This is an attractive new design for Flowers and Insects, Some Birds and a Pair of Spiders, Ted Hughes’ collection originally published in 1986. It features the same watercolor illustrations by Leonard Baskin, Hughes’ friend and near neighbor in Devon, and adds a sophisticated preface by the nature writer Tim Dee. As Dee explains, the former subtitle has been joined with the title to give the birds and spiders equal billing with the flowers and insects. Each of the sixteen poems records a particular species, usually in movement, flitting, flying, mating, or even just bending in the wind. There are various beauties and ecstasies to be found here, with speculations about nature and her will, and about the intelligence and purpose of her many little denizens. Hughes’ extravagant metaphors, more than metaphors, are metamorphoses: as carefully as he illustrates the actual forms of life, each of them is ready to be turned into something else, to live again, often in human form, and so present us back to ourselves having first appeared as something utterly different from us.
The speaker carries his authority in his strident rhythm. The first poem, “Narcissi,” begins thus:
The Narcissi shiver their stars
In the green-gold wind of evening sunglare.
Their happiness is weightless.
Their merriment is ghostly.
There is a strong hint of Gerard Manley Hopkins in the consonance of “green-gold wind” and “sunglare,” carried forward into “weightless” and “ghostly,” but the forceful parallelism of the third and fourth lines, anything but weightless or ghostly, asserts a different kind of rhetorical confidence. Soon the narcissi are transformed into the “laughing children / From the 1918 Armistice,” and later to “Ghost-lights in the orchard.” They are the dead, now, but they lived for a time in a new bloom of peace. The next poem, “A Violet at Lough Aughrisburg,” gives us a rather diffuse set of images by a lake in Ireland: the tide and the cliffs, the furnace of a sunset, an apple tree, a bronze bullock, milk and blood. The scene is somehow all contained in something it contains, as the flower is imagined as an amulet which “holds it all, a moment, / In a rinsed globe of light.” “Brambles,” a fanciful work, begins with jackdaws and “jackdawdom,” the complicated social arrangements of these birds, and then turns casually to consider the brambles, which seem to grow and grope with intelligent life. The cells of bird, plant, and man alike, Hughes decides, are themselves “mute” and unaware of the form they make up, but each contains a “godlike syntax and vocabulary.” They follow their orders.
The scientific view will return, but each living thing will seem to transcend its nature. The ecstatic mayflies of “Saint’s Island,” who in the morning are “Poetic electrons” become like whirling dervishes “Touched by God / Drunk with God.” These visions, rendered in the first person plural, come from a memory of sitting in a boat on a Lough which floats “anchored in the mirror” on a “skin of shivers.” The poem is dedicated to the Irish painter Barrie Cooke, who presumably shared in all this, but it still records the speaker’s particular observations of the rising mayflies: “(One time I found one had failed. / It wallowed in the oil of light.)” The next poem, “Where I Sit Writing My Letter,” a bit of a dud, is about some excited baby starlings which distract him as he hunches over a desk, one is not sure where exactly. It has an awkward contraction (“Probably the weird aniseed-corpse-odour / Of the hawthorn flower’s disturbed them,”) and a jangling assonance when the birds rush off “Leaving me fevered, and addled.” The activity and his response seem ginned up, but a startling line on the starlings follows: “They can’t believe their wings.”
Towards the end, we have the extraordinarily and intimately detailed “Eclipse.” As Dee notes in his preface, it is “a work of poetic natural history,” with fewer imaginative excursions than elsewhere in the collection. Through a magnifying glass trained on the lower left corner of a window the speaker studies a spider’s
trophy den of uniforms, reds, greens,
Yellow-striped and detached wing-frails, last year’s
Leavings, parched a winter, scentless—heads,
Bodices, corsets, leg-shells, a crumble of shards
In a museum of dust and neglect.
Wing-frails! The speaker seems to have magnified his hearing as well as his sight. The spider, immediately clocked as a female, finds a mate and locks forelegs with him, then they mate. The description is clinical: “I saw her fitting, with accurate whisker-fine feet, / Blobs of glue to the fibres.” The spiders stay resolutely spiderlike; in fact they are the most spidery spiders one has ever seen. Their transformation comes only when they have gone off somewhere in the recesses of the window frame, beyond his view. Now, he imagines, they are like human lovers, with arms as well as legs:
They are hidden
Probably together in the fusty dark,
Holding forearms, listening to the rain, rejoicing
As the sun’s edge, behind the clouds,
Comes clear of our shadow.
Flowers and insects, some birds and a pair of spiders. The names of the species may evoke myths and dreams, particular places and times of day, but the common nouns have a pleasant plainness. They are ready to be detailed as what they are, but they will be remembered as anything the poet can imagine, such is the emphatic force of this verse. An hour spent with this collection is a reminder of how to profit from giving attention to whatever fascinates.
POETRY
Flowers and Insects, Some Birds and a Pair of Spiders
By Ted Hughes
Faber & Faber
September 8, 2026 (originally published 1986)
