# The Stag



## Xlthlx (11 April 2010)

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 cam 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.

Ted Hughes


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## oakash (12 April 2010)

Yes,its a good poem from a few years back. The stag of course escaped on that occasion,we assume. Hughes does give the stag human emotions, but it is a skilful poem. Hughes himself was well aware of the terrible and protracted death the stag would die in the 'natural world' in the normal course of events (maiming,starvation, caught up in wire, wounded by shooting etc).


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## oakash (12 April 2010)

And of course the horsemen would not have been 'blue'!


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