Ted Hughes: Lupercalia

Length / Form Pt. 1, ten lines, two quatrains and a half-rhymed couplet; pt. 2, twelve lines, three unrhymed quatrains; pt. 3, twelve lines, three unrhymed quatrains; pt. 4, sixteen lines, four unrhymed quatrains.

Relationship to Classical text Uses the Lupercalia festival and its associated rites as the poem’s stimulus.

Comment The Lupercal cave is said to be where Romulus and Remus suckled on the milk of the wolf-mother as a part of the myth which tells of the founding of Rome. The details of this rite vary slightly according to different accounts, but it seems that at the Lupercal cave stood an altar to the god, Lupercus, the Roman god of shepherds, often associated with dogs and goats. Here, the Luperci (the ‘wolf-brothers’) presided over the practice of the festival held annually on 15 February. There, two goats and a dog would be sacrificed and their blood would anoint the foreheads of two young patricians. Part of the goat’s skin would be fashioned into a thong and worn by the Luperci, whilst another part of the goat’s skin would be formed into a whip which was used to strike those the Luperci encountered as they ran through the streets around the Palatine hill. Both fertile and infertile women would hope to be struck because it was believed that this would encourage both fertility and unproblematic childbirth. It is said that Mark Anthony, who ran in the race, offered Julius Caesar the crown of from on three occasions, which Caesar refused each time.

Perhaps Hughes’s most significant poem with classical allusions from the early part of his career. With its associations with fertility rites, Hughes concludes his collection with an incantation of sorts. He claimed that the poems of Lupercal  were ‘invocations to writing’; put this way it becomes clear that the images associated with the Lupercalia festival which he has scattered throughout Lupercal here reach their zenith and are a means of invigorating his future writings.

Further Reading

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

Rees, Roger (ed). Ted Hughes and the Classics. Classical Presences. Oxford: Oxford University                                Press, 2009.