Nature, Environment and Poetry

Ecocriticism and the poetics of Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes

Susanna Lidström

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317682844
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

The environmental challenges facing humanity in the twenty-first century are not only acute and grave, they are also unprecedented in kind, complexity and scope. Nonetheless, or therefore, the political response to problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss and widespread pollution continues to fall short. To address these challenges it seems clear that we need new ways of thinking about the relationship between humans and nature, local and global, and past, present and future. One place to look for such new ideas is in poetry, designed to contain multiple levels of meaning at once, challenge the imagination, and evoke responses that are based on something more than scientific consensus and rationale.

This ecocritical book traces the environmental sensibilities of two Anglophone poets; Nobel Prize-winner Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), and British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes (1930-1998). Drawing on recent and multifarious developments in ecocritical theory, it examines how Hughes's and Heaney's respective poetics interact with late twentieth century developments in environmental thought, focusing in particular on ideas about ecology and environment in relation to religion, time, technology, colonialism, semiotics, and globalisation.

This book is aimed at students of literature and environment, the relationship between poetry and environmental humanities, and the poetry of Ted Hughes or Seamus Heaney

1 Ecotrickster

Environment and nature religion in Crow ¹

DOI: 10.4324/9781315773919-2

In 1967, three years before Crow was published, Lynn White’s now classical article ‘The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis’ appeared in the journal Science. White argued that modern technology and science ‘are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecological crisis can be expected from them alone’. According to White, Christianity promotes a view of humans as essentially different from the rest of nature, with the right to dominion over the earth and its inhabitants and with the ability, ultimately, to transcend nature. As a result of those views, he suggests, Christianity supports an unsustainable attitude towards the environment. Without addressing this underlying ideology, White concludes that any improvement of the nature–human relationship is difficult, or even impossible: ‘Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious’ (1967: 1207).

White describes Christianity as ‘the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen’, and argues that the shift from paganism to Christianity signifies ‘the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture’ (1967: 1205). Christian ideology removed spirituality from the natural world and relocated it to an otherworldly realm, a different sphere from our empirical lives. This separation of the empirical from the spiritual realm made it possible to explore and exploit natural resources without taking into account sacred or spiritual entities present in the environment.

In Dark Green Religion, Bron Taylor notes that White’s article appeared ‘at an auspicious cultural moment’ of growing receptivity to alternative, non-Western worldviews:

This period was characterized by growing receptivity to the religious beliefs and practices of indigenous and Asian peoples at the same time that many were rejecting mainstream Western religions. Fused with intensifying environmental alarm, this religion-related ferment provided fertile cultural ground for a robust debate about the relationships between people, religion, and nature.

(2010: 8)

Hughes was aware of this development, and contributed to the debate. In 1980, he described Christianity as ‘just another provisional myth’:

There are now quite a few writers about who do not seem to belong spiritually to the Christian civilisation at all. In their world Christianity is just another provisional myth of man’s relationship with the creator and the world of spirit. Their world is a continuation or a re-emergence of the pre-Christian world … it is the little pagan religions and cults, the primitive religions from which of course Christianity itself grew.

(‘Ted Hughes and Crow: An Interview with Ekbert Faas’, in Faas, 1980: 205)

One of these writers was Hughes himself, and this chapter argues that especially his collection Crow, published in 1970, is an aesthetic expression of the kind of critique and reconsideration of the relationship between religion and environmental attitudes that was formulated theoretically by White. The story of Crow revolves, just like White’s argument does, around the relationship between Christianity and science and technology and the implications of that relationship for our view of and relationship with the natural environment. While White formulates a theoretical argument, the Crow poems enact a similar critique, not outlining but rather staging a different religious mythology.

This chapter reads White’s thesis, which sparked lively debate and was challenged by a number of philosophers, historians and theologians (see e.g. Barbour, 1973 and Shaiko, 1987), in tandem with Crow, not in order to underline White’s argument, but to historicise Crow and place it within a contemporary development of a contested relationship between Western culture and environmental degradation.

Crow the trickster

Crow critiques Christianity and other Western worldviews through a trickster narrative. Through deliberate mischief and accidental misunderstandings, the protagonist Crow reveals the separation of the physical world from a spiritual realm as absurd. The second main character in this story, the Christian God, desperately tries to civilise Crow and teach him about the world from a Christian point of view, but is instead repeatedly exposed as illogical, helpless and incapable. By revealing religious-based arrogance towards the natural world and its consequences, the poems counteract the Christian assumption of human superiority and divine protection. Instead, Crow suggests an alternative view of humans as ultimately exposed to indifferent and much more powerful forces of nature, promoting an attitude of humility rather than stewardship towards the global ecosystem.

In a foundational study of trickster stories from 1956, Paul Radin defines the trickster narrative as one of the oldest, most widely distributed and least changed of all myths:

The Trickster myth is found in clearly recognizable form among the simplest aboriginal tribes and among the complex. We encounter it among the ancient Greeks, the Chinese, the Japanese and in the Semitic world. Many of the Trickster’s traits were perpetuated in the figure of the mediaeval jester, and have survived right up to the present day in the Punch-and-Judy plays and in the clown. Although repeatedly combined with other myths and frequently drastically reorganized and reinterpreted, its basic plot seems always to have succeeded in reasserting itself.

(1956: p. ix)

Radin’s characterisation of the American Indian trickster in particular is also an exact description of Crow:

[he is] at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself. He wills nothing consciously. At all times he is constrained to behave as he does from impulses over which he has no control. He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being.

(1956: p. xi)

Several critics have noted the trickster character of Crow. The most thorough analysis of the Crow story as a trickster narrative is made by Jarold Ramsey in ‘Crow, or the Trickster Transformed’ (1983), where Ramsey recognises Crow as a figure that draws on related characters from traditional folklore from all over the world, including African, Norse, Native American, Greek, Islamic and Hebraic mythologies. Ramsey notes that the story of Crow ‘follows very faithfully the typical incidents in a cycle of Trickster-narratives’, including ‘the wild escapades in series, causes leading to improbable effects that snowball in magnitude, maniacal pursuits, villainous transformations, the periodic Bang! that utterly destroys the protagonist, who then appears in the next scene intact, the wholesale inconsistencies between narratives – all this is standard fare in the Trickster story’ (1983: 173, 176).

In an ecocritical analysis of the trickster narrative, John Gamber suggests that Native American tricksters ‘begin with the understanding that other-than-human elements comprise controlling forces over which they have, and more importantly should have, little power’. According to Gamber, the trickster ‘not only uses stories to con the people, but is himself a story’ – a story that ‘operates to liberate’ by countering ‘multiple levels of confinement, internment, imprisonment, bondage, and limitation’, ultimately recreating the world: ‘The trickster, though mischievous, is imagined to be innocent; his aim is to recreate the world, to imagine it otherwise’ (Gamber, 2009). In Crow, the liberating story is threefold: from a Christian worldview, from an exaggerated and unreflexive belief in scientific and technological progress, and from an estranged relationship with the natural world as a spiritual place.

While tricksters are anthropomorphised figures that to some extent are more similar to humans than the animals they appear as, they also draw on the individual mythologies of their specific species. Considering the different genealogies of common trickster animals, especially the fox that plays a central role both in Hughes’s collections preceding Crow (especially in the poem and background story of ‘The Thought-Fox’, recounted in Hughes, 1994) and in North American mythology (as a coyote), why did Hughes want the trickster in this collection to be a crow?

In an interdisciplinary study of crows, Boria Sax states that ‘No image of an animal is simpler, more iconic, and more unmistakable’than that of the crow. Part of the reason for this, he suggests, is its reputed intelligence:

Nature writer David Quammen has [suggested] that the natural intelligence of crows is far in excess of what is demanded for survival in their biological niche. The result is that they are continually bored and make up games to amuse themselves.

(2003: 8, 19)

This impression of excess creativity plays a significant role as a prerequisite for much of the mischief that Crow gets up to in the poems. Another possible reason why Hughes chose a crow is their black colour, in the sense that it associates them with dark and mysterious powers, and with blackness as a counter image to the symbol of light in Christian mythology. The colour black plays a central role in Hughes’s story. In ‘Crow Blacker Than Ever’ (Hughes, 2003: 244) Crow flies ‘the black flag of himself’, while in ‘Two Legends’ (Hughes, 2003: 217), the very first Crow poem, black is the origin of Crow:

Black was the heart

Black the liver, black the lungs

Unable to suck in light

Black the blood in its loud tunnel

Black the bowels packed in furnace

Black too the muscles

Striving to pull out into the light

Black the nerves, black the brain

With its tombed visions

Black also the soul

The anaphora of the word black in this poem emphasises its symbolic resonances, and the equivocation between that symbolism and an internal darkness creates a sense of a blackness that stretches from the relatively tangible reality of Crow’s insides to a subjective or fantasy realm suggested by the reference to a ‘black rainbow’.

Another of Crow’s typical trickster characteristics is his appetite: Sax notes that especially in its crow or raven form, the Native American trickster is ‘notorious for his voracious appetite’. The indiscriminate appetite of the trickster is illustrated by this Hopi story, summarised by Sax:

a crow once invited his friend the hawk to dinner. Though the fastidious raptor would eat only freshly killed meat, the crow served him a greasy bullsnake that had already begun to decay. The hawk politely pretended to eat and even complimented the crow on his culinary art, while secretly plotting revenge. Soon afterwards, the hawk invited the crow to dinner, and he served a putrid dish concocted from the skin and entrails of rabbits. Instead of turning away in disgust, the crow avidly devoured the meal, leaving the hawk more infuriated than ever.

(2003: 92, 98–9)

This story is so reminiscent of Hughes’s Crow that it could be one of the poems in his story. Many of the Crow poems similarly revolve around Crow’s sometimes just instinctive, sometimes compulsive appetite.

Crow also exhib...