The personification of the wind with the word ‘stampeding’ gives the wind an almost scary and hurried air because the wind cannot actually stampede because it has no substance and is not living thing. When you think of a stampede the mind immediately conjures up an image of a stampede of animals, running very fast away from or to something and overwhelming. At the end of the poem in the fourth stanza we get the image of the giant fire with people sitting in front of it. I think that these people are terrified of the wind coming and getting them because they sit and they ‘grip our hearts . . . each other’ which implies that they are so scared that they can’t do anything, not even think.
The wind is portrayed also as very vicious and strong as it says that ‘the wind flung a magpie away’. This is just to show how fierce and lethal the wind was, because it is not an easy task to fling a magpie if you aren’t actually made of anything but air. The poet also uses a simile to describe what the wind has done to a gull. It uses the simile that it ‘bent like an iron bar’, which is very difficult; probably nearer impossible for any human or animal to achieve, which shows that the wind is a lot stronger than any human. Another image of the winds strength that is created is that of the man as he ‘scaled along the house-side’ so that the wind doesn’t blow him away because if he didn’t cling on to the wall them it would blow him away, and he says that the wind is so strong that when he looked up at the hills the wind ‘dented’ his eye balls. He then uses a simile to describe what he sees when he looks at the hills. He describes them as tents that are straining their guy ropes with the force of the wind, which gives the reader the images of tents straining in the wind and so shows the reader what the hills looked like in the gale force winds.
The window is also a dominant image because it is mentioned twice in the poem on two separate occasions. I think that the window is mentioned like this because it represents one of the only things that keep the wind at bay and stops it from getting the people inside the house. It says ‘seeing the window tremble’ which shows that, the window as well as the wind is quite strong because when the poet describes the house, he says ‘that any second it would shatter it’ as though it can’t stand up to the strong wind but the window can and so is their beacon of hope. This creates the image of a trembling house with a solid window keeping out the evil of the wind.
The poet makes reference to eyes and seeing a few times as well which also imply that the wind is all seeing. Especially where uses the simile, ‘flexing like the lens of a mad eye’ which is describing the wind in the morning after the horror of the wind at night.
Ted Hughes describes the wind as a very alive being; he personifies it throughout the poem as he does the landscape. Nearly everything in his poem he has personified and described as though it were real such as the stones that ‘cry out’ and the ‘fields quivering’. I think that by personifying everything, the poet has made everything much more real to the reader, and easier to imagine what the wind feels like to everything around it. Making everything seem human and creating so many images in the poem helps the reader imagine they are there with the wind streaming around them.
