Poetry by Ted Hughes

Meet My Folks! (London: Faber and Faber, 1961)

Jessica Ann De Waal (Final year PhD candidate at the University of Northumbria) discusses Hughes’s first collection of poetry for children.

Meet My Folks! (1961) was Hughes’s first book for children, composed when living and working in Massachusetts with his first wife, Sylvia Plath, and published by Faber & Faber between the birth of their daughter Frieda in 1960 (to whom the book is dedicated), and their son Nicholas in 1962. Hughes was adding new ‘folks’ long after the book’s first appearance, showing that there was no formal stopping-point for his imagination; a copy of this first UK edition in which Hughes also handwrote poems added for the paperback edition (1972) is held at Pembroke College, Cambridge. These poems include ‘My Granny’, ‘My Uncle Mick’ ‘My Aunt Flo’ and ‘My Family.’ Pembroke also holds the original illustrations by George Adamson which were used for the first and paperback editions. Adamson would collaborate on Hughes’s work again with How the Whale Became (1963) and The Iron Man (1968).

Hughes introduces his young readers to his ‘folks’ one by one, each comical poem describing a single member of his extravagantly eccentric and imaginary family. The full rhymes with an exaggerated and unconventional tone create humour and interest for a young audience in poems such as ‘My Sister Jane’ who is a ‘great big crow’ and ‘My Father’ who has the unusual job of being a Chief Inspector of holes. As Cushman writes, ‘Hughes stretches the boundaries of the child’s imagination by transforming a family into a wild, strange collection of eccentric persons and odd creatures.’[1]Hughes would argue that the collection’s style was primarily composed for children, remarking that, ‘In my first book of youngsters’ verse, Meet My Folks!, I imagined myself about seven.’[2]

Hughes does not differentiate between the human and creaturely worlds and instead amalgamates the two together to present an intricate depiction of nature. ‘My Other Granny’ employs vivid images of mutual entanglements as the character happens to be an octopus, linking her tentacles between nonhuman and the human narrator. The poem opens matter-of-factly and embodies such mutual entanglements between the familial and the other, the human and the non-human:

My Granny is an Octopus

At the bottom of the sea

And when she comes to supper

She brings her family.

(ll.1-4).

The imagery given to the child reader places, locates and defines the Granny’s ‘otherness’ even as the poem invites her into the family home. The idea of the octopus as familiar is further developed when Hughes writes:

Some of her cousins are lobster

Some floppy jelly fish –

What would you be if your family tree

Grew out of such a dish?

(ll.13-16).

 The use of questioning asks children to stretch their own imaginations towards the possibility of a different life as a sea creature and thus prompts them to address an acceptance of mutual kin. The poem continues with the narrator’s father asking the octopus-Granny how things are ‘Down in the marvellous deep?’ (l. 29); in response ‘Her face swells up, her eyes bulge huge/And she begins to weep.’ (ll. 30-31). The octopus-Granny possesses the emotional capability to differentiate between the nonhuman and human worlds and therefore evokes great sadness at the realisation that she will never fully be part of the human family. Further, the tears of the octopus-Granny could relate to a wider environmental message — the pollution of the ocean and her longing to live elsewhere — so an overtly ecological stance from Hughes also presents a sorrowful message to his child readers.

‘My Own True Family’ is the final poem in the collection which claims identity and truth. Where the other poems in the collection are fanciful, this poem has a much more serious tone and reads as a prophetic journey around regeneration and ecological healing. As Bassnett notes, ‘It is fascinating, revealing as it does how Hughes’s most pressing concerns find their way into a book for young children.’[3] The young child in ‘My Own True Family’ has a dream in which he meets ‘an old woman’ (l.2) in a wood. As she claims she has ‘his secret’, he comes ‘twice awake’, ‘surrounded by a staring tribe and me tied to a stake’ (l.6). This is a crucial moment of awakening from a dream and into environmental consciousness of the young boy’s complicity with, and his own personal share of responsibility for, humanity’s indifference to the trees. The trees declare:

“‘We are the oak-trees and your own true family. /We are chopped down, we are torn up, you do not blink an eye”’ (ll.7-8).

Hughes’s concise fifteen-line fairy tale dramatises his abiding concern with humanity’s place in the created universe, drawing on the idea of the ‘tree of life’ which plants the seed for Hughes’s healing quest between humans and nature. The boy achieves his true identity only by discovering his interconnection with the trees; but also proves his intimate relationship to nature, transforming his heart and stirring in him an environmental awareness never felt before: ‘My walk was the walk of a human child, but my heart was a tree’ (l.15). The poem also serves as a confirmation that humanity, and in particular children, must connect with the natural world in order to achieve harmony.

Hughes’s cheerful investigation of family members largely presents a light-hearted and comical style which would be appealing for children if heard or read aloud. Both ‘My Own True Family’ and ‘My Other Granny’ however, present a more serious and prophetic narrative, showing the beginnings of Hughes creating a space of open communication about the themes which most concerned him. Through his later works, Hughes returned to this space, writing for children in ways which would promote greater ownership and awareness for pressing environmental issues.

[1] Keith Cushman, ‘Hughes’ Poetry for Children’ in The Achievement of Ted Hughes ed. Keith Sagar (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), pp. 239-256 (p. 241).

[2] Heather Neill, ‘The Nature of Poetry’, Times Educational Supplement Magazine, (June 1995), http://www.tes.co.uk/article.aspx?storycode=10719 [accessed 12 May, 2022] (para. 4 of 19).

[3] Susan Bassnett, Ted Hughes (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009), p. 241.