Pike by Ted Hughes: Critical Analysis
Pike by Ted Hughes is a poem
in which the persona's observation of the natural world provokes the
realization of how human beings have been wrongly imposing their own angle of
vision and interpretation to the world of animals, where nothing of human
perspective and understanding can apply.
The persona begins with an objective
description of the fish: ‘Pike, three inches long, perfect/ Pike in all parts,
green...Killer from the egg’. The description is, however punctuated with
thoughtfulness. The title focuses immediate attention on the creature’s under
scrutiny and on the natural world, which informs most of Ted Hughes's work. The
poem can be divided into three parts and three changing perspectives.
The first part, (stanza 1 and 2), sets
the scene, describes the voracious, ruthless nature of this fish and
establishes its green water world. In these stanzas, Hughes maintains an
objective narrative perspective in which the fish and its environment occupy
the center of attention. The next part (stanzas 3-7), begins a consideration of
the attention of the predatory nature of the pike and describes it as it moves
thought a green gold shadow habitat. Hughes vividly describes the fish’s 'jaws'
hooked clamp and fangs and makes the reader also almost terrified as he
describes the pike’s ruthless nature as it lurks silently waiting in the weed
for its prey.
The last part (stanza 8-11) brings the
narrator into direct contact with this coldly grim predator. The last stanza of
‘Pike’ concludes with an image of the silent fish slowly surfacing to consider
the fisherman who has dared to disturb it’s a nighttime lair with his puny
fly-casting. It is clear from Hughes’s choice of detail that this world, both
pond and bank, belongs to the pike and that the narrator violates the fish’s
domain at his peril. Finally, Hughes leaves the reader with the impression that
the fisherman, not like pike, is the real intruder perhaps even the only source
of true violence in the natural world. By doing so, the poet invites the reader
to examine his or her attitudes about the natural world, about whom or what has
the ‘right’ to behave in a particular way. It is the narrator, not the pike,
who feels fear; the pike, on the other hand, rises to the surface prepared to
stare down this intruder.
Ted Hughes has used the natural world
as habitations where the human species are only one of the thousands of
inhabitants and are in many ways not as powerful as they would like to believe.
Hughes’s poetry dwells on the innate violence in the natural world and on
instinctive predatory behavior; yet he sees to view it as appropriate. He
attempts to reconcile what at first appears to be a horrible violence in
nature. Perhaps human beings are no different from a creature such as the pike,
driven by impulse and appetite in a universe that follows no moral law but eat
or be eaten. Hughes clearly views the pike as a creature that belongs in its
water world, an animal that exemplifies survival of the fittest. The fish is a
part of the natural world in which it feeds. The pike shares the colors of the
water, the weeds, the pond bottom, and the shadows; it is in harmony with and a
necessary part of the world, but it is a type of creature that many will view
as unwholesome because of its very drive to survive. Hughes clearly believes
that the pike belongs where it is and has a ‘right’ to behave as it does, no
matter the violence, for it follows a naturally preordained path, instincts
that drive it even when the fish is only a three inch fry: pike are ‘killers
from the egg’. Those who find the fish’s appetite and killer instinct
unsettling do not see the world as Hughes does; to them, killing to survive is
repugnant. Hughes, on the other hand, expresses subtle admiration for the one
pike out of three that remained alive in his aquarium prison, having outlived….
and later …. its kin.
If anything, it is the narrator who is
out of place in this natural world. He has not only removed the pikes from
their natural habitat and imprisoned them in a glass cage but also invaded
their sanctuary. Gradually the narrator is overcome by fear; the violence that
the pike directs at their prey seems to be turned toward him as the fish rises
slowly to the surface of the bottomless pond to regard him, who foolishly
thinks he will catch the natural killer. Hughes skillfully juxtaposes the
natural with the human world, pairing the images of the fish with those of an
artificial world that imprisons the creature for the cruel or whimsical
purposes of the human that has captured it. Because Hughes contrasts what he
regards as naturally appropriate, such as the pike’s very existence, the pet is
able to call into question the behavior of the people who capture the fish in
the first place. The conversational tone of ‘pike’ heightens the tension and
impact of the poem’s violence.
The poet also makes the poem a kind of
parable from which he derives inspiration; by understanding the natural scheme
of things, he comes to be enlightened about the way he can live in harmony with
the rest of the natural world, without any fear and without any arrogance of
being superior to the fellow creatures. He also develops his meditation on the
animal world so as to let his imagination bear him away to the ancient world of
the pre- Christian past of his country in the primeval era when the spirits of
nature (now deeply hidden) confronted a man in his daily life. Fearsome
anticipation of what destructive visions form England’s past may visit him
seems the focus of ‘Pike’. The pond where the fisherman persona fishes is ‘as
deep as England’, and its legendary depths might produce cultural dreams from
the past as dark and malevolent as the viselike jaws of a pike. Hughes finds a
malevolent heritage ready to seize his poetic line with visions, ‘immense, and
old’. The poem ends essentially in an epiphany, and the reader is supposed to
understand that vision – that the pike, representing the animal world, will be
first and last itself, whatever the human hunter would think of it.
The conventional tone of ‘pike’ serves
as an effective device for Hughes to heighten the tension and impact of the
poem’s violence. Hughes choice of language is simple: with few polysyllabic
words; his phrases are stark, almost bare –without the frills that people seem
to need in order to escape from the brutal realities of living. Such simplicity
allows Hughes to make ‘Pike’ a highly visual poem. His descriptions evoke sharp
images for the reader in which the fish becomes tangible. One can see the
water, see the weeds, and sense the presence of the pikes as it blends in,
waiting to lunge at its unsuspecting quarry. The descriptions are rhythmic,
lulling the reader and allowing the final stanzas to take on additional
sinister imports.
M.H
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