Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Ted Hughes

An announcement this morning Ted Hughes is to have a memorial in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, as he is one of my favourite poets I'm not surprised, which poem illustrates him best? Pike or Hawk perhaps ..
It is only 12 years since his death but Ted Hughes is to be recognised as one of Britain's greatest artists as a memorial is erected to him in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner.
The memorial for Hughes, who was Poet Laureate from 1984 until he died from cancer in 1998, will lie in the south transept, alongside monuments for William Shakespeare, Geoffrey Chaucer, William Blake and T S Eliot. He is the first poet to be so commemorated since Sir John Betjeman's memorial was erected in 1984.
The decision to place memorials in the Abbey rests with the Dean of Westminster, Very Reverend Dr John Hall, who said not every Poet Laureate was granted the honour.
"Deciding within a few years of people's deaths that they will be remembered in hundreds of years' time is of course impossible. And yet, it is sometimes right to make such a decision, as deans have done over the centuries. By no means every Poet Laureate has been commemorated in Poets' Corner. But the overwhelming weight of advice I have received suggests that this is the right decision," he said.......
In the dark violin of the valley
All night a music
Like a needle sewing body
And soul together, and sewing soul
And sky together and sky and earth
Together and sewing the river to the sea.

In the dark skull of the valley
A lancing, fathoming music
Searching the bones, engraving
On the draughty limits of ghost
In an entanglement of stars.

In the dark belly of the valley
A coming and going music
Cutting the bed-rock deeper

To earth-nerve, a scalpel of music

The valley dark rapt
Hunched over its river, the night attentive
Bowed over its valley, the river

Crying a violin in a grave
All the dead singing in the river

The river throbbing, the river the aorta

And the hills unconscious with listening.
Taken from Three Books -Remains of Elmet, Cave Birds, River by Ted Hughes

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