Dick Straightup

Past eighty, but never in eighty years — Eighty winters on the windy ridge Of England — has he buttoned his shirt or his jacket. He sits in the bar-room seat he has been Polishing with his backside sixty-odd years Where nobody else sits. White is his head, But his cheek high, hale as when he emptied Every Saturday the twelve-pint tankard at a tilt, Swallowed the whole serving of thirty eggs, And banged the big brass drum for Heptonstall, With a hundred other great works, still talked of. Age has stiffened him, but not dazed or bent, The blue eye has come clear of time: At a single pint, now, his memory sips slowly, His belly strong as a tree bole. He survives among hills, nourished by stone and height. The dust of Achilles and Cuchulain Itches in the palms of scholars; thin clerks exercise In their bed sitters at midnight, and the meat salesman can Loft fully four hundred pounds. But this one, With no more application than sitting, And drinking, and singing, fell in the sleet, late, Dammed the pouring gutter; and slept there; and, throughout A night searched by shouts and lamps, froze, Grew to the road with welts of ice. He was chipped out at dawn Warm as a pie and snoring. The gossip of men younger by forty years - Loud in his company since he no longer says much- Empties, refills, and empties their glasses; Or their strenuous silence places the dominoes (That are old as the house) into patterns Gone with the game; the darts that glint to the dartboard Pin no remarkable instant. The young men sitting Taste their beer as by imitation, Borrow their words as by impertinence Because he sits there so full of legend and life Quiet as a man alone. He lives with sixty and seventy years ago, And of everything he knows, three quarters is in the grave, Or tumbled down, or vanished. To be understood His words must tug up the bottom-most stones of this village, This clutter of blackstone gullies, peeping curtains, And a graveyard bigger and deeper than the village That sways in the tide of wind and rain some fifty Miles off the Irish sea. The lamp above the pub door Wept yellow when he went out, and the street Of spinning darkness roared like a machine As the wind applied itself. His upright walk, His strong back, I commemorate now, And his white blown head going out between a sky and an earth That were bundled into placeless blackness, the one Company of his mind.

time memory isolation free verse

Dick Straightup - meaning Summary

Legend Amid a Changing Village

This poem commemorates Dick Straightup, an elderly Yorkshire pub regular whose physical toughness and accumulated local stories make him seem larger than ordinary life. Hughes contrasts his endurance with the younger men around him and shows how his memories are bound to a changing village, its dead, and its harsh landscape. The final image presents him as solitary but unbowed, carrying a private world that others can barely enter.

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