Pikes and Hunting Snake: Analysis

Explore how the poets Ted Hughes and Judith Wright convey their feelings of admiration and fear in their poems. “Pikes” and “Hunting Snake” The poet Ted Hughes has a passion for pike. In ‘Pike, Hughes presents pike with imagery and detailed descriptions. Through his words we see the beauty and malevolence of pike. We also understand his admiration towards them. Similarly, in ‘Hunting Snake’ Judith Wright writes about her encounter with a snake which aroused a sense of fear and awe. She presented her fear through adjectives, and the different rhyme scheme of the last stanzas. In ‘Pike’, the first four stanzas, Hughes describes the pike using a lot of adjectives to make pike sound lively. He contrasts their powerful form and terminal hunting capability with their graceful ability to move through the water. Pike are “perfect”, their bodies are “green tigering the gold” showing they are rare and beautiful. “Tigering” also gives us an image of the violent predator: a tiger, suggesting that pike are powerful like tigers, and are the kings in the lake.
The phrase “Killers from the eggs” may also conclude that pike are born as killers, indicating a sense of fear because they don’t choose to kill, killing is innate. Alongside these predatory images, Hughes also describes them with a “malevolent aged grin”. Here, personification is used, because only humans “grin” pike don’t. This gives them an even more fearsome quality as it implies they think like humans. The word “Malevolent” also shows a sense of evil, but
Hughes contrasts the destructive image by continuing, “they dance on the surface among the files.” The poet may be terrified and stunned by the pike, but at the same time he admires the pikes. The pike moved “over a bed of emerald and horror”. Hughes uses oxymoron, because emerald represents brightness, beauty, and is priceless, but silhouette is dark. The graphic imagery of pike with “hooked clamp and fangs”, “fangs” are normally saying the