Full Moon and Little Frieda - Analysis

Full Moon and Little Frieda

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -
And you listening.
A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming - mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm
wreaths of breath -
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.
'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!'

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.

Ted Hughes

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It is “evening” in a vague rural location: a “lane”, “hedges”, “a dog bark”, “a pail”, “the moon”. The evening is both “cool” and “small” – an interesting pair of adjectives. The simplicity of the vocabulary seems to echo the “little” of the title, and creates a childish, playful atmosphere. And yet despite the seeming insignificance of the evening it has “shrunk” further, focused in onto a specific moment – yet merely a “dog bark” and the “clank of a bucket”. Despite onomatopoeia and consonance working together here to make this description vivid, almost audible, they are hardly profound enough sounds to warrant the shrinking they acquire.

However, it is not the sounds themselves that imbue this moment with its importance, but rather their audience: Hughes describes “you listening” – presumably Frieda, his daughter. The hyphen and stanza break before this line combined with its sheer brevity in contrast to the first, merge to create both a sense of Hughes’ adoration of his daughter – developed further, perhaps, by the gentle second person pronoun ‘you’ – and an impression of the child’s quiet stillness and concentration. It is Frieda’s focus, almost fascination with the seemingly insignificant noises of the countryside that warrant this shrinking in to this moment in particular, on an evening which was previously ‘cool’, dispassionate, and ‘small’, unimportant.

What follows is a sequence of closely related images. Hughes notes a “spider’s web” and a “pail”. Superficially, these images work merely to develop setting and also appear contradictory: the natural fragility of the spider’s web opposing the heavy industrialism of the pail, however closer inspection reveals that they are closely linked: one is “tense”, the other “still”; both are associated in their turn with water – “dew” and the “brimming” fluid of the bucket; both wait for quiet – yet beautiful – miracles of nature: the “touch” or the first dew or the reflected “tremor” of a star in the “mirror” of the water’s surface.

Frequent personification, linked by subtly distant alliteration of ‘t’, work here to create a sense of a world that is coming alive, but currently waits in anticipation of that moment: the web is ‘tense’ for a ‘touch’, the water ‘tempt[s]’ a ‘tremor’. In this sense, these images not only develop setting and an atmosphere of expectation, but also character: they can be read as metaphors for Frieda herself.

Just as the web is fragile, Frieda is “little”. Just as the web waits for the dew’s touch, Frieda too waits for the appearance of the moon. Although at first a comparison between his daughter and a pail appears unromanticised, a comparison with Sylvia Plath’s oeuvre perhaps suggests otherwise. As Hughes’ wife reached the climax of the depression that would ultimately kill her, some of her only optimistic poetry concerned her children. In ‘Balloons’, she describes how one:

‘Sits

Back, fat jug

Contemplating a world clear as water’

And in ‘Child’ admits that:

‘Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing

I want to fill it with color and ducks …

Pool in which images

Should be grand and classical’

Plath saw her children as ‘jugs’, ‘pools’, vessels to be filled with knowledge of the ‘world’, ‘color’, ‘ducks’, ‘grand and classical’ images, all symbolised by the metaphor of water. Can we therefore read in Hughes’ comparison of his daughter to a ‘pail’ an allusion to his late wife’s poetry? Frieda is now the bucket Plath wished her to be, ‘brimming’ with the images and sounds of innocence and nature that Plath would have wished for her: ‘dog’, ‘spider’s web’, ‘star’, ‘cows’, ‘breath’, ‘hedges’, ‘moon’.

The shift from second to third stanza is a huge thematic shift too: from stillness to movement, innocence to experience, beauty to terror, life to death. The contrast between the relatively short lines of stanza two and the sudden length of

‘Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their

warm wreaths of breath’

works to create this sense of an increase in pace and a resuming of time. The line breaks of the previous stanza promoted stillness, pauses, contemplation, expectation. Suddenly, we have a continual flow of language, symbolising the continual flow of cows which are imagined in a suddenly threatening image as a “dark river of blood”. Indeed, that their breath is imagined as “wreaths” only contributes to this funereal image. What this slightly gruesome death imagery adds to the poem is a thematic contrast between innocence and experience, father and daughter. This is Hughes meditating on the cows, not Frieda, who - as her sudden and enthusiastic interruption of ‘Moon!’ indicates – remains engrossed by the evening sky. As an adult, Hughes’ perception of the world is different; he is unable to look in awe at the innocent beauty of stars and dew (and enjoy the sound of their words as his daughter does, exclaiming moon a further three times) without also imagining the slaughter of cattle and eventual spilling of their currently ‘balanc[ed]’ milk.

Beyond the relationship between these two natural objects and Frieda, is a wider relationship that Hughes establishes between earth and space. Although Hughes writes that the water in the pail can “tempt the first star to a tremor”, we know it is only the star’s reflection shaking, not the star itself. Similarly, as Frieda ‘points at [the moon] amazed’ that moon too appears to be ‘gazing amazed’ back at Frieda herself. The verb ‘gazing’ implies Frieda’s innocence and beauty - the moon personified in a simple simile as an ‘artist’ unable to take his eyes of his fabulous ‘work’.

In this sense the moon is also a projection of the poet himself, the fact that it is ‘full’ implying his fully grown adult ‘gaze’, now returned from the threatening ‘boulders’ of the ominous cows to the youthful innocence of ‘little Frieda’.