Full Moon and Little Frieda

Full moon and little Frieda is a poem written by Ted Hughes. The poem is about Frieda’s first word ‘Moon’, but in this poem, Moon represents her father, which is Ted. He is amazed at her for the first time calling his name. It starts of just like this “on a cool evening with dogs barking and buckets clanking with spider’s web with dew looking like a mirror.” And cows are wandering in their lane “A dark river of blood, many boulders”
In the first stanza, he says “as you listening”, it means that he’s trying to put you in his situation or current atmosphere, or in this case, in the barn. It is at night when the cows are getting ready to get back to their ‘home’. It is a silence night where there are spider webs with dews on it. In the second stanza, he shows us that the ‘cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm wreaths of breath’, meaning that the cows are going back to their home in their comfortable lane and that they are happy. ‘A dark river of blood, many boulders’ suggests that he wants the reader to think there is some sort of sadness when his wife left him because she committed suicide. But when Frieda cries Moon, his reaction changed become surprised and amazed because he is very happy to hear his name being called.
I think it is not a sad poem, but some parts like ‘dark river of blood’ suggest that maybe he is having a family trouble, which could be due to the fact that his wife committed suicide.
This poem is well-written in a very simply English even though the meaning behind it is not really obvious. The first time I read the poem, I thought it’s just about a little girl on a farm full of cows calls for the moon. But after a bit of research, I realized that Moon represents her father. The cows represent both sadness and happiness. I see that it is written in 3 stanzas. The first two stanzas, it has 5 verses. There is a lot of imagery going on in the poem that really put you in the peaceful mind, the animals doing what they are suppose to do (going back to the farm because it is late night already). I also see that there is no rhythm or rhyme in the poem. While you’re reading the poem, the feeling of relaxed and chilled are felt.
This is a short poem which I love as I can’t stand long poems that literally need deciphering before one can understand them. It had no rhyming or rhythm so one was free to put your one style into it which makes it more fun. I liked the subject of the poem and it was to me a very meaningful and well written poem.