In a letter to Keith Sagar (16th May, 1974), Hughes’s sister Olwyn passed on his description of ‘Mayday on Holderness’ as: "the introductory poem to what was to be a series, and which included the better poems in LUPERCAL. The whole thing was to be a celebration of the serpentine spirit of the hungry erg [sic]. That serpentine course threads them all together" (PC 33).

However we read ‘erg’ – urge? – the ‘serpentine course’ is, of course, the digestive system: in a letter to Leonard Baskin in July 1959, Hughes describes ‘the general drift of the [Lupercal] poems’ as “Man as an elaborately perfected intestine, or upright weasel” (LTH 147). At around the same time Hughes wrote to Olwyn explaining that Lupercal expresses ‘an entire vision of life’ arranged around ‘the notion of God as the devourer –as the mouth & gut’, and asserts that ‘mother-love’ (associated with the sexual urge through the fertility rite of the Roman Lupercalia) is the only ‘defence’ against the ‘natural appetite of everything living to devour everything else’ (LTH 148).

The dominant theme of Lupercal is thus the struggle of vitality against death – or, as Leonard Scijag puts it, between ‘eros and thanatos’, the two principles existing in an explosive, symbiotic, endlessly creative balance. ‘Mayday on Holderness’ is a manifesto-like expression of this essentially Heraclitean or Epicurean (Lucretian) worldview – a worldview that would inform Hughes’s work throughout his career. It is this that makes ‘Mayday on Holderness’ such an important poem in his oeuvre; indeed, there is a sense in which the poem provides what Gillian Groszewski has called an ‘embryonic template’ of his later work in the same way that T.S. Eliot’s early poem ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’ (according to Hughes in ‘A Dancer to God’) did to Eliot’s later work.

Steve will open the session with an introductory talk of around fifteen minutes before leading a line-by-line collaborative close reading of the poem in which all present are invited to contribute. Society members who wish to take part should register via by 6.00 pm GMT on 20 January, when an annotated copy of the poem and a handout will be distributed.

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Steve Ely is Director of the Ted Hughes Network and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Huddersfield. He is the author of Ted Hughes's South Yorkshire: Made in Mexborough (2015); his most recent collections of poetry are Lectio Volant and The European Eel (both 2021).

'Mayday on Holderness': a collaborative close reading led by Steve Ely