The poem depicts the harshness of nature through the image of a jawbone found on the seashore. The sea is portrayed as unfeeling force that consumes all in its path, leaving behind only indigestible remnants on the beach. The poem has three stanzas with varying line structures but consistent rhyme schemes. Literary devices like metaphor, synecdoche, and personification are used to represent the jawbone as a relic of human mortality and the relentless cruelty of time and nature.

1. RELIC
By: Ted Hughes

2. STANZA # 1
 futility of life and the ruthlessness of the sea
 introduces a “jawbone”, found at the seashore:
with dead crabs and dogfish.
 depicts death and the futility of life.;
constitutes the overall mood of the poem.
 However, also an image of the sea; acts as
a symbol of death, devouring lives and ends every
wish in a flash of a second
 No feelings in the heart of the sea. For this
reason, the poet says, “the deeps” of the sea is
cold.
I found this jawbone at the sea's edge:
There, crabs, dogfish, broken by the breakers or tossed
To flap for half an hour and turn to a crust
Continue the beginning. The deeps are cold:
In that darkness camaraderie does not hold.
TEXT EXPLANATION

3. STANZA # 1 - CONTINUED
 “Continue the beginning” refers to life’s cycle. Nature keeps this
cycle in motion.
 In the last line, an epigram, implying that during the time of death
one has to accept it or fight for life.
 None comes then to help.

4. STANZA # 2
 ‘Theme of vanity of human wishes;
reference to the jaw for this purpose is
innovative.
 Like Hamlet in William Shakespeare’s play
holding Yorick’s skull broods over the futility
of life, here, in this poem, Ted Hughes
holding the jaw of a dead person, thinks
about the vanity of human wishes.
 Sea never touches at lives with an
emotion; extreme cruelty in her heart; can’t be
measured by the standard of humanity’s scale.
Nothing touches but, clutching, devours. 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:
This is the sea's achievement; with shells,
Verterbrae, claws, carapaces, skulls.

5. STANZA # 2 - CONTINUED
 The sea clutches and “devours”, like a beast who never feels satiated; Jaw was
also not satisfied with reality. Like the sea, it also needed more.
 The person whose jaw it has died but the burning passion in his heart was still
there. It’s the nature of human desire, that is like a burning fire. It devours and
grows in size but the ignition never ceases.
 At last, remnants of life forms are the relics of the sea, her achievements. Like a
gallery of one’s achievements, the sea showcases hers on the sea beach; shells,
Vertebrae, claws, carapaces, and at last skulls. The underlying idea is anticlimactic
though.

6. STANZA # 3
 Here the poet invests the beastly features into
Time. Both time and sea devours lives and casts
the “indigestibles” on the shore.
 The first two lines depict two ideas: One is
the cruelty of nature and another is the futility
of the human body. The body that once was
adored by a man or woman, is now
“indigestible” of the sea’s diet.
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. This curved jawbone did not laugh
But gripped, gripped and is now a cenotaph.

7. STANZA # 3- CONTINUED
 “None grow rich/ In the sea” is a paradoxical reference to the sea’s severity
and the idea of possibilities associated with the sea in the previous era.
 The poet questions the image of nature or the sea as the bringer of joys.
Apart from that, in the last two lines, the poet talks about the helplessness of the
jaw as it has no life in it.
 The jaw “is now a cenotaph” since the poet has written this poem influenced
by it. Hence, the poet implicitly compares his poem to a memorial built for the
person whose jawbone it was.

8. STRUCTURE
 Contains a total of three stanzas. In the first and last there are five
lines in each. Whereas in the second stanza, there are six lines in it.
 The poet employs a specific rhyme scheme in the poem. The last two
lines of each stanza rhyme together and form a couplet. As an example,
“cold” and “hold” in the first stanza, “shells” and “skulls” in the second
stanza, and “laugh” and “cenotaph” in the third stanza rhyme together.
However, in the second stanza, the first and third lines end with the same
word “jaws”.

9. LITERARY DEVICES
 Likewise in the first line, “jawbone” represents a synecdoche as well
as metaphor. It represents the human beings in totality.
 The poet employs asyndeton in the second line of the first stanza: “There,
crabs, dogfish, broken by the breakers.”
 There is a metaphor in the phrase “Continue the beginning”. Here, the poet
refers to the cycle of life. There is another metaphor in the same line too. Here,
“deep” metaphorically presents the sea.

10. LITERARY DEVICES - CONTINUED
 Moreover, in the second stanza, there is an alliteration in “go gnawn”. Here
the “g” sound gets repeated in the neighboring words.
 However, the poet employs this device in several lines of the poem. In the
last stanza, the poet uses personification. He personifies both the sea and
time. The last two lines present a paradox as the “gripped” jaw surprisingly
becomes a “cenotaph” in the poet’s imagination.

11. HISTORICAL CONTEXT
 ‘Relic’ by Ted Hughes is a postmodern poem that innovatively employs
the theme of naturalism.
 However, there is also a reaction against Victorian ideals in this poem.
The reference to the sea as a beast or ravisher of lives is in contrast with
the image of the sea in the previous age. Then it was compared to a
“gateway of new possibilities”. Moreover, the poem depicts the theme of
the futility of human life and projects the ideas of naturalism through it.