Work and play

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Work And Play

The swallow and the serpent

In this poem, Hughes sets out to contrast two animals, one real and the other metaphorical. Even a look at the shape of the poem on the page will give you a hint of this. The lines on the swallow are set against the margin and tend to be quite long, while the lines on the serpent are inset and are generally shorter.

The two creatures are laden with metaphors to explain their condition or the nature of their activity, but the basic premise on which the poem works is that, even though the swallow toils (line1), she is a thing of beauty, life and energy. On the other hand, the serpent crawls in the dust of the earth suffering all sorts of discomfort in the name of leisure.

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Hughes intends to show us that people are ridiculous. They imagine that a seaside visit is delightful, as you can see in the words play and idle (line 8), but the actuality is quite ghastly. The contrasting swallow is glittering voltage (line) in the air. Voltage relates to electricity, of course, so Hughes suggests that the swallow is a vital force in her natural environment.

Lets look at the lines against the margin describing the swallow. Each group describes an aspect of her activity. Each activity is expressed in a metaphor.

A dark blue knot of glittering voltage A whiplash swimmerA fish of the air

They give the impression of high energy and swift, natural movement. Two of the metaphors place the bird in water, but this implies that the swallow is at home in the air, as a fish is in water. The water image also implies a certain coolness despite the heat of summer.

The serpent metaphors in stanza 1 are far less pleasant

Crawls through the dustshimmering exhaustSearching to slake/Its fever will bust

These metaphors all have to do with heat and fever, all culminating in bust (burst with overheating).

Note that Stanza 1 is only the initial part of the journey. The leisure time at the coast is in its earliest stage and will develop as the poem progresses.

In Stanza , the swallow is

the barbed harpoon

an image which emphasises her speed and power. When she is hot she is able to escape from the heat (fling from the furnace) and find comfort in water. The beautiful creature

Dips her glow in the pond and is perfect

By contrast, in this stanza, the arriving serpent has neither elegance nor power. It simply collapsed on the beach. It also lacks beauty, as the cars rather revoltingly throw up their owners when it Disgorges its organs. Once on the beach the people Nude as tomatoes with sand in their creases are only able to cringe in the face of the natural world of breaking waves and seagulls. Like the swallow, the serpent has a fiery colour, but its the colour of sunburn. The serpent is in a state of exhaustion and discomfort.

By the way, I am sure you havent missed Hughess humour in this poem. He is laughing at what people are willing to undergo in the name of leisure or having a holiday.

The swallow continues her work tirelessly in Stanza . She is

the seamstress of summer

Aspects of her work are detailed

She scissorsshe sewsShe draws... she knots

Her activity is described in terms of human work. Ironically, for her this is natural activity.

Interestingly, the serpent is not mentioned in this paragraph. It was originally the line of cars that brought people to the beach. Now Hughes talks about the holiday people explicitly and reduces them to a series of painful images. They are now on the beach laid out like wounded, in a hospital perhaps, or after a battle.

As they lie in the sun burning their skin, Hughes describes them as food cooking in the oven. Flat as in ovens / Roasting and basting. The effect of ultra violet radiation on their skin, tanning is made to seem ridiculous and ugly.

space burns them blue

While this is very amusing (and true), it is nevertheless very painful.

The holiday makers are not even tuning into the natural landscape. Instead

Their heads are transistors

tuning into radio stations and other sources of noise. The natural landscape, in the form of sand, just makes them uncomfortable and they seem impervious to the bites of flies. With all this and their children crying all the time, Hughes must be asking, Is this really a holiday?

Notice that the shape of the final stanza is reversed so that the swallow begins and ends the poem. This way Hughes will make his point effectively. The scene on the beach is reversed and the serpent retraces its journey. Look at the discomfort even now

headache it homewardA car full of squabblessobbing and stickinesssand in their cranniesInhaling petroleum

Perhaps we should be aware that, throughout the poem, the discomfort of children has been kept in view, and the journey home concentrates largely on this. Is Hughes saying that holidays and children ironically do not go together?

The final images of the swallow are much more positive. She is a boomerang returning naturally home to her starting point. There is no sense of effort in this return. Rather it is a joy involving cartwheeling and touching the honey-slow river (again the swallow is associated with water). This cool and unhurried, effortless journey is in strong contrast with that of the people of the serpent who are trapped in their cars.

The swallow boomerang returns to

the hand stretched from under the eaves -

The hand seems to be the impulse of nature that sends the bird to work in the first place and then brings it naturally home. I think we must take the final words of the poem as indicating the last contrast. The swallow is a

...rejoicing shadow

This is evening and the bird is consequently less clear visually. But look at the burnt and unhappy people of the serpent and contrast them with this cool, shadowy creature, the swallow.

The Warm And The Cold

When you read this poem you will definitely see that it is rather naive, and that quite young children could read and understand it. Ted Hughes wrote a number of poems for children, based on his rural experience and the animals he uses in adult poems.

Read this poem through once or twice. I dont think youre going to need much tuition for this poem, as it really speaks for itself. But there are some things we need to notice about the way Hughes has written it.

· The first four lines of the three long stanzas deal with dusk and the falling of night.

· The inset sections tell you about all the natural creatures who are safe in their habitats. Each creatures comfort is described with a suitable simile.

· The last section, lines 7-4, notifies us that night and the frost have come. Humans (farmers) are asleep in bed.

· Notice that the frost and the cold winter night are natural phenomena that the animals deal with according to their kind.

Moonlight freezes the shaggy worldLike a mammoth of ice-The past and the futureAre the jaws of a steel vice.

Hughes has taken some interesting liberties with language in these four lines. The moonlight is said to freeze the world, when in fact it only illuminates it. The idea is that moonlight is a cold light.

The word shaggy is applied to the world when strictly speaking it should be applies to the mammoth in the next line. Mammoths have been found frozen in ice, perfectly preserved for thousands of years, and the implication here is that the world is about to go into a sort of suspended animation for the night.

Things like mammoths freezing have happened and will continue to happen, and so the past and the future have a strong grip on our existence, like the jaws of a vice.

Now lets go to the last few lines. The words frost, flimsy moon and star are clean, cold, bright images, that contrast with the last three lines

· In contrast with the animals in natural habitats, the farmers are sweating unhealthily in bed.

· Whereas the animals are compared in similes with comfortable, suitable things, the farmers are like oxen on spits. Thats unnaturally hot and hideously uncomfortable, isnt it?

As you know by now, Hughes uses animals in poems to show something about humans. In this poem Hughes is making the simple point that nature adapts very simply and naturally to the earths climate, but humans dont seem to know how to do so at all.

Tractor

Introduction

Before you start on the discussion of this poem, you could read it though a few times so that you get used to the language and find out what Hughes is writing about here.

The poem describes a farmer trying to start up his frozen tractor one morning. It is a long battle with the machine, but in the end he manages to start it. This simple account shows that what actually happens in the poem is not our main point of interest. What makes this point interesting is the language which Hughes uses to describe the battle. This poem is so rich that we cant go through everything in it. The best we can do is select some areas for close attention.

The tractor has been standing all night in the snow and is now in the midst of an icy gale. It could not be more frozen.

From the very beginning, Hughes treats the tractor as if it is some kind of creature. He speaks of its agony and of the snow in its open entrails. The gale on the other hand is an immensely powerful, head-pincering adversary. It is so cold that its effects are like heat and Hughes talks of molten ice and smoking snow, using a poetic effect known as oxymoron, by which contradictory terms are used in conjunction, usually to create intensity.

TwoThe tractor wont start. The speakers hands and feet are frozen, and he feels hatred for the machine. Birds are flying about searching for shelter while the tractor sinks further and further into the snow.

The tractor, a machine, defies flesh as if it had a will of its own. The weakness of the farmers flesh itself is emphasised. His hands are like wounds and the toe nails feel as though just torn off. Life goes on beyond the struggle as the starlings blow smokily about, victims of the wind, but the tractor sinks into a hell of ice. Remember that we normally associate hell with heat, so here we have another oxymoron.

The starting lever cracks, like a snapping knuckle, suggesting both the sound and the pain that this action involves. The battery is alive but it cannot affect the tractor to which it belongs, just as a live lamb cant affect its dead mother. This is a particularly effective rural image, suggesting again the animate nature of the tractor and the hopelessness of the task. The speaker hammers home the impression of fierce cold with the heavy alliteration of buttocks-bone, bites There is no difference now between the absolute cold of outer space and the cold of earth.

The speaker pours de-icer into the engine. This has a throat and is capable of coughing and ridiculing the speaker. The tractor seems to be fighting against the farmer now, and his annoyance makes him see it as a trap of iron stupidity. The effort required to turn the engine over is emphasised by the repetition of hammering and hammer which gives an impression of the monotonous sounds that the process requires. There is a sudden change of tone as the engine bursts into happy life.

With its engine on, the tractor is described in terms of power and energy. It is like a demon and is full of superhuman well-being. Now it is full of heat and jerky movement and it is shouting with enthusiasm for work.

The tractor is alive but worse iron is waiting. Some of this is real iron like the power lift but some of the iron is metaphorical - cast-iron cow-shit. The tractor, one piece of iron, imposes its will on the other kinds. Hughes speaks of the other irons condemned obedience to the cruelty of the tractor, as if it really were a demon.

The poem ends with reminders of the discomfort of the farmers fingers and eyes as he works, but the tractor could not be happier

And the tractor, streaming with sweat,

Raging and trembling and rejoicing.

Hughes has given human qualities (anthropomorphised) the tractor here.

Wind

The subject is a wind of such huge proportions and power that the speaker is afraid that the house and its surroundings could be uprooted and perhaps destroyed. The wind is one of the phenomena of nature against which both humanity and nature seem entirely helpless.

The first line encapsulates for us the primary meaning of the metaphor

This house has been far out at sea all night... .

The house is a ship crashing through the sea in the windstorm. Everything seems unstable. The speaker starts with the house and then includes the surroundings, which are vehicles for the noise of the wind. Lines - make that clear to us

The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,Winds stampeding the fields under the window...

Note how Hughes creates the impression of the winds power in words like crashing, booming and stampeding. The whole picture is one of tremendous size, noise and movement as the ship is swept along, floundering.

In the light of day it seems almost as if the natural surroundings have been reconstituted. Here Hughes undermines our conviction that our environment is solid and immovable. We rely on our natural surroundings being permanent, but the morning after, as line 6 tells us,

The hills had new places...

We are shaken at the idea of a home and its surroundings rendered impermanent in this way.

The wind creates visual effects, too. Lines 7-8, with the concentrated use of alliteration and simile, convey the mad and frightening light created by the wind

...and wind wieldedBlade-light, luminous black and emerald,Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

The personification of the wind as the wielder of a blade (a knife) results in both a dangerous and a crazy impression. Black and emerald, the colours of the mad eye flexing, are indicative of the winds eerie and frightening effects as it moves clouds erratically around the sky.

Read these lines (7-8) aloud to hear the effects created by the alliteration. The w sound emphasises the deliberate movements of the knife blade, while the l and b sounds force us to read slowly and with emphasis

Stanza is characterised by descriptions of the winds force. Moving outside takes effort and a short walk to the coal-house is like scaling a mountain. The word Brunt is not normally used as an adjective but a noun denoting the main force of an action. Here it conveys the concentrated power of the wind. The statement that the wind dented the balls of his eyes gives a vivid physical impression of its power. In line 1, Hughes suggests that the whole landscape is under threat.

The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope...

The metaphor of the tent billowing and straining like a canvas held only by a rope gives the hills an unstable aspect, and the effect is extended into the next stanza with the image of the fields quivering and the skyline apparently crushed up into a grimace. These normally permanent features of the landscape seem perilously close to disappearing.

Hughes takes our attention from the hills and fields back to the house, using the birds in lines 15 -16 to regain our focus. We keep the winds power in view by seeing the magpie flung...away, and then by watching

... a black-Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly...

The heavy alliteration in these lines compels a slow and careful reading so that we are aware of the slowness of the action as the gull struggles for control of its flight.

The house seems as fragile as the landscape but it is much more rigid than the natural objects. Instead of flapping or bending, the house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the noteThat any second would shatter it.

It seems about to be shattered because, like the crystal of the goblet, it is finely tuned. The stasis that grips the humans inside the house is full of internal stresses and strains. People are unable to concentrate on anything other than the wind and

cannot entertain book, thought Or each other.

All movement on the part of the humans is frozen, but the senses still function as they take comfort in shelter and warmth. The wind still reaches them via vibrations, and the rattling of the windows. They see the window tremble to come in and they hear the stones cry out. These last two images seem to imply that the windows and the stones are desperate to get out of the wind as well

Hughes uses a great deal of figurative language in order to create the many facets of the winds power. The main metaphors concern solid things whose movements we find alarming a ship in a storm, a tent in a gale and the roots of trees. Their main task is to convey the alarming power of the wind.

The similes are equally striking. For instance, the flexing of the lens of a mad eye as a way of describing sudden changes in light; the idea that a flesh and blood bird might put up so much resistance to the wind that its bending is like that of an iron bar and the thought that a solid house could be as fragile as a green goblet.

There is frequent use of alliteration as a way of linking ideas together and as a way of controlling the emphasis of our reading.

At times the wind is personified as a human wielding a knife or flinging a bird.

This poem is primarily an attempt to capture on the page the power of the wind. This is no easy task and Hughes expends considerable poetic resources in trying to find ways to describe the wind and its effects. It reflects the power of nature but the landscape is as much threatened as the human beings who are contained in it.

Hawk Roosting

The voice is that of the Hawk himself, and through him, Nature. The voice is a thinking voice; there is no action in the poem. As Hughes has intimated to us that the Hawk is a metaphor for Nature, we can also take it that Nature is thinking these thoughts.

We need to note that Nature with a capital letter means a force or a being, rather than just the things you get in the countryside.

Throughout the poem the Hawk sits at the top of a tall tree, where he either sleeps or ponders on his power. He is self-obsessed, as all his thoughts relate to his own circumstances and the fact that he holds the power of death in his talons.

With that in mind, we can read each stanza to see what aspect of his own power (and of course the power of Nature through him) he is thinking about.

We have seen previously that Hughes tends to use the language and expression of ordinary speech, but in this poem he does something slightly different. In order to suit the character of the Hawk, Hughes has used rather more sophisticated or elegant expressions. If the Hawk represents Nature with all that power, then he is a kingly creature, the height of Creation. He expresses himself carefully and in rather a formal way.

For instance, in the first stanza the Hawk boasts that he is not bothered by the falsifying dream of ordinary creatures. When awake and in sleep he likes to rehearse perfect kills. These expressions are formal in character and imply a high degree of control on the Hawks part. We see other examples of this kind of language and attitude throughout the poem.

In the second stanza, the Hawk sees the height of trees, the airs buoyancy and the suns heat as things arranged especially for his convenience. In fact he sees the whole of the earth as his own.

And the earths face upward for my inspection.

This personification of the earth shows the Hawk in control over it, like a king or governor. In this line the Hawk is presenting himself as the representative of Nature. It is Nature that controls the earth.

As we approach the central section of the poem, we hear the voice of Nature more and more clearly. While the Hawk speaks of his own feathers and feet, it must be Nature who says

Now I hold Creation in my footOr fly up, and revolve it all slowly -I kill where I please because it is all mine.

The Hawk can do these things to a certain extent, but the arrogance and pride, as well as the performance of these feats, must be those of Nature.

In Stanza 4, the Hawk speaks of his own straight flight through the bones of the living as though he would be intact and alive at the end of it. However, Hughes himself once pointed out that this is not possible, because the Hawk, like every other creature in nature (note the small n) has to fight against the enemies that are placed in his way. He will also die one day, so it is Nature who has the power to allot death, not the Hawk.

We would call that an example of irony, as the Hawk is deceived as to his own power.

Hughes stated on one occasion that the last three lines of the poem are Nature speaking. It is Nature who makes the decisions as to whether things will remain the same, not the Hawk.

The tone is hard and brutal. The Hawk says in line 16

My manners are tearing off heads

The expression is unadorned, while the lines are made up of statements that are brief, terse and always to the point. The hard tone is derived partly from the fact that the Hawk (and therefore Nature) speaks logically and with a certain intellectual pride.

The Hawk speaks emphatically and is confident that we will find him as fascinating as he does himself

It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each featherNow I hold Creation in my foot

The alliteration in these lines is there to hold them together but it is also produced by the fact that the Hawk is so arrogant and sure of itself that once it uses a word, that is the right one. You cannot imagine the Hawk searching for synonyms.

Hughess portrait of the Hawk is an attempt to convey the power and arrogance of such creatures. He finds this power in what could be described as their singleness of purpose.

Ordinary mortals are distracted from their tasks by all sorts of hopes, fears and opinions. The Hawk is free from such falsifying dreams and because he considers no one but himself, he acts exactly as he likes.

There is no sophistry in my body

he says, meaning that he is what he is and nothing else. His flight has only one path because whatever decision he makes must be the right one.

The poem makes the statement that Nature has power over the earth and also has the power to allot death. Nature will survive, unlike creatures like the hawk, ensuring that her domain will remain unchanged.Please note that this sample paper on work and play is for your review only. In order to eliminate any of the plagiarism issues, it is highly recommended that you do not use it for you own writing purposes. In case you experience difficulties with writing a well structured and accurately composed paper on work and play, we are here to assist you. Your cheap custom college paper on work and play will be written from scratch, so you do not have to worry about its originality.

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