The Full Text of “Relic”
The Full Text of “Relic”
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“Relic” Introduction
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In "Relic," English poet Ted Hughes considers the circle of life. The sight of a picked-clean fish jawbone on the beach leads the poem's speaker to reflect that it's a fish-eat-fish world out there—and that perhaps the only consolation for nature's brutality is the fact that new life arises from death. "Relic" first appeared in Hughes's second collection, Lupercal (1960).
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“Relic” Summary
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The speaker remembers finding a jawbone on the seashore. On the beach, the speaker recalls, the waves batter the bodies of all sorts of dead or dying sea creatures until they turn into the crusted, decomposing matter that will host new life. The ocean, the speaker says, is deep and cold, and down in its depths there's no such thing as friendship.
The creatures in the sea, the speaker says, touch each other only when they want to eat each other. The same jaws whose very purpose is to kill other animals for food die as they lived, gnawed to bare bone by other jaws. Those jaws first eat, then are eaten, then wash up on the beach. And that, the speaker reflects, is what the sea does: it strips bodies down to bones.
The ocean, the speaker concludes, thus creates both life and death, and flings up the bones that don't rot, the remnants of a failed struggle to survive down in the deeps. Nothing in the ocean lives what you'd call a happy, prosperous life. The jawbone the speaker sees now never laughed: all it did was bite and bite, and now it's nothing but a memorial to its career of biting.
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“Relic” Themes
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Nature's Brutality
The speaker of “Relic” sees a fish’s bleached jawbone, washed up on the seashore, as a reminder of nature’s constant, indifferent violence. The speaker reflects that these jaws, which once ripped the flesh off of other fish, are now picked clean themselves—and that this emotionless fish-eat-fish brutality is the law of the whole ocean. In the “deeps” of the sea (and in nature more generally), this poem suggests, the only fundamental rule is “eat or be eaten.”
The sight of a picked-clean fish jawbone leads the speaker to reflect that the ocean is a place without gentleness or consolation. All the creatures beneath the surface live only to devour each other. “In that darkness,” the speaker declares, “camaraderie does not hold”; in other words, there’s no friendship in the ocean, and perhaps none in nature more broadly, either.
The bare “jaw” the speaker sees here itself had one goal in life: to “eat” until its fishy owner was devoured. This fish never once “laugh[ed],” not did it grow “rich”; its whole “purpose[]” was just to survive for as long as it could. In short, it lived a brutal, violent life, far away from any of the values that human beings might feel give their own lives a sense of meaning or security.
The fish’s jawbone, in the speaker’s eyes, thus becomes a “cenotaph” (or monument to the dead, often the war dead). It commemorates not any individual fishy soul, but rather the eternal war for survival. And the poem’s picture of a beach as an oceanic battlefield strewn with the “indigestible” remnants of sea life—"shells, vertebrae, claws, carapaces, skulls”—implies that every living creature fights in this war, human beings not excepted!
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-16
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The Circle of Life
The whole natural world, “Relic” suggests, is built on an infinite cycle of destruction and creation, of death and rebirth. The fish jawbone the speaker finds washed up on the beach seems, to the speaker, to represent one end of an infinite process. Itself “gnawn bare,” this biting jaw reminds the speaker that everything that eats will one day be eaten. Everything that lives has to die someday, this poem suggests, but death also helps to create new life—and this cycle is the eternal law of nature.
The sight of a bare jawbone washed up on the beach reminds the speaker that death is inevitable. The very animal this bone once belonged to, the speaker reflects, once “gripped” and devoured other animals, and then was devoured itself. That fate, the speaker notes, is unavoidable for everything that lives.
Describing a whole beachful of “indigestibles,” bits of dead animals that couldn’t be eaten—“vertebrae, claws, carapaces”—the speaker reminds readers that death comes for every living thing sooner or later and that it leaves only bleached bones behind. But all that death, the speaker observes, also supports new life; destruction brings creation along with it. The washed-up bodies of “crabs” and “dogfish,” “crust[ing]” as they decay on the beach, also “continue the beginning,” feeding other animals and supporting new life.
What’s more, this cycle goes on and on. The circle of “time” and life in the sea, the speaker observes, “eats its own tail”—an image that evokes the ancient symbol of the ouroboros, a serpent eating its own tail, traditionally used as an image of infinity and eternity. Destruction and creation, the poem thus observes, feed on each other in an endless loop. Uncomfortable though this idea might be for the human beings wandering beside the ocean, trying to live their comfortable lives, there’s no life without death. But on the bright side, there’s no death without life either.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 8-11
- Lines 12-14
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Relic”
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Lines 1-4
I found this ...
... Continue the beginning.As the poem begins, the speaker remembers finding a grim "relic" on the seashore: a fish's picked-clean jawbone thrown up on the sand by the waves. This jawbone will become this poem's central symbol, an image of nature's indifferent brutality. In this speaker's eyes, life in the sea—and, when you really think about it, life anywhere in the natural world—is nasty, brutish, and short.
To set the scene, the speaker depicts the beach as something like a battlefield. The ocean, the poem observes, is constantly flinging casualties ashore. Take a look at the meaningful repetition here:
There, crabs, dogfish, broken by the breakers or tossed
To flap for half an hour [...]"Broken" and "breakers" aren't just an instance of polyptoton; they also introduce a pun. On the surface, the speaker means "broken" in the sense of "injured" and "breakers" in the sense of "waves" (said to "break" on the shore). But those "breakers" also seem to be, well, breakers here, breaking those crabs and fish apart. The ocean itself, the poem suggests, smashes its own creatures to bits.
Brutal crushing isn't all the ocean does. Even as these dead, mangled animals decay and "turn to a crust," they "continue the beginning." Their deaths, in other words, aren't just a grisly ending. They're also the start of something new. And if they "continue" the beginning, then that "beginning" goes on and on. Exactly how this might be true will be one of the poem's big themes.
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Lines 4-5
The deeps are ...
... does not hold. -
Lines 6-9
Nothing touches but, ...
... to the beach: -
Lines 10-11
This is the ...
... claws, carapaces, skulls. -
Lines 12-15
Time in the ...
... In the sea. -
Lines 15-16
This curved jawbone ...
... now a cenotaph.
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“Relic” Symbols
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The Ocean
The ocean symbolizes the eternal rhythms of life and death. Personified as a kind of vast creature, the sea uses its "breakers" (or waves—but notice the pun on plain old breaking there!) to digest the bodies of dead animals and feed living ones. It thus embodies both life and death.
In that sense, the ocean is also like "Time" itself: it "eats its tail" and has no beginning or end. The ceaseless motion of its "breakers" (or waves) represents a ceaseless cycle that transforms living things into dying things and back again. That is, the specific rhythm of the ocean reflects the cycle of life and death that everything (not just sea creatures) is caught up in.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 1: “I found this jawbone at the sea's edge:”
- Line 2: “broken by the breakers or tossed”
- Lines 4-5: “The deeps are cold: / In that darkness camaraderie does not hold.”
- Lines 12-15: “Time in the sea eats its tail, thrives, casts these / Indigestibles, the spars of purposes / That failed far from the surface. None grow rich / In the sea.”
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The Jawbone
The jawbone the speaker finds washed up on the beach symbolizes the fish-eat-fish brutality of nature.
There's something ironic about this fish's jawbone. Once used to kill and devour other fish, this bone is now dead as a doornail itself—and, by the looks of it, it's been picked clean by the very fish it might have hoped to eat! Through this jawbone, then, the speaker suggests that nature is a brutal place where every living thing is either eating or being eaten.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 1: “I found this jawbone at the sea's edge:”
- Lines 8-9: “Jaws / Eat and are finished and the jawbone comes to the beach:”
- Lines 15-16: “This curved jawbone did not laugh / But gripped, gripped and is now a cenotaph.”
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“Relic” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Irony
The poem's image of a dead fish's jawbone suggests that a dark irony underlies the struggle for survival: those who eat, the jawbone warns, will always be eaten themselves one day.
The jawbone leads the speaker to reflect that the very part of the dead fish that once "gripped" other fish and devoured them has now been picked clean itself. "Gnawn bare," the bone suggests that there's no comfort to be found in the food chain; no matter how many other fish this one ate, it was always doomed to meet exactly the same fate as its victims. As the speaker puts it, "none grow rich / In the sea": there's no permanent security for any living creature, no matter how efficiently they devour.
The very body part that helped the dead fish to stay alive as long as it did, then, becomes a "cenotaph," a monument to the dead. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say that the jawbone is a monument to death, and the natural cycle it's part of. After all, the fish that die "continue the beginning," feeding new life even as they die. In this sense, the poem suggests, perhaps life itself is ironic!
Where irony appears in the poem:- Lines 6-9: “And the jaws, / Before they are satisfied or their stretched purpose / Slacken, go down jaws; go gnawn bare. Jaws / Eat and are finished and the jawbone comes to the beach:”
- Lines 15-16: “This curved jawbone did not laugh / But gripped, gripped and is now a cenotaph.”
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Metaphor
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Personification
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Repetition
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Asyndeton
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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Synecdoche
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"Relic" 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.
- Breakers
- Camaraderie
- Their stretched purpose slacken
- Gnawn
- Vertebrae
- Carapaces
- Spars
- Cenotaph
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(Location in poem: Line 2: “broken by the breakers”)
Waves.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Relic”
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Form
This free verse poem uses a form of Hughes's own design. The poem's three stanzas move from a cinquain (or five-line stanza) to a sestet (or six-line stanza), then back to a cinquain again. This pattern of growth and shrinking mimics precisely what the poem describes: the endless cycle of birth and death, eating and being eaten, that is the fate of all animal life.
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Meter
This free verse poem doesn't use any steady meter. But its measured lines, all roughly the same length, give the speaker's voice a steady, meditative tone. The poem moves along at a walking pace, just like the speaker ambling down the beach and reflecting on nature's indifferent brutality.
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Rhyme Scheme
While there's no consistent rhyme scheme here, irregular flickers of rhyme mark some of this free verse poem's most pointed insights.
For example, take a look at what happens at the end of the first stanza:
[...] The deeps are cold:
In that darkness camaraderie does not hold.This rhymed couplet lends some extra weight to the poem's warning that there's no such thing as friendship in wild nature. The "deeps" here are "cold" literally and metaphorically: the ocean is both icy and unfeeling!
The same effect reappears at the end of the poem:
[...] This curved jawbone did not laugh
But gripped, gripped and is now a cenotaph.This closing couplet itself feels rather like a "cenotaph," a monument to all of nature's grim deaths.
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“Relic” Speaker
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This poem's speaker—a thoughtful person with a bleak (or perhaps merely realistic!) view of nature's indifferent, eat-or-be-eaten rhythms—sounds a lot like Ted Hughes himself. Hughes often wrote poems about his intense encounters with the natural world, poems that often came to similar conclusions about devourings and death.
But readers don't have to interpret the speaker as Hughes to understand the poem. All they need to know is that the sight of a picked-clean sea creature's "jawbone" provokes this reflective speaker to consider the currents of life and death that run, not just through the life of the sea, but through the whole natural world. This speaker is a person who sees danger and truth in the smallest things.
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“Relic” Setting
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The poem is set on the seashore—a thin strip of relative safety next to the vast and dangerous sea. Here on the beach, the speaker observes, people can get a glimpse of all the violence and drama of life in the ocean through the "indigestibles" the sea coughs up: the "vertebrae, claws, carapaces, and skulls" that nothing in the ocean (try though it might) could devour.
In a sense, the setting could be read as an image of the whole natural world. Everything in nature, the speaker implies, is rather like this: little patches of secure "dry land" lie next to chilly, dangerous "deeps," and the eat-or-be-eaten wilderness is never as far away as people might like to think.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Relic”
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Literary Context
Ted Hughes (1930-1998) is one of the best-known British poets of the 20th century. His 1957 debut, The Hawk in the Rain, was a shock to the system of UK poetry; its percussive rhythms and raw imagery challenged the dominance of more restrained and formal poets like Philip Larkin.
"Relic" was first collected in Hughes's second book, Lupercal. Discussing his ambitions for this collection, Hughes spoke of wanting to "find a simple concrete language with no words in it over which I didn’t have complete ownership," turning away from old poetic traditions to find his own stripped-down voice. Many of the poems in this collection (and many of Hughes's poems in general) depict the power and violence of the natural world.
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 deeply influence his poetry. This poem is also one of many he wrote that capture an intense, disorienting encounter with animals. Hughes was both reverent and unsentimental about the natural world, seeing it not just as a source of wisdom and beauty (as the 19th-century Romantics like William Wordsworth often did) but also as a place full of instinctive violence and danger.
Hughes's writing was also deeply influenced by his first wife, fellow poet Sylvia Plath; over the course of their short and often tormented marriage, the pair produced a rich, unsettling body of work.
Historical Context
Hughes's long and prolific career ran from the 1950s until his death in 1998. He began publishing his poetry during a period of rapid post-war urbanization and industrialization. In the '50s, 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.
But like a lot of Hughes's animal poetry, "Relic" steps outside its specific historical context to a world of eternal (and not especially comforting) truths. This poem suggests that nature's rhythms—life and death, eating and being eaten—keep on going no matter what humanity does, or how human beings feel.
Hughes found awe and inspiration even in the natural world's harshest moments. Though he grew up hunting in the North Yorkshire countryside, as an adult he came to prefer capturing nature on the page.
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More “Relic” Resources
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External Resources
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A Brief Biography — Learn more about Hughes's life and work via the Poetry Foundation.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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Hughes's Legacy — Watch an event in which contemporary poet Alice Oswald discusses Hughes's work.
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The Ted Hughes Society — Visit the Ted Hughes Society to learn more about Hughes's work (and his continuing influence).
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An Interview with Hughes — Listen to a 1961 interview with Ted Hughes and his wife, fellow poet Sylvia Plath. The literary duo discuss their writing and their influence on each other.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Ted Hughes
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