A Summary and Analysis of Ted Hughes’ ‘Pike’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Pike’ is one of the best-known poems by the English poet Ted Hughes (1930-98). Published in his second collection, Lupercal, in 1960, the poem describes the fish known as the pike, which is depicted as deadly and dangerous: a force of nature which obeys its own rules. Like many of Hughes’ poems, ‘Pike’ focuses on the brutality of the natural world.

Let’s take a closer look at this remarkable poem. Before we offer an analysis of its language and themes, here’s a stanza-by-stanza summary of the poem, which gives an idea of how the poem’s ‘argument’ develops.

Summary

Hughes begins by describing the type of fish known as a pike. It is three inches long, perfect in every regard, with its green and gold stripes being like the stripes on a tiger’s fur. Pikes have evolved to be ‘killers’: as soon as they hatch from the egg, they seem to ‘grin’ with a malevolence born of many years. And yet their movement is light as they swim through the water, like a fly flitting along the water’s surface.

The fish seem to surprise even themselves with their grand and elegant way of moving through the green water, with their silhouettes under the water a picture of both ‘delicacy’ and ‘horror’. Although they’re only a few inches long in reality, in their heads they feel a hundred feet long, like giant fish.

In the third and fourth stanzas, Hughes’ speaker describes the ‘gloom’ of the pike as they remain still in various places among the water. They have hooked jaws and ‘fangs’ which have evolved to make the fish efficient killers, and evolution is unlikely to alter that in the future.

From the fifth stanza onwards, the speaker of the poem turns to his own experiences of pike. He once kept three pike in a fish tank, feeding them ‘fry’ (hatchlings of young fish). But two of the fish ended up killing each other. The speaker reflects that nobody is safe from a pike: one of the dead fish retained that ‘iron’ look in its eye even when it had died.

From the eighth to the final stanza of ‘Pike’, Hughes’ speaker describes a pond in which he used to fish. This bond, dug by monks who once owned the land there (their monastery has long since been destroyed), was ‘as deep as England’, he tells us. The pike there were ‘immense’ (he uses this word twice to emphasise their colossal size), so the speaker was afraid to fish there at night, fearful of what ‘eye’ he might see moving through the water.

Yet he still did so. As he was fishing at night, he was aware of a dreamlike (nightmarish?) ‘darkness’ under the darkness of night: the dark movement of the pike under the water, moving towards him and watching him.

Analysis

‘Pike’ can be categorised as a nature poem, but we should be wary of reducing Ted Hughes’ poetry to this restrictive label. Although he does often take his inspiration and subject-matter from the natural world, he does what T. S. Eliot congratulated Charles Baudelaire for doing with the landscape of the modern city: namely, elevating it ‘to the first intensity’.

The language of ‘Pike’ is so matter-of-fact and down-to-earth that the poem’s artistry is barely noticeable: the smooth shift from a kind of natural-history crib sheet on the qualities and appearance of pike (their length, their colours, their markings and other properties) to a more personal recollection about the speaker’s encounter with them.

And note here, too, how we shift from the relative safety of the domestic sphere – the three pike which the poem’s speaker took home and kept in a tank – to the more unnerving world of the pike’s own natural habitat. It is cold and dark when the speaker goes fishing for the pike, thus intensifying the feeling of trepidation the predatory fish inspire in him. (Was he still a small boy when he went fishing for them? Ted Hughes had been keen on fishing from a young age.)

Then there are the numerous repetitions within the same line of verse, drawing attention to specific details: the pike in the pond are ‘too immense to stir, so immense and old’; the speaker waits for ‘what might move, for what eye might move’; the ‘Darkness’ of the fish moving through the pond is ‘beneath night’s darkness’, part of it and yet, at the same time, distinguishable from it.

The same goes for the oxymoronic details which draw attention to the strange, almost alien power of these fish: the fact that they make ‘still splashes’ on the pond, for instance (can a splash occur without movement?). ‘Still’, indeed, had already been put to surprising use (as a verb) in the line describing the fish in the pond as having ‘Stilled legendary depth’.

Overall, there is a sense that these pike, with their ‘aged grin’ and ‘watching’ eyes, have outlasted the monasteries and the religious changes that have overtaken England (presumably the ruins of the monastery near the pond was one of the countless buildings destroyed during the dissolution under Henry VIII), and will outlast many other historical events and transitions too.

And that pond containing the pike is like a microcosm of England itself: England as a place of nature, a country inhabited by the pike and the tench and the lilies as well as the people who build monasteries and fish in its ponds. That pond is ‘as deep as England’ not just in a physical sense but, we suspect, in a spiritual or metaphorical sense too: the world of the pike contains meaningful depths.

Form

‘Pike’ is written in quatrains, without a rhyme scheme or a regular metre. There is also a fair amount of enjambment (run-on lines, where the syntax of one line flows into the next line), not only between lines but also between stanzas: stanzas three into four, five into six, and so on. All of this adds to the rather conversational, relaxed style of delivery which is appropriate for a poem which wishes to view the pike both as they are and (in a larger sense) what they represent in the world of nature.