Where The Boy with Nails for Eyes, a comic, is

I don’t quite know how, but I ended up getting off on a tangent on another post I was writing, and doing a critique of Ted Hughes’ poem ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’. I figured I might as well spin it off into a separate post, and explore it more fully.

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket –

And you listening.

The above are a couple of lines from Hughes’ poem – here’s a link to the full text.

A couple of things to note, just about those lines alone. The enjambment of these lines of the extract implies the distance between the addressee in the poem (‘you listening’ – presumably Frieda) and the night-sounds she hears (the dog barking, the clanking bucket).

Yet at the same time the enjambment also communicates the sense of ‘veiledness’ that accompanies night, its effect on our senses: sight is diminished, the ear takes precedence. Hughes has used a pair of synedoches – rather than a dog and a bucket, we have only their sounds – barking, clanking. Though the things themselves are taken out of sight by darkness their presence is still inferable – and this in turn implies another tension, between the limited extent of the child Frieda’s experience of the ‘small evening’ and the adult Hughes’ knowledge of its vastness, observing Frieda as she observes. Though the evening is ‘small’, Hughes’ use of ‘shrunk’ indicates that it is bigger than experienced; it has depth outside its stated extension.

There is another, closely-related contrast here, between the adult knowledge of the world’s vastness, and little Frieda’s (the ‘little‘ in the title is an important pointer) childish apprehension of it as being small. Hughes’ language is utterly simple. He repeats long vowel sounds (‘cool’, ‘looping’, ‘Moon!’ – the last one three times in one line) that have overtones of baby-talk. There are only three instances of words above two syllables, all of them involving suffixes (‘balancing’, ‘listening’, ‘suddenly’). The simplicity of the language reinforces the fact that childrens’ interactions with the world, unconditioned by experience, are the focus here.

The final lines of the poem work upon the interplay between reality – the adult knowledge of the world’s implacable hugeness – and the childhood experience of it as being small, entirely comprehensible, imbued with human feeling and intimacy:

‘Moon!’ you cry suddenly, ‘Moon! Moon!’

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.

Vision bursts into the poem. From being a secondary night-sense, sight (‘gazing’) has resumed supremacy over hearing. The two visions of the world – the adult’s, vast and distant; the child’s, small and intimate – are brought together in the final lines. The world remains vast, but that vastness has taken on a human dimension: the moon has ‘stepped back’ in amazement. There is also a mirroring occurring here: the final repetition of ‘amazed’ links Frieda’s ‘small evening’ and the vast interstellar spaces of reality. The image of a mirror has already been invoked by the poem:

A pail lifted, still and brimming — mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.

The placement of the word ‘mirror’ at the end of the line (though syntactically it belongs with the following line) emphasizes it and implies the role of a mirror as a ‘hinge’, a point of locus between an object and its reflection, or a person and a perception of themselves. It’s worth remembering that the moon, also a key player in the poem, is itself an enormous rock mirror, a reflector of the absent sun.

Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (a story, like Hughes’ poem, that is concerned – almost obsessed – with mirrors and doublings), tells us of Roderick Usher’s mind that it poured forth darkness, as if that darkness was an ‘inherent positive quality’, upon ‘all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom.’ William Blake stated in a letter written in 1799 that the world appears differently depending on the mind of its beholder: ‘The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity, and some scarce see Nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is Imagination itself.’ To Blake, imagination wasn’t the same as the modern conception, but was more akin to the creative aspect of consciousness, the projection of the mind’s perceptions of the world back onto the world.

(A brief aside on perceptual projection. It is commonly accepted that mental experiences of the world aren’t occurring in the world, but rather in the mind [that is, the brain] of the viewer. But if you were to look at a tree and someone asked you ‘Where is the tree that you are looking at?’ you wouldn’t point to your head – where, physically, the perception is seated – but at the tree itself. This is because the brain doesn’t simply sponge up phenomena and hold them within itself, but projects the experience out of itself, dresses the world with cloth harvested, spun and woven from the world’s own raw fibres. Experiences aren’t felt as occurring in the brain – which is, after all, the place where experiences are, in physical terms – but in the world beyond the body. This isn’t a process that is physically manifested – as in the take-up and transformation of light into electrical impulses by the eye – but is something that occurs only in the mind; hence it is perceptual. In this sense, the mind is like a mirror, reflecting the world back upon itself; and, I might add, capable of perceiving itself only in the perception of what is not itself.)

This same process of perceptual projection is what Hughes is describing in Frieda; hence the prevalence of mirrors and reflections in the poem. Like a mirror, the child’s mind has bridged the gap between herself and the world she inhabits, re-creating the world that created her. So the artist-moon is amazed at seeing its creation, Frieda, come to life; there has been a reversal of status, with Frieda’s gazing mirror-mind assuming primacy, painting its vision over the the night’s vastness and blankness.