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“A Memory” Introduction
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"A Memory" describes a farmer shearing a sheep. The speaker admires the farmer's combination of strength, tenderness, and dexterity as he wrestles with the impatient animal. The poem presents this traditional labor in a realistic light, portraying it as both grueling and oddly beautiful. Hughes composed "A Memory" while living and working on a farm he bought in Devon in the west of England. He wrote it specifically about his father-in-law, Jack Orchard, who was a farmer all his life. The poem first appeared in Moortown Diary, Hughes's collection of versified diary entries about farm life, in 1973.
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“A Memory” Summary
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The farmer, whom the speaker addresses in the second person, arches his thin, pale back while wearing a vest. He looks as strong as a horse as he bends over an upside-down sheep, shaving its wool while a cold easterly wind blows through the murky dark of the barn. He perspires and shivers, his face as red as fire. He mutters rhythmically, as though cursing in a foreign language, as he wrangles the sheep into position. He looks like he's trying to tie up a large, heavy, spilling bale of hay as it shifts about.
The farmer's cigarette bends at the burning tip, its ash still hanging proudly while he makes his movements—now violent, now tender—and remains in control of the sheep.
The speaker compares the farmer to a coal miner, one who works at the coalface (the place where coal is extracted) in difficult, risk-filled darkness. The farmer pays no attention to his own body as he shears the sheep inch by inch, completing his task through sheer strength (possibly as morning solidifies around him). He is bald and very wrinkled, and his worn head bends over his reassuring cigarette.
Then he sits up straight and lets out a moan. He releases the shorn sheep, which bounds away.
The farmer takes his still-lit cigarette butt from his mouth, and with large, gloved, greasy hands, carefully lights another cigarette with the glowing tip.
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“A Memory” Themes
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The Difficulty and Beauty of Traditional Labor
"A Memory" was inspired by Ted Hughes's father-in-law, Jack Orchard, a farmer in Devon in southwest England. The speaker of the poem observes Jack as he shears a sheep in a barn, admiring his primal strength, his mastery of the animal, and his grace as he goes about his hard work. As a nostalgic "Memory," the poem celebrates this type of traditional labor, finding a rugged beauty and dignity in it.
Sheep shearing, as portrayed by the speaker, requires determination, skill, care, guile, and brute strength. The shearer "bundle[s]" the sheep into position, requiring movements that are "suddenly savage, suddenly gentle." It's not just a case of overpowering the animal; finesse is required, too. The speaker seems awed by the shearer's mastery in both regards. Even for a highly skilled worker, shearing takes considerable effort: the shearer mutters "curses" as he works and lets out a "groan" when he's done. Even then, he may not really be done: he'll likely have to shear another animal right after he "L[ights] another" cigarette. His is a long, demanding task, and smoking seems to be his only "comfort."
The poem thus celebrates those who perform farm labor (and other manual labor), while acknowledging the toll their work takes on them. The speaker admires the "Powerful" sheep shearer—and, by implication, people with equally difficult jobs—without romanticizing what they do. The shearer's efforts over the years show in his physical appearance: he's "Bald" and "arch-wrinkled," with a "weathered" look. His back is "bony" and "bowed" (though he's also "Powerful as a horse"). At the same time, the shearer feels proud (or should, according to the speaker). His cigarette hangs with its "pride of ash" while he shears the sheep and provides the ember to light the next one. His ability to keep smoking through such difficult work shows just how skillful he is, but his compulsive chain-smoking also hints at the stress of his job.
By comparing the shearer to a "collier" (a coal miner), the poem associates him with other working-class laborers. He's part of a long tradition, which, the poem suggests, should be honored—cherished within the larger cultural "Memory."
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-24
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Humanity vs. Nature
The poem dramatizes human beings' patient wrestling with animals and nature. "Mastering[]" nature, the speaker shows, requires incredible dexterity and effort—and the effort is never finished. For example, animals provide for humans through their meat, hides, etc., but they do not do so voluntarily. Getting even the tamest creatures to serve human needs requires skillful handling and an often exhausting struggle.
The poem illustrates how sheep—and nature more generally—don't willingly bend to the wants and needs of humans. The sheep being sheared is like an "oversize, overweight, spilling [hay] bale." That is, it's tricky to handle; it tries to wriggle free and "leap[s]" away as soon as the ordeal is over. Meanwhile, the barn is punishingly cold and "cave-dark," with an "East chill" blowing through it. Farm labor, the poem suggests, is an arduous way to make a living, in part because nature doesn't care about human preferences.
The resistance nature poses makes the shearer's accomplishment all the more impressive. But the accomplishment isn't final; for the shearer, the ordeal is still ongoing! The sheep he finally manages to shear is just one among many. As soon as the shearing is finished, the sheep "leap[s] free." It doesn't want to be there, nor do the other sheep, so the shearer has his work cut out for him. Nature itself, here, seems like a "free," independent, headstrong force that humans can only partly and temporarily domesticate. It sustains us, but it always resists our attempts to control it.
This dynamic between humans and nature—part-conflict, part-collaboration—also shows in the shearer's physical appearance. His back is "bony" and "bowed," suggesting great physical strain. His face is "flame-crimson" with effort (and the cold!). He is wrinkled and weathered—a visual reminder of the intense demands of his work.
When all's said and done, the shearing provides wool to keep humans warm through the winter. But the poem demonstrates that animals and nature don't willingly cater to human needs, or submit easily to human control.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-21
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “A Memory”
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Lines 1-5
Your bony white ...
... sweating and freezing—Ted Hughes wrote "A Memory" about his father-in-law, Jack Orchard, who was a farmer in southwest England. The poem is intended as a kind of diary entry in verse form, a way of recording—memorializing—what it was like to live on a farm with Orchard. Here, the speaker (a stand-in for Hughes) watches Orchard (whom this guide will call the farmer or shearer) as he shears a sheep—that is, cuts off some of the animal's woolen fleece, probably to sell it as material for clothing. The poem captures the beauty and intensity of this traditional labor.
The opening lines describe the shearer's appearance and setting. The speaker stresses the physical nature of his work and the toll it takes on his body. Visual imagery and simile combine in a vivid portrait:
Your bony white bowed back, in a singlet,
Powerful as a horse,In other words, the farmer wears a kind of vest ("singlet"), and his back is bent and bony, indicating strenuous effort. His sheep don't always want to cooperate with his shearing! The alliteration in "bony white bowed back" imposes itself strongly on the line, much as the shearer imposes his strength on the sheep. Next, the simile in line 2 compares him to a horse: one of the most "Powerful" and majestic animals found on a farm. The comparison is simple yet flattering, and it's firmly grounded in the poem's setting. The speaker clearly admires this farmer; indeed, the poem celebrates him and his work.
In line 3, the speaker repeats the word "Bowed," again stressing the shearer's humble, strenuous effort. Then there's some satisfying alliteration: "sheep / Shearing..." This is almost onomatopoeic, as the /sh/ sounds like clippers working their way through the sheep's fleece.
Lines 4 and 5 focus mainly on scene-setting:
Shearing under the East chill through-door draught
In the cave-dark barn, sweating and freezing—This "barn" is cold and drafty (or "draughty" to the Brits); the poem is set in the north of Dartmoor, Devon, an often chilly area. "The East" refers metonymically to the wind (which blows in from the east, off the Atlantic Ocean). The stressed monosyllables of "East chill through-door draught" sound powerful and insistent, mimicking the wind's stubborn attempts to enter the barn.
The barn is also "cave-dark" (it's probably very early in the morning, when farmers traditionally start working). This metaphor hints that there's something ancient and primeval about the shearer, as though his work places him in a millennia-long tradition. The work is so difficult that he's both hot and cold at the same time: "sweating" from strenuous labor, yet "freezing" in the chilly climate.
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Lines 6-9
Flame-crimson face, drum-guttural ...
... adjustments of position
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Lines 10-13
The attached cigarette, ...
... of the animal -
Lines 14-19
You were like ...
... your cigarette comfort -
Lines 20-24
Till you stretched ...
... another at it
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“A Memory” Symbols
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Cigarettes
In the notes to Moortown Diary (in which this poem appears), Hughes observes that Jack Orchard (the shearer portrayed here) always had a cigarette in his mouth. Here, that continuously burning cigarette becomes a symbol of the shearer's determination and the primal, elemental nature of his work. His chain-smoking, meanwhile, seems to represent the continuous tradition he inherits.
The speaker first describes the cigarette in the second stanza:
The attached cigarette, bent at its glow
Preserving its pride of ash
Through all your suddenly savage, suddenly gentle
Masterings of the animalAll through the challenging task of shearing a sheep, the cigarette never goes out. It demonstrates the farmer's control and physical grace: even while making sudden, "savage" movements, he's never flustered. In this way, it illustrates the dogged "pride" and care he takes in his work.
Before he finishes one cigarette, the shearer lights another. Instead of a lighter, he uses the end of the cigarette he's about to finish (lines 22-24):
Then nipped the bud of stub from your lips
And with glove-huge, grease-glistening carefulness
Lit another at itThis continual smoking subtly gestures toward an unbroken farming tradition. The shearer carries the metaphorical torch of generations of farmers before him, stretching back hundreds of years.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 10-11: “The attached cigarette, bent at its glow / Preserving its pride of ash”
- Line 19: “your cigarette comfort”
- Lines 22-24: “Then nipped the bud of stub from your lips / And with glove-huge, grease-glistening carefulness / Lit another at it”
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“A Memory” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration fills the poem with rough music that reflects the farmer's physical appearance and psychological character.
The first line, for example, describes the farmer's "bony white bowed back." Even though "bony" and "bowed" don't suggest physical strength, the powerful plosive /b/ alliteration does. The next line confirms that the farmer is "Powerful as a horse." The speaker also notes the farmer's "flame-crimson face"; these rough, fricative /f/ sounds seem to suit his rugged appearance.
That's not the only mention of fire in the poem. The farmer's cigarette—which never goes out—"preserv[es] its pride of ash" (line 11) the whole time he shears the sheep. This bold alliteration jumps out of the line, as if to highlight the farmer's pride. His movements are "suddenly savage, suddenly gentle" (line 12); the insistent, repeated /s/ sounds here convey his stubborn struggle with the sheep. Likewise, the repeated /l/ sounds in "Letting a peeled sheep leap free" might evoke the sheep's light bounding motion.
At the end of the poem, the speaker admires how the farmer lights one cigarette with the end of another. He does so with "glove-huge, grease-glistening carefulness." This alliteration, together with the /s/ consonance of "grease-glistening," makes the line a bit tricky to say, subtly evoking the slippery greasiness of the gloves.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 1: “bony,” “bowed back”
- Line 6: “Flame-crimson face”
- Line 11: “Preserving,” “pride”
- Line 12: “suddenly savage, suddenly”
- Line 21: “Letting,” “leap”
- Line 23: “glove-huge, grease-glistening”
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Assonance
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Metaphor
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Simile
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Repetition
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“A Memory” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Singlet
- Shearing
- Draught
- The East
- Flame-crimson
- Drum-guttural African curses
- Bale
- Masterings
- Collier, a face-worker
- Heedless of your own surfaces
- Main strength
- The solid hour
- Arch-wrinkled
- Weathered dome
- The bud of stub
Singlet-
(Location in poem: Line 1: “Your bony white bowed back, in a singlet,”)
A sleeveless shirt; a vest.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “A Memory”
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Form
Ted Hughes wrote "A Memory"—and the other poems in Moortown Diary (1973)—as a way of chronicling his experiences while living and working on a farm in Devonshire. These are intentionally rough "improvised verses," aimed more at capturing a particular moment than creating a finely wrought poem.
The poem's form reflects the spirit in which it was written. Each stanza has a different length and offers sketch-like impressions of the shearer (Hughes's father-in-law Jack Orchard) as he works. There's a nine-line stanza, a quatrain, a sestet, a couplet, and a closing tercet. This unpredictable, dynamic form might also reflect the restlessness of the sheep as it tries to wriggle free.
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Meter
"A Memory" uses free verse, meaning that it has no strict meter. The poem's unpredictable rhythms capture the rough, unpredictable nature of farm work, including the sheep's attempts to wriggle free from the shearer.
However, the poem occasionally plays with one specific effect: loading lines down with stressed syllables. Notice how many stresses occur in this phrase from line 4:
the East chill through-door draught
These insistent stresses evoke the wind's dogged determination to get into the barn. It's as if the "draught" is trying to push through the door, or even the page!
Later, in line 21, the same technique has a slightly different effect:
Letting a peeled sheep leap free [...]
These stressed (and assonant) monosyllables sound a little bouncier, a little more staccato. (The tongue-twisting consonants force the reader to enunciate each word clearly.) The rhythm reflects the sheep's newfound freedom as it bounds away from the shearer.
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Rhyme Scheme
"A Memory" has no rhymes at all. Hughes wrote this poem—and others in the same collection—very quickly, in an attempt to capture particular fleeting moments. The poem is a kind of sketch, one that deliberately avoids too much "poetic process." Rhyming, meter, and so on would make the poem feel too carefully considered. Instead, it feels rough and organic, like the farm work it describes.
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“A Memory” Speaker
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The speaker in "A Memory" plays the role of observer, watching a farmer as he shears a sheep (and smokes a cigarette). Hughes explained that he wrote this poem, and other poems in Moortown Diary, while living on the farm he owned:
It occurred to me from time to time that interesting things were happening, and that I ought to make a note of them, a note of the details in particular [...] a fleeting snapshot.
It's fair, then, to read the speaker as Hughes himself.
That said, the speaker's identity is not very important. The poem is all about the farmer the speaker observes—and greatly admires. By comparing the farmer to a coal miner (lines 14-19), the speaker places him in a long-running tradition of manual labor: difficult, yet important and strangely beautiful work.
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“A Memory” Setting
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Like all the poems from Hughes's collection Moortown Diary, "A Memory" is set in the west of England, around the time it was written (the early 1970s). Hughes and his wife, Carol Orchard, owned and lived on a farm called "Moortown" in North Devon. They were joined there by Hughes's father-in-law, Jack Orchard (a farmer and the shearer in the poem).
The poem takes place in a "cave-dark barn." It's probably so early that it's not yet fully light out, though it could be late in the evening. The weather is typical for the area: drafty and cold, with an Easterly wind finding its way inside despite the barn doors being closed.
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Literary and Historical Context of “A Memory”
Literary Context
The English poet Ted Hughes (1930-1998) is one of the best-known writers of the 20th century. His 1957 debut, The Hawk in the Rain, was a shock to the system of British poetry; Hughes's raw imagery challenged the dominance of more restrained and formal poets like Philip Larkin. To this day, Hughes remains one of the most widely read poets in the English language.
Hughes grew up in West Riding, Yorkshire, a relatively rural part of England, and he cultivated an early interest in the natural world that would influence his poetry. He also worked on farms from time to time. Hughes was both reverent and unsentimental about nature, seeing it not just as a source of wisdom and beauty (as 19th-century Romantics like William Wordsworth often did), but also as an environment full of instinctive violence and danger. Animals occupy a central role in Hughes's poetry (most famously in his series of "Crow" poems), where they often symbolically reflect the human psyche.
In "A Memory," however, the focus is more on the farmer than the animal. In the early 1970s, Hughes and his wife owned and lived on a farm in Dartmoor, in the west of England. Jack Orchard, Hughes's father-in-law, farmed it with them (he was a retired farmer). Hughes says of these times: "It occurred to me from time to time that interesting things were happening, and that I ought to make a note of them, a note of the details in particular [...] a fleeting snapshot, for myself, of a precious bit of my life." The resulting book was Moortown Diary (1973), which includes "A Memory." The poems in this collection were written quickly and soon after the events they capture; Hughes deliberately avoided relying on the "process of 'memory'" (despite the title) or the "poetic process." The book was published in part as a memorial to Jack Orchard, who, as Hughes noted, smoked a cigarette "throughout whatever he did."
Historical Context
Over the course of his long and prolific career (which ran from the 1950s until his death in 1998), Hughes saw enormous social change. He began publishing his poetry during a period of rapid post-war urbanization and industrialization. Britain had a booming manufacturing industry in products as diverse as ships, cars, metals, and textiles, but with this boom came increasing pollution. Hughes's poetry, with its interest in wild nature and animal instinct, might be read as a skeptical rejoinder to a post-war enthusiasm for civilizing, scientific progress.
Indeed, Hughes's experiences as a farm owner coincided with profound changes to the industry. Farming methods and practices in Devon in the early 1970s were not much different than those in ancient farming communities, in part due to the relative inaccessibility of the land. Soon enough, many of these ancient practices were altered or overhauled by "new chemicals, new gimmicks, new short-cuts, every possible new way of wringing that critical extra percent out of the acreage and the animals. We were dragged," recalled Hughes, "[through] one of the biggest extinctions so far in the evolution of English countryside and farming tradition." It wasn't an animal that went extinct, but the "last vestige of grandeur in the real work"—that is, the honoring of tradition. Europe-wide legislation drove the price of farm produce down, making it harder for farmers to survive.
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More “A Memory” Resources
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External Resources
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Moortown Diary — Read more about the book in which this poem appeared.
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Ted Hughes's Life and Work — A biography of the poet and additional poems via the Poetry Foundation.
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British Library Archives — Additional resources on Hughes's work from the British Library.
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Hughes Remembered — Read the 1998 New York Times obituary of Hughes, which discusses his controversial life and career.
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Agriculture and Devon — Learn more about the area of England in which the poem is set (and its farming culture).
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Ted Hughes
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