English Tutor Manchester and Bolton: Ted Hughes’ Jaguar analysis:Wild at heart!

The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion

Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil
Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or
Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.
It might be painted on a nursery wall.

But who runs like the rest past these arrives
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes

On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—
The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—
He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him

More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.

Overview. 

Jaguars are a threatened species on this planet. In the wild they are on the verge of extinction:

Not an understatement to own that we are by far,  the most dangerous predators on earth.

Here Ted Hughes takes the reader to visit a zoo where animals seem to have resigned themselves to their caged safety each adopting their own preferred type of behaviour in order to cope with the  sedentary limitations of their existence.

Some big cats like the lions and tigers practice indifference when faced by the gawping eyes of visitors, choosing to embrace their caged predicament with endless sleep.

Gawping crowds of stream past the animals, spectating on the animals  imprisonment, upon the spectacle that is the creatures’ daily existence.

The jaguar however is different.

His free spirit remains, rendering his watchers, ‘mesmerized.’  He seems to exist in a different mental dimension.

The irony of this poem is that the jaguar refuses to accept the limitations of his caged freedom. Like a messiah figure, he seems visionary and spontaneous.  All other animals seem inanimate in comparison .

They have been degraded by their caged existence.

Mentally he is elsewhere, outside, roaming his natural habitat, moving powerfully and with deadly intent The poem celebrates this separation, this defiance through a language that conveys his imaginative agility, even when faced by the all too real boundaries of his cage.

This is one of my favorite poems by Hughes as it captures the unbowed grandeur of the jaguar, giving representation to his courage and creative imagination as he refuses to be cowed by man’s attempts to domesticate his wild nature.

Jaguar a call for liberty, for bravery in the face of any form of oppression, where an individual refuses to compromise their integrity to suit those in power.

The last line of the poem resonates with me deeply about the emotive and imaginative value of liberty: ‘Over the caged floor, horizons come.’ 

Stanza One.

The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion

Boredom dominates the lives of the animals described in the opening stanza. Even the normally irritating fleas have become a matter of affectionate interest to the apes as their lives are so dull, that even fleas seem deserving of tenderness.

The parrots are so stressed mentally by their unnatural, demeaning existence that they alternate their behaviour, feeling as if they are on fire because perhaps chained; seeking attention in increasingly desperate and pitiful ways. all for a mere ‘nut’ probably bough by the visitor as they enter in to the zoo where wild life has become com modified and freedom irrevocably compromised.

The heavy irony  of the first stanza’s last line, underlines the tiredness of having nothing to do. Once energetic and  bold wild creatures have now become reduced ‘unnatural’  replicas/ mere ciphers of their original states.

Stanza two 

Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil
Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or
Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.
It might be painted on a nursery wall.

The zoo seems a ghost town.

Visitors can hardly tell if the cages are occupied or not. The immobility of the lions and tigers is emphasized by the way the enjambment spills over indolently into the second stanza. One day is very much like another. Wild creatures’ Lives have become reduced to repetition and monotony. This is not pleasure, it is mental and physical inanimacy. Even the boa constrictor looks dead-long dead, resembling a ‘fossil’. Such is the inactivity of the resigned incarcerated animals.The word ’empty’ whilst literally untrue, conveys the irony of ‘dead’ or ’empty’ lives. The spirits of the wild animals have been squashed by their imprisonment.

We join with the visitors in the overriding sensory impression of smell as we encounter the brash pronouncement ‘Stinks of sleepers.’ They are even inseparable or undifferentiated from their straw.

Their lack of animacy or authenticity is emphasizes by the tentative provisionality of their  comparison to a ‘nursery wall.’ Once again, the wildness of the animals on show,  has been reduced to a mere cameo, a nursery picture, never noted for their ferocity or naturalness. Despair seems coupled with ironic complacency.

BUT  then the poem dramatically shifts and we encounter(with the desultory visitors) the JAGUAR!

Stanza Three

But who runs like the rest past these arrives
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes

Until we reach this stanza (figuratively this ‘cage’),the zoo has been a place of silence and lethargy. Sounds have been leisurely and ‘indolent’ aside from the desperate attention seeking ‘strut’ of the poor parrots.

Hughes deliberately disorientates the reader by the quizzical ‘who’ that deliberately elides the spectator with the (new) spectacle; namely the jaguar. The dismissal of  ‘these’ animals reveals how incarceration has reduced the snakes, the lions and tigers to beings regarded as a  mere group of uninteresting objects, deprived of their natural vitality and therefore unjustly now dismissed. Humans crave sensations and excitement and only the untamed, proud and frustrated jaguar can give the visitors what they believe they have ‘bought’ of paid for.

Hughes is revealing the disturbing and cruel commodification of nature for human gratification.

This stanza reveals the extreme power(and pathos) of an animal who refuses to be degraded into a dull spectacle. Here we meet the jaguar who is ‘enraged’ by his situation and who stares out of his confinement with ‘drills’ for ‘eyes’. The eyes of this defiant creature seem penetrating and unbroken. They stare at the human from a non-human perspective, a perspective that unsettles and mesmerizes the watchers. The power is thus still curiously with the wild animal, rather than taken away from him by those who own the zoo.

There is a strong element of trance in this stanza as the world becomes dreamlike and intensely raw. Such an encounter is extraordinary as it is so different from the tired domesticity/resignation of the other creatures seen at the zoo.

The rage of the jaguar is  electrifying and hypnotizes the watchers who held by his wild, natural energy, become as one ‘crowd’ as they stare at his movements.

Stanza Four

On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—
The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—
He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him

All the indolence and silence of the animals in the previous stanzas is swept away by the aliveness of the jaguar :’On a short fuse.‘ This animal is explosive with passion.No compromised quietude for him.

Hughes is quick to allay any fears that this behaviour is just another response to the frustrations of being caged up in a prison/zoo. So we immediately read the denial, ‘Not in boredom’. We then find an intensely  compressed reading of the jaguar’s  behavior and soul

The passion of the jaguar differentiates it from the other creatures trapped at the zoo. It has no fear of extremity. ‘The eye satisfied to be blind in fire.’ There is a sort of baptismal light that makes the jaguar so alive, that its feeling ironically render him blind too.

The jaguar  is so consumed by his passion for his natural habitat and self that he is purposefully blind to his literal situation. Likewise the sheer volume of blood racing to his head as he imagines freedom and a wild ‘elsewhere’, makes him ‘deaf’ to his predicament too.

Mental liberation involves a switching off of the senses in order to preserve the illusion of an outside  ‘beyond’ where he is not trapped behind bars, no matter how safe they may be.

Ironically even though he ‘spins’ away from the bars, he seems to ignore their existence. Hughes is endowing the jaguar with a wild dignity and powerful sense of autonomy. It is the humans who seem a mere, undifferentiated ‘crowd’ all bent on sameness and lumped together as a  group rather than owning any personal response.

It is as if the poet is associating the jaguar with a powerful creativity, an intensely realized agency that refuses to be suppressed by the ostensibly civilizing environment of a zoo.

Stanza Five. 

More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come

The use of enjambment between the fourth and fifth stanzas once again lends emphasis to the fluid, imagined freedom and potency of the jaguar’s mental and physical movement .

The poet personifies the jaguar as a ‘visionary’ whose ‘cell’ has no control over his thinking. This establishes the jaguar as exceptional and unique; a seer whose confinement only intensifies the courageous visions of his mental life.

It is significant that in seeking a metaphorical comparison between the jaguar and the world, the poet(whom we might believe is a visionary) also identifies the jaguar with such a quality or identity.

The grandeur of the jaguar’s liberating ‘stride’ that is compared to a ‘wilderness of freedom,’ is suggestive of awe.We are in the presence of some passionate visionary, an exceptional being who eclipses  the world around him, reducing it to banality through contrast.

If there is even something god like or messianic about the jaguar, then  these ideas are   extended further through the reference to his movement that ‘rolls under the long thrust of his heel’. The expansiveness of the world is something that can be conquered by the jaguar’s movement.

Little wonder that the poem ends on a mystical note, where the jaguar’s untarnished naturalness has the capacity to conquer the limitations of his confinement, and make the ‘horizons come’. In the mind of the jaguar, the reality of the ‘here and now’ has no power to stop him dreaming physically and mentally-even spiritually of an elsewhere, a free and natural ‘there’ where the jaguar can be purely and utterly himself.

A terrific poem that shows the poet’s profound admiration for the natural poetry of the jaguar and his acknowledgement of its visionary, creative and enduring potency.