k enough abt nightmares, actualli i wanted to blog abt my two fav ted hughes poems.. feeling poetic todae haha.. ya so muz read!! the poems veri nnice!

The Horses

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird, --
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left torturous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline -- blackening dregs of the brightening
grey --
Halved the sky ahead. And i saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey, -- ten together --
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed, not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew's tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted.

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging --
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads as patient as the horizons
High over valleys, in the red levelling rays --

In din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the
faces,
May i still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing
curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

*************************************************



Six Young Men

The celluloid of a photograph holds them well --
Six young men, familiar to their friends.
Four decades that have faded and ochre-tinged
This photograph have not wrinkled the faces or the
hands.
Though their cocked hats are not now fashionable,
Their shoes shine. One imparts an intimate smile,
One chews a grass, one lowers his eyes, bashful,
One is ridiculous with cocy pride --
Six months after this picture they were all dead.

All are trimmed for a Sunday jaunt. I know
That billberried bank, that thick tree, that black wall,
Which are there yet and not changed. From where these
sit
You hear the water of seven streams fall
To the roarer in the bottom, and through all
The leafy velley a rumouring of air go.
Pictured here, their expressions listen yet,
And still the valley has not changed its sound
Though their faces are four decades under the ground.

This one was shot in an attack and lay
Calling in the wire, then this one, his best friend,
Went out to bring him in and was shot too;
And this one, the very moment he was warned
From potting tin-cans in no man's land,
Fell back dead with his rifle-sights shot away.
The rest, nobody knows what they came to,
But come to the worst they must have done, and held it
Closer than their hope; all were killed.

Here see a man's photograph,
The locket of a smile, turned overnight
Into the hospital of his mangled last
Agony and hours; see bundled in it
His mightier-than-a-man dead bulk and weight:
And on this one place that keeps him alive
(In his Sunday best) see fall war's worst
Thinkable flash and rending, onto his smile
Forty years rotting into the soil.

That man's not more alive whom you confront
And shake by the hand, see hale, hear speak loud,
Than any of these six celluloid smiles are,
Nor prehistoric or fabulous beast more dead;
No thought so vivid as their smoking-blood:
To regard this photograph might well dement,

Such contradictory permanent horrors here
Smile from a single exposure and shoulder out
One's own body from its instant and heat.