Dark Is the Night

The early poems of Richard Hughes

Gipsy-Night and Other Poems by Richard Hughes

A hermit woman lived ninety years far from society, far from man, the poet says. All that time, in a cave, she ate berries and lichen and lived. She built beside her a cross, and when she was dragged from where it was she stayed by evil men, and so mistreated that she died, she was too old to cry or to fight.

They cramped her in a barrel
— All but her bobbing head
— And rolled her down from Teiriwch
Until she was dead :
They took her out and buried her
— Just broken bits of bone
And rags and skin, and over her
Set one small stone:

And now, many years on, there is a great pile of stones that men leave when they pass by her place, her resting place. Each man who goes by must leave a stone. It has grown to an immense height. Piled up a great cairn to the woman, some measure of earthly respect. Respect and not justice. Dare the poet travel past and refrain from leaving a stone?

This is but one story in Richard Hughes’s (best known, likely, for his children’s story A High Wind in Jamaica) debut collection of verse. The poems of this book are not uniformly tragic; and they are not uniformly dark. Some of them are about thing the author likes — puddings, paintings, poetry, for instance. (‘Poets, painters, and puddings; these three / Make up the World as it ought to be.’)

But all have the hint of a dark flavour. It’s a bad world out there. We hear of terrible storms that leave men sprawling and weak; the deaths of strange, innocent creatures that happen to arrive upon men’s paths; and the epitaph of a fine young man who ‘loved old bracken, and now it pushes / Affectionate roots between his bones.’

This is not a pleasant world.

In houses where much life and love took place, the furnishings slowly grow mould and damp. Those stones that held and protected lives are now worn away by the harsh winds, by time, by rain. And the hearts that made the place a home are buried in its grounds. The laughter that was there is long silent.

The author, or his surrogate, stumbles upon poor children (‘Small child with the pinched face, / Why do you stare / With screwed-up eyes under a shock / Of dull carrot hair?’). They are tired; their limbs ache, backs are bent; and they have such knowledge of the world in their eyes that their gaze pierces the viewer and runs him through.

Some men are haunted by strange visions. One, who shot an owl, is followed around by the sight of owl’s eyes — owl eyes in the morning when he wakes, in the dark of night, in the moment the light of day is extinguished. ‘Owl-eyes, without sound. / — Pale of hue / John died of no complaint, / With owl-eyes too.’

Another man sees before him in a vision a great mirror, and beyond that mirror a tall figure, pale and falling. ‘And she was dying, dying; / She combed her long hair, / And the crimson blood ran /In the fine gold there.’ His vision is mute, transfixed. The man his himself struck by the horror. And by the odd attitude, the attitude of dreams and half-recalled visions, of the woman before the mirror. She seemed so unafraid. More than anything, he writes, she was not afraid.

A man — once, he tells the reader, a great painter — rants and raves to spectral guests in a room by night. He talks to the ghosts; he cannot paint. Some of his old patrons might, on the rarest occasion, come to visit. They might converse, perhaps of the old times. The times when the painter was respected and known, and they themselves were younger, happier. A social fiction. They may even put down some money, supposedly to guarantee the rights to the next picture to roll off the line and out of the studio. But the old man continues to caper and to talk, while his canvases remain unfinished, without form. ‘Someday he’ll win fame, / — So Isaac boasts, / Lecturing half the night / To long-legged ghosts.’

And another is a tramp — out on the road, a man sees much. He sees the life he’s missing, the life that’s passing him by. The movement of the young and the confident, the people without fear. He sees their happiness, their gestures which mean so little to them and so much to him. Such a man is trapped in a battle of his own — a battle between body and mind. They turn into deadly enemies: the wreck of one would be the ruin of the other. ‘In agony clenches fist / Till the nails bite the hand.’ And then, quietly, ‘I sink at last faint in the wet gutter; / So many words to sing that the tongue cannot utter.’ The man falls and, as both mind and body fail together, the quarrel is ended — one way or other.

Hughes’s world is one where many of us would not want to live. And yet it is our world. We live there. He sees it with different eyes. Eyes accustomed to the darkness.