"Thistles" by Ted Hughes

“Thistles” by Ted Hughes discusses the terrible annoyance of thistles. In the home, the thistles actually presented as being warlike, which adds a bit of slapstick comedy to the tone. Lines two and three of the first stanza have a slant rhyme in the words “air” and “pressure.” In the third line of that same stanza, the word blue-black closely relates the word pressure back to the  statement that the thistles are cracking open because “BL” sounds like a release of pressure. The second stanza has many “ST” sounds forcing the violent harshness of the thistles.  This can be seen in the words “Burst,” “Grasped,” “Fistful,” “Splintered,” and “Icelandic frost thrust.” The “ST” sounds fairly sharp, not to mention the fact that this collection of words literally causes pointed discomfort for people who are reading out loud. “Burst” and “Fistful” connect their respective lines because they are a half feminine slant rhyme.  While there is no true rhyme in the poem, many words come close. For instance, the words “frost” and “thrust” have consonance but lack the accented assonance, yet the “st” sound takes so much time to say that it marginalizes the “o” and “u,” causing this to feel like rhyme. In the first line of the last stanza, we see another case of alliteration in the comparison between men and thistles, which “grow grey.” In the first line of the poem, “hoeing hands” is also an alliteration. The first line of the third stanza contains assonance between the words “stain” and “decayed,” and in the following line, “pale” and “hair,” although the former is more effective than the latter. The assonance of the first example serves to strengthen the connection between the “stain” and the “decayed” because they both came from the “Viking.” Finally, “grow” is connected by assonance to “mown,” and “feud” is tied to “appear” by a curious embodiment of assonance.