Lupercal

Author: Hughes, Ted

Published by Faber & Faber, 1960
US ed.: Harper & Row, 1960

Lupercal collected such poems as "Hawk Roosting", "The Bull Moses", "View of a Pig", "An Otter", "Thrushes" and "Pike". The title refers to the Roman fertility festival of the Lupercalia, held on February 15.

See also Ann Skea's essay "Wolf Masks", accessible on her site and Edward Hadley's "Ted Hughes as an Elegist: The Vegetation Deity and Fertility Rites in 'Lupercalia'" which you can read on this site.

Contents:

Lupercal (1960)

• Things Present
• Everyman's Odyssey
• Mayday on Holderness
• February
• Crow Hill
• A Woman Unconscious
• Strawberry Hill
• Dick Straightup
• Fourth of July
• A Dream of Horses
• Esther's Tomcat
• Historian
• Pennines in April
• Hawk Roosting
• Nicholas Ferrer
• To Paint a Water Lily
• Urn Burial
• Of Cats
• Fire-Eater
• Acrobats
• The Good Life
• The Bull Moses
• Cat and Mouse
• View of a Pig
• The Retired Colonel
• The Voyage
• Relic
• Wilfred Owen's Photographs
• An Otter
• Witches
• November
• The Perfect Forms
• Thrushes
• Singers
• Bullfrog
• Crag Jack's Apostasy
• Pike
• Snowdrop
• Sunstroke
• Cleopatra to the Asp
• Lupercalia