A Clear Explanation of Ted Hughes’ ‘Relic’
Ted Hughes was one of the most prominent British poets of the 20th century. His first poetry volume, The Hawk in the Rain, published in 1957, affirmed him as a fresh voice on the literary scene, the poet impressing his readers with the rawness of his lyrics. ‘Relic’ was included in his second volume, Lupercal, published in 1960. It followed the same lucidity in expression whilst approaching themes like nature, the cycle of life, violence, and power. Hughes was married to poet Sylvia Plath, and during their short and troubled marriage, they produced some very powerful pieces of poetry.
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“I found this jawbone at the sea's edge:
There, crabs, dogfish, broken by the breakers”
Hughes places us right in the middle of a scene in this poem: he (or the speaker) is walking along the coast, and comes across the jawbone of a long dead sea creature. He notices that all around him, the sea has spat out fragments of bones and pieces of animals that once were alive and swimming there. He thinks about how ‘cold’ the depths of the ocean are - it is a brutal, harsh environment, a kind of fish-eat-fish world where no friendship or loyalty exists.
Interestingly for Hughes, the jawbone he’s looking at is the very part of a fish which would have eaten other fishes - but it is now a ‘relic’,
TASK: Think about these definitions of the word ‘relic’, and explain how each relates to the poem:
noun
an object surviving from an earlier time, especially one of historical interest.
"a museum of railway relics"a part of a deceased holy person's body or belongings kept as an object of reverence.
"miracles wrought by the relics of St Stephen"a person or thing that has survived from an earlier time but is now outmoded.
"the supermodel has become an embarrassing relic from the early 1990s"
Source: Oxford Languages
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