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Can you help me understand the poem "Heptonstall" by Ted Hughes, including the historical/biographical background that might be connected to it?

Heptonstall is an ancient village in Yorkshire, England, the birthplace of Ted Hughes. Before the Industrial Revolution, it was home to weavers, who had large windows in their dwellings so that the sunlight would brighten the area where they worked. However, as Hughes's poetry demonstrates, humanity cannot truly dominate nature. Furthermore, there is something savage about nature in Hughes's poems. Hughes himself wrote that his poetry exhibited



"The collision of the pathos of the early industrial revolution – that valley was the cradle of it – with the wildness of the place."



Heptonstall is also where the writer Sylvia Plath, wife to Ted Hughes, is buried.


In the first stanza of his poem "Heptonstall," Hughes describes this village where life has long struggled against death. It is black from age and the Industrial Revolution's pollution and dead dreams. A poet who describes his poems "as a sort of animal" (Poetry in the Making, London, 1967, p.15), Hughes uses the skulls of the sheep in the second stanza and the bird to metaphorically describe the tragic history of the old industrial town. 


The final four lines convey humanity's struggles in this ancient area. Hughes expresses the relentless cruelty of experience as both life and death try, but "Only the rain never tries." Humanity cannot dominate nature.

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