‗Beautiful, beautiful America!‘: On Ted Hughes‘

Birthday Letters

Rehan Qayoom Let them laugh At your superstition. (Remembering it will make your palms sweat, The skin lift blistering, both your lifelines bleed.)

1

I look up – as if to meet your voice With all its urgent future That has burst in on me. Then look back At the book of printed words. You are ten years dead. It is only a story. Your story. My story.

2

It is said that Birthday Letters is primarily a book of poetry rather than an accurate diary of events. Critics are keen to point out the contradictions in poems such as ‗Superstitions‘ and others where Hughes seems to have prioritised poetic possibilities over what actually happened. Skea, for example, discusses and offers retractions in her commentary on ‗St Botolph‘s‘ and Myers has pointed out several such instances in his memoir, offering the explanation that Hughes was mythologising his wife in Birthday Letters: The straightforwardness of Ted‘s other poems contrasted with those in Birthday Letters. The Sylvia of Birthday Letters was not a believable human being. The other side, the entirely separate side that fell in love with Sylvia and wrote Birthday Letters, mythologized Sylvia.

3 This, however, is something Hughes himself does not deny. In fact, he makes a point to admit his slips of memory, misrememberings, gaps and omissions in the story repeatedly. Indeed, the very first line of the book asks ‗Where was it, in the strand?‘, and ‗Then I forgot. Yet I remember / The picture: the Fulbright Scholars.‘

4 This holds a striking parallel with

Plath‘s ghost ‗I see trying / To remember – or suddenly not to remember‘ in the big, dark city of which he says her works are suburbs,

5 ‗I remember / Little from the rest of that evening‘,

6

‗Then - / Blank. How did you enter? What came next? / How did Lucas delete himself, for instance? / Did we even sit? // I cannot remember / How I smuggled myself, wrapped in you, / Into the hotel.‘

7 ‗How did you stop? I can‘t remember / You stopping. I imagine they

reeled away –‗8, ‗I remember little‘.

9 This device also emphasises the nuanced ‗slippery,

elusive quality of memory‘.10

He does not claim to be offering an authoritative version of the

1

1 Ted Hughes. ‗Superstitions‘, Howls & Whispers. Collected Poems. (2003). 1184.

2 Hughes. ‗Visit‘, Birthday Letters. Collected, 1049.

3 Lucas Myers. An Essential Self – Ted Hughes & Sylvia Plath: A Memoir. (2011). 9, 11.

4 Hughes, ‗Fulbright Scholars‘, Collected, 1045.

5 Hughes. ‗The City‘, Howls & Whispers, Collected, 1180.

6 Hughes. ‗St Botolph‘s‘, Collected, 1052.

7 Hughes. ‗18 Rugby Street‘, Collected, 1056, 1057.

8 Hughes. ‗Chaucer‘, Collected, 1076.

9 Hughes. ‗A Dream‘, Collected, 1119. Also ‗Astringency‘.

10 Erica Wagner. Ariel’s Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath & the story of Birthday Letters. (2000). 91.

history but one made ‗clearly and expressively. Simply. No style. Plain‘:11

I‘ve been intrigued, I must say, by the maze of interconnections between those BLs. Considering how I wrote them, months often years apart, never thinking of them as parts of a whole – just as opportunities to write in a simple, unguarded, intimate way – to release something! Nor can I recall how I came to shuffle them into that order – following chronology of subject matter was the only rule, I think.

12

This view is somewhat surprising given the intricacies that have been discussed in the writings of those who have made careful studies of the book. It has been challenged by Kilfoil in her doctoral project ‗Knowing the text as I do, it is difficult to take him at his word. These poems are complex, intricate and extremely self-conscious.

13 It should be noted that

Hughes also affirms what he does remember, most strongly in ‗Daffodils‘ where he emphasises his own memory alone ‗Remember how we picked the daffodils? / Nobody else remembers, but I remember‘. He remembers ‗your daughter‘ coming with armfuls of them but ‗She has forgotten. / She cannot even remember you. // But somewhere your scissors remember. Wherever they are.‘

14

The lost scissors are representative of a lost memorial and evocative of what only he remembers. ‗Fulbright Scholars‘, the poem that opens the volume begins with being unable to remember an image of Plath that is ‗Unalterable, stilled in the camera‘s glare.‘

15 This

memory takes place in close proximity to underground stations that are alluded to in order to connote a journey or descent into the underworld with all the mythical/literary associations mentioned in several of the poems. This method of remembering is somewhat reminiscent of Dali‘s hand-painted dream photography as a form of memory.

Salvador Dalí, The Persistence of Memory, (1931).

2

11

Hughes. To Keith Sagar, 15th

August 1997. Poet & Critic: The Letters of Ted Hughes & Keith Sagar.

(2012). 258. 12

Hughes. To Sagar, 22nd

June 1998. Poet, 267. 13

Karen Kilfoil. ‗From Ted Hughes‘ Birthday Letters: Annotations & Commentary‘. Plath Profiles 3, (2010).

192. 14

Hughes. Collected. 1125, 1126. 15

Hughes. ‗St Botolph‘s‘, Collected, 1052.

Ann Skea has written about the significance of the ‗PAUM!‘ in ‗Grand Canyon‘ comparing it to the Om in Hinduism: Nothing is left. I never went back and you are dead. But at odd moments it comes, As if for the first time, like a hand grabbing And shaking me from light sleep, Through all these years, and after thirty years, Close, itself, ours as the voice of your daughter – PAUM!

16

This also relates to Plath‘s wonderfully rounded vowels in ‗Morning Song‘ and may well explain their existence in no less than four of the poems (among others) that include her ‗Love, love‘ repetition (‗Burning the Letters‘, ‗Fever 103°‘, ‗Nick and the Candlestick‘ and ‗The Couriers‘). René Guénon has described a triangle with an A at its top and D and M at its base. Inside it, a smaller triangle the other way round with an E and V at its base and an A at its apex. These are Adam and Eve. On the right side of the larger triangle is written one and on its left is written Om with Permanent at its base.

17 I am told that "Ooooooooommm" is

the first word a baby brings out and also has deeper meaning in every language: in breath, in the gap that is the 'O gape', in mother, the feminine, in a sigh, in doubt, in rethinking, in a moment of understanding and so on.

18 The interlocked triangles are widely understood in

mystical teaching as representing heaven and Earth, God channelling the Divine energies into our world and Humankind reaching upwards to Heaven, they are commonly used as a protective symbol in Cabbala and magic. Hughes was familiar with the whole mystical philosophy of sound (probably through the work of Franz Bardon as early as 1962)

19 with

which the rituals in most spiritual disciplines are replete. In ‗Stubbing Wharfe‘, Hughes recalls 'the gummy dark bar‘ where he and Plath sat drinking and pondering over their futures. It is possible for the ardent visitor to feel something of the atmosphere and the spirit of inspiration behind the poem in which he says that he realised at

3

16

Hughes. Collected, 1106. 17

René Guénon. Collected Works of René Guénon. 23 vols. Information based on Shaykh Muhiyudeen Ibn

Arabi‘s Futûhât al-Makkiya: ii [The Meccan Revelations]. 2 vols, edited by Michel Chodkiewicz. (2002,

2004). 145. Selected chapters from Ibn Arabi‘s magnum opus have also been translated by Aisha Bewley and

published by Great Books of the Islamic World. 18

Also Ziba Karbassi. Ooooommm, (2011).

About 'The Moon and the Yew Tree':

The poem‘s dramatic crisis is that the form of the tree cannot hold the subject matter: the o-gape of the

moon‘s despair, an inversion of the agape that is divine love in the Christian tradition, reminds us of

her mythic and often tragic inheritance in her various guises as Isis, Hecate and Venus. The sublime

light of the moon in Plath‘s poem is too much for the mind of the tree, and, in turn, the mind of the

speaker, for whom the tree speaks. Subjectivity has been brought to its realizable limits, and although

the projecting ‗gothic shape‘ of the yew tree points towards sublimity, it cannot contain it; it cannot

speak of it. And so the ‗bald and wild‘ statements of the moon go unrepresented. There is no form

adequate for her terminal o-gape of sublime despair. In the end, the speaker returns to ‗blackness and

silence‘ as language fails to translate the overwhelming experience of pain and terror.

The ‗O‘ constitutes a terminal omega replacing the initial alpha in the Greek word.

Sally Bayley. ‗The trees of the mind are black, the light is blue‘: sublime encounters

Sylvia Plath‘s ‗tree poems‘. Representing Sylvia Plath. (2011). 103, 109.

Hughes explores alpha as a metaphor for Plath‘s poetic endeavours in the poem ‗Telos‘, (Collected, 1157). 19

Ann Skea. ‗Creatures of Light‘, (October 2005).

that time that Sylvia could never be as passionate about this part of the country as he was. While he is making passionate exclamations about the place, he notices her lost, aloof, somewhere else, uninterested: Your eyes were elsewhere – The sun-shot Atlantic lift, the thunderous beaches, The ice-cream summits, the whisper of avalanches, Valleys brimming gentians - the Lawrentian globe Lit the crystal globe you stared into For your future -

20

This disinterestedness is seen by Hughes in terms of Plath‘s Americanness that he says she never really recovered from; her Americanness is one of the constant themes that govern the book like ‗fixed stars‘

21 as Maeve O‘Brien notes:

Throughout the years she spent in England, Plath would find it difficult to understand what she perceived as England's technological backwardness. As late as 1963, this topic still provided a source of inspiration and occasional amusement for Plath, with her wry short story "Snow Blitz," lamenting the struggles of the English in a debilitating winter.

22

Plath‘s Americanness is contrasted with Hughes‘ own ‗post-war utility survivor‘ Britishness/brutishness (‗A Pink Wool Knitted Dress‘, ‗Your Paris‘, ‗The Rabbit Catcher‘, ‗The Beach‘ and others) whereas ‗The Badlands‘ explores a similar landscape in America. It is also expressed in terms of the native weather and landscape in Hughes‘ other poems such as 'Football at Slack' and the poems on Hepstonstall, he penned a long preface on that very aspect in the 1994 edition of Remains of Elmet

23 and ‗he often described Yorkshire as being

in perpetual mourning for the dead of World War I‘.24

Hughes‘ vision of Paris in June 1956, then, was still as coloured by wartime horrors as he imagined Plath‘s was composed of American writers who had lived in Paris such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Miller and Stein, and by artists‘ representations of the city. In ‗Your Paris‘ Hughes contrasts that vision as being ‗some euphoric / American Europe‘

25 with ‗My

Paris‘26

that he kept from her, ‗Something always goes wrong for us in Paris,‘27

wrote Josephine Hart in the novel described by Hughes as ‗really a poem‘ dangling like a knife that pierces the heart. For Hughes, Paris would have meant the capital of the German Occupation ‗a post-war utility survivor‘ (how he also describes himself in the preceding poem about their wedding), for Plath it meant a desk in a pension upon which her letters to Richard Sassoon lay unopened just two months after their break-up. The poem following describes Plath as a ‗bobby-sox American‘

28 and her panic-stricken

efforts to clutch back at ‗college America‘ to which she cries for help in ‗Fever‘. It speaks of their visit to see the bullfight in Madrid where she pressed sweaty palms to her eyes in horror, Plath also wrote a poem called ‗The Goring‘ about the experience and mentioned it in a letter

4

20

Hughes. ‗Stubbing Wharfe‘, Collected, 1112. 21

Hughes, ‗The Bee God‘, Collected, 1142. Sylvia Plath. ‗Words‘. Collected Poems. 22

Maeve O‘Brien. "I am, in my deep soul, happiest on the Moors": The Impact of Dealing with the World

Beyond the Shores of the United States in the Life and Work of Sylvia Plath'. Plath Profiles 4. (2011). 21. 23

Hughes. Collected: Appendix One, 1200-1202. 24

Henry Hart. ‗Seamus Heaney & Ted Hughes: A Complex Friendship‘. Ted Hughes: From Cambridge to

Collected. (2013). 150. 25

Hughes. ‗18 Rugby Street‘, Collected, 1056. 26

Hughes. ‗Your Paris‘, Collected, 1066. 27

Josephine Hart. Damage. (1991, 2011). 28

Hughes. ‗You Hated Spain‘, Collected, 1068.

to her mother.29

‗Drawing‘ is a moving poem about Plath‘s drawings of the market at Benidorm, ending on a poignant note: As your hand Went under Heptsonstall to be held By endless darkness. While my pen travels on Only two hundred miles from your hand, … And the contemplative calm I drank from your concentrated quiet, In this contemplative calm Now I drink from your stillness that neither Of us can disturb or escape.

30

Jillian Becker remembers Plath telling her she would have liked to be buried in the churchyard next to Court Green ‗in undulating Devon, not flinty Yorkshire‘.

31 Her idea of

England in ‗55 Eltisley‘ as ‗part / Nursing home, part morgue / For something partly dying, partly dead‘

32 is explored further in ‗The Beach‘. It recalls the heirloom paperweight crystal

ball that she had holding in miniature inside it ‗your New England Christmas, / A Mummy and a Daddy, still together / Under the whirling snow, and our future‘.

33

Their friend Lucas Myers particularly feared the marriage would descend into a struggle for the suburban goods of the American way of life, for Hughes 'Beautiful, beautiful America!'

34

29

Plath. To Aurelia Schober Plath, 14th

July 1956. Letters Home: Correspondence 1950 – 1963. (1978). 30

Hughes. Collected, 1071. 31

Jillian Becker. Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath. (2002). 25. 32

Hughes. Collected, 1074. 33

Ibid, 1075. 34

You were a new world. My new world.

So this is America, I marvelled.

Beautiful, beautiful America!

Hughes. ‗18 Rugby Street‘, Collected, 1058.

The reference is to Donne‘s elegy:

Licence my roving hands, and let them go

Behind, before, above, between, below!

O, my America! my new-found land!

My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned!

My mine of precious stones! My empery!

How am I blest in this discovering thee!

To enter in these bonds is to be free:

Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be.

John Donne. ‗To his Mistress Going to Bed‘, The Complete Poems of John Donne.

(2008, 2010). 328, 329.

In an interview with Drue Heinz, Hughes said ‗To me, of course, she was not only herself—she was America

and American literature in person. I don‘t know what I was to her. (‗The Art of Poetry: 71‘. The Paris

Review, Spring 1995). In this poem Hughes describes her as ‗…slim and lithe as a fish‘. The comparison is

reminiscent of Yeats‘ poem 'The Song of Wandering Aengus', Yeats explained that ‗…the Tribes of the

Goddess Danu can take all shapes, and those that are in the water take often the shape of fish‘. (W. B. Yeats.

The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats: I – The Poems. 480, 482).

Danu was related to Brigit (Christianized as St. Bridget) whose flame burned at Kildare until the

Reformation (Robert Graves. The White Goddess. 138). It also harks back to the Biblical saying of Jesus

‗Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men‘. (The Holy Bible. Matthew 4: 19). The icon of the fish

appears in Christian and alchemical texts, not to mention the incarnation of the Hindu God Vishnu in the form

would act as a catalyst of potent associations as would her ‗long, perfect American legs‘ that ‗Simply went on up‘.

35 If we leave aside putting things down to destiny or 'Fate' everything

else seems to be put down to this, her ‗transatlantic elation‘,36

‗Your exaggerated American / Grin for the Cameras, …‘

37 ‗Your American royalty,‘

38 he wrote to her ‗That night was

nothing but getting to know how smooth your body is. The memory goes through me like brandy.‘

39 This brings to mind Betjeman‘s verse:

I run my fingers down your dress With brandy-certain aim And you respond to my caress And maybe feel the same.

40

In ‗A Pink Wool Knitted Dress‘ Hughes describes the ‗great cut jewels‘ in Plath‘s eye-pupils ‗Jostling their tear-flames, truly like big jewels / Shaken in a dice-cup and held up to me.‘ This recalls the description of her eyes in ‗St Botolph‘s‘: Squeezed in your face, a crush of diamonds, Incredibly bright, bright as a crush of tears That might have been tears of joy, a squeeze of joy. ‗Fate Playing‘, ‗A Pink Wool Knitted Dress‘ and other poems such as ‗18 Rugby Street‘ describe Plath‘s panic attacks (her ‗dybbuk fury‘)

41 as ‗an American girl being so American‘,

her flinging arms, sobbing, goading, pleading, her tears scattering and splashing over him. ‗Fate Playing‘ begins by offering answers to the great question:

42

Because the message somehow met a goblin, Because precedents tripped your expectations, Because your London was still a kaleidoscope Of names and places any jolt could scramble, You waited mistaken.

43

Hughes wrote to his sister early in 1957: After her exams etc I suppose she felt nervy – she did, that was obvious. Her immediate ‗face‘ when she meets someone is too open & too nice – ‗smarmy‘ as you said - but that‘s the American stereotype she clutches at when she is in fact panic-stricken. Or perhaps – and I think this is more like it – her poise & brain just vanish in a kind of vacuous receptivity – only this American stereotyped manner keeps her going at all. She says stupid things then that mortify her afterwards. Her second thought – her retrospect – is penetrating, sceptical, and subtle. But she can never bring that second-thinking mind to the surface with a person until she‘s known them some time. She‘s hard to bring out, in fact.

44

6

of a fish with which Hughes would have been familiar as with Jung‘s discussion of the iconology in The

Collected Works of C. G. Jung: xi (2) - Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. (1969). 35

Hughes. ‗St Botolph‘s‘, Collected, 1052. 36

Hughes. ‗Wuthering Heights‘, Collected, 1080. 37

Hughes. ‗Fulbright Scholars‘, Collected, 1045. 38

Hughes. ‗Error‘, Collected, 1121. 39

Hughes. To Sylvia Plath, March 1956. Letters of Ted Hughes. (2007). 37. 40

Sir John Betjeman. Collected Poems. (2006). 171. 41

Hughes. ‗The Rabbit Catcher‘, Collected, 1136. 42

A poem on this theme is ‗Why.‘ By Hollace M. Metzger. Transcriptions of Time. (2009. 154, 155). John

Siddique‘s poem with the same title in the book Full Blood (2011. 81) is another example. 43

Hughes. Collected, 1062. 44

Hughes, to Olwyn Hughes, 20th

– 23th

June 1957. Letters. 99.

He notes that nobody wanted her dance, her strange glitter, her floundering and drowning life, her efforts to save herself: Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil, Looking for something to give – Whatever you found They bombarded with splinters, Derision, mud – the mystery of that hatred.

45

Myers quotes and comments on a letter he wrote to Hughes‘ sister Olwyn: ‗I know the American type of which Sylvia is very representative quite well. This type has its own desires for any course of action it chooses… Publicly, and somehow in their own conscious minds, this is all done in some high name such as Poetry, Religion, and the Life of Feeling‘. Sylvia‘s behaviour was abnormal and Ted might have tried to make her see that explicitly, in which case her reaction would most likely have been hysterical. Or he could have tried indirectly to make her change, which is what he did and what led to the Ariel voice.

46

Referring to Plath‘s posthumously published poetry that he edited, Hughes is referencing Eliot‘s lines from the ‗Four Quartets: Little Gidding‘

47 when he says ‗the tongues / Of fire

told their tale. And suddenly / Everybody knew everything‘.48

In ‗The Chipmunk‘ Plath is remembered making a chipmunk face for the camera and Hughes describes the animal in words he uses to describe Plath in ‗St Botolph‘s‘, ‗18 Rugby Street‘ and ‗You Hated Spain‘ recollecting other snapshots. Hughes explains how he felt the Chalcot Square flat would have proved extremely small to house a small fox cub he had bought for a pound ‗On the hump of Chalk Farm Bridge!‘ then let it go ‗As if out of my own life‘.

49 He imagined what Sylvia would think if he had taken it home (all expressed in terms

of caring for the baby) – After her death he wrote to Anne Stevenson about protecting Plath‘s legacy, comparing it to holding a fox cub and protecting it from the hounds, allowing oneself to be bitten in the process

50 (as he does when nursing the sick bat in ‗9 Willow Street‘

ignorant that American bats carried rabies). Hughes vows never to go near Reims again after the ‗lightning stroke‘ experience with the terrifying gypsy lady whose warning of Plath‘s impending suicide hung in his mind ‗Heavier than the Cathedral‘ so that he seriously contemplated going back to find her and bribe her to ‗call home / Her projectile.‘

51 ‗The Rabbit Catcher‘ and ‗The Beach‘ both concern (among

other things) Plath‘s hatred of ‗England‘s grubby edges / That flat, draughty plate was not an ocean‘,

52 something she also expressed feeling in a letter to her mother:

7

45

Hughes. ‗God Help the Wolf after Whom the Dogs Do Not Bark‘, Collected, 1060. 46

Myers, 58. 47

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,

They can tell you, being dead: the communication

Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.

T. S. Eliot. Collected Poems 1909 – 1962, (1963). 202. 48

Hughes. ‗The God‘, Collected, 1165. 49

Hughes. ‗Epiphany‘, Collected, 1116, 1117. 50

Hughes. To Anne Stevenson, November 1989. Janet Malcolm. The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted

Hughes. (1994). 142. 51

Hughes. ‗The Gypsy‘, Collected, 1117, 1118. 52

Hughes. ‗The Rabbit Catcher‘, Collected, 1137.

There is something depressingly mucky about English sea resorts. Of course, the weather is hardly ever sheer fair, so most people are in woollen suits and coats and tinted plastic raincoats. The sand is muddy and dirty. My favourite beach in the world is Nauset, and my heart aches for it. I don‘t know, but there is something clean about New England sand, no matter how crowded.

53

Being always unaware of the significance of the event until it is too late to change anything is also another major theme that abides throughout the book. Fate is spelt four times with a Capital F: Time and time again, he offers up the machinery of doom, whether it's Ouija sessions, an offended gypsy, a dream, an illness, Otto, poetry. There's a tense- the opposite of the future- perfect, if you like, the posthumous future -where the poems like to take you, the tense of 'I had no idea,' of 'if only I‘d known what I know now,‘ the tense of dramatic irony…

54

Ann Skea sees this aspect in the light of the Fool card in Tarot and that would conform with Hughes describing himself as ‗dumbfounded‘, ‗ignorant‘, ‗stilled‘: Unable to fathom what stilled you As I looked at you, as I am stilled Permanently now, permanently Bending so briefly at your open coffin.

55

When Hughes writes about Plath‘s dumbness in his foreword to her journals (although he was famously reticent about their life together, he actually wrote about her quite extensively in his many forewords to her books and in his notes, articles and letters to the press) he relates it to ‗something about her reminiscent of what one reads of Islamic fanatic lovers of God –.‘

56 In

Plato‘s Phaedrus it is the spiritual station described as the Theia Mania or the Divine Madness, the concept of the Holy Fool is also common to the Hindu, Christian and Islamic religious traditions (termed the Avadhuta/Antevasin in Hinduism and the Malamatiyya in the Sufi tradition, of which the followers of Mollah Nasr-ad-Din are of particular note).

57

Plath famously said that she felt God speaking through her.

58 This is the voice which

transforms the being upon whom it descends and infuses and engulfs completely so that a new voice is granted which has no relation however remote to the random and occasional voices of hallucination. It is the voice of reason and rationality; it is the voice of truth, a voice to be called revelation, speaking in a language beyond the possibilities/probabilities of human discourse and that is what Hughes says she achieved in the poems of Ariel: When the two loves meet—each functioning as the masculine and feminine dynamic—they give birth to a strong communion and intense affinity between the Creator and the creation. The blazing flames of Divine love set ablaze the tinder dry firewood of human love, giving birth to a third phenomenon known as the Holy Spirit.

59

8

53

Plath, Letters Home, 391. 54

Michael Hoffman. 'Stare at the Monster,' Poetry: 183. (2004). 288 55

Hughes. ‗The Blue Flannel Suit‘, Collected, 1086. 56

Hughes, ‗Foreword‘ in The Journals of Sylvia Plath. (1982). A subject to which he returned in the poem

‗The God‘ in Birthday Letters. 57

Idries Shah. The Sufis, (1964), a book with which Hughes was familiar, probably through Graves and which

he reviewed upon publication (‗Regenerations‘, Winter Pollen) and referred to in his writings. 58

Hughes, ‗The God‘. Collected, 1165. See also Judith Kroll. ‗Foreword 2007‘ in the 2007 edition of

Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath for variorum. (1976, 2007), xxxi. 59

Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad. Taudhih e Maram [Elucidation of Objectives]. (1891. English: 1971,

2004). Alternative Translation, 1966. 19, 20.

It has been suggested that Hughes chose to express his innermost feelings about Plath retrospectively in his translation of Euripides‘ Alcestis and he thought so himself in a letter to Seamus Heaney. The play has these lines: He does not know what loss is. Nothing has ever hurt him. But when she has gone he will know it. When everything is too late Then he will know it. When he has to live in what has happened

60

In ‗Paris 1954‘

61 he sees himself as his own double peering over his shoulder, looking back

with hindsight towards his younger self as he chews his first ever Gruyère and sips his first ever claret oblivious of the scream that is heading towards him.

62 Hughes recognised that

Plath was an embodiment of the White Goddess (Plath, too, identified herself with her), Wevill an embodiment of the Black Goddess in the myth that became his life, in the equation he worked out through Shakespeare‘s writing in his great book Shakespeare & the Goddess of Complete Being: The poems repeatedly emphasise the idea that there is something mythic about the Hughes- Wevill relationship, something which is predestined to be fated as if their story is a fable or folklore which has become real.

63

Hughes calls her ‗The Ancient Mariner‘s Death-in-Life Woman‘ and a Kraken

64 (the

albatross makes an appearance in ‘55 Eltisley‘) ‗Since Plath was, indeed, the form taken by the White Goddess in Hughes' life, it had been her destiny to inflict devastation on Hughes, as well as release his creative fluency‘.

65

As such, for Hughes, their fate like that of the Ancient Mariner

66 (in whose hands the players

in the tragic ‗drama‘ were helplessly caught) also seems to be indicative of what Heaney describes as a ―struggle in the soil as well as in the soul‖

67 and he almost seems to be

speaking for himself half the time when writing about Shakespeare in Shakespeare & the Goddess of Complete Being as in the following passage:

9

60

Hughes. Alcestis. (2000). 15. 61

Hughes. Howls & Whispers, Collected, 1173, 1174. Also ‗The Hidden Orestes‘ in Howls. 62

Shakespeare explores the blindness of love in 'Sonnet CXLVIII'. 63

Edward Hadley. The Elegies of Ted Hughes. (2010). 142. 64

Hughes. ‗Moonwalk‘, Collected, 1069. 65

Diane Middlebrook. Her Husband – Hughes & Plath: A Marriage. (2003). 283. 66

‗That day the solar system married us / Whether we knew it or not‘, (‗St Botolph‘s‘), ‗Whoever comes into it

never gets properly out! / Whoever enters it enters a labyrinth / A Knossos of coincidence! And now you‘re

in it‘ (‗18 Rugby Street‘). This ignorance of a sense of impending doom is also present in Hughes‘ early

poem ‗Six Young Men‘. It is also the leitmotif of Josephine Hart‘s novel Damage that had impressed

Hughes so much, he would have related to several of the passages in the novel including such as ‗How can

you not know? Can‘t you sense, smell, taste disaster waiting in the corners of the house? Waiting at the

bottom of the garden?‘ In her introduction to the 2011 edition, Hart even wondered whether the novel (or the

writing thereof) had damaged her!

Becker comments on this aspect with reference to the poem ‗Dreamers‘ in Giving Up: The Last Days of

Sylvia Plath, (35). For its relation to ‗Dreamers‘ See also Carol Bere‘s ‗Complicated with Old Ghosts: The

Assia Poems‘, Ted Hughes: Alternative Horizons. Edited by Joanny Moulin. (2005), 14 – 22 and Skea.

Poetry & Magic 3: Capriccio. (2007). 67

Seamus Heaney. ‗Funeral Oration Delivered At the Thanksgiving & Memorial Service for Ted Hughes,

Westminster Abbey, 13th

May 1999‘. (‗A great man & a great poet‘, The Guardian, 16th May 1999).

Without relaxing its hold, his 'total, unconditional love' has been split into two, as his lady's body is possessed by two different women. One is the beloved of his 'true soul', the other a demoness. The anguish of these poems is the anguish of his effort, and failure, to separate the two women behind the one pair of eyes.

68

Roy Davids says as much: …the book is as much about Ted Hughes as it is about Shakespeare. At one time he even considered putting the whole Plath story on the stage of this book -- behind the scenes even -- using it as a metaphorical ground rather than writing Birthday Letters.

69 Birthday Letters is also full of many different types of silence. Hughes seemed to be inspired by blank spaces infused by natural landscapes. Birthday Letters is also, of course, about his own silence on Plath (though her absence also seems to work through earlier volumes such as Recklings)

70 culminating at last as Capriccio, Birthday Letters and Howls & Whispers. It

would be interesting to examine the many different ways he engages and drives the physical word of 'silence/silent' in his poetry as opposed to an absence. Plath, too, investigated the silence of the Muse in 'The Colossus' and in 'The Moon and the Yew Tree'. There are also the many voices/presences silenced by time, commerce, political division which Heaney talked about too in his Stepping Stones

71 interviews and other factors not to

mention the deliberate distortions or pushed silences we make ourselves. Birthday Letters is also about the pain, the regret and the remorse time can ruthlessly leave us with, with so many things unsaid and undone and this sense of self-pity is not found in Birthday Letters but Hughes‘ correspondence is full of it and it is present in the newly discovered poem ‗Last Letter‘.

72 It is about how fleeting certain moments can be, how there are no answers, really.

In the end, we are at a loss until nature takes it course and a healing, productive warmth is produced, especially through art, music and poetry but the sense of loss is always there, and especially so if one is alone without anybody to share it with.

© The Ted Hughes Society Journal / Rehan Qayoom, February 2014.

10

68

Hughes. Shakespeare & the Goddess of Complete Being. (1992, revised & corrected 1993). 62. 69

Roy Davids. ‗An unpublished appreciation of Ted Hughes's Shakespeare and the Goddess of Supreme

Being‘, (1999). 70

Hughes echoes Plath‘s ‗Love, love‘ in ‗Plum-Blossom‘. 71

Heaney. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. (2008). 72

New Statesman, 11th

October 2010.

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