Literary Analysis Of Ted Hughes's Pibroch By Wodow

Abstract: “Pibroch” of Ted Hughes’s poem collection Wodow is a short, lucid lyric with complex metaphorical and mystical overtones. This poem’s apparent nothingness, symptomatic of Ted Hughes in the poems of Wodow is more discussed by eminent critics than its deep philosophical, spiritual and religious underpinnings. It is a poem with unusual title bearing symbolic kinship with its theme The title of the poem reminds us of the musical genre of Scottish Highland known as ceol mor. It is a multilayered signifier and my humble effort in this paper is to explore the “unheard melodies” of it. Unlike the poems of Wodwo, the poem is less dramatic in unfolding of its evident. But what strikes is the intensity of a quest for one’s own self that is the hallmark of the collection. A detail analysis of this poem will unfold various metaphors presented by the sea, heaven, stone, wind, mountain, tree and an old woman but no one can over look the centrality of the theme of the poem—a philosophical journey of the poet as a modern man to search the root cause of existential dilemma which ends in an epiphanic moment of self-realization. However, the poem cannot be read in isolation. The way the different characters of the poem are found to be linked thematically or the way the poem is found to be closely

I think what the West needs is a lot of the spirit of the East. That is why I think during the sixties there was an enormous thirst for Eastern things. Because we know that the whole world, the whole spiritual world, on which the East still floats in many different ways and forms and so on-from extreme fundamentalism to philosophical mysticism-nevertheless, there is an easy acceptance through Eastern society that existence is based on spiritual things....They (westerners) want some invented new spiritual reality that hasn’t been