Unseen Poetry aka Practical Criticism aka Close Reading:To Paint a Water Lily, Ted Hughes

Close Reading 2

To Paint a Water Lily

Ted Hughes

A green level of lily leaves

Roofs the pond's chamber and paves

The flies' furious arena: study

These, the two minds of this lady.

First observe the air's dragonfly

That eats meat, that bullets by

Or stands in space to take aim;

Others as dangerous comb the hum

Under the trees. There are battle-shouts

And death-cries everywhere hereabouts

But inaudible, so the eyes praise

To see the colours of these flies

Rainbow their arcs, spark, or settle

Cooling like beads of molten metal

Through the spectrum. Think what worse

is the pond-bed's matter of course;

Prehistoric bedragoned times

Crawl that darkness with Latin names,

Have evolved no improvements there,

Jaws for heads, the set stare,

Ignorant of age as of hour—

Now paint the long-necked lily-flower

Which, deep in both worlds, can be still

As a painting, trembling hardly at all

Though the dragonfly alight,

Whatever horror nudge her root

One starting point for a close reading of a poem is the title. The title in this case tells us that the poem is to be about a water lily and, furthermore, it promises to give instruction on how to paint a water lily. However, once we start to read the poem we quickly discover that this is an art lesson of a different kind. There are no details concerning brushes, types of paint, colour palette and so on. This art lesson says that before you think of these painterly matters you must first have an appreciation of the ‘world’ the water lily inhabits. We may well come to the poem with certain pre-conceptions regarding water lilies and poems. Lilies in general, as opposed to specific varieties, have ‘poetic’ associations: they symbolise beauty, purity, rebirth and femininity. Water lilies are often cultivated as ornamental plants and feature in garden ponds and lakes. Their Latin botanical name is Nymphaea which associates them with the nymphs of Greek mythology. Put these associations together and the title alone may lead us to imagine a place of rest and tranquillity, an idyllic rural scene around an ornamental pond with water lilies. The poem, however, has a very different view of the water lily world. The ‘world’ above the water, the air world, is seen as a modern battlefield whilst the submarine world is seen as prehistoric and unrelentingly predatory.

So far, we have considered the title and made a general point about the way the poem is likely to challenge our expectations concerning water lilies. Another approach to reading a poem is to consider whether it can be divided up into parts. With the contents of this poem, we can see divisions which could be expressed as A1 B C A2. Our first A consists of the poem’s first four lines which focus on the water lily; our B is from line 5 to the first half of line 15 ¬– lines which are about activities in the air above the lily; C runs from the rest of line 15 up to and including line 21 and is concerned with the underwater world; with A2 we return to the lily itself and, having undergone the processes of observation in B and C, we are in a position to paint. We should now know the reality of the lily’s world and we can now appreciate the extraordinary equanimity with which “this lady” presides over both worlds. Given that the poem involves two worlds it is appropriate that in its rhyming couplet form it enacts this duality. The subtle use of what are predominantly near, rather than full rhymes, enacts both sameness and difference between the two worlds. Both worlds have disturbing lethal powers but where one is full of hum and buzz and projectiles the other is a place where ‘things’ move slowly, though, as we will see, with even more sinister threat as they crawl through the darkness.

The B section develops an analogy with a battlefield something which has already been suggested by the “flies’ furious arena” in line 3 – an arena, particularly one that is a scene of fury, often being a place of competition and combat. Note here the ‘transferred epithet’ that attributes what belongs to the flies (“furious”) to the arena. However, before the dragonfly is metaphorically changed into a bullet and then a shooter, it is described as one who “eats meat” and is therefore magnified into a much larger carnivorous animal. This disturbing way of seeing it immediately gives way to metaphors from firearms. The dragonfly’s speed and deadly intent are expressed with “bullets by”. Its power to hover and “take aim” turns it into a combination of gun and marksman. The dragonfly is not a lone ‘soldier’ in this combat zone. Others are engaged in military-like ‘ops’ as they “comb the hum/Under the trees” – note the onomatopoeic ‘hum’ effect of the vowels in comb, hum and under. We do need to be shown what is really ‘there’ because the “battle-shouts” and “death-cries” are inaudible and we may well be feasting our eyes on appearances only when we are drawn to the colourful beauties of the flies. The rather unorthodox use of “praise” in line 11 is worth further consideration. When used as a verb, praise usually has an object, we praise something. Here we are told that the “eyes praise’. Although in line 12 we are given a reason for the eyes praising, the absence of a grammatical object suggests that the eyes, having ‘fallen for’ the colours, have relinquished their powers to see things and have gone into a rapture of praise. As such, they have been captured by appearances and are in need of the poet’s lessons in how to see what is really happening. As for what is really happening, “Eats meat”, “bullets by”, “death-cries/ everywhere”, is hyperbolic, but it is designed to shock us into ‘shrinking’ ourselves down to insect scale in order to grasp the frenetic deadly competition for survival.

Whilst the world above the water was seen in terms of war, the world below the surface is one which evolution has passed by. It remains locked in a prehistoric primitivism. Time is personified into an animal since it is the “Prehistoric, bedragonned times”, not the fish and other aquatic creatures, that are said to “Crawl”. By making the plural abstract noun, “times”, the subject of crawls we are metaphorically left in the dark as to exactly what we are facing in this literally dark pond. “Crawl” has many negative associations with lowly forms of animal life and with morally base behaviours. Yet these creatures that “Crawl that darkness” are said to be tagged with “Latin names”. Latin has associations that suggests things elevated and possessed of imperial powers. This combination of the low and the ’high’, makes these “times” seem even more disturbingly potent. However, notwithstanding the reference to their “Latin names”, they remain mysterious ‘dragons’ since, to add further to the point already made, no specific names are given. Evolution has made no changes, no “improvements”, to these creatures. The prehistoric era, perhaps even the aquatic world that preceded land animals, is still alive in the pond’s dark chamber. Heads are simply jaws and so, subservient to the single purpose of their “set stare”. They are formed to do one thing: to bite and to eat.

Having been guided through these two disturbing worlds we now in a position to appreciate the water lily. In the opening lines we are told that the water lily presides over the two worlds. It oversees them since it “Roofs” one world and “paves” the other. However, her possession of these two worlds goes beyond a role as overseer since they form the “two minds of this lady”. Her intimate involvement with both worlds is picked up again when, in the last five lines we return to her and are told that she is “deep in both worlds”. The idea of the water lily as a ”lady” is also picked up again when we return to ‘her’: a graceful feminine beauty is suggested by describing her, with her long underwater roots, as “long necked”. The creatures of the air world are furious and lethal; those of the water world are mysterious prehistoric horrors, but, unlike them, the water lily is personified as a civilised being, a graceful lady who is possessed of a mind, in fact, two minds. Yet, notwithstanding her grace and dignity, the terrors above and below her are also within her two minds and could, perhaps, be said to have their source within her ‘deep mind’;. Perhaps she could be seen as the goddess of her world, the creator of a nature that combines beauty and terror.

Now that we understand both the terrors of the two worlds and the extraordinary equanimity with which she is poised between them, we are now in a position to paint her – note the emphatic position of “Now” at the beginning of line 22. Here it is worth pointing out that throughout the poem we are being directly addressed by the speaker, since, as we read, we become members of the poet’s unorthodox art class. This sense of being spoken to through a series of instructions is evident in the verbs, “study”, “observe”, “Think”, and “paint”. This sense of the poet speaking is particularly felt when we hear his use of the colloquial “hereabouts” in line 10. The casual, colloquial character of “Hereabouts” makes for a kind of understatement. Think of someone in the midst of an analogous front-line firefight saying, ‘Well there’s loads of death hereabouts”. This understatement suggests that the speaker is someone who, as it were, remains calm under fire and for all the hyperbolic intensity of much of his description, he has the ability to see things objectively and calmly.

Further to the associations of the lily which were mentioned earlier, we can add a link with Buddhism albeit that the flower linked to Buddhism is the lotus which is very like the water lily though not the same. Despite this difference, I want to make the link with the lotus because of the Buddha-like undisturbed calm with which the water lily hardly trembles when the deadly dragonfly alights, or when something even worse ‘nudges her root’.