Michael Thurston et Nigel Alderman, Reading Postwar British and Irish Poetry, Oxford, Wiley Blackwell, 2014

The armour of bric-a-brac

To which your soul’s caddis

Clings with all its courage

The metaphors here is complex and worth lingering over. The features of the landscape are armor, worn to protect the warrior. The protective nature of this armor seems to be understood by the soul, whose «  caddis », a binding fashioned of coarse wool or cotton cloth, clings (the verb suggests desperation) to it. In « courage », Hughes connotes thye warrior’s signature virtue, but also etymologicaly, the heart ; we might legitimately read the last line, then, as « Clings with all its heart », and the change again hemps us to hear the soul’s desperation beneath its (perhaps illusory) bravery.