浅析休斯与丁尼生诗歌中鹰意象之不同

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摘 要

阿尔弗雷德·丁尼生与泰德·休斯同为英国著名的桂冠诗人，并且在各自的诗歌作品中对“鹰”形象都有过塑造，但是丁尼生所描绘的鹰坚毅与雄健之中又带着一丝孤寂和哀伤之感，而休斯所描绘的的鹰凶残骄傲。本文拟从鹰意象的视角出发，对丁尼生的《鹰》和休斯的《鹰之栖息》比较分析，以探寻在截然不同的历史时代背景下，两首诗歌通过同一意象的所体现出的不同主题意义和内心情感。前者中的鹰侧重于一种怀旧色彩,表达诗人对其挚友的悲痛的哀悼，而作为残暴的弑者以及专横的统治者形象，后者中的鹰是人类力量的象征。

关键词：《鹰》；《鹰之栖息》；鹰意象

Contents

1. Introduction………………………………………………………….…….1
2. Literature Review……………………………………………………… …2
3. “The Eagle” and “Hawk Roosting”……………………………………....3

3.1 Nostalgia in “The Eagle” and Human Power in “Hawk Roosting”………...3

3.2 The Lonely Eagle and the Arrogant Hawk ………………………………...5

1. Different Eagle Images in “The Eagle” and “Hawk Roosting”………...7

4.1 Pattern Styles ………………………………………………..………….….7

4.2 Ecosystem and Egoism…………………………………………………......8

1. Analysis of Reasons for Different Eagle Images ………………………...9

5.1 Historical Conditions ……………………………………………………....9

5.2 Private Elements ………………………………………………….…..……10

6. Conclusion……………………………………………………………..……12

Works Cited……………………………………………………..………….....13

1. Introduction

Alfred Tennyson, once the first Baron Tennyson, Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) (1809–1892) is Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Northern Ireland during the time of Queen Victoria"s reign and has been regarding as one of the most popular British poets until now. In 1827, he was admitted into Trinity College, Cambridge, where Tennyson met Arthur Henry Hallam and they admired each other at once and started a lifelong connection since then. Alfred Tennyson began his poetry writing when he was a child. His first published work received poor reviews, but his series of poems upon Hallam"s death, collected in In Memoriam, attracted Queen Victoria. They first met each other in April 1862, as Victoria wrote in her diary, “very peculiar looking, tall, dark, with a fine head, long black flowing hair amp; a beard, — oddly dressed, but there is no affectation about him” (Hope, Charles 69).Tennyson met the queen again almost twenty years later and the Queen told him how comforting In Memoriam A.H.H. had been. As a productive poet in Victorian age, he created 499 poets during his life, 131 of which are collected in In Memoriam A.H.H as one of the greatest elegies in British literature.

Ted Hughes, Order of Merit (1930–1998), life of whom was as dramatic and extraordinary as his poetry, was deemed as one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century. Hughes was married to Sylvia Plath, an American poet, from 1956 until her suicide in 1963 at the age of 30. She left Hughes with their two kids to take care of. The misfortune was far more than this. His next love, Assia Wevill, also killed herself and even their daughter, Shura. After wandering between Devon and Ireland in the 1960s, Hughes married again in 1970 and settled down in Devon. In 1984, Hughes was favored as British Poet Laureate. In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on their list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945” (The times: 98).

2. Literature Revew

Image means to use figurative languages to represent objects, actions and ideas in such a way that it appeals to our physical senses. Image is both the spirit of poetry and the aesthetic correspondence between artists’ affection and objects. Including music, drama and even sports, it covers a wide range of many fields where poetry exists as a special pattern. Eagle image may be defined as an aesthetic image carried by eagle so as to inflect the philosophical concepts. Eagle image absolutely doesn’t only means something about eagle, but it describes eagle’s life to bring out a few issues over human beings. Based on that, we can explore the inner intention by means of analyzing different external images. Over the past years, numerous native scholars have made a series of analysis upon the image of “The Eagle” and “Hawk Roosting”. Sun Huaxiang divided eagle image of “The Eagle” into five parts, i.e. auditory image, symbolic image, kinesthetic image, metaphorical image and abstract image. He claimed that no image in any poems is found to be independent of others. They are relatively independent, but also have influence on each other, forming an “image chord” among a group of images. In “The Eagle”, the theme of the “image chord” is the poet’s sorrowful expression to Hallam by means of the image of the eagle. Nevertheless, the presentation of the theme is by the “image chord” of these six images (Sun Huaxiang, 1998: 31-34). Zhu Fengying once claimed, “The eagle in the poem is favorably presented as being strong and tough, proud and majestic, sharp-eyed, alert and quick in movement. Instead of stating these qualities directly, the poet makes use of poetic devices to achieve this effect. The devices used in the poem include: sound pattern, rhyme scheme, word choice and carefully used punctuation marks. These devices make the whole poem appeal to the readers’ visual as well as aural sense. It is as if the readers could see and hear the bird” (Zhu Fengying, 2002: 81-84). Besides the study of “The Eagle”, Zhang Lin and Zheng Xiaoqing got a conclusion after analyzing a series of animal poems from Ted, that “Hawk Roosting” not only implies the violence of the hawk image, but also eulogizes the mysterious power in Nature and its manifestation in humans. The symbol of the hawk image is so multiple that it can symbolize the whole animal world, and the Great Nature all creatures living in, even the entire human society (Zhang Lin amp; Zheng Xiaoqing, 2006: 42-46). These essays give me a great deal of inspiration which is useful to my writing. Aimed at analyzing the two poems’ thematic meaning and different inflectional emotion in two totally different historical time, this article is going to compare Hughes’ Hawk Roosting and Tennyson’s The Eagle at the angle of eagle image. The article is to be divided into five parts. The first is the introduction of Tennyson and Hughes, as well as a few of former studies of the eagle images in the two works. The second part is going to state the theme and the concrete images in the two poems. The next will be intended to find the main differences between “The Eagle” and “Hawk Roosting”. After that, the writer will analyze the several reasons for the differences, which is the most important in this article. The last part is the conclusion of the whole article.

3. “The Eagle” and “Hawk roosting”

3.1 Nostalgia in “The Eagle” and Human Power in “Hawk Roosting”

“The Eagle” originates from his experiences while traveling as a young man with his beloved friend Hallam in the Pyrenees. It published at first in 1851, around the time Tennyson was on his way to becoming the most famous British poet of his age. The poem is considered a perfect combination of sound and meaning. In a few lines, Tennyson captures a small but majestic event – an eagle diving from a cliff – with total precision. For those of you without much experience in reading poetry, many have found that this short work is a great place to begin.

The whole poem focuses most attention on the eagle’s quietness against the “lonely land” and the azure sea. At the end of the poem, captured by Tennyson with total precision, the eagle diving from the cliff “like a thunderbolt”, which leaves our readers an impression of despair. Without violence, the eagle under Tennyson’s pen, to a large extent, is endowed more grief and loneliness (seen from “lonely lands”). T. S. Eliot once felicitously described Tennyson as "the saddest of all English poets", whose technical mastery of verse and language provided a "surface" to his poetry"s “depths, to the abyss of sorrow” (Eliot, 1975: 246). Because of that, there is no wonder why “The Eagle” is included in Memoriam A.H.H. which is a requiem for his beloved friend Hallam. Some literature critics believe the poem is attached to a sense of “nostalgia”, namely reminiscence complex. According to Batcho, the term “nostalgia” describes sentimentality for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations (Batcho, 2013: 355-367). Tennyson uses a nostalgic tone to show that everything changes with time.

Different from Tennyson who is much more romantic, Ted Hughes is indulged in the mighty nature. Having studied Native American cultures whilst at Cambridge University, Hughes was obsessed with the concept of “animism”. Animism (from Latin animus, means “soul”, “life”) is the worldview that non-human entities (animals, plants, and inanimate objects or phenomena), possess a spiritual essence (Stringer, 1999: 541-456) (Hornborg, 2006: 21-32). Sir Edward Tylor, in his 1871 book Primitive Culture, defined it as “the general doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings in general”. According to Tylor, animism contains “an idea of pervading life and will in nature” (Tylor, 1871: 260), i.e., a belief that natural objects apart from human beings also have souls.

In “Hawk Roosting”, Hughes personifies a hawk, and describes it in the first person. Under his description, the hawk is not just a preying animal, but has his own spirit. He appears to be a brutal killer and a tyrannical controller. For convenience, the writer will call the hawk “he”. He sits “in the top of the wood” (Hawk Roosting Line 1), feasting “perfect kills and eat” in dream; he soaks up the sun and air, arrogantly waiting for the earth’s worship; he doesn’t permit any change, because, absolutely, he is a king. All these characters are designed to illustrate how powerful the hawk is. In fact, man is often entitled to have these features as well. Based on this, it is natural to draw a connection between hawk and man which can mislead readers to think that the one who is speaking is man if not for the title. Therefore, the hawk, which is dignified among birds, is used by Ted Hughes as a symbol to represent power of humans.

3.2 The Lonely Eagle and the Arrogant Hawk

“The Eagle” is very short but meaningful. Personification is an important feature of this poem. Tennyson describes its claws as "hands" and confers the eagle upon the bird almost. Like the above, the writer will call the eagle “he” for simplicity. Tennyson referred to the “crags” being “mountain walls”, which indicated that the eagle is defending for his “fortress”. The poem offers many symbols, like eagle, sun, the azure world, sea, mountain, etc. “The eagle in the poem is favorably presented as being strong and tough, proud and majestic, sharp-eyed, alert and quick in movement” (Zhu Fengying,2002: 84). The poet carefully chooses the words “clasp”, “close to”, “watch”, “stand” describing the eagle. The picture can be apparently imagined by readers that a vigorous eagle appears to spread his powerful wings and to fly up in the sun. This feeling lasts until the last line. In the last moment, he suddenly falls, “like a thunderbolt”, because of which the readers’ mood hit the bottom. The great letdown implies everything supposed to be beautiful has changed. The final verse implicitly revealed the theme of the poem.

Compared to Tennyson’ hawk that is featured by vigorousness and loneliness, Ted Hughes’s eagle represents arrogance and fierce. In “Hawk Roosting”, Hughes writes in the imagined voice of a hawk. The expression “perfect kill” refers to the impression that the hawk has about himself being superior and arrogant. The first stanza reveals the hawk is asleep in the top of a high tree. It supposed to be a peaceful scene, but though in sleep he still rehearses “perfect kills and eat”, where fierce can be found enough.

“The convenience of the high trees! / The air"s buoyancy and the sun"s ray/ Are of advantage to me; / And the earth"s face upward for my inspection” (Hawk Roosting Line5-8).

In the second stanza the hawk’s being joyful and arrogant is vividly displayed. In his eyes the world is created to serve him and he has a definite superiority to inspect everything on the earth. The word Creation in the third stanza, which is used with a capital C, can be synonymous with God. “It took the whole of Creation/ To produce any foot, my each feather” (Hawk Roosting Line10-11), the arrogance and sense of superiority is pushed to the highest level. Finally, the hawk thinks himself to be the all powerful, to be God, “Now I hold creation in my foot.”

The end of the stanza and the beginning of the fourth are linked by enjambment, as the hawk is shown that it is free to “fly up” and circle the world below at its leisure. The idea that he sees himself as God is again reinforced in the lines, “I will kill where I pleasure because it’s all mine.” In line 15 and 16, the hawk says his possesses no “sophistry” which means that his doesn’t reason. Line 16 uses bitter language like ‘tearing off their heads’ signifying that the hawk enjoys much his actions.

“The allotment of death” in the fifth stanza provides the readers with an image of the hawk hunting. The hawk chooses its own prey brutally. The stanza closes with the lines “No arguments assert my rights” meaning that the hawk need not justify his ways of killings. They are unquestionable.

In the final stanza, the hawk says “the sun is behind” which we can deduce as the sun is behind him for real or it could also mean that the sun is with him. In the second verse, the hawk says, “nothing has changed since I began” which gives the impression of time. It makes the reader feel that the hawk has always been looking upon the earth. The final lines “My eye has permitted no change/ I am going to keep things like this”(Hawk Roosting Line23-24) show the idea of domination or control.

So apparently we can draw a conclusion that the image of the hawk is arrogance, supremacy, like a God.  It can be compared with a tyrant or an authoritarian despot who is self-centered and arrogant. He would allow himself or his ways to be questioned and would see the world as designed for his purpose.

1. Different Eagle images in “Hawk Roosting” and “The Eagle”

The poems, “The Eagle” by Alfred Lord Tennyson and “Hawk Roosting” by Ted Hughes, have virtually the same basic image. Both poems describe the magnificence of birds and their need to stalk and kill prey. The most dominant similarity of the two eagle image lies in that both poems impart a feeling of power and majesty. In “The Eagle”, the poem describes: he is “close to the sun in lonely lands, ringed with the azure world, he stands” and “the wrinkled sea beneath him crawls.” In “Hawk Roosting”, he claims, “the earth"s face upward for my inspection”; “I holds Creation in my foot” and even “the sun is behind me”. As Master of their domains, they have a king power to take control of the world belonging to them. “The Eagle” says, “he clasps the crag with crooked hands” while “Hawk Roosting” says, “I sit in the top of the wood”, which both indicate their top position in the nature.

The second similarity concerned is that both the eagle image can be connected to the human beings. As a matter of fact, with no use of the first name as Tennyson created the poem, the poet personifies the eagle as well with the word “he” “hands” and “stands”. “He watches from his mountain walls”, looking like a noble king, filled with a sense of dignity. Then, there is no denying that Ted Hughes personifies the hawk in purpose to express his thought about humans. The hawk is likely to be the incarnation of a ruler or an autocrat who is eager to dominant the whole Zeus. Yet, the poems have different sides and have dissimilar results.

4.1 Pattern styles

There are differences in the poems pattern styles. The poem “The Eagle” has consistent rhyming pattern. The ending words of each line rime. “The Eagle” consists of two stanzas. All of the ending words rhyme. The first stanza has the rhyming words “hands, lands, and stands”. Furthermore, the second stanza rhymes with the words “crawls, walls, and falls”. In the “Hawk Roosting” there are no consistent rhyming patterns except for the third and forth line in the first stanza with the words “feet and eat”. There are lines in both poems that have similar patterns. One is described with words, while the other is describe with tone. Both poems refer to the birds as having human like characteristics. In “The Eagle” these characteristics are demonstrated is physical terms, “a crooked hand and hooked feet, rather than saying wings and claws. In “Hawk Roosting” the bird identifies himself as if he were a human through is egotistical self.

Although the event taking place is both poems are similar (hunting), the tones are different. Whereas one poem demonstrates as obsessive opinion of one’s self, the other states the facts. In The Eagle, the tone captures the bird’s great ability, yet keeps some boundaries and reflects more of nature’s way, rather than a pontification of one’s self and power as heard in “Hawk Roosting”. In the “Hawk Roosting” the statement “I kill where I please because it is all mine” demonstrates this obsessive ownership and opinion of this creature. In addition, the hawk enjoys having the power over other creatures and the craving for more of it. “He watches from his mountain walls” stated in “The Eagle” demonstrates the facts of what an eagle does to hunt and survive. The tone in the “Hawk Roosting” uses statements and single words that although uplift the Hawks view of him, limit all others.

4.2 Ecosystem and Egotism

The poems both convey the same basic message that birds must kill and eat. Both voices describe the dignity and power of the two large hunting creatures. However, the poems contrast in that one expresses ecosystem and the other egotism. The speaker of the eagle believes that the eagle is also a superior creature, “The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls”. Both lines demonstrate a point of view having a high and respected station in life. However, this is not the ego of the bird speaking; it is an observation by another voice stating the facts on what an eagle must see and how he hunts. In “Hawk Roosting” the hawk projects that “It took the whole Creation to produce my foot, my each feather”. His message is clear. He believes that he is higher than any other creature.

5. Analysis of the Reasons for Differences in Eagle Image

The relationship between the poets and their backgrounds is always very subtle. Because of different historical conditions, growth settings and personal beliefs, The Eagle’s image and Hawk Roosting’s are different in some ways.

5.1 Historical Conditions.

Tennyson lived in the prevail-in-a-time Victorian age. The Victorians were proud of their welfare, of their good manners and of their middle-class values, and tended to ignore the problems which still afflicted England. There was, in fact, a part of society mainly the working class, among which misery and distress were still widespread. The new urban conditions, made worse by growth of slums, had created a lot of health problems. Whole families were often crowded in single rooms, where lack of hygiene occasionally led to cholera. The New Poor Law of 1834 had not been a solution for the still extant problems, and the creation of the much hated workhouse (so well described and denounced by Dickens) had often made life a hell for the poor. Poverty, whether the result of bad luck or thoughtless behavior, was considered a crime and penalized as such. Debtors, for example, were still punished with jail, and life in prison was appalling. Education, too, had its problems. Teachers were often incompetent and corporal punishment was still regularly applied to maintain discipline. The particular situation saw prosperity and progress on the one hand, and poverty, ugliness and injustice on the other, which opposed ethical conformism to corruption, moralism and philanthropy to money and capitalistic greediness, and which separated private life from public behavior.

After the Second World War, the socio-economic and socio-culture history of Britain was undergoing a remarkable change which has largely been reflected in contemporary literature. Having lost domination over major colonies resulting in shrinking of revenues and other economic crisis and causing a great number of people to be left jobless, Britain produced a cluster of pessimistic poets dealing with contemporary issues like loss of faith, frustration, hopelessness and morbidity. “One finds a noteworthy combination of a loss of belief in traditional positions and roles, with at the same time perplexity, skepticism or near indifference over what might replace them” (Ford, 1990: 82). Schizophrenia, violence, nostalgia or throw-away resignation might be predicted as being among the outcomes (Ford, 1990: 82). A strong sense of frustration and pessimism came out of the very core of social and cultural aura of British society. Thus, one can characterize contemporary British poetry as an outcome of pessimistic and morbid intensity of frustration, negation and of course violence. It is simply sad, shabby, cynical, and ironic.

Such two different social conditions take much influence in the creation of the two poets. The former makes some of Tennyson’s poets, especially in his In Memoriam A.H.H., attached to a color of reminiscence, sadness and despair, while the latter causes Hughes to write a great number of animal poems with realistic violence and supreme power.

5.2 Private Elements

Alfred Lord Tennyson was born in Somersby East Lindsey district of Lincolnshire, which is a rural area where the pace of life is generally much slower than in much of the United Kingdom. It is particularly worth mentioning that when Tennyson wrote The Babbling Brook he was referring to a small stream here. Other features of the local landscape are claimed as features mentioned in Tennyson"s poetry, such as “Woods that belt the grey hillside” and “The silent woody places by the home that gave me birth”. In 1949 the copper beech was reported to be still standing at the former rectory which was mentioned in In Memoriam:

“Unwatched, the garden bough shall sway,/The tender blossom flutter down,/Unloved, that beech will gather brown,/This maple burn itself away.”

The same poem also mentions leaving "the well-beloved place / where first we gazed upon the sky"(In Memoriam A.H.H., 1900: 216) .In such poems as The Lady of Shallott Tennyson uses the word "wold" for a hill in a sense found in Lincolnshire. The peaceful landscape gives Tennyson a great deal of inspiration to inject into the Eagle, which makes it more elegant and noble.

Compared with Tennyson’s living conditions, Hughes’ is much less tranquil. Ted Hughes started his childhood in Mytholmroyd, a town in West Yorkshire, England. The culture of Yorkshire has come into being over the county"s history, affected by the cultures of those invading clans who came to command the region, including the Celts , Romans, Angles, Vikings and Normans. The long-standing history accumulated distinct civilizations, especially in humanity. It is said that Yorkshire man has an inherently strong sense of “regional identity” and is often considered to be friendly and laborious but “bloody-minded”, stubborn, argumentative, even strict with money. It is this routinism that is referred to in the saying “You can always tell a Yorkshire man, but you can"t tell him much”. Growing in such a dauntless nation, Ted Hughes is much affected by his county’s culture. The living environment not only enables Hughes to cultivate his ruggedly strong, obstinate and unruly temperament, but also makes him deeply addicted to the nature. Because of that, the hawk in Hawk Roosting is mostly characterized by violence and vigor.

Apart from living experiences, personal beliefs are also an element. In memoriam created by Tennyson to mourn his best friend Hallam, is a window to observe the poet’s heart. Tennyson’s family gives him two-sided influence. On the one hand, his mother’s love for Nature and the good academic atmosphere draw him to advocate science from young. On the other side, however, his father and his brother’s epilepsy, as well as the economic dilemma cultivated Tennyson’s sensitive and melancholy personality. The death of his best friend and the hard time of his family bring Tennyson much pressure. In addition, continuous new findings in, Geography, Astronomy and the evolution of flora and fauna seriously challenge his piety for religion. He started to become suspicious of the existence of God and the meaning of life, grievous, confused and wandering. Early, tragic death and suicide appear throughout Tennyson’s poetry. In “ The Eagle”, the bird suddenly in the end falls from the high crag towards the at-the-bottom wrinkled sea, where to stop nobody knowing, which perhaps implies death in some way, completely revealing the death of his friend, and also, the depression of the poet’s heart.

From an early age, Ted Hughes held strong views about any form of organized religion and the religious dogma associated with it. Writing to Sylvia Plath in 1956 (Hughes 2007 570), he expressed contempt for what he called the “dogmatic egotist” philosophers of the “post–Christian school” and for the “avarice, greed, cruelty and tyranny” which has marked and marred religion. Hughes’ belief in some supreme creative force was most frequently expressed in his work as reverence for the powers of Nature, especially as represented in the mythologies of the world by a goddess or goddesses who control the natural cycles of birth, procreation and death. He expressed these cyclical creative to destructive powers of Nature in many ways. One of the most comprehensive of Hughes’ own descriptions of his spiritual beliefs was written in 1990 to the Anglican priest, academic, poet, and sculptor, Moelwyn Merchant. In it, he wrote that “the processes of creation and created life are ‘divine’” and that the animals, “live a divine life in a divine world”. Humans, however, in the evolutionary process have developed “ego–consciousness” and have become alienated from that “animal/spiritual nature”: through our “ability to manipulate abstract ideas amp; direct our behavior against instinct, we have lost the divine world and internal identity with the divine self” (Hughes, 2007: 579–581). Therefore, it is reasonable to draw a conclusion that Ted Hughes created the hawk with an image of primitively rage to reveal the most divine world in Nature, and to contrast with the bondage of people’s inner hearts.

6．Conclusion

Both as Poet Laureate of Great Britain and having once gained education in Cambridge, the two poet Ted Hughes and Alfred Tennyson respectively describe two different eagle imageries with different posture in different pictures. On account of living in different historical conditions and environment, as well as respective beliefs, the two odes of the eagle contain different emotional meaning and insights on life. Ted’s Hawk Roosting shows not only a deeply infatuated complex for Nature in its poet’s heart but also a warning of extreme anthropologists’ cannibalism, enabling people to respect Nature and to revere life. While due to the era full of conflict and the distressed experiences, Tennyson’s The Eagle is endowed with some kind of nostalgic color. There is less violence and ferity in the poem than that in Hawk Roosting, instead, the poem more inflects a sort of pride and aloofness. The two deep and abundant eagle odes containing different imageries, which give us different aesthetic feelings and perceptions, are both provided with eternal art vitality.

Works Cited

[1] Batcho, K. I. “Nostalgia: Retreat or support in difficult times?” The American Journal of Psychology, 2013 (3): 355-367.

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