I must admit to struggling with poetry and resent the idea that somehow it is superior to prose. I also struggle with the idea that there is something morally superior if it is opaque and needs to be worked hard at in order for its meanings to become clear. Why shouldn't beauty and profundity be clear and accessible?

However, having said that the Guardian this week has been publishing little booklets of work by great poets (Note the lack of inverted commas there - greatness really isn't some elitist clique but is utterly genuine) and I was particularly struck by Ted Hughes and Siegfried Sassoon.
And best of all, for me, was the last section of Hughes' poem 'Pike'

"A pond I fished, fifty yards across,
Whose lilies and muscular tench
Had Outlasted every visible stone
Of the monastry that planted them -

Stilled legendary depth:
It was as deep as England. It held
Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old
That past nightful I dared not cast
But silently cast and fished
With the hair frozen on my head,
For what might move, for what eye might move.
The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woods
frail on my ear against the dream
Darkness beneath night's darkness has freed,
That rose slowly towards me, watching"

I think Ted Hughes expresses there what I try to express but with considerably less talent in my photographs. That sense of a dark and powerful but not necessarily beautiful natural world. One that makes more sense perhaps when viewed through pagan eyes and when I take photographs I put aside my rationality and athiesm. Perhaps I should stop here as I cannot convey what the poem does which is of course the point of it.

Moorland Stream Garrow