Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, is the author of more than forty books of poems, prose, and translation. He has received the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and now the W. H. Smith Award for his Tales of Ovid. However, what first brought him into the limelight was the death of his poet wife, Sylvia Plath - an incident that sent shock waves through literary circles in1963 and had all the radical feminists up in arms against the man who had allegedly driven his wife to a self-inflicted death. Ever since, Hughes has been at the centre of controversies.
Condemned to live on as a survivor, for many years Hughes wrote nothing but children's verse. At the same time he concentrated on bringing out Sylvia Plath's poems, letters (edited by her mother, Aurelia Plath) and journals. And then, when he did turn back to poetry, not surprisingly, he focused on the negative side of life, the darker forces in the universe which are forever threatening man. He did not write of personal experiences. He did not write of his wife's suicide, or of emotional and other disasters he surely must have suffered. And yet the sense of doom crept into his poetry through symbols from the animal world: the jaguar, the the hawk, and the crow - masks from the world of nature that the poet donned to hide the pain he lived through. Meanwhile the Plath myth has grown. It has all the makings of a cult: the love and the hate, the betrayal and the anger, with the sensationalism climaxing in self-destructive violence.
The present volume of poems, Birthday Letters, is very different from the earlier collections. Whereas earlier Hughes liked to assume the role of a sort of wild man of the woods surrounded by his animals and birds, here we have Ted Hughes the man, the husband and the lover, without his mask. These are poems, personal and intimate, addressed to Sylvia Plath, written over a period of thirty-five years following her death.
In order to appreciate the poems of Birthday Letters fully the reader needs to be familiar with the life and work of Sylvia Plath. There are at least three crucial biographical facts that cast their shadow on her work: one, the premature death of her father when she was barely eight; two, the separation from her husband, Ted Hughes, in whom she saw a father surrogate; and, three, her suicide attempts, the first unsuccessful one at the age of twenty-one, and the final successful attempt in her thirtieth year. On these major events of Plath's life is based her major poetry, its cries of helpless rage alternating with gloomy despair, its narcissistic concern with the individual self colouring all themes and subjects she chooses to write of. And these are the events referred to repeatedly in the new poems of Ted Hughes.
Birthday Poems may thus be considered a companion piece to Sylvia Plath's poetry, offering another understanding of it by filling in the background to poems, to the early days of their courtship and the growing intensity of their relationship. A sense of fatality seems to be an integral part of the relationship, right from the beginning:
"Nor did I know I was being auditioned
For the male lead in your drama,
Miming through the first easy movements
As if with eyes closed, feeling for the role.
As if a puppet were being tried on its strings,
Or a dead frog's legs touched by electrodes."
A suicide, they say, kills two people - the one who dies and the one who doesn't. As the survivor who didn't, Ted Hughes has silently borne his private hell over the last thirty-five years. This is what the poems testify. But if writing them must have been a painful process, breaking his silence and compiling them for public consumption could not possibly have been easy. And so he speaks of the
"Old despair and new agony / Melting into one familiar hell."
Images and themes from Plath's work find their way repeatedly into Hughes' poems. "Sam" refers to the time when Plath's horse (Ariel) ran wild. She had hung on to his neck and returned to the stables in a state of shock. The image of the Hanging God from Plath figures several times and is linked to the Daddy figure that, according to Hughes and other Plath critics, was the harbinger of doom in her life. The arrow symbol of "Ariel," the fixed stars governing one's life, the Bronte countryside, the man in black, the stalking panther, azalea flowers, the works of Giorgio de Chiricio - these are images from Sylvia Plath's work that Hughes draws upon and they all testify that for him she is still a presence that he must live with whether he likes it or not.
Perhaps Hughes is trying to exonerate himself. It is not surprising that he talks about Sylvia Plath's life as a struggle to keep in control. Driven by the demons to succeed, she had to pay a heavy price for fame and recognition. In "Ouija," Hughes describes an early premonition of doom:
"Maybe you'd picked up a whisper that I could not
Before our glass could stir, some still small voice:
`Fame will come. Fame especially for you.
Fame cannot be avoided. And when it comes
You will have paid for it with your happiness,
Your husband and your life.'"
Hughes poems are like snapshots frozen in time, best understood by a reader who approaches them without prejudice against the author. They give us the survivor's story of what it was like to be bonded to a brilliant, fiery individual who was to be transformed into a myth, into something of an immortal cult figure, who was destined to live a brief but meteoric life. And who flamboyantly proclaimed that dying was an art: like everything else she did it exceptionally well.
