Ted Hughes Poetry Trail at Stover Country Park

Lonely keeper of the gold

In the tumbled cleave.

A bird out of Merlin’s ear.

from ‘Wren’, by Ted Hughes

One of the things I love about Taleblazers is that I get to spend most of my working week outdoors, exploring the coast and moors with our young people. Together we go to a whole variety of places, moorland, beach and woodland, and one of our students’ favourite places is Stover. It’s not the wildest of places but there’s always something to see: tufted ducks diving, dragonflies buzzing over the marsh, finches squabbling at the bird feeder. We always love to spend a few hours there.

Dotted around the park, and linked together by a trail that weaves around the woods, are some of Ted Hughes poems. They are printed on shiny plaques attached to big wooden posts, and are usually sited in an appropriate environment reflecting the poem. You can sit by the water and reflect on To Paint A Water Lily, or read Roe-Deer deep in the woods. Hughes was born in Yorkshire but is closely associated with Devon, and his poems are perfect for this setting. It can feel very calming to sit by one of his poems and unpick the words and phrases, immersing yourself in each line. His work often needs a little unpicking, but Hughes will repay an investment of time many times over.

My favourite work of Hughes’s is A Cormorant, and on the trail the poem is sited at a spot where you can often look across the lake and see one drying its wings high up in a tree (for all their otherwise perfect adaptation, cormorants do not have waterproof wings and need to dry them off after diving). A Cormorant is a masterpiece, contrasting Hughes as an ‘optimistic, awkward, infatuated’ fisherman with a cormorant ‘dissolving fish naturally’. Hughes is cumbersome, overloaded with gear, entirely unsuited to the task of catching fish, while the cormorant is a sleek marvel, perfect for the task. I love the way Hughes even uses clunky language and lumpy phrases to describe himself, while when describing the words spill out in a wonderful flow. I thoroughly recommend you go and find the poem by the lake and take some time to digest it, and if you are incredibly lucky you may even find you have a cormorant for company.

I hope you enjoy it half as much as I do.

Here before me, snake-head.
My waders weigh seven pounds.

My Barbour jacket, mainly necessary
For its pockets, is proof

Against the sky at my back. My bag
Sags with lures and hunter’s medicine enough

For a year in the Pleistocene.
My hat, of use only

If this May relapses into March,
Embarrasses me, and my net, long as myself,

Optimistic, awkward, infatuated
With every twig-snag and fence-barb

Will slowly ruin the day.  I paddle
Precariously on slimed shale,

And infiltrate twenty yards
Of gluey and magnetized spider-gleam

Into the elbowing dense jostle-traffic
Of the river’s tunnel, and pray

With futuristic, archaic under-breath
So that some fish, telepathically overpowered,

Will attach its incomprehension
To the bauble I offer to space in general.

The cormorant eyes me, beak uptilted,
Body-snake low — sea-serpentish.

He’s thinking: “Will that stump
Stay a stump just while I dive?” He dives.

He sheds everything from his tail end
Except fish-action, becomes fish,

Disappears from bird,
Dissolving himself

Into fish, so dissolving fish naturally
Into himself. Re-emerges, gorged,

Himself as he was, and escapes me.
Leaves me high and dry in my space-armour,

A deep-sea diver in two inches of water.

‘A Cormorant’, by Ted Hughes

See also: the Ted Hughes Poetry Trail on the Devon County Council website (external link).