By anyone’s standards, Jaguar and Second Glance at a Jaguar are poetic curiosities. It is rare that a poet returns to a subject - with the obvious exception of love poemss - and rarer still that the second poem should differ so dramatically from the first. When we consider the circumstances under which both poems were written, however, this distinction becomes less surprising. There is a decade between the writing of the first poem and the second – a decade that was arguably among the most difficult of Hughes’ life. In the space of those ten years, his marriage to Plath fell apart, mainly due to his affair with Assia Wevill, for whom he ultimately left his wife in 1962. Plath committed suicide a year later by gassing herself in her apartment. As could be expected, her death had a profound effect on Hughes and on his poetry. For almost three years after her death, Hughes did not write a single piece of poetry. And, when he was finally able to break through whatever block existed, his work was profoundly changed. There is a clear distinction between the poetry of Lupercal and Hawk in the Rain and the poetry of Wodwo, just as there is a difference in perspective of the Hughes who wrote the former and the Hughes who wrote the latter.

The Jaguar and Second Glance at a Jaguar are extraordinarily useful pieces when it comes to demonstrating this change in Hughes. As mentioned in the above paragraph, they are written on the same subject, yet treat it in startlingly different ways. In many respects, the second could be read as an alteration of or retraction of the first. In the broadest terms, they both appear to be Hughes’ meditation on a caged jaguar pacing up and down his cage in a zoo. They both seem to be an attempt to get to grips with what that jaguar embodies and with how he deals with his situation. Nonetheless, they reach different conclusions on all those points. In the course of this essay, I will attempt to catalogue the similarities and differences between these two poems, as well as demonstrate how they can be seen as characteristic of different phases of Hughes’ poetry.

Firstly, the imagery used in both poems to describe the animal is similar. One of the predominant associations of the jaguar is with fire. In The Jaguar, Hughes speaks of him being “on a short, fierce fuse” and being “blind in fire”. In Second Glance at a Jaguar, he carries “his head like a brazier of spilling embers”. He is also connected with religion and ritual in both pieces. The Jaguar compares him to a “visionary”, while Second Glance at a Jaguar speaks about him “muttering some mantrah (sic)” and “going like a prayerwheel”.

Nonetheless, the charge carried by the imagery within each poem is strikingly different. The fire in the first poem is a positive, creative force. It blinds him to his captivity and allows him to transcend the limits of his cage. Like the fire in Blake’s The Tiger, on which this poem is clearly patterned, it is a fire that cannot be grasped or tamed by humans. It is a fire that burns in “distant deeps and skies”, and that allows the animal escape through it to them. In the second poem, however, this fire has burnt to “embers”. It is on the verge of being extinguished for good. Moreover, these embers are found in “a brazier”, which suggests they have been contained and put to the use of humans. To paraphrase Blake, human hands have dared to seize this fire, and to harness it for their purposes. Consequently, it is no longer the liberating, primal force that it once was for the jaguar.

The same conclusion has to be drawn from the other set of imagery which I mentioned in an earlier paragraph - namely, the religious and ritualistic images. In The Jaguar, the implied comparison of the animal with a “visionary” and “his cell” furthers the idea of transcendence. A visionary is able to look beyond the boundaries of space and time, and to rise above any place in which s\he might find him\herself. Similarly, the jaguar is able to reach the “horizons”, despite the bars. Admittedly, it could be argued that Buddhist mantras and prayer wheels have the same purpose. They are used to focus the mind and reach another plane of consciousness. However, they are merely the instruments by which higher awareness is reached. In themselves, they are also repetitive and circular. A mantra will keep returning to the same phrase, and a prayer wheel will return to the same point again and again. There is no escape from their cycle, in the same way there is no escape for the jaguar from the cycle of pacing his cage. Because of this, he can never reach the “horizons” or the “wildernesses” of the first poem.

Moving momentarily away from a discussion of the imagery in the poem, I would like to look at what might seem to be a minor detail in both poems, yet captures the crux of the distinction between them. It is a clear indication of Hughes’ class as a poet, that even the smallest touches are tremendously significant and well-chosen. In the first, “the world rolls under the long thrust of (the jaguar’s) heel”. Obviously, this suggests an unstoppable, uninterrupted, linear motion. It suggests that the jaguar is in control of his own world, and that he cannot be stopped by anybody or anything from moving across it. In the second, however, the jaguar swivels “the ball of his heel on the polished spot”. Even as the circular motion is captured neatly in a word like “ball”, the fact that the spot on which the jaguar pivots is “polished” suggests that he has paced that precise track and turned in that precise spot many times in the past. Like the mantra or the prayer wheel, he keeps coming back to the same place. He can never escape his cage.

The personification of the jaguar confirms this fundamental difference between the two texts. Having already discussed the implications of comparing him to a visionary, we need to consider how he is personified in Second Glance at a Jaguar. The two, salient examples are the jaguar as “a thick Aztec disemboweller” and as a “Gangster” with a “blackjack tail” seeking “revenge”. In the first poem, the rage and violence are means of freedom for the jaguar. He cannot see the bars if he is “blind in fire”, nor hear the people if he is deafened “by the bang of blood in the brain”. In the second, however, the jaguar’s violent urges are simply shown to be brutal and vengeful. There is nothing liberating about them. In fact, they show the extent to which he has internalised the cruelty of life in a zoo.

Similarly, in Second Glance at a Jaguar, we can see the cage has also had a profound effect on the animal. The poem insists repeatedly that something essential in the jaguar has been and is being destroyed by his captivity. “His head is like the worn down stump of another whole jaguar”, according to Hughes, and he is “trying to grind some square socket between his hind legs round”. It is like he can no longer be a real jaguar in his situation. Pacing the cage grinds him down to “heavy ovals”. He has to change himself to survive. He has been fundamentally altered by being in captivity in a way the jaguar of the first poem has not been. That jaguar refuses to acknowledge his cage, so cannot be worn down by it.

Moving on from a discussion of the imagery, it is worthwhile considering the stylistic and structural aspects of the poems. Firstly, The Jaguar consists of five quatrains with a relatively simple rhyme scheme. That is, the first four stanzas can be described by abba, while the last changes it to cdcd. The majority of these rhymes are imperfect - like “coil” and “wall” or “fire” and “ear” - but there are also several, perfect ones - like “boredom” and “him” or “strut” and “nut”. They also tend to be masculine. As is evident from this, it is a very exact, very controlled form that initially seems an inappropriate or ironic choice given the poem’s focus on liberation from confines and structures.

However, Hughes is an incredibly skilled and thoughtful poet, and it is difficult to believe he would choose a form simply to demonstrate or show off his mastery of rhyme and structure, as the early French poets did. He must have had a reason for framing The Jaguar in this way. To understand why, we need to consider how Hughes viewed poetry. As he remarks in an interview which I shall discuss in more depth later, he believes his poems about jaguars “do have real summoning force”(Faas, 199). He sees them as means of invoking “jaguar-like elementals”(Faas, 199). If so, the structure, which is evocative of a cage in its regularity and rigidity for four quatrains, becomes a means for Hughes of imprisoning these “elementals” within the poem. The fact that the rhyme scheme changes for the last quatrain is immensely significant, therefore, suggesting the “elementals” have transcended and altered the structure that confines them. The same effect of breaking free or of wanting to break free is achieved very differently in the second piece.

That said, standing in stark contrast to the careful, precise structure of the first one, Second Glance at a Jaguar is written in free verse. There is no rhyme, but there is an insistent, almost too fast rhythm that governs the piece. The number of verbs in the piece, especially in the present continuous tense or in the present participial form, is also remarkable. In the space of the relatively short poem, there are thirty-seven or so verbs, most of them clustered in the latter half of the poem. As a result, when the poem is read, it feels like it is rushing ahead too fast for the reader to keep up with it, as if it is also wanting to break the confines of its lines.

Adding to the claustrophobic power of the second poem is the pure, concentrated focus on the jaguar. There is no sense of the people watching him, or of the other animals in the zoo. From the first line to the last, Hughes’ concentration on the jaguar’s pacing is absolute. On the contrary, the focus in the first poem is slightly diffuse. The technique Hughes employs is remarkably cinematographic in that respect. Even though the poem ends with the jaguar, it moves through describing the other animals and the visitors to the zoo before pausing on the jaguar’s cage. The jaguar exists in contrast to the other animals, who have been completely tamed and humanised, and to the people, who are standing and staring almost mindlessly. This is unlike the second poem, where the jaguar seems to be completely self-absorbed and self-sufficient.

So far, we have considered the poems as being simply about a caged jaguar and about the effects of captivity upon him. Such a reading agrees with Hughes’ primary explanation of the two poems, yet, in the interview mentioned in earlier paragraphs, the poet provides other interpretations that take them further:

I prefer to think of them as first, descriptions of a jaguar, second . . . invocations of the goddess, third . . . invocations of a jaguar-like body of elemental force. . . .

A jaguar after all can be received in several, different aspects. . . he is a beautiful, powerful nature spirit, he is a homicidal maniac, he is a supercharged piece of machinery, he is a symbol of man’s baser nature shoved down to the id and growing cannibal murderous with deprivation. (Faas, 199)

It is interesting that Hughes makes no distinction between the jaguar of the first poem and the jaguar of the second. Applying his comments to the poem, they can be read as
invocations to two aspects of a single spirit, to two faces of the goddess. The pure violence and rage embodied by the jaguar (or jaguar-spirit, as Hughes insists) can be creative or it can be destructive. Neither of those forces can be privileged above the other, because they are both necessary parts of a necessarily complex whole.

Hughes goes on to argue in the same interview that “it is the reader’s own nature that selects” (Faas, 199) whether the jaguar-spirit brings with it creativity and freedom or destruction and degradation. To apply it more precisely, the reader’s nature determines whether the jaguar-spirit comes as it does in the first poem or the second. He remarks that the “tradition is, that energy of this sort once invoked will destroy an impure nature and serve a pure one” (Faas, 199). Again, to draw conclusions from the poem, a pure nature will use violence and rage as positive, liberating forces to battle against the confinement and sterility of life. An impure one will use those forces to destroy and hurt both others and themself.

As both the preceding discussion and the interview suggests, the poems are also invocations to the “cannibal murderous” part of ourselves that we have “shoved down to the id”. In Jungian terms, they are about the necessity of raising our personal Shadow into consciousness. Jacobi describes this Shadow succinctly when he refers to it as “our dark side, the inborn collective predisposition which we reject for ethical, aesthetic or other reasons and repress because it is in opposition to our conscious principles” (110). Applying this principle to the poem, it is not hard to see the id as the cage in which the jaguar of our more primitive and violent instincts prowls. Therefore, the two poems seem to describe different aspects of the same phenomenon of repression. The first poem suggests the liberation provided by embracing violence and rage as positive forces, while the second suggests the degradation of self that arises from repressing them and viewing them as solely negative. When read in this light, the poems are complementary, rather than contradictory, pieces.

Having said that, Hughes’ reading of his own poetry is esoteric, just as his view of the world tended towards the mystical and occultic. He believes in the power of poetry to invoke spirits. He practises his literature as a kind of a magic, a means of making things happen as he wanted them to happen. (Skea) He was also known to call up and consult spirits by other means, as in the Pan incidents described in his Ouija and Plath’s earlier poem by the same name. Nonetheless, I have difficulty accepting his view of these two pieces as incantations designed to invoke actual goddesses or real, animal spirits. I believe that is an overstatement of what the poems achieve, of what literature can achieve, preferring the more psychological interpretation of the pieces above the mystical. In other words, poems evoke, but they cannot invoke.

In his brief biography of Ted Hughes, Shaw agrees with this psychoanalytical view of Hughes’ work:

Hughes’s enterprise is to examine the isolated and precarious position of man in nature and man’s chances of overcoming his alienation from the world around him. In pursuit of these interests, Hughes focuses frequently (and often brilliantly) upon animals. Animals participate in the cycles of nature from which man has grown progressively distant, as his instincts have been subdued by his rational faculties and by the conventions of civilization. To see the world as an animal does would be to recover a vision forfeited in the dawn of civilization, to gain access to a power and a wholeness which men, in exchange for other considerations, have agreed to forego. (261)

Reading Hughes’ poetry in this light provides a cogent counterargument to critics who insist that his work focuses too much on animals and ignores human issues. It suggests that his work is not about only about nature, but about human nature. Both the jaguar poems, despite their differences, have at their heart the same concern for the way humans have repressed the other, less palatable side of their natures, as well as the same ecological concern for the effects zoos have on animals.

Having examined similarities and differences within the poems, we must turn our attention to how they are representative of different stages of Hughes’ poetry or how they can be seen as characteristic of different parts of the Hughes’ canon. As I have already stated in the opening paragraphs, I believe a clear line can be drawn between the poetry of Hawk in the Rain or Lupercal, and that of Wodwo. I also believe it is more profitable to see those two stages as both a continuum and a contrast, rather than to attempt to reconcile them in an effort to speak of characteristically Hughesian poetry. In the remainder of the essay, I shall attempt to draw out points of similarity and contrast between the two stages.

Beginning with the question of style, in the article cited above, Shaw comments that “Hughes’s progress as a poet has been marked more by modifications of style than of theme. Rather than continually seeking out new objects of attention he has sought . . . to approach ever more closely those things which enthralled his youthful imagination”(261). I have already discussed the profound difference in style between The Jaguar and Second Glance at a Jaguar, but I am not sure to what extent the discussion can be extended to encompass the remainder of his poetry. Hughes has always had a distinctively muscular, physical style which can be seen in the majority of his work. Even looking directly at The Jaguar, the penultimate stanza is easily comparable to the tight, claustrophobic poetry of Second Glance at a Jaguar, so I believe it is inaccurate to say that his style has changed so profoundly.

However, if I were to make a case for a stylistic shift between the two phases of Hughes’ poetry, I would probably base it on the work Ted Hughes did during the three year hiatus between publishing Lupercal and starting work on Wodwo. That is, he seems to have devoted a great deal of that time to editing and compiling his late wife’s work, and it shows in his own writing. For example, the concentration of simile and metaphor in Second Glance at a Jaguar and other Wodwo poems is very reminiscent of a Plath poem, as is the great variety of this imagery and the way Hughes constantly shifts between it. The jaguar is a disemboweller, a butterfly, a prayer-wheel, a brazier and a gangster in the space of the poem - most of lines contain a metaphor or a simile of some sort. In The Jaguar and other poetry dating from that period, metaphor and simile is far less frequently used. Plath’s debt to Hughes has been discussed a great deal - often by Hughes himself - but his latter work echoes and is inspired by hers in a number of ways.

Nonetheless, thematically, Shaw is absolutely right in remarking that Hughes’ interests have remained relatively constant throughout his career. Jaguar and Second Glance at a Jaguar, as I have discussed, seem to be dealing with the same phenomena, seem to be different attempts to explain or to understand the same issues. To draw out their main ones, they include ecological issues, like the plight of animals in zoos; psychological notions, like the need to raise the Shadow into consciousness; and mystical or mythological beliefs, like his stated invocation of the jaguar-spirit within this poem. These themes are prevalent to a greater or lesser degree in most of Ted Hughes’ poems, especially in his animal poetry.

Another characteristic of his poetry that has remained constant is the refusal to soften or to sentimentalise nature. In both of his jaguar poems, he makes no attempt to disguise its rage and latent violence. At no point does either poem become about aesthetic appreciation of the animal’s beauty, forgetting the fangs, claws or murderous instincts beneath the skin. As a result, both poems have been accused of celebrating violence. Hughes vehemently rejects this claim in the same interview as cited earlier:

When Christianity kicked the devil out of Job what they actually kicked out was Nature . . . and Nature became the devil. . . . Where I conjured up a jaguar, they smelt a stormtrooper. Where I saw elementals and forces of nature, they saw motorcyclists with machine guns on the handbars. (Faas. 199, 201)

As this suggests, he sees death, violence and rage as a natural and necessary part of nature. They are not evil forces in and of themselves. They are only evil because of how humans have abused them. And his poetry is an attempt to redress the balance, to promote them as positive and important forces.

In the same way, there has always been a strange tension in his poems between the precise, detailed nature of his descriptions and the mystical, supernatural effect that he is trying to achieve through him. This emerges more strongly in Second Glance at a Jaguar where he captures in exact terms the way the jaguar paces, the way he carries his head, the way he lashes his tail. Despite the often metaphorical character of the descriptions, they manage to be very precise and very naturalistic. If someone had never seen a jaguar, they could draw one from this poem. Nonetheless, despite this biologist precision, Hughes insists that this poem be read as an invocation to the jaguar-spirit or to the goddess nature. This unease between the scientific and occultic aspects of his subject can be found in the vast majority of his poetry.

Nevertheless, even as his style and theme remained consistent, the mood and tone of his poems underwent a dramatic change between Hawk in the Rain or Lupercal and Wodwo. It is a difficult alteration to qualify or to quantify, but the entire feeling of his latter body of work is profoundly different to that of his earlier. Where his earlier work is cognisant of the violence and implacability of life, it seldom seems to be bleak or hopeless. On the contrary, there is a great sense of emptiness, futility and despair especially in a collection like Wodwo. This distinction emerges neatly in The Jaguar and Second Glance at a Jaguar. As already mentioned, the former ends on a remarkably positive, hopeful note. The jaguar might be caged, but he has freedom in spite of it. The latter, on the contrary, is completely negative in its message. The jaguar can never escape his cage, can never achieve freedom and will ultimately be defeated and worn down by his captivity. It is a subtle distinction, but a vitally important one to understanding the way Hughes changed in the space between Lupercal and Wodwo.

Consequently, as I said, the best way to read Hughes’ poetry is in terms of continuation and contrast. As his traumatic experiences impacted upon and transformed him, they also transformed his poetry in profound ways. This change is particularly evident in poems like The Jaguar and Second Glance at a Jaguar, which deal with the same subject and themes in different ways and to strikingly different ends. To paraphrase Hughes’ own statement, the invocation - or the evocation - of a jaguar depends on the nature of the subject calling it. And, after Plath’s death in 1963, the subject had been changed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Blake, William. “The Tiger”. Seasons Come to Pass: A Poetry Anthology for South African Students. ed. Es’kia Mphahlele and Helen Moffett. Cape Town: Oxford UP. (1994)

Faas, Ekbert. Ted Hughes: The Unaccomodated Universe. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow. (1980)

Hughes, Ted. “Ouija”. Birthday Letters. London: Faber and Faber. (1998)

“Second Glance at a Jaguar”. Ted Hughes: New Selected Poems. 1957- 1994. London: Faber and Faber. (1995)

“The Jaguar”. Ted Hughes: New Selected Poems. 1957-1994. London: Faber and Faber. (1995)

Jacobi, Jolande. The Psychology of C. G. Jung. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1942.

Plath, Sylvia. “Ouija”. The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. ed. Ted Hughes. London: Faber and Faber. (1981)

Shaw, Robert. “Ted Hughes”. Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol 40. Poets of Great Britain and Ireland since 1960. Part 1: A-L. ed. Vincent B. Sherry Jr. Detroit: Gale Research. (1985)

Skea, Ann. "Poetry and Magic". (2000) http://ann.skea.com/PoetMag.htm (28 April 2002)