Ted Hughes — Skylarks

I The lark begins to go up Like a warning As if the globe were uneasy – Barrel-chested for heights Like an Indian of the high Andes, A whippet head, barbed like a hunting arrow, But leaden With muscle For the struggle Against Earth’s centre And leaden For ballast In the rocketing storms of the breath. Leaden Like a bullet To supplant Life from its centre. II Crueller than owl or eagle A towered bird, shot through the crested head With the command, Not die But climb Climb Sing Obedient as to death a dead thing. III I suppose you just gape and let your gaspings Rip in and out through your voicebox O lark And sing inwards as well as outwards Like a breaker of ocean rolling the shingle O lark O song, incomprehensibly both ways – 
Joy! Help! Joy! Help! O lark IV You stop to rest, far up, you teeter Over the drop. But not stopping singing Resting only for a second Dropping just a little Then up and up and up Like a mouse with drowning fur Bobbing and bobbing at the well-wall Lamenting, mounting a little – But the sun will not take notice And the earth’s centre smiles. V My idleness curdles Seeing the lark labour near its cloud Scrambling In a nightmare difficulty Up through the nothing Its feathers thrash, its heart must be drumming like a motor, As if it were too late, too late. Dithering in ether Its song whirls faster and faster And the sun whirls The lark is evaporating Till my eye’s gossamer snaps and my hearing floats back widely to earth. After which the sky lies blank open Without wings, and the earth is a folded clod. Only the sun goes silently and endlessly on with the lark’s song. VI All the dreary Sunday morning Heaven is a madhouse With the voices and frenzies of the larks, Squealing and gibbering and cursing Heads flung back, as I see them, Wings almost torn off backwards – far up Like sacrifices set floating The cruel earth’s offerings The mad earth’s missionaries. VII Like those flailing flames The lift from the fling of a bonfire Claws dangling full of what they feed on The larks carry their tongues to the last atom Battering and battering their last sparks out at the limit – So it’s a relief, a cool breeze When they’ve had enough, when they’re burned out And the sun’s sucked them empty And the earth gives them the O.K. And they relax, drifting with changed notes Dip and float, not quite sure if they may Then they are sure and they stoop And maybe the whole agony was for this The plummeting dead drop With long cutting screams buckling like razors But just before they plunge into the earth They flare and glide off low over grass, then up To land on a wall-top, crest up, Weightless, Paid-up, Alert, Conscience perfect. VIII Manacled with blood, Cuchulain listened bowed, Strapped to his pillar (not to die prone) Hearing the far crow Guiding the near lark nearer With its blind song “That some sorry little wight more feeble and misguided than thyself Take thy head Thine ear And thy life’s career from thee.”