The Offers
I've posted two poems from Ted Hughes' collection Birthday Letters (the last poetry volume he published, a year or so before his death) before, my favourites - "Life after Death" and "Daffodils". One of the reasons why I love them best is that the beauty of the language and the emotional impact is there whether or not you know anything about Hughes and/or Sylvia Plath. They work as their own entities, and any information you need to understand them is given in the poems themselves. That's not the case for some of the other poems, whom I love as well, but for slightly different reasons, and will quote from this time. These poems bring Plath to life in a way none of her biographers (imo, as always) have managed. Of course, it's Hughes' version of her, his perspective and his memories, and also his decades long struggle with those memories and the way his own life has become part of a public narrative, but all the same, there is an emotional richness with all its contradictions there, and a physical reality, that I didn't find in the various versions by third and presumably more objective parties. (Unless they were quoting from Plath's diaries and letters.) One of the red threads throughout Birthday Letters is the attempt to get back to Sylvia the living woman as opposed to Sylvia Plath the cult figure; it's a double engagement both with Sylvia's own versions of her life and herself (and she had several - the "I" of the letters is not the "I" of the journals is not the "I" of the poems) and with the public figure. One of the earliest BL poems addresses the moment of reading her journals again, a decade or so after her death.
Suddenly I read all this -
Your actual words, as they floated
Out through your throat and tongue and onto your page -
Just as when your daughter, years ago now,
Drifting in, gazing up into my face,
Mystified,
where I worked alone
In the silent house, asked, suddenly:
'Daddy, where's Mummy?' The freezing soil
Of the garden, as I clawed it.
All round me that midgniht's
Giant clock of frost. And somewhere
Inside it, wanting to feel nothing,
A pulse of fever. Somewhere
Inside that numbness of the earth
Our future trying to happen.
I look up - as if to meet your voice
with all its urgent future
That has burst in on me. Then loko back
At the book of the printed words.
You are ten years dead. It is only a story.
Your story. My story.
The double awareness - Sylvia, in the poems, young and alive, and Sylvia dead, Ted Hughes the young man falling in love, marrying, struggling, failing that marriage, and the old man, looking back near the end of his life is constantly there. What even the darkest poems give you a sense of, however, is the immmense vitality Plath must have had (and what biographical renderings like, say, the film Sylvia utterly miss).
(...)A great bird, you
Surged in the plumage of your excitement,
Raving exhilaration. A blueish voltage -
Fluorescent cobalt, a flare of aura
That I later learned was yours uniquely.
And your eyes' peculiar brightness, their oddness,
Two little brown people, hoode, Prussian,
But elvish, and girlish, and sparking
With the pressure of your effervescence.
Were they family heirlooms, as in your son?
For me yours were the novel originals.
And now at last I got a good look at you.
Your roundy face, that your friends, being objective,
Called 'rubbery' and you, crueller, 'boneless':
A device for elastic extremes,
A spirit mask transfigured every moment
In its own seance, its own ether.
And I became aware of the mystery
Of your lips, like nothing before in my life,
Their aboriginal thickness. And of your nose,
Broad and Apache, nearly a boxer's nose,
That made every camera your enemy,
The jailer of your vanity, the traitor
In your Sexual Dreams Incorporated,
Nose from Attila's horde: a prototype face
That could have looked up at me through the smoke
Of a Navajo campfire. And your small temples
Into which your hair-roots crowded, upstaged
By that glamorous, fashionable bang.
And your little chin, your Pisces chin.
It was never a face in itself. Never the same.
It was like the sea's face - a stage
For weathers and currents, the sun's play and the moon's.
Never a face until that final morning
When it became the face of a child - its scar
Like a Maker's flaw.
Those were excerpts from longer poems. Two poems, in their entirety now:
Fingers
Who will remember your fingers?
Their winged life? They flew
With the light in your look.
At the piano, stomping out hits from the forties,
They performed an incidental clowning
Routine of their own, deadpan puppets.
You were only concerned to get them to the keys.
But as you talked, as your eyes signalled
The strobes of your elation,
They flared, flicked balletic aerobatics.
I thought of birtds in some tropical sexual
Play of display, leaping and somersaulting,
Doing strange things in the air, and dropping to the dust.
Those dancers of your excess!
With such deft, practical touches - so accurate.
Thinking their own t houghts caressed like lightning
The lipstick into your mouth corners.
Trim conductors of your expertise,
Cavorting at your typewriter,
Possessed by infant spirit, puckish,
Who, whaever they did, danced or mimed it
In a weightless largesse of espressivo.
I remember your fingers. And your daughter's
Fingers remember your fingers
In everything they do.
Her fingers obey and honour your fingers,
The Lares and Penates of our house.
And the poem he wrote about their wedding day (June 16th, Bloomsday, literature-obsessed young couple they were, they picked that one):
A Pink Wool Knitted Dress
In your pink wool knitted dress
Before anything had smudged anything
You stood at the altar. Bloomsday.
Rain-so that a just-bought umbrella
Was the only furnishing about me
Newer than three years inured.
My tie-sole, drab, veteran RAF black-
Was the used-up symbol of a tie.
My cord jacket-thrice-dyed black, exhausted,
Just hanging onto itself.
I was a post-war, utility son-in-law!
Not quite the Frog Prince. Maybe the Swineherd
Stealing this daughter’s pedigree dreams
From under her watchtowered searchlit future.
No ceremony could conscript me
Out of my uniform. I wore my whole wardrobe-
Except for the odd, spare, identical item.
My wedding, like Nature, wanted to hide.
However-if we were going to be married
It had better be Westminster Abbey. Why not?
The Dean told us why not. That is how
I learned that I had a Parish Church.
St George of the Chimney Sweeps.
So we squeezed into marriage finally.
Your mother, brave even in this
US Foreign Affairs gamble,
Acted all bridesmaids and all guests,
Even-magnanimity-represented
My family
Who had heard nothing about it.
I had invited only their ancestors.
I had not even confided my theft of you
To a closest friend. For Best Man-my squire
To hold the meanwhile rings-
We requisitioned the sexton. Twist of the outrage:
He was packing children into a bus,
Taking them to the Zoo-in that downpour!
All the prison animals had to be patient
While we married.
You were transfigured.
So slender and new and naked,
A nodding spray of wet lilac.
You shook, you sobbed with joy, you were ocean depth
Brimming with God.
You said you saw the heavens open
And how riches, ready to drop upon us.
Levitated beside you, I stood subjected
To a strange tense: the spellbound future.
In that echo-gaunt, weekday chancel
I see you
Wrestling to contain your flames
In your pink wool knitted dress
And in your eye-pupils-great cut jewels
Jostling their tear-flames, truly like big jewels
Shaken in a dice-cup and held up to me.
Her final flat, the one she died in, was near that London zoo, too, which is why the animals make a return in the poem Life after Death. When Birthday Letters was published, people (unaware Hughes was already diagnosed with cancer and hence knew he was likely to die soon) wondered what made him break his public silence about his first wife: self-justification, an attempt to reclaim the "my story" part form "your story", an ongoing attempt to deal? All of the above, I guess, but something more. Only a few days before he died, the poem The Offers, which isn't in Birthday Letters but is also addressed to Sylvia Plath, was published in the Times. It imagines three encounters with her ghost, after her death, and ends like this:
Even in my dreams, our house was in ruins.
But suddenly - the third time - you were there.
Younger than I had ever known you. You
As if new made, half a wild roe, half
A flawless thing, priceless, facetted
Like a cobalt jewel. You came behind me
(At my helpless moment, as I lowered
A testing foot into the running bath)
And spoke - peremptory, as a familiar voice
Will startle out of a river's uproar, urgent,
Close: 'This is the last. This one. This time
Don't fail me.'
Don't fail me. Don't fail to - what? It wasn't as if he could undo what had gone wrong in their marriage. You know, though, what else Hughes wrote in that last year of his life? A translation/version of Alcestis (which I posted about before). A letter to a friend of his, Keith Sagar, about why he avoided including the story of Orpheus in his earlier Ovid translations/versions, Tales from Ovid states that tackling Orpheus would be "too obvious an attempt to exploit my situation" and adds: "The shock twist was that Pluto answered: 'No, of course you can't have her back. She's dead, you idiot.'"
Alcestis, as opposed to Eurydice, actually does come back from the dead (a death of which Admetos both isn't and is guilty). A poet, in Hughes' understanding, always is a shaman as well. No, I don't think he intended literal resurrection, of course not. But he believed in the magic of words. And what can a poet give another poet, but words? A returned life, in words? This time don't fail me.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/678545.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Suddenly I read all this -
Your actual words, as they floated
Out through your throat and tongue and onto your page -
Just as when your daughter, years ago now,
Drifting in, gazing up into my face,
Mystified,
where I worked alone
In the silent house, asked, suddenly:
'Daddy, where's Mummy?' The freezing soil
Of the garden, as I clawed it.
All round me that midgniht's
Giant clock of frost. And somewhere
Inside it, wanting to feel nothing,
A pulse of fever. Somewhere
Inside that numbness of the earth
Our future trying to happen.
I look up - as if to meet your voice
with all its urgent future
That has burst in on me. Then loko back
At the book of the printed words.
You are ten years dead. It is only a story.
Your story. My story.
The double awareness - Sylvia, in the poems, young and alive, and Sylvia dead, Ted Hughes the young man falling in love, marrying, struggling, failing that marriage, and the old man, looking back near the end of his life is constantly there. What even the darkest poems give you a sense of, however, is the immmense vitality Plath must have had (and what biographical renderings like, say, the film Sylvia utterly miss).
(...)A great bird, you
Surged in the plumage of your excitement,
Raving exhilaration. A blueish voltage -
Fluorescent cobalt, a flare of aura
That I later learned was yours uniquely.
And your eyes' peculiar brightness, their oddness,
Two little brown people, hoode, Prussian,
But elvish, and girlish, and sparking
With the pressure of your effervescence.
Were they family heirlooms, as in your son?
For me yours were the novel originals.
And now at last I got a good look at you.
Your roundy face, that your friends, being objective,
Called 'rubbery' and you, crueller, 'boneless':
A device for elastic extremes,
A spirit mask transfigured every moment
In its own seance, its own ether.
And I became aware of the mystery
Of your lips, like nothing before in my life,
Their aboriginal thickness. And of your nose,
Broad and Apache, nearly a boxer's nose,
That made every camera your enemy,
The jailer of your vanity, the traitor
In your Sexual Dreams Incorporated,
Nose from Attila's horde: a prototype face
That could have looked up at me through the smoke
Of a Navajo campfire. And your small temples
Into which your hair-roots crowded, upstaged
By that glamorous, fashionable bang.
And your little chin, your Pisces chin.
It was never a face in itself. Never the same.
It was like the sea's face - a stage
For weathers and currents, the sun's play and the moon's.
Never a face until that final morning
When it became the face of a child - its scar
Like a Maker's flaw.
Those were excerpts from longer poems. Two poems, in their entirety now:
Fingers
Who will remember your fingers?
Their winged life? They flew
With the light in your look.
At the piano, stomping out hits from the forties,
They performed an incidental clowning
Routine of their own, deadpan puppets.
You were only concerned to get them to the keys.
But as you talked, as your eyes signalled
The strobes of your elation,
They flared, flicked balletic aerobatics.
I thought of birtds in some tropical sexual
Play of display, leaping and somersaulting,
Doing strange things in the air, and dropping to the dust.
Those dancers of your excess!
With such deft, practical touches - so accurate.
Thinking their own t houghts caressed like lightning
The lipstick into your mouth corners.
Trim conductors of your expertise,
Cavorting at your typewriter,
Possessed by infant spirit, puckish,
Who, whaever they did, danced or mimed it
In a weightless largesse of espressivo.
I remember your fingers. And your daughter's
Fingers remember your fingers
In everything they do.
Her fingers obey and honour your fingers,
The Lares and Penates of our house.
And the poem he wrote about their wedding day (June 16th, Bloomsday, literature-obsessed young couple they were, they picked that one):
A Pink Wool Knitted Dress
In your pink wool knitted dress
Before anything had smudged anything
You stood at the altar. Bloomsday.
Rain-so that a just-bought umbrella
Was the only furnishing about me
Newer than three years inured.
My tie-sole, drab, veteran RAF black-
Was the used-up symbol of a tie.
My cord jacket-thrice-dyed black, exhausted,
Just hanging onto itself.
I was a post-war, utility son-in-law!
Not quite the Frog Prince. Maybe the Swineherd
Stealing this daughter’s pedigree dreams
From under her watchtowered searchlit future.
No ceremony could conscript me
Out of my uniform. I wore my whole wardrobe-
Except for the odd, spare, identical item.
My wedding, like Nature, wanted to hide.
However-if we were going to be married
It had better be Westminster Abbey. Why not?
The Dean told us why not. That is how
I learned that I had a Parish Church.
St George of the Chimney Sweeps.
So we squeezed into marriage finally.
Your mother, brave even in this
US Foreign Affairs gamble,
Acted all bridesmaids and all guests,
Even-magnanimity-represented
My family
Who had heard nothing about it.
I had invited only their ancestors.
I had not even confided my theft of you
To a closest friend. For Best Man-my squire
To hold the meanwhile rings-
We requisitioned the sexton. Twist of the outrage:
He was packing children into a bus,
Taking them to the Zoo-in that downpour!
All the prison animals had to be patient
While we married.
You were transfigured.
So slender and new and naked,
A nodding spray of wet lilac.
You shook, you sobbed with joy, you were ocean depth
Brimming with God.
You said you saw the heavens open
And how riches, ready to drop upon us.
Levitated beside you, I stood subjected
To a strange tense: the spellbound future.
In that echo-gaunt, weekday chancel
I see you
Wrestling to contain your flames
In your pink wool knitted dress
And in your eye-pupils-great cut jewels
Jostling their tear-flames, truly like big jewels
Shaken in a dice-cup and held up to me.
Her final flat, the one she died in, was near that London zoo, too, which is why the animals make a return in the poem Life after Death. When Birthday Letters was published, people (unaware Hughes was already diagnosed with cancer and hence knew he was likely to die soon) wondered what made him break his public silence about his first wife: self-justification, an attempt to reclaim the "my story" part form "your story", an ongoing attempt to deal? All of the above, I guess, but something more. Only a few days before he died, the poem The Offers, which isn't in Birthday Letters but is also addressed to Sylvia Plath, was published in the Times. It imagines three encounters with her ghost, after her death, and ends like this:
Even in my dreams, our house was in ruins.
But suddenly - the third time - you were there.
Younger than I had ever known you. You
As if new made, half a wild roe, half
A flawless thing, priceless, facetted
Like a cobalt jewel. You came behind me
(At my helpless moment, as I lowered
A testing foot into the running bath)
And spoke - peremptory, as a familiar voice
Will startle out of a river's uproar, urgent,
Close: 'This is the last. This one. This time
Don't fail me.'
Don't fail me. Don't fail to - what? It wasn't as if he could undo what had gone wrong in their marriage. You know, though, what else Hughes wrote in that last year of his life? A translation/version of Alcestis (which I posted about before). A letter to a friend of his, Keith Sagar, about why he avoided including the story of Orpheus in his earlier Ovid translations/versions, Tales from Ovid states that tackling Orpheus would be "too obvious an attempt to exploit my situation" and adds: "The shock twist was that Pluto answered: 'No, of course you can't have her back. She's dead, you idiot.'"
Alcestis, as opposed to Eurydice, actually does come back from the dead (a death of which Admetos both isn't and is guilty). A poet, in Hughes' understanding, always is a shaman as well. No, I don't think he intended literal resurrection, of course not. But he believed in the magic of words. And what can a poet give another poet, but words? A returned life, in words? This time don't fail me.
This entry was originally posted at http://selenak.dreamwidth.org/678545.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.