Chapter 3 - The Biblical Fall

Summary

This chapter turns to the many poems in which Hughes plays with the characters of Adam, Eve and the Serpent, including an attempt to tease out Hughes’s sense of human moral accountability. We tour some of the most raucous of Hughes’s Edenic rewrites, including “Theology” and “A Horrible Religious Error,” demonstrating how Hughes continues to pursue an essentially religious agenda in the teeth of his gleeful anti-ecclesiasticism. The chapter turns then to morality, addressing a central paradox of Hughes’s work: he seems on the one hand to embrace Nietzsche’s anti-Christian moral nihilism, but on the other hand he argues passionately on behalf of our moral obligations toward nature. The problematic biblical term “dominion” is discussed. Many of the moral inconsistencies presented in this chapter are seen to smooth out in Hughes’s farming poems, in which Mosaic moral duty and ecological responsibility unite within a lapsarian view of human existence.