Came across this highly evocative reflection on the archaeological secrets hidden under fields, in a sublime little book from Eland, The Ruins of Time (in their lovely Poetry of Place series).
This is what editor Anthony Thwaite has to say about it:
When Ted Hughes was an undergraduate at Cambridge in the early 1950s, he switched from English to Archaeology and Anthropology; and though I feel Hughes’s anthropological interests were probably stronger than his archaeological ones, there seems to be a strong flavour of what one could call linguistic archaeology in his poem Thistles. Remember that Hughes came from a partly Viking enclave of Yorkshire. (p46)
Thistles
by Ted Hughes
Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air
And crackle open under a blue-black pressure.
Every one a revengeful burst
Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up
From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.
They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.
Every one manages a plume of blood.
Then they grow grey like men.
Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear
Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.
