Ted Hughes — The Stag

While the rain fell on the November woodland shoulder of Exmoor While the traffic-jam along the road honked and shouted Because the farmers were parking wherever they could And scrambling to the bank-top to stare through the tree-fringe Which was leafless, The stag ran through the private forest. While the rain drummed on the roofs of the parked cars And the kids inside cried and daubed their chocolate and fought And mothers and aunts and grandmothers Were a tangle of undoing sandwiches and screwed-round gossiping heads Steaming up the windows, The stag loped through his favourite valley. While the blue horseman down in the boggy meadow Sodden nearly black, on sodden horses, Spaced as at a military parade, Moved a few paces to the right and a few to the left and felt rather foolish Looking at the brown impassable river, The stag came over the last hill of Exmoor. While everybody high-kneed it to the bank top all along the road Where steady men in oilskins were stationed with binocular, And the horsemen by the river galloping anxiously this way and that And the cry of hounds came tumbling invisibly with their echoes down through the draggle of trees, Swinging across the wall of dark woodland, The stag dropped in to strange country. And turned at the river Hearing the hound-pack smash the undergrowth, hearing the bell-note Of the voice carried all others, Then while the limbs all cried different directions to his lungs, which only wanted to rest, The blue horsemen on the bank opposite Pulled aside the camouflage of their terrible planet. And the stag doubled back weeping and looking for home up a valley and down a valley While the strange trees struck him and the brambles lashed him, And the strange earth came galloping after him carrying the loll-tongued hounds to fling all over him And his heart became just a club beating his ribs and his own hooves shouted with hounds’ voices, And the crowd on the road got back into their cars Wet-through and disappeared.