Ted Hughes poetry

View Of A Pig

The pig lay on a barrow dead.

It weighed, they said, as much as three men.

Its eyes closed, pink white eyelashes.

Its trotters stuck straight out.

Such weight and thick pink bulk

Set in death seemed not just dead.

It was less than lifeless, further off.

It was like a sack of wheat.

I thumped it without feeling remorse.

One feels guilty insulting the dead,

Walking on graves. But this pig

Did not seem able to accuse.

It was too dead. Just so much

A poundage of lard and pork.

Its last dignity had entirely gone.

It was not a figure of fun.

Too dead now to pity.

To remember its life, din, stronghold

Of earthly pleasure as it had been,

Seemed a false effort, and off the point.

Too deadly factual. Its weight

Oppressed me—how could it be moved?

And the trouble of cutting it up!

The gash in its throat was shocking, but not pathetic.

Once I ran at a fair in the noise

To catch a greased piglet

That was faster and nimbler than a cat,

Its squeal was the rending of metal.

Pigs must have hot blood, they feel like ovens.

Their bite is worse than a horse’s—

They chop a half-moon clean out.

They eat cinders, dead cats.

Distinctions and admirations such

As this one was long finished with.

I stared at it a long time. They were going to scald it,

Scald it and scour it like a doorstep.

The drowned woman

Millionly-whored, without womb,

Her heart already rubbish,

Watching the garret death come,

This thirty year old miss

Walked in park pastoral

With bird and bee but no man

Where children were catching armsful

Of the untouched sun.

With plastic handbag, with mink fur,

A face sleep-haggard and sleep-puffed

Fresh-floured and daubed “whore,”

This puppet was stuffed

With rags of beds and strangers’

Cast-offs, one cracked cup, a cough

That smoked and malingered.

But put a coin in her slot

This worn public lady

Would fountain a monologue,

Would statuesque and goddess a body,

Ladder Jacob a leg.

She plucked men’s eyes from happy homes;

Hands grew in the empty dark

And hung like jewellery on her limbs,

Yet she came to this park

Not for the sun’s forgetful look

Nor children running here and there;

On the mud bed of the lake

She found her comforter.