The 1980s were the decade when environmental awareness became more visible in mainstream British politics and society. By the end of the decade, the Conservatives were trying to sound ‘green’, environmental concerns were shaping the choices of individual consumers, and both the Green Party and environmental pressure groups had seen a surge in support. This was also the decade when Britain would appoint a distinctly ‘green’ Poet Laureate. Thatcher had come to power in 1979 with little interest in the environment, describing it as a ‘humdrum’ concern (McCormick 1991 58). But by 1988, she highlighted problems such as population growth, global warming, threats to the ozone layer and acid pollution, speaking of the Tories as ‘friends of the Earth’ (60). The Iron Lady was beginning to sound more like Hughes’s Iron Woman. The demand for environmentally friendly
products also increased in the late 1980s; The Green Consumer Guide became a bestseller,
and one of the ‘green consumers’ to purchase it was Hughes.224 With the rise of green
consumerism came an increase in support for green politics. The Green Party surprised many British people by winning fifteen per cent of the vote at the European Parliament Elections of 1989 – a far higher proportion than before (109). Greenpeace saw its membership soar by 3,100% from 1980 to 1989 (153). There was a strain of ‘radicalization occurring in the environmental movement’, fostered by Thatcher’s initial unwillingness to engage with environmental issues and the sense of urgency that accompanied the 1986 Chernobyl disaster (154). By 1990, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace were also becoming less confrontational in their tactics (158), and brought about ‘substantial changes in public policy’ (165). As we shall see, Hughes was contributing to this radical strain in contemporary environmentalism, in his own quiet way.
Hughes’s environmental activities were becoming more high-profile, more public, and more campaign-oriented. The years 1984 to 1992 saw some of his most sustained campaigning. With his appointment to the Laureateship in late 1984, Hughes found that his poetry had a far wider audience. He was able to harness the recognition that he gained from this wider
readership to sell his protest-poems to major national newspapers, disseminating their green message in the media. Indeed, Terry Gifford has called him ‘Laureate of nature’ (2011 Chapter 6) – but the Laureateship represents a specific current of thought in Hughes’s environmentalism and in his writing. It gave him the gravitas to criticise politicians who did not do enough for the environment, and form alliances with powerful people who could help his cause. His letters to newspapers about environmental issues now bore his name. He befriended Conservative politicians and lobbied those in power with letters. The
environmental poetry that Hughes produced during this time is not always his best ecopoetry. His ‘semi-protest pieces’ do not equal River in poetic quality, but they offer a more factual, hard-hitting environmentalist message than his aestheticised water-song. But with the launch of Arts for Nature in 1988, and the Sacred Earth Drama Trust’s children’s writing
competition in 1990, it was clear that Hughes was renewing his efforts to use the arts for environmental education and awareness. As Gifford’s research has shown, he campaigned determinedly against the pollution of the Torridge Estuary from 1984, and supported his friend Ian Cook’s high-profile 1992 court case against South West Water. With the
publication of his children’s environmental fable The Iron Woman in 1993, he broadcast his concern about water pollution and waste, and articulated his respect for women
224 John Elkington and Julia Hailes, The Green Consumer Guide. London: Gollancz, 1998. Emory MARBL, TX337 .G7 E43 1988 HUGHES.
environmentalists. Although he was rubbing shoulders with Conservatives, he donated royalties from his poems to Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace.
Hughes’s ‘green laureate’ activities are distinctive for their focus on affairs in the British Isles, targeting either specific localities or nationwide problems. Of course, they overlap chronologically with a more global current of thought in Hughes’s environmentalism, which had long been developing and which becomes most clearly visible in the late 1980s and the 1990s (see next chapter). In 1984, Hughes became involved in a prolonged campaign to protect the Torridge at Bideford from sewage pollution. Hughes heard about the Torridge Action Group, six campaigners determined to protect the river’s estuary from sewage pollution, and rang Torridge Action Group member Monica Pennington to offer his help (‘Ted Hughes: Eco Warrior’). They campaigned against the installation of a fine screening plant at Bideford, which would remove ‘solids’ such as hair and cardboard from sewage, but
would leave the sewage itself untreated.225 Levels of dangerous bacteria in the estuary were
high (12-13) – hence the prevalence of ulcers, stomach, throat and chest ailments among Bideford’s residents (13). An area of deoxygenated water, polluted by sewage, also prevented migrating salmon and seatrout from swimming up the Torridge and forced them either to swim up the Taw, or to stay in the sea and be decimated by netsmen (20-23). They were unable to spawn, which damaged the lucrative fishing industry (23). The lifting of a building embargo in the area would only worsen the situation by creating yet more sewage (27-8). By June 1985, Hughes had grown ‘sick’ of the battle over the River Torridge (PC 144). Yet he persevered with the cause, lobbying those who could raise money to pay the Action Group’s legal fees (‘Ted Hughes: Eco Warrior), and delivering a persuasive speech as the main
witness at a public inquiry into Bideford’s sewage problem in September of that year. Hughes begins his speech by stating that although he is a writer, he takes a ‘Scientific interest’ (TS draft of speech for Enquiry 4) in environmental matters. His speech is full of carefully
researched statistics and persuasive readings of scientific documents. Unfortunately, the other side also deployed ‘scientific research’ to obscure the real dangers of the contaminated estuary (‘If’ 33), and the battle for the Torridge would continue in future years. Hughes’s publications continued to reflect his concern. In a 1984 coffee-table book of photographs of British landscapes, Hughes complained that for forty years, water authorities had ‘ravaged’ Britain’s rivers in the name of flood control, turning ‘winding wildernesses’ into ‘sterile aqueducts in which no wildlife can survive’. While other contributors rhapsodised about Britain’s scenic beauty, Hughes bludgeoned his reader with alarming information about otters killed by dieldrin and habitat loss, the inadequacy of the 1981 Wildlife and Country Act, and the political pressure that ‘landowners’ exerted to drain land for their ‘private gain’, thus ‘depriving the public of a priceless landscape’ (‘A Devon River’ 16). This environmental essay reads more like Hughes’s pessimistic letter to Gifford (Gifford 2011 85) than the quietly hopeful tone of River. At this point, riverine landscapes and water pollution proved a key theme of his first Laureate-poem.
Environmentalism and Monarchism
Hughes’s royalism was influenced by his mother (Bentley 100), and he would come to regard Prince Charles and Prince Philip as allies in his environmentalist cause. The previous chapter explored the courtly dimensions of a river-poem, and it is clear that Hughes was considering how his poetry could honour the Royal Family – and examine Britain’s environments – several years before he accepted the Laureateship. In 1982, the Sunday Times asked him to
225 BL Add MS 88918/121/1 4. TS draft of speech given by TH at public Enquiry; archivist’s numbering. The page numbers of further references to documents in this folder are given in parentheses in the body of the text.
write a poem to mark the occasion of Prince William’s birth (LTH 497); a national newspaper was positioning Hughes as a potential successor to Betjeman. Hughes was trying on the Laureate’s mantle in the resulting astrological poem, ‘The Zodiac in the Shape of a Crown’. Hughes’s monarchism was an important facet of his patriotism (1216), but it was partly informed by his rejection of materialistic modernity and contemporary politics, his longing for a timeless alternative to the ‘tabloid scrimmage of ideologies’ (1217). His
environmentalist ideology also provided an alternative to ‘tabloid’ ideologies (but it can hardly be seen as timeless since it was very much a product of its historical moment). His Laureate-poems are not always his best, but they imagine an antidote to warfare, societal division, pollution and species loss. The poems for the Queen Mother ‘project an Eden – not just a childhood land of the animals, but a land of communal protective care’ (LTH 507). Hughes wrote ‘Little Salmon Hymn’ for the Queen Mother because she enjoyed fishing and was patron of the Salmon and Trout Association (CPH 1216). He disliked the ceremony and suit-wearing that accompanied his acceptance of the Queen’s Medal for Poetry (LTH 354- 56), although he found the Queen, Prince Charles and the Queen Mother ‘easy to speak to quite intimately’ (738). His environmentalist collaborations with Prince Philip and Prince Charles are explored later in this chapter.
‘Rain-Charm for the Duchy’
Hughes was appointed Poet Laureate in December 1984. His first Laureate-poem, published
in The Observer on the 23rd of December, commemorates Prince Harry’s christening a few
days before Christmas 1984. Yet Hughes admitted in early 1985 that his poem had originally been intended to add ‘a few pieces of different voice & focus’ to River (PC 142). It was
conceived as a rain-charm for bringing back the salmon226 after a five-month drought.227 The
poem describes the breaking of the drought in 1984, but also draws on memories of the severe drought of 1975 (CPH 1216). The tone of ‘Rain-Charm’ is regional, humorously shamanic, and distinctly environmental. The title marries Christian and pagan symbolism, prompting Heaney to call Hughes’s poem ‘bardic’ (1985 6), The Times to report the
appointment of ‘The Crow Man as Tribal Poet’ (1984 9) and Robert Nye to call Hughes the ‘royal witch-doctor’ (48).
‘Rain-Charm’s’ title suggests that this poem is a piece of slyly heathen, faux-primitive fertility-magic – and that the poet himself is a rain-maker. Rain-making is an important role in many pre-Christian societies, and is often the province of kings (Frazer 101-104). Hughes alludes to his careful reading of Frazer and Jessie Weston, and Eliot’s (perhaps mock-
scholarly) deployment of their work in The Waste Land, especially in ‘What the Thunder Said’. Ritualistic symbolism in the poem is handled with a light touch, but it is present: bracken does a ‘rain-dance’ and the moors are two ‘stone-age hands’ that hold water, ‘Cupped and brimming, lifted, an offering’ (CPH 805). The ‘you’ in the poem climbs into a car, ‘Scattering oxygen like a drenched bush’ (803). Middlebrook finds in the ‘drenched bush’ a reference to Eliot’s reworking of Weston’s fertility myths: ‘Slyly suggestive, it points to an ancient belief in the relationship between the king’s fertility and the nation’s health’ (4).
226 MARBL c. 644, subseries 2.2, b. 78, fol. 6, ‘RAIN CHARM FOR BRINGING BACK THE SALMON’ TS. 227 MARBL c. 644 subseries 2.2 b. 78 fol. 6 ‘AFTER THE FIVE MONTH DROUGHT’ TS
This allusion to human fertility is apt considering that a new prince had just been born, but the fertility of the land and its rivers is more important to Hughes.
West Country rivers such as the Barle, Lyn, Mole, Little Silver and Crooked Oak are named and personified in an epic catalogue. The poem creates a realistic river-map of a large region, beginning at the rivers’ moorland sources and ending at their estuaries. Hughes described these rivers in detail in his 1992 notes to the collection Rain-Charm for the Duchy (CPH 1214), and his river-map in verse is topological ecopoetry. The poem begins with the pools at Cranmere – near the sources of the Okement and Dart. These are now ‘ulcer craters’, but they ‘had been river pools’. The focus shifts to an urban setting, where ‘Thunder gripped and picked up the city’ (803). Environmental issues predominate in the latter half of the poem. The ‘smoke of life’ that seeps into the Taw is more than figurative: it relieves a parched river. The Torridge is a ‘washed cherub, clasping the breasts of light’, the cleansed river becoming a christened child. An undated prose piece expresses Hughes’s disgust at seeing litter in the
Torridge after floods,228 and the clean Torridge that ‘Rain-Charm’ describes must have been
a welcome sight. The Okement begins moving the litter that clogs up its course, ‘nudging her detergent bottles, tugging at her nylon stockings, starting to trundle her Pepsi-Cola cans’ (804). The tectonic power-surge of the line ‘And the Tavy, jarred from her quartz rock-heap, feeling the moor shift’ is followed by a personification of the river in which ‘she’ is ‘Rinsing her stale mouth, tasting tin, copper, ozone’. Alongside a powerful evocation of the forces of nature, Hughes includes a realistic list of the pollutants that human beings have poured into the Tavy. There is a distinctly regional flavour to the poem, which incorporates local dialect: the Tamar has ‘shillets’ (805). Hughes first encountered this word in Tarka the Otter, which taught him that it means ‘Flat stones of the river bed deposited by flood waters’ (Williamson
187); he later heard it used by the Devon farming community.229 Hughes ends the poem with
very precise descriptions of estuaries: the Torridge and Taw meet the sea at Crow Point and Bideford Bar, the Dart debouches at One Gun Point, the Ness ends its journey at Teignmouth and the Tamar flows into the Hamoaze. The rain-charm ends with the salmon, which have been waiting to swim up the rivers to spawn, beginning their journey upriver:
The salmon, deep in the thunder, lit
And again lit, with glimpses of quenchings, Twisting their glints in the suspense,
Biting at the stir, beginning to move. (CPH 805)
Hughes’s 1992 note to the poem explains that salmon will wait for a rise in river levels before attempting to swim up to their spawning grounds, and demonstrates that salmon catches in West Country rivers have declined since the eighteenth century. Because salmon are ‘such sensitive glands in the vast, dishevelled body of nature’ (1215), they are attuned to changes in the weather – but also to changes in water quality, which Hughes does not discuss in his notes to the poem. Sewage in Bideford Estuary was a particularly significant problem for returning salmon. Hughes’s protest poems tackle environmental issues, but his ecological Laureate- poems have a particularly significant societal role, as they are written for a monarch and are designed to be read by an entire nation. Originally published in a national newspaper, and the
228 BL Add MS 88918/6/12 undated MS notes 15-22. My numbering. 229 Letter from Carol Hughes to Yvonne Reddick, 28. 01. 2013.
only Laureate-poem to make it into his New Selected Poems, ‘Rain-Charm’ was a high- profile way for Hughes to demonstrate his concern about Britain’s river environments. The other Laureate-poems contain powerful plant and animal symbolism. Yet it is striking that Hughes’s critics – and Hughes himself – regarded this Laureate-poem about salmon as his best.
There is an old tradition of deriding the Laureate (Roberts 2006 152-54), and in January 1985 Hughes wrote Sagar a humorous rhyme saying that he paid no more attention to his critics than to ‘the horrible same old effluvia going down the River Don’ (PC 141). Water pollution was clearly a significant concern for Hughes in the year that he presented evidence at the inquiry into Bideford’s sewage problem. Although some of his Laureate-poetry might have been mocked, Hughes’s ‘Rain-Charm’ did have a very practical effect. One of the ‘perks’ of being Laureate was that his lines about pollution in the Okement caused ‘great agitation in Okehampton’, and he hoped that they ‘might even affect the Council’s laissez faire’. Hughes had cut some lines describing the Torridge as a ‘leper in her pit’ because of the ‘doctored and scabby farms from Welcombe to Hatherleigh to Torrington’, since they seemed in ‘poor taste’ (PC 142), but his later protest-poems would expose such unpleasant details. Poetry seldom makes anything happen, but a poet of Hughes’s status does not need to use rain- charm magic to make people listen. What is even more extraordinary is that Hughes donated the payment he received for the poem to Greenpeace (‘Ted Hughes: Eco Warrior’). He used his earnings from his first Laureate-poem to benefit a radical green pressure group: a daring act that contrasts with the conservative, conservationist tone of some of his writing about fishing.
Hughes revisits the 1984 drought in ‘1984 on ‘The Tarka Trail’’, a poem that was first published in the Three Books version of River in 1993. Moreover, one section of it, ‘Nymet’, was first published in a different arrangement in 1980 (CPH 1299); Hughes considered
including it in the 1983 edition of River,230 and finally collected it in Three Books in 1993.
Terry Gifford calls the two sections of the poem ‘hard-hitting’ (2009 58). Hughes begins by using richly figurative language, describing the eutrophied stream as ‘glutted’ and its remains as a ‘ditch-carcase’. Yet he also mentions a realistic catalogue of pollutants: ‘Surfactants, ammonia, phosphates’. A dead mussel is not ‘Queen of the River’, a pearly incarnation of the White Goddess, but ‘A yawn of putrid phlegm’. Most worryingly, this part of the river goes into the mains (842). It is impossible to escape pollution, because even Peter, ‘our clean corn farmer’ (843), a nature-lover, heaps ‘poisons’ into those who eat his corn, following advice from ‘The Min. of Ag and Fish.’ (842). ‘Nymet’ is the poem’s second movement, and it evokes an ancient landscape spoiled by recent pollution. Hughes goes in search of the genius of the stream – ‘What was her true name [?]’ (843) – but this river is so polluted that its nymph has departed. The Georgian manor Nichols Nymet House was where Carol lived when she first met Hughes, and she says that the word Nymet, preserved in many local place
names, means ‘a sacred place’.231 Hughes also told Blake Morrison that a large Celtic circle
in a field near where he lived was probably sacred to the goddess Nymet (Morrison 32). The name Nymet would have reminded Hughes of the sacred grove at Nemi, where the priest-
230 Keith Sagar’s private archive. Carbon typescript of The River, 13 June 1982. 231 Letter from Carol Hughes to Yvonne Reddick, 23. 01. 2013
kings of Diana were sacrificed (Frazer 3) – hence the image of the May bridegroom’s head crushed into the river’s flood. The river-goddess used to bear eels, peal and salmon, but she is now ‘Drowned in the radioactive Irish Sea’ – the site of the nuclear waste dumps that Hughes had read about so many years earlier. She is contaminated by effluent from the ‘Express Dairy Cheese Factory’ and mourns her ‘doomed parr’. Yet most alarmingly, ‘The death-rags that she washes and washes are ours’ (CPH 844). This poem explores a previously venerated landscape; water pollution desecrates it and endangers its inhabitants. Here, Hughes’s work responds to Rigby’s call for an ecopoetry that ‘bears prophetic witness, in anger and grief’, to environmental damage (127). Scathing, shocking and impassioned, these protest-poems do not omit any unsettling details.
Flowers and Insects, Hughes’s 1986 collaboration with Baskin, does not match River’s
unified structure or so poetically suggest an environmental ethics. Uncollected poems from between 1987-89 are more informative about Hughes’s concerns about environmental issues. ‘Devon Riviera’, published in the Poetry Book Society’s 1986-87 Anthology, exposes the