which in the earliest times came to the poet as a god, took possession of him, delivered the poem, then left him’. Yeats’s dabbling in the supernatural, like Hughes’s, though considered by many to be ‘at best a wilful indulgence, at worst a little bit crazy’, was of a piece with his belief in the magical spirit-force of the poetic self and with his attunement to Irish myth, legend and folklore. Yeats thus became the poet of the land and the spirit of place, the culmination of ‘the complex of autochthonous traditions in these islands’, the true Irish bard.21
Eliot, by contrast, was the poet of deracinated modernity. His ‘unique position in the history of poetry’ came from the fact that he was the first to see the ‘desacralized landscape’ of the world after the Great War, the first to give voice to ‘a new terror: the meaningless’. The Waste Land announced a rupture in the history of the world: it shores against our ruin fragments of civilisation in a time broken not only by the mass slaughter of the trenches but also by Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God and Freud’s reinvention of the poetic or second self as the dark unconscious within instead of a quasi-divine Muse descending from above. Eliot’s poetic career, Hughes suggests, followed a path from this new desolation to the redemption of Four Quartets, climaxing in the grace of the Farrar community at Little Gidding, ‘the rose-windowed, many-petalled choreography of the dance before God in an English chapel’.22 He also suggests that one of the key tensions in Eliot was that between the divine love embodied by Christ and the figure of ‘Eros/Dionysus, the androgynous, protean daemon of biological existence and the reproductive cycle’.23 Like many readers of Eliot, he links the imagery of desiccation and sterility in The Waste Land and elsewhere to some crisis of sexual frustration, to a failure of Eros concealed at the core of Eliot’s inner life.
Hughes proposes that the richest revelation of the evolution of the poetic self in its hidden life often comes from a single early poem, ‘either because the interfering ego is weakest then, or because these creative visions are very like conventional serial dreams, in that the first successful representation is likely to be a compact index of everything to follow’. In Eliot’s case, the key was to be found in the early poem ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ (‘Come in under the shadow of this gray rock, / And I will show you something different …’).24 So which early Hughes poem is the ‘compact index of everything to follow’ in his writing career?
Eros is certainly a central feature of his early work. ‘Bawdry Embraced’ goes to it, with a vengeance:
Great farmy whores, breasts bouncy more
Like buttocks, and with buttocks like
Two white sows jammed in a sty door,
Are no dunghills for Bawdry’s cock.25
But this is rollicking, playful stuff, not a hidden revelation of the inner self. Hughes himself clearly thought of ‘The Thought-Fox’ as his signature poem. It was written in 1955, sitting in bed at one o’clock in the morning after an evening in the flat of fellow-poet Thom Gunn.26 But the point of his argument about the key early creative vision is that the ‘interfering ego’ has no say in its significance. So the poet himself is the last person to be in a position to identify the key early work. ‘The Thought-Fox’ is ruled out by the presence of Hughes’s self, both in the poem and in his self-conscious mythologising of the poem when in public readings he linked it to the dream of the burnt fox.
Hughes was not a fox, he was a jaguar. An early manuscript draft of ‘The Jaguar’ survives: this is the poem that is a compact index of everything to follow. He began with a leopard, then crossed the word out. A leopard folding itself to sleep in the sun. No, he crosses it out again. Begin with the other animals: yawning ape, shrieking parrot, coiled boa-constrictor. And then the sleepers awake: excited children gather outside the cage of the pacing jaguar on a ‘short fierce fuse’ with eyes that drill as blood bangs inside its brain.27 Voracious, violent and beautiful, the jaguar has embodied the raw force of nature for a million years. Now it is caged in our so-called ‘civilisation’. Spinning on the ball of his heel, he stalks behind his bars like a prisoner serving a life sentence. This is the fate of the human spirit confined in dreary Fifties Britain. For Hughes, the role of the poet is to break the iron bars, to set free the spirit of the jaguar, to return humankind to its primal relationship with nature.
His later memory was of beginning the poem as he sat in a deep chair wearing his First World War greatcoat in the front room of Liz’s flat in Norwich Street, Cambridge, on a freezing-cold morning in January 1955. He informed his American friend Ben Sonnenberg that the previous autumn he had had a temporary job doing the washing up in the cafeteria of London Zoo in Regent’s Park. A particular jaguar was kept in a ‘transit’ cage near the kitchen window. He watched it going to and fro all day. He was reminded of seeing a jaguar in a very small cage on a family trip to Morecambe Zoo when he was about five and of how he had tried to model it in plasticine, clay and wax. Then he explained that in trying to describe the jaguar’s snarl, he thought of a dog he had once seen trying to bite a fly that had landed on its nose. So in order to suggest the intensity of the jaguar’s rage, he imagined that a fly had gone right up its nose. As he was writing a line to this effect, a bluebottle flew across the room in Norwich Street – which was very odd, given that it was midwinter and icy cold. It went straight up Ted’s nostril. He took it out and pressed it into his precious volume of Shakespeare’s complete works.28
‘That’s the magic of poetry,’ Ted said to Sonnenberg, on telling him the story in London in the early Sixties.29 He saw the incident as a classic example of what C. G. Jung called synchronicity, an idea that fascinated him. Jung and Hughes used the term for those moments of meaningful coincidence when the boundary between different worlds dissolves. A synchronicity is like a dream that offers a glimpse into an alternative reality.
Jung told of a patient who was locked in her own world, trapped in the self-created prison of her own mind. But then in a session of psychoanalysis she narrated a dream in which she was given a golden jewel in the shape of a scarab beetle. As she was recounting the dream, there was a tap on the window of Jung’s consulting room. He opened the casement and in flew a gold-green scarabaeid rose-chafer beetle. He caught it in his hand, gave it to her and said, ‘Here is your scarab.’ Her defences were broken and she became open to treatment, with Jung reporting very satisfactory results.30 For Jung, a synchronicity was a manifestation of an ‘archetypal’ pattern within what he called ‘the collective unconscious’. The individual psyche comes into constellation with a deeper reality that transcends time and place. For Hughes, the same thing happens in the moment of red-hot poetic creativity. Poet and jaguar become as one.
The more mundane reality of the making of a poem is the craft of writing and rewriting. Ted wasn’t satisfied with the ending of ‘The Jaguar’. He continued working on the poem on a visit home to Yorkshire. The original manuscript has an additional stray line about the animal’s eye being ‘blind in fire’. The first published version ends with the jaguar staring out through the bars. Far from being completed in a white heat of inspiration, stimulated by a bluebottle in Liz’s Norwich Street flat, it did not reach its perfected form for a long time.
A new issue of Chequer appeared in Cambridge with the date November 1954. Previously, Hughes had published there under a pseudonym. Now, having graduated, he put his real name to two poems. One of them was ‘The Jaguar’. It was reprinted the following year in a collection of Poetry from Cambridge 1952–4,
