The Warm and the Cold however, has three verses of twelve lines, then a finishing part where seven lines are spaced out to give a slowing down effect.
This poem also has a recognisable effect where nearly every other line is a simile.
E.g.
But the trout is in its hole
Like a chuckle in a sleeper.
The hare strays down the highway
Like a root going deeper.
The snail is dry in the outhouse
Like a seed in sunflower.
The owl is pale on the gatepost
Like a clock on its tower.
The language of each poem is also very different. Work and Play has an almost sarcastic view, mocking the people featured in it.
E.g.
Nude as tomatoes
With sand in their creases
To cringe in the sparkle of rollers and screech.
The cynicism in the poem makes it enjoyable to read, giving you a different view of sunbathers on a beach. Not tanned and beautiful, but ugly, burnt raw.
However, The Warm and the Cold is a deep, emotional poem referring to the beauty of different types of animals and habitats.
Work and Play’s main subject is the swallow, but also projects a deeper meaning that gets the reader thinking about the effect of humans on the countryside.
Ted Hughes describes the sunbathers as ‘roasting and basting’ in the sun and mosquitoes as ‘man-eating flies, jab electric shock needles’ into the helpless day-trippers. This sentence being a very sarcastic comment.
Hughes comments on the swallow throughout the poem, projecting her as a beautiful ‘boomerang of rejoicing shadow’.
The Warm and the Cold however has a varying subject, starting with night arriving, and the animals away in their different homes, the trout in its hole, and the badger in its bedding. Then the poem continues to mention different places an animal might be in the night, the main animals mentioned being fish, birds or insects.
Neither poems rhyme exactly, but The Warm and the Cold has lines in its stanzas like:
But the carp is in its depth
Like a planet in its heaven
And the badger in its bedding
Like a loaf in the oven.
This stanza, as most of the poems verses, has words that very nearly rhyme with each other, but not quite. I think this gives uniqueness to the poem, making it different from others that rhyme everything exactly.
Each poem follows a pattern, which alters at the end of the piece.
E.g.
The stanzas in The Warm and the Cold always begin with something related to freezing.
E.g.
Freezing dusk is closing
Freezing dusk has tightened
Moonlight freezes the shaggy world.
Such a frost (this last couple of lines, altering the pattern of a four or five lined beginning of each stanza)
The work I have done on the two poems by Ted Hughes has made me realise his appreciation for wildlife and the countryside. He seems to despise all things materialistic especially in Work and Play, when he mocks the sunbathers, wanting to be tanned and attractive, but not realising they are ugly and red, a blotch on the landscape of golden sand and blue waters, their cars metal and rusty on the black road, slicing through the natural, precious countryside, choking it with fumes.
Hughes seems almost angry towards everything that ruins the landscape and the habitats of many species. The poems could be used to advertise Greenpeace, they are so emotional!
Isobel Manley