The nuptial flight

Ted Hughes and the mayfly

Mark Wormald

pp. 21-37

in: Neil Roberts, Mark Wormald, Terry Gifford (eds), Ted Hughes, nature and culture, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

Ted Hughes wrote three poems about the mayfly, an insect whose life cycle moved him. "The Mayfly" (1983) supplied phrases and insights for "Saint's Island", the central poem in Flowers and Insects (1986), "Saint's Island". And in 1993, "The Mayfly is Frail" struggled its way into River in its Three Books text. By then, Hughes's fascination with ephemera danica had left its mark elsewhere, notbably on "Daffodils", also in Flowers and Insects, as it would on the significantly revised text incorporated in Birthday Letters. This chapter details the stages in Hughes' education in the mayfly, which I argue represents a model of the successful convergence of environmental sensitivity, personal experience and a moving mythopoeic poetry. Like its subject, it had a long and hidden larval stage, but took memorable flight in a fishing trip to Ireland in May 1982. Two remarkable prose accounts of this trip are among Hughes' papers in the British Library: one a contemporary diary, the second a visionary narrative. Both inform the hitherto neglected transcendence of "Saint's Island", with a reading of which the chapter closes.