When you finish reading "Pike" by Ted Hughes, you come away with a healthy respect for this kind of fish, maybe even fear, or at least awe. Let's see how the poet's words express, concisely and vividly, the power of these pike, whom the poet clearly admires.
For Hughes, the pike's power seems to lie in several dimensions: first, sheer size; second, ruthlessness; and third, grace and beauty. These features all combine to delineate the fish as powerful creatures worthy of this intense poem.
Notice how, as we get into all of these details, that it's always Hughes's choice of precise words that convey the pike's attributes. He's never vague. He's always bold in his word choice.
For instance, in conveying their impressive size, Hughes doesn't say "they're huge" or "they're monstrous." He says they are "three inches long," yet a "hundred feet long in their world," compared to the flies that they swim around. And the other specimens are "six pounds each, over two feet long" - exact measurements that give you a chill as you imagine how hefty they would be to hold. The last we hear of their size is when Hughes describes them as "too immense to stir, so immense and old." Their hugeness is part of their power.
So, too, is their ruthlessness. The speaker calls these pike "killers from the egg," with jaws that "clamp" with "fangs." Their grins are "malevolent" (evil) and "aged." These fish even have "iron" in their eyes in death. Well, I'm pretty terrified of them by now!
Yet despite their ability to kill and clamp and show an iron reserve, the pike retain a powerful grace and beauty. They "dance on the surface" of the water, Hughes tells us. There is "green tigering the gold" on their scales, and the pike themselves are at times "stunned by their own grandeur." So it's not that they're simply monsters; they also have their own brand of elegance, adding even more to the sense of their power.
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