Water in “Three Poems” by T. Hughes (A Symbolic Journey into the Unconscious)

Abstract

This paper presents the analysis of 3 poems by Ted Hughes. The aim of the paper is to offer an innovative approach to Hughes’s poetry based on symbol analysis, and thus contribute to the emerging Hughes scholarship. The poems were analyzed on the basis of Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious, archetypes, and symbolic representations. A set of archetypal symbols discovered in the selected poems was analyzed to produce novel interpretations. On the basis of these new interpretations, the author was able to prove the hypothesis, that in his poetry Hughes used symbolic language in order to speak of the contents of the unconscious.