On Thursday January 27th 2022, renowned poet and Ted Hughes scholar Steve Ely will lead an online, collaborative close reading of Hughes’s poem ‘Mayday on Holderness’.
Steve describes the event:
In a letter to Keith Sagar (16th May, 1974), Hughes’s sister Olwyn passed on his description of ‘Mayday on Holderness’ as:
the introductory poem to what was to be a series, and which included the better poems in LUPERCAL. The whole thing was to be a celebration of the serpentine spirit of the hungry erg [sic]. That serpentine course threads them all together (PC 33).
However we read ‘erg’ – urge? – the ‘serpentine course’ is, of course, the digestive system: in a letter to Leonard Baskin in July 1959, Hughes describes ‘the general drift of the [Lupercal] poems’ as “Man as an elaborately perfected intestine, or upright weasel” (LTH 147). At around the same time Hughes wrote to Olwyn explaining that Lupercal expresses ‘an entire vision of life’ arranged around ‘the notion of God as the devourer –as the mouth & gut’, and asserts that ‘mother-love’ (associated with the sexual urge through the fertility rite of the Roman Lupercalia) is the only ‘defence’ against the ‘natural appetite of everything living to devour everything else’ (LTH 148).
The dominant theme of Lupercal is thus the struggle of vitality against death – or, as Leonard Scijag puts it, between ‘eros and thanatos’, the two principles existing in an explosive, symbiotic, endlessly creative balance.[i] ‘Mayday on Holderness’ is a manifesto-like expression of this essentially Heraclitean or Epicurean (Lucretian) worldview – a worldview that would inform Hughes’s work throughout his career. It is this that makes ‘Mayday on Holderness’such an important poem in his oeuvre; indeed, there is a sense in which the poem provides an ‘embryonic template’ of his later work in the same way that T.S. Eliot’s early poem ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ (according to Hughes in ‘A Dancer to God’) did to Eliot’s later work.[ii]
Steve will open the session with an introductory talk of around fifteen minutes before leading a line-by-line collaborative close reading of the poem in which all present are invited to contribute. Society members who wish to take part should register via Eventbrite by 20 January, when an annotated copy of the poem and a handout will be distributed.
[i] Leonard M. Scijag, The Poetry of Ted Hughes (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986). p.75.
[ii] Gillian Groszewski, ‘A Dancer to God’, http://thetedhughessociety.org/dancertogod