INTERNATIONAL WEEK: 'The Bull Moses': a poetry challenge...

Ted Hughes, one of the most important poets this country has ever produced (see my previous blog entry on his poem 'The Jaguar'), was OBSESSED with Ancient Egypt and the mythology that surrounded it. As you know, Hughes was also fascinated by nature and animals, and the following poem combines these two obsessions. Whilst, on the surface, it is a poem about a BULL, if you read more deeply, you can see it is also exploring the darker underbelly of egyptian mythology.

This is a VERY difficult poem, and you will need to read it LOTS of times before it starts to make sense. What a PERFECT opportunity to use the COMMENTS facility in this blog to discuss the poem between you, and work out what YOU think it is all about...

'The Bull Moses' by Ted Hughes

A hoist up and I could lean over
The upper edge of the high half-door,
My left foot ledged on the hinge, and look in at the byre’s
Blaze of darkness: a sudden shut-eyed look
Backward into the head.

Blackness is depth
Beyond star. But the warm weight of his breathing,
The ammoniac reek of his litter, the hotly-tongued
Mash of his cud, steamed against me.
Then, slowly, as onto the mind’s eye–
The brow like masonry, the deep-keeled neck:
Something come up there onto the brink of the gulf,
Hadn’t heard of the world, too deep in itself to be called to,
Stood in sleep. He would swing his muzzle at a fly
But the square of sky where I hung, shouting, waving,
Was nothing to him; nothing of our light
Fond any reflection in him.

Each dusk the farmer led him
Down to the pond to drink and smell the air,
And he took no pace but the farmer
Led him to take it, as if he knew nothing
Of the ages and continents of his fathers,
Shut, while he wombed, to a dark shed
And steps between his door and the duckpond;
The weight of the sun and the moon and the world hammered
To a ring of brass through his nostrils.

He would raise
His streaming muzzle and look out over the meadows,
But the grasses whispered nothing awake, the fetch
Of the distance drew nothing to momentum
In the locked black of his powers. He came strolling gently back,
Paused neither toward the pig-pens on his right,
Nor toward the cow-byres on his left: something
Deliberate in his leisure, some beheld the future
Founding in his quiet.

I kept the door wide,
Closed it after him and pushed the bolt.