The 1970 publication of British poet Ted Hughes' (August 17, 1930 – October 28, 1998) Crow released an almost unprecedented and unfathomable work upon the world. Dark, sinister at times, nihilistic, and full of subtle bereavement. Poems that introduced a crow as a metaphor for our torn complex selves and an often-absurd universe.

Crow's Theology

Crow realized God loved him-
Otherwise, he would have dropped dead.
So that was proved.
Crow reclined, marveling, on his heart-beat.

And he realized that God spoke Crow -
Just existing was His revelation.

But what
Loved the stones and spoke stone?
They seemed to exist too.
And what spoke that strange silence
After his clamour of caws faded?

And what loved the shot-pellets
That dribbled from those strung-up mummifying crows?
What spoke the silence of lead?

Crow realized there were two Gods -
One of them much bigger than the other
Loving his enemies
And having all the weapons.

A crow settles itself on "Physical Energy" a statue in Kensington Gardens by British artist George Frederic Watts. Learn more.

The Crow, appearing in many but not all of the poems in this collection, served as a symbol, a character, and a wild force; simplistic about life, yet observant of its irony and pain. Hughes wrote most of the poems in the empty space and time following the suicide of his estranged wife, Sylvia Plath, in 1963. Estranged, I should mention, due to Hughes' infidelity, and marital violence (revealed in 2017 with the publication of Plath's private letters to her psychiatrist.) According to Plath, she miscarried the couple's second child in 1961 after being beaten by Hughes.

A relationship that began from a mutual adoration of each other's poetry, ended in destruction and death.  Hughes' Crow, poems, could be read as an attempt to reconcile the pain and glory of the marriage and the poet. The overwhelming tone is annihilation, however, hardly hopeful. Themes like the futility of life abound. We will be claimed by death; nevertheless, we're given a stay of execution, precarious at best.

Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth? Death
Who owns all of space? Death
Who is stronger than hope? Death
Who is stronger than the will? Death
Stronger than love? Death
Stronger than life? Death
But who is stronger than death? Death
Me, evidently.
Pass, Crow.
From "Examination at the Womb-door"

The idea of our fate (which is, of course, death) being sealed from the moment we exit the womb is chilling. Others (like Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov) have pointed out that the coda of our birth is death, but they don't drop the words quite as harshly.

Perhaps because Hughes, born and raised in Yorkshire, uses a Yorkshire vernacular that lacks embellishment (also seen in his first published collection of poems The Hawk in the Rain.)

"Crow" by Talya Baldwin, a Yorkshire artist and illustrator of birds and other characters.

Throughout the work, there is a force outside of Crow, outside of Hughes. Something bigger, unknowable, yet present and extremely powerful. This unknowable divine, a theme given attention by German poet Hermann Hesse in his less-known poetry.

Hughes became the Poet Laureate of Great Britain from 1984 until his death and is widely regarded as one of the most important poets of the 20th century.   This Crow entry feels like an appropriate place to scatter a few thoughts on poetry.  
 
Like T. S. Eliot who wrote "Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an abandonment". And Wislawa Szymborska whose poem "In Fact Every Poem" begins: "In fact every poem might be called "Moment." And finally, Stephen Fry who said "I believe poetry is a primal impulse within us all."  
 
Poetry mingles like a vapor, entering our breath. I don't understand it, surely, yet I feel it. It is the step aside of emotions (such that it allows my own); it is a moment; it is an impulse deeper than purpose.  
 
I felt like that with Hughes' work (or viewing Francis Bacon's art). When I posted Rupi Kaur's poems on the Site I got comments that it wasn't poetry. Perhaps not. But it makes me think, for hours. Some primal thing twitched in its vapor.

Crow Frowns

Is he his own strength?
What is its signature?
Or is he a key, cold-feeling
to the fingers of prayer?

He is a prayer-wheel, his heart hums.
His eating is the wind - Its patient power of appear.
His footprints assail infinity
With signatures: We are here, we are here.
He is the long waiting for something.
To use him for some everything.
Having so carefully made him.
Of nothing.

I came by this particular collection by way of the equally alluring work Grief Is a Thing With Feathers, a prose/poem by the imaginative English writer Max Porter about a crow that moves in with a family following the death of their mother and wife. Like Hughes, Porter uses a crow as a metaphor for post-grief emptiness and the savagery of life.

"Crow Resting on Wood Trunk" by prolific, wildly-talented Japanese illustrator of the 19th century, Kawanabe Kyōsai. Learn more.

Accompany Hughes' work, including his elegy to mentor T. S. Eliot, or his earliest Hawk poems, with the philosophical questions of Albert Camus or the poetry of W. B. Yeats both of which illuminate the contradictions in the universe that tormented Hughes. There is room for all attitudes towards Hughes in this universe - love, hate, trepidation, anger, indifference.  It is this author's opinion that poetry is born of our darkest parts, that it gives voice to the inarticulate and in a way, presents an attempt at a soul making sense of itself.  This collection of Hughes, as complex a human as any, is exquisitely that, nothing more.