Sometimes a poet is difficult to find in their poem. They hide teasingly, daring you to discover them beneath their cool specifics.

                  Be sure, no literature is optional. Composed by compulsion, it contains its composers, defines them, because they wrote this and not that for no purpose except to expose themselves. No lasting literature since the Renaissance has been impersonal. A self was confessing itself for its own selfish reasons. Seek and – with more or less difficulty – you will find.

                  Ted Hughes is hidden in his famous poem. His poem is about a species of fish called pike, as its title informs us blandly. Our naturalist shows us three baby pike in an aquarium, who cannibalize themselves into one. Then he shows us in a pond two pike between four and eight years old, six pounds each, in the process of cannibalizing themselves into one. Finally he describes an ageless pike, “too immense to stir,” which dwells at “stilled legendary depth,” which, we’re pretty sure, the poet has only envisioned, never seen. This final pike terrifies him, so he’s reluctant to fish that pond in the dark, though he does anyway, “with the hair frozen on my head.”

                  The pike in this poem are pike, not metaphors conducing to a convenient conclusion, the poet more a laconic reporter than confident bard. That’s his story. But he would not be telling us this or we reading if the poem were not somehow about us. There are thirty-five thousand species of fish, the roster lengthening each year. “Why seems it so particular with” pike?

                  Here’s where the hide-and-seek gets fun. Why the poet’s fascination with pike? How has he elevated the pike into a ghastly significance we can sense if not readily express? What from these pike might we learn about ourselves?

                  Listen.

 Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.

                  Our poet, no surprise, is a glutton for beauty. The pike is “perfect… in all parts, green tigering the gold” – what a spectacular verbing, “tigering,” evoking both splendid striation and mortal peril. And that beauty is both enthralling and appalling, for it devours its kind – and revels in the havoc. Why else is it grinning?

                  The poet fishes for this dangerous beauty. That he keeps pike in an aquarium indicates his interest in the phenomenon from its infancy. That he fishes for it in an old pond demonstrates his dedication to the vocation.

                  And where does he fish? In a pond

                        fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them –

a pond “as deep as England.”

                  Henry VIII, after the Act of Supremacy in 1534, abolished England’s monasteries, as any English schoolchild knows. This act ruptured the unitary truth of the Roman Catholic church and made religion, thus truth, a matter of personal choice. Thinking for oneself proved both enthralling and appalling. As Yeats put it in another context, “A terrible beauty is born.”

                  Fishing for beauty, with a naturalist’s curiosity and disciple’s discipline, spooks our poet, but he does it anyway. Is he brave or crazy – or both? What if that deep beauty, “too immense to stir,” emerged in the dark like the Loch Ness monster and devoured him! We shudder as

                                              the dream
Darkness beneath night's darkness had freed,
[rises] slowly towards me, watching.

* 

Pike (1960)

By Ted Hughes (1930-1998)

Pike, three inches long, perfect
Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.
Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.
They dance on the surface among the flies.

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,
Over a bed of emerald, silhouette
Of submarine delicacy and horror.
A hundred feet long in their world.

In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads -
Gloom of their stillness:
Logged on last year's black leaves, watching upwards.
Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

The jaws' hooked clamp and fangs
Not to be changed at this date;
A life subdued to its instrument;
The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

Three we kept behind glass,
Jungled in weed: three inches, four,
And four and a half: fed fry to them -
Suddenly there were two. Finally one

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.
And indeed they spare nobody.
Two, six pounds each, over two foot long.
High and dry in the willow-herb -

One jammed past its gills down the other's gullet:
The outside eye stared: as a vice locks -
The same iron in his eye
Though its film shrank in death.

A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastery that planted them -

Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,

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