Mayday on Holderness by Ted Hughes
Mayday on Holderness by Ted Hughes

Mayday on Holderness

Ted Hughes * Track #8 On Selected Poems of Ted Hughes

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Mayday on Holderness by Ted Hughes

Performed by
Ted Hughes
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This poem was first published in 1960 In Hughes’s collection entitled Lupercal, in which observations of nature are precisely and imaginatively drawn. They are also unsentimental and realistic. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Nature red in tooth and claw”, the phrase from his extended poem In Memoriam unde...

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Mayday on Holderness Annotated

This evening, motherly summer moves in the pond.
I look down into the decomposition of leaves –
The furnace door whirling with larva:

From Hull’s sunset smudge
Humber is melting eastward, my south skyline:
A loaded single vein, it drains
The effort of the inert North – Sheffield’s ores,
Bog pools, dregs of toadstools, tributary
Graves, dunghills, kitchens, hospitals.
The unkillable North Sea swallows it all.
Insects, drunken, drop out of the air.

Birth-soils,
The sea-salts, scoured me, cortex and intestine,
To receive these remains.
As the incinerator, as the sun,
As the spider, I had a whole world in my hands.
Flowerlike, I loved nothing.
Dead and unborn are in God comfortable.
What a length of gut is growing and breathing –
This mute eater, biting through the mind’s
Nursery floor, with eel and hyena and vulture,
With creepy-crawly and the root,
With the sea-worm. entering its birthright.

The stars make pietas. The owl announces its sanity.

The crow sleeps glutted and the stoat begins.
There are eye-guarded eggs in these hedgerows,
Hot haynests under the roots-in burrows.
Couples at their pursuits are laughing in the lanes.

The North Sea lies soundless. Beneath it
Smoulder the wars: to heart-beats, bomb, bayonet.
“Mother, Mother!” cries the pierced helmet.
Cordite oozings of Gallipoli,

Curded to beastings, broached my palate,
The expressionless gaze of the leopard,
The coils of the sleeping anaconda,
The nightlong frenzy of shrews.

Mayday on Holderness Q&A

Who wrote Mayday on Holderness's ?

Mayday on Holderness was written by Ted Hughes.

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