football at slack

the text of the poem is on page 157 of your books

some introductory thoughts on what the poem is about

Sport, whilst it is such an important aspect of life and culture, has not always been a popular topic with poets.  Hughes's football poem is striking and powerful, recalling the traditional heritage of football in England as a game for working men, playing in amateur clubs, rather than today's massively lucrative professional game encompassing male and female teams.  

Interestingly, Ted Hughes's father, William Hughes, was a fine amateur footballer, and was, in the words of Ted Hughes's biographer, Professor Sir Jonathan Bate, 'always a great footballer, could have been a professional' (from Ted Hughes The Unauthorised Life, by Jonathan Bate, 2015, page 33).  This poem and its celebration of the local game was inspired by the poet's father.

You may wish to think about how Hughes characterises football as a sport in this poem.  It's presented as a man's game, often associated with tough matches and bad weather - an interesting characterisation of what leisure time was like for men in traditional working roles in England as recently as the late 1970s. 

This poem was published in 1979, in a volume of poems called Remains of Elmet *.  This collection focused on the Calder Valley (the name Elmet was the ancient name of a Celtic kingdom in this part of what is now West Yorkshire), the place where Ted Hughes's poetic consciousness was formed.

Slack * is a place-name, of a tiny settlement near to the town of Hebden Bridge.  The topography is central to this poem, as Hughes makes the most of setting the football game in this characteristic landscape of steep hills and windswept moorlands.  See the YouTube video above, featuring common land in the village, giving you a good idea of the atmosphere of this location.

The setting is a characteristically tough one, and open to the massive natural forces of the weather: 'between plunging valleys' in which 'winds from fiery holes in heaven / Piled the hills darkening around them / To awe them'.  These are strong, threatening natural forces, similar to those vividly characterised in the poem Wind.

some questions to consider

• A number of Ted Hughes's poems in this selection use the present tense to create vivid description.  This poem, contrastingly, uses the simple past tense throughout: what's the effect of this choice on the story-telling and the poem's overall effect?

• This poem uses plenty of alliteration and assonance: what's the effect of these aural effects in the first stanza of the poem?

• The rhythm in these stanzas is dynamic and varied: what might that suggest as you listen to the poem?

• Hughes chooses to structure his stanzas in a fairly free form: what are the main effects of this choice?

• Why do you think Hughes chooses to repeat the phrase 'blown ball'?

• What do you imagine when you hear the phrase 'rubbery men' in stanza 3?

• Hughes describes the football kit as 'bunting colours' and its wearers as 'merry-coloured men' - this contrasts with the with the wind and rain of the match-day: what colours does Hughes evoke as he describes the bad weather?

• What do you understand by the phrases 'glare light', 'mad oils' and 'threw glooms'?  Note the effect of these phrases on your imagination - which phrases make things clear to you, and which are less clear?

• Hughes shows off his descriptive powers in writing about the rain-shower in stanza 5: what's your favourite item of description in this verse, and why do you like it?

• West Yorkshire rain, as in the poem Wind, seems to suggest images of the sea to Hughes: what do you imagine when he writes of the 'humped world' in stanza 6?  And why does Hughes specifically name the Atlantic in this verse?

• Note down all the verbs Hughes uses to describe the movements of the players and their ball: what's the overall effect of this lively and adventurous description?  What's your favourite verb describing play, and why do you like it?

• 'And the goalie flew horizontal' - this is really clear, but does this sort of simple language combine well with the more elaborate lines?  What do you think?

• A 'holocaust' means literally the cause of a huge slaughter or destruction through fire.  The word today is normally used to denote the mass murder of Europe's Jewish people by the fascist regimes of the 1940s, so it's impossible to use the word in its general sense in a poem without thinking of the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust or Shoah.  Nevertheless, Hughes is using the word here in a general, not historical, sense to indicate the sun emerging from clouds following the rain-shower.  Notice that this seems a rather ambiguous emergence of the sun, as it comes out 'to watch them' - maybe this phrase suggests some sort of surveillance rather than the positive, simple action of watching the match?

• What poems do you know on the subject of sport and team-games?  Do let us know if you have a favourite which isn't on our list below.

some creative writing to help you understand the poem more deeply

• Why not try writing your own poem on the experience of watching a lively team-game?  For example, you could try the subject of a football game played by female or young players.  Or you could try writing writing about a football game played by two famous teams.

some other lovely poems in English about football and related topics

Ode on a distant Prospect of Eton College * by Thomas Gray

Is My Team Ploughing * by A.E. Housman

Sporty People * by Wendy Cope

Here's an interesting short article entitled Five of the Best Poems about Football * by Dr Oliver Tearle, a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University, England.

And, from the USA, a selection of poems about American football *.

An interesting analysis * of poems in the volume The Remains of Elmet

photo

Football match at Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, England - photo by James Harding.