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     Ted Hughes once described a dream he shared with the director Peter Brook of creating a theatre which was “simultaneously sacred and profane, simultaneously a revelation of spiritual being and an explosive image of life’s infinite animal power and psychological abundance”. Much of his poetry can be read as a highly-charged account of emergency moments in that perpetual drama. And now here, in his Introduction, Hughes spots something very similar operating in Ovid. He identifies Ovid’s central interest in “what passion feels like to the one possessed by it. Not just ordinary passion either, but human passion in extremis - passion where it combusts or levitates, or mutates into an experience of the supernatural”. Putting all this together, we can see why Hughes found himself drawn to Ovid’s account of passion in crisis in the Metamorphoses. Hughes is a natural story-teller, and his reports from the front line here are pulse-quickening and vibrant.

     The Gods are everywhere of course, but in Hughes’s telling the most powerful force is destiny, especially as a metaphor for genetic inevitability. Destiny appears as impulses emerging from so deep within the genes that it is ultimately irresistible, even by a sophisticated sensibility. Its importance is reinforced by the way Hughes begins his account of the death of Actaeon:

Destiny, not guilt, was enough
For Actaeon. It is no crime
To lose your way in a dark wood.

A parade of characters struggles to come to terms with these compulsive urges: they make futile attempts to control or constrain them, they flee from them, they give way to them. These struggles are at the root of the book’s tension. Hughes finds a wonderfully dramatic image to describe this irresistible genetic force, during his account of the Fall of Man: “Snares, tricks or plots come hurrying/ Out of their dens in the atom”. Guilt and evil, together with this conflict between raw impulse and the rational intelligence, have been central themes of Hughes’s work. Very often the obsession, and therefore the dilemma, is a sexual one. In the account of Actaeon, for example, the plot is driven forward by Diana’s arbitrary punishment of Actaeon’s guiltless intrusion on her chastity. But what gives Hughes’s version its interest is his metaphorical exploration of the psychological impulse which took Actaeon to that point of his crisis in the first place. Through a series of highly symbolic images, the “nudgings” of a “pitiless fate” impel Actaeon to enter the paradise of the “deep cleft at the bottom of the mountain/ Dark with matted pine” where Diana is bathing. Hughes’s description is remarkable for the way it brings each aspect of the landscape so vividly to life. The nature of that landscape is experienced so intensely that it feels like an interior landscape. Actaeon cannot resist the promptings and the result (again familiar in Hughes’s work) is annihilation.

     Nowhere is the pain of this conflict more assiduously explored than in Hughes’s harrowing recreation of Myrrha’s lust for her father. It begins with her highly developed sense of conscience and ends with her remorse. But in between is the inescapable violent lust of their illicit affair. Hughes captures precisely the black compulsion and primitive rawness of their lovemaking:

The next night father and daughter did it again
In pitch darkness.

Myrrha’s fateful journey through the dark to her father’s bed is reminiscent both in its style and tone of Keats’s ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’. In fact Keats’s own obsession with fateful passion may be another influence at work in Hughes’s book.

     The language with which Hughes conjures the stark horror of these emergency moments is that language stripped of rhetoric - “super simple, super ugly” - which he developed during the 1960s. It found its most explosive expression in his adaptation of Seneca’s Oedipus for Peter Brook, and in the Crow poems. Fittingly, it was developed as a way of stripping all rational intellectual artifice from his poetry. The language manages to be both guttural-sharp and mellifluous. The impact of its raw energy and spontaneity brings these tales bang up to date. The horror is stared square in the face, for example, in the revenge taken on Tereus and, most memorably, in Hercules’s efforts to rip off the poisoned shirt:

Wherever the weave came away
It lifted sheets of steaming skin with it.

Again, in both these examples, the horror is the result of sexual obsession - in Hercules’ case both the Centaur’s lust for Dejanira and Dejanira’s sexual jealousy. But Hughes can also find moments of great tenderness, as in, for example, his own solution to how Peleus and Thetis’s violent struggle developed into delicate lovemaking. The verse is characterised, in both its violent and tender phases, by the sure control Hughes exerts over the rhythm. Even in the most furious passages, like Phaethon’s breakneck journey in the sun chariot, he keeps control over the reins without ever sacrificing pace or flair.

     There is evidence everywhere of how fundamentally Hughes has been influenced by the narrative techniques of Anglo-Saxon and medieval story-tellers (techniques also deployed to great effect in Arthur Golding’s classic version of the Metamorphoses in the mid-sixteenth century). The influence is here, for example, in Atalanta’s race with Hippomenes at the point where he distracts her by throwing in front of her a golden apple:

Startled to see such a gorgeous trinket
Simply tossed aside, she could not resist it.
While she veered to pick it up
Hippomenes was ahead, breasting the crest
Of the crowd’s roar.

     It is hard to imagine anyone else capable of producing such a vivid, first-hand account of these stories. Hughes unearths with chilling precision the genetic root of the horror. The mobile intelligence, the penetrative insight, the varied music and - not least - the compassion are all hallmarks of his wider achievement. It has been said that Hughes is one of the few poets writing today who we can be sure will be read in two hundred years. But what will our descendants be reading? Tales from Ovid is a banker.