Children are wonderful.
I don’t have any, thank god, but I have spent many terrific, terrifically hair-raising afternoons hanging out with those too young to engage in any of a number of adult vices. Of course, children are hair-raising for the same reason they are wonderful – they don’t follow the same rules adults do. The youngest don’t even know that such rules exist, and so are able to apprehend the world with a degree of bliss that few adults can access. Ted Hughes realized this, because he was fortunate enough, or foolish enough, depending on your mood and stage in life, to have had a daughter. Why do we care that he had a daughter? We don’t, but we do care that he wrote this poem, which goes to the center of why poets do ridiculous things like giving up their lives to those little tyrants known as the next generation. If any person managed to inspire a poem as good as this one from me, I would promise to feed them and pay their college tuition too.
Here is a bit of advice. On the evening of the next full moon, go out to the darkest place you can find, preferably in the middle of a farmfield with nothing around but cornstalks and killdeers, where you can’t hear traffic noise or the chitchat of neighbors, where your breath is the loudest sound. Put down your things. Untie your sneakers. Ignore the bite of frost. Close your eyes and tilt your chin up to the sky. Slowly, slowly open your eyes. Soak in the sky. Shake yourself. Feel humbled. Remember this poem while you’re on your way back home, aware again that you’re human, and so small that you may waver and disappear.
Full Moon and Little Frieda
A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket –
And you listening.
A spider’s web, tense for the dew’s touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming – mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.
Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm wreaths of breath –
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.
“Moon!” you cry suddenly, “Moon! Moon!”
The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.
--Ted Hughes, from Wodwo (1967)
