lungfish: six lectures on fish
diversity and evolution featured in the compulsory ‘Animal Kingdom-
vertebrates’ lectures and tutorials he received from Dr Tom Kemp.15
So he could supply any reminders Hughes needed of their evolutionary
significance.
Even so, the claims ‘The Mayfly’ makes for the dancing insects of the
lungfish’s Shakespearean dream are intensely charged, a development
even from the kind of imaginative cross-fertilization of literary and sci-
entific cultures that drive ‘Caddis’ and ‘Performance’. For these mayflies
mount even higher than those two species. These treetop dancers are
‘Poetic atoms’. And they seem a tribe, a culture, of their own, sacrificial
victims of their own fierce religion, close to the language of Christian
sacrament that, as David Troupes has pointed out, characterizes the
poems in River and yet at a sexualized distance from them.16
This religion is fierce. It crucifies them

Through a sacrament of copulation
Onto the face of water. (CP 685)
On that human face, a version of a Christian Heaven is seen to shudder;

on these insects’ cross, we also trace a reimagined and justified version of
Fallgrief’s vision of insects coupling and murdering each other.
As Sagar, Tabor and Keegan note, ‘The Mayfly’ itself doesn’t die
here.17 It had a complex textual afterlife. Its first lines, reduced, con-
densed, clarified, reappear as the opening line of the final slender ver-
sion of the poem, set unmistakably on a rain-flushed river, and included
in Three Books: ‘The Mayfly is Frail’ ‘The Way the shivering Northern
Lights are frail’ (CP 847), but still with its own strange version of a natu-
ralized Christian God, speaking in the aftermath of a flood as God spoke
out of the tempest in the Book of Kings: this time ‘the still small voice’
heralds:
A purity in a mould
And the mould splits at the touch of the air
A shimmering beast
Dawns from the river’s opened side. (CP 848)
Other lines from ‘The Mayfly’ did not have to wait so long. They took
flight in ‘Saint’s Island’, the centrepiece of Flowers and Insects. Despite
remaining almost entirely untouched by his critics, this is the poem in
which Hughes’s fascination with the mayfly reached its most extended
heights, and the finest justification his fishing diaries contain of Hughes’s
sense of his ‘life as a prolonged project of research, deliberately planned,
painstakingly pursued’.18
*
On 19 May 1982, Hughes sat up until 3 a.m., ‘typing the Taw/
Torridge article’. His diary reveals how right Terry Gifford was to iden-
tify the environmental ‘subtext’ of the published essay, which, in its pub-
lished form, manages to confine Hughes’s concern about the effects of
the pollution already poisoning the river’s lower reaches to a final page
and a half.19 Hughes records how, ‘Once I had learned the facts, fasci-
nating + shocking as they are – the neglect, the statistics, the outrages
etc. – it was almost impossible not to tell them’. And yet, Hughes was
also aware—it was, he claimed, ‘the first time I’ve seen this tendency in
myself so clearly’—that he had been right to ‘wrestle’ as hard as he had
with ‘the desire to spill the beans’. ‘Whenever I got onto any topic, it
veered towards “exposure” + polemic against those imbeciles or oppor-
tunists responsible for whatever was so wrong’. The time had not yet
come when—in ‘If’, and in ‘1984 on the Tarka Trail’—he was prepared
to risk angry polemic in his verse.20
For now, a fishing diary provided both an outlet for this frustration
and the prospect of diversion. That morning, the Hugheses drove north
to visit Nicholas in Oxford, then in his first Easter term at Queen’s
College. And it was that afternoon, as Nicholas took them punt-
ing on the Cherwell, that on its ‘pea-soupy’ waters, to which Hughes
also brought the preoccupation with pollution he had been struggling
to control in his essay, that he registered the subject that was in the
weeks and months ahead to become the means of an entirely different
28 M. WORMALD
mode of ecological engagement: ‘a big crop of Mayflies, both green

drake + spent. The water covered with spent, + thick with shucks, so
it cannot be too polluted, though it struck me I got the odd whiff of
sewage’.21
Hughes had another reason for noticing those mayflies, and for
deploying angler’s terms for their sub-imago and imago—the ‘green
drake’ and ‘spent’, respectively. Oxford was a staging post for what
became a solitary onward journey, first to Holyhead for the ferry, and
then to Ireland, where he joined the Irish painter Barrie Cooke and a
coterie of Cooke’s friends, all fanatical fly fishermen of a very particular
bent. They were after trout during the fortnight of the hatch of mayfly,
first on Loughs Key and Arrow, straddling the Roscommon/Sligo bor-
der, then on Lough Ree, in the heart of the Irish midlands.
In terms of trout caught, it was an unsuccessful trip. Hughes caught
not one, and its own real frustrations mark the 4400 word diary he
kept throughout it. But at least some of these were redeemed as the trip
ended, and in its aftermath. An unexpected harvest of memory marks the
final paragraph of that diary, composed as Hughes waited to catch the
ferry home on the quayside at Dun Laoghaire.
Memory of the beautiful spents — or moulted greens — hanging under

all the leaves, marvellous magical living fruit. Very fascinating that. The
whole process of these insects — emerging green — writhing little drag-
ons — sitting on the water, flying up, hanging in the leaves, dancing
above + between the trees, flying out onto the water, coupled sometimes
crashing like dud helicopters. Flying sometimes far out over the lake.22
Yet, for all the interest in and of these lines—readers of ‘The Mayfly’ will
recognize those ‘writhing little dragons’—they were also sketchy. They
needed more definition, rehearsal.
That came in the next stage of Hughes’s writing. Soon he embarked
on a second version of his account, as he had previously done for his
diaries of the trips to Alaska and to Lough Gur in 1980, but this time
framed as self-consciously for a reader, as his initial notes had been for his
own eyes only. This second account, 4560 words in length, has a title,
‘Mayflies in Ireland, 1992’, and sets out to engage an addressee in a nar-
rative he knows is improbable: ‘See if I can tell you the true story of
my trip to Ireland, to catch fish on the imitation of the Mayfly, Green
Drake and Spent’. It also makes no secret of the comparative ignorance
in which he set out, even as he reveals a broad familiarity with the insect,
natural and artificial:
To begin with, I was not even sure of the phases, the precise natu-
ral history, of the terminology, though I have been reading about it for
years, + have been using the Mayfly nymph, the representation of the crea-
ture rising from the water-bed to the air, + catching fish on it, for years.23
But that was as nothing to the induction, in two stages, he was about to
receive.
The first came on the Cherwell that afternoon in Oxford. Nicholas
was the real reason Hughes denigrated his own knowledge of the mayfly.
‘An extremely keen underwater creaturist’ at thirteen, by 1979 Nicholas
had an ‘aquarium full of varieties of caddis larvae’24: Hughes’s illustra-
tions came from the life. Now Nicholas ‘described the stages of the may-
fly’: the two years of its life as a larva in the mud of the ‘water-bed’; its
ascent to the surface where it emerges as a large and startlingly beauti
ful sub-imago, whose wings unfold, dry and harden in the first vulner-
able moments after hauling itself from its pupal case; and its maiden
flight from the water, to a tree or, as that afternoon, onto the clothes
of the observer. Within forty-eight hours, another transformation occurs,
generally as the sub-imago hangs from a leaf. Another entire tough but
translucent case is discarded, and the sexually mature imago, cream and
black in its abdomen where the sub-imago was green, takes to the air
to mate: the nuptial flight. Triggered by the same warmth, hundreds or
thousands of these flies will dance, mating occurring in mid-air, coupled
males and females sometimes tumbling—those helicopters—from the
sky. But most will then make their way, blown by the wind, out onto
the surface of the water, where the females deposit eggs that will fall to
the water-bed and the cycle begins again.
Why hadn’t Hughes seen before what he saw that afternoon, and
what enabled him to see it then in more detail than he had at first com-
mitted to his diary? By the early 1980s, as he later told Thomas Pero,
salmon had become his passion,25 and salmon do not feed on return-
ing to the rivers of their early years to spawn; though the ‘flies’ salmon
fishermen use to irritate them into taking are tied on hooks, like the
artificial insect patterns deployed to catch trout, they are more properly
lures, designed to evoke the diet at sea these anadromous fish have for-
saken on their own journey to mate and die. Devon’s topography was
30 M. WORMALD
also to blame. Different geologies of riverine and lacustrine ecosystems

support different populations of aquatic flies. Hughes had not yet fished
the greatest of those English rivers, the mineral-rich chalk streams of
Wiltshire and Hampshire, as he was to from 1985; and though he was
travelling to Irish loughs that did support great populations of mayflies,
the Cherwell’s muddy-bottomed waters proved a much richer habitat for
them than the stonier rivers Hughes fished in Devon.
It wasn’t just the availability of the mayflies that made this afternoon
so extraordinary. It was also ‘the naturalist’s headglass’ Nicholas gave
his father that enabled him to watch as ‘the insects began to distinguish
themselves’, and to develop a new closeness and exactitude of observa-
tion and expression as his sympathy for ‘this ancient fellow-actor’ grew.26
The physical beauty of these creatures, ‘the ancient of the ancients’,
reminded him of human heroism. Watching ‘as their long serpentine
abdomen writhed behind the uplifted sails’, Hughes ‘felt the piercing
accuracy of their name Drake’.
He also invoked, for the first time, the language of the spiritual, the
moral and the metaphysical. Insects ‘seeming to be utterly dead, or quiv-
ering in a vibrant halo of rings’, compelled thoughts of how ‘they might,
with help, recover from this apparent accident + fly again – survive + live
again some purposeful life’.27
Yet, in writing this, Hughes was also drawing on the larger and
very different knowledge he was still to acquire, in Ireland, and from a
very different breed of dedicated fishermen-naturalists. That is why his
extraordinary account of his floating Oxford tutorial in zoology includes
another confession: as he reflects once more on the Green Drake’s heroic
struggle from the water, he is preparing his reader for his own subse-
quent flight into higher and still more specialized knowledge, and the
role that another art, another culture, would play in the fortnight ahead.
I did not appreciate what that meant, that extra total armour, carried up
from the surface on that maiden flight, I did not grasp what it guaranteed
in toughness – in durability, or how it made all the difference between the
mighty art – + deadly art – of dapping, + no dapping at all!28
Non-fishing readers may not be alone in feeling bafflement at that refer-

ence to a ‘mighty … + deadly art – of dapping’. Hughes’s story depends
on a moment of surprise, as it moves to the second and most substantial,
Irish stage, of ‘my education in the Mayfly’.29
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
[B] Je ne dois pas dissimuler que l'histoire de cette courtisane n'est pas à
beaucoup près aussi authentique que celle d'Arsénius. Rufin la raconte, mais
Rufin est rempli de fables. Sozomène, Théodoret, et l'auteur de la vie de saint
Athanase dans Photius, l'ont adoptée, et c'est ce qui m'a engagé à en faire usage.
Mais il faut avouer que ni saint Athanase, qui en plusieurs endroits de ses
ouvrages développe les iniquités du concile de Tyr, ni les épîtres synodales du
concile d'Alexandrie, et de celui de Sardique où les mensonges des Ariens sont
détaillés, ni la lettre du pape Jules, ni l'historien Socrate n'en font aucune mention.
Les commissaires envoyés dans la Maréotique y
firent l'information au gré de la calomnie. Toutes xlvii.
les règles furent violées, et la cabale, soutenue par Conclusion du
le préfet Philagrius, apostat et très-corrompu dans concile de Tyr.
ses mœurs, y étouffa la vérité. Les catholiques
protestèrent contre cette procédure monstrueuse. Athan. Apol.
Alexandrie fut le théâtre de l'insolence d'une contr. Arian. t. i,
soldatesque effrénée, qui donnait main-forte aux p. 135-140.
prélats, et qui les divertissait par les insultes qu'elle
faisait aux fidèles attachés à leur pasteur. Ces Socr. l. 1, c. 31,
commissaires, à leur retour, ne trouvèrent plus à 32.
Tyr Athanase: il fut condamné sur leur information
et sur tous les crimes dont il s'était justifié. La
Theod. l. 1, c.
sentence de déposition fut prononcée; on lui 30.
défendit de rentrer dans Alexandrie. Jean le
Mélétien et tous ceux de sa faction furent admis à
la communion et rétablis dans leur dignité. Pour Soz. l. 2, c. 25.
tenir parole à Ischyras, on le fit évêque d'un village
où il fallut lui bâtir une église; et afin que tout fût étrange dans
l'histoire de ce concile, on ne tarda pas à regagner Arsénius; il signa
la condamnation de celui dont il prouvait lui-même l'innocence. Les
actes du concile furent envoyés à l'empereur. On avertit les évêques
par une lettre synodale, de ne plus communiquer avec Athanase
convaincu de tant de forfaits; et qui après une orgueilleuse
résistance ne s'était trouvé au concile que pour le troubler, pour y
insulter les prélats, pour récuser d'abord, et fuir ensuite le jugement.
Les évêques catholiques refusèrent de souscrire, et se retirèrent
avant la conclusion de l'assemblée.
Ce mystère d'iniquité était à peine consommé, que
les évêques reçurent ordre de se transporter à xlviii. Dédicace
Jérusalem, pour y faire la cérémonie de la de l'église du S.
dédicace. Les lettres furent apportées par Sépulcre.
Marianus, secrétaire de l'empereur, illustre par ses
emplois, par sa vertu, et par la fermeté avec Euseb. vit.
laquelle il avait confessé la foi sous les tyrans. Il Const. l. 4, c. 43
était chargé de faire les honneurs de la fête, de et seq.
traiter les évêques avec magnificence, et de
distribuer aux pauvres de l'argent, des vivres et Socr. l. 1, c. 33
des habits. L'empereur envoyait de riches présents et 36.
pour l'ornement de la basilique. Outre les évêques
assemblés à Tyr, il en vint un grand nombre de
toutes les parties de l'Orient. Il s'y trouva même un Theod.
31.
l. 1, c.
évêque de Perse, qu'on croit être saint Milles; qui,
après avoir beaucoup souffert dans la persécution
de Sapor, quitta sa ville épiscopale, où il ne Soz. l. 2, c. 14,
trouvait que des cœurs endurcis et rebelles au 26 et 27.
joug de la foi, et vint à Jérusalem sans autres
richesses qu'une besace où était le livre des évangiles[82]. Un
nombre infini de fidèles accourut de toutes parts: tous furent
défrayés pendant leur séjour aux dépens de l'empereur. La ville
retentissait de prières, d'instructions chrétiennes, d'éloges et du
prince et de la basilique. On rendit cette fête annuelle: elle durait
pendant huit jours, et c'était alors un prodigieux concours de pèlerins
des pays les plus éloignés. Après la dédicace, les autres évêques se
retirèrent; il ne resta que les prélats du concile de Tyr.
[82] S. Milles était évêque de Suse. Les actes de son martyre, écrits en syriaque
et publiés avec une version latine par Assémani font mention de son voyage à
Jérusalem, t. i, p. 71.—S.-M.
Cette solennité brillante fut suivie d'un événement
fâcheux pour l'église. Arius et Euzoïus avaient xlix. Concile de
surpris des lettres de Constantin. Ce prince, Jérusalem.
trompé par une profession de foi qui lui paraissait
conforme à celle de Nicée, reconnut pourtant qu'il n'appartenait qu'à
l'église de prononcer en cette matière. Il renvoya Arius aux évêques
assemblés à Jérusalem, et leur écrivit d'examiner avec attention la
formule qu'il présentait, et de le traiter favorablement s'il se trouvait
qu'il eût été injustement condamné, ou qu'ayant mérité l'anathème il
fût revenu à résipiscence. Constantin ne s'apercevait pas que mettre
en doute la justice de la condamnation d'Arius, c'était porter atteinte
au concile de Nicée, qu'il respectait lui-même. Il n'en fallait pas tant
pour engager des Ariens cachés à rétablir leur docteur et leur
maître. Les prélats réunis de nouveau à Jérusalem en forme de
concile, reçoivent à bras ouverts Arius et Euzoïus; ils adressent une
lettre synodale à tous les évêques du monde; ils y font valoir
l'approbation de l'empereur, et reconnaissent pour très-orthodoxe la
profession de foi d'Arius. Ils invitent toutes les églises à l'admettre à
la communion, lui et tous ceux qui en avaient été séparés avec lui.
Ils écrivent en particulier à l'église d'Alexandrie, qu'il est temps de
faire taire l'envie, et de rétablir la paix; que l'innocence d'Arius est
reconnue; que l'église lui ouvre son sein, et qu'elle rejette Athanase.
Marcel d'Ancyre ne voulut prendre aucune part à la réception
d'Arius.
Les évêques venaient d'envoyer les lettres par
lesquelles ils communiquaient avec complaisance l. Athanase
leur décision à Constantin, lorsqu'ils en reçurent de s'adresse à
sa part qui n'étaient pas aussi flatteuses. l'empereur.
Athanase, s'étant échappé de Tyr, était venu à
Constantinople; et comme l'empereur traversait la Ath. Apol. contr.
ville à cheval, le prélat accompagné de quelques Arian. t. i, p.
amis, se présenta sur son passage d'une manière 131, 132 et 201-
si subite et si imprévue, qu'il étonna Constantin. Le 202.
prince ne l'aurait pas reconnu sans quelques-uns
de ses courtisans qui lui dirent qui il était, et Epiph. hær. 68.
l'injuste traitement qu'il venait d'essuyer. § 8, t. i, p. 724
Constantin passait outre sans lui parler; et quoique et 725.
Athanase demandât d'être entendu, l'empereur
était prêt à le faire retirer par force. Alors l'évêque Socr. l. 1, c. 34.
élevant la voix: Prince, lui dit-il, le Seigneur jugera
entre vous et moi, puisque vous vous déclarez
pour ceux qui me calomnient; je ne vous demande Soz. l. 2, c. 28.
que de faire venir mes juges, afin que je puisse
vous faire ma plainte en leur présence. L'empereur, frappé d'une
requête si juste et si conforme à ses maximes, manda sur-le-champ
aux évêques de venir lui rendre compte de leur conduite; il ne leur
dissimula pas qu'on les accusait d'avoir procédé avec beaucoup
d'emportement et de passion.
Cette lettre consterna la cabale. Les évêques
mandés à la cour se dispersèrent aussitôt et s'en li. Exil
retournèrent dans leurs diocèses: il n'en resta que d'Athanase.
six des plus hardis, à la tête desquels étaient les
deux Eusèbes. Ils se rendirent devant l'empereur, Athan. Apol.
et se gardèrent bien d'entrer en dispute avec contr. Arian. t. i,
Athanase. Selon leur méthode ordinaire, au lieu de p. 132 et 203.
prouver les accusations dont il s'agissait, ils en
formèrent une nouvelle. Bien instruits de la Socr. l. 1, c. 35.
prédilection de Constantin pour sa nouvelle ville,
ils chargèrent le saint évêque d'avoir menacé
d'affamer Constantinople, en arrêtant le blé Theod. l. 1, c.
d'Alexandrie. Athanase eut beau représenter qu'un 31.
pareil attentat ne pouvait tomber dans l'esprit d'un
particulier sans pouvoir et sans force; Eusèbe Soz. l. 2, c. 28.
prétendit qu'Athanase était riche, et chef d'une
faction puissante. La seule imputation irrita tellement l'empereur,
qu'incapable de rien écouter, il exila l'accusé à Trèves, se flattant
d'ailleurs que l'éloignement de ce prélat inflexible rendrait la paix à
l'église. Le saint fut reçu avec honneur par l'évêque Maximin, zélé
pour la vérité; et le jeune Constantin, qui faisait sa résidence en
cette ville, prit soin d'adoucir son exil par les traitements les plus
généreux.
Les Ariens, maîtres du champ de bataille,
formèrent à Constantinople une nouvelle lii. Concile de
assemblée: on y fit venir de bien loin les évêques Constantinople.
du parti. Ils se réunirent en grand nombre. Il fut
proposé en premier lieu de donner un successeur Athan. Apol.
à Athanase. L'empereur n'y voulut point consentir. contr. Arian. t. i,
On déposa Marcel d'Ancyre, et Basile fut nommé p. 150 et 151.
en sa place. Marcel n'avait jamais usé de
ménagement à l'égard des Ariens: il s'était signalé
contre eux au concile de Nicée; il avait refusé de Socr. l. 1, c. 36.
communiquer avec eux au concile de Jérusalem; il
n'avait pas même voulu prendre part à la Soz. l. 2, c. 33.
cérémonie de la dédicace: ce qu'on sut bien
envenimer auprès de l'empereur, qui en fut fort irrité. Mais son plus
grand crime était la guerre qu'il avait déclarée à un sophiste de
Cappadoce nommé Astérius. Celui-ci était l'émissaire des Ariens, et
courait de ville en ville prêchant leur doctrine. Marcel le confondit, et
ce succès mit le comble à la haine que lui portaient déja les
hérétiques: ils l'accusèrent de sabellianisme. Il fut justifié au concile
de Sardique. Mais ses écrits donnèrent dans la suite occasion de
soupçonner sa foi; et plusieurs saints docteurs l'ont condamné
comme ayant favorisé les erreurs de Photin. Quelques autres
évêques furent encore déposés contre toute justice dans le concile
de Constantinople.
Mais le grand ouvrage d'Eusèbe, ce qu'il avait le
plus à cœur, c'était de forcer les catholiques à liii. Efforts
recevoir Arius. Après le concile de Jérusalem, cet d'Eusèbe pour
hérésiarque était retourné à Alexandrie. Il se flattait faire recevoir
que l'exil d'Athanase ferait tomber devant lui toutes Arius par
Alexandre.
les barrières: il trouva les esprits plus aigris que
jamais. On le rebuta avec horreur. Déja les
troubles se rallumaient, quand l'empereur le Socr. l. 1, c. 37.
rappela à Constantinople. Sa présence augmenta
l'insolence de ses partisans, et la fermeté des Theod. l. 1, c.
catholiques. Eusèbe pressait l'évêque Alexandre 14.
de l'admettre à sa communion, et sur son refus il le
menaçait de déposition. L'évêque, mille fois plus
attaché à la pureté de la foi qu'à sa dignité, n'était Soz. l. 2, c. 29.
point ébranlé de ces menaces. L'empereur fatigué
d'une contestation si opiniâtre, voulut la terminer: il Vit. Athan.
fait venir devant lui Arius, et lui demande s'il apud. Phot. cod.
adhère aux décrets de Nicée. Arius répond sans 257.
balancer qu'il y souscrit de cœur et d'esprit, et
présente une profession de foi où l'erreur était adroitement couverte
sous des termes de l'Écriture. L'empereur, pour plus grande
assurance, l'oblige de jurer que ce sont là sans détour ses véritables
sentiments. Il n'en fait aucune difficulté. Quelques auteurs
prétendent que, tenant le symbole de Nicée entre ses mains, et la
formule de sa croyance hérétique cachée sous son bras, il rapportait
à celle-ci le serment qu'il paraissait prononcer sur l'autre. Mais Arius
était apparemment trop habile pour user en pure perte d'une pareille
ruse, et trop éclairé pour ignorer qu'une restriction mentale ne rabat
rien d'un parjure. Constantin satisfait de sa soumission: Allez, lui dit-
il, si votre foi s'accorde avec votre serment, vous êtes
irrépréhensible: si elle n'y est pas conforme, que Dieu soit votre
juge. En même temps il mande à Alexandre de ne pas différer
d'admettre Arius à la communion. Eusèbe, porteur de cet ordre,
conduit Arius devant Alexandre, et signifie à l'évêque la volonté du
prince. L'évêque persiste dans son refus. Alors Eusèbe haussant la
voix: Nous avons malgré vous, lui dit-il, fait rappeler Arius; nous
saurons bien aussi malgré vous le faire entrer demain dans votre
église. Ceci se passait le samedi; et le lendemain tous les fidèles
étant réunis pour la célébration des saints mystères, le scandale en
devait être plus horrible. Alexandre voyant les puissances de la terre
déclarées contre lui, a recours au ciel: il y avait sept jours que, par le
conseil de Jacques de Nisibe qui était alors à Constantinople, tous
les catholiques étaient dans le jeûne et dans les prières; et
Alexandre avait passé plusieurs jours et plusieurs nuits enfermé seul
dans l'église de la Paix, prosterné et priant sans cesse. Frappé de
ces dernières paroles d'Eusèbe, le saint vieillard accompagné de
deux prêtres, dont l'un était Macarius d'Alexandrie, va se jeter au
pied de l'autel; là, courbé vers la terre qu'il baignait de ses larmes,
«Seigneur, dit-il d'une voix entrecoupée de sanglots, s'il faut qu'Arius
soit demain reçu dans notre sainte assemblée, retirez du monde
votre serviteur; ne perdez pas avec l'impie celui qui vous est fidèle.
Mais si vous avez encore pitié de votre église, et je sais que vous en
avez pitié, écoutez les paroles d'Eusèbe, et n'abandonnez pas votre
héritage à la ruine et à l'opprobre. Faites disparaître Arius, de peur
que s'il entre dans votre église, il ne semble que l'hérésie y soit
entrée avec lui, et que le mensonge ne s'asseye dans la chaire de
vérité».
Tandis que cette prière d'Alexandre s'élevait au
ciel avec ses soupirs, les partisans d'Arius liv. Mort d'Arius.
promenaient celui-ci comme en triomphe dans la
ville, pour le montrer au peuple. Lorsqu'il passait Socr. l. 1, c. 38.
avec un nombreux cortége par la grande place
auprès de la colonne de porphyre, il se sentit
pressé d'un besoin naturel qui l'obligea de gagner Theod. l. 1, c.
un lieu public, tel qu'il y en avait alors dans toutes 14.
les grandes villes. Le domestique qu'il avait laissé
au-dehors, voyant qu'il tardait beaucoup, craignit Soz. l. 2, c. 29.
quelque accident; il entra et le trouva mort,
renversé par terre, nageant dans son sang, et ses entrailles hors de
son corps. L'horreur d'un tel spectacle fit d'abord trembler ses
sectateurs; mais toujours endurcis, ils attribuèrent aux sortiléges
d'Alexandre un châtiment si bien caractérisé par toutes les
circonstances. Ce lieu cessa d'être fréquenté; on n'osait en
approcher dans la suite, et on le montrait au doigt comme un
monument de la vengeance divine. Long-temps après, un Arien
riche et puissant acheta ce terrain, et y fit bâtir une maison afin
d'effacer la mémoire de la mort funeste d'Arius.
Le bruit s'en répandit bientôt dans tout l'empire.
Les Ariens en rougissaient de honte. Le lv. Constantin
lendemain, jour de dimanche, Alexandre à la tête refuse de
de son peuple rendit à Dieu des actions de graces rappeler
solennelles, non pas de ce qu'il avait fait périr Athanase.
Arius, dont il plaignait le malheureux sort, mais de
ce qu'il avait daigné étendre son bras et repousser Ath. ad Monach.
l'hérésie, qui marchait avec audace pour forcer hist. Arian. t. i,
l'entrée du sanctuaire. Constantin fut convaincu du p. 345 et 346.
parjure d'Arius; et cet événement le confirma dans
son aversion pour l'arianisme, et dans son respect pour le concile de
Nicée. Mais les Ariens, après la mort de leur chef, trouvant dans
Eusèbe de Nicomédie autant de malice et encore plus de crédit,
continuèrent de tendre des piéges à la bonne foi de l'empereur; et il
ne cessa pas d'être la dupe de leur déguisement. Les habitants
d'Alexandrie sollicitaient vivement le retour de leur évêque: on faisait
dans la ville des prières publiques, pour obtenir de Dieu cette faveur;
saint Antoine écrivit plusieurs fois à Constantin, pour lui ouvrir les
yeux sur l'innocence d'Athanase et sur la fourberie des Mélétiens et
des Ariens. Le prince fut inexorable. Il répondit aux Alexandrins par
des reproches de leur opiniâtreté et de leur humeur turbulente; il
imposa silence au clergé et aux vierges sacrées, et protesta qu'il ne
rappellerait jamais Athanase; que c'était un séditieux, condamné par
un jugement ecclésiastique. Il manda à saint Antoine qu'il ne pouvait
se résoudre à mépriser le jugement d'un concile; qu'à la vérité la
passion emportait quelquefois un petit nombre de juges, mais qu'on
ne lui persuaderait pas qu'elle eût entraîné le suffrage d'un si grand
nombre de prélats illustres et vertueux; qu'Athanase était un homme
emporté, superbe, querelleur, intraitable: c'était en effet l'idée que les
ennemis d'Athanase donnaient de lui à l'empereur, parce qu'ils
connaissaient l'aversion de ce prince pour les hommes de ce
caractère. Il ne pardonna pas même cet esprit de cabale à Jean le
Mélétien, qui venait d'être si bien traité par le concile de Tyr. Ayant
appris qu'il était le chef du parti opposé à Athanase, il l'arracha, pour
ainsi dire, d'entre les bras des Mélétiens et des Ariens, et l'envoya
en exil, sans vouloir écouter aucune sollicitation en sa faveur;
toutefois, dans les derniers moments de sa vie, il revint de son
injuste préjugé. Mais avant que de raconter la mort de ce prince, il
est à propos de donner une idée des lois qu'il avait faites depuis le
concile de Nicée.
Dès le commencement du schisme des
Donatistes, Constantin les avait exclus des graces lvi. Lois contre
qu'il répandait sur l'église d'Afrique. Il tint la même les hérétiques.
conduite à l'égard de tous ceux que le schisme ou
l'hérésie séparait de la communion catholique: il Cod. Th. lib. 16,
déclara par une loi, que non-seulement ils t. 5.
n'auraient aucune part aux priviléges accordés à
l'église, mais que leurs clercs seraient assujettis à
Eus. vit. Const.
toutes les charges municipales. Cependant il l. 3, c. 63 et
montra dans le même temps quelques égards pour seq.
les Novatiens. Comme on les inquiétait sur la
propriété de leurs temples et de leurs cimetières, il
ordonna qu'on leur laissât la libre possession de Soz. l. 2, c. 31
et 32.
ces lieux, supposé qu'ils eussent été légitimement
acquis, et non pas usurpés sur les catholiques.
Vers la fin de sa vie il devint plus sévère: il publia Amm. l. 15, c.
contre les hérétiques un édit, dans lequel, à la 13, et ibi Vales.
suite d'une véhémente invective, il leur déclare,
qu'après les avoir tolérés, comme il voit que sa patience ne sert qu'à
donner à la contagion la liberté de s'étendre, il est résolu de couper
le mal dans sa racine; en conséquence, il leur défend de
s'assembler, soit dans les lieux publics, soit dans les maisons des
particuliers; il leur ôte leurs temples et leurs oratoires, et les donne à
l'église catholique. On fit la recherche de leurs livres; et comme on
en trouva plusieurs qui traitaient de magie et de maléfices, on en
arrêta les possesseurs, pour les punir selon les ordonnances. Cet
édit fit revenir un grand nombre d'hérétiques: les uns de bonne foi,
les autres par hypocrisie. Ceux qui demeurèrent obstinés, étant
privés de la liberté de s'assembler, et de séduire par leurs
instructions, laissèrent peu de successeurs; et ces plantes
malheureuses se séchèrent insensiblement, et se perdirent enfin
tout-à-fait, faute de culture et de semence. Les Novatiens, quoiqu'ils
fussent nommés dans l'édit, furent encore traités avec indulgence:
ils étaient moins éloignés que les autres des sentiments catholiques,
et l'empereur aimait Acésius leur évêque. On laissa aussi subsister
tranquillement ceux des Cataphrygiens, qui se renfermaient dans la
Phrygie et dans les contrées voisines: c'était une espèce de
Montanistes. L'édit ne parle point des Ariens: ils ne formaient pas
encore de secte séparée; et, depuis leur rétractation simulée,
l'empereur, loin de les regarder comme exclus de l'église, s'efforçait
de les faire rentrer dans son sein. Il s'était fait instruire de la doctrine
et des pratiques des diverses sectes par Stratégius, dont il changea
le nom en celui de Musonianus. C'était un homme né à Antioche, qui
fit fortune auprès de Constantin par son savoir et par son éloquence
dans les deux langues. Il était attaché à l'arianisme, et parvint sous
Constance à des honneurs qui mirent dans un grand jour ses
bonnes et ses mauvaises qualités.
Eusèbe dit que Constantin se fit un devoir de
confirmer par son autorité les sentences lvii. Loi sur la
prononcées dans les conciles, et qu'il les faisait juridiction
exécuter par les gouverneurs des provinces. épiscopale.
Sozomène ajoute que, par un effet de son respect
pour la religion, il permit à ceux qui avaient des Eus. vit. Const.
procès de récuser les juges civils, et de porter l. 4, c. 27.
leurs causes au jugement des évêques; qu'il voulut
que les sentences des évêques fussent sans appel Soz. l. 1, c. 9.
comme celles de l'empereur, et que les magistrats
leur prêtassent le secours du bras séculier. Nous
avons à la suite du Code Théodosien un titre sur la Cod. Th. extra.
juridiction épiscopale, dont la première loi, leg. 1, et ibi
attribuée à Constantin et adressée à Ablabius, God.
préfet du prétoire, donne aux évêques une
puissance suprême dans les jugements: elle Till. not. 71, sur
ordonne que tout ce qui aura été décidé en Constantin.
quelque matière que ce soit par le jugement des
évêques, soit regardé comme sacré, et sortisse irrévocablement son
effet, même par rapport aux mineurs; que les préfets du prétoire et
les autres magistrats tiennent la main à l'exécution; que si le
demandeur ou le défendeur, soit au commencement de la
procédure, soit après les délais expirés, soit à la dernière audience,
soit même quand le juge a commencé à prononcer, en appelle à
l'évêque, la cause y soit aussitôt portée, malgré l'opposition de la
partie adverse; qu'on ne puisse appeler d'un jugement épiscopal;
que le témoignage d'un seul évêque soit reçu sans difficulté dans
tous les tribunaux, et qu'il fasse taire toute contradiction.
L'authenticité de cette loi fait une grande question entre les critiques.
Il ne m'appartient pas d'entrer dans cette contestation. Le lecteur
jugera peut-être que ceux qui soutiennent la vérité de la loi font plus
d'honneur aux évêques, et que ceux qui l'attaquent comme fausse et
supposée en font plus à Constantin. Cujas justifie ici la sagesse de
ce principe par le mérite éminent des évêques de ce temps-là, et par
leur zèle pour la justice. Constantin vit à la vérité dans l'église ce
qu'on y a vu dans tous les siècles, d'éclatantes lumières et de
sublimes vertus: mais je doute que saint Eustathius, saint Athanase
et Marcel d'Ancyre eussent été de l'avis de Cujas; du moins
auraient-ils excepté des conciliabules fort nombreux.
La religion et les mœurs se soutiennent
mutuellement; aussi Constantin fut-il attentif à lviii. Lois sur les
conserver la pureté des mœurs, surtout par mariages.
rapport aux mariages. Dans ses ordonnances, il
met toujours les adultères à côté des homicides et Cod. Th. lib. 9,
des empoisonneurs. Selon la jurisprudence t. 7.
romaine, qui avait suivi en ce point celle des
Athéniens, les femmes qui tenaient cabaret,
Lib. 3, t. 16.
étaient mises au rang des femmes publiques; elles
n'étaient point sujettes aux peines de l'adultère.
Constantin leur ôta cette impunité infamante; mais Cod. Just. lib. 5,
par un reste d'abus, il laissa ce honteux privilége à t. 27.
leurs servantes; et il en apporte une raison qui
n'est guère conforme à l'esprit du christianisme: Lib. 4, t. 39.
C'est, dit-il, que la sévérité des jugements n'est
pas faite pour des personnes que leur bassesse rend indignes de
l'attention des lois. L'adultère était un crime public, c'est-à-dire, que
toute personne était reçue à en intenter accusation: pour empêcher
que la paix des mariages ne fût mal à propos troublée, Constantin
ôta l'action d'adultère aux étrangers; il la réserva aux maris, aux
frères, aux cousins-germains; et pour leur sauver le risque que
couraient les accusateurs, il leur permit de se désister de
l'accusation intentée, sans encourir la peine des calomniateurs. Il
laissa aux maris la liberté que ses prédécesseurs leur avait
accordée, d'accuser leurs femmes sur un simple soupçon, sans
s'exposer à la peine de la calomnie, pourvu que ce fût dans le terme
de soixante jours depuis le crime commis ou soupçonné. Les
divorces étaient fréquents dans l'ancienne république; Auguste en
avait diminué la licence; mais la discipline s'était bientôt relâchée sur
ce point, et les causes les plus légères suffisaient pour rompre le lien
conjugal. Constantin le resserra: il retrancha aux femmes la faculté
de faire divorce, à moins qu'elles ne pussent convaincre leurs maris
d'homicide, d'empoisonnement, ou d'avoir détruit des sépultures,
espèce de sacrilége qui se mettait depuis quelque temps à la mode.
Dans ces cas, la femme pouvait reprendre sa dot; mais si elle se
séparait pour toute autre cause, elle était obligée de laisser à son
mari jusqu'à une aiguille, dit la loi, et condamnée à un bannissement
perpétuel. Le mari, de son côté, ne pouvait répudier sa femme et se
remarier à une autre qu'en cas d'adultère, de poison, ou d'infâme
commerce; autrement, il était forcé de lui rendre sa dot entière, sans
pouvoir contracter un autre mariage: s'il se remariait, la première
femme était en droit de s'emparer et de tous les biens du mari, et de
la dot même de la seconde épouse. On voit que cette loi, toute
rigoureuse qu'elle dût sembler alors, n'était pourtant pas encore
conforme à celle de l'Évangile sur l'indissolubilité du mariage. Par
une autre loi, Constantin voulut arrêter les mariages contraires à la
bienséance publique. Il déclara que les pères, revêtus de quelque
dignité ou de quelque charge honorable, ne pourraient légitimer les
enfants venus d'un mariage contracté avec une femme abjecte et
indigne de leur alliance: il met en ce rang les servantes, les
affranchies, les comédiennes, les cabaretières, les revendeuses, et
les filles de ces sortes de femmes, aussi-bien que les filles de ceux
qui faisaient trafic de débauche ou qui combattaient dans
l'amphithéâtre. Il ordonna que tous les dons, tous les achats faits en
faveur de ces enfants, soit au nom du père, soit sous des noms
empruntés, leur seraient retirés, pour être rendus aux héritiers
légitimes; qu'il en serait de même des donations et des achats en
faveur de ces épouses; qu'en cas qu'on pût soupçonner quelque
distraction d'effets ou quelque fidéicommis, on mettrait à la question
ces malheureuses enchanteresses; qu'au défaut des parents, s'ils
étaient deux mois sans se présenter, le fisc s'emparerait des biens;
et qu'après une recherche sévère, ceux qui seraient convaincus
d'avoir détourné quelque partie de l'héritage, seraient condamnés à
restituer le quadruple. En un mot, il prit toutes les précautions que la
prudence lui suggéra pour arrêter le cours de ces libéralités, que la
loi appelle des largesses impudiques. Il défendit sous peine de la vie
de faire des eunuques dans toute l'étendue de l'empire; et ordonna
que l'esclave qui aurait éprouvé cette violence serait adjugé au fisc,
aussi-bien que la maison où elle aurait été commise, supposé que le
maître de cette maison en eût été instruit.
Attentif à toutes les parties de l'administration
civile, il ne perdit jamais de vue les intérêts des lix. Autres lois
mineurs, exposés aux fraudes d'un tuteur infidèle, sur
ou d'une mère capable de les sacrifier à une l'administration
civile.
nouvelle passion. Il voulut que la négligence des
tuteurs à payer les droits du fisc, ne fût
préjudiciable qu'à eux-mêmes. En quittant Rome, il Cod. Th. lib. 2,
prit soin de veiller aux approvisionnements de t. 16.Lib. 14, tit.
cette grande ville; il ne diminua rien des 4, 24. Lib. 8, t.
9. Lib. 1, t. 7. ib.
distributions qu'y avaient établies ses
6, t. 37. Lib. 2, t.
prédécesseurs. Les concussions palliées sous le 25. Lib. 4, t. 4.
prétexte d'achat de la part des officiers des Lib. 22, t. 6. Lib.
provinces furent punies par la perte et de la chose 15, t. 2. Lib. 13,
achetée, et de l'argent donné pour cet achat. Il t. 4.
réprima l'avidité de certains officiers qui
entreprenaient sur les fonctions des autres: il régla Cod. Just. lib.
l'ordre de leur promotion, et voulut connaître, par 11, t. 61. Lib. 2,
lui-même, ceux dont la capacité et la probité t. 20. Lib. 1, t.
méritaient les premières places. Il arrêta les 31. Lib. 3, tit.
concussions des receveurs du fisc, et les 27. Lib. 11, t.
usurpations des fermiers du domaine. Mais une 62. Lib. 1, tit.
40. Lib. 11, t.
preuve, plus forte que tous les témoignages des 65. Lib. 3, tit.
historiens, et de la corruption des officiers de ce
prince, et de l'horreur qu'il avait de leurs rapines, 19. Lib. 3, tit.
c'est l'édit qu'il adressa de Constantinople à toutes 13. Lib. 7, tit.
les provinces de l'empire: il mérite d'être rapporté 16.
en entier; l'indignation dont il porte le caractère, fait
honneur à ce bon prince; mais ce ton de colère est peut-être en
même temps une marque de la violence qu'il se faisait pour
menacer, et de la répugnance qu'il sentait à exécuter ses menaces.
Que nos officiers, dit-il, cessent donc enfin, qu'ils cessent d'épuiser
nos sujets; si cet avis ne suffit pas, le glaive fera le reste. Qu'on ne
profane plus par un infâme commerce le sanctuaire de la justice;
qu'on ne fasse plus acheter les audiences, les approches, la vue
même du président. Que les oreilles du juge soient également
ouvertes pour les plus pauvres et pour les riches. Que l'audiencier
ne fasse plus un trafic de ses fonctions, et que ses subalternes
cessent de mettre à contribution les plaideurs. Qu'on réprime
l'audace des ministres inférieurs, qui tirent indifféremment des
grands et des petits; et qu'on arrête l'avidité insatiable des commis
qui délivrent les sentences: c'est le devoir du supérieur de veiller à
empêcher tous ces officiers de rien exiger des plaideurs. S'ils
persistent à se créer eux-mêmes des droits imaginaires, je leur ferai
trancher la tête: nous permettons à tous ceux qui auront éprouvé ces
vexations d'en instruire le magistrat; s'il tarde d'y mettre ordre, nous
vous invitons à porter vos plaintes aux comtes des provinces, ou au
préfet du prétoire, s'il est plus proche; afin que sur le rapport qu'ils
nous feront de ces brigandages, nous imposions aux coupables la
punition qu'ils méritent. Par un autre édit, ou peut-être par une autre
partie du même édit, ce prince, sans doute pour intimider les juges
corrompus et s'épargner la peine de les punir, permet aux habitants
des provinces d'honorer par leurs acclamations les magistrats
intègres et vigilants, quand ils paraissent en public, et de se plaindre
à haute voix de ceux qui sont malfaisants et injustes: il promet de se
faire rendre compte de ces divers suffrages publics par les
gouverneurs et les préfets du prétoire, et d'en examiner les motifs.
Les priviléges attachés aux titres honorables furent supprimés à
l'égard de ceux qui avaient acquis ces titres par intrigue ou par
argent, sans avoir les qualités requises. Il assura aux particuliers la
possession des biens qu'ils achetaient du fisc, et déclara qu'ils en
jouiraient paisiblement, eux et leur postérité, sans crainte qu'on les
retirât jamais de leurs mains. Un trait qui prouve que les plus petits
objets n'échappaient pas à Constantin quand l'humanité y était
intéressée, c'est qu'il ordonna par une loi, que dans les différentes
répartitions qui se faisaient des terres du prince lors des nouvelles
adjudications, on eût soin de mettre ensemble sous un même
fermier les esclaves du domaine qui composaient une même famille:
C'est, dit-il, une cruauté de séparer les enfants de leurs pères, les
frères de leurs sœurs, et les maris de leurs femmes. Il fit aussi
plusieurs réglements sur les testaments; sur l'état des enfants quand
la liberté de leur mère était contestée; sur l'ordre judiciaire, pour
empêcher les injustices et les chicanes, pour éclaircir et abréger les
procédures. Les propriétaires des fonds par lesquels passaient les
aquéducs, furent chargés de les nettoyer; ils étaient en récompense
exempts des taxes extraordinaires; mais la terre devait être
confisquée, si l'aquéduc périssait par leur négligence. La quantité
d'édifices que Constantin élevait à Constantinople, et d'églises qu'on
bâtissait par son ordre dans toutes les provinces, demandait un
grand nombre d'architectes: il se plaint de n'en pas trouver assez, et
ordonne à Félix, préfet du prétoire d'Italie, d'encourager l'étude de
cet art, en y engageant le plus qu'il sera possible de jeunes Africains
de dix-huit ans, qui aient quelque teinture des belles-lettres. Afin de
les y attirer plus aisément, il leur donne exemption de charges
personnelles pour eux, pour leurs pères et pour leurs mères; et il
veut qu'on assure aux professeurs un honoraire convenable. Il est
remarquable qu'il choisit par préférence des Africains, comme les
jugeant plus propres à réussir dans les arts. Par une autre loi
adressée au préfet du prétoire des Gaules, il accorde la même
exemption aux ouvriers de toute espèce, qui sont employés à la
construction ou à la décoration des édifices; afin qu'ils puissent sans
distraction se perfectionner dans leurs arts et y instruire leurs
enfants.
L'empereur commençait la soixante et quatrième
année de sa vie, et malgré ses travaux continuels, An 337.
malgré les chagrins mortels qu'il avait essuyés, et
la délicatesse de son tempérament, il devait à sa frugalité et à
l'éloignement de toute espèce de débauche, une santé qui ne s'était
jamais démentie. Il avait conservé toutes les
graces de son extérieur; et les approches de la lx. Les Perses
vieillesse ne lui avaient rien dérobé de ses forces. rompent la paix.
Il montrait encore la même vigueur, et dans tous
les exercices militaires, on le voyait avec la même Eus. vit. Const.
facilité monter à cheval, marcher à pied, lancer le l. 4, c. 53, 56,
javelot. Il crut avoir besoin d'en faire une nouvelle 57.
épreuve contre les Perses. Sapor, âgé de vingt-
sept ans, étincelant de courage et de jeunesse, Eutrop. l. 10.
pensa qu'il était temps de mettre en œuvre les
grands préparatifs que la Perse faisait depuis
quarante ans. Il envoya redemander à Constantin Aurel. Vict. de
Cæs. p. 177.
les cinq provinces[83] que Narsès, vaincu, avait été
contraint d'abandonner aux Romains à l'occident
du Tigre[84]. L'empereur lui fit dire qu'il allait en Chron. Alex, vel
personne lui porter sa réponse; en même temps il Paschal. p. 286.
se prépara à marcher, disant hautement qu'il ne
manquait à sa gloire que de triompher des Perses. Il fit donc
assembler ses troupes, et il prit des mesures pour ne pas
interrompre ses pratiques de religion, au milieu du tumulte de la
guerre. Les évêques qui se trouvaient à sa cour, s'offrirent tous avec
zèle à l'accompagner, et à combattre pour lui par leurs prières. Il
accepta ce secours, sur lequel il comptait plus encore que sur ses
armes, et les instruisit de la route qu'il devait suivre. Il fit préparer un
oratoire magnifique, où il devait avec les évêques présenter ses
vœux à l'arbitre des victoires; et se mettant à la tête de son armée, il
arriva à Nicomédie. Sapor avait déja passé le Tigre et ravageait la
Mésopotamie, lorsque, ayant appris la marche de Constantin, soit
qu'il fût étonné de sa promptitude, soit qu'il voulût l'amuser par un
traité, il lui envoya des ambassadeurs pour demander la paix avec
une soumission apparente. Il est incertain si elle fut accordée; mais
les Perses se retirèrent des terres de l'empire, pour n'y rentrer que
l'année suivante sous le règne de Constance[85].
[83] Ces cinq provinces sont nommées dans les extraits des ambassades du
patrice Pierre (p. 30), l'Intélène, la Sophène, l'Arzacène, la Corduène et la
Zabdicène. C'étaient cinq petits cantons, situés sur les bords du Tigre au nord de
Ninive, dans les environs d'Amid, entre l'Arménie et l'Osrhoëne. On varie un peu
sur leurs noms, qui ne nous ont pas été transmis avec toute l'exactitude désirable
par le patrice Pierre. Je crois qu'au lieu de l'Intélène, il faut lire l'Ingélème, nom
d'une petite province d'Arménie, vers les sources du Tigre, mentionnée dans saint
Épiphane (heres. 60) et dans les auteurs arméniens et syriens. Pour le nom
inconnu de l'Arzacène, je n'hésite pas à le remplacer par celui de l'Arzanène,
province bien connue, dont il sera souvent question dans la suite. Ammien (l. 25,
c. 7) remplace la Sophène et l'Intélène, par la Moxoène et la Réhimène. Il ne
paraît pas malgré cette cession que ces provinces aient fait partie intégrante de
l'empire romain; des garnisons romaines y remplacèrent des troupes persanes,
mais la souveraineté y appartenait à de petits princes feudataires de l'Arménie. Il
sera question, sous le règne de Julien, d'un prince de la Corduène, allié ou
dépendant de l'empire et qui portait le nom romain de Jovianus.—S.-M.
[84] Lebeau se conforme ici à l'opinion de Tillemont, qui n'a fait lui-même que
reproduire celle de Henri de Valois. Ces savants pensaient que le nom de
Transtigritains, donné aux peuples orientaux qui devinrent, sous le règne de
Dioclétien, dépendants de l'empire romain, indiquait leur position par rapport à la
Perse et non pour les Romains. C'est une erreur. Elle a été produite par le peu de
connaissance, qu'on avait de leur temps, de la disposition géographique des pays
dont il s'agit. Il est certain, au contraire, que toutes ces régions étaient situées à
l'orient du Tigre, par conséquent au-delà de ce fleuve par rapport aux Romains.—
S.-M.
[85] Je ferai connaître dans le § 14 du livre vi, les véritables motifs qui avaient
décidé Constantin à porter ses armes dans l'Orient, contre les Perses, et qui
obligèrent son successeur à leur faire la guerre.—S.-M.
La fête de Pâques qui tombait cette année au 3
avril, trouva Constantin à Nicomédie. Il passa la lxi. Maladie de
nuit de la fête en prières au milieu des fidèles. Il Constantin.
avait toujours honoré ces saints jours par un culte
très-solennel; c'était sa coutume de faire allumer la Eus. vit. Const.
nuit de Pâques, dans la ville où il se trouvait, des l. 4, c. 22, 55 et
flambeaux de cire et des lampes, ce qui rendait seq.
cette nuit aussi brillante que le plus beau jour; et
dès le matin il faisait distribuer en son nom des Socr. l. 1, c. 39.
aumônes abondantes dans tout l'empire. Peu de
jours avant sa maladie, il prononça dans son
palais un long discours sur l'immortalité de l'ame, Theod. l. 1, c.
32.
et sur l'état des bons et des méchants dans l'autre
vie. Après l'avoir prononcé, il arrêta un de ses
courtisans qu'il soupçonnait d'incrédulité, et lui Soz. l. 2, c. 34.
demanda son avis sur ce qu'il venait d'entendre. Il
est presque inutile d'ajouter, ce que Constantin Vales. not. ad
aurait bien dû prévoir, que celui-ci, quoi qu'il en Eus. vit. l. 4, c.
pensât, n'épargna pas les éloges. L'église des 61.
Apôtres qu'il destinait à sa sépulture, venait d'être
achevée à Constantinople; il donna ordre d'en faire Concil.
la dédicace, sans attendre son retour, comme s'il Neocæs. Can.
eût prévu sa mort prochaine. En effet, peu après la 12.
fête de Pâques il sentit d'abord quelque légère
indisposition; ensuite étant tombé sérieusement malade, il se fit
transporter à des sources d'eaux chaudes près d'Hélénopolis. Il n'y
trouva aucun soulagement. Etant entré dans cette ville, que la
mémoire de sa mère lui faisait aimer, il resta long-temps en prières
dans l'église de Saint-Lucien; et sentant que sa fin approchait, il crut
qu'il était temps d'avoir recours à un bain plus salutaire, et de laver
dans le baptême toutes les taches de sa vie passée. C'était un
usage trop commun de différer le baptême jusqu'aux approches de
la mort. Les conciles et les saints Pères se sont souvent élevés
contre cet abus dangereux. L'empereur qui s'était exposé au risque
de mourir sans la grace du baptême, alors rempli de sentiments de
pénitence, prosterné en terre demanda pardon à Dieu, confessa ses
fautes et reçut l'imposition des mains.
S'étant fait reporter au voisinage de Nicomédie
dans le château d'Achyron qui appartenait aux lxii. Son
empereurs, il fit assembler les évêques et leur tint baptême.
ce discours: «Le voici enfin ce jour heureux,
auquel j'aspirais avec ardeur. Je vais recevoir le Eus. vit. Const.
sceau de l'immortalité. J'avais dessein de laver l. 4, c. 61 et
mes péchés dans les eaux du Jourdain, que notre seq.
Sauveur a rendues si salutaires en daignant s'y
baigner lui-même. Dieu qui sait mieux que nous ce Socr. l. 1, c. 39.
qui nous est avantageux, me retient ici; il veut me
faire ici cette faveur. Ne tardons plus. Si le
souverain arbitre de la vie et de la mort juge à Theod. l. 1, c.
propos de me laisser vivre, s'il me permet encore 32.
de me joindre aux fidèles pour participer à leurs
prières dans leurs saintes assemblées, je suis Soz. l. 2, c. 34.
résolu de me prescrire des règles de vie, qui soient
dignes d'un enfant de Dieu.» Quand il eut achevé Hier. Chron.
ces paroles, les évêques lui conférèrent le
baptême selon les cérémonies de l'église, et le
rendirent participant des saints mystères. Le prince Chron. Alex. vel
reçut ce sacrement avec joie et reconnaissance; il Paschal. p. 286.
se sentit comme renouvelé et éclairé d'une lumière
divine. On le revêtit d'habits blancs; son lit fut couvert d'étoffes de
même couleur, et dès ce moment il ne voulut plus toucher à la
pourpre. Il remercia Dieu à haute voix de la grace qu'il venait de
recevoir, et ajouta: C'est maintenant que je suis vraiment heureux,
vraiment digne d'une vie immortelle. Quel éclat de lumière luit à mes
yeux! Que je plains ceux qui sont privés de ces biens! Comme les
principaux officiers de ses troupes venaient fondants en larmes lui
témoigner leur douleur de ce qu'il les laissait orphelins, et qu'ils
priaient le ciel de lui prolonger la vie: Mes amis, leur dit-il, la vie où je
vais entrer est la véritable vie: je connais les biens que je viens
d'acquérir, et ceux qui m'attendent encore. Je me hâte d'aller à Dieu.
C'est ainsi qu'Eusèbe qui écrivait sous les yeux
mêmes des fils de Constantin et de tout l'empire, lχιιι. Vérité de
deux ou trois ans après cet événement, raconte le cette histoire.
baptême de ce prince, et ce témoignage est au-
dessus de toute exception. Il est confirmé par ceux Athan. de
de saint Ambroise, de saint Prosper, de Socrate, Synod. t. 1, p.
de Théodoret, de Sozomène, d'Évagrius, de 723.
Gelasius de Cyzique, de saint Isidore et de la
Chronique d'Alexandrie. Tant d'autorités ne sont Ambros. orat. in
contredites que par les faux actes de saint fun. Theod. §
Silvestre, et par quelques autres pièces de même 40, t. 2, p. 1209.
valeur. Aussi la lèpre de Constantin et les fables
qu'elle amène, le baptême donné dans Rome à ce
prince avant le concile de Nicée par le pape Hier. Chron.
Silvestre, sa guérison miraculeuse, ne trouvent
plus de croyance que dans l'esprit de ceux qui Socr. l. 1, c. 39.
s'obstinent à défendre la donation de Constantin,
pour le soutien de laquelle ce roman a été inventé. Il ne l'était pas
encore, lorsque peu d'années après la mort de ce prince, Julien d'un
côté insultait les chrétiens en leur disant que leur
baptême ne guérissait pas de la lèpre, et que de Theod. l. 1, c.
l'autre, saint Cyrille occupé à le confondre, ne 32.
disait pas en si belle occasion un seul mot ni de la
lèpre ni de la guérison de Constantin. Soz. l. 2, c. 34.
Ce grand prince, régénéré pour le ciel, ne songea
plus aux choses de la terre, qu'autant qu'il fallait Till. not. 65, sur
pour laisser ses enfants et ses sujets heureux. Il Constantin.
légua à Rome et à Constantinople des sommes
considérables pour faire en son nom des largesses
Cyrill. Alex. l. 7,
annuelles. Il fit un testament par lequel il confirma contra Julian. p.
le partage qu'il avait fait entre ses enfants et ses 245-247, ed.
neveux, et le mit entre les mains de ce prêtre Spanh.
hypocrite, qui avait procuré le rappel d'Arius; il lui
fit promettre avec serment qu'il ne le remettrait
lxiv. Mort de
qu'à son fils Constance. Il voulut que ses soldats Constantin.
jurassent qu'ils n'entreprendraient rien contre ses
enfants ni contre l'église. Malgré Eusèbe de
Nicomédie, qui toujours déguisé ne l'abandonnait Liban. Basil, t.
pas sans doute dans ces derniers moments, il se 2, p. 113, ed.
Morel.
délivra du scrupule que lui causait l'exil
d'Athanase, et ordonna qu'il fût renvoyé à
Alexandrie. Ce saint prélat incapable de Ath. apol. contr.
ressentiment, et plein de respect pour la mémoire Arian. t. 1, p.
de ce prince, quelque sujet qu'il eût de s'en 203, et ad
monach. hist.
plaindre, voulut bien l'excuser dans la suite, et se Arian. t. i, p.
persuada que Constantin ne l'avait pas proprement 349.
exilé; mais que pour le sauver des mains de ses
ennemis, il l'avait mis comme en dépôt en celles
de son fils aîné qui le chérissait. Quelques auteurs Theod. l. 1, c.
32-34 et l. 2, c.
ont prétendu que Constantin avait été empoisonné 2.
par ses frères, et qu'en étant instruit il avait
recommandé à ses enfants de venger sa mort.
C'est un mensonge inventé par les Ariens, pour Soz. l. 3, c. 2.
justifier, aux dépens de ce prince, leur protecteur
Constance qui fit périr ses oncles. Constantin Acta. Mart. p.
mourut le 22 mai, jour de la Pentecôte, à midi, 667.

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Ted Hughes, Nature and Culture 1st ed.

Edition Neil Roberts

Ted Hughes, Nature

ISBN 978-3-319-97573-3 ISBN 978-3-319-97574-0 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950414

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Part I Hughes and Environments

1 Ted Hughes’s ‘Greening’ and the Environmental

2 The Nuptial Flight: Ted Hughes and the Mayfly 21

3 Ted Hughes’s Paradise 39

4 Why Look at Animals? 53

5 Coetzee’s Hughesian Animals 69

6 The Nature of Ted Hughes’s Similes 87

7 The Nature of Englishness: The Hybrid Poetics of

8 Imagination Alters Everything: Ted Hughes and Place 125

Part II Hughes’s Cultural Connections

9 ‘Our Chaucer’: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the

10 ‘The Remains of Something’: Ted Hughes and

11 Ted Hughes’s Apocalyptic Origins 177

12 Spectral Ophelia: Reading Manuscript Cancellations

13 The Influence of Ted Hughes: The Case of Alice Oswald 215

14 Hughes and Urbanity 231

Laura Blomvall researches lyric theory at the University of York, with

John Goodby currently holds a personal chair at Swansea University.

James Robinson currently teaches in the Department of English

Abbreviations Actually Used

‘Every new child is nature’s chance to correct culture’s error’, Hughes

Conversely, ‘nature’ itself is a concept that is profoundly culturally deter-

O’Connor writes: ‘if we can see something “natural” (though anthro-

referring to a landscape that comprises both a mythical or spiritual hin-

major, but under-valued, collection Cave Birds, by also taking in Plath’s

4. Wendy Wheeler, Expecting the Earth: Life, Culture, Biosemiotics (London:

Hughes and Environments

Ted Hughes’s ‘Greening’

At the end of his first year at Mexborough Grammar School, Ted

© The Author(s) 2018 3

upon the much over-simplified and misrepresented arguments on either side

Our school syllabus of course is the outcome of three hundred years of

education, Hughes suggests that this mode of ‘the scientific attitude’ is

The environmental humanities […] envision ecological crises fundamen-

Greg Garrard, in his contribution to this Companion, offers, as a defi-

from ‘humanizing ecology’ to ‘ecologizing humanity’. Underlying this

be affected by landscape is the focus of Hughes’s earliest poems about

finds language to celebrate the hawk’s ‘diamond point of will’, although

knowing in being and attending’.27 The Wodwo’s being leads him to go

environmental pollution throughout the sequence.32 Reddick argued

Fine Screening is in his words, “not likely to be measurable epidemio-

From his 1970 review of Nicholson’s The Environmental Revolution,

environmental brochures of industry seem to miss the mark’.51 In ‘If’,

sequences, to the realism of Moortown Dairies and the ‘social ecology’

12. Ted Hughes, ‘Myth and Education’, Children’s Literature in Education 1

35. See Terry Gifford, ‘From Countryside to Environment’, in Kate McLoughlin

58. For an introduction see Sian Sullivan, ‘What’s Ontology Got to Do

The Nuptial Flight: Ted Hughes

On 17 January 1981, Leonard Baskin wrote to Ted Hughes summa-

© The Author(s) 2018 21

Do you know Agrion Splendens? Do you distinguish male from female?

That anxiety about his work’s calibration with the expectations or

4. Wendy Wheeler, Expecting the Earth: Life, Culture, Biosemiotics (London:

12. Ted Hughes, ‘Myth and Education’, Children’s Literature in Education 1

35. See Terry Gifford, ‘From Countryside to Environment’, in Kate McLoughlin

58. For an introduction see Sian Sullivan, ‘What’s Ontology Got to Do