Ted Hughes: February

Length / Form 24 lines, 6 quatrains

Comment This poem is from Hughes’s second collection of poem Lupercal. Taking its name from the Lupercalia fertility festival of ancient Rome, Hughes laces his poems with images and symbols associated with the festival to the effect that the poems read like a series of incantations in an attempt to reinvigorate his writing. On its own, ‘February’ seems to have little to do with the classics; it certainly contains no obvious allusions. However, this is the month in which the Lupercalia festival occurred, and given the title Lupercal, Hughes has in mind a very specific role for dogs and wolves in his collection and makes frequent use of canine imagery. In ‘February’, Hughes imagines the last wolf in Britain and uses it to figure how in his view, the human race has insulated itself from what he sees as the potent natural energies at work in nature and its creatures. Worse still, he suggests that taming such energies and creatures is a cruelty of sorts. Considering the importance dogs in relation to the Lupercalia festival (and wolves in the myth of the founding of Rome) and Hughes’s poem of the same name, tracing the use of canine imagery in Lupercal reveals a latent symbolic patterning which links a number of the Lupercal poems together.

Further Reading

Stuart Hirschberg. Myth in the Poetry of Ted Hughes, Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1981.