Which is your favourite Ted Hughes poem & why is it your favourite Ted Hughes poem?

Answer 1

How To Paint A Water Lily

To Paint a Water Lily

A green level of lily leaves
Roofs the pond's chamber and paves

The flies' furious arena: study
These, the two minds of this lady.

First observe the air's dragonfly
That eats meat, that bullets by

Or stands in space to take aim;
Others as dangerous comb the hum

Under the trees. There are battle-shouts
And death-cries everywhere hereabouts

But inaudible, so the eyes praise
To see the colours of these flies

Rainbow their arcs, spark, or settle
Cooling like beads of molten metal

Through the spectrum. Think what worse
is the pond-bed's matter of course;

Prehistoric bedragoned times
Crawl that darkness with Latin names,

Have evolved no improvements there,
Jaws for heads, the set stare,

Ignorant of age as of hour—
Now paint the long-necked lily-flower

Which, deep in both worlds, can be still
As a painting, trembling hardly at all

Though the dragonfly alight,
Whatever horror nudge her root.

Ted Hughes

I love this because I love dragonflies, and there aren't enough poems about them. He has a good Owl poem too.

Sylvia Plath was nuts, manic depressive and killed herself--why should that make her a great poet or Hughes a *******?

Answer 2

'examination at the womb door' from 'crow'. when i was a teenager i preferred hughes to larkin because hughes' work is just so much more vivid and exciting. but as i got older i found myself turning more and more to larkin. larkin's work stands study better than hughes' does. hughes makes more of a first impression, but often the full weight of the poem comes through the very first time - larkin's poems act more like depth-charges. but 'examination at the womb door' strikes me as a poem which is both immediately shocking and unfathomable. i was blown away by the piece the first time i heard it read, but even today i can read it again and find something in it i never noticed before. a poem which makes a strong first impression is excellent. a poem which is still making a strong first impression thirty years after you first met it, is really something.

Answer 3

Ted Hughes needs to go the same way Sylvia Plath did...He has made no good poems imo. I know the rest of the world seems to disagree **shudders**

Answer 4

No favorite. I just can't get past what a mean person he was.