’THE SEVEN SORROWS’’ by Ted Hughes is a poem about the seven
sorrows of the autumn season. Autumn is usually known as the season of fall and
it marks the transition from summer to winter. The arrival of the night becomes
noticeably earlier, so the poet calls it as the first sorrow, “is the slow
goodbye of the garden who stands so long in the evening.” He begins the poem
with the imagery of nature and gradually moves on to death. Most of Hughes’
poetry abound in nature imagery in general and animal imagery in particular.
“The sun who gathers the minute of evening’’ relates to the
last phase of life. The evening and the sun setting usually has connotation to
old age and death, though the sun does not signify death. It is the minute of
the evening which refer to the last stages of man’s life, the last moments when
everything is packed up. Death is a natural and inevitable sorrow which exists
in everyman’s life.
The sixth sorrow being the fox’s sorrow, whose pleas ae just
ignored and only fall on deaf ears. This precisely reflects the callousness and
indifference shown by people to other‘s suffering as is true of the proverb
“when you cry, you cry alone.”
The last stanza denoting the seventh sorrow as the “slow
goodbye of the force with its wrinkles”, relates to the old age when the
wrinkled face looks out of the window, searching for traces of joy, the joy
that evaded him during his entire life.
The mortality of man and the ephemeral quality of life are
reflected in the last lines. The passing of
a year is realised by the change of seasons. The four seasons have
different characteristics and cause changes in the world. The poet relates the
change of seasons with the life of man
The poet poignantly captures the various images of the onset
of autumn which brings about changes all around. In the concluding part, the
poet ties it all to human beings and explains how the change of seasons affects
their lives. Growing old with the passage of time is one such instance.
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