Crow Therapy: How Authors Max Porter And Ted Hughes Both Use Crows To Explore Grief In Their Work 

Grief creates a rupture in time; by its very nature, it breaks the reality of our universe. This suspension of belief takes a literal turn in Max Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers – Dua’s Monthly Read for April – when an enormous crow (yes, human-sized) shows up on a family’s doorstep. In the story, a mourning husband, struggling to hold it together for his sons after the death of his wife, finds himself visited by a crow that seems determined to stay until “you don’t need me anymore”. However, his crow doesn’t just show up – it makes itself at home, becoming an absurd and constant presence in a world already turned upside down by loss.

This isn’t the first time a crow has made its way into literary depictions of grief. In fact, Max’s Crow draws heavily from the work of one of Britain’s most celebrated poets (and one of his personal inspirations), Ted Hughes.

Ted’s Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow – widely considered his masterpiece – is a haunting collection born out of deep personal tragedy and an ideological challenge to the very heart of Christianity and humanism. The crow in Ted’s world is far from friendly, serving as a dark, almost apocalyptic figure that reflects the turmoil of life. For Hughes, the crow is more than just a bird; it’s a symbol of death, grief and chaos, whereas the crow in Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers takes on a different persona, one that is both sinister and absurdly playful, offering us a more irreverent take on loss. The twist? Despite their differences, both authors use their crows to dive deep into grief and the messy complexities of the human experience.

In Ted’s collection of poems, a nightmarish corvid roams an apocalyptic state. His crow is impish: an all-seeing, all-knowing joker; a product of the decade leading up to the 1970 publication of Crow, which was marked by unimaginable tragedy. Poet Sylvia Plath, to whom he was married, died by suicide in 1963 – this was followed by the death of the poet Assia Wevill, his partner, who took her own life and Shura’s, their four-year-old daughter, in 1969. Hughes has referenced Crow as his way of grappling with the emotional fallout of these devastating events. The collection’s dark, apocalyptic tone could only have come from a place of deep trauma.

This exploration of loss and darkness is mirrored in Max’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, where he plays with Ted’s crow as a metaphor for grief and loss. While Ted’s crow is a marker of doom, Max’sversion takes on a more playful and irreverent form. Max’s Crow becomes silly, funny and sinister, screaming profanities at his new human housemates (‘BIRD FEATHERS UP YER CRACK, DOWN YER COCK-EYE, IN YER MOUTH’), transforming the creature into something quite grotesque and yet darkly comedic.

Ted’s Crow, as in Max’s novel, is an unending sequence of references to other stories, narratives, poems and myths. And Ted’s imagery is deeply rooted in creation myths, with the book of Genesis revised as a birth story of tragedy or pain: ‘In the beginning was Scream.’ Meanwhile, Grief Is The Thing With Feathers weaves its own mythology – a narrative of loss filled with grieving humans, talcum-dusted boys and an ‘encyclopaedia of no-longer hers’. In both works, the presence of the crow amplifies the crisis, but with different intentions. Ted’s catastrophic crow grapples with how we might start over, while Max’s freakish and miasmic cartoon Crow attempts to fathom an end. This is where the books speak to each other: Crow... tries to chart a path forward in the wake of trauma; Grief... seeks to make sense of a life in its aftermath.

Max, with his narrative loopholes and in-jokes (his Crow, for instance, most fears a biographer of Ted Hughes), turns what could have been a straightforward haunting into something much more layered. As Max’s Crow declares, it can be anything: “a doctor or a ghost”; “a perfect device... a friend, excuse, deus ex machina, joke, symptom, figment, spectre, crutch, toy, phantom, gag, analyst and babysitter”. In both Grief... and Crow..., the crow becomes whatever we need it to be – whether a symbol of torment, a source of dark humour or a catalyst for healing. Ultimately, these crows might serve as a reminder that, in the face of the chaos of grief, humans reach for any shape or form that might help us to navigate the darkness, no matter how strange or unsettling it might be.