Ted Hughes is as alien as Shakespeare

Damn I'm old

Here is a poem by Ted Hughes (1930-1998).

Telegraph Wires
Take telegraph wires, a lonely moor,
And fit them together. The thing comes alive in your ear.
Towns whisper to towns over the heather.
But the wires cannot hide from the weather.
So oddly, so daintily made
It is picked up and played.
Such unearthly airs
The ear hears, and withers!
In the revolving ballroom of space,
Bowed over the moor, a bright face
Draws out of telegraph wires the tones
That empty human bones.

And here are some of the things I had to explain to my 21st century son so that he could understand it.

1. Telegraph wires are actually telephone wires. I explained this when we hit the title, and I could hear him not taking it in. Landlines and telegraphy are both just ancient technologies to him, with little difference between them. When we got to line 2, with the machine “in your ear,” we had to back over the fact that telegraph wires are actually telephone wires, because now he needed to fully assimilate that knowledge to understand the poem.

2. Landlines have a dial tone. This boy is old enough that he has used a landline, at his grandparents’ house. But he’s forgotten it, apparently. He wasn’t able to bring it to mind to understand the second line, at least.

3. Despite being outside, old technology was robust enough to stand up to the rain, so the “weather” that the wires can’t hide from was unlikely to be simply rain.

4. Revolving ballrooms were a real thing.

I make it 77 words, requiring four explanations of “ancient” technology. Let no one tell you that the pace of progress has slowed down. We live in worlds incomprehensible to even fairly educated younger people.