A word on Birthday Letters

When thinking about “Conflicting Perspectives” it is worth remembering a few things:

• Hughes is in a position of power as he has the final say and can say what he likes without any chance of a rebuff or response.
• He has chosen to give the work the title “Birthday Letters”. ‘ Birthday’ has positive connotations and “letters” implies intimacy and an element of truth or objectivity.
•  Think about the times when people write letters, think about purpose, audience and tone. Under what circumstances would letters be written and in what form/s ?
• Now consider why Hughes has written “Letters” in a chronological poetic form? What does the poetic verse bring to the subject matter in terms of  ‘conflicting perspectives’ ?
• Does (and if so, then HOW) form influence representation of the situation, events and personalities?

Module C Birthday Letters: Writing the Essay

Perspective implies that one is ‘positioned’ in one way or another. This means that we are viewing or possibly representing an issue, incident or event from a particular point of view. When the idea of ‘conflict’ is introduced alongside the word ‘perspective’ then we have two opposing viewpoints brought about from being positioned differently on the same event, issue or event. Within Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters some of the poems explore conflicting perspectives within the poems themselves but are also in conflict with the subject matter of some of the poems of Sylvia Plath, who writes about some of the same events and incidents that Hughes represents within his Birthday Letters anthology. While the composer is prone to explore incidents and events from a specific perspective it must be noted that the responder will also be positioned in a unique and personal manner. In part this can be attributed to prior knowledge of the subject matter but also reader –response is part of that equation.
To explore these ideas some of Hughes’s and Plath’s poems will be discussed along with the films Sylvia and Tom & Viv.

In “Fulbright Scholars” Hughes portrays his first recognition of Sylvia Plath. He draws on both his memory and hindsight within the poem. Both of these bring different perspectives to the piece and these result in tonal changes within the poem. While walking on a hot summer’s day, the speaker passes a news stand displaying the newspaper of the day. He notices the picture of the Fulbright Scholars who were the intake for that year. The assumption in this poem is that Sylvia Plath was one of the students represented in that photograph.
The poem explores Hughes’s memories and reminiscence about that day. In the poem the speaker draws on both memory and hindsight. This creates a tension within the poem, between what he remembers and what he has since learned. For this reason there are conflicting perspectives within this poem. However, one must remember that the poem is merely HIS perspective, his interpretation, his perception of the events of that day and consequently – as inferred within the poem-of their lives together. For this reason it is subjective. The speaker evokes memories of his thoughts and feelings on this occasion. He remembers some of Plath’s physical attributes like “Your Veronica Lake bang” and “your grin”. He is not always complimentary in his observations, and at times employs sarcasm and disdain, by way of high modality “exaggerated”.
The poem opens with a rhetorical question which sets up the tension between the conflicting perspectives of his memories and his hindsight. It is dominated by a tone of questioning and uncertainty made evident through the repeated use of rhetorical questions and the oft used word ‘maybe’. Even the line “For some reason…” evokes a feeling of uncertainty. This is compounded by the repetitive use of the word ‘or’ which is used to mean ‘perhaps’, not to mean an alternative choice.
Hughes is a master craftsman with words and he uses the power of language to skilfully position the reader to his perspective.
The director of the film Sylvia uses cinematic techniques to position the viewer to empathise with the young Plath. From the outset the producer has used a combination of slow rhythmic music (non-digetic sound) with a voice -over that represents the voice of Plath speaking of her dreams of marriage and family in soft pensive tones. Immediately the viewer is positioned to see the events from Plath’s perspective. The viewer experiences the film from Plath’s perspective and this is most evident through the title of the film and the use of close- up shots of Plath in the opening scenes, accompanied by soft music. This influences the viewer into a position of sympathy for Plath. In contrast “Fulbright Scholar” reads like a monologue and makes frequent use of personal pronouns which again conveys a sense of subjectivity or personal perspective. There is the obvious contrast of “I” and “you” within the poem which evokes the ever-present debate about their different perspectives on their relationship and the perspectives of so many others, to date. This tension between the two is evident in the “Were you among them? I studied it…”.

Continue to analyse this and two other poems along with SYLVIA and another piece of related material of your own choosing.

Ted Hughes: A Talented Murderer

Ted Hughes: A Talented Murderer

from: http://1lit.tripod.com/june2001.html

by Nadeem Azam

I am inhabited by a cry. Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

Sylvia Plath, ‘Ariel’

If a man’s wife commits suicide he attracts and, in most cases deserves, sympathy and support; for his next partner to go on to do the same thing (and take the life of their child at the same time), only six years later, inevitably leads to suspicions about his character and deserves investigation.

Unfortunately, by virtue of being both a man and a talented writer, Ted Hughes’ indiscretions and contributions towards the suicides of Sylvia Plath and Assia Welville have been largely confined to the feminist lobby and, as a result, been given short shrift. As one writer put it: “He was a great man and nothing was said or done to disturb the aura around him.”

When Ted Hughes used to give readings he would often be confronted by demonstrators holding placards which accused him of murdering Sylvia Plath. Plath’s grave in Yorkshire has repeatedly been desecrated with the letters ‘Hughes’ hacked off her name on the headstone. The recent revelations about her husband’s philanderous behaviour and lack of faithfulness to any of his wives are sure to incite haters of Hughes even further.

A new book has been published which exposes yet more womanising by Hughes, names another mistress of his, and suggests he fathered a fourth, unacknowledged child.

In May 2001, the Australian Jill Barber revealed her four-year affair with the late Poet Laureate in an account replete with all the lupine cliché that now threatens to overwhelm him. She told a journalist Hughes doesn’t speak; he “growls”; he looks like Heathcliff; he is “rough, passionate and forceful”.

Some detractors of Hughes, who had maintained a campaign against him because of his adulterous behaviour, softened their villification of the poet after the publication in 1998 of “Birthday Letters” in which, for the first time, he poured out his heart to the world and delved into his relationship with Plath.

He wrote about her with passion (“St Botolph’s”), and with tenderness and affection. Hughes recalled scenes from their courtship and marriage with precision – the peach scrunched outside Charing Cross station; the student parties (that famous bite/kiss), the first love-making (“You were slim and lithe and smooth as a fish”).

But he also shifts the blame entirely onto Plath for her ending. On first reading, there does seem to be a narrative of explanation that can be lifted out of these poems: that Sylvia Plath was doomed by the eight-year-old girl inside her who failed to grieve a father who died too soon; that her whole project (“trajectory perfect as if through ether”) was to get back to that father in his grave (whereas Hughes had “no more purpose in me than my own dog which I did not have”).

This leaves Hughes no option but to go seeking for them both: “big shock to meet me face to face in the dark adit where I have come looking for your daughter” (this, one of the only two poems not addressed to Plath, comes near the end, as if Hughes was left with no other place to go). According to this story, from very early on, Plath was heading inexorably to her death, and Hughes was a helpless bystander. If Hughes’s earlier poetry often reads as a tribute to a nature in excess of his own mastery, this would then be the first time that such a force at which he also marvels so utterly defeats him.

He also admits the differences which separate them – things which surface as local problems, but which generally signify a larger, subterranean divide. (On honeymoon: “Spain frightened you. Spain/Where I felt at home.”)

But precisely because what Hughes is writing about is a form of energy with a strength and will of its own, no attempt – if indeed this is the attempt – to hand it over to Plath alone, to her distressed and haunted selfhood as he sees it, can work. Lines like these, often cited over the past three years, are almost too easy to lift out of the poems: “auditioned for the male lead in your drama”, “I was a fly outside on the window pane / of my own domestic drama”, “Your life was a liner I voyaged in”, “Inside your Bell Jar / I was like a mannikin in your eyeball”. But they only tell half, if indeed that much, of the story.

Time and again, Hughes also has a dig at Plath lobbyists:
“Who caught all
That teeming population, every one,
To hang their tortured eyes and tongues up
In your poems?”
If this is true, then her readers are dupes. All they have is “the empty mask’”of her genie; or gloves from which “the hands have vanished”. Or worse, they are the guilty party to the crime:
“In the wilderness
Between the locusts and the honey
They demanded it. On, no problem
If that’s all you want,
You said, and you gave it.”
In the penultimate poem, addressed to his children, Hughes writes about those who have written about Plath’s work:

”Let them
Jerk their tail-stumps, bristle and vomit
Over their symposia.”

“Birthday Letters” produced a caricature of feminism as always pitying Plath and blaming Hughes as a man with no heart to speak of. This, of course, enraged legions of people who felt sympathy for Plath. The British literary critic Asad Yawar said the anthology “was an apologist diatribe concealed in honey” the feminist poet Robin Morgan told “Newsweek”: “My teeth began to grind uncontrollably.”

There’s no question of Hughes finding ways to forgive himself for leaving Plath. By giving us his account of her psychic history inside his portrait of their domestic history, he creates a long perspective in which sudden actions become comprehensible – or at least inevitable. “What happens in the heart simply happens.”

Even in his otherwise surprisingly-candid last interview with the “Daily Telegraph’s” Eilat Negev he shirked responsibility and was cagey when Plath was raised. When prompted about what may have caused her suicide he replies: “It’s too complicated. There are too many theories.”

It is obvious from both Hughes revelations and Plath’s own diaries that the couple were deeply in love and the latter was an empty vessel which benefited both artistically and emotionally from being filled by the talent and personality that was England’s greatest poet of the last century.

But the circumstances surrounding the last months of Plath’s life, and Ted Hughes’ desire to suppress as much information as possible relating to them, notwithstanding the recent revelations about the difficulty he had in keeping his trousers on, lead one to invariably point a finger or two, or eight, at Hughes.

If he didn’t have anything to hide, why would he have kept his wife’s suicide hidden from their children? He said in the interview with Negev:

“I didn’t know what to tell them about the circumstances of their mother’s death, so I kept quiet. They grew up without knowing she committed suicide.”

Why would he have destroyed the final volume of Plath’s journal, detailing their last three years together? Why would another diary, which every Plath scholar and enthusiast would be desperate to get their hands on, have suspiciously gone “missing”?

Plath was clearly a disturbed character – she had tried to commit suicide before ever meeting Hughes – and, as with almost all suicides, a wide array of factors need to be taken into consideration before attempting to decipher why she had chosen to take her own life.

But Hughes failure to apologize for cheating on Plath with another married woman, his refusal to discuss the circumstances surrounding her death head-on, and the revelations in Feinstein’s biography are sure to ensure he remains the Most Despised Poet on America’s campuses and nothing less than a murderer, albeit a talented one, in the eyes of many Plath sympathisers.

http://1lit.tripod.com/june2001.html

“The Minotaur” by Ted Hughes commentary by Mel Mc Guinness

“The Minotaur” by Ted Hughes
Commentary by Mel Mc Guinness

Minotaur –from Greek mythology, a half man-half beast that feeds on flesh and is found in a labyrinth.

This poem consists of 6 quatrains. It has a fast pace brought about through the use of sparse punctuation coupled with enjambment. The enjambment gives effect to the sudden and swift action within the verse accompanied by the extreme emotions which trigger this action.

There are two personalities on whom the focus is within the poem. While there is also reference to two other people within the poem, viz. Aurelia and Otto Plath, the focal point is the action and dialogue between Hughes and Sylvia Plath. The poem opens with violent action. Plath is represented as being in a fit of rage, smashing Hughes’s mother’s heirloom sideboard. For Hughes, the damage goes beyond the destruction of the physical, as seen in “Mapped with the scars of my whole life”. This could also be interpreted tom imply that he too has emotional childhood ‘scars’.

The second stanza provides the apparent reason for the rage. Hughes arrived home twenty minutes late for baby-minding. The first three lines focus on her actions thus diminishing and down-playing the fact that he was late. There are obvious gaps within the poem and one cannot but wonder why he was in fact late!

The third and fourth stanzas use dialogue which is sharp and sarcastic. These are Hughes’s words within the context of this incident. He ties her anger and violence to her personality rather than to his tardiness, sarcastically suggesting that she fails to include these emotions and destructive tendencies in her poetry. Again Hughes paints himself as the calm, placid one encouraging her in her creative pursuits, “Get that shoulder under your stanzas/ And we’ll be away”. From this point onward the focus changes and there is implied reference to Plath’s father. Otto Plath is described as the goblin which controls Sylvia’s psyche. The image of a “bloody skein” hints at Plath’s connection to her father and the destruction that this has wrought. It is a strong Freudian image conjuring notions of an in tact umbilical cord which strongly connects the two people.

The penultimate stanza utilises the jarring personal pronoun “Your” repeatedly. This creates an accusatory tone through repetition, “your marriage”, “your children”, “your mother”. Hughes has in effect, written himself out of the equation. The use of the simile “Left your children echoing/ Like tunnels in a labyrinth” connects them to the minotaur, their grandfather. This implies that they too have been affected by the ‘ghosts’ of their grandfather who wreaks havoc on Plath. The idea of Otto Plath as a monster or beast is echoed in the final stanza alongside the image of her mother who is seemingly helpless and abandoned. Hughes uses the juxtaposition of ideas in the penultimate line “Grave of your risen father” to foreshadow Plath’s death. The last two stanzas read like an explanation for her death. They imply that her death was a consequence of her manic tendencies and uncontrollable rage. The tone here is fierce and seemingly frustrated.

Sylvia Plath: “Daddy” commentary by Mel Mc Guinness

Sylvia Plath ~ “Daddy” has relevance to “The Shot” byTed Hughes

This poem conveys tension from the very outset. It is a confessional poem, in which Plath reveals a love-hate relationship for both her father and Ted Hughes, her husband. The title “Daddy” has positive connotations associated with love, warmth and security. This is sharply contrasted with the first line “You do not do, you do not do”. The tone can be interpreted as insistent because of the repetition but it is also possible to view it as accusatory because of the repetition of the work “not”. When you consider that Plath has used enjambment here, then the opening line must be read to include the first tow words of the second line, “Any more”. This then brings us to the idea that ‘daddy’ is no longer active, hence no longer alive. The speaker then establishes the image of the black shoe. Black is a colour used frequently in this poem and each time the connotations are negative. Plath uses colour to great effect within this poem, “black, white, green, blue, bright blue” and red is implied through the idea of blood.

The image of the speaker living in a black shoe in which she dared not breathe conveys a feeling of restrictions and fear. This is conveyed through the use of the simile in line 3.

The second stanza becomes darker in tone and from this point on the poem descends into proverbial darkness. In this stanza we note that the speaker idolised ‘daddy’ and he is represented as larger than life but in an intrusive and freakish way. He is described through an allusion of him being a seal that stretches from the east to the west. The speaker continues by stating that she longed to recover him “pray”. This however is in the past tense. Thus she is implying that she no longer prays to recover him. Something has changed and this poem gives the reasons for this change.

In the following stanzas, Plath refers to her father’s ancestry. Plath’s mother was Austrian and her father was German. Within this poem she connects his German descent to the holocaust and applies images of him as her persecutor and therefore she sets herself up as his victim- a Jew, “I think I may well be a Jew”. She finds the German tongue unappealing “language obscene” and it is evident that she feels this way about her father in this poem. There is a strong sense of disconnection form her father within this poem, “I have always been scared of you”. The images that are constructed around this notion of her father as a Nazi persecutor and herself as the Jewish victim are symptomatic of her psychotic state. She uses sarcasm to set up the idea of him as a brute, “Every woman adores a Fascist/ The boot in the face, the brute”. There is strong use of the repeated use of the word “brute” which conveys extremes of emotion.

In the stanzas that follow her father is described as a devil and as the devil that destroyed her heart. The idea of him biting her heart is grotesque and inhuman. We discover that she tried to kill herself at the age of twenty in order to be reunited with her father. The description of her recovery implies that she was noever quite the same- it was a temporary fix, “stuck me together with glue”.

There is a turning point in the poem as the focus shifts from ‘daddy’ to the man with the “Meinkampf look”-a reference to Ted Hughes. He is described as having a love of torturing her. She describes him as a vampire who sucked the life from her for seven years. For this reason, she addresses ‘daddy’ telling him that he can now rest because she has a new torturer.

In the final stanza “daddy” and Hughes become one and the same person. These last five lines are loaded with anger, frustration and desperation and speak strongly of her intention to suicide.
In his poem “The Shot” Hughes makes reference to many aspects of this poem and Plath’s “Ariel”.

“Fulbright Scholars” by Ted Hughes

Fulbright Scholars – Ted Hughes
Commentary by Mel Mc Guinness

Subject Matter

This poem is the first in a chronological selection from Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes. It is a representation of his first sighting of the other person addressed in the poem. It explores the poet’s first sighting of Sylvia Plath in a photograph on a newspaper stand at the Strand.
While walking on a hot summer’s day, the speaker passes a news stand displaying the newspaper of the day. He notices the picture of the Fulbright Scholars who were the intake for that year. The assumption in this poem is that Sylvia Plath was one of the students represented in that photograph.
The poem explores Hughes’s memories and reminiscence about that day. In the poem the speaker draws on both memory and hindsight. This creates a tension within the poem, between what he remembers and what he has since learned. For this reason there are conflicting perspectives within this poem. However, one must remember that the poem is merely HIS perspective, his interpretation, his perception of the events of that day and consequently – as inferred within the poem-of their lives together. For this reason it is subjective.

The speaker evokes memories of his thoughts and feelings on this occasion. He remembers some of Plath’s physical attributes like “Your Veronica Lake bang” and “your grin”. He is not always complimentary in his observations, and at times employs sarcasm and disdain, by way of high modality “exaggerated”.

Later in the poem, he remembers buying a peach from a stall near Charing Cross Station. The peach takes on a metaphoric significance within the context of the poem.
It must be noted that the poem is set not long after World War II. The peach therefore also has significance in that luxuries like fruit had started to become available after the war.
The last four lines are very rich in meaning as they operate on more levels than merely the literal.
In a literal sense, not a great deal happens within this poem. However, there is a deeper level of meaning which requires some contextual knowledge of Birthday Letters.

Analysis

The poem opens with a rhetorical question which sets up the tension between the conflicting perspectives of his memories and his hindsight. It is dominated by a tone of questioning and uncertainty made evident through the repeated use of rhetorical questions and the oft used word ‘maybe’. Even the line “For some reason…” evokes a feeling of uncertainty. This is compounded by the repetitive use of the word ‘or’ which is used to mean ‘perhaps’, not to mean an alternative choice.

It reads like a monologue and makes frequent use of personal pronouns which again conveys a sense of subjectivity or personal perspective. There is the obvious contrast of “I” and “you” within the poem which evokes the ever-present debate about their different perspectives on their relationship and the perspectives of so many others, to date. This tension between the two is evident in the “Were you among them? I studied it…”.

The poem moves through a journey from innocence to experience, from being alone to being ‘dumbfounded’. It is noticeable that the speaker remembers some aspects of this experience very clearly, “Noted your long hair…” and yet there is uncertainty about other aspects of the event, “I remember that thought. Not Your face.” From this we can assume that Sylvia Plath definitely was in the photograph and that he did indeed notice her. The use of the word “Noted” has different connotations to the word ‘noticed’. In other words he made a point of remembering these characteristics, viz. her long wavy hair. Almost in the same breath he states that he noted the ‘bang’ and then goes on to state, “Not what it hid”. This implies that she has a secret. It was a case of the obvious concealing the less obvious. He knows this with the benefit of hindsight.
This is further compounded by the use of the word “appear” in the line “It would appear blond”. This raises the notion of appearance versus reality- or indeed the idea of perspective.

The reference to “Your Veronica Lake bang” is loaded with meaning. Veronica Lake was known for assuming the roles of a femme fatale. This leads us to question whether Hughes is implying that Plath was his indeed his personal femme fatale. He furthermore suggests that this “bang” was hiding aspects of her character- that this representation of her was duplicitous.

In the following lines he alludes to her problems, implying that her grin was fake and held a purpose of its own. It was there for the “cameras, the judges, the strangers, the frighteners”. Is the “frighteners” an allusion to the “demons’ that haunted Plath?
The line “Then I forgot. Yet I remember/The picture…: makes judicious use of juxtaposition of the two ideas of forget and remember. It is not clear what exactly he forgot. However, the enjambment of the following lines makes it clear that he remembers the picture but not necessarily all the details of the occasion.
Hughes employs a pun, through the use of the “luggage”. This implies that the Fulbright scholars, esp. Plath, were carrying more thatn just the usual luggage. That as in the case of Plath, there was emotional luggage as well. “It seems unlikely,”hints at the incredulity if the idea that these awarded scholars would have emotional luggage. ON a literal level, it implies that it is unlikely that the photograph would have included their luggage alongside them.
In the final section of the poem Hughes uses alliteration in “”sore-footed, under hot sun, hot pavements”. This evokes the‘s’ sound which is reminiscent of a burning sensation. This evokes a sense of discomfort in the poem. This is followed by a question then a statement, “That’s as I remember”. The combination of the two alongside each other leaves the reader with a feeling of uncertainty and doubt about how sure he really is. We question how much is perspective and how much is conjecture.
The image of the peach hints at the idea in Genesis aka as Adam’s apple, or the fall of man. These lines lead us to believe that Hughes’s interest in Plath was sparked by this picture and in hindsight he now recognises this as the moment which led to his subsequent strife.
Structurally the piece consists only of one stanza. It is a monologue which mimics Plath’s confessional style of poetry.

Sylvia Plath Reads Daddy

It is worthwhile reading and considering both “Daddy” and “Ariel” before you start exploring The Shot by Ted Hughes. “Daddy” is a great source of background knowledge in relation to the study of Birthday Letters. It gives insight into Hughes’s references to Plath’s relationship with her deceased father.

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Friday poem # 12 – Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

Some contextual info for Module C – Conflicting Perspectives

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