"Wuthering Heights" & "Wind" Jacks

Setting

The setting in WH arguably appears to be an extended metaphor for the speaker’s mindscape, projected onto nature.

Using the title of the poem as a contextual indication, this mindscape would appear to be one that fears losing themself to a relationship. For example, the ‘roots’ of the heather may be a metaphor for the historical groundwork that provides the poem its implicit meaning. 

This could be seen through a pattern of similes

• The horizons dissolve and dissolve like a series of promises

• The wind pours by like destiny, bending everything in one direction

Gothic Imagery

Graveyard metaphor: the air remembers people and moans (in despair), repetition of ‘black stone’ for gravestone. Could be a manifestation of the speaker feeling isolated from others.

Crossing the Water (1971)

• Declarative grammatical mood — no excitement or intrigue

• Enjambment — talkative

• Unexperimental — unclear rhyme scheme, rigid 9-line stanzas

• Colour motif — orange — contrasts the typical vivid red — mundanity?

• Eyes of the sheep

• Confessionalism

• Absurdism

• Gothic imagery — graveyard

• Emily Bronte’s Victorian novel about a toxic relationship in which Heathcliff emotionally abuses his wife; set on the Yorkshire moors

• Plath wrote this poem while Hughes and herself were living in Hughes’ parents’ house as newlyweds, on the same moors

“In many instances, it is nature who personifies Plath”

Setting

‘This house has been far out at sea all night.’

• Demonstrative pronoun 

• Far out at sea = in a dangerous place = arguing

• All night

• House is a domestic metaphor for the relationship

Loud auditory imagery of the storm may replicate shouting in an argument eg the onomatopoeic verbs ‘crashing’ and ‘booming’

Anthropomorphised Metaphors

The speaker repeatedly projects human structures and forms onto differing aspects of nature. 

• Lightning compared to ‘the lens of a mad eye’ – perhaps like the phrase ‘staring daggers’

• Hills = tents. Symbol of how the relationship is flimsy and breakable any second. 

Symbol of a fire

Sitting around a fire has often been a symbol of comfort in media; however in this case it is a place of stagnant tension. May symbolise the passivity that the people in the relationship maintain despite a ‘fire blazing’ before them, despite ‘the roots’ of the house moving, despite the house threatening to crash down.

The Hawk in the Rain (1957)

• Enjambment — disarray?

• Quatrains

• Motif of violence

• Eyes

• Romanticism — finding the sublime in nature

This was written amidst his relationship with Plath, which was known to be turbulent and fast – like a storm. Hughes’ guilt regarding this relationship was apparent in his work Birthday Letters (1998), and he is also known to have guarded and destroyed some of Plath’s work, had control over posthumous publishing, and refused (until Birthday Letters) to speak of their marriage publicly. This all indicates his guilt and perhaps troubles regarding romance (with Plath in this case) and control. 

“The wind serves as a metaphor for stormy relationships, undoubtedly Hughes’ own.”

The wind “thwarts any human attempt to ‘experience’ its awesome force.”

• Both again project the poets’ inner world onto a landscape

• Both attempt to find sublimity within nature — Hughes is successful while Plath is not

• Both could be seen as metaphors for relationships and perhaps reveals their differing perspectives to their status as newlyweds