Crow Sickened by Ted Hughes

Question 1

Context

Answer 1

• One of the sequence of poems that were published as Crow (1970)
• It was his most controversial work: a stylistic experiment which abandoned many of the attractive features of his earlier work, and an ideological challenge to both christianity and humanism.

Question 2

Form and Structure

Answer 2

• narrative poem, one of 67 that tell Crow’s tale.
• pyrrhic metre has an effect of brutality/ bluntness/ aggression.
• crow’s despair is a violent one.
• run-on lines and one line statement-stanzas add to the enigmatic, symbolist form of the poem.
• this is hughes moving from the moralist tradition of wordsworth and coleridge to a more modernist standpoint.

Question 3

Language techniques

Answer 3

Tones

• the majority of the crow sequence is shocking in tone.
• they are darkly funny but nihilistic in the extreme.

Imagery of violence and force: “vomit”/ “blow”/ “ambush”
-Crow is sickened because he cannot find the answers to the mystery of life, and in this poem, death.
“He decided to get death”- only succeeds in hurting himself.
-Central metaphor is of a black figure searching for truth but only succeeding in finding more and more questions.
-a search for light which only keeps him in the dark.
-that’s why crow is sickened, his life’s journey is meaningless.