Ted Hughes and Rain-Charm for the Duchy

The poet in Ted Hughes's Rain-Charm for the Duchy is both concretely present and allusively obscure. Both the poet's presence and absence in the poem serves to connect the reader with the imagery of water, almost pulling the reader along across the rivers of the Exmoor and Dartmoor. The poem describes a downpour following several months of drought, first published in 1984 with the subtitle A Blessed, Devout Drench for the Christening of His Royal Highness Prince Henry. In Hughes's footnote to the poem, he describes in detail the geography of the two moors and the rivers of the region. This intimate knowledge of the land lives within the poem's powerful, mythical yet concrete imagery.

When the rain begins to fall as the poem begins, the poet is focused on nature beyond temporal human matters. Instead of thinking that the rain would be beneficial for the agricultural harvest, the poet imagines the rivers in the area as living entities. Using animal imagery, he describes the rivers relieved by the new water. "I imagined the two moors" he writes, cleansed and quenched by the rain. As the other person in the car mentions the harvest, the poet "was thinking of joyful sobbings" of the rivers as they filled with water. Here the poet is concretely anchored within his poetry, present within it as a passenger in a car driving through a city.

If it is true that "[i]magination's goal is atonement, the healing of the split between the mind and the rest of our faculties"(1) then Hughes accomplishes a symmetry between the human city and nature, united by the rain. As his imagination carries the reader over the lands that approximately contain the Duchy, he looks outward onto the world from a place that begins within the confined space of one person in a car. Whether he indicates this only literally or as a symbolism for the inner and outer world of the poet himself (or the human soul generally) remains unclear, although the poem's beauty is that it describes a simpler reality unsullied by "hubristic human perspectives and habitual complacencies."(2)