Ted Hughes and Schopenhauer: the poetry of the will

The striving of matter can always be impeded only, never fulfilled or satisfied. But this is precisely the case with the striving of all the will's phenomena. Every attained end is at the same time the beginning of a new course, and so on ad infinitum. . . . Eternal becoming, endless flux, belong to the revelation of the essential nature of the will. (World 1: 164)

Schopenhauer refers specifically to the "life of birds," with its "endless needs and exertions" in the service of a "future that afterwards becomes bankrupt" (World 2: 353).

In his poem "Poor Birds" (Moortown), Hughes once again produces what we might call a poetic correlative of the philosopher's speculations:

In the boggy copse. Blue Dusk presses into their skulls Electrodes of stars. All night Clinging to sodden twigs, with twiggy claws, They dream the featherless, ravenous Machinery of heaven. At dawn, fevered, They flee to the field. All day They try to get some proper sleep without Losing sight of the grass. Panics Fling them from hill to hill. They search everywhere For the safety that sleeps Everywhere in the closed faces Of stones.

The stars here are no longer avatars of a callow rationalism, but the poles of the will as galvanizing current, as the blind, seething, ubiquitous energy that burns without stint in the galaxies and relentlessly drives the creatures beneath them. The "machinery of heaven" is the will, unfeathered and unfleshed in its noumenal status. As the literally insatiable hunger at the heart of being, it is also the stuff that dreams are made on, and thus the subverter of all repose. Waking is nothing but a feverish flight from dream-hungers into the terrors of real ones - the unending needs to eat and to avoid being eaten. The linkage between an all-pervasive anxiety and the all-pervasive will is inherent in the etymology of the "panics" that constantly flush the birds from place to place. The word derives literally from the Greek god Pan, whose "presence or unseen appearance caused terror" in the woodlands, and whose name derives in turn from the Greek [Greek Text Omitted], meaning "all" (Oxford 646). This latter etymology was subsequently adopted by philosophers "who saw in the God the Universe, the Totality" (Grimal 341). Their search for safety "everywhere" is doomed to failure because the will that drives them is everywhere, decreeing that they - as organic phenomena - must stay in motion in order to constantly renew that matter the "sleeping" stone enjoys as a nonrenewable essence.

Even though the birds must "suffer" the will's relentless pressure in proportion to the grade of consciousness they possess, they obviously are incapable of formulating a notion such as "poor birds." This act is the prerogative of the human intellect, which is able to separate itself from the immediate demands of the will long enough to contemplate disinterestedly the essences of phenomena. In Schopenhauer's terms, we are able to relinquish considering things under the guidance of "the principle of sufficient reason," which involves considering them solely with regard to "the where, the when, the why, and the whither" as these relate to "our own will." Instead, we turn to the what, in which "the particular thing, at one stroke, becomes the Idea of its species, and the perceiving individual becomes the pure subject of knowing" (World 1: 178-79). This "Idea" is, for Schopenhauer, "the most adequate objectivity possible of the will" (World 1: 175). It occupies an intermediate status between the will, of which it is a direct objectification, and the particularized phenomena that are the will's indirect objectification.