A Summary and Analysis of ‘Wind’ by Ted Hughes

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Wind’ is, after ‘The Thought-Fox’, probably the most famous and most successful poem in Ted Hughes’ debut collection of poetry, The Hawk in the Rain (1957). In the poem, Hughes describes the experience of a powerful gale which blasts through the landscape, affecting everything from the birds flying through the air to the very foundations of the earth itself.

Before we offer an analysis of the poem’s language and themes, here’s a stanza-by-stanza summary of ‘Wind’.

Summary

The speaker of the poem begins by describing how the house in which he is sheltering from the wind. The wind is so powerful, it’s as if the house is floating on some tempestuous sea, with the wind bursting through the night, resounding off the surrounding hills, and hammering on the fields outside.

This storm, which involved rain as well as wind, went on until daybreak. As the sun came up, it looked almost as if the hills had been moved about the landscape by the wind, and were now in different locations. The wind appeared to have a sharp light like a blade or the edge of some precious gemstone. But the wind also appeared to be a sentient, living thing: like a madman whose eye glints with insanity.

In the third stanza, the speaker moves forward to midday, when he went outside to survey the damage the wind had done. He only made it as far as the shed housing the coal supplies before the wind appeared to ‘dent’ his eyeballs as the hills around him, like a tent straining against the rope tying it to the ground, appeared to threaten to come loose from the earth.

The fields themselves were shaking, the horizon resembling a grim frown, as if the entire skyline might snap shut and disappear. The wind was so powerful, it ‘flung’ a magpie away with ease, and appeared to bend a gull in two.

The house made a noise like a goblet being struck: a goblet which might be shattered at any moment. Now, he tells us, he and the other occupants of the house sit in front of the fire and try to be brave as the storm continues to assail the house. However, the wind preys on their mind, and they cannot think or occupy their minds by reading a book: the storm is too distracting. They cannot even find solace in one another.

Instead, they sit and watch the fire burning in the fireplace, feeling the house appear to come loose at its foundations as they sit there and watch the window shaking, as if it is scared too and longs to come inside the room and shelter with them. They can hear the very stones of the surrounding area cry out beneath the skyline.

Analysis

T. S. Eliot once said of Charles Baudelaire that the French poet depicted the ‘sordid elements of the great metropolis’ realistically or ‘as they are’, but that he also had a fondness for ‘elevating’ these details ‘to the first intensity’. In other words, Baudelaire presented the city as it is in reality, but intensified certain aspects of city life, for additional effect.

The same might be said of much of Ted Hughes’ poetry, which at once depicts the natural world in a down-to-earth and wholly truthful and realistic manner, yet at the same time imbues nature with a powerful intensity which exaggerates certain features of the natural world, raising them almost to the level of a divine force.

We see this in the early poem ‘Wind’, where the very windows of the house in which the speaker sits appear to want to come inside to escape the wind’s ravages. The gull flying through the storm is ‘like an iron bar’ – sturdy and tough – and yet it, too, is ‘bent’ out of shape, seemingly, by the force of the wind. Likening the wind to the waves of a stormy sea in the poem’s opening line has much the same effect.

Indeed, we might liken this technique to Expressionism, a movement which Hughes may have encountered via one of his literary heroes, D. H. Lawrence (himself a prolific nature poet). Expressionist art distorts reality in order to make it expressive of the artist’s own thought, emotion, or mood; and although Hughes is unsentimentally describing the effect of the wind on the house and the surrounding landscape, he is also choosing imagery – that bent gull, for instance – which intensifies the force and power of this natural phenomenon, emphasising its power to threaten the natural world, as well as man’s own foundations (literally, in the case of the house).

The word ‘wind’ recurs in this short poem: it appears four times, or five if we include the title, but seven times if we include its ghostly presence within the repeated ‘window’. Hughes’ language is incessant, as is his syntax: aside from the second stanza, every other stanza flows directly into the next, so that we are carried forward headlong by ‘Wind’ just as the wind itself continues on unabated.

Form

‘Wind’ is written in quatrains which are unrhymed, although we should be wary of labelling this poem ‘free verse’. Why? Because, as in many of Ted Hughes’ poems, ‘Wind’ is not entirely without some semblance of structure. But because he favours pararhyme and consonance over full rhyme, the poem appears more formless than it actually is. (This is perhaps something else he learned from D. H. Lawrence, who called for ‘apparent formlessness’ in literary works.)

So, for instance, in the second stanza ‘sky’ and ‘eye’ are full rhymes, but ‘wielded’ and ‘emerald’ are half-rhyme or consonance; in the third stanza, ‘as’ and ‘eyes’ are brought together by consonance, just as ‘up’ and ‘guyrope’ are linked by their final plosive sounds.

This allows Hughes to adopt a looser, freer style than if he were employing traditional rhyme, and to conceal the artfulness behind these lines which are, after all, describing an unpredictable natural phenomenon.