Letters of Ted Hughes (edited by Christopher Reid)
As promised here in my report of the Frankfurt Book Fair, I've now collected the passages of Letters of Ted Hughes which for one reason or another struck me most.
( Cut for length )
( Cut for length )
Re:Hughes' reputation, the Spike Wars have nothing on the Sylvia and Ted debates raging through the decades. Personally, I wouldn't have wanted to be married to either of them, but I love their poetry, I think they brought out both the best and the worst in each other as people, and that neither party was blameless when it came to their breakup. But TH didn't have a backstory of suicide attempts and of course he didn't kill himself. Was his desertion one of the reasons why SP got to a state where she did? Well, yes. Was it the only reason? No. Was he therefore to blame for her death? IMO no, not from a rational pov, but suicides are about emotions. And he, not the readers, was the one who had to live with this death of a woman he had undoubtedly loved, in the knowledge that it might not have happened if he had acted differently in 1962. And the one who raised their children, and seems to have managed to do that without the kids repeating the psychodrama of the previous generation.
WWI mythologization: yes, I found that that intrigiuing, too. He wrote some essays about Owen, and WWI really keeps showing up in his poetry; the last example is one of only two poems in Birthday Letters not addressed to Sylvia Plath, but her father, Otto:
Your ghost inseparable from my shadow
As long as your daughter's words can stir a candle.
She could hardly tell us apart in the end.
Your portrait, here, could be my son's portrait.
I understand - you never could have released her.
I was a whole myth too late to replace you.
This underworld, my friend, is her heart's home.
Inseparable, here we must remain.
Everything forgiven and in common -
Not that I see her behind you, where I face you.
But like Owen, after his dark poem,
Under the battle, in the catacomb,
Sleeping with his German as if alone.
Reply
Literary history in fandom analogies -- heh.
And I completely agree with you on the assessment of Ted Hughes's responsibility (or lack thereof) for his wife's suicide and the shadow this must have cast over his life, too. That his second wife killed her self as well is, well, I'm reluctant to call it one of life's ironies because that's far too flippant -- I can only imagine it as unbearable.
I didn't know this poem from his last collection, but I find it fascinating because its use of Strange Meeting not that straightforward at all. I've just reread it, and it seems strangely unclear which metaphor refers to what, and who has got which role here. Is Sylvia the warzone, and her husband and her father the enemies that keep killing each other, that are destroyed, and simultaneously reconciled? That are victims of the battlefield but have also destroyed it (by implication)? Or is she "in the catacomb" with them as well? Or both? Hmmm.
(And I'll shut up now.)
Reply
Now, quotes, because nobody ever described SP like this, :
"...A great bird, you
surged in the plumage of your excitement. (...)
And your eyes' peculiar brightness, their oddness,
Two little brown people, hooded, Prussian,
But elvish, and girlish, and sparking
With the pessure of your effervescence."
or
"Who will remember your fingers?
Their winged life? They flew
With the light in your look.(...)
They flared, flicked balletic aerobatics, (...)
Those dancers to of your excellss!
With such deft, practical touches - so accurate.
Thinking their own thoughts caressed like lightning
The lipstick into your mouth corners."
And there is a constant interaction with her poems, as with "The Rabbit Catcher":
"In those snares,
You'd caught something.
Had you caught something in me,
Nocturnal and unknown to me? Or was it
Your doomed self, your tortured, crying,
Suffocating self? Whichever,
Those terrible, hypersenstive
Fingers of your verse close round it and
Felt it alive. The poems, like smoking entrails,
Came soft into your hands"
And of course, few people can match Hughes with the nature descriptions, as in "Daffodils" (which he and SP cut and sold, they were that short of cash)
"We bent there together, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks -
Fresh-opened dragonflies, went and flimsy,
Opened too early. (...)
Wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth.
With their odourless metals,
A flamy purification of the deep grave's stony cold
As if ice had breath-"
My favourite of these is the one I'll quote in a separate reply -
Reply
„Life after Death“
What can I tell you that you do not know
Of the life after death?
Your son’s eyes, which had unsettled us
With your Slavic Asiatic
Epicanthic fold, but would become
So perfectly your eyes,
Became wet jewels,
The hardest substance of the purest pain
As I fed him in his high white chair.
Great hands of grief were wringing and wringing
His wet cloth of face. They wrung out his tears.
But his mouth betrayed you - it accepted
The spoon in my disembodied hand
That reached through from the life that had survived you.
Day by day his sister grew
Paler with the wound
She could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed it
Each day with her blue Breton jacket.
By night I lay awake in my body
The Hanged Man
My neck-nerve uprooted and the tendon
Which fastened the base of my skull
To my left shoulder
Torn from its shoulder-root and cramped into knots -
I fancied the pain could be explained
If I were handing in the spirt
From a hook under my neck-muscle. (…)
We were comforted by wolves.
Under that February moon and the moon of March
The Zoo had come close.
And in spite of the city
Wolves consoled us. Two or three times each night
For minutes on end
They sang. They had found were we lay.(…)
The wolves lifted us in their long voices.
They wound us and enmeshed us
In their wailing for you, their mourning for us,
They wove us into their voices. We lay in your death,
In the fallen snow, under falling snow.
As my body sank into the folk-tale
Where the wolves are singing in the forest
For two babes, who have turned, in their sleep,
Into orphans
Beside the corpse of their mother.
Reply
The last one in particular is breath-taking, so seemingly raw in its old grief and yet very polished in various, almost laboured metaphors, which culminate in this strange union with nature (strange, because it's, of course, not comfort from nature itself, but only via the familiar fairy-tale-like motif of folklore).
And now I want to dig out some of my largely ignored and neglected poetry anthologies to look up Plath and Hughes again.
Reply
SP (all from the discussion site of the SP forum):
Mirror
Tulips
Daddy
Edge
TH:
Six Young Men (At the bottom of the article, but the article itself is worth reading, and again, the WWI subject)
Hawk Roosting
Full Moon And Little Frieda
Daffodils
And here's an eight minute Ted Hughes tribute from the BBC, which contains footage of Hughes himself reciting some poems...
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment