Wind

“Wind” appears in Ted Hughes's first poetry collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957). The poem describes a violent storm that attacks the speaker’s house and landscape, showcasing Hughes's keen focus on the awe-inspiring and terrific power of nature. In sharp contrast to the sentimentality and flowery descriptions that characterized the traditional poetry of Hughes’s contemporaries, “Wind” employs precise, spare, and savage language to fully evoke its topic.

Juxtaposed with the natural storm is a quieter but no less endangered human storm, within which the speaker and his partner have ended an ongoing argument in a strained stalemate. They unsuccessfully attempt to overcome their terror at the chaos outside to take comfort and safety in the shelter of their house. Hughes wrote and published “Wind” during his marriage to troubled American poet Sylvia Plath; she committed suicide after Hughes left her for a woman with whom he was having an affair. The couple’s literary partnership was as prolific as it was creatively fruitful, but their personal discord grew legendary, haunting Hughes for the remainder of his life.

Poet Biography

Ted Hughes was born Edward J. Hughes on August 17, 1930, to a rural family in the farming community Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, England where he lived for the first six years of his life. At seven, his family moved to Mexborough in South Yorkshire—an area notable for its moorlands. The natural world, and human relationship to it, informs and appears throughout his poetry.

Upon his high school graduation in 1949, Hughes became a ground wireless mechanic with the Royal Air Force. During this quiet period, he passed the time reading and memorizing Shakespeare and Yeats. When his two years of national service ended, Hughes accepted an academic scholarship at the University of Cambridge’s Pembroke College (1951-54), which he attended as an anthropology and archaeology major with a focus in mythology and related narratives. He wrote some poetry during these years and continued to read, committing many works to memory. Hughes worked a series of jobs after graduation, including gardening and zoo work, both of which gave him the opportunities to closely observe the natural world.

In 1956, Hughes co-founded the St. Botolph’s Review literary magazine, named for the patron saint of travelers and wayfarers. At the journal’s February launch party, he was introduced to American poet Sylvia Plath who was studying at Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship. The couple married on June 19, 1956, and alternately resided in the United Kingdom and the United States during their brief union. The couple each wrote and published a number of poems in these years; Plath typed Hughes’s first book manuscript, The Hawk in the Rain (1957)—a volume that, once published, received critical acclaim.

Though the couple gave birth to two children—Freida in 1960 and Nicholas in 1962—the marriage was unhappy. Hughes left Plath in 1962 for his mistress Assia Wevill, and in 1963, Plath committed suicide—a death for which Hughes was blamed for by the public throughout his lifetime. This blame was solidified after Wevill—who he never married despite having a child together in 1965—committed suicide in 1969. Hughes married Carol Orchard in 1970; the couple remained together until Hughes’s death from cancer on October 28, 1998, at 68.

After Plath’s death, Hughes turned from his own writing for three years to focus instead on editing and publishing her work. In 1982, The Collected Poems was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize; Hughes edited the volume. In time, he published more than 15 volumes of poetry (two of them posthumously), nine volumes of translation, and numerous other works. His work garnered numerous awards in each of the four decades during which he actively wrote and published. In 1984, he was appointed England’s Poet Laureate—a position he held throughout the remainder of his life.

Poem Text

Hughes, Ted. “Wind.” 1957. allpoetry.com.

Summary

“Wind” is comprised of six, four-lined stanzas. In the first stanza, the speaker describes a violent storm that has taken place during the night—one which has made the house feel like a boat far out in the ocean away from land. The wind, thunder, and torrential rain were so severe it affected the entire landscape from the trees to the hills to the fields.

The second stanza brings the morning and the end to the rain with the rising of the sun. The speaker notices in the orange light of dawn the way in which the land has seemed to change—the hills themselves somehow altered. This promising beginning of calm does not last. The wind picks back up, threatening like a knife, flashing ominous shades of green and black and strange movements.

The wind continues in the third stanza, when at noon the speaker makes his way against the side of the house to the shed where coal is kept for the fire that warms the house. It is so forcefully blowing at this point that when the speaker looks up to see the hills at the mercy of the wind’s strength, flimsy as tents tethered only by ropes, his eyeballs are “dented” (Line 11). By the fourth stanza, the speaker describes the tent-hills as so mercilessly buffered that any moment they could become detached from the earth. Two birds are also damaged by the wind: A magpie is “flung away” (Line 15) and a larger gull is “bent like an iron bar” (Line 15). The house itself, to which the speaker returns in Stanza Five, seems as if it might shatter like a glass as a result of the ringing vibrations of a high-pitched musical note.

By the middle of the fifth stanza, the speaker is inside the home with their partner. They sit in front of the fire that has been made with the coal earlier retrieved. The couple is agitated and cannot be distracted nor comforted by pastimes or each other’s companionship. The sixth and final stanza shows the couple continuing to watch the fire in silence as the foundation of the house shakes, the window rattles in its pane, and the rocks outside “cry out” (Line 24).