Moon-Whales and Other Moon Poems by Ted Hughes

First published: 1976; illustrated

Subjects: Animals

Type of work: Poetry

Recommended Ages: 10-15

Form and Content

Moon-Whales and Other Moon Poems is a collection of fifty-four short poems that resist easy classification. Individually, the poems describe the bizarre plant and animal life that occupy the poet’s fantasy moonscape, creatures ranging from gossiping moon-cabbages to a powerful burrow wolf who hides in “moon holes” and swallows blazing meteorites. Ted Hughes also describes several human (or human-like) inhabitants—for example, a group of people who travel by clinging to one another in a giant ball that rolls across the moon’s surface. Despite its strange inhabitants, the geography of Hughes’s moon resembles that of the actual moon, complete with deep craters, barren wastes, and vast, eerie silences. Taken together, the poems in the collection evoke a frightening world, part fantasy and part nightmare. Many of the moon-creatures are grotesque and violent, pursuing victims who, in one poem, are “turned inside out/ And sucked dry like an orange” or transformed “instantly into a puff of purple mist.” Yet, there is another side to this world. Several poems evoke a sense of wonder, creating a kind of Alice-in-Wonderland distortion of ordinary experience that delights as much as it terrifies.

Among the most striking poems in the book are those describing animals. The title poem, “Moon-Whales,” for example, offers a vivid picture of the giant “sea” creatures moving gracefully underground, “lifting the moon’s skin/ Like a muscle” and plunging “deep/ Under the moon’s plains.” The moon-whales’ songs includes single notes that last hundreds of years. Other animal poems describe moon-hyenas whose mad laughter comes “to devour the living ones” and silvery white moon-ravens whose “croak” is “not dark/ And ominous,/ But luminous.” If such animals have their earthy counterparts, others, such as moon-hops and moon-heads, do not. The latter, which float bodiless among the moon’s volcanoes, are menacing “spirit-shapes of unborn prehistoric monsters.” The bizarre vegetation of Hughes’s moonscape includes jungles of huge nasturtiums swarming with gorillas, marching moon-tulips, and horrible moon-thorns that “make a startling rush/ And stab you to the bone.”

Hughes’s animal and plant poems constitute about half the pieces in his book. Other poems describe such phenomena as moon-wind, an “utter stillness” in which objects large and small are blown fiercely about. Several poems detail the dreadful symptoms of moon-diseases, one of which—cactus-sickness—causes its victims to sprout a “bunch of ten or fifteen heads,” first pea-sized and then melon-sized, all of which are “hungry, arguing or singing.” Younger readers may find such descriptions frightening, but they will also sense the comic absurdity that underlies even some of Hughes’s most terrifying images. Sometimes, in fact, the mood is predominantly comic, as in “Music on the Moon,” in which various instruments make absurd and unearthly “sounds”; the bassoons, for example, produce “huge blue loons” instead of notes. In “The Armies of the Moon,” one faction in an unending civil war—the soldiers of the Moon-Dark—fling vampire bats at the soldiers of the Moon-Light, who fight back by shining electric torches into the bats’ eyes.

In form, Hughes’s poems are mostly irregular, lacking a fixed metrical pattern, with lines ranging from short and clipped (“Moon thirst/ Is the worst”) to long and rambling (“Saddest of all things on the moon is the snail without a shell./ You locate him by his wail, a wail heartrending and terrible”). The poems vary in length from four lines to nearly forty, with the bulk falling somewhere in the middle of that range. While some poems follow a pattern of repeated stanzas—four lines or two being the most common arrangement—the majority do not. Most pieces are loosely structured and sound colloquial when read aloud, a feature that should appeal to young readers wary of artificial poetic diction or elevated language. The most notable exception to this informality is the extensive use of rhyme, often in heavy-handed couplets that draw attention to themselves, sometimes for comic effect (“caterpillar” and “gorilla,” or “anacondas” and “wonders”). The rhyme gives a degree of control to the otherwise loose syntax of some poems.

Critical Context

Moon-Whales and Other Moon Poems is an enduring part of Ted Hughes’s contribution to literature for young readers. Like much of his other work—stories and plays as well as poems—this book aims to bring young readers into contact with mysterious, foreboding, often dark aspects of experience that, according to Hughes, are sometimes suppressed or sanitized by contemporary children’s writers. His aim is to revitalize, to preserve, and to nurture the child’s capacity to imagine, to tap into the inner landscape of the psyche and to face the outer world of raw physical nature. Moon-Whales and Other Moon Poems explores a world of dream and nightmare, sometimes fearful but also magical and transforming.

In other books of poetry, Hughes directs attention toward an equally mysterious realm: the outer world of nature, which is powerful, vital, and foreign. Season Songs (1975) describes the natural cycles of birth and death that link the human and animal realms, while Under the North Star (1981) sees nature as powerful and vast, indifferent to human desires, a source of awe and imaginative regeneration. What all Hughes’s collections share is a vision of poetry not as a means of sentimentalizing or prettifying the world but as a vehicle for confronting the powerful, irrational forces that contemporary society, trusting blindly in scientific certitude and the power of technology, often tries to ignore.