Chapter 6 - Sacrament and Transcendence in River

Summary

This chapter return to the soteriological arc with a discussion of sacramental imagery and aspirations of redemption and transcendence. Beginning with the Gaudete Epilogue poems and moving on River and Under the North Star, it looks at the rise in sacramental and specifically eucharistic imagery in Hughes’s poetry, arguing that the naturalization of sacramental activity in these poems authenticates human religious concerns. Sympathies between Hughes’s work and that of the American Transcendentalist, hinted at here there so far in the book, are discussed explicitly. Also making significant reference to Eliot, this chapter discusses the question of time in Hughes’s poetry, where, especially in River, it appears as something to be resisted and potentially escaped or transcended. The chapter culminates in a close reading of the poems “That Morning” and “The River.” We watch as Hughes overcomes anxieties about the destructive nature of time by cleaving ever closer to an explicitly Christian metaphysic.