Relic Notes

“Relic,” a short poem by Ted Hughes that was published in

The poem is in free verse. Apart from that, the line lengths of the poem are also
irregular. But the poet employs a specific rhyme scheme in the poem. The last
two lines of each stanza rhyme together and form a couplet. As an example,
“cold” and “hold” in the first stanza, “shells” and “skulls” in the second stanza,
and “laugh” and “cenotaph” in the third stanza rhyme together. However, in the
second stanza, the first and third lines end with the same word “jaws”.

The narrator begins in the first person, saying that he has found a
jawbone washed up on the beach. This sends the character in deep thought and
he is made to wonder where it has come from and what it passed from. The
clause "I found this jawbone" made it look spoken than written, as if someone
was standing in front of the poet and could as well see the jawbone
himself/herself. After this line, the rest of the poem generalizes about the life of
the sea, and the narrator makes no further reference to himself. The line ends
with a colon to create a forward momentum in the poem as it helps in further
explanation of the subject in discussion. In the second line, the poet lists other
things that wash up at the ocean's edge to die like the dead crabs and dogfish.
Hughes describes how creatures of the sea are killed and then washed ashore or
thrown upon the beach to struggle for a time, die, and then begin the process of
decay. The scene depicts the cruelty of the sea that topples lives. The poet's tone
is objective and impersonal, offering no sympathy or sadness for these
creatures. Hughes has used imaginative description telling that how an undefined
entity, the jawbone got to the sea as if he has witnessed it "broken by the
breakers or tossed/ To flap for half an hour and turn to a crust.” The sea has been
personified as an evil monster taking pleasure in tossing and flapping those dead
creatures breaking their identity further by its powerful thrashing waves, and in
the end these bones crumble to become sea crust. The sea is portrayed as a
continuous cycle where life is halted by death and this can be seen by the action
of the jawbone to “continue the beginning”. The enjambment occurs from line 2
to line 4; the thought concludes in the middle of line 4 with a period. Curiously,
here Hughes says the creatures have begun a process, though they have died.
This idea that the beginning is the end, and the end starts another beginning. This
idea is reflected throughout the poem, a reference to the perpetual cycle of life
and death. The use of enjambment emphasizes the theme, because the end of a
line is not the end of a thought. The second half of line 4 begins a new thought,
referring to the deepest part of the sea, where it is extremely cold and dark. The
poet described the deep sea as a battleground where friendship does not exist.
There is a perfect rhyme at the ends of lines 4 and 5 stressing on the fact that
there is no friendship in these depths; there is no intimacy, just this clutching and
consuming. These creatures that feed on others for their survival, later fall victim
to others.
‘Relic’ by Ted Hughes presents the theme of vanity of human wishes in the second
stanza. Holding the jaw of a dead creature, he thinks about the vanity of human
wishes. In this stanza, the poet says the sea never touches at lives with an
emotion. There is extreme cruelty in her heart that can’t be measured by the
standard of humanity’s scale. The sea clutches and “devours”, like a beast who
never feels satiated no matter how much it eats. Apart from that, the poet refers
to the jaw that was also not satisfied with reality. Like the sea, it also needed
more. He could still feel the burning passion in the heart of that creature whose
jaw he was holding in his hand. It’s the nature of human desire, which is like a
burning fire. It devours and grows in size but the ignition never ceases until the
human soul has been taken away with the skeleton left to be decayed to return to
its origins. Both lines 6 and 8 end with the word ‘jaws,’
and there is a rhythm created in line 8 with one syllable phrases that evoke the
strident attack of the animals, gnawing at this bone. The line ends with another
enjambment that keeps the rhythm moving forward. Line 9 finally ends in a colon,
after the gnawed jawbone washes up at the water's edge. The poet continues by
telling us that this is what the sea does, not just with jawbones but also with
other bones and armor, which he lists at the end of line 10 and to the end of line
11. The tone exposes the fact that the sea is not a friendly place to be in and even
the creatures that prey on other creatures eventually also become a part of this
recycling process. At last, the poet says the remnants of life forms are the relics of
the sea, her achievements. Like a gallery of one’s achievements, the sea
showcases hers on the sea beach. It includes shells, Vertebrae, claws, carapaces,
and at last skulls.
In the previous stanzas the poet has personified the sea but in stanza three, the
poet invests the beastly features into time. Both time and sea devours lives and
casts the “indigestibles” on the shore.
He gives an intangible thing like time animal qualities. Here he tells the reader
that time consumes its own tail in the ocean. Hughes often used mythical
references in his poetry, and in this case he is referring to the mythical snake
Ouroboros, which is shown eating its own tail and is considered a symbol for
infinity, for an endless cycle. So here again the theme of the life cycle is
reinforced. After time eats, it throws aside the parts that cannot be digested,
which fall to the depths of the sea. Time – birth, life, death – goes on in a
continuous circle - ‘eating its tail’ – and every atom is recycled, devoured, broken
down in some way and reused. The bones are described to be “the spars of
purposes / that failed.” The bones are of those creatures which were once intent
on eating to stay alive but which were themselves eaten, or simply died. Hughes
gives human qualities to sea saying that nothing gets wealthy in the sea as the
bones become a reminder of an animal which has served its purpose in the sea. In
the last two lines, the poet talks about the helplessness of the jaw as it has no life
in it, as the poet ironically says at the end that the jaw “is now a cenotaph”
implicitly comparing his poem to a memorial built for the person whose jawbone
it was. Hughes brings the poem full circle, ending the poem the way he began, by
talking about the jawbone. He tells us the jawbone never opened to laugh, but
instead kept clutching and now is dead, a monument to itself.

The focus in “Relic” is upon the natural cycle of life, the unending circle of decay
and regeneration. In most of Hughes's work, nature is not viewed in a soft
or sentimental light. He takes a more Darwinian, survival-of-the-fittest viewpoint,
in which the strong prevail, often through violent means. In “Relic,” the reader
never learns what kind of sea creature the jawbone
came from, and the other animals do not care. There is no sympathy, only
survival, as the other creatures gnaw away what is left of the animal and the sea
discards it onto the beach. Hughes tells the reader there is no camaraderie in the
sea, no touching, no warmth. He also points out that the jawbone's purpose was
never satisfied before its death; nature is indifferent to the desires of the
individual and is concerned only with the overall continuation of the life cycle.

If the sea in “Relic” is viewed as the unconscious, then the jawbone can be seen
as a memory, a remnant of an experience. An individual can never truly recapture
the full experience the memory represents; only this shell of it is available to the
conscious mind. Alternately, because many of Hughes's poems grappled with the
idea of humans’ inability to connect with our natural instincts, the poem can also
be seen as an illustration of this theme. The narrator stands on the beach
and sees only a dry, lifeless carcass, while beneath the sea a ferocious, life-and-
death struggle occurs that is separated from him by the waters of the sea. He sees
only the cenotaph, an empty monument, of this battle. He is detached from the
natural, animalistic side of his nature. He shies away from this part of himself
because he views it as cold and unfriendly, the darker side of his nature, but as a
result he is left with only the bare bones of experience.