The idea of the titular Crow in Ted Hughes’ poems is wild, untameable and irreducible to words. In an early poem in the sequence, words come at Crow from all angles but he just ignores them. Finally, “Words retreated, suddenly afraid / Into the skull of a dead jester / Taking the whole world with them”.
Crow just yawns: “long ago / He had picked that skull empty”. A figure that is ancient and beyond the reach of gods or human belief systems, Hughes’ Crow resists ever being pinned down or fully understood.
