Ted Hughes's Paradise

Neil Roberts

pp. 39-52

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

Abstract

This chapter will focus on "A solstice", the poem in which a shooting expedition with a companion, who is implicitly Gerald, results in the killing of a fox, Hughes's totem animal. It centres on the conflict between the enhanced sense of connection with the natural world that Hughes claimed to feel when hunting or fishing, and the feeling of desecration that overcomes him when he looks at the dead fox.