Pike in All Parts

Looking Back at Ted Hughes’s Chilling Poem “Pike”

Some of us remember the mind-blowing scene in Alien where the dismembered robot Ash (Ian Holm) describes the deadly creature as “a perfect organism.” This comes after the revelation of a secret directive that the alien must be brought back to Earth for examination and the crew of the Nostromo are expendable.

The ship’s name is a reference to Joseph Conrad. Could another aspect of the film—Ash's bizarre admiration for the alien's perfection—have a literary antecedent? 

When revisiting Ted Hughes’s poem “Pike,” which appeared in the collection Lupercal in 1960 and which some have called one of the greatest poems written about an animal species, it is helpful to have some knowledge of the author’s background. Edward James Hughes, whom some people today know little about other than that he was Sylvia Plath’s husband, was born in West Yorkshire, England, in 1930 and spent much of his youth hunting and fishing.

These experiences provided Hughes with material for several volumes of poetry in which he described the natural world as it appeared to him. Since Hughes undoubtedly drew on his own fishing experiences for “Pike,” it is not a stretch to infer that the author and narrator of the piece may be one and the same. “Pike” is one of the most striking examples of Hughes’s work because his view of the natural world is so vividly illustrated: it is at once serene and violent, beautiful and savage. Human beings are attracted to both violence and beauty, and, as we learn in the poem, pike incorporate both. Hence Hughes’s fascination with the fish.

The first two lines of “Pike” depict the fish as beautiful creatures: “Pike, three inches long, perfect / Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.” Then in the next line, Hughes abruptly switches to a description of the innate savagery of pike: “Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.” Thus, in the first stanza, the conflicting aspects of pike’s nature are clear. Hughes draws this conflict more concisely in the second stanza, using the phrase “delicacy and horror.” His use of the term “grandeur” in the second stanza applies a certain dignity and nobility to pike’s character, and yet we see later in the poem that pike’s savagery is utter and boundless. When Hughes places three of them “behind glass,” or in a tank, they eat one another. Then “there were two, finally one.” The behavior of the pike here goes against any concept of dignity. In pike and their behavior, we see the natural world in microcosm, violence and savagery at odds with a strange beauty and perfection.

The pike seemingly have one raison d’être, namely, to kill and eat other creatures. Hughes states that the life of a pike is a “life subdued to its instrument,” the instrument being pike’s jaws. Pike’s behavior is limited almost exclusively to the use of those jaws for killing and eating. The poem vividly describes the creature’s jaws, reiterating the horrific aspects of pike: “hooked clamp and fangs” twisted into a “malevolent aged grin.” Pike use their jaws to kill with incomparable efficiency, but the poem also describes pike’s other “perfect” instruments, bringing out once more the essential conflict of the poem: “The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.” One senses that Hughes’s admiration for these creatures’ aesthetic perfection is truly great, but that it is really symbolic of something more, a deep love and deep fear of nature itself.

The narrator stands in a state of awe regarding the pond in which pike abound. The poem’s final image is more chilling than any deep-space monster:

“Owls hushing the floating woods
Frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,
That rose slowly toward me, watching.”

Michael Washburn’s books include The Uprooted and Other Stories (2018), When We’re Grownups (2019), and Stranger, Stranger (2020). His short story “Confessions of a Spook” won Causeway Lit’s 2018 fiction contest, and another of his stories, “My Role in the Rise of Julian Assange,” won the Adelaide Books fiction award for 2019. Another of his works of short fiction, “In the Flyover State,” was named a Distinguished Mystery Story of 2014 by The Best American Mystery Stories.