Ted Hughes and Schopenhauer: the poetry of the will

"Pibroch," from Wodwo, is perhaps the most striking and ambitious of these works. Its title denotes a set of variations for bagpipes on a traditional dirge or martial theme. Music thus becomes an analogue of sorts for the functioning of the mysterious but fundamental dynamic that preoccupies Hughes in this poem. It is a mirroring that Schopenhauer has theorized in some depth:

music differs from all the other arts by the fact that it is not a copy of the phenomenon, or, more exactly, of the will's adequate objectivity, but is directly a copy of the will itself, and therefore expresses the metaphysical to everything physical in the world, the thing-in-itself to every phenomenon. Accordingly, we could just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will. (World 1: 262-63)

Elaborating the analogy, he recognizes "in the deepest tones of harmony, in the ground-bass, the lowest grades of the will's objectification, inorganic nature, the mass of the planet," and in the higher tones above this ground "the plant and animal worlds" (World 1: 258).

In "Pibroch," it is the steady drone of the bagpipes beneath the melody that stands in for the "mass" of "inorganic nature" so central to the poem's bleak drama. Strictly speaking, this drone is an organ point that is sustained even when the melody crosses it to produce dissonance, rather than a ground-bass varied to produce constant harmony; but this very difference serves to illustrate Schopenhauer's principle of inner antagonism, of the will turning on itself. On the phenomenal level, the notion of melodic variations acts to differentiate the sea, rock, wind, and tree of the poem as distinct antagonists and as varying modalities of quasiconsciousness. On the noumenal level, however, the whole idea of variation in a monistic force-field is ironically undermined.

The cosmic monotony quite literally inherent in the monotone, the organ point of the inorganic, is captured by the poem's opening:

The sea cries with its meaningless voice Treating alike its dead and its living, Probably bored with the appearance of heaven After so many millions of nights without sleep, Without purpose, without self-deception.

The principal thrust of this description, however, is not to differentiate the sea from "higher" phenomena, but to reintegrate it, symbolically, with the noumenal will of which it is a representation. The sea's very lack of distinctiveness and discrete components makes its use as a symbol of the monolithic will convincing. As Schopenhauer observes, individuality - at its peak in human beings - declines through the realms of animals and plants until "finally, in the inorganic kingdom of nature all individuality completely disappears" (World 1: 132). Void of rationality and meaning, aimless, mindlessly incessant, the sea as will stands in contradistinction to the "appearance of heaven," which is to say, to the mere appearance of a logos that betokens a moral code and a coherent teleology. Instead, the ground of being proves to be such that sleep, purpose, and self-deception are of a piece in a purposeless universe.