This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Hughes poem opens with a very particular house-his house, being under attack by the elements; specifically the wind, a force animated into a savage character bent on destruction and power.The house feels as if it is ‘far out at sea’ because of the actions of the wind.  This place is dangerous and unrecognisable as the wind takes control and violates the space that may have been a ‘home’.

It is this loss of familiarity of  ‘home’ that renders the poem strange, sinister  perhaps,  or even uncanny.

This immediate use of personification for the house and then for the wind,  adds drama and intensity to the poem from the beginning.

Indeed, everything around the poet seems dangerously alive, threatened by the uncompromising force of the relentless attacks by the wind:’Booming hills’ and winds stampeding’.

We are plunged into a world rioting with the excesses of the elements.

This is a poem about conflict and war: between the natural world and those feeble, arrogant  creatures  who try to govern it-namely human beings.  The language reflects this guerilla type situation and we as readers feel carried along by the energy and rapid movement of the poem accentuated by the use of enjambment: ‘the window/ Floundering black astride and blinding wet..’

There almost seems something sexually violating and disturbing about these images.  The familiar has lost all sense of cosy identity.

Interestingly Hughes makes the house a very specific house. It is not just ‘any’ house. For it is ‘this house’ and this use of the adjective gives uneasy particularity to the proximity of the threat.

It is the intimacy and ‘nearness‘ of the poem’s subject matter that gives the poem its power and resonance. The whole poem has an immediate, nightmarish quality that disorientates the reader and gives the wind a predatory character too.

All the movements in this first stanza are loud, agggressive and dramatic. We feel disorientation as we are lost in the rampaging antics of the malevolent wind.

The poet  uses the auditory sense in particular in order to give the wind an intense presence, and to reveal how the familiar environment around the poet has become transformed into monstrousness by the wind’s power.

(to be continued)

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up –
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.