By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Six Young Men’ is one of the most successful poems in Ted Hughes’ first collection, The Hawk in the Rain (1957). It might be variously categorised as a war poem, an ekphrastic poem (of which more in a moment), and a historical poem, since Hughes wrote the poem in the mid-1950s when the First World War was already nearly four decades in the past.
Living memory for some – such as Hughes’ father William, who fought at Gallipoli and was one of only seventeen men from his regiment to return from the war, and who narrowly avoided being killed when a bullet hit the paybook in his breast pocket – but not for Ted Hughes himself, who was born in 1930, twelve years after the war ended.
Summary
The poem presents a description of an old photograph showing six young men shortly before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Although the forty years that have elapsed since the photograph was taken have wrinkled the photo itself, the faces and hands of the young men still seem smooth and youthful. Six months after the photograph was taken, the speaker of the poem tells us, all six of the men pictured were dead.
The natural world has not changed in all that time. The valley looks and sounds exactly as it did back when the photo was taken and those men were still alive. But they have been dead for four decades, killed in action or their exact fates unknown (presumably because they were reported missing in action: ‘nobody’, the speaker tells us, knows what happened to several of the men, except that they were all ‘killed’).
The photograph, the speaker tells us, is the ‘one place’ keeping the men alive, still dressed in their smart Sunday clothes. Indeed, nobody whom we can meet and greet in our daily lives is ‘more alive’ than the men in the photograph. At the same time, these men are as dead as prehistoric beasts who perished a long time ago. They are at once as alive as anything now living and as dead as anything dead.
Such a contradictory thought, the speaker concludes, can make one go mad when considering it. It’s enough almost to take us outside of our own bodies, as we contemplate our own mortality and the fates of the young men who were cut down in their prime.
Analysis
‘Six Young Men’ is one of several poems about the First World War which Hughes included in his debut collection The Hawk in the Rain (the other most notable poem on this subject was ‘Bayonet Charge’). War would continue to be an important subject for Hughes throughout his career, right up to his late poem ‘Platform One’ in 1996.
Hughes was born in 1930. He was born too late to see the Great War himself, and was just a few years too young to serve in the next world war. But he grew up in Yorkshire surrounded by war stories which he heard from relatives, friends, and neighbours: it’s even been claimed, contrary to Hughes’ own later account, that his own father used to tell him and his siblings tales from the war as bedtime stories.
This is the only way the younger Hughes can access the Great War, which was already being mythologised as part of national history when he was growing up in the 1930s and 1940s: through memories, stories, historical accounts, and historical artefacts, like this photograph.
Poems and other works of literature which are about visual art – whether sculptures, paintings, or photography – are examples of ekphrasis. So ‘Six Young Men’ is an ekphrastic poem whereby the human cost of the war is accessed via a photographic depiction of men who lost their lives early on in the conflict.
Contradictory
The final stanza of ‘Six Young Men’ posits a curious paradox: when viewed in this photograph, which has captured them in their prime of youth shortly before they were violently killed, the six young men are as alive as anyone still living and breathing.
The photograph keeps them so, since it is a strong visual reminder that the war cost the lives of real men; it brings home the human sacrifice the men made (and ‘sacrifice’ willingly offered, if unintended: as these men all died within a few months of the outbreak of war, they were volunteers who enlisted, rather than conscripts who were compelled by law to sign up, as became the case in the UK from January 1916).
But if the photograph brings home the vitality and youth of the men at the moment it was taken, its context also reminds us of the horrific and sudden deaths they suffered shortly afterwards, so they are as dead as everything else no longer living. It’s a curious paradox, almost requiring a feat of cognitive dissonance on behalf of the observer.
Note also how the language of photography bleeds into the poem itself: ‘shot’ (referring to the manner of death endured by one of the men, but summoning the ‘shot’ of the photo); ‘flash’ (the flash of a bomb, but also the flash of the photograph); and ‘exposure’ (curiously, also the name of a Wilfred Owen poem about war).
Form
Ted Hughes was fond of using pararhyme (also known as slant rhyme or half-rhyme) in his poetry, rather than full rhyme or free verse. In many of his poems, we can detect the subtle interplay between consonant and vowel sounds, and in ‘Six Young Men’ we find ‘friends’ chiming with ‘hands’, ‘pride’ half-locking with ‘dead’, and ‘fashionable’, ‘smile’, and ‘bashful’ forming a kind of triplet. These are all just in the first stanza of the poem; more examples can be found in the subsequent stanzas.
Such pararhyme – as in Wilfred Owen’s poetry about the First World War – rejects the neatness of full rhyme, which might be deemed too ‘pat’ for a subject like mass industrial warfare which led to the deaths of so many men. It’s also worth remembering that, unlike our present moment, the 1950s was still a time when the Great War was truly in living memory for so many people, including Hughes’ father and uncle.
Another ekphrastic poem about a photograph showing men on the eve of the outbreak of the First World War, written just a few years after Hughes wrote ‘Six Young Men’, could be put into a productive dialogue with Hughes’ own poem. But the author of the later poem was a very different poet from Hughes: Philip Larkin.
Larkin’s ‘MCMXIV’ is, like ‘Six Young Men’, a meditation on the impact of the war by a poet who was not born until the war was over (and who also never served in the Second World War either). Although the two poems share some striking similarities, their conclusions are somewhat different, and it would be worth undertaking a comparative analysis of the two poems side-by-side.