On the black ridge of the road
Dank yellow oozed a toad.
The rain wet, steaming wood
Stretched, his ultimate good.
But simple, primaeval, he
Bulked there, content to be.
And we, whose thoughts outrace
Our wheels and our own pace
Stopped, seeing that clot of yellow
Whose life to ours was fellow.
A knop of being, whose cold
Skin throbbed with the heart it held.
The slow peace of the wood,
The drip of the rain like blood,
All this for a moment became
Our life, as too, for him,
Nothing beyond the breath.
Life springing from the fungus death.
Taking him in our hands
We lifted him beyond
The black ridge of the road.
And then we knew, the toad
Was compassion, the weight we hold,
Warm heart in a rind of cold.
Hope Mirrlees cuts an odd figure in literary history, though maybe that fits with what survives of her character: learned, wealthy, well-connected, sometimes unpleasant.
Young, she wrote three novels, and the third of these was Lud-in-the-Mist, a fantasy piece which lay dormant for decades but has grown more influential in recent decades. In the same part of her life, she wrote Paris, a 600-line avant-garde poem which predates, and may have helped to inspire, Eliot's Waste Land. Much later, she published a few more slim collections of poems, and these surprise with their quite regulated formalism. Some feel like they could have been written in the 1880s.
'The Toad' doesn't feel quite so archaic as that, but its short-line couplets—perhaps deceptively simple—certainly look a long way from Paris. One part of the poem leans towards allegory, but another aspect thinks about how, sometimes, animals and humans share a place or an experience, which is the sort of thing Ted Hughes was trying to write about in totally different ways at roughly the same time.
