Ted Hughes Alternative Horizons

TED HUGHES: ALTERNATIVE HORIZONS

CONTEXT AND GENRE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE Series Editors: Peter J.Kitson, Department of English, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK William Baker, Department of English, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, USA

Ted Hughes: Alternative Horizons EDITED BY

JOANNY MOULIN

LONDON AND NEW YORK

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Copyright © 2004 Taylor & Francis Group plc, London, UK All rights reserved. No part of this publication or the information contained herein may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, by photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written prior permission from the publishers. Although all care is taken to ensure the integrity and quality of this publication and the information herein, no responsibility is assumed by the publishers nor the author for any damage to property or persons as a result of operation or use of this publication and/or the information contained herein. Published by: Taylor & Francis The Netherlands, Lisse http://www.tandf.co.uk/books ISBN 0-203-01798-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 90 265 1973 7 (Print Edition) ISSN 1573-2320

Contents

Series Preface

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Foreword Joanny Moulin

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The Deterministic Ghost in the Machine of Birthday Letters Leonard M.Scigaj

1

Words to “Patch the Havoc:” The Imagination of Ted Hughes in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath Gayle Wurst

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Complicated with Old Ghosts: The Assia Poems Carol Bere

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“Dead Farms, Dead Leaves:” Culture as Nature in Remains of Elmet & Elmet Terry Gifford

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Ted Hughes’s Crying Horizons: “Wind” & the Poetics of Sublimity Christian La Cassagnère

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Poetry & Magic Ann Skea

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Self-Revelation, Self-Concealment & the Making of the Ted Hughes Archive Stephen Enniss

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Drives & their Vicissitudes in the Poetry of Ted Hughes Axel Nesme

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Hughes & the Female Addressee Neil J.Roberts

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Ted Hughes’s Anti-Mythic Method Joanny Moulin

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In Search of the Autobiography of Ted Hughes Diane Wood Middlebrook

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“Earth-Moon:” Ted Hughes’s Books for Children (& Adults) Claas Kazzer

101

Ted Hughes & the Folk Tale Paul Volsik

115

List of Contributors

125

Works Cited

128

Abbreviations

135

Index of Names and Titles

138

Series Preface

Context and Genre in English Literature The aim of the Context and Genre in English Literature series is to place bodies of prose, poetry, and drama in their historical, literary, intellectual or generic contexts. It seeks to present new work and scholarship in a way that is informed by contemporary debates in literary criticism and current methodological practices. The various contextual approaches reflect the great diversity of the books in the series. Three leading categories of approaches can be discerned. The first category, consisting of historical and philological approaches, covers subjects that range from marginal glosses in medieval manuscripts to the interaction between folklore and literature. The second category, of cultural and theoretical approaches, covers subjects as diverse as changing perceptions of childhood as a background to children’s literature on the one hand and queer theory and translation studies on the other. Finally, the third category consists of single author studies informed by contextual approaches from either one of the first two categories. Context and Genre in English Literature covers a diverse body of writing, ranging over a substantial historical span and featuring widely divergent approaches from current and innovative scholars; it features criticism of writing in English from different cultures; and it covers both canonical literature and emerging and new literatures. Thus the series aims to make a distinctive and substantial impact on the field of literary studies

Foreword

The authors of this collection of essays have been chosen so as to span a large spectrum of approaches to the poetry of Ted Hughes, instead of favouring one line of criticism as opposed to others. The initial purpose of the project was to bring together writers whose divergent opinions and theories promised mindopening contrasts. Although these authors are from five different countries, they belong basically to three critical traditions. Some markedly post-structuralist continental European papers turn resolutely to a close re-reading of the poetic texts themselves, and in so doing, serve, in part, as neutral ground for an encounter between milder representatives of the recent, and often opposed, tendencies in British and American critical readings. While most English experts often have a propensity for hagiography, the American reception of Hughes’s poetry has remained engrossed in, and conditioned by, a debate about his responsibility in the suicide of Sylvia Plath, sometimes at the excessive cost of no longer reading the poetry, except from this biographical vantage. But even here, new assessment is needed after Hughes’s own copious, albeit partial treatment in Birthday Letters of the issues involved in his life with Plath. However, the main argument of this book lies elsewhere, and is a theoretical one. Unsurprisingly for one who trained in social anthropology as well as in English literature in the Cambridge of the 1950s, Ted Hughes was a cryptostructuralist of sorts, at least until the late 1970s, but with a marked preference for Jungian theory, which implicitly dominates most of his ethics and Weltanschauung. This helps to explain why, except in a few recent instances, the main body of existing criticism concerning Hughes’s poetry draws predominantly on Jungian psychology. This poses a problem of method, since, with varying degrees of intensity, criticism tends to relay the poet’s own critical discourse, not only without acknowledging the fact, but perhaps without even being aware of it. This is all the more striking considering that, as his career gathered momentum and he became an established figure, Hughes’s discourse became more and more overtly ideological. For all that, the essays collected in this book are not concerned with erecting a barrage of counter-discourse, but rather to avoid yet another critical pitfall, that lies in Hughes’s mostly involuntary tendency to push his readers to take sides and to enlist either as fans or as detractors. Over and against partisanship, the plurality of approach to be found in

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this collection should be seen as a search for different ways to steer Hughes criticism gently but firmly out of the ruts of certain well-travelled avenues. Impartial assessment is, to be sure, the best service that can be rendered to Hughes’s poetry, by helping to ensure that one of the most powerful poetic achievements of the twentieth-century is no longer stranded in biographical or psychological sands. This collection of essays is the first to be produced since the poet’s death and presents a good sample of directions in academic research devoted to the poetry of Ted Hughes at the turn of the century. It is meant as a continuation of Hughes studies and a tentative broadening of their perspectives. Joanny Moulin

1 The Deterministic Ghost in the Machine of Birthday Letters Leonard M.Scigaj

“I looked for omens,” Ted Hughes writes, as he and Sylvia Plath enter their first rented flat in BirthdayLetters (49). But in Birthday Letters (1998) all the omens save Assia’s pike dream are bad omens. A pillowstain of blood, a gypsy’s curse, a ouija board, an earthenware head, a possibly rabid bat, a fox cub, a snake, ponderous astrology, and the word “Fate,” capitalized many times—all testify to a fatalistic inevitability. These are the “fixed stars” (118, 152, 188) that led to Plath’s suicide. For Hughes these “fixed stars” are the poet’s story, the one deep story at the heart of a lifetime that the poet expresses with a “thirst of the whole being. “But are Hughes’s “fixed stars” the same as the “fixed stars” Plath stated “Govern a life” in her late poem “Words” (CPP 270)? “Who has dismembered us” asked Plath, alluding to Assia, in her poem “Event” (195), written just after David and Assia Guttman Wevill ended their fatal weekend stay Court Green (21 May 1962). Hughes repeats the phrase in Birthday Letters (133), but the dismembering persona is not Assia and the time Hughes refers to is not the spring of 1962. For Hughes the dismembering persona is Plath’s father, Otto Emil Plath, and the time is 1940, the year of his death. At this juncture Hughes’s interpretation of Plath’s life and career becomes obsessive, deterministic. In his 1995 essay “Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems and The Bell Jar” (WP 466–81), Hughes argued that the primary revelation Plath experienced in writing her first novel was her fixation on her father’s death and his abandonment of her. This resulted not only in repressed anger at other males who might abandon her, for Hughes asserted that in writing The Bell Jar Plath also uncovered the source of her emptiness, a tendency toward violence buried deep in her German genetic roots. Though on the “upper level” of her mythology, asserted Hughes, Plath was certainly engaged in tearing free of those genetic roots with her death and rebirth poems in Ariel, on the “lower level” she succumbed to the “explosive experience” of her earlier attempted suicide, her desire to “annihilate herself” in a communion with her dead father, a desire falsely and inadequately subverted in The Bell Jar by scapegoating it into Joan Gilling’s hanging. The genetic determinism behind this interpretation of Plath’s demise, an unarticulated subtext in that 1995 essay, becomes Hughes’s primary theme in Birthday Letters.

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The central structural design of Birthday Letters concerns an obsessive equation of Otto and Sylvia Plath with King Minos and the Minotaur of Cretan mythology. In Apollodaurus, summarized by Edith Hamilton (151–2), Poseidon gives a bull to Minos, king of Crete, in order that the king sacrifice the bull to him. Instead Minos keeps it for himself, and Poseidon in turn punishes Minos by having his wife, Pasiphae, fall in love with it, producing the ravenous half-man, half-beast Minotaur. Minos directed his architect Daedalus to build a labyrinth to house the Minotaur. Once inside, no one could escape the labyrinth’s maze, and Minos used the structure to sacrifice captured enemies until the Athenian hero Theseus slays the Minotaur and finds his way out with the help of Ariadne’s thread. Hughes evidently sees in this myth a parable of how a self-centered, selfabsorbed person becomes inattentive to the spiritual, obsessed with the covetous rational, and in so doing bestializes his or her instinctual life, creating chronic and self-destructive needs to overindulge in satisfying one’s passions. In this contemporary recension, Hughes casts Otto Plath as the self-absorbed Minos (133), given his autocratic pater familias behavior acquired from his Germanic roots. In her self-destructive indulgence in anger and emotional tirades, Plath apes her father as she becomes the Minotaur (120). But Hughes does not stop here. He adds a second level of genetic and cultural determinism. Otto himself is infected with fascistic faith in an all-powerful Ruler, der Herr des Hauses (LH 13), and this has destructive consequences. So Plath, his offspring, exhibits in her destructive behavior that same genetic tendency. Her dreams in Birthday Letters are infected not only with corpses, but with “fatherworship” and its particular Germanic legacy of Nazi horrors, the “Death-camp atrocities,” the “gas-chamber and the oven” (141–42). Otto’s brow is “Modified in Peenemümde/Via Brueghel” (179). Peenemünde is the village in the north of Germany where the Nazis researched and tested their V-1 and V-2 rockets, and the Brueghel alluded to is no doubt Peter Brueghel the Elder’s “The Triumph of Death,” a painting of carnage and slaughter that Plath meditated upon in her early poem “Two Views of a Cadaver Room” (CPP 114). Both World Wars deeply affected Hughes’s personality development. As a child Hughes heard endless stories of the dead and the survivors of World War I at family gatherings and at Sunday night dinners, for his father was one of only seventeen survivors of an entire regiment that went through its numbers three times at Gallipoli. Hughes was nine when World War II began, and his adolescence was molded in the food rationing, the stresses of the Blitz, and the daily news accounts of the fighting. German fighters flew sorties regularly over much of England, looking mostly for aircraft hangars and Rolls Royce engine factories, but also bombing many cities in the shires. Parachuted pilots already crisped by explosions and fires in their planes were not uncommon, as in Hughes’s early poem “The Casualty” in The Hawk in the Rain. In his poetry Hughes performed an important civilizing function by locating ways to control aggression. Though he once quipped that the machinery of religion was the traditional way to control violence (Faas 201), he shared the

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modernist view that myth in twentieth century literature performs that religious function for a populace less and less influenced by traditional beliefs. Hence, as I have argued in my 1986 and 1991 works, Hughes controlled aggression through meaning-bearing modernist structures developed from his storehouse of myth and cultural anthropology: the Lupercalia ritual and the poem as wolf mask in Lupercal, the narrative of the adventure of the hero in Wodwo, the Zen Enlightenment of Part III of Wodwo and in the irony of Crow, and the psychology of alchemical transmutation to achieve the Jungian Self in Cave Birds. Often in these works—and especially in the Lupercal poem “Childbirth,” and the Wodwo poems “Thistles” and “The Warriors of the North” —Hughes meditated on Freud’s theory of phylogenetic inheritance, of an aggressive taint in the blood, transmitted to each succeeding generation by one’s forebears, that can instigate violent actions (See Scigaj, 1986, 43, 95; 1991, 52–5). Hughes’s use of the Minotaur myth in Birthday Letters, however, is deterministic, not liberating. Genetic determinism is how Hughes understands his former wife’s bouts of sullenness, her hostility, anger, and her final act of selfviolence. Otto’s hands are the hands of Fate manipulating Plath’s actions (184– 5), and those hands function as a perfect incarnation of a German death-wish, a cultural Ragnarok, in World War II. What Plath’s parents wanted from their daughter, insists Hughes, was “Thor’s voice” in the act of “Doing a hammerdance on Daddy’s body/Avenging the twenty-year forsaken/Sobs of Germania” (169). Just as Sylvia “danced for (her) father/In the home of anger” (26) as a child, so the adult’s “flames fed on rage” (149), ultimately to unite with him (153) after convicting him of autocratic control in “Daddy.” Hughes views “Daddy” as both Plath’s love letter and her death-wish, her “Cupid’s bow” nailing her father to the town square “Stark naked full of those arrows/In the bronze of immortal poesy” (179). Every arrow becomes a poetic “star” in her “constellation,” though “it was/[Her] blood that dried on him” (180). Using her published poetry as evidence against her, Hughes argues that ultimately Plath really “wanted/To be with [her] father” (153) in a “wedding” foreshadowed by her summer 1962 interest in becoming a beekeeper (150). Plath’s analyst, Ruth Beuscher, convinced her that she had “instant access” to her creative energies (69), but what coalesced from “the core of [her] Inferno” (69) was “Germany’s eagle/Bleeding up through [her] American eagle/In a cloud of Dettol” (78), as the dead Otto rose in poetic form from the well at the center of the Devon house (137, 150, 152). Hughes convicts himself of complicity in the poem entitled “Error” (122–3). He romanced Plath into his vision of bucolic rural life as the ideal environment for raising a family and ensuring greater poetic productivity. Instead of going to sunny Italy on that Guggenheim grant, Hughes convinced Plath to sleepwalk into his “land of totems.” “Gallant and desperate and hopeful,” Plath followed, listening to her own gods, and arrived “soul-naked and stricken/Into this cobbled, pictureless corridor/Aimed at a graveyard” (122). So Plath in the winter of 1961–62 sat in a freezing house, without central heating, “Listening/To the

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leaking thatch drip” and “staring at that sunken church” just beyond the graveyard (122–3). Creating a bedroom in red (197–8) and planing an elm plank for her writing table (138) were other errors committed by Hughes during the move to Devon that only gave Plath easier access to her anger and her past, and thus a quickly opened door into Otto’s grave (138). But what of the genetic determinism that Hughes advances in his reading of Plath’s poetry and in the structure of Birthday Letters? A key term, deposited in the poem “Suttee,” is “gruelling prolongueur,” which Hughes uses to describe Plath’s resurrection from her first suicide attempt into the “labour-pangs” of a “child-bride” on the “pyre” of a new myth—a myth of suicidal devotion to Daddy (147–9). Hughes had used “gruelling prolongueur” in the Wodwo poem “The Warriors of the North,” to signify a Viking genetic inheritance of aggressive behavior in the North Country Englishmen that flowed into the Predestination of Calvin. To what extent can we accept this deterministic ghost in the structural machine of Birthday Letters? From her student days at Smith College until her death, Plath was an existentialist, wavering only between the agnostic and atheistic versions. As Sartre persistently argued, deterministic thinking is absolutely inimical to existential freedom, choice and responsibility. In The Concept of Mind (1949), Gilbert Ryle invented the term “The Ghost in the Machine” (15–6) to characterize the mistaken view, originating with Descartes and seventeenth-century mechanistic thinking, that the mind operates as a shadowy, unwitnessable realm that nevertheless partakes of the mechanistic logic that drives the body. Because “the physical world is a deterministic system, so the mental world must be a deterministic system” (20), and mechanists like Descartes were really reformulating the religious bogey of Predestination in the new scientific language of Galileo (23). Descartes placated his religious scruples by using mental conduct words in ways that suggested that the mind is a quasideterministic causal agent of human action. Thus the bodily machine was governed by its deterministically-inclined ghost, the mind. Using logic and linguistic categories, Ryle argues against this determinism throughout The Concept of Mind. He affirms that dozens of mental conduct words used to signify intelligence (“clever,” “sensible” “stupid,” etc.) actually signify many different categories of dispositions, abilities, capacities, and qualities of character that may express themselves in observable behaviors under certain conditions or on certain occasions. We must reason back from observed behavior and recognize the element of freedom of purpose in assessing whether any dispositions or qualities of character have been employed, and this is not the same as attributing a fixed or deterministic cause of all behavior. Knowing “how” is a disposition that cannot be absorbed into knowing “that,” into knowing with causal certainty (45–6). Though a half-century old, Ryle’s argument is worthwhile today for its energetic indictment of reductionism. Humans “are not machines, not even ghostridden machines,” affirmed Ryle, and there is “plenty of room for purpose” (81), for discrete and differing responses to varying occasions, as well as for “learning

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how or improving in ability” (59). “There are very few machines in nature. The only machines that we find are the machines that human beings make” (82). In Birthday Letters Ted Hughes has created a machine of words, a labyrinth meant to reduce his former wife’s behavior to one deterministic cause, and in so doing deflect attention from his actions as well as reaffirm for one last time in print his male control of her actions. Through the obsessive emphasis upon the genetic determinism of Otto Plath’s anger and control, Hughes eliminates all other possible causes of Sylvia Plath’s actions in the last years of her life. What Plath learned in writing The Bell Jar was her fixed link to her father, according to Hughes, a link that electroconvulsive shock only temporarily numbed with its emptiness, and in composing the poems of Ariel Plath expressed that one inevitable wish—to merge with her father in a suicidal pyre. But by reasoning with Ryle, however, one could scrutinize Plath’s Journals, “The Magic Mirror,” The Bell Jar, the poems of Ariel, and instances of behavior in Plath’s last years, and locate responses to needs and desires other than a suicidal merging with her father, as well as recognize gains in her craft that reflect improvements in her abilities to comprehend social forces from a woman’s point of view. On five occasions in Birthday Letters (8, 18–9, 20–2, 25, 136), Hughes informs his readers that he has been rereading Plath’s Journals. In the first three occasions, Hughes is primarily interested in how Plath referenced early encounters with him —when he and Lucas Myers lobbed clods of mud at the wrong dormitory window (J 133), or her anticipation of his panther-like male prowess (131–4); how Plath perceived their first meeting at the infamous St. Botolph’s Review party (112–3), or how she was really on her way to find Richard Sassoon when she fell into Hughes’s arms and first made love with him (134–44). On the fourth occasion, Hughes alludes to her “juggernaut” of ambition that was meant to defeat “The grinding indifferent millstone of circumstance” (132). The last allusion to Plath’s Journals reveals that Hughes has reread a portion from 1961– 62, from writings that were supposedly either lost or burned, and remembered “what furies” she “bled into” that rag rug she labored over in the Devon home. None of these five allusions captures what Ryle would recognize as the main purpose of Plath’s Journals, the continuing reaffirmation of her existential (nondeterministic) “self-integral freedom” (31) and her desire to have her writing recognized as a career equal to that of any male: “I will not submit to having my life fingered by my husband, enclosed in the larger circle of his activity, and nourished vicariously by tales of his actual exploits. I must have a legitimate field of my own, apart from him, which he must respect” (35). This purpose could one day flower in Plath’s ideal of two equilibrated stars, her “two stars, polarized” (42–3), as in the “Excurse” chapter of Lawrence’s Women in Love. Why couldn’t Hughes balance his portrait of Plath with celebrations of that enviable ideal, however imperfectly realized in her actions and in the many hours of literary collaborations they no doubt shared at least during the early years of the marriage?

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In “Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems and The Bell Jar” Hughes wrote that “The Bell Jar is the story, in other words, from behind the Electroconvulsive Therapy. It dramatizes the decisive event of her adult life which was her attempted suicide and accidental survival, and reveals how this attempt to annihilate herself had grown from the decisive event in her childhood, which was the death of her father when she was eight” (WP 468). This may suit Hughes’s deterministic purpose in Birthday Letters, but it does so by denying that the novel catalogued what must have been for Plath the tremendously liberating experience of bringing to the surface a past traumatic event in a way that revealed the social causes of her earlier demise—an American 1950s society organized and administered by males, where roles for women are secondary and where gender equality in the exercise of social and political power is impossible. The goal of liberation through knowledge, both self-knowledge and knowledge of society—what Ryle would see as non-deterministic improvement by developing one’s abilities (Ryle 59) —is the most pervasive theme in Plath’s work. This is apparent even in “The Magic Mirror,” her undergraduate Honors thesis on the Double in Dostoevsky’s The Double and The Brothers Karamazov. Plath’s central assertion here is that Golyadkin in the former novel commits suicide because he never recognizes that his double is his own creation, a crystalization of his own suppressed ambition. In the latter novel, Ivan has the chance for recovering his “health and integrity” because he is “an artist in his own right” who self-analytically recognizes both his responsibility for his bastard brother’s parricide and the Devil as his own projection of his worst ideas (“Magic Mirror” 43, 57–60). As in Freud, acknowledging the repressed and the traumatic can lead to liberation through self-knowledge. In her Journals Plath also records her jagged progress from late adolescence through early adulthood as a struggle with her own doubts and inner demons, a struggle which is also potentially liberating. The Bell Jar is sometimes denigrated as a roman à clef, with its characters so satirically exaggerated that they suggest mean motives and limited creative abilities in its author. But like Brecht’s alienation effect, these one-dimensional satiric characters forestall empathy and keep the reader’s critical intellect alive. Of much greater importance are the events of the novel, events that Plath not only did live through, but which were typical of 1950s American culture. The events raise the reader’s awareness as they expose social forces within a society of male privilege where women are restricted and disempowered. Though Esther Greenwood’s visit to her father’s grave does appear just before the attempted suicide, the visit occupies only three pages of chapter thirteen (BJ 134–7). Its net effect is to make Esther realize that she can expect no help from parents, especially male parents, and that she must forego adolescent idols and make her own decisions. Esther is surprised at how ordinary her father’s grave is. Here she receives a healthy dose of adult realism as she revises her childhood perception of him from a godlike muse to an ordinary human. The fact that she can mourn his death at the conclusion of this short scene means that she is ready to move

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onward toward adulthood and accept responsibility for her own actions. Though Plath consciously presented her father in many early poems as “the buried male muse and god-creator risen to be my mate in Ted,” a remark she entered in her Journals in 1958 (J 222), she does not develop Esther’s relationship with her father in the chapters before or after the graveyard visit in The Bell Jar, a work she completed three years later. No one will gainsay that Otto’s early death was “the decisive event of her childhood,” as Hughes insists, but if The Bell Jar were primarily devoted to exploring her relationship with her father, Plath would certainly have developed it into a major structural motif. In real life her father’s early death did leave her with feelings of abandonment that led to overdependence upon male figures and at times a treatment of males as surrogate father figures, but she was aware of this tendency in herself by 1959 (J 267, 278, 284), and this is NOT the central subject of The Bell Jar. The main character’s (and the reader’s) liberating growth in understanding the limitations placed upon women in a society of male privilege is the central focus of every Bell Jar chapter. Twice in chapter thirteen of The Bell Jar, Plath presents Esther Greenwood reading books on abnormal psychology shortly before her unsuccessful suicide event. Plath had read Eric Fromm’s Escape From Freedom (J 83–6) and consulted psychiatrists in the summer of 1953, in the weeks before her unsuccessful suicide attempt (LH 130). By 1958 Plath had found in Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” a perfectly acceptable reason for her first suicide attempt, and it concerned her mother, not her father. She wrote that Freud’s account is “An almost exact description of my feelings and reasons for suicide: a transferred murderous impulse from my mother onto myself: the “vampire” metaphor Freud uses, “draining the ego”: that is exactly the feeling I have getting in the way of my writing: Mother’s clutch. I mask my self-abasement (a transferred hate of her) and weave it with my own real dissatisfactions in myself.” As Plath recorded this in her Journals (279), she emphasized that this is both a source of depression and “a changeable liability.” How to rectify the situation? Again notice the emphasis upon awareness promoting selfdevelopment: “Talking and becoming aware of what is what and studying it is a help” (J 279). Plath was to reuse that Freudian vampire metaphor later, in the Ariel poem “Daddy,” and for a similar liberating purpose. The real consciousness-raising purpose in writing The Bell Jar is Plath’s dawning awareness, conveyed in Esther Greenwood’s dry Salingeresque wit, that the causes for her first suicide attempt did not issue from an irreparable psychic wound, but were in large part the result of the stresses, thwarted desires, and lack of opportunity for equality in a 1950s American society of male privilege. Esther doesn’t want to become another self-abasing housefrau, like her mother or Mrs. Willard. She doesn’t want “infinite security” and the secondary role of being “the place the arrow shoots off from.” She wants “change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself” (BJ 58, 68). Similarly, she doesn’t want to learn shorthand to support herself after college; she “hated the

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idea of serving men in any way. I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters” (BJ 100, 62). But for a woman to achieve domestic and career equality in 1950s America was next to impossible. Like Plath, Esther Greenwood is an aspiring poet. Well, what are the possibilities for acquiring that “self-integral freedom” and equal opportunity for career advancement (J 31, 35) in The Bell Jar? Esther goes to New York having won a prestigious guest editorship at Mademoiselle, as did hundreds of American coeds in the fifties. Before long she bursts into tears while being photographed as a guest editor, simply because she is asked what career she desires, and she answers “a poet” (BJ 83). Esther has already learned from Jay Cee, her supervisor, that to be in the literary game is to exhaust oneself in dull days of routine editorial work, punctuated by vapid social events such as fashion shows and advertising or women’s products luncheons, and interrupted by inane meetings where one must stroke successful authors, almost all of whom are males. Being in the literary game means desexing oneself to the point of being an unlovely, driven Jay Cee, with “pug-ugly looks” (5), who fills out schedule cards (25) after spending years learning languages (27). Esther’s tears signify her recognition of the hopelessness of trying to fulfill her career ideals as a poet in this society. Here the only fact that Plath did not add was that most of the powerful senior editors above the Jay Cees in these slick magazines were males., veteran slicks writer and 1942 Smith graduate, was learning this in 1961, the year Plath composed The Bell Jar, as Friedan researched and composed the first text of the feminist movement, The Feminine Mystique (1963; see ch. 2, pp. 54–5). When not on the slow track to dull middle management jobs, the guest editors at Mademoiselle are encouraged to waste their time accumulating free gifts and dressing up as dolls, only to be escorted by mysogynists like Marco, the Peruvian United Nations delegate, who throws Esther into the mud after tearing off the front of her dress (BJ 86– 9). Instead of the very minor graveyard scene, Hughes should have focused on Esther’s green dirndl skirt and white peasant blouse. When Esther, despondent at the hollowness of her Mademoiselle experience, rejects the New York literary scene that has ended her career dream, she tosses all of her new fashion clothing out the window during her last night in the city, and borrows from her friend Betsy a green dirndl skirt and white peasant blouse. Continuing this defiant attitude after she returns home, Esther wears the same outfit for the next three weeks, sees Dr. Gordon in that outfit a few days before he begins administering the electroconvulsive shock treatments, and wears precisely this outfit on the day of the attempted suicide (BJ 91–2, 104, 108, 137). This clothing motif suggests that balked career advancement in a society of male privilege causes the attempted suicide, not feelings of abandonment from a father who died more than a decade ago. Sexual experience has been throughout Western literature a vehicle for growth and self-realization. But in The Bell Jar Esther must struggle for years with the gospel of chastity advocated by her mother (65–6). One is either pure or dirty,

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like Doreen (19). Esther rejects an obvious potential husband in Buddy Willard, for his air of scientific superiority, his disdain of a poem as “a piece of dust,” and most of all, for his male double standard regarding sex (45, 56–9). Esther would like the same sexual freedom (63), but when she decides to allow Constantin, the one non-threatening male she meets, to seduce her, she falls asleep. Constantin wouldn’t work as a husband anyway, reasons Esther, for even such a nice person would expect her to live under the bell jar of gender inequality. Constantin would no doubt want her to spend her day washing dishes and making up beds (68). Marriage could only be Mrs. Willard’s dreary routine: “I knew that’s what marriage was like, because cook and clean and wash was just what Buddy Willard’s mother did from morning till night, and she was the wife of a university professor and had been a private school teacher herself” (68–69). Males remain in complete control throughout The Bell Jar. Even the joys of childbirth are not joys in this male-oriented society. When Buddy takes Esther to watch him carve up cadavers, she views a live birth in ways that anticipate Adrienne Rich’s exposure of male hospital practices in Of Woman Born. Immobilized on “an awful torture table with these metal stirrups,” the woman is given drugs to alleviate pain and put her to sleep, so she never experiences the joy of childbirth. For Esther this is “just like the sort of drug a man would invent” (BJ 53). When Esther finally allows the ugly, unguent Irwin, who takes pride in always seeming “to get on with the ladies,” to seduce her, the event causes an excruciatingly painful hemorrhage, evidently the cost for a member of a subordinate gender to become “part of a great tradition” (184–91). Dr. Gordon, the most powerful figure in The Bell Jar, misdiagnoses Esther— exactly what happened to Plath in real life—and prescribes outpatient electroconvulsive shock treatments. In real life a Dr. J.Peter Thornton, a psychiatrist recommended by the Plath family physician, prescribed these outpatient shock treatments before the suicide attempt, as is the case with Esther Greenwood and Dr. Gordon in the fictionalized Bell Jar account. This overwhelming display of male power, not Plath’s childhood memories of abandonment by her father, helped to precipitate the first suicide attempt. Paul Alexander, the Plath biographer who has researched this area of Plath’s life most thoroughly, noted that Sylvia was not given a muscle relaxant or anesthesia, supposedly standard practice, and was therefore nearly electrocuted. The immediate results were that Plath ceased communication almost entirely, and her sleeplessness converted to acute insomnia. After the first few sessions, Dr. Thornton went on vacation and left his assistant in charge (Alexander 119–20). In The Bell Jar, Plath conveys the utter impersonality of this decisive episode of her life through a light touch—Dr. Gordon’s inability to converse with Esther as a person. “They had a WAC station” at her college, he twice remembers—his sole pathetic attempt to relate to Plath’s personal situation (107, 118). The only tenderness Esther receives in The Bell Jar comes from her psychiatrist, Dr. Nolan —a woman (179).

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Many scholars, especially Lynda Bundtzen, have observed that composing The Bell Jar was a liberating experience for Plath, an instructive exercise in how social forces affect individual behavior and judgment. One can readily see why Plath’s portraits of her father in the Ariel poems “Little Fugue” and “Daddy” differ so markedly from her early deifications of Otto. Having taken a more measured view of Otto as an ordinary person in the Bell Jar graveyard scene, Plath by the time of the Ariel poems has grown to an adult knowledge of the gender inequalities within American society and now views her father as symbolic of yet another control-minded male who restricts the development of women. In 1982, Hughes observed in his essay “Sylvia Plath and Her Journals” that in “Little Fugue” the ghost of her father suddenly reappears, after a two-and-a-halfyear absence, for “a daunting, point-blank, demythologized assessment” (WP 187). Hughes sees this as the beginning of Plath’s final tailspin toward identifying with the “deathly woman” at the heart of “Elm,” which he argues develops into a deterministic resignation to the inevitability of suicide. In this essay, composed thirteen years before the “Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems and The Bell Jar” essay, Hughes wrote that “An Appearance” (CPP 189), the poem Plath composed two days after “Little Fugue,” was “the most precise description she ever gave of The Other—the deathly woman at the heart of everything she now closed in on” (WP 187). “An Appearance” concerns Plath’s self-revelation of the super-efficient housewife role—so like her mother and the married women in The Bell Jar—that she could sink into as easily as a stuffed chair. Note that Hughes’s 1982 observation identifies Plath’s central problem as a tug-of-war with her maternal role, with her mother as model. This is far from the obsessive determinism of Otto Plath and German genetics that Hughes develops in Birthday Letters. One can view “Little Fugue,” composed on 2 April 1962, as the consequence of the more realistic view of the father in The Bell Jar, and as a prelude to the exorcism of the patriarchal imago inside the dutifully trained, once subordinated, but now rebellious 1950s woman persona of “Daddy.” Contrary to the god-like figure in the poems of The Colossus (1960), Plath’s first poetry volume, the father in “Little Fugue” appears as a gruff, grotesque autocrat, with a “yew hedge of orders,/Gothic and barbarous,” and the power to judge and decapitate, as in the memory of him lopping sausages “Red, mottled, like cut necks” (CPP 188). Even in memories that are two decades old, this is scary enough to induce guilt. The persona’s direct, calm reply, however, is that of an adult woman in control of her own life: “I am guilty of nothing.” The distance of time in the cold white clouds that spread their “vacuous sheets” and in the lameness of the persona’s memory becomes a saving buffer that ensures survival at the end of the poem. Hughes is correct: this is a “demythologized assessment,” but one that becomes an occasion for personality growth. In “Daddy,” written six months later (12 October 1962), one sees the consequences of that growth. The dominant imagery of the poem deliberately returns us to Plath’s 1958 Journals comment concerning Freud’s “Mourning and

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Melancholia,” where a person’s destructive impulse toward a parent may induce sufficient guilt that the impulse recoils upon the self. Like Esther Greenwood with her abnormal psychology textbooks, Plath is trying to understand her past in order to liberate herself from its grip. As Freud argued, hate transferred to the self produces guilt that can “drain the ego” and at the very least leave one in a limbo that forestalls personality growth. So in “Daddy” Plath adapts her Freudian vampire metaphor (J 279) into a liberating exorcism. No longer the victim of the male imago that leads to subordination, Plath will erase from her psyche the negative influence of both the father and the adulterous husband, “The vampire who said he was you/And drank my blood” for over six years of marriage. The final stake in the heart continues the vampire imagery and the exorcism, though the real vampire is the male imago introjected into the female superego as a controlling patriarchal force. As a single parent now, Plath desires the freedom to erase the hold that the past has on her psyche, so she can set new selfdevelopment goals. She is still struggling toward that “self-integral freedom” (31) that has been the driving force of all her adult work. That Hughes moved Plath’s five beekeeping poems from their original position at the conclusion of Ariel to a less important position near the midpoint of the volume has been a sore spot for decades among Plath scholars. Hughes further complicates our understanding of the beekeeping poems in his Birthday Letters poem “The Bee God” (150–2). He writes that the original beekeeping activities he and Plath engaged in during the summer of 1962 were actually a marriage of Plath with her father, and that the stings Hughes received the day he didn’t wear the proper hat were the result of Otto Plath’s “Prussian” plans. Here Hughes ignores the import of Plath’s beekeeping poems. In an important 1982 essay, Susan Van Dyne examined the drafts of the five beekeeping poems and concluded that, as Plath revised, she downplayed her anger at Hughes by condensing the stinging incident and moderating her descriptive language. She did this, Van Dyne observed, because Plath recognized that the major thrust of those beekeeping poems was to reassert her own self-confident authenticity as an artist in control of her emotions and life, whereas the bees who lose their stingers in venting their anger will soon die. The central moment of the entire, five-poem sequence occurs in “Stings,” where Plath asserts “I/Have a self to recover, a queen” (CPP 215). Once again Plath’s theme concerns the realization of that “self-integral freedom” and career equality that she desires in her Journals (J 31, 35), and once again Hughes ignores this theme as he revisits the events. In Birthday Letters we often see the pain that Hughes experienced in coming to grips with Plath’s feisty personality, and the years of agony he underwent after her suicide. This is especially the case in “Life After Death” where, after the day’s labor of feeding and dressing the motherless children, the pain becomes acute. Here Hughes likens himself to “The Hanged Man” in Plath’s poem about her electroconvulsive shock therapy (CPP 141), as he lay awake at night feeling as if his neck nerves were uprooted and his aching shoulder tendons “cramped into knots” (182). Posterity should be aware of the pain he experienced in the

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years after Plath’s suicide. But it is a pity that Hughes could not occasionally celebrate Plath’s desire for a liberating equality of career and personal life in the poems of Birthday Letters. Until Birthday Letters, Hughes shared with Plath that quest theme of a liberating growth through self-knowledge and knowledge of society. He could have offered a more balanced view of his former wife thirtyfive years after her death—both for posterity and for the solace of his children, who must continue to live amid the tangled and hopelessly sensationalized Plath biographies. In his “Foreword” to Plath’s Journals, Hughes wrote that he destroyed Plath’s last journal, because he “did not want her children to have to read it” (J xv). But he will let his children read Birthday Letters, the poems of which contain not a single sympathetic portrait of Plath that might console her children. Hughes follows a straightforward historical sequence in Birthday Letters from his first notice of Fulbright scholars at Cambridge to beyond Plath’s suicide, but even in the final glimpses the determinism grinds on, with poems that note the Plath family features genetically inherited in his children—in Frieda’s nimble fingers (194), so like her mother’s “long, balletic” fingers (15), and in Nick’s eyes and facial features, features that are so like Otto’s that his portrait could be Nick’s (130, 182, 193). Yet the “fixed stars” that Plath referred to in the late poem “Words,” may not be the fixed stars of genetic determinism, but of a woman’s steadfast determination to find equality and “self-integral freedom” until the very end. Doubtless the few misguided feminists who repeatedly defaced the gravestone where Hughes kept renewing the lettering of his name, and the dozens and dozens of biographers and academic researchers who wanted interviews and copyright permissions during his thirty-five years of silence, wore Hughes down. He says as much in one of the final Birthday Letters poems, disdainfully entitled “The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother” (195–6). But since he was rereading Plath materials during the composition of Birthday Letters, he could have balanced his portrait with other factors that surely must have influenced Plath’s final suicide decision, factors that have become available in the research data that has accumulated over this thirty-five year span. We know that Hughes read Linda Wagner-Martin’s 1987 Plath biography, because he strongly disagreed with the manuscript version. But he could have made a mental note of one important paragraph in chapter seven: During 1954, Aurelia heard from Otto’s sister that the women in the Plath family had histories of depression. Otto’s mother had been hospitalized at least once; his other sister and a niece also struggled with the problem. But Mrs. Plath never told Sylvia this—nor, so far as is known, did she ever tell her daughter’s psychiatrist. Her tactic with Sylvia was not to discuss her breakdown or anything relating to it. (Wagner-Martin 110). Hughes could have connected this with the doctors report in Anne Stevenson’s 1989 Plath biography, the authorized biography of the Plath Estate. Dr. John Horder, Plath’s physician at the time of her suicide, stated that she was seriously

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ill, needed hospital care, and had been taking an antidepressant for several days before the suicide, specifically a “mono-oxidase inhibitor” which could restore enough energy for the patient to carry out a “determined, desperate action” (Stevenson 297). Ryle would find one of Aurelia Plath’s letters to her son Warren extremely interesting. During her last visit to Devon, unluckily during the tense time when Sylvia first learned of Hughes’s infidelity, Aurelia sought refuge at the home of Plath’s midwife, Winifred Davies. From there she sent a letter to Warren, dated 17 July 1962 (available in the Plath Collection of the Lilly Research Library, Indiana University), stating that her daughter had crowded her day with too many duties, and that this wasn’t the first time Sylvia had overworked herself with a difficult daily schedule (a reference to her first suicide attempt?) Many women and men, especially the highly intelligent, become afflicted with episodes of depression when their life becomes too crowded with cares and duties. This does not augur genetic determinism, but occasional tailspins—tailspins that are very treatable with today’s more sophisticated drugs and therapy. One recent medical study, conducted over ten years by Canadian psychiatric researchers and published in the American Journal of Medical Genetics, concludes that humans who have more than the usual 2A serotonin receptors in their brains are more likely to become depressed. About twenty million Americans suffer from depression, and about one-tenth of one per cent (20,000) commit suicide each year (Du). This genetic trait simply increases the possibility of depression and suicide; the research does not suggest determinism. Ryle would agree that under some conditions, individuals with certain character traits and dispositions may succumb to depression, and a few of these might commit suicide. Individuals with such character traits can help themselves by avoiding situations and behavior that cause these tailspins. This is just one of many possible accounts of Plath’s suicide that does not entail an obsessive fixation upon merging with one’s dead father in a saga of genetic determinism. But sophisticated medical and marital counseling were unknown in the early 1960s in both America and England. In America last year, amid the media blitz surrounding the Emory University acquisition of Hughes literary materials, Hillel Italie ran a syndicated column for the Associated Press (12 April 1999) in which he quoted from a letter that Hughes sent to Aurelia, years after the suicide, about Plath having been “emotionally exhausted and devastated by those last tranquilizers.” Tranquilizers! Was Hughes unaware of his children’s mother’s medical condition in the weeks before the suicide? Depression is one of the most frequently used words in all of the Plath biographies to describe her occasional episodes of aberrant behavior, but Hughes pays it no heed. Hughes’s blindness to Plath’s struggle for equality appears at the very beginning of Birthday Letters, in a very telling Freudian literary slip. In the second and third poems, Hughes critiqued Plath’s “Caryatids” poem, one of two poems that comprised her first British publication (1956). Hughes found “no stirring/Of omen” in the “white, blindfolded, rigid faces/Of those women.” His

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friend Dan Huws concocted a broadsheet satirizing the convoluted style and cool, lofty aesthetic diction of these two Plath poems (see Stevenson 69). But Hughes is blind to the point of Plath’s poem. Caryatids are pillars, supporting columns molded in the forms of draped female figures. In Plath’s short, twelve-line poem with a long title (“Three Caryatids Without a Portico. by Hugo Robus. A Study in Sculptural Dimensions”), the persona observes that these virginal pillars of aristocratic “classic sister” have the strength to perform the public task of holding up a portico. But the Gods do not grant the caryatids “such a trial” of strength. Once again Plath appeals for equal career opportunity for women, but the point never registers in Hughes’s perceptions. In the labyrinth of words that Hughes concocts in Birthday Letters, Plath must always appear as the destructive Minotaur (130), offspring of “King Minos,/Alias Otto” (133), enflamed in uncontrollable passions, ravenous for more victims. Only childbirth gives her momentary respite. Hughes never considers Aurelia’s unequivocal statement, in her “Introduction” to Letters Home, that Otto Plath, a well-liked university professor of entomology and Middle High German at Boston University, was “a confirmed pacifist,” who would “never bear arms” or “take another’s life” (LH 9, 31). Appearing early in Birthday Letters, the poem “Your Paris” suggests an irreparable opposition of culturally inherited perceptions, with Hughes’s formed in the crucible of World War II. Here Hughes coaxes the reader into accepting the major premise of Birthday Letters—that Hughes was a “post-war utility survivor” whose “perspectives were veiled by what rose/Like methane from the reopened/Mass grave of Verdun.” And Plath’s perspectives were already split into a surface glitter of Impressionism and Modern Art from her American education that covered “the underground,” a “chamber where (she) still hung waiting/For (her) torturer,” Thanatos-Otto, “To remember his amusement” (36–7). From then on most of the poems follow an unvarying structural formula: discrete instances of Plath’s behavior followed by the same deterministic judgment, the same foreshadowed glimpse into the crypt: “You had to lift/The coffin lid an inch” (118). Meanwhile, Hughes’s perceptions do not vary. Near the end of Birthday Letters the war imagery concludes in “A Picture of Otto,” where Hughes expects to meet the “Lutheran/Minister manqué” in the underworld beyond the grave, in the “dark adit,” as in Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting,” where Owen meets the man he killed yesterday in battle in the “profound dull tunnel” of Hell (Owen 148–9). Here, as Hughes suggests, Owen sleeps “with his German as if alone” (193). Since he engages the issue of the move to Devon in “Error,” one wonders whether the “dark adit” could have been otherwise had Hughes remained with Plath in London. I applaud Hughes for letting Plath, who had the drive and the ambition, make the major moves early in their marriage. Hughes took a one-year job teaching secondary school students while Plath completed her MA at Cambridge, and sailed with her to America, again letting her take the lead to explore college teaching at Smith and possibly a PhD Program. Hughes

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scrambled into a one-semester teaching appointment at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, just ten miles away. And when Plath realized that college teaching exhausted her creative energies, they spent a year in Boston with their salary savings and met William and Dido Merwin, who convinced them that they could possibly avoid the college teaching track forever by working for the BBC in London (Stevenson 322–4). Throughout this period, Hughes definitely followed Plath’s ideal of career equality. After their return to England in December of 1959, and throughout the first year-and-a-half of their daughter Frieda’s life (born 1 April 1960), Hughes followed a regimen that was the most sacrosanct in the household: he watched little Frieda in their cramped, three-room apartment from 8 a. m. until noon, to free Plath for her creative writing. Plath fed Frieda lunch and Hughes composed in the afternoon. Six months after the move back to England, Plath noticed a roomy corner town house or row house for sale nearby, at 41 Fitzroy Road, just a few doors from 23 Fitzroy Road, where she eventually would end her life twoand-a-half years later (LH 387). Living at 41 Fitzroy Road would have allowed Plath to have two things she desperately needed to maintain her career equality: London’s assurance of cultured intellectual women to converse with, and reliable child care to ensure that sacrosanct creative writing time. But Hughes demurred, probably rightly so, for their finances were nowhere near the purchase price. But during the next year, Hughes was thoroughly “taken up” by the BBC, his career and the family finances assured. Had they remained in London, there is at least a chance that their marriage could have survived, and a stronger chance that Plath may not have attempted suicide again, even had the marriage not survived. Hughes’s Minotaur myth is deterministic in part because it is incomplete. He apparently never saw the Theseus sword in Plath’s work—that drive toward “self-integral freedom” through career equality. The evidence suggests that both Hughes and Plath were tempted by Hughes’s vision of rural life, where one could raise a family amid bucolic surroundings, and accomplish more creative work without the interruptions of the London literary game—announced and unannounced guests dropping in every week followed by that wearing round of stroking at weekend cocktail parties. But if Hughes had understood the implications of Plath’s struggle for career equality beneath the satire in The Bell Jar, completed before they moved to Devon, he should have demurred over his bucolic dream. And Plath at this point should have put her foot down and demanded to stay in London. Like the girl beneath the fig tree in The Bell Jar (45, 62), Plath wanted it all, and at times overreached, felt that she could handle it all, effortlessly and perfectly. She had big eyes, and was often too demanding of herself (LH 123). At the Houghton Research Library, Harvard, resides a letter Plath wrote to their friends Jack and Maire Sweeney, a week before the move to Devon, in which she proudly describes the house and grounds as the realization of Ted’s dream. Did she write from conviction, or was she beginning to backslide into the role of the dutiful housewife?

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In Birthday Letters Hughes attempts to convince the reader that Court Green, with its clammy cold and leaky thatch, and its view of a graveyard followed by a dour Anglican Church, gave Plath further access to Thanatos-Otto. From this view Plath certainly “cannot see where there is to get to,” as she observes in “The Moon and the Yew Tree” (CPP 173). But her sense of being trapped in a dead-end existence derives not simply from the view. Without the company of intellectual women and reliable day care, Plath crawled cabin fever walls that were turning into a prison of overscheduling, taking on too much with two children in diapers—cooking, gardening, home refurbishing, playing hostess for a week or for weekend-long guests, dealing with post-partum depression after the birth of her second child, often watching her husband catch a train for BBC work in London (which meant no child care help for that entire day), and in the process squeezing hardly any time to write from her exhausting schedule. Because neither spouse, so far as we know, gave sufficient thought to the effects of rural life on Plath’s drive for career equality, Plath was fast becoming a character in her worst nightmare—an overworked, self-sacrificing Mrs. Willard from The Bell Jar, a kitchen mat awaiting the return of the workaholic male (BJ 69). As Aurelia observed in her letter to Warren, Sylvia indeed had taken on too much, and as a result her own career was being placed on hold. Certainly much of the hostility Hughes absorbed from Plath in Devon derived from the Theseus sword of a hemmed-in heroine’s last struggle. But all Hughes could see was Otto and World War II behind Plath’s anger; he never recognized the sword of this female Theseus. His bucolic rural vision crowded it out. In Devon he seldom saw its point, for he was aglow with the shine of his own soaring career. But in the “dark adit” he still feels its point. And in Birthday Letters his ghost grinds on in his labyrinth, alone in the machine of his words.

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Words to “Patch the Havoc:” The Imagination of Ted Hughes in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath Gayle Wurst

As editor of Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems, Ted Hughes chose 1956, the year of his marriage to Plath, as the first “logical division” in her poetry, using it as a line of demarcation to separate her juvenilia from the beginning of her mature work. “Early 1956,” when Plath had just turned twenty-four, “presents itself as a watershed,” Hughes tells us, “because from later this year came the earliest poems of her first collection, The Colossus. And from this time I worked closely with her and watched her poems being written” (Introduction, J 16). The eye of Ted Hughes is indeed ever present in Plath’s early poetry, just as his vision of her development was later determinant in the over-all organization, interpretation, and publication of her largely posthumous work. The meaning of this poetic regard for Plath herself is inseparable from her joyous “big Hero Worship” of Hughes, whom she famously portrays as destined for the pantheon she self-consciously worshipped as “gods” in the likes of Eliot, Auden and Yeats (LH 108). Even before Plath identifies Hughes by name, the entry in her Journal written the morning after “that fatal party where [she] met Ted” announces him with gusto as “the only one there huge enough for me.” He is “that big, dark, hunky boy. The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge with hulk and dynamic chunks of words” (J 211–2). Writing to her mother, Plath was more ecstatic yet: “I met the strongest man in the world, ex-Cambridge, brilliant poet whose work I loved before I met him, a large, hulking, healthy Adam, half French, half Irish, with a voice like the thunder of God—a singer, storyteller, lion and world-wanderer, a vagabond who will never stop” (LH 233). Much of Plath’s mythologizing is clearly motivated by the belief that union with such a paragon, whom she repeatedly describes as “the male counterpart of [her]self,” augured well for her own poetry (LH 264). Her rapturous praise of Hughes’s physique and poetic prowess thus went hand-in-hand with her own hopes for herself as a writer. Hughes’s hugeness made it possible for her to “marry him,” Plath wrote, for he was the only man with whom she would “never have to restrain” her own “little gift, but could push it and strain it to the utmost, and still feel him ahead” (J 295). “For the first time in my life I can use all my knowing and laughing and force and writing to the hilt all the time, everything,” she exclaimed. “He has a health and hugeness. I am writing poems, and they are better and stronger than anything I have ever done” (LH 234; Plath’s emphasis).

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Just as Ted was writing “virile, deep banging poems,” he would “work with [her] to make [her] a woman poet like the world will gape at” (LH 248): “Ted says he never read poems by a woman like mine working, sweating, heaving poems born out of the way words should be said” (244). And, while Plath was very proud of having been “clairvoyant” enough to foresee Hughes’s rise to fame as one of Britain’s most promising young poets (329), in 1958 she accurately predicted his future as Poet Laureate in a parenthetical afterthought to a sudden surge of assurance about herself: “Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be the Poetess of America (just as Ted will be the Poet of England and her Dominions)” (J 360). As Plath’s descriptions of Hughes’s “virile, deep banging” poems, and the birth-throes of her own “heaving” work vividly illustrate, her fantasies of mutual poetic potency and creation are keyed to a sexual metaphor based on the erotic attraction of male poet and female muse. Given the strength of this metaphor in her letters and journals, it is not surprising that immediately after Plath met Hughes in February 1956, a composite male figure, poet/lover/muse, begins to inhabit her poetry. The first of these poems, chronologically speaking, is “Pursuit” (CPP 22, 23), a piece about sexual attraction and flight, written on February 27, 1956, only two days after the poets” tempestuous first encounter. “Wrote a full-page poem about the dark forces of lust: “Pursuit”, Plath recorded in her Journal. “It is not bad. It is dedicated to Ted Hughes’s (J 214). As Hughes recalls it in “St. Botolph’s” (BL 15), he himself was the pursued in an incident “that was to brand [his] face” with a “swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks.” Plath’s poem, however, foregoes the depiction of physical contact to prominently feature the dangerous, hypnotic gaze of the poet/lover: “There is a panther stalks me down:/ One day I’ll have my death of him,” she begins. “What lull, what cool can lap me in/ When burns and brands that yellow gaze? ” From this point on, the erotic poetic regard in Plath’s work becomes an increasingly problematic presence. In its initial stage, Plath celebrates and completes this gaze with a portrait of the lover/muse as a mythologized and fructifying force of nature. “Faun” (originally called “Metamorphosis”) is an excellent example of this tendency. This poem, which Plath includes in a letter dated 19 April 1956 to exemplify her new, “better and stronger” work (LH 234), implicitly draws on the famous passage from Wordsworth’s “There Was a Boy,” where the budding poet figure blows “mimic hootings to the silent owls” and is answered with “quivering peals” across “the watery vale.” Plath, however, goes Wordsworth one better in Hughes, creating an image of poetic prowess so irresistible that “all owls in the twigged forest/Flapped back to look and brood/ On the call this man made.” In the end, the poet/lover, transformed in the magic “arena of yellow eyes” himself changes shape: via the owls’ yellow gaze, Plath the female ephebe recounts how she vicariously “saw hoof harden from foot, saw sprout /Goat-horns. Marked how god rose/And galloped woodward in that guise.”

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This poetic jeu de regard reaches its climax in “Ode for Ted” (CPP 29–30), another of the earliest pieces from 1956, and the sole poem Plath ever wrote to bear her husband’s name. Here, the male poet’s very look makes the universe bear fruit, conflating the image of the poet-as-Adam with that of a pagan nature deity. In the poem’s most interesting turn, “Ode for Ted” takes the trope of the fruitful male gaze to its furthest extent only to end in a curiously distant, apparently rhetorical, yet self-reflexive question: “how but most glad/could be this adam’s woman,” Plath asks, “when all earth his words do summon/leaps to laud such man’s blood!” How but most glad, indeed? Much of Plath’s poetry from 1956 through 1958 and, it could be argued, for the rest of her career, will attempt to work out the answer to this question. Plath purposely fashions Hughes into the primal namer of all things, leaping to “laud such man’s blood” the better to imagine herself as “adam’s woman.” Likewise, she proudly took up the mantle of muse and ceaselessly worked as his amanuensis, typing his poetry and submitting his manuscripts for contests and publications, the better to nourish her imagination of Hughes as a powerful creator, and turn this image into a self-fulfilling prophecy. “I am so glad Ted is first,” she declared when Hawk in the Rain “won the Harper’s first publication contest.” Hughes entered this competition at the insistence of Plath, who both scouted out possible venues for his work and saw to the typing of his manuscript: “All my pat theories against marrying a writer dissolve with Ted,” she reflected in her Journal: “his rejections more than double my sorrow and his acceptances rejoice me more than mine—it is as if he is the perfect male counterpart to my own self: each of us giving the other an extension of the life we believe in living. It sounds so paragon. But I honestly believe we are.” (J 271). Yet when “this adam’s woman” turned to writing poetry herself, her fantasy of fruitful poetic union ironically backfired. Plath’s poems tell a very different picture than the rosy idealization she painted in her letters home, and even in her journal. Rather than providing an enabling myth which permitted her to see herself as poet-god and co-creator, Plath’s deification of her husband played into, and quickly exacerbated, her lifelong dread of her own poetic sterility, once he began “work[ing] closely with her” and “watch[ing] the poems being written.” As Steven Gould Axelrod has succinctly worded the problem, Hughes became the model for a “male force which engendered (Plath’s) creativity even as he annulled it” (30). This is the view which Hughes, too, has followed in Birthday Letters, portraying himself as both “puppet” and unwitting “male lead in [her] drama” (BL 7), the victim of a “Greek necessity” (CPP 272) stronger and bigger than them both, which gradually, but relentlessly, conflated his image with Daddy. Yet if we go back to Plath’s juvenilia, we see that her union to Hughes—and especially her imagination of his imagination—served largely to intensify a tightly-knit complex of negative themes and images of female creativity which were already well developed, and even obsessional in her poetry long before she

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ever encountered him. Significantly, perhaps tragically, Plath most acutely expresses her self-doubt in the juvenilia in the single poem that dares to confront her interiorization of the “spinster” woman writer. The encounter with this stereotype occurs in an undated poem she ironically entitles “Female Author” (CPP 301), as if the term were an oxymoron. Plath portrays her “prim, pinkbreasted, feminine” poetess as the very image of de-natured sterility: “nurs[ing]/ Chocolate fancies in rose-papered rooms,” she “lies on cushions curled,” “lost in subtle metaphor” in isolated “retreat” from all that is vital in the world. Furthermore, Plath’s use of intertextuality in this poem deftly calls on Blake’s “London,” Eliot’s “Wasteland” and even Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra to make her scornful point. All come barreling down on her unfortunate female author, only to prove that her frivolous musings are not worth the paper they are written on—and to distance Plath herself from scribblers of this genre.1 Given Plath’s early tendency to extol the vitality of the male gaze at the expense of the woman writer, it is perhaps to Hughes’s credit that as editor of the Collected Poems he foregoes chronology to introduce the body of Plath’s “mature” work with “Conversation Among the Ruins” (CPP 21). This sonnet, named after a painting by Georgio De Chirico, actually postdates “Pursuit” and other pieces from 1956 in which the role of the male poet/lover is less ambiguously praised. Poem and painting both feature two figures: a standing man dressed in modern clothing, and a seated woman, wearing a white tunic. In the painting, the woman is at a table, her back turned to the viewer, while the man stands to her left, looking down on her with dark eyes. Above his head, and turned in the same direction, is the bust of a Greek statue, perhaps Apollo. The landscape around them, barren of life, is glimpsed between a column to the left, and two half open doors which swing inward toward the female figure from a broken wall to the right.2 “Conversation Among the Ruins” differs from many other poems Plath wrote in 1956 in that she here already is takes stock of her own mythologizing, and especially of its effect on herself as a poet-god. One of the most striking things about the poem is its portrait of the male figure as an intruder responsible for a wasted landscape. The male poet-figure, described as “heroic” in spite of his “wild furies,” is both active principle and agent of destruction. He “stalks,” “disturbs,” and “rends” the structures of an elaborately composed, classical landscape, turning it into an “appalling ruin.” A modern figure, too, dressed “in coat and tie,” he stands in domination over the “bankrupt estate,” where “fractured pillars frame prospects of rock.” By contrast, the female figure, still

1. A fuller analysis of this poem focusing on Plath’s use of intertextuality is found in my Voice and Vision: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. 2. I thank Leonard Scigaj for furnishing me with the reproduction of De Chirico’s painting on which this description is based. For an excellent discussion of Plath’s wider use of modern painting, see his “The Painterly Plath That Nobody Knows.”

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tied to the past and robed in classical tradition, remains subordinate and unmoving: “I sit /Composed in Grecian tunic and psyche-knot,/Rooted to your black look, the play turned tragic.” Like “Ode for Ted,” this sonnet also ends with a crucial question that will reverberate throughout Plath’s entire work: “What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?” This question is all the more important in that “Conversation Among the Ruins,” which serves as a portal to the Collected Poems, is manifestly reflexive in nature. Plath’s blighted landscape, once decorous and “elegant,” now “blighted,” not only foreshadows future developments in her poetry; it turns back to allegorically evoke the highly artiflcial world of her juvenilia—a world of balanced symmetries, archetypal figures, and carefully structured villanelles and sonnets. Destruction, usually imminent rather than actualized, constantly menaced Plath’s “elaborately structured and staidly traditional” poems of this period (Broe 6), and she constructed her world all the more tightly to keep her doubts about herself as creator at bay: “The asteroids turn traitor in the air,/The planets plot with old elliptical cunning; clocks cry, stillness is a lie, my dear,” she warned herself in the early villanelle, “To Eva Descending the Stair” (CPP 303). In Birthday Letters, Hughes represents his initial response to this poetry, noting how he and his friends “concocted/An attack, a dismemberment, laughing,” when Plath “published [a] poem/About Caryatids” in Cambridge. In yet another poem about the incident, he writes, “It was the only poem you ever wrote/That I disliked through the eyes of a stranger./It seemed thin and brittle, the lines cold” (BL 4, 5). Once Hughes’s eyes were no longer those “of a stranger,” he continued to dislike much of the work Plath was producing; he thus set about criticizing her poems and assigning her subjects for new ones. While Plath learned much under his tutelage, internal evidence from her Journals and the poems she wrote during their early marriage shows that she also began to focus the persistent, yet heretofore vaguely identified, menace that had always threatened to blow her “rich order of walls” apart. From mid-1956 on, Plath gave danger a habitation and a name in the “bleak light of his stormy eye.” Hughes’s dislike and criticism of Plath’s writing must have deeply preoccupied him, at least in retrospect, for the problem forms the only instance in Birthday Letters where two poems, devoted to the same subject, bear the same title. It is as if Hughes wished to revise himself, or needed a double-take. In “Caryatids (2)” (BL 5–6), he seems to repent, writing that he sought to “reach” more than “reproach” or “correct” Plath with his mockery. The authority of this critical regard once Plath began submitting her poems for Hughes’s critique, and her need for his respect and approval are inseparable from the repeated rise to hyperbole in her early praise of the mythic poet/lover. Yet ironically, his empowerment most often takes place to the detriment of the female figures in her poetry. “The Queen’s Complaint” (CPP 28–29), facing “Ode for Ted” in the Collected Poems, is another case in point: here, a “giant” with “looks black and

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fierce as rooks” “hulk[s]” across the Queen’s “dainty acres,” causing her to “sing us thus: “How sad, alas, it is/To see my people shrunk so small, so small.” It is crucial to note that the gaze of the male poet is never lovingly directed at the muse in Plath’s poetry, nor is there ever a mutually gratifying exchange of regards between a male and female figure. Typically, Plath’s speakers and narrators are removed from the arena of action: their role is to witness from the margins while the poet figure at the center of the poem causes the universe to blossom or blow apart wherever he directs his gaze. Notably for the development of her later voice, Plath also begins to distance herself from this dilemma in “Conversation Among the Ruins,” ironizing the “black look” and devastating commentary of the poet/lover in her description of the birds emblematic of Hughes: “rooks croak above the appalling ruin (my emphasis). The male figure’s mythified “black look,” however, still remains the center of concern in the poem and her work as a whole. Turning to his eyes in the hope of finding herself reflected as poet, Plath instead discovers a muse in her “psyche-knot,” “composed” but no composer. Although Plath’s Journals joyously claimed her “buried male muse and godcreator” had “risen to be (her) mate in Ted” (J 381), her poem, “Full Fathom Five,” written in The Colossus period, tells another story. Here, the image of the bountiful young poet/ god gives way to a more ominous male figure—a Titian who “surface[s]” suddenly as an “old man” in the “unimaginable,” yet haunting guise of the drowned father: “foam-/ Capped: white hair, white beard, far—flung,/ A dragnet, rising as the waves/Crest and trough.” Writing to herself about this poem in her Journal, Plath exclaims, “O, only left to myself, what a poet I will flay myself into!” (381). Meanwhile, the speaker, confined to the margins of the poem and her role as witness to male power, walks “dry” on the border of a troubling “kingdom/exiled to no good” (CPP 92). In “Apprehensions” (BL 140), Hughes has written very affectingly both about Plath’s terror of sterility, the “fear” that “hid in [her] Schaeffer pen,” and what it was like to be the focal point of her efforts to write herself out of it. Doing so, he pays considerable, and painful homage to the power of Plath’s own poetic regard, overturning the convention that so plagued Plath herself. This reversal is exemplified in Hughes’s “Black Coat” (BL 102–03), a poem that responds to “Full Fathom Five,” and even more directly to Plath’s “Man in Black” (CPP 119– 20). Plath wrote this piece in March 1959 on a what she blithely calls “one of my fruitful visits to Winthrop” (J 477); after visiting her father’s grave, she “walked over rocks along the oceanside” where she observed “Ted out at the end of the bar, in black coat, defining the distance of stones and stones humped out of the sea” (J 473). Although Plath described it as “the only “love” poem” in the book manuscript she was preparing (J 477), “Man in Black” is an ominous, seven-stanza, singlesentence poem which barrels down syntactically to focus on the poet/lover in his “dead/Black coat,” a “fixed vortex on the far/Tip” of a menacing seascape, “riveting stones, air,/All of it, together.” Remembering “going out there” in his

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“black overcoat” many years later, Hughes recalled the incident quite differently. The speaker of “Man in Black” is literally out of the picture. For Plath, this distance permits her to make a stake on safer ground, but it also signals her position of exile in relation to Hughes’s enviable (and increasingly ominous) centrality; for Hughes, this centrality is not only unwanted, it transforms him into a prey in a telescopic rifle lens. For Hughes and Plath both, the male figure in the black coat, seen from “so far off/half a mile, maybe,” “rivets” the universe together as the first clear precursor to “Daddy” (BL 103; CPP 120). During the later phase of Plath’s poetry, she famously rid herself of Ted’s “shadow,” as she put it in 1962 (LH 479)—a shadow largely formed and formed in large by her former projections of his prowess. Although critics have tended to neglect or misinterpret them, numerous poems Plath wrote between February 1956 and March 1958 shed much light on this change in her work, and form an intermediate stage in her effort to shed “dead hands, dead stringencies,” as she so famously put it in “Ariel” (CPP 239–40). Poems like “Strumpet Song,” “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” “On the Difficulty of Conjuring up a Dryad,” “On the Plethora of Dryads,” “The Lady and the Earthenware Head,” “Ouija,” “On the Decline of Oracles,” “Virgin in a Tree,” “Perseus,” and “The Disquieting Muses” shift the male poet from center stage to concentrate on the figure of the female muse, all the while foregrounding the absence of inspiration.3 Taken together, these poems show Plath coming to consciousness of her specificity as a woman poet by reflecting on the conditions of representation, and articulating her reactions to the portrayal of female figures in western art. Plath’s use of the myth of Daphne and Apollo, common to several of these poems, succinctly illustrates the shift in her paradigm. According to Annis Pratt’s groundbreaking study, this myth forms one of the major archetypal patterns in fiction authored by women. For Pratt, the story of Apollo and Daphne originates as the “account” of a cultural “invasion,” the “story of the rape of (a) local female divinity by a “patriarchally structured culture, the Achaeans,” whom Apollo represents. Pratt points out that “Daphne means laurel and laurel leaves were chewed by pre-Achaean priestesses to induce oracular powers:” the myth thus recounts how “Apollo conquers a territory by raping its goddess, assimilating her magic, and setting himself up in her place.” Or rather, how he attempts to conquer the goddess. For unlike his usurpation of the oracular powers of Gaea at Delphi, Apollo is unable to conquer Daphne the nature nymph. To return to Pratt once more: “Daphne wishes to protect her body and her sacred places from forced entry and thus turns herself into a tree. Because of her natural magic, she remains forever unravished, Apollo forever in the process of ravishing” (4). “The tension between what Apollo intends and Daphne is willing to accept, between forces demanding our submissions and our rebellious assertions of personhood, characterize far too much of our fiction to be incidental,” Pratt writes (6). Pratt’s analysis only pertains to fiction: but if we extend her argument to poetry, Apollo, crowned with leaves of laurel, clearly emerges the symbolic

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victor in spite of Daphne’s successful escape. His is the image of the conquering poet, cultural guardian and producer of language in the perpetual act of desire; while Daphne, the perpetually pursued object of his attentions, is reabsorbed into nature, a state tantamount to silence and unconsciousness. Elements of this myth were particularly well suited to Plath’s imagination of Hughes, whose head she so willingly envisioned crowned with laurels. More problematical, the ironic nature of Daphne’s victory presented Plath with the conundrum of her own role as muse, as she tried to tap the tradition for a conscious female subject, only to discover that traditional poetic conventions proved an obstacle to her course. “Why do I freeze in fear my mind & writing: say, look, no head, what can you expect of a girl with no head? “she queried herself in her Journals (437). One of the earliest of Plath’s Daphne poems, “On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad” (CPP 65–6) ironically foregrounds “the vaunting mind” of a female poet which “wrestles to impose/its own order” on recalcitrant nature and myth.4 “However I wrench obstinate bark and trunk/To my sweet will, no luminous shape/Steps out radiant in limb, eye, lip.” Plath declares, foregrounding the “difficulty” the title of her poem announces. In stanza five, the speaker comes to the root of the problem, acknowledging her jealousy of male poets: her vision is “cold,” she says, addressing a “doctor “and adopting the medieval medical vocabulary that equated the lack of female imaginative powers to a cold, wet humor.5 The final stanza compares her feminine “fancy” to the powerful fecundity of the masculine imagination, which, ironically, she can envision all too well. Unable to conjure up a dryad, the speaker “spurns such fictions as nymphs,” but her envious description of the male poet’s fertility makes her statement seem like sour grapes. Left with a strong sense of inadequacy, she ends with a sad self-diagnosis: her “Beggared brain/Hatches no fortune,/But from leaf, from grass,/ Thieves what it has.” The diminished female author steals what little she can, and Plath herself plays the thief in this poem. As Margaret (Dickie) Uroff has noted, the language throughout is a “strange concoction of Hughes and Wallace Stevens.” In an embedded reference, the “star-lucky slight of hand man” can even be seen as “Hughes described in Stevens’ words” (78, 80). Yet Hughes is far more than the envied referent: Plath makes Hughes’s success as a poet represent the dynamics of an entire poetic tradition, then uses her art to study the way her relationship to “her poetic fathers undermines her sense of competence” (Axelrod 35). This transformation is all the more striking in that Plath grafts into the poem a key citation from Yeats, whom she associates with Hughes in her Journals.6 Notably, she takes a phrase from Yeats’ “A Prayer for my Daughter,” which

3. The dating for some of these poems in the Collected Poems is unfortunately erroneous. My own discussion relies on dates given in Plath’s Journals and Letters Home, and follows corrections supplied in Nancy D.Hargrove’s indispensable study, The Journey Toward Ariel: Sylvia Plath’s Poems 0f 1956–1959.

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also draws on the Daphne myth to express the wish that his daughter Anne “become like a flourishing hidden tree:” “Oh may she live like some green laurel/Rooted in one dear place,” Yeats writes. For Yeats, his daughter’s soul is cognizant that “its own sweet will is heaven’s will:” for Plath, however, such company only assures her of the insufficiencies of her own “sweet will” as poet. 7 “That damn scrupulous tree won’t practice wiles/To beguile sight,” her persona states, mockingly reporting her symptoms of sterility to the “doctor” she consults. “However I wrench obstinate bark and trunk/To my sweet will, no luminous shape/Steps out radiant in limb, eye, lip.” As a result, the female poet cannot “concoct a Daphne.” She says: “My tree stays tree.” The rare feminist critics who have addressed these early poems seem to find their avowal of failure an embarrassment. Jacqueline Rose, for example, hesitates between two opposing scenarios in the attempt to explain their “very awkwardness.” Plath here is either “symptomatic of the way women internalize patriarchy, take into themselves and embody some of patriarchy’s most sexual images and tropes” or, conversely, she “expos[es] or foreground[s] the denigrated femininity on which the more inspired vision of women (and poetry) so often relies” (115). Seen within the evolution of the poetic regard in Plath’s work, however, the interest and value of her dryad poems surely lie in the way she is consciously struggling to conceptualize the problem of representation from a woman’s point of view, using specifically gendered terms for what well may be the first time in contemporary poetry. In a sense, these poems are very private. They show Plath in the process of articulating the problem and formulating it for herself: and although she attempts to move from the first to the second position Rose delineates, from “internalizing” to “exposing,” she does not entirely succeed in her aims. Rose asserts that Plath “writes herself into the place of the man” who is “lured, failed, or deceived” or, conversely, as in “On the Plethora of Dryads,” is distracted by nymphs “who surfeit the senses” (114, 115). Yet Plath’s early work represents the erotic attraction between male poet and female muse as always fully consummated. The male poet is such a stud he has only to look, to make “the opulent air go studded with seed.” Only from the female point of view does the erotic spark refuse to ignite, and the model fail for lack of inspiration.

4. Hargrove dates “On the Plethora of Dryads” October 26, 1956 (48), and my analysis supports her conjecture that “On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad,” which is obviously a companion poem, was also composed in the fall of that year. 5. For an excellent examination of the medical, philosophical, psychoanalytical and literary discourse on the female imagination in the theory of humors, see: Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics. Pages 31–33 and 83–87 are particularly to the point for Plath’s poem. 6. See, for example, Plath’s entry for February 25, 1957 (written on the first anniversary of her meeting with Hughes): “Ted is an excellent poet, full of blood & discipline like Yeats” (J 270).

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In 1958, Plath attacked the model of Daphne with redoubled vigor in “Virgin in a Tree” (CPP 81–2), a poem modeled on an etching by Paul Klee entitled “Jung Frau in Baum.” This depicts a naked, sour-looking, knarled female figure horizontally reclining in an awkward posture that conforms to the boughs of a dwarfed and blighted tree. Propped on one elbow, the figure looks the viewer straight in the eye. Paradoxically, Plath now can see the dryad, or “virgin in a tree” all too well; the trouble is, she can’t see how to get her out. Plath dismantles this “tart fable,” enlisting irony and bawdy puns throughout her poem in an effort to diminish the virgin’s “untongued” torture. She also foregrounds her own poetic regard, and even sets it off in a frame, engraving Klee’s etching on her mind as a warning: “As you etch on the inner window of your eye/This virgin on her rack.” “Barren sirs” and “ugly spinsters” feed their imagination on the dryad’s “ache and wake,” but the regard of the virile male poet is absent from the list of the guilty; still fertile in Plath’s imagination, his gaze has nothing to do with the “lemon-tasting droop” of the dryad’s “lips.” As a result, Plaths poem ends in a characteristic avowal of failure: “Tree twist will ape this gross anatomy/ Till irony’s bough break.” “Virgin in a Tree” was the first in a series of poems Plath wrote in a week which left her “stunned” by her own capabilities: “I had about seven or eight paintings and etchings I wanted to write on as poem-subjects, and bang! After the first one, “Virgin in a Tree,” after an early etching by Paul Klee, I ripped into another,” she writes excitedly in Letters Home. “These are easily the best poems I have written and open up new material and a new voice” (336). Her Journal entry of March 28 seconds this excitement, equating the week to the first breakthough in her writing since her suicide attempt in the Spring of 1953: “I wrote eight poems in the last eight days,” Plath records, “poems breaking open my real experience of life in the last five years: life which has been shut-up, untouchable, in a rococo crystal cage, not to be touched. I feel these are the best poems I’ve ever done” (J 356). These are the poems that caused Plath to exclaim she had written lines which “qualify [her] to be the Poetess of America,” as cited above (360). Part of Plath’s elation derives from her new concentration on her dilemma from the specific point of view of a woman poet: as “Virgin in a Tree” illustrates, once she begins to analyze her own response to the representation of the feminine, the male figure modeled on Hughes drops out. Yet the fact that his

Plath goes so far as to envision her marriage to Hughes as “a team better than Mr. and Mrs. Yeats” (LH 280). 7. For further analysis of Plath’s use of Yeats, see: Elizabeth Butler Cullingford, “A Father’s Prayer, A Daughter’s Anger: W.B.Yeats and Sylvia Plath,” Daughters and Fathers, Lynda E. Booze and Betty S.Flowers, eds. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 233–55.

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regard is still deeply rooted as implied comparison and internalized standard leaves Plath all the more alone to struggle with her vision, or lack of it, in an increasingly female world. It is no wonder, then, that she cannot be fully comfortable expressing her own self-assurance, or new sense of mastery as a poet, without immediately asserting a parallel glory for Hughes, whom she immediately imagines as “the Poet of England.” In the poems that ensue, Plath comes face to face with the “basilisk—look of love,” as she puts it in “The Lady and the Earthenware Head” (CPP 69–70). This look is central to the paradoxical encounter with the female muse that increasingly dominates her poetic struggle. The confrontation first fully takes place in “The Disquieting Muses” (CPP 74– 6), written several days after “Virgin in a Tree.” “Mouthless, eyeless, with stitched, bald head,” these “dismalheaded Godmothers” are actually anti-muses: in them, we find the muses who inspire, the three fates who kill, the Furies who pursue, and the three gorgons, most notably the Medusa, who paralyses with her gaze. All combine with the wicked witch of fairy tale to inhabit the abstracted female body of modern art from which they take their name, De Chirico’s The Disquieting Muses. This “poetic kingdom” is the result of a tradition of representation stretching from classical to modern times, as Plath’s comments for the BBC make clear. The “dummies” of De Chirico’s painting, she says, “suggest a twentieth-century version of other sinister trios of women—the Three Fates, the witches in Macbeth, de Quincey’s sisters of madness” (CPP 276; note 60). Plath’s poems from 1962 also make clear that the “black look” she first attributes to the male poet is later transferred, anchored, and further concentrated in the eyes of the Medusa who constantly seeks to fix the female poet at the center of her petrifying gaze. Contrary to the “difficulty” of the dryad who refuses to appear, the Medusa figure surges up unexpectedly, and always uninvited in Plath’s later work. In the Journals, the Medusan presence consistently translates Plath’s fear of writing block into images of freezing, stasis and paralysis, often accompanied by a head/division: “I am stymied, stuck, at a stasis,” she wrote on March 4, 1957. “Some paralysis of the head has got me frozen. As if I can escape by going numb and daring to begin nothing. Everything seems held up, what is it? “(J 272–3). “Something deep, plunging, is held back,” she wrote in January 1958, “Voice frozen” (J 312). By February 1959, the Medusan imagery had turned violent: “What inner decision, what inner murder or prison break must I commit if I want to speak from my true deep voice in writing. and not feel this jam up of feeling behind a glass-dam fancy-façade of numb dumb wordage (J 469). In Plath’s later poetry, the Medusa’s sudden intrusion begins at least as early as “Elm” (CPP 192–3). Written in April 1962, this poem gives voice to the virgin in a tree, only to blow the female figure literally apart with the sound of a terrible “cry.” This violent fragmentation cannot diminish the power of the Medusa. Reasserting herself as muse, she appears superimposed with the moon at the end of the poem as a “face. murderous in its strangle of branches.” “Its snaky

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acids kiss./It petrifies the will,” Plath writes. “These are the isolate, slow faults/ That kill, that kill, that kill.” The centrality of the Medusa in Plath’s later work, and the attempt of the poetI to counter her muse’s petrifying gaze, grows out of, and eventually overwhelms the “black” regard of the male poet/lover. This process equally takes place in natural settings like “Elm” and those that portray a domestic, female interior. Leaving no respite, the encounter engenders an on-going and never-ending struggle for self-appropriation as Plath paradoxically fights to keep the muse at bay in an escalating display of violence. “Is this the one I am to appear for,/is this the elect one.//Is this the one for the annunciation? “the muse scornfully thinks as she gazes on the female poet working in the kitchen in “A Birthday Present” (CPP 206–8). “My god, what a laugh!” In “An Appearance,” too, the muse suddenly erupts on a scene of domestic activity, as the poet-I sits at her sewing machine, “red material/Issuing from the steel needle that flies so blindingly:” “O heart, such disorganization!” the persona of the poem exclaims. “The stars are flashing like terrible numerals./ABC, her eyelids say.” Nowhere do the disquieting muses feature more prominently or savagely in Plath’s late work as in “Lesbos” (CPP 227–30). “Viciousness in the Kitchen!/ The potatoes hiss,” the poem begins. Written on October 16, 1962, this highly ironic return to the source of the lyric figures the speaker locked eye to eye with her deadly other in a surreal female landscape: “The fog of cooking, the smog of hell/Floats our heads, two venomous opposites/Our bones, our hair.” The male figure is exiled from “Lesbos” with an electric look which figures as a shower of sparks. No longer a virile poet, he is now transformed to an “impotent husband” who “slumps out for a coffee:” “He lumps it down the plastic cobbled hill/ Flogged trolley,” as “blue sparks spill/Splitting like quartz into a million bits.” Finally, it is not the poet of “Man in Black,” who “rivets” Plath’s universe together, but the “basilisk look of love” of the female muse. The male poetfigure is last glimpsed in “Lesbos” onanistically “hugging his ball and chain” at the margins of the poem, “down by the gate/That opens to the sea/where it drives in, white and black” (CPP 229). He has not only been decentered from the focus of “Man in Black;” he has taken up, or been relegated to, the former position of Plath’s persona in “Full Fathom Five,” “exiled to no good” on the edge of a menacing shore. This exile results from the hard look of the Medusa, who rejects the male poet, indeed, ejects him from the poetic universe, to center her “venomous” regard squarely on the female poet. The gorgon’s gaze also reflects the final image of what well may be Plath’s final poem, as the muse looks down at the body of a dead, “perfected” woman, staring from her “hood of bone” in “Edge.” “The moon has nothing to be sad about” Plath says. “She is used to this sort of thing./Her blacks cackle and drag” (CPP 272–3). Plath’s “ceremony of words” never patched the havoc of the “black look” to which her writing, and her image of herself as poet, always remained firmly “rooted.” In an extraordinary move, she took this look instead and made it the subject of her own poetic regard. Doing so, she recouped ground lost to the lyric

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by inscribing a self-consciously female subjectivity in the process of defining itself. Just as crucially, she also laid the groundwork for subsequent poets, male and female both, by articulating the cost of poetic conventions that define the feminine as an object of contemplation rather than a speaking subject. That Hughes is both Plath’s target and the inheritor of her achievement, Birthday Letters painfully attests. “Meet[ing]” Plath’s voice “on a page of [her] journal, as never before,” he encounters “the shock of [her] joy” and her “panic/ That prayers might not create the miracle.” (BL 8) Birthday Letters, too, is a “conversation among the ruins,” the address of a poet readying to die to one who has long been dead. Yet the interconnectedness of Hughes’s last volume with Plath’s life and work creates a living dialogue between poetic equals who honed their art against and for each other throughout their entire lives. In the end, it is not Hughes’s interpretation of the facts, but his acknowledgement of Plath’s poetic regard that counts; not his particular “take” on his role in her art or myth, but his tribute, despite the cost to himself, to the focus and power of her “brown iris.”

3 Complicated with Old Ghosts: The Assia Poems Carol Bere

Assia Gutmann Wevill, the “other woman” in the Sylvia Plath/Ted Hughes story, has either been ignored, or treated disparagingly by Plath biographers. The criticism, in fact, tends to minimize the impact that Wevill had on Hughes’s life. What is well documented is that Assia’s suicide in 1969, along with the death of their small daughter, Shura, brought the Crow poems to a halt. The Crow sequence, published in 1970, was dedicated to the memory of Assia and Shura. And then relative silence, or so it seemed, until the publication of New Selected Poems 1957–1994 (1995), which included eight poems about Assia in the Uncollected section of the volume. What is generally not well known, however, is that an earlier location of the Assia poems is Capriccio, a twenty-poem sequence, published in a limited edition of 50 copies in the spring of 1990. Any detailed analysis of Ted Hughes’s poetic canon should certainly include the Assia poems. Capriccio, in particular, is a significant, well realized narrative sequence in its own right. Capriccio also provides additional perspective on “Dreamers” in Birthday Letters, which refers explicitly to Assia, and indirectly on the overall tenor of the sequence. In this article, I will attempt to map the field of the published poems addressed to or about Assia, and provide some commentary on the sequence. First, a caveat: my analysis, to some extent, is preliminary. I have not seen the Hughes archive at Emory University, and therefore do not know whether there are other “Assia” poems among the manuscripts. What I will be talking about here are only those poems that Hughes actually chose to publish about Assia. Second, there are definite links between Capriccio, Birthday Letters, and Howls & Whispers, a limited edition of “Plath” poems, published around the same time as Birthday Letters, which are suggested briefly at the conclusion of this essay. Some brief biographical facts about Assia are necessary for understanding of the poems. She was born in Berlin in 1927. Her father, Dr. Lonya Gutmann, was a Russian Jew, and her mother was a German Protestant. Much of her childhood in Berlin was lived under Nazi threat, and the family fled to Tel Aviv in the 1930s. Hughes speaks of Assia’s long-standing fears of Nazi persecution in poems such as “The Locket,” also in New Selected Poems, and in “Smell of Burning,” and “The Roof.” She later moved to British Columbia with her first husband, although when Assia met the Hughes, she was married to a Canadian

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poet, David Wevill, working at an advertising agency in London, and writing poetry. All reports note that Assia was quite beautiful, with substantial amounts of black hair, and this is supported by a few of the Assia poems, and by Baskin’s illustrations. In May 1962, the Wevills visited the Hughes in Devon, and sometime after this, Assia’s relationship with Hughes is generally thought to have begun. Hughes and Plath separated in the fall of 1962, and Plath committed suicide in February 1963. Hughes continued to see Assia and their daughter, called Shura, was born in March 1965.1 Assia moved to Devon with Hughes some time in 1966. Yet the relationship was not without problems, and in late 1967, Assia moved back to London, although she continued to see Hughes (Myers, 131–33). The title of this article, “Complicated with Old Ghosts,” is actually a quote from a letter Hughes wrote to Celia Chaikin, Assia’s sister who lives in Canada, reported by Israeli writer, Eilat Negev, who interviewed Hughes in 1996. Negev quotes Hughes as saying “we tried to escape the shadow, live as if we started anew,” but the “shadow” of Plath hung over their relationship—not only Plath’s suicide, but what also, to a large extent, Hughes believed to be Assia’s envy and/or obsession with Plath’s talent and life. Beyond this, I discuss only the relationship (or a relationship) as set out in the published poems. I know little or nothing about Ted Hughes’s relationship with Assia, and conjecture would be unfair. While it is tempting to consider the sequence as biography or even autobiography, I am reading Capriccio as a blend or mosaic of ancient myths, historical and contemporary events, some actual facts of the relationship—and, more to the point, as a fully realized poetic sequence. As mentioned, the earliest published location of the Assia poems—at least as far as I am aware—was the Capriccio sequence. The volume comprises twenty poems by Hughes, and twenty-five etchings, woodcuts, and wood engravings in various colors by Leonard Baskin, Hughes’s long-time collaborator. A separate broadside for Capriccio announces publication of twenty new poems by Ted Hughes. Whether “new” means “unpublished” is somewhat ambiguous since the individual poems are undated, and could have been written sometime earlier than 1990. The broadside also assures readers (or, more likely, potential collectors) that “The poems will not be reprinted in the poet’s lifetime.” Whether this was a comment inserted by the publisher, or whether Hughes changed his mind quickly is also an open question. In any case, individual poems from the sequence were published in various periods from 1992–1995, and Hughes read a few of these poems in a radio broadcast.2 The eight poems that Hughes placed immediately 1. I am grateful to Ann Skea for verifying the correct date of Shura’s birth. Skea reports that the birth certificate in the Family Records Office in London states that Alexandra Tatiana Eloise (later called Shura) was born on March 3, 1965 at Charing Cross Hospital. Shura’s mother was listed as Assia Wevill (formerly Gutmann) of Camden, and father, Edward James Hughes, of Court Green, Devon. Shura’s birth was registered April 6, 1965, Westminster Registration District.

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following the Plath poems (later published in Birthday Letters) in the Uncollected section of New Selected Poems, was the largest grouping of Capriccio poems published collectively outside of the original publication, and included “The Other,” “The Locket,” “Shibboleth,” “Snow,” “Folktale,” “Opus 131,” “Descent,” and “The Error.” With the exception of “Flame,” another Capriccio poem also published outside of its original location, the eight poems in New Selected Poems were the same poems that had been published either individually or in various combinations during the 1992–1995 period. This suggests that Hughes believed that these poems were either representative of, or conveyed the “Assia” story most effectively. On the surface the title of the sequence, Capriccio, is somewhat misleading. The most obvious reference is to a musical term, denoting an improvisational, lively, joyful, free-form instrumental work. Without even reading the sequence, however, Baskin’s haunting illustrations would suggest otherwise. The illustration on the title page, a human head (perhaps female) with hair standing on end, with hands that appear to be claws poised over the frame of the picture at shoulder level represents the general thematic environment of the full sequence. Other accompanying illustrations, which include dark, rather threatening, blackbeaked animals; several skull-like animal heads; misshapen, twisted figures of birds; a figure with sprouting hair; and a face of a woman (or possibly an animal) encased in a shroud suggest that the archaic Italian definition of capriccio, or “head with hair standing on end,” denoting horror, is closer to the story set out in the narrative sequence. A related, perhaps even closer derivation that supports both the narrative story line, and the accompanying broadside illustrations is raccappriccio, from Italian, meaning horror or shudder. At the same time, the opening poem, “Capriccios,” suggests that life is subject to chance, the contingency of events, sheer dumb luck, the capricious acts of the gods—hence, a whim. Here, the derivation is capra, or goat (one of the illustrations), which is derived from the Latin caper. Overall, the capriccio of the title suggests unmotivated acts, without purpose in any religious or mythical sense, as well as horror, and these interpretations are borne out in the structure of the sequence. Capriccio is structured on a relatively loose narrative framework, an interplay of myth, history, biography, and some autobiographical elements. The individual poems have an almost lapidarian effect, but the overall mood of the sequence is finality. The opening poem, “Capriccios,” establishes the narrative line, and announces the “chronicle of a death foretold,” or deaths, since the outcome is

2. “Flame,” was published in the Poetry Book Anthology in the fall of 1990. Hughes read four of the poems that appeared in New Selected Poems— “Descent,” “Laws of the Game,” (“The Other” in New Selected Poems), “Folktale,” and “Opus 131” on the Poet of the Month broadcast on Radio 3. on April 9, 1992. At least four of the poems that appeared in New Selected Poems were also published individually during 1992–1995. Hughes made minimal changes to the poems published initially in Capriccio, and published later in other venues; see Sagar and Tabor, Ted Hughes: A Bibliography.

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never in doubt. “The Locket,” the second poem in the sequence, addresses Assia directly, establishes her individual mythology, while the third poem, “The Mythographers,” sets up the players in the tableau, the organizing myth of Capriccio, and related mythological and biographical facts. Understanding of the individual poems—or the sequence as a whole—flows directly from “Capriccios,” and “The Mythographers.” (Collected Poems 783–6) “Capriccios” appears initially to be a pastiche of Norse myths, Biblical as well as Christian symbolism, and commonly held superstitions or beliefs. With the references to Adam, Friday the thirteenth, the drunken gods, Good Friday, and the bloodied halo, sponge, and nail in the opening few stanzas, however, Hughes creates a cosmic portrait of the disordered, chaotic world of the gods and the universe. Over this fractious universe, presides Frigga, the wife of Odin, the protector of married love, often associated with fertility or childbearing. In an earlier Germanic myth, she has given her name to Friday; in other words, Friday is Frigga’s day. More important, Frigga’s nature is somewhat ambivalent: she gives fruitfulness, and at the same time, also rules over the province of the dead. References to the personal level are also implied but unstated: In “18 Rugby Street,” in Birthday Letters, for example, Hughes recalls Plath’s visit, and their lovemaking before she left for Paris on Friday the thirteenth, her father’s birthday.3 Without exploring Hughes’s later sense that he was caught between Plath and her father, “the god with the smoking gun,” and destined to fail, I would only suggest here that the connections are implicit in “Capriccios.” The world of “Capriccios” is one in which human beings are relatively helpless, subject to the seemingly erratic, unmotivated events of life, and with little control over death. Nowhere is this more clear than in Hughes’s mention of “Loki’s gift,” “spermy mistletoe,” and “ship of tinder,” a direct reference to the death and burial of Balder, the son of Frigga and Odin, brought about by Loki, brother of Odin. Briefly, according to the myth, Balder has premonitions that his life might be in jeopardy, and to protect him, Frigga extracted a pledge from all living things, fire, water, and metals. She neglects the mistletoe, which Loki, in the guise of trickster, directs the blind god Hother to throw at Balder, killing him instantly. Mistletoe is generally considered to be a life-giving or divine essence, but in “Capriccios,” it is also the instrument of death. Loki has created death, the

3. I appreciate Keith Sagar’s comment that Hughes was mistaken about the date of Plath’s visit (April 13 in “18 Rugby Street”) before she left for Paris during spring vacation from Cambridge. In excerpts from the unabridged journals published in The New Yorker, March 27, 2000. (109), Plath writes on Monday, March 26, 1956: “Arrived in Paris early Saturday evening exhausted from sleepless holocaust night with Ted in London.” Thus, the date of her visit would have been March 23. Lucas Myers, a friend of Hughes and Plath, and referred to in the poem, corroborates this date in his recent memoir (see Myers 43) Myers notes that he met Plath at The Lamb, a London pub on March 23, and took her to see Hughes at 18 Rugby Street. Myers also notes that Plath returned from Europe on April 13.

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dominant theme of the sequence. Yet caprice, chance, lack of motivation are the cause of fragmented myth, similar to the way in which the deaths of Assia and Shura cut short the projected transforming myth of Crow. Beginning in the sixth stanza, myth and actual events merge as Hughes refers to “Frigga’s two-faced gift,” probably birth and death, and the narrative assumes immediacy as it shifts to the personal: “Imagine the bride’s mirror/In the form of a cauldron/Of the soul’s rebirth.” Associated with the female mana figure, the cauldron is a vessel of life, death, and rebirth, as well as inspiration and magic. As noted in The Great Mother, the transformative nature of the cauldron moves through various stages: through dissolution and death, to the spirit or symptom of rebirth, which leads to vision and word, often interpreted as fate (Neumann, 296–7). The poem then shifts to the early stages of the transformative process, here defined in specific references: to Sylvia Plath “who forgot death,” to Assia, “who forgot life,” and to Shura, who “sank without a cry.” The mention of the “epicanthic fold lifted in the bride’s mirror,” which is essentially a fold of skin in the upper eyelid that tends to cover the inner corner of the eye, connects directly to “Life After Death” in Birthday Letters, where Hughes describes: “Your son’s eyes, which had unsettled us/With your Slavic Asiatic/epicanthic fold/but would become/So perfectly your eyes” (182) And the final lines of “Capriccios,” “Remembering it: will make your palms sweat/The skin lift blistering, both your lifeline’s bleed” reinforce the sense of horror that is at the heart of the sequence. “Capriccios” establishes the cosmic terrain while “The Mythographers” sets out the mythological architecture that governs the sequence. Briefly, Hughes’s imagination was intensely mythic, and he believed that myths had the power to us move us into greater areas of perception, to help us bridge or reconcile our inner and outer worlds—ideally, to recover some sense of the numinous. The overarching myth of Capriccio, is that of Lilith and Na’ama. This myth is key to understanding the events—or at least the interpretation of the relationship and actual events set forth in the sequence—and explains the placement and thematic link to “The Dreamers” in Birthday Letters, a poem in which Hughes essentially attempts to explain to Plath, that he was helpless, perhaps unwittingly seduced by Assia, “A German/Russian Israeli with the gaze of a demon.” Lilith is a major figure in Jewish demonology, although earlier roots of the legend can be traced to Babylonian and Sumerian demonology. She is also an influential figure in the Kabbalah, the teachings of Jewish mysticism—which Hughes had studied—and in the Zohar, the holiest book of the Kabbalah, and commentary on the Pentateuch. In the Zohar, she is occasionally replaced by Na’ama (Nehama in “The Mythographers”), while in other sources, Na’ama operates in company with Lilith, and is occasionally defined as the mother of demons. The name Lilith has been associated with lilah, the Jewish word for night, and in some legends, she appears as a female demon flying around the worlds at night, with the face of a woman, long hair, and wings (which supports some of Baskin’s illustrations for Capriccio). In the Zohar, as well as in other sources, Lilith (and by extension Nehama) has two primary roles: in the first, she

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is the incarnation of lust, the seducer of men; and in the second, she attempts to strangle newborn babies. Occasionally, when she finds no children, she turns on her own. In the earliest version of the legend, God created Lilith as a companion for Adam, (here I refer to the first few lines of “The Mythographers,”) “When God had created Man and Woman/He gave them to the Mythographers for testing. Said the Mythographers:/Let there be Lilith.” The phrase “owlish from her hole in the window,” refers to Lilith, the “screech owl,” mentioned in Isaiah 34.14, the only time that her name appears in the Bible. Lilith and Adam fought endlessly. She refused to be dominated in any aspect, particularly in her lovemaking, captured here in a somewhat hallucinatory image. According to the legend, Lilith flew out of the Garden of Eden, refused the three angels that Adam sent to bring her back, claiming that her mission was to steal the souls of infants. It is only when confronted with an amulet containing the names of three angels, and the words, “Out Lilith,” that she will refrain from harming infants. Clearly, this has not occurred in “The Mythographers,” as the narrator, or teller of the tale, conflates and extends the myth in the concluding section of the poem, and in raw, unflinching terms, describes the death of Nehama and the child. The myths of Capriccio, for the most part, are those of woman as seducer and destroyer—perhaps the dark side of the Great Mother archetype. Agency is female-centered; and the speaker or narrator—in some poems an indeterminate voice, in others, the first-person speaker, is essentially a passive respondent. There is no hero descending into the underworld to rescue the woman, no completed shamanic flight and return. Rather, in “Descent,” the fourth poem in the sequence, the process of shedding the self begins with direct references to Assia stripping off Germany (with “the crisp shirt of crossed lightnings” [here, the reference is to SS symbols], Israel, Russia, British Columbia, ultimately her child: “As your own hand, stronger than your choked outcry,/ Took your daughter from/you.” The poem shifts from the personal to the mythic level with the reference to Inanna, the Sumerian queen of heaven and earth, who “has to lie naked” in the underworld, “between strata/That can never be opened, except as a book.” The story of Inanna follows the pattern of the archetypal moon goddess. With her descent into the underworld, Inanna has access to the mysteries of death and rebirth, but according to some versions of the myth, she must first understand and accept her neglected dark side before she can reemerge as the goddess who rules over sky, earth, and the underground. At this stage of the sequence, there is no resolution, no suggestion of return. From this point on in the sequence, the speaker addresses Assia, the “you” of the poems, directly, talking of her individual history, her Jewish ancestry— actual, tribal, and Holocaust-related—and, at a more measured distance, their relationship and her death. With the exception of “Flame,” perhaps, which speaks of actual places in the north of England, where Hughes and Assia talked of moving—and may have visited some time before her death, chronology is kept to a minimum4 Although the poems, in general, are not grouped in an explicit

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pattern, major related motifs are developed through shifts in language, tone, and perspective. As noted, poems such as “The Locket,” “Smell of Burning,” and “The Roof,” and, to varying degrees, “Snow,” “Shibboleth,” and “Familiar,” speak of Assia’s entrenched, ceaseless fears of Nazi persecution of the Jews. “Rules of the Game” (“The Other” in New Selected Poems) and “The Error,” address what appeared to be Assia’s obsession, sheer envy, and perhaps unresolved feelings of guilt about the death of Sylvia Plath. The magnetic force of desire, with its implicit potential for self-destruction, is profiled (in somewhat contemporary reworkings of the Lilith myth) in “The Pit and the Stones” and “The Coat” where the narrator claims: “Nobody/Can deter what saunters/ Up the ferny path between/The cool, well-ironed sheets, or what spoor/Smudges the signature of the contract.” And in “Folktale,” one of the more graphic representations of the potentially harsh, destructive capabilities of human beings, the relationship founders on misunderstanding, questionable motives, and absence of generosity.5 In some aspects, “Folktale” is the horrific dark side of the optimistic vision of joyous union described by Hughes in “Bride and groom lie hidden for three days” in Cave Birds. Before abandoning the Crow project, Hughes intended that “Bride and groom,” would be the concluding poem of the ultimately triumphant story of Crow, a response to the question of the Ogress, “Who gives most, him or her?” (Faas 144). Both “Folktale” and “Bride and Groom” are structured on notions of reciprocity, but while the couple in “Folktale” are propelled by sheer self interest (“He wanted…,”/ (“She wanted…”), “Bride and groom” builds on notions of cooperation and generosity, culminating in vision of ideal love: “So gasping with joy, with cries of wonderment/ Like two gods of mud/Sprawling in the dirt, but with infinite care/They bring each other to perfection” (CB 56). “Bride and groom” describes the dissolution of the self, the achievement of union, through the transformative power of mutual giving, whereas the disintegration of the relationship in “Folktale” suggests fragmented, incomplete myth. Capriccio is shot in dark colors, shadows, images of death. The mythical framework is in place, but the path to reintegration, to some sense of wholeness, has been short-circuited. Some measure of hope, or at least protection, is suggested in the brief concluding poem, “Chlorophyl,” with its interweaving of

4. There is also a degree of ambiguity regarding the narrative voice in “Flame,” and it may be that the addressee is not Assia; rather, the somewhat indeterminate “you” may actually be Hughes referring to himself. As mentioned previously, Hughes and Assia had spoken of moving to the north of England. Allusions to the Duke’s powerful set speech in Measure for Measure (Act III, Scene I), concrete place names in the north, and the more specific mention of lines such as “You did not know how history had already/Cast you to repeat yourself,” which probably refer to the death of Plath and now Assia, suggest that the speaker is Hughes. Without knowing the concrete facts, it is still possible to assume that within the context of the poem, even if the chronology is not exact, the “you” of “Flame” is nevertheless Hughes.

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imagery of the descent of the departed mother and daughter with the sycamore, the Egyptian tree of life. In The Book of the Dead, “two sycamores of turquoise” stand at the gate of heaven, and are associated with Nut, the goddess of heaven, and coffin goddess who shelters or encloses the dead. And in the cabala, the tree situated at the center of events in paradise represents knowledge of life and death. Yet within the full context of Capriccio, the recurrent or structuring image of “Chlorophyl,” “the keys/Of a sycamore” —possibly the fruits or seeds of regeneration—and the accompanying illustration of the phoenix appear to be more of an implied, even added—on prayer for resurrection and immortality, rather than an achieved reality. Capriccio, Birthday Letters, and Howls & Whispers can also be viewed as fragments of one long sequence, or, more accurately, as separate, although interrelated, sequences that speak to each other across separate frames. Some of the more obvious guides to interpretation such as publication dates of the sequences while suggestive, are generally inconclusive. Composition dates for many of the poems are unknown. Several of the poems, which were later included in Birthday Letters, were published as early as 1980,6 and Hughes mentioned writing many of what we assume to be Birthday Letters poems (and possibly poems included in Howls & Whispers) around 1995.7 Of greater concern, however, is not the date of composition of the individual poems, but rather the appearance and placement of separate poems in the sequences. A detailed reading across the three sequences would suggest many relationships, some clear differences, and provide more extensive analysis than can be encompassed in the scope of this article. Nevertheless, some preliminary comments are useful at this stage. At the outset, the shifts in tone, emotional perspective, narrative progression, and, more important, narrative voice suggest some differences among the three sequences. The narrative voice in Birthday Letters, and, to some extent, in Howls & Whispers is more conversational, more intimate than the voice of Capriccio, where, as noted, the speaker tends to be a passive respondent. There are

5. There are several references to Assia, both direct and implied, in “Folktale” such as “She wanted…escape without a passport”; “…an enemy without a gun”; and “…the hillstream’s tabula rasa,” which could indicate her desire to erase the past, to start life anew with Hughes. The “leopard Ein Gedi” (between Jerusalem and Masada on the shores of the Dead Sea), also seems to refer to Assia, and could have several connotations. While the leopard is often associated with hunting and ruthless force, in some cultures, the leopard is viewed as a lunar creature, which could relate to the myth established in Capriccio. I am grateful for Leonard Scigac’s comments that the leopard can be associated with Dionysus (cf. Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, where the panther is referred to as “a mythical beast half-leopard, half-lion, sacred to Dionysus,”) or in Macedonian art, where Dionysius, is often depicted riding a leopard, indicating a more effeminate aspect, of the god. In “The Pan,” (Birthday Letters), the seductive attractiveness, along with unsuspected, hidden danger of the woman with “leopard-claw ear-rings,” may also refer to the Lilith myth that underpins Capriccio.

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also subtle shifts in the narrative voice in a few of the poems of Howls & Whispers such as “The City” and “The Offers,” which cut closer to the vein, and reveal more of Hughes’s painful, unresolved feelings about Plath’s death than many of poems in Birthday Letters. The most obvious question is why the poems of Howls & Whispers were considered “strays,” why Hughes chose to publish these eleven poems in a limited edition, not to include any in Birthday Letters, and publish a couple of the poems separately in 1997 and 1998.8 Similarly, while the mythical framework of Capriccio helps to explain the relationship, and the interplay between myth and actual events provides much of the narrative integrity of the sequence, and perhaps a way for Hughes to come to terms with the relationship, the use of myth also tends to distance or inhibit emotional response. Myth is relegated to a secondary, although implicit role, however, in the placement and ordering of the eight Assia poems from Capriccio in New Selected Poems 1957–1994. The poems immediately follow the seven Plath poems (published later in Birthday Letters), and “The Dogs are Eating Your Mother,” the poem to Plath’s children. As I have suggested elsewhere, both the Plath and Assia poems lose their individual franchise, because they are grouped together within the Uncollected frame (Bere, Moulin 2000 240). The contiguous placement of the poems does suggest the importance of the interrelationships between the two women (with Hughes as the implied center), while the placement of “The Other” and “The Error” as the bracketing poems in this group reinforces the notion that the inescapable influence or “shadow” of Plath was a major force in Assia’s death. With the placement of “Capriccios,” as the opening poem of Capriccio, and the same poem, with a few variances, as the closing poem of Howls & Whispers (here, called “Superstitions”), Hughes has deliberately created a circular pattern among the sequences, again suggesting the unpredictable, unmotivated nature of events, and, more important, the impossibility of fulfillment of transforming or completed myth. Finally, the decision to publish specific poems is always a carefully considered decision, and the placement of individual poems in a sequence also requires aesthetic decisions. Essentially, the creative act of writing continues into the design of the sequence. Reading the poetry of Ted Hughes is not simply a question of reading isolated poems, but rather of understanding the complex, interconnectedness of the various sequences. 6. “You Hated Spain” was first published in Ploughshares 6:82–87, 1980; and “The Earthenware Head” was published in The London Review of Books, 2:4 (February 21, 1980); see Sagar and Tabor, Ted Hughes: A Bibliography. 7. Ted Hughes: Timeline, compiled by Ann Skea. In a conversation with Skea in 1995, Hughes mentioned that he was writing “about 100 poems about things I should have resolved thirty years ago. Should have written then, but couldn’t.” 8. “The City,” was published in The Sunday Times, Int’l edition, Book section, October 26, 1997; and “The Offers” in The Sunday Times, October 18, 1998.

4 “Dead Farms, Dead Leaves:” Culture as Nature in Remains of Elmet & Elmet Terry Gifford

First, the immortals dwelling on Olympos Fashioned a golden race of human beings Under the reign of Kronos, king of heaven. They lived like gods, with hearts immune from care, Remote from toil and trouble, ignorant Of vile old age; with never-failing limbs They danced and feasted, far from every evil, Dying as though subdued by sleep. All blessings Were theirs, for fertile fields, uncultivated, Brought forth abundant crops, and people lived Peacefully off the land. (Hesiod, Works and Days [c. 700 BC] Torrance 287) Hesiod’s description of the Golden Age is regarded as the earliest antecedent of pastoral, the idealised literary mode that came, four centuries later in the Idylls of Theocritus to be associated with shepherds and their pipes, and four centuries later again, to be located in the literary construct Virgil overlaid on the Peloponnese region of Arcadia. Ovid retold a version of the Greek myth of the Golden Age and Ted Hughes’s version of this pastoral is expressed with ironic contemporary relevance: “Listening deeply, man kept faith with the source.” The poem “Open to Huge Light,” from Remains of Elmet, however, evokes the opposite of Arcadia. The humans are sheep and the (wind-)shepherds, who, in a twist of the pastoral iconography, are now playing “the reeds of desolation” rather than idealisation, are revealed by Fay Godwin’s photograph to be trees. That the sheep’s heads might hold any awareness of the nature of that desolation, or any awareness of their responsibility for it, seems unlikely. They are not “listening deeply to the source.” Startled by something—that flash of emptiness —they turn back to the business of eating, or rather, to unpack the metaphor, business as eating. This poem both celebrates the celestial light to which these two trees are witness before this wind-blown Yorkshire moor, and the end of the pastoral as a mode of celebration. Here is merely emptiness, actually deforested in the uplands by a Bronze Age culture based upon wood: houses, fencing,

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heating, ships (Rackham 35). Hughes’s translation of Ovid’s version of the Golden Age makes the point by continuing: “Then the great conifers/Ruffled at home on the high hills./They had no premonition of the axe/Hurtling towards them on its parabola./Or of the shipyards.” (TO 9) In Elmet, published after fifteen years as a completely reconstituted second edition of Remains of Elmet, the poem previously titled by its first line, “Open To Huge Light” is now titled, as many of the earlier first-line-titled poems are, to reveal its location: “Two Trees at Top Withens.” And the second edition’s better print (now duotone) of the photograph reveals the desolation of the broken stone walls at Top Withens, a ruin which is the location of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. So here are a second (physical) and third (literary) sense in which human culture contributes to the desolation of this actual place. “Two Trees at Top Withens” is a post-pastoral poem and one which hints that human culture, whilst being as natural as eating, is also as self-absorbed and as head-down to its effects. “Post-pastoral” is a term I coined at the Ted Hughes conference ten years ago (Sagar, 1994 129ff), partly as a joke—it was the age of post-structuralism, postcolonialism, postmodernism and post-feminism. But I found that I had to take my own joke seriously because I needed the term to characterise literature that, “listening deeply kept faith with the source” in a mode which, whilst avoiding pastoral Golden Age idealisation, was not limited by the simple opposition of anti-pastoral. I have since refined the concept in the final chapter of my book Pastoral to include six features which can be briefly, crudely, listed as a recognition (I) that a “listening” awe should lead to humility, (II) that the “source” is a creative-destructive universe, (III) that human nature is a continuum of outer nature, (IV) that nature is culture and culture is nature, (V) that consciousness produces conscience and a responsibility to define what “keeping faith with the source” should mean, (VI) that the exploitation of natural resources is not separate from the exploitation of social groups. Of course, these features are not unproblematic absolutes; each requires definition in relation to texts. Whilst they appear to be epistemological (that is, concerned with how we know), they are more importantly ontological (concerned with how to be). One of the concepts which I have found to be most problematic is the notion of culture as nature. Post-structuralism has left a legacy of an easy capacity to conceive of nature as culturally constructed by language, and BSE reminds us (in England) that we culturally construct nature in material terms as well. Indeed, Leonard M. Scigaj’s opposition to Derridian différance and the deferral of meaning, with the notion of référance, is a timely intervention to refer “one’s perceptions beyond the printed page to nature, to the referential origin of all language” (Sustainable Poetry 38). It is crucial that the words “conifers,” “axe” and “shipyards” do refer to real things because we have to take responsibility for our past relationships with them in the undeferrable decisions we are actually making all the time in the present. So perhaps nature is more obviously (and, indeed, dangerously) culture, than culture is capable of being perceived as nature.

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But throughout the work of Ted Hughes that which is human culture is characterised in terms that imply that it is, fundamentally, nature. Nowhere is this more evident than in Remains of Elmet, with an interesting added emphasis in the additions to that project in Elmet. Not only are “Dead Farms, Dead Leaves” in that poem’s title, but the industrial revolution, the opposite of “natural” to a writer like D.H.Lawrence, is, in its death throes, characterised by Hughes’s imagery as part of the creative-destructive cycles of nature. This is both a radical conflation of long-standing separation of first, civilisation and nature, art and nature, then industrialism and nature in English culture, and a return to the earliest European sense of the grounding of human culture within nature. Ovid echoes Hesiod in describing the decline of human life from the Golden Age through the ages of silver and bronze to the assumed present Age of Iron where, in Hughes’s translation, “Earth’s natural plenty no longer sufficed… Precious ores the Creator had concealed/As close to hell as possible/Were dug up —a new drug/ For the criminal (TO 12). But it need not have been like this—the exploitation of the earth as of people in “criminal” behaviour. Even when the earlier Age of Brass had “brought a brazen people” in Hughes’s words, “still/ Mankind listened deeply/To the harmony of the whole creation,/And aligned/ Every action to the greater order” (TO 10). And Hesiod’s Work and Days goes beyond the pastoral to offer advice, in the Age of Iron, on wholesome husbandry that anticipates a strand of “aligned” rural work literature that takes its name from Virgil’s The Georgics. (Of course, Hughes’s Moortown sequence of poems is a contemporary georgic in the tradition of Hesiod, with an anti-pastoral emphasis). Peter Coates’ recent survey of Western conceptions of nature traces the separation of culture and nature to the great poet of the generation before Ovid, Titus Lucretius (99–55 BC), whose poem On The Nature Of Things distinguishes, in the very voice of nature, between the body which is to be celebrated as naturally mortal, and the mind that can be “liberated” to “contemplate the nature of all things” (Torrance 407). Thus began a Manichaean dualism that in its often dominant forms privileged mind over body, civilisation over nature, science over arts, virtual over material, indoor keyboard consumers over sensory interactors with land in David Abram’s terms (268), modern goddesses over postmodern cyborgs in Donna Harraway’s terms (181). The subversive form of this dualistic thinking took its starting point in classical pastoral, flourished in eighteenth century Romanticism, and then in modern resistances to industrialism and later technology. Here the value system is reversed, foregrounding or favouring body over mind, nature over the works of man, imagination over empiricism, the instinctive over the rational, the organic to the genetically modified, sky burial to the crematorium in poet Graham Mort’s terms (57), “the power of sun and moon” used by Lucretius, rather than nuclear power. In its dominant forms and its subversive reversals the separation of culture from nature has increased the distance over which our species must “listen deeply/To the harmony of the whole creation.” What Lucretius was breaking was a harmony of culture and nature at the heart of Greek poetry.

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Torrance reminds us that “There could be no “nature poetry” in classical Greece, for the natural world could never be conceived apart from the human” (275). In Remains of Elmet Hughes looks around at the remains of the human project in the upper Calder Valley, writing, as Lucretius momentarily did, as “if Nature suddenly should find a voice” (Torrance 406), but with a holistic view of “the whole creation.” Hughes’s perspective is therefore a long one and his theme is decay, beginning with the “corpse” of the glacier that shaped the Calder Valley in the title poem which, perhaps surprisingly, was omitted from the second edition. Hughes lists glacier, farms, mill-towns and their population as responsible for his conclusion: “Now, coil behind coil,/A wind-parched ache,/An absence, famished and staring,/Admits tourists/To pick among crumbling, loose molars/And empty sockets” (RE 53). In his introduction to Elmet he adds the First World War and Methodism to the “cataclysms” that contributed to his sense that, growing up in this place, “gradually it dawned on you that you were living among the survivors.” The difference between the two books and the tone of their introductions, and perhaps the reason for dropping the title and poem “Remains of Elmet,” is the difference in emphasis between “empty sockets” and “survivors.” This might also be seen as the difference between the destructive and creative tensions in nature, or between, as the later introduction puts it, “pressurised stagnation” and “fermenting independence” in the region’s history. Before I return to this difference between the two editions, I want to demonstrate the poetic devices by which Hughes characterises culture, the various forms of the human enterprise in this place, as nature. “Lumb Chimneys,” the model example, has been dropped from the second edition and its telling photograph has been placed beside the important poem “Chinese History of Colden Water” (a symptomatic revision of the first edition’s poem “The Trance of Light”). “Lumb Chimneys” reverses metaphors so that we understand nature by human comparison (“And the nettle venoms into place/Like a cynical old woman in the food-queue”) and decaying culture by comparison with natural processes (“Before these chimneys can flower again/They must fall into the only future, into earth”). This technique for the conflation of culture and nature, which so often ends with an image of culture as nature, is again in evidence in the retained and revised poem “First, Mills.” After building mills, cenotaphs were necessary, after crown greens for the ancient art of bowls, “the railway station/That bled this valley to death” for the First World War. Nature is “requisitioned” (changed from the less specifically military “commandeered”) by culture: “Then the hills were requisitioned/For gravemounds.” The cover photograph shows in its far left corner a hill-top cenotaph. But the poem ends: “And now—two minutes silence/In the childhood of earth.” The “cataclysms” that hung over Hughes’s childhood (one of which is still remembered by two minutes silence each November 11th) were merely a brief time in the earth’s evolution, although they were a part of it, if only as “everything fell wetly to bits.”

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This was, of course, only the stage of the process whereby dead farms, like dead leaves, “cling to the long/Branch of the world” as “the hills went on gently/ Shaking their sieve.” This evolutionary phrase from “When Men Got To The Summit” foregrounds the hills and the process of “sieving” against the failed human habitation of these hills, as even the puritanical force of “the hard, foursquare scriptures fractured.” This sieving metaphor raises two questions which ought to be addressed in considering the notion of culture as nature. First, if it’s easy to observe what falls through the sieve, what remains? What are the positive remains of Elmet? Second, is all that falls through, like all that remains in the hills’ sieve, of equal value? Is there no distinction between dead farms and dead mills in terms of human suffering, for example? Is the television that remains in the homes of Hebden Bridge of equal value to, say, the survivor’s spirit of “outcast and outlaw,” the inheritors of Billy Holt (E 51) who remain in Hebden Bridge? “Nevertheless, for some giddy moments/A television/Blinked from the wolf’s lookout” (RE 56). I will answer the second question first. Clearly some aspects of human culture, although “nature” in the broadest sense of being products of what Gary Snyder calls “the wild mind” (Snyder 168), are more self-destructive, or alienating from external nature, than others. Human culture exterminated the wolf and now humans look at nature programmes about wolves on television in houses sited where the Elmet wolf might have looked out. (The photograph of the television aerial standing alone above a ravine has been omitted from the second edition). But the humans’ and the wolf’s are not the same kinds of looking. Of course, Hughes hints, human culture might so alienate itself from “listening deeply” to the whole creation that it follows the fate of the wolf in Elmet, after “some giddy moments” in the timescale of the creation. (That is, the wolf, and the foxes of Elmet, might have the last laugh). And certainly Remains of Elmet regularly recognises the exploitation of mill-workers, as of nature, in the Calder Valley. “Slavery” is a word used about both stone and people in the poem “Hill-Stone Was Content.” This recognition is also present in the second edition. The Chinese immortal who falls asleep beside Colden Water wakes in terror at the sounds of hammer, looms, clog-irons, biblical texts and gutter water that has resulted from the exploitation of this brook and its valley that seemed to be an idyllic “leafy conch of whispers.” But the answer to the first question—what remains in the sieve—lies in the difference between the two editions. In the first, culture is in natural decay: industrialism, farming, religion, even childhood memories. The new tourism is an empty kind of casual, so far “unheritaged,” accident—“pick[ing] among crumbling, loose molars.” But that image is absent from the second edition, the poem “Remains of Elmet” excised and a new title chosen implying the continuity of place—simply Elmet. Twenty poems of the sixty-two poems were dropped from the first edition and twenty new to the book were inserted into the second edition. (Of the twenty dropped, eighteen had already been dropped for Three Books published a year earlier and six poems dropped for Three Books were

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reinstated, or revised, in Elmet, indicating some considered rethinking of the project over a period of time). Of the twenty poems new to the both editions, four came from the Hawk in the Rain, two from Lupercal, and one each from Recklings and Wodwo. (Sagar and Tabor, in their invaluable Bibliography 1946– 1995, miss two poems from those indicated as first published in the second edition: “Familiar” —a different text from that of the same title in the 1990 limited edition Capriccio—and “Slump Sundays”) (105). This endorses Hughes’s view of this project as reported by Fay Godwin, that “this was his definitive collection of Calder Valley poems” (Gammage 107). The revised poem now titled “Chinese History of Colden Water” ends by replacing the earlier version’s sense of a land emptied of any signs of human culture—a land “Heavy with the dream of a people” —with the line “all but the laughter of foxes.” The lightness of this is symptomatic of the difference in tone between the two editions, although the additions to the second edition celebrate more than foxes. All of the previously uncollected poems in Elmet, with the exception of “Telegraph Wires” are family reminiscences. Keith Sagar reports Hughes telling him that the sequencing of poems in the two books was not a matter of significance (The Laughter of Foxes 28). My recent interview with Fay Godwin indicates that her suggestions led their joint process of sequencing the contents (see Appendix below). But the placing of the new family poems towards the end of Elmet cannot be ignored. Their focus is not so much on a lost childhood, as they might have been in the earlier book, but on the celebration of what might be called “the spirit of Billy Holt” (see Sutcliffe, Cockroft and Pease). The last two poems in Elmet are about survival under the shadow of the aftermath of the First World War, whilst “Walt” counterbalances the fact that he survived to make his fortune (1893–1976), with the “skyline tree-fringe” of “all that was left”.1 “Sacrifice” extends the admiration for a family member who survived being the “sacrificed” youngest brother, “born bottom of the heap” (presumably Albert, 1902–1947, the brother of Walt, 1893–1976, and Hughes’s father William Henry, 1894–1981). “His laugh thumped my body,” Hughes writes, celebrating the spirit that also survived the motorcycle accident which he laughs to recall. Together with his father in “Familiar” and his brother in “What’s The First Thing You Think Of?” the fact that these are warmly remembered family members adds a living vitality to Elmet that could not be encompassed by the verdict of the introduction to the first book, “Within the last fifteen years the end has come.” The evidence of the decay of the mills and chapels is still there, but the last sentence of the introduction to the second edition emphasises what is left in the sieve, above the remains that have fallen through: “Gradually, it dawned on you that you were living among the survivors, in the remains.” “The remains” are not now so much what is dead, but what has survived. Of Fay Godwin’s new photographs in the second edition eight contain the presence of people, those survivors, including three photographs of children replacing the one in the first edition. (Fay Godwin suggests that this was not a conscious strategy on her part in the interview below.)

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I want to highlight two dimensions to the spirit of survivors behind Elmet, the second edition, that are the subject of recent theoretical elaboration in English cultural geography and social anthropology associated with Lancaster and Manchester universities respectively. In both disciplines there is a recognition of a modern collapse of the categories of culture and nature that might be seen to have both negative and positive consequences. First, a contemporary cultural geography of Elmet would observe that these two books have themselves contributed to, not just the cultural representation, but the cultural reconstruction of nature and the natural in the upper Calder Valley. They must now be seen as, in a small way, contributory to the region’s cultural regeneration and continuing survival. In a radio reading from Remains of Elmet in 1980 Hughes followed his reading of “For Billy Holt” with an introduction to “When Men Got To The Summit,” in which he said: “It has even been rediscovered as a hideout from society. In the mid-sixties Hebden Bridge was declared the hippy capital of the United Kingdom” (BBC Radio 3, 3.10 1980). The inheritors of the “outcast[s] and outlaw[s]” described in the poem “For Billy Holt,” including the hippies of the sixties, have flourished in Hebden Bridge which is now a centre for a thriving alternative culture in which nature has a strong presence in those industrial remains. Significantly Hughes wrote in the introduction to Elmet that the old Methodism had been superseded by “the new age.” “New Age” bookshops leak whale-song into the streets of Hebden Bridge. The Walkley Clog factory, the last in the UK, is also jangling with jewelry and craft shops inside its austere mill building. A recent Channel Four documentary revealed that Todmorden has more psychotherapists in the population than anywhere else in the UK (“Darkest England,” 24.1.2000). Lumb Bank, the creative writing centre established by Hughes a quarter of a century ago, can now be seen as an established part of the Calder Valley tourist industry. The plaque on N° 1 Aspinal St. is not the blue one of English Heritage such as Plath was delighted to find on her final house in London (LH 477), but one erected by the Mytholmroyd Residents’ Association. A writer seeking to be a self-imposed “outcast” from London can find no better alternative than Mytholmroyd, as the Guardian reported recently in the case of novelist Sarah Champion: “No sooner had Champion begun to unpack her lava lamp and flying ducks than she discovered that her new house was the birthplace of Ted Hughes’s (23.10.1999). The Hebden Bridge Times reported on April 2nd 1999 plans to establish a Ted Hughes Heritage Centre in the derelict Mytholmroyd railway station. The canal behind N° 1 Aspinal St, featured in Elmet, has been renovated and reconnected to Lancashire, a symbol of Yorkshire confidence in the regeneration of heritage, as

1. In fact, it was a visit from “Uncle Walt” to Devon that resurrected the Remains of Elmet project in Hughes’s mind as a kind of “episodic biography,” as Hughes outlined to Fay Godwin in a letter of 4th July 1976. This was before the photographs and the place itself took over the project of the first book.

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cultural industry replaces the woollen industry and clogs-irons ring for style rather than work. But the Hebden Bridge Literary and Philosophical Society at which I heard Hughes read in the early 1970s, like The Boarding House (“Overlooking the Crags, Close to the Moors, Parties Catered for”) were featured in the tourist guide of 1927 (Wilcock 23). So, in the timescale Hughes deploys in these two books, are these merely “some giddy moments” of cultural flourish, or a culture surviving by “listening” better? In Contested Natures, Macnaghten and Urry argue that such distinctions are now harder to make: The innovations of twentieth-century science have rendered the distinction between natural and social time as invalid and lead us yet again to conclude that there is no simple and sustainable distinction between nature and society. They are ineluctably intertwined. There are therefore many different times (as indeed there are different spaces) and it is not possible to identify an unambiguous social time separate from natural time. (Macnaghten & Urry 29) So there is both our sense of glacial time and personal memory and “heritage regeneration” in the present, in a space we might call a valley, a retreat, a crucible of water power, a corridor and a tourist centre. In “Walt” memory is overlaid on memory in a multilayered construction of nature (“the skyline treefringe”) that is itself a celebration of “kinship,” the name we give to one experience of culture as nature (“as through binoculars”). Walt’s binoculars of time and space are shown us through the poem’s binoculars of time and space. In a sense, any study of the Elmet project has to, in Macnaghten and Urry’s terms, “decipher the implications of what has always been the case, namely, a nature elaborately entangled and fundamentally bound up with social practices and their characteristic modes of cultural representation” (30). For Walt, as for Hughes, as for the reader, “Natures are in time as they are in place” (167). Culture is nature’s way of helping us decipher our relationship with nature. Memory, kinship, time and place give definition to “the skyline tree-fringe” in the poem and contribute to our understanding of the ways it can be “all that was left” in the poem’s final line. That “all,” may be empty for Walt, full for Hughes, and both for the reader. The social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern would find Hughes’s increased emphasis on “natural” family ties in this landscape interesting less as an example of culture as nature than as a case of what she calls “postplurality.” Her book is called After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century and argues that although comparatively recently diversity of individualism and social groups was to be valued (fathers, mothers, brothers, uncles in Elmet are celebrated for their idiosyncrasies), and “the person was seen as “part” of nature,” we now value the overlapping of what had been regarded as separate and distinctive. The final chapter of her book is titled “Nostalgia from a postplural world.” Nature, she

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says, which had provided a model or analogy for human kinship, is no longer a stable contextualising category. When postmodernism showed that nature was culture, culture could no longer be nature. “Kinship was regarded as an area of primordial identity and inevitable relations. It was at once part of the natural world that regenerated social life and provided a representation of this relationship with them” (198). Dead fathers, dead farms, dead leaves could all be seen both metaphorically and literally to “cling to the long/Branch of the world.” But, Strathern would argue, once that branch was only perceived as metaphor, “the grounding function” of nature disappeared (195). Coates concludes that “the greatest threat to nature today” is not pollution in its now highly technical forms from gene manipulation to the computer virus as new life-form, but “the postmodernist challenge” —the circular discourse about the instability of the category of “pollution” (184). This would debate virtually dead leaves, culturally dead farms on the cyborg branch of the world in which there can be no verb “to cling.” This brings us back to the Lucretian separation of mind and body, language and nature—a world in which human intersubjectivity takes place in a different realm from our sensuous relationship with the non-human. The result, anthropologist Tim Ingold observes, is human beings who, as social beings…are destined to remain permanently suspended in such semantic webs, while their bodies continue to be firmly anchored in the material relations of the object world—relations that may furnish metaphorical resources for social cognition but that are, by the same token, partitioned off from it… Social life goes on, according to this scenario, and indeed will always go on, beyond the edge of nature; society floats like a mirage above the road we tread in our material life (238). In his brilliant essay “Life beyond the Edge of Nature?” Ingold argues that if nature is regarded as subject rather than object, and a world that is interactively transforming itself rather than working out some kind of DNA pre-programming, “it is a world, if you will, not of intersubjectivity but of interagentivity” (249). Culture is then what we call our evolving “relationships within the continuum of organic life” (250), “our listening deeply” to our poet’s evocation of both “the laughter of foxes” (E 42) and the knowing laughter of the human survivors (124).

5 Ted Hughes’s Crying Horizons: “Wind” & the Poetics of Sublimity Christian La Cassagnère

Originally published in Ted Hughes’s first book of poems, The Hawk in the Rain, in 1957, “Wind” was ten years later one of the few compositions of his that the poet singled out to exemplify his discussion of the creative experience in Poetry in the Making. The poem was thus republished, in the chapter entitled “Wind and Weather,” to illustrate the idea that creative writing originates within the creator’s self in the intensity of a genuine experience, however commonplace its occasion may be: “A strong wind certainly stirs your mind up, as if it actually could enter your head, and sometimes on such occasions you get the feeling of having lost your bearings, and that something terrible is about to happen, almost as if it were the beginning of an earthquake. On and off I live in a house on top of a hill in the Pennines, where the wind blows without obstruction across the tops of the moors. I have experienced some gales in that house, and here is a poem I once wrote about one of them.” (33) The composition of “Wind” was thus to Hughes a memorable moment of writing; and he seemed to regard it as representative of his poetic impulse. But if the poem commends itself as an object of close reading, it is chiefly because it brings into play, in the nutshell of its single page, the fundamental adventure of Hughes’s creation, namely, as Joanny Moulin has emphasized in his recent book, meeting the real: the Tyche theorized by Aristotle in his Physics and reinterpreted by Lacan as “la rencontre du réel” (Lacan 1973, 55), that real—whatever we mean by it: this will be my concern in this essay—being at any rate experienced as traumatic, as Lacan observes (55) and as Hughes forcefully suggests when speaking, in “Egg Head” (10)1, of the “manslaughtering shocks” from the world as it impinges on consciousness, and as an “otherness” (still to quote “Egg Head”), as an alterity on which language, or more generally the symbolic order, has no grasp because it cannot do anything but substitute its autonomous system of signifying forms. A poem, in such conditions, cannot but be a self-defeating space in which a subject of language—i. e. originating and existing in the order of language—attempts to meet the real in a field that excludes it by nature. Is the poetic venture, then, a further evidence that the real is, as Lacan argues, “what the subject is doomed to miss” (39)? Is the poem bound to be the place of a “rencontre manquée” (54) of a missed meeting? Such is precisely, at bottom, the problem explored by “Wind,” whose true object is not so much a cosmic

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phenomenon as the status of language: the highly problematic capacity of the poetic signifier to register the “manslaughtering shocks” of the real without abolishing itself as language. An issue, I would suggest, that reactivates somehow a question that was at the heart of the concept of sublimity as it was understood in (pre)romantic art and theories of art, namely as an aesthetics of the impossible and, in literature, as a poetics of the unutterable: let us remember Burke’s praise, in his Enquiry (55), of Milton’s negative description of Death in Paradise Lost as a paradigmatic instance of the sublime. I would thus like to suggest in a reading of “Wind” how the poem reexplores in its own way the problematics of sublimity, how it struggles to articulate it anew, and so how, in this particular light, Ted Hughes does appear to us, after Yeats and in the very field of modernity, as one of the last romantics. Beyond the horizon of language My reading will be grounded on the observation of two structural features of the text, two features that seem conflicting and which I would like to use as keys to two alternative readings: the poem’s strongly formalized construction, and yet, within this construction, the presence of rupture, of discontinuity which tends to deconstruct the pattern, however insistently it maintains itself (almost) until the last. The first feature may seem paradoxical in that while having “wind” as its referent, in other words a sheer “energy” in the Blakian sense, refusing all form that would “contain” it, the poem presents itself—visually in its layout as well as auditively—as a firm metrical construct, with its clear division into six four-line groups that repeat the same stanza design; each stanza being moreover selfbounded by a network of phonic repetitions—consonances and assonances— occurring at the end of all lines (with the only exception of lines 2 and 3) and thus shaping the stanza into a quatrain with enveloping rhymes (in the 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th stanzas) or alternating rhymes (in the 3rd and 6th). And within the stanza the lines, whose boundaries are marked out by the terminal rhymes, repeat basically the same five stressed pattern, so a set verse design, straight away established in the opening line, “This house has been far out at sea all night,” a decasyllable in which the ear definitely identifies an iambic pentameter loaded with spondaic modulations. That seeming paradox of the “watertight compartment of words,” to borrow Dylan Thomas’ phrase, that has as its object a shapeless force—“woods crashing… Winds stampeding… Floundering” —has no doubt its deeper logic, a logic whose best formulation might be found in the poem of another poet, the self-portrait of Yeats in the writing act:

1. Except when otherwise stated, references to Ted Hughes’s poetry are to the New Selected Poems, 1957–1994 (NSP).

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…the elemental creatures go About my table to and fro That hurry from unmeasured mind To rant and rage in flood and wind; Yet he who treads in measured ways May surely barter gaze for gaze (Yeats, 57) What Yeats is stressing, in this metapoetic passage which is fully relevant, I think, to Hughes’s poem, is the necessity of controlling form to cope with the real. The limits which the poetic signifier keeps on inscribing within itself in “Wind” are the securities that protect the subject—whose representative, “I,” will not venture into the text until line 9, so as the stanza design has been twice established—from being engulfed by whatever “raging” forces he is confronted with: much in the same way as in “Meeting,” the poem next to “Wind” in the New selected Poems (13), stages the irruption of the goat’s “devil head” in the close-knit safety net of the terza rima. In other words in “Wind,” the poem’s coded and regulated dis-course is Hughes’s speaker’s way of “treading in measured ways” as he ventures into the fleld of an impossible real. The poem thus sounds, on the whole, like the narrative of a mythical journey, an initiatory journey which is doubly inscribed: first in the opening line which establishes the isotopy of the night sea-voyage, then throughout the poem in its narrative dimension which is underpinned by a sequence of temporal terms, from “all night” (1.1) to “Till day” (1.5) to “At noon” (1.9) and finally to the “Now” of line 18 which introduces an epiphanic present. As such, “Wind” inevitably tends to read like a variation on the “shamanic flight” pattern, a major and wellknown reference of Hughes in his analytical writings, so the ritual journey in which the shaman (to quote Hughes in his 1970 interview about Crow) “goes to the spirit-world…to get something badly needed” (Faas, 206) or, in terms of artistic creation, the course of the poet set upon “opening negociations with whatever happen[s] to be out there” (201), “far out at sea.” In its basic opposition between two places, here within and far out, between “house” and “horizon” —the two alliterating words at the two ends of the signifying chain—, the poem projects a topography in the Freudian sense, in other words a psychical space where “house,” a locus immediately connected in the opening phrase with the subject of enunciation through the deictic “this,” appears as a metonymic image of the “I,” i. e. the meditating, self-transparent, self-protected ego that “entertain[s] book, thought” and social conversation (l.20– 21), that aspect of the psyche which Hughes designates, in his major essay on Coleridge, as “the wall of intellectual ego” (WP 420). The journey thus appears as a decentering movement of the subject from an ego, initially experienced as central, to another “far out” locus, so that the poem’s trajectory defines itself as a search for that “ex-centricity” Lacan speaks about in his comment on Freud’s basic discovery, namely that “the subject does not coincide with its intellect, it is

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not on the same axis, it is ex-centric… Let us stick to this topographic metaphor: the subject is decentered from the individual. That is the meaning of Je est un autre (Lacan 1978 17). I is an Other, the “I” discovers itself as Other: such seems to be the ritual at work in the poem, a ritual where the ego (as alienating centre) has to be displaced in all the forms that represent it in the signifying field, i. e. “I,” “we” (its extension in the order of speech) and “house” (its metonymic stand-in). And here, ironically, the fixed limits of metre are made to serve the decentering process, for whenever they occur, the signifiers of the ego appear in a different place in the line space: successively in the positions of syllable 2, 3, 6, 10, 9 and 5. In the poem’s space, therefore, the “I” (or its equivalent) is never given any stable stance from which to speak. It hardly survives, adrift like a wreckage tossed in a verbal sea—the poem itself being that sea, a “sea of ink,” if it may borrow George Herbert’s metaphor—until it completely submerges in the final stanza through the syntactic ritual that superposes four parallel clauses whose sequence performs, as it were in a filmic effect, an ellipsis of the grammatical subject: “We watch the fire blazing,/ And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,/Seeing the window tremble to come in,/Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.” The elliptic process should be read literally, as an aphanisis in the Lacanian sense (Lacan 1973 197–210), namely as a fading of the subject as ego—as existing in “book,” “thought” and discourse (1.20–21), in other words in the symbolic order—, which allows the emergence of the Other, i. e. of the subject as a subject of desire, existing “a long way from the world of words” (PM, 119) and irrupting at the poem’s end in the “cry:” so a sheer vocal occurrence arising straight from the body, free of the mediation and the interdicts of the linguistic law—like those “cries” Hughes will evoke in Gaudete, coming “from the awkward gullets of beasts/That will not chill into syntax “(G, 176)—an animal language manifesting, in its immediacy, the naked truth of desire. At the end of the shamanic journey there is thus no vision but a hearing, that of an unthinkable sound: the stones’ cry whose utter strangeness is registered in the uncanny rhythm of the final line behind which now we can no longer recognize any ghost of a known metre, which makes it metrically “unsayable” —to use a term Hughes took up from a review qualifying another final line of his, that of “The Horses” (WP 320)—, an unsayableness moreover that captures us, in the reading performance it imposes on us, into psychosomatic participation in the uncanniness. We may think at this point of Lacan’s observation that “the ears are in the field of the unconscious the only opening that cannot be stopped” (Lacan 1973 178). And we may think, above all, of Hughes’s own observation, in his later comment on the Orghast experiment, that however incommunicable the otherness may be, “here and there, it may be, we hear it… Some animals and birds express this being pure and without effort, and then you hear the whole desolate, final actuality of existence in a voice, a tone. There we really do recognize a spirit, a truth under all truths. Far beyond human words. And the startling

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quality of this “truth” is that it is terrible. It is for some reason harrowing, as well as being the utterly beautiful thing” (WP 124–5). This observation might be read as a gloss to the unthinkable final line of the poem. And it should be realized at the same time that between the two texts—the observation and the poem—Hughes is actually offering his reinterpretation of sublimity (although he does not introduce the term), emphasizing as he does the violence and brevity characteristic of the “sublime” experience (“here and there, it may be”), its specific intricacy of terror and pleasure (the Burkean oxymoron of the “delightful horror” (Burke 67) being rearticulated in Hughes’s “terrible beautiful”), while stressing as well (in “far beyond human words”) the transgression inherent in the access to sublimity, since it involves breaking through the boundaries of the Law to which the speaking subject is normally submitted, the ethical as well as the linguistic Law, which makes an utterance speakable: a transgression which the poem inscribes within itself in the violent images of dangerous overstrain ready to blow up limits: “The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,/The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,/At any second to bang and vanish with a flap” (ll. 12–14), images at the poem’s centre which are not so much descriptions of a landscape as self-metaphors of the poem in its sublimity, a mise en abyme of the exploding poem. The sublime moment, if it happens, thus happens on the extreme edge of enunciation, where the poem breaks open into the cry that rises from beyond the frontier of the symbolic order, and into the silence that rushes in through the cry. That frontier where the poetic voice ventures at the risk of its death, where “I” dies into “cry”, is the horizon of Hughes’s poetic myth: those “horizons,” those “skylines” which often appear—especially in The Hawk in the Rain, as here in “Wind,” or again in “The Jaguar” (5), or in “The Horses” (8) as well—at the poem’s end and which are always described as places of vision and chiefly of hearing, as if the poem’s ultimate object was to draw us into listening to something which is not in the poem, into hearing the silence beyond the text, a silence where the meeting may take place at long last. Within the poem’s horizon And yet such reading would leave out, I think, a vital aspect of our experience of the poem, for reading the text, we are made to put silences within its body, and this, owing to the second formal feature I mentioned at the beginning and I would now like to discuss: the ruptures, and to begin, the erratic syntactic breaks that interrupt the flow of the metrical sequences (stanza or line) and thus impose a silence where a signifier was expected. Leaving aside the starting point of the initial utterance in the opening line (where syntax and metre necessarily coincide), six out of the remaining sentences (from “then under an orange sky” in line 5) begin within a stanza and most often even within a line, at an unpredictable place, so that the major syntactic pauses which precede them make rifts in the metrical texture, for instance: “That any second would shatter it. Now deep,” (l.

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17) “Or each other. We watch the fire blazing” (l.21). There are thus in the signifying chain interstices where a palpable silence makes itself heard, between the utterances, between the signs, and even once at the heart of the sign. I am now referring to the startling metrical and typographical break that occurs at the end of line 15, “The Wind flung a magpie away and a black-/Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly”: between “black” and “Back,” at least in a really poetic or “musical” reading, a rest, a pause, may be no longer than the pulse of an artery, but in which the syntagm cleaves itself into a chasm of silence. Woven into the poetic utterance, are thus spots of muteness and thereby potential cry-like sounds that haunt the muteness and introduce somehow in the linguistic construction what Hughes has called in Poetry in the Making “something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies” (124), in other words, we may now say, the silent life of drives: as in the third line of the poem, “Winds stampeding the fields under the window” which is framed in between two occurrences of the same signifier (“wind,” 1st and 10th syllables of the decasyllable: still the insistence on the signifying limits), but prolonged in an extra syllable by the /ou/ of “window,” a cry-like diphtong in excess (of the line frame) and foreign as well to the rhyme scheme which controls the poem at large (it is the only exception I pointed out before): a sheer sound, therefore, irreducible to the verbal construction and occurring in the initial stanza like an early emergence of the crying “stones” in the final utterance (l. 24) where the erratic /ou/ has now crept into the stressed monosyllable at the core of the line. And something from “beyond human words,” as well, steals in in the insistence of certain phonemes throughout the poem, especially the obsessive /d/ and /b/ alliterations and consonances, for instance “woods crashing through darkness…/ Winds stampeding the fields under the window/Floundering black astride” (l. 2– 4), and “a black-/Back gull bent like an iron bar” (l. 15–16): phonemes that, beyond the semantic function of the linguistic signs of which they are parts, make up as letters in their materiality something of a pulsation and manifest in their recurrence that “compulsion to repeat” which is characteristic of the world of drives and which gives them, as Freud has observed, their “daemonic character” (107). The real therefore, which is after all the reality of drive life and of unconscious desire, is no longer (or at least not only) beyond the signs: it works in the signs and in sublime gaps between the signs, it is present and active in enunciation. The semantics of the “horizon,” in this second reading, is thus turned inside out, or more exactly outside in, pointing no longer to the frontier of the linguistic code leaving out an impossible real, but rather to the boundary of the text within which something of the real can speak. The “horizon,” in other words, delimits the poem as a self-bounded space, like the snow-covered clearing of “The Thought Fox” (3), “this blank page where my fingers move,” leaving “prints,” i. e. letters, which are traces of an unspeakable real. Could we go any further in the analysis of the reality of desire and of the traces it imprints in the poem? A clue may be found, no doubt, in the insistent

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theme of the gaze, in the intensity with which it is invested—which gives it the character of the Freudian Schaulust (scopophilia) —and chiefly in the reversibility it goes through in the poem’s unfolding and which makes it vacillate between subject and object, between an “I gaze at the Thing” and “the Thing gazes at me”: a vacillation between “Once I looked up” (l. 10) and the “mad eye” (l. 8) that (implicitly) looks at me; a vacillation repeated within the space of the penultimate line between “Seeing,” whose elided grammatical subject is “I” or “we,” and “window,” which is etymologically—as Keith Sagar has pointed out (28) —the “wind’s eye,” the hole made in the wall for the wind to look in: the eye of the other which takes me as its object. This scheme of oscillating positions between looking and being looked at might be read in the light of the Lacanian studies of the gaze, more particularly in the analysis “Of the gaze as object a” (Lacan 1973 65–109) where the scopophilic drive is shown to generate fantasies characterized by such reversibility, the subject actively gazing at the object of desire, imaginarily “devouring” and incorporating it, but adopting as well the object’s position and thus becoming the object of the other’s desire: “Seeing the [wind’s eye] tremble [out of desire] to come in.” Being under the desiring gaze of the Thing, the desire to be the object of the other’s desire, such is, I think, the fantasy that writes itself out in the poem. And the image of the “roots” in the final stanza (l. 22), which may prefigure the “roots, roots, roots” of the embryonic Wodwo (88) still below the condition of language, and which is in itself anyway a reference to a place of origin, points symptomatically to the originary, to the motherly nature of the Thing: to that mother figure Ted Hughes often conjures up in his mythological constructions, calling her for instance the “Mother of animals and food” (WP 414), or again (borrowing the phrase from Coleridge) the “nameless female,” i. e. literally the female as unnamed and desirable as such, in other words the mother still unconnected with the name-of-the-father, whose destiny is to become unthinkable as an object of desire in the world of words, and thus whose perilous approach, in the poem’s verbal world, is marked out by the castration anxiety signals that flicker in an insistent blinding fantasy that features an Œdipus behind the shaman: the “blinding wet” (l. 4), the “Blade-light “wielded by the wind (l. 6–7), the wind “that dented the balls of my eyes” (l. 11). Is the journey’s end, therefore—the final line with the crying stones—, the locus where the “I” can hear the voice of the other’s desire, the “terrible beautiful,” a-stoneishing cry of Medusa, the nameless animal mother claiming back her child to be whole? Or is it the cry of the “I”’s own desire? Whichever way we read this fascinating “unsayable” line, what is certain is the inscription, in its intense nonsense, of an unspeakable enjoyment (“jouissance”). The sublime, then, is no other than the in-scription, the trangressive inscription. It takes place in the poem, within the horizon of its verbal space, rather than in the silence beyond. What is remarkable, on the whole, is that by offering those two alternatives to read its concept of sublimity, Ted Hughes’s poetry revives a question that was central to the romantic poetics, namely the debate, or the polarity, between the

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view of the sublime as the unutterable, theorized by Burke and often reechoed afterwards, for instance by Shelley’s Demogorgon’s pronouncement that ultimately “a voice is wanting,” that “the deep truth is imageless” (Prometheus Unbound, II. 4. 115–116), and on the other hand the romantic attempt to integrate that unspeakable within the poetic utterance, to capture fragments of the wanting voice in the interstices of discourse, as Coleridge does in his “conversation poems” by listening to what can be heard “in the interspersed vacancies/And momentary pauses of the thought” (“Frost at Midnight,” 46–47), or like Blake’s demon writing with “corroding fires” on a plate of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (pl. 6–7) and engraving the letters that speak of desire, or again like Los, the maker, creating forms in “sublime labours” (Jerusalem, pl. 10, 65). It does seem that we find in “Wind,” and more generally in the poetry and the critical writings, as well, of Ted Hughes a vacillation that reenacts the debate that was—should we say that is—at the heart of romanticism. Does sublimity point to a real that is “far beyond human words,” as Hughes asserts in his comment on Orghast (WP 124–5), so in the speechless space of the Beast of “Gog,” beyond the field of the Logos-God’s alienating speech, in the world of “great bones (. that) pound on the earth” (71)? Or may it be that sublimity lies “here and there,” as Hughes says in the same comment, if we understand “here and there in the space of the poem,” in those effects of the letter where we can hear it? This remains of course an open question. But we may, as reading—and inevitably desiring—subjects, prefer the second alternative, that in which the subject that speaks and treads in measured ways in Ted Hughes’s poetic metres is, like the Curlew of The Remains of Elmet (163) “A web-footed god of the horizons.”

6 Poetry & Magic Ann Skea

“Is there any significance,” a correspondent asked me, “in the fact that there are eighty-eight poems in Birthday Letters?” “None of which I am aware,” I replied, “But, since Ted does structure his poetic sequences very carefully, I would not rule it out.” I thought no more about this, because I was preoccupied with the idea that the Birthday Letters were Ted’s Eroici Furori—a sequence of passionate love poems such as were considered to be the crowning achievement of a Renaissance magus like Giordano Bruno, with whose work Ted was very familiar. Love, for Renaissance Hermeticists and for Platonic Neoplatonists like Bruno, was “the living virtue in all things, which the magician intercepts and which leads him from the lower things to the supercelestial realm by divine furor” (Yates 272). It was a means of understanding, ordering and, ultimately, influencing things in our world. Bruno published De gli Eroici Furori in England in 1586, but it is a cryptic text full of magical symbolism, and very different to Birthday Letters. It was dedicated to Sir Philip Sidney, whose English love poetry is, however, similar in some ways to Ted’s and has itself been attributed (although contentiously) to the inspiration of divine furor. Ted’s belief in the primacy of the imagination as an instrument for reaching the truth was exactly that of Sidney and the other members of the so-called “Areopogus” who befriended Bruno on his visit to England. And his preface to 100 Poems to Learn by Heart sets out exactly the sort of mnemonic techniques for training the imagination that they had learned from the work of Renaissance Hermeticists like Marsilio Ficino. His belief in poetry as “magical” and as “one way of making things happen the way you want them to happen”1; his knowledge of the work of Renaissance figures like Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola (as evidenced in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being; his sustained, careful and detailed use of the techniques, processes and beliefs of alchemy in Cave Birds, Remains of Elmet and River; and his acknowledged use of meditation and astrology, all point to his lifelong interest in using magic in his work. None of this, however, threw any light on Birthday Letters until I read about the way in which poets like Sidney, Fulke Greville, Marlow, Milton, Donne and, later, even Dryden, adopted Cabbalistic number theory in the structure and content of their poems. The work by Alastair Fowler

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in revealing this kind of structuring has been of major importance, and it was whilst reading his work on Spencer that I suddenly realised the possible relationship between Cabbala and the eighty-eight poems in Birthday Letters. Cabbala, in its ancient and traditional form, is the knowledge of occult number theory in the Bible. It is also a mystical and magical discipline by means of which the Cabbalist may understand our world and use its energies to reintegrate its disparate elements—to create harmony and heal its ills. This is the Great Work, and the individual seeking to undertake this work must begin with the self. Cabbala is based on the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. These letters are arranged on interconnecting pathways on a Sephirothic Tree (a tree of life) on which there are ten Sephira—ten points at which the divine energies enter our world, transmitted as a lightning flash from the Divine Source (Illustration 1). And, in Ted’s own words: “Everything in the universe, attached to its symbol, can be given its proper place on the Tree…” So the Tree becomes a means of ordering the psyche by internalizing the knowable universe as a stairway to God” (SGCB 20–1). Those who seek to order the psyche and climb the stairway to God in this way, follow The Path of Wisdom (also known as “The Path of the Serpent”) along the Tree’s twenty-two interconnected pathways, through four overlapping worlds: Atziluth (the World of emanation, archetypes and (in Jungian terms) the psyche; Briah, the World of the intellect, the possibility of creation, the collective subconscious; Yetzirah, the World of synthesis, formation, the individual subconscious; and Assiah, the world of making, the earthy, material world of consciousness. William Blake’s four worlds of Eden, Beulah, Generation and Ulro “derive from the same tradition” (Raine 6). The twenty-two letters of the Cabbalistic alphabet in these four worlds make eighty-eight pathways along which the Cabbalist makes the questing journey. And, from the time of the Renaissance, the cards of the Tarot pack (especially the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana) have been used as a mnemonic for the pathways of this Cabbalistic quest. If all this seems to be a long way from poetry, then I can only say that magic is an art, and it is an art in which Ted was very interested. He often described poetry as a magical shamanic journey undertaken to obtain some healing energies needed in our world, and he constantly sought ways to use the imagination to reintegrate our inner and outer worlds. One might also apply to Ted some of his own observations about Shakespeare: “The idea of a syncretic mythology… The idea of these images as internally structured, precisely folded, multiple meanings… The idea of meditation as a conjuring by ritual magic of hallucinatory figures—with whom conversations can be held.” (SGCB 32–3) All

1. Ted Hughes & R.S.Thomas read and discuss selections of their own poems, Norwich Tapes Ltd, London: The Critical Forum, 1978.

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of these ideas are very relevant to Birthday Letters. The question then, for me, was whether Ted did use Cabbala, and in particular the imagery of the Tarot, to structure the sequence of poems in Birthday Letters and, if so, whether this offers us a different perspective on the work. I began my investigation of these questions sceptically, knowing the richness and range of Ted’s imagination and very aware that I might easily impose the structure for which I was searching. But, for many reasons, not least the closeness and consistency with which the poems match the cards and embody the Sephirothic emanations, I now have no doubt that such a structure exists. (Table 1) Each episode of the story—“Your story. My story” —in Birthday Letters is a stage on the path at which something—some pattern from the past—is (often quite literally) captured in a photograph, film, picture or mental image and brought into the present to be meditated on, questioned, illuminated and recreated in a poem. For Ted, who believed in the magical power of poetry and the summoning power of symbols, this was a dangerous process, as well as being psychologically harrowing. Cabbala, if nothing else, provided him with a protective structure within which to negotiate with the energies and to conjure into being the people and events of his past. The Cabbalistic journey begins with the first manifestation of form, the point, in which every potential exists. It is everything and nothing; the closed and endless circle; zero; the aleph of the Hebrew alphabet. For the neophyte Cabbalist or magician, it is the image of The Fool in the Tarot pack. Here is the “imbecile innocent” of Cave Birds, stepping off blindly on his journey towards knowledge and enlightenment with the baggage of his past life on his back and the dog of materialism and worldly convention snapping at his heels. The very title of the first poem in Birthday Letters embodies all these things (“Fullbright Scholars,” BL 3). Here are “Scholars,” Sylvia amongst them, about to embark on the search for knowledge in a strange land. The accumulated Alphas of their past lives have earned them a place on this path, and they are “Fullbright” like the zero of the sun. They have their luggage with them, literally and metaphorically. In the photograph, as in the first manifestation of matter, everything is still possible. Ted, too, is an innocent, “dumbfounded” by his “ignorance of the simplest things” and confessing (like the neophyte magician making the ritual negative confession at the start of the journey) that he lacks memory, knowledge and direction. In Cabbalistic terms, at the apex of the Tree is Kether, the Crown, the Monad, the number 1, the planted seed from which all else grows. This is also the Garden of Eden, and just as Adam’s bite of the apple from the Tree of Knowledge brought him knowledge of his nakedness, so Ted’s first taste of a fresh peach brings self-consciousness. Consciousness, Force and Form, the first three Sephiroth on the Tree, are the fundamental aspects of the divine as manifest in all creation and from them comes all change in the natural world and in the inner world of the Cabbalist. (Illustration 2)

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Chokmah, Sephira number 2, and Binah, Sephira number 3, form the base of this triangle of supernal energies. Chokmah and Binah each occupy the summit of one of the two pillars of Justice and Mercy on and between which all ten Sephiroth of the Tree are positioned. Chokmah, on the right-hand pillar of Mercy, is also known as Abba, the All Father, Raw Energy: Binah, on the left-hand pillar of Justice, is known as Aima, the All Mother, Capacity to take form. Given this graphic arrangement, it is interesting to note that the title of both the second and third poems in Birthday Letters (4–6) is “Caryatids” (the name of carved female figures which form pillars supporting the portico of a Greek temple) and that in both the hardback and the paperback editions of the book these poems, perhaps fortuitously, stand side-by-side, pillar-like, on opposing pages. Also, the poem on the left embodies female energies: the caryatids are “friable” and “frail-looking” (“each body” in Sylvia’s poem, to which Ted refers, is “a virgin vase”), yet they are strong enough to bear a “falling heaven of granite.” In the Tarot, the related card is that of The High Priestess, who represents Artemis, the huntress, (caryatids are named after the women of Caryae who worshipped Artemis) and also Isis, Diana and other moon-goddesses of potential fertility. Which suggests not only a literal answer to Ted’s opening question in “Caryatids (1),” “What were those caryatids bearing?,” but also that they are bearers of the omen which he failed to see. “Caryatids (2),” the poem on the right, embodies raw male energies, “frivolous as faithless,” “stupid with confidence,” “careless,” carousing and destructive, focussed only on the present, the “real World and self.” Just such energies belong to The Magician, The Juggler, Hermes/Mercury, whose Tarot card is associated with the duad Binah. He can be dexterous and cunning, creative and destructive, magus or trickster. He, too, like the protagonist of Ted’s poem, wears “playclothes,” “tests every role for laughs,” yet is able to spark connections “through bustling atmospherics.” Sylvia’s caryatid poem was meant to catch the attention of Ted and his poet friends, which it did. But they thought it exemplified form without energy (just as Chokmah does) and disliked it. In Ted’s view it was “thin and brittle,” “cold,” “like the theorum of a trap, a deadfall.” The irony of this was that the trap caught both Ted and Sylvia. In these first three poems, as nowhere else in Birthday Letters, Ted deals directly with the Sephiroth rather than with the paths between them. This is appropriate, because at this level—that of the first three divine emanations in the highest, Atziluthic, world—the energies are nearest to the Source and are of equal importance. It is also appropriate, because in all the rituals associated with Cabbalistic journeys, such as those of the Order of the Golden Dawn (of which Yeats was once a prominent member), the Neophyte is brought to the “Pillars of Soloman/Hermes/Seth” beyond which lies the gate to “The Hall of Truth.” At this stage in Birthday Letters, Ted has brought himself and Sylvia to this

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gateway. Together they will begin the journey but, until their marriage, their paths run parallel and are joined only at times, as fate decrees. Clearly, it is not possible for me to trace the Cabbalistic pattern of this journey poem by poem through Birthday Letters in this short paper. What I will do, instead, is look at four poems which represent the same path in each of the four overlapping Worlds. The path I have chosen is that of the thirteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Mem, which is symbolised by water and is represented in the Tarot by card 12, The Hanged Man. For the sake of simplicity, too, I will concentrate on the Tarot, which is, as I have already mentioned, a mnemonic device for remembering the complex theory of Cabbala, and, as such, it relies on vivid images and rich mythological associations. The image on the card of The Hanged Man was identified in Frazer’s Golden Bough as Attis, the Dying God on the Tree of Life. It is a symbol of sacrifice, death and rebirth, an overturning of the world, a time for radical change on the path. Mem, described by Cabbalists as “between the Waters above and the Waters beneath,” is also a path of transition. The Birthday Letters poem related to the path of Mem and The Hanged Man in the first, Atziluthic, world of archetypes and first emanations is “Fidelity” (28), and almost its first words are—“I was just hanging around.” Here is Ted, “afloat on the morning tide,” “gutted,” “free,” suspended: “…I think of it/As a kind of time that cannot pass./That I have never used, so still possess.” At this stage of the Cabbalistic journey, worldly things have been left behind and the aspirant is in a state of suspension and must prove him or herself worthy of continuing along the path. Like the Grail-quest Knight, some trial must be passed, some choice or sacrifice made. Only a short time earlier, Ted was “playing at friendship,” “frivolous as faithless. The old life had to end, just as Dionysus had to perish to be reborn as laccus. Already Ted has left behind the baggage of his first twenty-five years. All he has is “a bare mattress, on bare boards, in a bare room” and his notebook. Now, every night in this bare, top room, he encounters “a lovely girl” and, just as the Grail-quest Knight (Gawain, in particular) was tested in his encounters with the amorous lady in the mysterious castle, so Ted’s “fidelity” to Sylvia is tested. Images of “knighthood,” “holy law,” “a priestess,” “nakedness” and chaste “sisterly comforting” all reinforce this parallel. Ted makes a choice, and even the second, “wilder,” “shameless gap-tooth,” plump and pretty girl does not break his chivalrous resolve to “keep the meaning of my words/Solid with the world we were making.” Significantly, it was the breaking of faith which was the issue here not sexual gratification, for in Cabbala sex is not a sin. So, each girl—one naked and sisterly, the other naked in her desire to get him “inside her” —is sacrificed, “laid,” like a “sinless child,” under the threshold of Ted’s and Sylvia’s future. The second poem on the path of Mem and The Hanged Man is “Astringency” (80). Now, Ted’s and Sylvia’s paths are combined. They are no longer in the

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Atziluthic world of archetypes but in the lower, watery, mutable World of Briah, the world of intellect and abstract creation. In “Astringency,” the natural energies, like the River Charles, seem frozen and everything is suspended. Ted strolls “slackly,” and he and Sylvia are “Together, silent, thinking of nothing.” The word “astringency” was for years, as Ted tells us, a cant, insincere, catchword but it also means “the drawing together of organic tissues” (OED), a process by which healing is promoted. In the poem, which is full of images of sickness and distress, Ted draws together fragments of free, healthy energy (like the goldfish) and the “toxic” world of “Agrochemicals,” air polluted by iron-smelting, and “Lit. Crit” —all the result of intellectual intervention in a natural, creative process. He and Sylvia are “Right there on the edge” of this world, standing “on” America, rather than immersed in it’s culture, watching the “lariat” noose of “each small, tired wave” wash over “a nipple of rock,” as if these murky, poisoned waters are threatening their own mother. In their lives at this time, too, they were on the edge. They had left behind the rational, predictable path of jobs and academia and they were not yet committed to the literary life of Boston. “A life of doing nothing is death,” Sylvia wrote in her journal on August 2nd, 1959, and she swung between elation and depression: “the strangling noose of worry, of hysteria, paralysis…” [July 27, 1959] (J 410) was ever present. In the true spirit of Briah they were “writing, consolidating our splayed selves” [Sept. 27, 1959] (423): discovering identity and voice. Amongst the other organic energies brought together in the poem, are the human energies, rational and instinctive. In Sylvia, if not in Ted, rationality is “the censor,” “the night hands,” “the snare” which silences her instinctive energies and traps “all that teeming population” of imaginative metaphors, to hang them, tortured, in her poems (another image of suspension). Only once does Ted hear an instinctive metaphor escape in her speech. But, like the goldfish, this “Brainstorm of the odds” shows that the situation is not hopeless, the natural energies are still strong and “frisky” and choice still exists. No sacrifices are mentioned in the poem, but the choice Ted and Sylvia make (as the very next poem in Birthday Letters shows) is to follow instinct, rather than logic, and to keep faith with the trust each has placed in poetry and its paramount importance in their shared future. Below the World of Briah, but connected to it, is the World of Yetzirah, a world of syntheses and formation in which poetry, music, literature, art, law and all other real but intangible patterns exist and are shaped by the individual subconscious. “The Rag Rug” (135), (which is the poem on the Hanged Man path in this Yetziratic World) does not, on first reading seem to be about suspension, choice or sacrifice, as the other poems were. But it is full of Cabbalistic symbolism, especially in the snake energies which coil and sway and pour through the poem. Sylvia’s “motley viper,” a serpent which seems “to pull something out of (her) like some tapeworm of the psyche” and is dragged, like her own “entrails, out

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through (her) navel,” and Ted’s great golden snake, shaken awake by an inversion of Ted’s dream world and lifting “its head from a well in the middle of the house,” are both superb images of subconscious energies. They are also energies which are as dangerous and mysterious as The Path of Wisdom (which is itself The Path of the Serpent) is for those who travel it. And they are linked in the poem with some deep “knowledge” which will alter Sylvia’s “blood” and Ted’s “nerves and brain” and lie “coiled between” them like the rag rug, dividing them from each other. Hanged Man imagery is there in the poem, too. It is there in the doubleness which Ted himself weaves into the poem so that the rag rug becomes a symbolic interface between two worlds, the earth world of “venous blood,” “the grave,” malediction and death, and the sky world of the “serpent’s jumbled rainbow,” of “lightnings,” sunny “daffodil yellow,” happiness and birth. At this interface, Ted and Sylvia are “lifted,” “freed” by the physical act of creation. Sylvia, plaiting the rug and “creating the serpent” soothes Ted with her calm industry, and Ted, lulls her with his voice, “like a snake-charmer,” reading books which are, themselves, about interfaces where dark, subconscious energies enter the world. The mood of suspension, of “breath-held camera moments,” of shared beauty and happiness is strong in the poem, but so, too, is the fragility of this world, the sense of impending, irreversible, division and change. And the poem lies at a moment of change in the Birthday Letters sequence and in the story which it tells. In my reading of the poem, the creation of the rag rug is a metaphor for the creative gestation which was going on in Sylvia in the early months of 1962, a process in which Ted, himself was “pushed out and away.” Until then, in spite of all their differences, Ted and Sylvia had worked together. But at the heart of this poem, following the moment of suspension and beauty, are Sylvia’s “furies” (“bled into the rug” and “confided to whoever” in her diary), followed by Ted’s images of birth and separation. Sylvia seems driven by this new knowledge she has “unearthed” to separate herself from Ted—to do what she had described once in her journal in a burst of fury at Ted: “I won’t bother showing him the story of Sweetie Pie I’ve done, keep the viper out of the household and send it out on its own” (J 484, May 20, 1959). It is not clear whether the viper, at the time of that entry, was Ted or the story she had written. In April 1962, according to Ted in “Sylvia Plath and her Journals” (WP 187– 8), Sylvia achieved “this cool, light, very beautiful moment of mastery, that enabled her to take the next step…(then) she started on a poem about a giant wych elm that overshadowed the yard of her home… And at once the Ariel voice emerged in full, out of the tree.”. The poem to which Ted refers is “Elm” (LH 192). And the poem immediately after “The Rag Rug,” which represents the next step on the journey in Birthday Letters, describes how Sylvia divined new inspiration for her writing “in the elm,” although here it is the elm table Ted made for her2.

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And there are sacrifices here, too. “The Rag Rug” ends with an image of the end of Ted’s and Sylvia’s shared Eden. The rag rug itself, and the inspiration and knowledge which the process of gestation and birth achieved, survived this ending but, from this point on, Sylvia followed her path alone and Ted “sleepwalked” (“The Table,” 138) after her. In “The Ventriloquist” (181), the poem on The Hanged Man path in the World of Assiah, sacrifice is total. Assiah is the world of making, where all that has been prepared for and formed in the other Worlds becomes real and present. It is the lowest, earth-bound World, furthest from the Source and nearest to the dark Underworld. “The Ventriloquist” is full of doubleness, it encapsulates all that has happened so far in the journey and it ends with Sylvia’s most terrible choice and sacrifice—her death. In my reading of this poem, Sylvia is the ventriloquist of the poem’s title, and Ariel is her “doll.” Ariel was a magnificent and terrifying creation, strong, angry and destructive, beautiful but flawed like everything in the World of Assiah. It was Ariel’s voice that Sylvia had worked so hard to find and which spoke so clearly in the poems she wrote in the last months of her life. And Ariel has accompanied Ted and Sylvia on their journey through Birthday Letters. Ariel was the “humanoid, raggedy shadow” which appeared in the portrait painted of Sylvia at Yaddo (“Portraits,” 104) but she has now grown strong and independent. Hers was the voice “which cried out in (your) sleep” in “Fairy Tale” (159) and which Sylvia did not recognise as her own. And Ariel was the “prisoner in the dungeon” who Sylvia fed “through the keyhole” in “The Blackbird” (162), and the “Guardian Angel” into whose bosom Sylvia “crept for safety” but who turned out to be her “Demon Slave,” and “devoured” her. “The Ventriloquist” begins with the bodily fall into sex, love and marriage which, in Birthday Letters was also Ted’s and Sylvia’s fall into the Abyss from the top of the Sephirothic Tree at the start of their questing journey. Whilst Sylvia wept and clung to Ted through the “thorny wood” and the “river’s freeze” of the journey which was also their marriage, her other, destructive, self put “Mummy” on show as “The Kraken” in The Bell Jar and screamed in her poems that “Daddy was no good” and that Ted “was with a whore.” Finally, it is this second self, which Sylvia had sought out and nurtured, which kills her.

2. At At the time of the events in the poem, Ted and Sylvia were living in Devon in the house with the well “beneath its slab in the middle” and the worn threshold. It was 1962, Nicholas had been born in January and Sylvia’s mother had visited them from late June to mid August. But the table which Ted describes in “The Table”, the poem which follows “The Rag Rug” in Birthday Letters, had been made for Sylvia in September the previous year (Letters Home, Sept. 15, 27, 1961. 429–30). Sylvia’s poem “Elm”, in which Ted suggests the Ariel voice first appeared, was written in April 1962. So, the chronology of the poems does not follow that of actual events here but is consistent with the order of the pathways on the Sephirothic Tree.

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This was the ultimate self-sacrifice, the ultimate destructive revenge by the “doll” on the stars which had guided Sylvia towards her creation. In Cabbalistic terms, it was not “Justice” (note the capital given to this word in the poem) but the result of an unbalanced use of the severe energies of the Pillar of Justice, which should have been tempered by those of the Pillar of Mercy. As Portia so rightly tells Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, “earthly powers do then show likest God’s when mercy seasons justice.” For Sylvia, this was the end of her journey. The re-birth which, in Cabbalistic terms, should have followed her sacrifice was no longer possible. Ted’s world, too, was overturned. In spirit, he too was plunged into darkness and it was a long time before he began, again, his journey towards the Source. But Birthday Letters does not end with “The Ventriloquist.” Cabbala, like alchemy, works at three levels: the conscious, story-telling, level: the metaphorical level at which images and symbols work on the subconscious and the spiritual message is understood; and the practical level of applied processes and rituals. In the remaining Birthday Letters poems, Ted completes the new journey which he began when he started the imaginative processes and rituals needed to conjure past events and re-create them in his work. The final poems are all aspects of life after death, which is also the title of the poem following “The Ventriloquist.” They tell of the effects of Sylvia’s death on Ted and her children; of the myths and stories which Ted created because of it; and of the industry which grew up around her story and her work. They tell, too, of the characteristics and skills Frieda and Nicholas inherited from her and of Ted’s memories of her, which, like the “flawless crystal” of her “seer’s vision-stone,” encompass both ecstasy and horror. In “The Dogs are Eating your Mother,” Sylvia’s children and we, the readers of the poem, are told to imagine her journey out of the underworld and on towards the sun, to “think her better.” And in the final poem, Ted lays to rest the ghost of Sylvia which he has conjured back into life in the poems by recombining the red and the blue colours which reflected her blood and her spirit, and sealing this journey’s end with the symbol of kindly caresses which he has used in the poem—a blue jewel. Afterword For Ted, Birthday Letters brought, he said, “a sense of inner liberation, a huge sudden possibility of new inner experience. Quite strange.”3. His wife, Carol, wrote4 that “he was renewed after publishing them.” For me, following Ted’s footsteps through Birthday Letters along some well-trodden Cabbalistic pathways has been an enlightening and magical experience. But it is the nature of Cabbala that every person must make the journey for themselves. Although we may follow the same paths, what I learn on my journey is likely to be quite different to what you would learn on yours. So, in the end, all anyone can offer

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as a guide are a few unsteady footprints in the mud and the suggestion of sights you might see along the way.

3. Ted Hughes’s letter to Kathleen Raine read at the Whitbread Book of the Year Awards, Jan. 1999. 4. Carol Hughes in a letter to me. Dec. 1999.

7 Self-Revelation, Self-Concealment & the Making of the Ted Hughes Archive Stephen Enniss

When Emory University acquired the Ted Hughes archive in February 1997, journalists around the U.S. and abroad were quick to proclaim Ted Hughes’s secrets revealed. “Hughes papers reveal agony and ecstasy of his love life” (Harlow) was one of the more sensational and, I would add, one of the more misleading. The truth is few journalists actually visited the archive itself, and those who did were ill-equipped for the time-consuming spade work necessary even to begin to grasp the extent or the nature of the archive’s revelations. Nevertheless the presence of the archive evoked for them, as it often does for us, intimations of the deeply personal. Its very existence gave the newspaper stories that followed a new degree of credibility, simply through their invocation of the archive’s authority. Even as some were proclaiming Hughes’s secrets revealed, however, others were approaching the archive with the opposite conclusion. A number of journalists were particularly interested in that small portion of the collection that remains under restriction.1 In particular there was great interest in a single trunk that the library was asked to keep closed for twenty-five years. One reporter was particularly eager to get a photograph, not of any of the newly acquired papers, but of the sealed trunk itself (a request I’m happy to say I declined). Another chose to fill his newspaper’s column space with his own unsupported speculation about the contents of the sealed trunk (Bone).2 The truth is an archive is many things. The Ted Hughes archive is as much a product of Hughes’s inattention as it is his deliberate actions. Many decisions— most small but some large—give an archive its final character. The daily decisions over what to save and what to throw out offer ample opportunity for a self-conscious fashioning of the self that all of us engage in. The neatly numbered and cataloged boxes also have the power to blow the top off our carefully constructed notions of self. 1. Such restrictions are common in archives of contemporary materials. Often the restriction, as is the case in the Ted Hughes papers, protects the privacy of individuals whose letters are present among the papers but who was not a party to their disposition. The largest number of restrictions in the Hughes archive are of this kind and are on letters Hughes received from

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What I wish to examine in the following essay are some of the ways these contrary impulses of self-revelation and self-concealment are expressed in the Ted Hughes archive now housed at Emory. I want to examine some of the decisions that have gone into the making of the Hughes archive but not in order to implicate one person or another for this or that lost artifact. All archives, after all, are a record of absences. The one figure we most want to find in the archive is, in the end, the figure that we are sure not to find. Instead, I wish to examine the making of the Ted Hughes archive for what it may tell us about Ted Hughes’s own stance towards personal history and artistic creativity. The same contrary impulses of self-revelation and self-concealment that we see dramatized in his own actions towards the material archive reflect on a life-long pattern of self-presentation that informs his mature poetry as well. As Ted Hughes recalled in his 1961 BBC radio program “Capturing Animals,” some of his earliest and fondest childhood memories were of fishing and hunting in Yorkshire. In recalling the importance of those early experiences in his own development, he mentions the diaries that he kept at the time, diaries where he recorded “nothing but my catches” (3). While these childhood diaries have apparently not survived, his reference to them establishes an early preoccupation with capturing—not simply animals—but his own experience in some more permanent form. These early diaries, along with the sketches he began making at the time, point to a precocious self-expression on the blank page and hint at what would become for Hughes a life-long preoccupation. The earliest surviving manuscripts in the Emory collection were not preserved by Hughes himself but, rather, were saved by the Mexborough Grammar School classmate to whom he gave them in 1947 or 1948. These two poems (one of which is reprinted here for the first time) are heavily derivative and offer little glimpse of the self that composed them. The one reprinted here seems less an expression of a distinctive personality than an expression of sheer will. Like Alexander whose conquests it relates, the poem casts the poet himself in a different kind of drama of conquest, one for the affections of a childhood classmate (Plate 2). Among the earliest surviving manuscripts from the Hughes archive itself are drafts of poems that were collected in the early collection Wodwo. Examining these drafts now what one immediately notices is Hughes’s habit of composing poems on any scrap paper at hand. Poems appear on envelopes, on the back of letters, on coarse brown wrapping paper, and, most strikingly, on the back of his friends and colleagues. In each case, the restriction on these letters can be lifted with the permission of the copyright holder. 2. There is no evidence to support James Bone’s speculation that the sealed trunk contains Sylvia Plath’s lost journal. As the agent in the sale of the Ted Hughes archive made clear in a reply to Bone’s article published in The Times: “I can satisfy the curiosity of scholars and others about the possibility of Sylvia Plath’s missing journal being incarcerated in it. It is not” (Davids).

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own and Sylvia Plath’s own discarded manuscripts.3 On the one hand, the practice seems to reflect a disinterest—if not, in fact, a more active disdain—for the manuscript itself. Clean desk paper is not required. One can instead scribble on anything at hand, since the manuscript is temporary, a means to another end. Yet these drafts have survived in the hundreds. An early manuscript draft of “Public Bar TV” appears on the opposite side of a letter from his Faber & Faber editor Charles Monteith; drafts of “Gog” were written on a discarded typescript of his 1960 radio play The House of Aries, and an unpublished verse play (Bardo Thodol) is written on discarded pages of Sylvia Plath’s lost novel Falcon Yard (Plate 3). Handling them now, they seem to have a power more charged with the current of Hughes’s own daily life than do any clean, carefully scripted drafts. The dual-sided drafts evoke something of Hughes and Plath’s shared life, even as they document each poet’s own creative work. The absence of any significant number of drafts from The Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal can be explained by Hughes’s own early awareness of the commercial value of his manuscripts. While Emory purchased the bulk of his archive in 1997,4 as early as 1960 he sold the manuscripts from his first two collections to a rare book and manuscript dealer for a mere £160 (LH 388).5 Two years later he was actively promoting his manuscripts to the London dealers Winifred Myers, Kyrle Fletcher, Bertram Rota, and Ben Sonnenberg, in effect, working them against one another. In a 1962 letter to Myers he holds out the prospect of a direct sale to the University of Texas bypassing the London dealers altogether. This was a period when Ted and Sylvia were struggling to meet their financial obligations. Ted’s Guggenheim had come to an end immediately before the 1960 sale, and the following year they had purchased a home in Devon and were trying to live off of their writing. The sale of his manuscripts provided some modest help in facing these hardships, and, as for later, “he’ll have other manuscripts then” Sylvia noted in a letter to her mother (387). Thus began a lifelong practice of cannibalizing his own manuscripts in order to supplement his irregular income. We catch some glimpse of Hughes’s own attitude towards this enforced stringency when he confides in a later letter that he has parted with the

3. As a result of this practice, a number of previously lost works by Plath have surfaced in the Ted Hughes archive, among them a fragment of a short story titled “Runaway,” based on the same incident as Hughes’s Birthday Letters poem “Sam” and notes for her previously lost novel Falcon Yard. 4. Emory began buying Ted Hughes manuscripts in 1985 and had assembled a substantial Ted Hughes collection before the 1997 purchase of his own archive. Since that time, Emory has continued to make additions to the papers including a large number of early manuscript drafts from the collection of Joseph Gold, correspondence from Hughes to Lucas Myers, and an extensive correspondence (1950–1998) with his own brother, Gerald. 5. In a 1975 letter to Aurelia Plath, Hughes recalls the amount paid as $450 dollars (Ted Hughes to Aurellia Plath).

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manuscript of “Pike” reluctantly, only because he was “exceedingly pressed for cash” (Hughes to Gold, 19 Mar 1964).6 Indeed, immediately after selling that particular manuscript, Hughes regretted the decision and took steps to recover it from the American collector who had subsequently purchased it. In an exchange of letters with this collector, Hughes acknowledges, “This last year I’ve lost a lot of stuff, manuscripts and so on. I’ve started locking [them] in a chest—ridiculous business” (Hughes to Gold, 7 Aug l964). The specific loss Hughes refers to is likely Sylvia’s burning of an unknown quantity of his papers in July 1962 (recounted in her poem “Burning the Letters”), soon after learning of his affair with Assia Wevill. In a second fire, this one in 1971, Hughes’s papers were again targeted, this time by someone who broke into his Yorkshire home and set them ablaze.7 A number of manuscripts in the Hughes archive bear evidence of one or the other of these fires, including a 1969 letter from Leonard Baskin which was badly singed in the second fire. In each case the manuscript stands in as a surrogate for the self that is the real target of anger. While Hughes took steps to safeguard his manuscripts, he showed no awareness of the greater value that a larger archive might contain, indeed, just the opposite. He apparently made little effort to secure an institutional buyer (the earlier mention of the University of Texas came to nothing), but was content instead to let his early manuscripts be scattered among many different individual collectors. In the mid-1970s he was still selling manuscript material with his sole interest apparently being the price realized. A handwritten note from that period lists potential buyers for his manuscripts along with the prices he expected to get.8 “Market price of holograph of published poem—1 page—written out by author—£20… Market price for manuscript pages of achieved poems—£35” (“Possible Buyers”). On at least one occasion in the mid-1970s, Hughes eliminated the step of converting his manuscripts into cash and instead used drafts of Wodwo as a kind of currency in a direct payment for a chest from a Devon antique dealer. Similarly when a friend once asked him for money, he sent instead fair copies of several poems which he copied for the purpose. Letters that survive in the archive reflect Hughes’s growing understanding of the value of such material and his active negotiation over prices. In the early 1960s he writes to one of his London dealers: “I am gradually being forced to realize that in time to come my manuscripts are going to be worth quite a lot… I would be foolish, and so would you, if we were to go on almost giving these things away.” (Letter to Myers) One element of this letter is of particular interest, that is the implication that the manuscript—the material artifact itself— 6. This element of regret for this early sale is captured as well in a 1975 letter to Mrs. Prouty Smith. He writes, “I sold my own early papers years ago for a couple of hundred pounds—parts of them I know have since changed hands for vastly greater sums, but they can’t help me any more… They were probably my freshest best work” (Letter to Prouty Smith, 12 May 1975).

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has a greater inherent value than the published poem. “In the past, I’ve sold manuscripts for next to nothing,” he writes, “for less than I was paid merely for the publication of the poems” (emphasis added). While the manuscript, as we have seen, clearly had a monetary value for Hughes, it also had a value unrelated to the marketplace and, indeed, unrelated to mere publication. Unlike the published poem, the manuscript draft retained some vestige of that creative power that first animated the poem. For some insight into the nature of that power, we need to look at the poems themselves; I’d like to consider briefly just two, one well-known, the other previously unpublished and unknown. The early poems—those written at the time when he was beginning to sell his own manuscripts—return often to images of decay, whether that decay takes the form of “dust” (“Song”), “fragments” (“The Horses”), “muck” (“Fallgrief’s Girlfriends”), or the broken jawbone and carapaces washed ashore in “Relic.” Unpublished drafts from the time express a similarly bleak view of a broken and mutable world. “Dust has no memory whatsoever,” is how he puts it in one unpublished fragment (“Dust”), while in another he acknowledges time’s steady assault in the line, “Paper yellows, even without flame” (“Concurrence”). Such images dominate Hughes’s poetry and suggest a familiar and characteristic stance towards human history and man’s tenuous hold on it. Against the broken fragments of these early poems there is, however, often a suggestion of some opposite movement. This latter poem, titled “Concurrence” in the surviving manuscript, continues: “Paper yellows, even without flame,/But in words carbon has already become diamond” (“Concurrence”). In these lines Hughes establishes a link between the carbon that is the result of time’s slow fire and the carbon of the poet’s own pencil. Even as the page slowly smoulders, the poet’s own creative fire inscribes words on the page that have already become diamond. The poem is an affirmation of some counter movement against, what he calls it elsewhere, the “cold clockwork of the stars” (HR 53), and an expression of hope for that otherwise fleeting creative force. We see such an affirmation of the creative moment many places in Hughes’s poetry, but perhaps nowhere as familiarly as in his self-mythologizing account of writing a poem that we find in “The Thought Fox” (HR 15). In this well-known poem poetic inspiration is described as a midnight visit from a fox which slowly advances across a forest clearing. In his recent study, Keith Sagar takes exception to “the myth of unpremeditated art” that the poem seems to posit; however, we need to consider not the accuracy of its account so much as the importance of this myth of creativity to Hughes (2000 89). Early in his career the

7. Hughes describes this fire in the Note to the Vintage Edition of Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman (210). 8. Among the possible buyers were the well-known bookseller Bernard Stone, the London-based firm of Bernard Quaritch, and the American dealer Marjorie Cohen of the House of Books.

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poem became a kind of signature piece for him. He gave it pride-of-place in his New Selected, and he commented on the circumstances of composition on more than one occasion, most fully in the same “Listening and Writing” radio broadcast where he described his childhood hunts. In his remarks, he did not qualify or otherwise retreat from the fictional elements of the analogy, but instead expanded them even further: “If I had not caught the real fox there in the words, I never would have saved the poem,” he writes. “I would have thrown it into the wastepaper basket as I have thrown so many other hunts that did not get what I was after.” More to the point, he then adds, “as long as a copy of the poem exists, every time anyone reads it the fox will get up somewhere out in the darkness and come walking towards them” (“Capturing Animals”). What Hughes is describing is the original moment of creative inspiration. The poem, if successful, reenacts that moment and gives us as readers access to the original experience that the poet serves. The reader’s experience is not a new one but is, instead, a distant echo of that original inspiration. In Hughes’s mind that moment is the final measure of value and is the end that the poet serves. As Ekbert Faas summarizes his position, “No craft, education, professional dedication and experimental ingenuity, not even the most thorough artistic conscience, will produce great poetry in default of this inspiration” (39).9 This chain of association which stretches back to the poet’s original inspiration explains in large part the great value that Hughes came to place in the manuscript draft itself. The draft is always closer to that original inspiration than the final published poem. More than the achieved poem, the draft is for Hughes a reminder of the fox’s first stirring and his slow movement towards us. The poetic manuscript held a particular power for Hughes as evidenced as well by his early and frequent publication in special manuscript editions of his work. The first of these was the 1967 publication of Animal Poems in only one hundred copies, thirty-six of which include one or more of the poems in Hughes’s own hand. This was followed by numerous other manuscript editions which incorporated either fair copies of his poems in his hand, cannibalized working drafts, or, in the case of Cave Birds and the broadside of “Sky Furnace,” facsimiles of the original manuscripts prepared for the purpose. The practice, begun in 1967 was one he returned to repeatedly over his lifetime, most recently in Howls and Whispers the fine press companion volume to Birthday Letters published shortly before his death.10 Like his early sale of manuscript drafts, his decision to issue these manuscript editions was surely, in large part, a financial one. He could not only charge considerably more for these special editions, he could also issue them between the appearance of his major collections. We should not, however, let the economics of these publications obscure what they also convey about the special status he accorded the manuscript itself. These editions served a personal need as well and are consistent with Hughes’s early critical statements privileging the original creative inspiration over any subsequent working out of a poem’s final form. The manuscript edition quite literally contains the artifact of that otherwise

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elusive inspiration, which Ekbert Faas calls an “obsessive concern” of Hughes’s early poetry (38). Hughes’s 1981 sale of the Sylvia Plath archive to Smith College offers further evidence of Hughes’s own attitude toward the manuscript record. In a letter that anticipates this upcoming sale, Hughes comments on the wide fluctuations in prices paid for archives and on the impossibility of capturing their real value. “I know that Dylan Thomas’ miraculous early notebooks, from which he drew all his major poems, went for a few pounds—even as late as the fifties. While in 1963 Roethke’s papers went for [a] quarter of a million [dollars].” He then adds, “these things have no absolute value. They are simply priceless.” While he recognizes their clear market value—and its fluctuations—he also attaches a value to manuscripts that is outside the marketplace altogether. Neither a few pounds nor a quarter million dollars can adequately measure the value of such materials. “The first drafts, in hand,” he writes, “are astonishing documents of inspiration” (Letter to Prouty Smith). It is important to note, however, the manuscript that he charges with such importance is the poem draft: “the first drafts in hand” and the “miraculous early notebooks.” Indeed, in what is clearly the most commented on manuscript action of Hughes’s life, his destruction of Sylvia Plath’s last journal, we see him drawing a clear distinction between Plath’s creative work (which he saw into print in five major collections) and a journal record of her personal life. What has escaped notice is that Hughes maintained the same distinction with regard to his own journals from the period. In a 1975 letter to Plath’s mother, Aurelia, he mentions “my journal of that time” and later adds that the harsh view of his marriage to Plath “will only be corrected, probably, when somebody produces her journals of the time and mine” (Letter to Aurelia Plath).11 Hughes’s early insistence that the sources of his own inspiration lay outside the self explains, in large part, his very different stances towards the poem draft and towards personal documents such as letters or journals. In drawing a distinction between the public value of poetic manuscripts and the private nature of the journal, Hughes forces a split between the lived life and the creative imagination itself. Implicit in such a position is the notion that creative

9. Hughes’s insistence on a spontaneous and uncontrollable inspiration may have been, in part, a response to Sylvia Plath’s far different manner of laboring over her poems with thesaurus in hand. In his “Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems,” he describes her method of composition this way: “She wrote her early poems very slowly, Thesaurus open on her knee, in her large, strange handwriting, like a mosaic, where every letter stands separate within the work, a hieroglyph to itself… Every poem grew complete from its own root, in that laborious inching way, as if she were working out a mathematical problem, chewing her lips, putting a thick ring of ink around each word that stirred for her on the page of the Thesaurus.” (188) 10. Howls and Whispers was published in an edition of only 110 copies, ten of which included a single manuscript of one of the poems.

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inspiration can be separated from the day-to-day details of the lived life, indeed, that its source lies somewhere outside the self altogether. The self-effacement implicit in such a split would later be construed by many readers as a defensive act of self-protection. In fact, the roots of this split lie in his early conception of the creative process itself. In 1988 Roy Davids, the head of manuscripts at Sotheby’s and a personal friend of Hughes’s, asked Hughes if he could provide some notes on the surviving drafts of Plath’s poem “Sheep in Fog” for a lecture that Davids was to give later that year. What began as only a series of notes quickly grew into a well-developed essay that now offers one of the most full statements by Hughes on the manuscript and poetic creativity itself. Hughes presents a view of the creative process remarkably consistent with his early views first articulated twenty-five years before. Repeatedly Hughes refers to “the amazing inspiration” (emphasis added) that produced Plath’s major poems, in effect, giving agency to some force other than the self. Elsewhere in the original notes for the essay, Hughes suggests that the process of writing the Ariel poems was “a triumphant surmounting of all her personal difficulties” (Letter to Davids). In such statements, Hughes seems on the brink of an Eliot-like argument. about the impersonality of the poet, yet what he privileges in these statements is not so much a larger poetic tradition beyond the self as it is a kind of possession of the self. Thus, he writes of “the inner law of the poem,” the poem that has been “persistently trying to emerge,” and its “inevitable conclusion.” In a series of highly illuminating statements, Hughes describes three types of poetic composition, three degrees really of poetic inspiration.12 In the first, the poem springs complete from its initial inspiration. As Hughes puts it “the poem seems to write itself, and takes the poet completely by surprise, as if he had no idea where it came from. Once here, it cannot be altered” (TH to Davids). The second type of process is one where “the poem can half rise” and the poet “struggles to help it, offering it words, images, anything from his bag of tricks, trying to anticipate it and take its slightest suggestions from the bits that have appeared.” In the third, the initial inspiration offers the poet no more than an odd phrase or line, and the poet “goes after it” with deliberate skill. “The final work can often carry a strong poetic charge, it may well be rhetorically powerful and carry striking phrases, lines, felicities, and at the very least can be an admirable piece of craftmanship [sic]. But we have to ask: what relation does it bear to the first inspiration (emphasis added), to the unique psychic materials that were pushing for expression?” I am less interested in the application of this scheme to Plath’s own poem than I am in the implications for Hughes’s own poetics. These statements seem aimed at establishing the primacy of poetic inspiration. The drafts before him are

11. The Ted Hughes papers at Emory include several journal-like entries on widely scattered notebook pages but contain no sustained journal.

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important not for where they eventually lead, but for where they have come. They trace “the beginning, middle and end of a phenomenon to which no poem’s final printed version can give any clue” (WP 207). They are “a complementary revelation…the log-book of its real meanings.” This view of artistic creativity has wide implications. While it validates the initial impulse that animates the manuscript draft, it also diminishes the poet’s own contribution to that creative process. Hughes attributes creativity not to any deliberate skill of the poet but, instead, to some fundamentally unknowable inspiration. In order to make such a claim Hughes had to ignore the considerable manuscript evidence of his own creative work. His own papers typically reveal extensive revision of draft upon draft. In the “Sheep in Fog” essay, however, he chose to emphasize not the artist’s control over his materials but his role as a channel for that original inspiration. Implicit in this position is a certain denial of self that on some level Hughes found appealing. What is most remarkable about the late collection Birthday Letters is the way the poems reunite that previously bifurcated self. When Hughes published the collection near the end of his life, reviewers were quick to proclaim, as the New York Times did, “Hughes Breaks His Silence on Sylvia Plath.” Though he had written extensively about Plath, and had edited a considerable body of her work for publication, the Birthday Letters poems, for the first time, presented Hughes’s own self as a register of events. No longer was he writing in a disinterested voice of a third party, as he had done in “The Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems,” “Ariel by Sylvia Plath,” “Sylvia Plath’s Crossing the Water,” his introduction to the Collected Poems, or in various other editorial notes and introductions. In Birthday Letters he once again placed himself in relation to the events the poems. He also did so in verse. That act, more than any other, reunited the two halves of the self that he had kept apart in his earlier critical statements regarding the sources of poetic inspiration. Here was a series of poems that sprang not from any impersonal and unknowable inspiration but quite directly from the journals, letters, poems, and photographs that are such a frequent point of reference of the poems. Birthday Letters sprang quite directly from the stuff of his own lived life. These poems are an effort towards the coherent reassembly of that personal past, a past that is by its very nature broken, fragmentary, and always receding into dim and irrecoverable memory. In the end, the split that Hughes tried to claim between his personal experience and the sources of his own art was not one he was able to maintain with any consistency. The tensions between these two selves are most apparent in the contradictory actions towards his own material archive. While he valued the poem draft for its creative and talismanic properties, he also insisted that other

12. In the original letter to Roy Davids, Hughes describes three forms of poetic inspiration; in the published essay, he identifies four. The fourth, however, is a variation on the third; therefore, I do not consider it here.

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elements of his archive were his alone and not for any public scrutiny. These contradictory impulses of self-revelation and self-concealment allow us a glimpse of Hughes’s own conception of his art. The late synthesis of these opposing tendencies, most apparent in Birthday Letters, allows us a glimpse of a self restored by art.

8 Drives & their Vicissitudes in the Poetry of Ted Hughes Axel Nesme

When I indicated to Joanny Moulin that I was considering working on “drives and their vicissitudes” in Ted Hughes’s poetry, he wrote back suggesting that I do some checking on the concept of enantiodromia as introduced by Jung in his writings and further explored by Hughes in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. I will therefore go back on this term, which I hope will permit me to situate differentially the more specifically Freudian concept of drive. In Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (40), Hughes defines the term with the formula: “Jung’s term for the reversal of one dominant psychological attitude into its opposite.” In his own use of the concept Jung acknowledges his debt towards Heraclitus: Old Heraclitus…discovered the most marvellous of all psychological laws: the regulative function of opposites. he called it enantiodromia, a running contrariwise, by which he meant that sooner or later everything runs into its opposite… Thus the rational attitude of culture necessarily runs into its opposite, namely the irrational devastation of culture… The enantiodromia that always threatens when a movement attains to undisputed power offers no solution of the problem, for it is just as blind in its disorganization as it was in its organization. In Psychology and Alchemy Jung also writes: “an enantiodromia has obviously taken place: after being rejected the unconscious asserts itself even more strongly” (1970 112). Enantiodromia could thus be viewed roughly as a return of the repressed in the form of a dream or a symptom. It may also take on the shape of a reversal affecting the history of a subject or an entire culture. In any case, between enantiodromia and entropy or, to use a more Freudian terminology, homeostatic regulation, or even the life-drive/death-drive dialectic, the difference may seem minimal. However, while in Freud’s theory this dynamic is as unavoidable as the very existence of the drive itself, Jung does not view it as a necessary condition: “The only person who escapes the grim law of enantiodromia is the man who knows how to separate himself from the unconscious, not by repressing it. but by putting it clearly before him as that which he is not.” (1966 72)

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I would not therefore go as far as to assimilate enantiodromia to a “reversal of a drive into its opposite,” for insofar as the drive is that which defines man as a linguistic being subjected to the Other’s desire, there is no object which, being perfectly adequate to it as would be the object of the need, can put an end to it; there is only a succession of metonymic substitutes which temporarily fill the gap of the lost primal object1 and which constantly reactivate the dynamics of the drive, whose aim is “but the return, as in a closed circuit. to its own source, which allows us to understand how a drive can be satisfied without reaching its goal.” (Dorr 185) Following Hughes’s own logic, the poet’s writing is not only enantiodromic in relation to the culture whose repressed side it unveils, its shamanistic claim is also to offer its reader a way out of what Jung calls “the grim law of enantiodromia.” On the contrary it seems to me there is no possible integration of the objects of the drive in Hughes’s poetry; instead the drive can be seen as both constantly re-circulating and circum-venting what Lacanian theory designates as Objet Petit a. Whether in its in its vocal or phonemic manifestations on which I will primarily focus in this paper, the object of the drive defines itself partly by the space it delineates, the vacuum whose edges it maps out as does the curlew’s flight in “The Horses” (HR 16): “I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge./The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.” Thus while insisting in “Skylarks” that “The sky lies blank open” (W 168) and depicting in the poem “Pibroch” (177) the universe as the cradle of a persisting nothingness where his gnats will later be seen to fly, “at large in the nothing” (179), Hughes does not only create a vacuum in the sky the better to lodge there his new gods of survival, be they thrushes, larks, or “an almighty gnat,” he also pins down the nothingness to which the object of the drive can be assimilated in the final analysis. For as Alain Juranville points out, “the object of the drive lends itself to infinite substitutions. It is nothing (Il est le rieri).” It is, in Lacan’s own terms, “the object that we confuse all too often with that upon which the drive closes—this object, which is in fact simply the presence of a hollow, a void, which can be occupied, Freud tells us, by any object, and whose agency we know only in the form of the lost object, the petit a” (1964 180). The void central to the mechanism of the drive is apt to become resonant and turn into the oxymoronic “ringing nothing” which is heard at the end of “The Contender” (C 41), “the one note of silence/To which the whole earth dances gravely” in the poem “Fern” (W 28), or conceivably the uncanny hieroglyphic silence of the bodies of the mute children described in “Deaf School” (M 105). The voice as object of what Lacanian theory calls “pulsion invocante” i. e. 1. “L’objet d’une pulsion. ne peut pas être l’objet du besoin. Le seul objet a même de répondre a cette propriété ne peut être que l’objet du désir, cet objet que Lacan désignera comme objet an objet du désir et objet cause du désir tout a la fois, objet perdu. A ce titre, l’objet a en tant qu” il est éternellement manquant, inscrira la presence d’un creux que n” importe quel objet pourra venir occuper (Dorr 185).

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“invoking drive,” partakes of a similar paradox. Its truest expression might be the silent scream at the center of Munch’s famous painting which carries the same title, the same scream Hughes presents as the origin of all things in “Lineage” and whose toned-down version we might trace for example to the rat’s screeching in “Song of a Rat” (W 162), an apt analogon of Hughes’s writing insofar at least as it is the other of the metaphysical sophistries his poetry is fond of denouncing, but also more importantly the other of meaning itself. In Poetry in the Making Hughes explains that a good poem may acquire the same solidity and unavoidable factuality as what he calls “some lovely solid thing” (WP 19). In that case, its mode of presence in the world is not similar but identical to that of an animal: “I think of poems as a sort of animal… Maybe my concern has been to capture not animals particularly and not poems, but simply things which have a vivid life of their own, outside mine” (10). In other words, the poem does not exist as a linguistic artefact implicitly signalling to the subject’s divorce from the Real. It is a thing among others, hence also consubstantial to das Ding, the Freudian Thing defined in Lacanian theory as “plenitude insofar as it is there located by the (verbal) signifier” (Juranville 253), or, following one of Lacan’s many untranslatable formulas, “ce qui, du réel primordial…pâtit du signifiant” (1986 142), i. e. that part of the primal real of which the signifier necessarily falls short and whose quest leads the subject beyond the pleasure principle. For lack of ever becoming one with the real of das Ding, however, a poem may at least convoke it by means of the scream which brings into play the vocal object as that which stands for das Ding, or rather, for the gap which its absence inscribes in each speaking subject: The scream is not primarily a call, it brings silence into being. Not because silence sustains it, being in its background: quite the opposite. According to Lacan the scream creates a gulf into which silence rushes. He then mentions the knot that silence ties between something which exists just before it vanishes and the Other thing where speech may falter: it is this knot that becomes resonant when the scream carves a space inside it. The “gap the scream delineates” is internal, but it is also that of the Thing. The death drive penetrates this inner gap, then returns to its surface. The scream thus carves a hole within the body while at the same time resonating in the space where das Ding is lacking. It is at this level that the Nebenmensch (the Freudian Thing) appears as an unbridgeable gap delineated within ourselves and which we can barely approach. The death drive has no object, since the subject then becomes that nothing which is the Thing in its emptiness, and can trigger no desire. It is there that the lack of the Object is experienced as the lack of all objects. (Juranville 231–2) The pure voice of the other thing where speech falters thus resonates in the scream with which the pure signifier Gulkana is equated in Hughes’s poem by the same title “The Gulkana” (R 78): “Gulkana—/Biblical, a deranging cry/From the wilderness—burst past us./A stone voice that dragged at us.” The utter nonsense of this river name isolates the voice as object, a petrified voice (“a

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stone voice that dragged at us”) whose fate the gaze will later share (“Bliss had fixed their eyes”), a voice which therefore carries no meaningful speech and reduces the speaker’s ear to a pure void; the voice of perversion perhaps also, since, as A.Juranville points out, it “ultimately refers to the voice of the threatening mother, of the seducing mother” (187) whose deadly power and force of attraction is expressed in the verb “dragged.” The voice which thus makes itself heard is a voice from before the law, hence the denial attempt (“something I kept trying to deny”) of the speaker, led by his transgressive desire to set foot on the locus of origins where the resurrection of the fish translates a primal scene fantasy in almost explicit terms. This experience necessarily triggers a sense of anxiety, as the speaker finds in the resurrected fish his own image, “A bodiless twin, some doppelganger/Disinherited other, unliving,” reflected in the frame of fantasy, here designated as “the windows of the express torrent.” Bearing witness to a dysfunctioning of the paternal metaphor which introduces the subject to the symbolic order, this erection of the voice as object is also the privileged medium of a questioning of the law of finitude, the law of symbolic castration partly challenged by the poetic subject in “Anniversary” (CPH 854). In this poem, as in a sonnet by Seamus Heaney called “In Memoriam M.K.H.,” the use of grammatical tenses signals the incompletion of the mourning process, as does from the outset the fate inflicted on the page from the diary which mentions the death of the poet’s mother. While the indication “Ma died today” inscribes this death in the linear temporality of the diary, the poem subtracts the vision of the mother from this order to maintain her in a perpetual present, in a fashion similar to the tearing off of the page mentioning her death from the diary. The text thus offers the maternal voice as object of the invoking drive a space where it can be heard from the grave and become the voice that is invoked, an evanescent and seductive object which, by drawing the outline of a void, turns it into the imaginary locus where the lack of das Ding designates itself: “Her voice comes, piping,/Down a deep gorge of woodland echoes” (292). Indeed, it is no accident if many poems in which Ted Hughes apostrophizes the departed, such as “For the Duration” (Ww 22) or “Old oats” (CPH 852) or “You Hated Spain” (BL 39) foreground the dimension of invocation, thus possibly manifesting the poet’s difficulty in coming to terms with loss otherwise than via a return of the ghost of the object, that which all invocations aims at, and more specifically that which occurs in “Anniversary.” For here the voice which is invoked is precisely the object which, according to Juranville “lets the ear appear as a void” (186) where the drive involutes. This is at least the suggestion one may read in the lines, “She is using me to tune finer/Her weeping love for my brother” (CPH 855), where the speaker subjected to the mother’s desire for fusion (be it presented as a mere con-fusion between the two brothers: “able for all that distance to think me him”) becomes a tuning instrument, in other words, an ear for the voice of the mother who, having merged with the cosmos, is animated by the pure binary movement of the drive: “The work of the cosmos,/Creation and destruction of matter/And of anti-matter/Pulses and flares, shudders and

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fades/ Like the Northern Lights in their feathers” (292). Central to the emergence of the voice as object is its withdrawal as the vehicle of meaningful speech, at times when selves are “no longer woven into a voice” as Hughes wrote once again in “Deaf School” (M 105) or when animals set in resonance the void in which their voices are heard: “the voices and frenzies of the larks,/Squealing and gibbering and cursing./ Like sacrifices set floating/The cruel earth’s offerings/ The mad earth’s missionaries.” These lines from “Skylarks” (W 168) are exemplary of the two contradictory forces at work in Hughes’s poetry: on the one hand the fascination with the Other of articulate language as embodied by the larks’ gibberish; on the other, the discursiveness which here substitutes a meaningful comparison for the nonsense of which the reader previously caught a glimpse. Given the line of questioning I have chosen, my focus will continue to bear primarily on the first term of this dichotomy, which I would now like to approach from a more metapoetic angle. As meaningless as the scream in which the invoking drive opens onto the death drive which is the primum mobile of all partial drives in the essential vanity of their motion, is the writing that Hughes’s gnats are seen to successively jot down and erase in mid air, “Writing on the air, rubbing out everything they write” (179). Animated by the pure alternating motion of the drive in their constant shifts from activity to passivity—“Ridden to death by your own bodies/ Riding your bodies to death” (180)—the dancing gnats also follow the circular pattern of the drive circumscribing the central void which stands for the absence of das Ding, hence their being defined as “immense magnets fighting around a center.” Hughes’s insects thus offer an apt analogy for the initial moment of the writing process, preceding sublimation: The act of writing. is a pure act in which the signifier is produced, but as meaningless in and of itself. This appears quite clearly in the way one draws a letter on the page, then returns to where one started, in the same way as in the partial drive, one revolves around the object, i. e. always also the void of das Ding. The motion which inscribes a letter is the motion of the drive. And this motion is bound to repetition in writing: once the letter has been produced, it calls for the production of another letter, without the second one being anymore than the first, with the same presence of meaninglessness (non-sens). (Juranville 284) Yet all this only applies to the initial logical moment of writing. As soon as a structure emerges, however, sublimation occurs, by virtue of which, in Lacanian theory, the object is elevated to the dignity of das Ding, which appears in lieu of the object, within the specific temporality of poetic speech. This scenario we can see at work in the poem from River “Milesian Encounter on the Sligachan” (44) with which I would like to conclude this paper. In his article entitled “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” after listing the various objects of standard analytical theory Lacan

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adds: “An unthinkable list, if one adds, as I do, the phoneme, the gaze, the voice —the nothing” (1966 315). Following Lacan’s suggestion I would like to show how in this poem, it is precisely through the agency of the phoneme that the object is elevated to the dignity of the Thing. Despite the predominance of its narrative aspect, reinforced by the six prose paragraphs inserted after the third line, this poem presents a number of formal features which suggest from the start that the encounter in question will extend beyond the level of the plot and involve the dimension of the signifier. Indeed, besides the falling rhythms introduced by several dactyls and trochees— “tumblequag,” “hairiness,” “clatterbrook,” “petrified scapulae, vertebrae,” “underbank opposite,” “something sinister about bogland rivers” —as a prelude to the fading “from the light of reality” undergone by the speaker at the end of the poem, one formal characteristic that stands out are the numerous alliterations which seem to take this poem back to the origins of English verse, perhaps as an echo of the primitivist longing for Beowulf days already expressed in “Thistles” (W 17). Here are a few examples: “something sinister” (l.2) “crusty, quaking cadaver and me lurching over it in elation like a daddy-long-legs” (l.6); “crooked little clatterbrook” (l.7); “The shock./The sheer cavern of current” (l.5); “clear/ Cleansing” (ll.8–9); “giddy/Ghostly” (ll.12–13); “peering into that superabundance of s pirit” (l.15) “Those shuttles of love-shadow” (l.23) “precious like a preservative” (l.29). This omnipresence of alliteration draws the reader’s attention to what Laurent Jenny calls “plastic nuances” which “bring the weight of reality to bear on utterance,” they belong to what the critic calls “that sensitive border which unfolds at the same time as utterance itself” and which can be seen as “a kind of “interface” between discourse and the world” (17). Indeed, according to Jenny, not only “deictics and nouns act as shifters between language and its other. The sensitive materiality of discourse also functions “deictically” in that it is oriented towards the world” (18). This plasticity of poetic speech, this encoding of the real in the substance of the text to which alliteration contributes, may thus be seen as the exact counterpart of the symptom as the encoding of jouissance in the real of the body. In its primitivism, alliteration thus opens up a discursive space “made up of the substance of the world and unfolding together with it;” it fashions the poem as the locus where “this world divides within itself, tears itself away from itself while preserving its plasticity, thereby creating the possibility of a withdrawal, but not of an absolute separation.” (Jenny 19). This last quote encapsulates, I believe, the transgressive dimension of Hughes’s poetic undertaking in its problematic relationship to the law that posits the real as language’s impossibility. No wonder therefore, if in “Milesian Encounter on the Sligachan,” language is made subservient to the speaker’s attempt at restoring a primal unity of sorts, notably by way of hyphenated words and compounds that stich various nouns together2, the most spectacular example being the bog which serves not only as

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the setting for poetic revelation, but also as an omnific signifier that lends itself to various transformations: “bogland” (line 2), “bog-cotton” (l.11), “underbog” (l.28), “boggart” (l.65). By stressing the infinite malleability of words as he also does in suggesting the genesis of the word “whisker” (l.54) from the merger of “whisky” (l. 51) and “whisper” (l.52), Hughes thus reenacts in the materiality of the letter the imaginary scenario of the origins one of whose main protagonists is, if not the Freudian Thing, at least that which stands for it, call it the phallic mother or simply the legendary Gorgon whose presence in this text is made quite explicit by the mythological reference: “With a ram’s skull there—magnified, a Medusa” (l.30) bearing witness to the “Milesian” or picaresque aesthetic adopted by Hughes, but also conveniently assimilating the river to the Gorgon from whose veins legend has it that both a deadly poison and medicine to bring the dead back to life could be drawn. There are thus, I would argue, two encounters in this poem: first, the imaginary confrontation—mediated by a scopic fantasy in which gazes are exchanged: “I… peering into…” (l.14), “the loveliest ogress…watched me,” (ll. 59–61)—with the “fellow aliens” (l.16), whose oxymoron encapsulates the poem’s strategy aiming to reduce alterity to similarity—“Those peculiar eyes/So like mine,” (ll.17–8)—the better to tone down the threat perceived in the landscape as locus of epiphany. The frame of fantasy does not however provide the only connection between the two agencies involved. Indeed the subject and the Other, being respectively compared to a “Daddy-long-legs” and to a “mostlonged-for-ogress,” i. e., both designated by hyphenated names, seem linguistically destined to meet, which transfers the stage of the encounter from the river’s imaginary setting to the poem’s linguistic make-up. In the same way as the various hyphens create a continuity between signifiers, the [ou] assonance and [l] consonance thus metonymically connect verbs predicated of the speaker with the Other of the encounter: “I stroked its throat… I licked the moulded hollows/Of its collarbones.” But while a sexual meaning is deliberately suggested in lines 34–47 where the speaker portrays himself as successfully attempting to arouse the pool, an attempt which partially culminates in the climactic crash of line 47, the linguistic climax of the poem only occurs in lines 50–2, which define the text’s second, and more specifically poetic, encounter. This apex is itself followed by the purely verbal anticlimax of “salmo salar” (71) where Latin taxonomy takes over from the more native capitalized nouns of lines 50–2.

2. “Tumblequag,” “Ice-Age hairiness” (ll.4–5) “daddy-long-legs” (l.7), “clatterbrook” (l. 7), a razor-edged, blood-smeared grass, the flood-sucked swabs of bog-cotton, the dusty calico rip-up of snipe -” (l.12), “the Cuillins…that were blue-silvered” (ll.14–5), “up to my hip in a suck-hole…teetering over the broken-necked heath-bobs a good half-hour” (ll. 19–20), “So lonely-drowning deep, so drowned-hair silent” (l.7); “the long pool-tail” (l. 14); “With an ushering-in of chills” (l.43); “the tip of my heart-nerve” (l.47); “the eyepupil darkness? The loveliest, left-behind, most-longed-for ogress” (l.59), “her timewarped judas-hole” (l.61).

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The poem thus stages a love encounter with the signifiers of the mother tongue, the word “boggart,” which is West Yorkshire dialect for “specter,” and also with a specific phoneme. In “Milesian Encounter” the poet is not only fishing “the long pool-tail” for the tale of an encounter in a pool, but also for certain gutturals, be it at the cost of what Craig Robinson calls “deliberate exaggeration” (203–4). This, Hughes does most spectacularly in the apocopated internal rhyme of line 50 (“a Gruagach of the Sligachan), where he extols those remnants of his language’s Celtic prehistory as the privileged vehicles of the metaphor which veils the woman as imaginary bearer of the phallus, before staging their demise when denotative, scientific language takes over and the lack is revealed behind the linguistic veil that covered it. Yet through the mediation of Hughes’s poetic narrative, the reader has had ample enough opportunity to relish the raucous charms of the voiceless velar fricative, previously repressed from the signifier which designates the setting of the poem, namely the Cuillins whose Promethean connotations (“asylum of eagles”) were the only reminder of the hero Cuchullain after whom those mountains are also named. While “Thistles” (W 17), one of Hughes’s many explorations of the death and resurrection pattern, stages by way of a simile the resurrection of “the gutturals of dialects,” “A Milesian Encounter” thus achieves a similar effect to that described by Hughes in the often-quoted passage from his “Notes on Shakespeare” (WP 105) where the poet explains how Shakespeare’s use of the Latin word “aggravate” reactivates “the concrete Anglo-Saxon “gr” core of growl, grind, eager, grief, grate etc.” Hughes’s own brand of linguistic archaelogy not only unearthes the same sound combination set off by the chiasmatic ordering of the voiced and voiceless. plosives (“grabbed…crashed”/“crack…anite” [græ]/ [kræ], [kræ]/[græ]), it also throws into relief a phoneme that takes us back to the Germanic roots of English. This poem thus enacts a transition of sorts from linguistic innocence to experience as well as the speaker’s exile from original light. As he implicitly did lines 35–6 in constructing a phonological chain that connected him with the Thing, the speaker finally suggests that such metonymic ruins of the (m)other are the only object of jouissance allotted to him as subjected to the signifier. While confming the other within the “judas-hole” of line 61, i. e. the frame of scopic fantasy necessarily perceived as a betrayal of the total truth that hides behind, the poem, by also letting through phonemic glimmers of what Hughes terms “the light of reality,” elevates those to the dignity of the Thing Does the poet emulate Perseus who defeated Medusa by trapping her image in the reflection of his shield, i. e. by interposing the imaginary order between himself and the Other’s jouissance? This reading would be legitimate, but perhaps incomplete. It is worth remembering here that at the beginning of the poem, the origin of the encounter is located in directions provided by a third party —““up in the pools,” they’d said,” (l.1)—a symbolic Other ensuring mediation between subject and object of the encounter. This fact, I would argue is to be related to the poem itself being addressed to “Hilary and Simon.” Simultaneously

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to this inscription opposing the gift of the poem as symbolic artefact to the gift of the salmon’s eye as imaginary object also thematized in the poem, knowledge of jouissance is located in the Other: “you know when it’s coming” (l.40). The phoneme as letter thus borders a gap in knowledge, the knowledge of jouissance as located in the unconscious, i. e. , an Other which defines the subject of speech as the product of his splitting between his discourse and his speech as well as between his imaginary reflection and the real of his body. Which may explain why in the poem under scrutiny, alterity, initially located in a prehistoric other whose connection with the subject, although acknowledged, was of a primarily specular nature (“Those peculiar eyes/So like mine”) is later on integrated in terms of an “altering” predicated of the speaker’s body at the same time as the text undergoes the rather theatrical linguistic alteration I have been studying. In a recent book psychoanalyst Henri Rey-Flaud propounds a vision of modernity as the moment when the ultimate Cause of all things, a signifier which incidentally shares the same root as Chose, the French word for thing, is elided. Previously, he adds, the world “was only thinkable as obeying a principle of causality whose founding signifier was located in the Other, designated by the expression “Heaven.” In other words, the universe was thought as reasonable on the basis of the belief that the final reason of all things would be given one day and provide the meaning of meaning” (58). Rey-Flaud argues that the moment when “the chain of causes was broken and the founding signifier was lost is a decisive one in our culture, for it marks the birth of scientific thought which, by “eluding” and “eliding” the question of the ultimate cause, once and for all dismissed as pertaining to the impossibility of the real, lays down the foundation of reality as such.” (58–9). As for Ted Hughes’s poetic project, it manifests a resurgence of a prescientific imaginary order which, in its iconoclastic guise, denounces metaphysical illusion the better to promote nature as a universal cause of creation and destruction. Hence his mimologism, which can be read as a refusal to accept the signifier’s essential inadequacy to its meaning, or in other words, that for lack of an ultimate Cause, the only possible belief rests on the absence of the ultimate Cause and on the assumption of the arbitrariness of the sign. Perhaps therefore Ted Hughes falls short of what Rey-Flaud thus defines as “pure belief.” I have tried to show how in his poetry meaningless objects occupy the space which this belief leaves vacant, and are convoked in lieu of the primal signifier (designated in Lacanian theory as S2, or the phallic symbol Ф) to function as substitutes of the Thing whose absence it proclaims.

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At a cocktail party honouring W.H.Auden at the offices of Faber & Faber on June 23rd, 1960. The poets are (left to right): Stephen Spender, W.H.Auden, Ted Hughes, T.S.Eliot, and Louis MacNeice. Photograph by Mark Gerson.

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Plate 1: Ted Hughes preparing his papers for sale, Court Green, 1996. (Carol Hughes) World these three poems are ordered according to Sephiroth 1, 2 and 3 on the Tree, not

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Plate 2: “You were not born when mighty Alexander died,” early poem in Ted Hughes’s hand, ca. 1947. Among the earliest surviving manuscripts by Ted Hughes in the Hughes collection is this poem inscribed “for Jean,” a childhood classmate at Mexborough Grammar School. (Estate of Ted Hughes)

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Plate 3a and 3b: Working draft of Ted Hughes’s unpublished oratorio “Bardo Thodol” with, on the verso, notes in Sylvia Plath’s hand for a planned novel, Falcon Yard, 1960. (Estate of Ted Hughes)

DRIVES & THEIR VICISSITUDES 73

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Plate 4: “The Thought-Fox,” signed fair copy prepared for sale. (Estate of Ted Hughes)

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Plate 5: Howls & Whispers, The Gehenna Press, 1998. One of ten deluxe copies (out of a total edition of 110) featuring three watercolor drawings by Leonard Baskin, a second suite of etchings, one copperplate, and a single leaf of Ted Hughes’s manuscript. This series of eleven poems is described in the prospectus for the volume as “strays from the series” Birthday Letters. Shown here is copy number 7 with a single manuscript draft of “Minotaur 2.” (Estate of Ted Hughes)

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The Sephirothic System of the Ten Divine Names

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Correspondences between Birthday Letters poems, Cabbala and Tarot. “In the Atziluthic according to the alphabet. Tarot Card

Hebrew Alphabet

Cabbala Symbol

World of Atziluth

World of Briah

World of Yetzirah

World of Assiah

The Fool

Aleph

Ox

“Chaucer ”

“Isis”

“Dreamer s”

1 The Magician 2 The High Priestess 3 The Empress

Beth

House

“Ouija”

Gimel

Camel

“Fullbrigh t Scholars” “Caryatid s (1)” “Caryatid s (2)”

“Epiphan y” “The Gypsy”

Daleth

Door

“Visit”

“Fairy Tale” “The Blackbird ” “Totem”

4 The Emperor

He

Window

“Sam”

5 The Hieropha nt

Vau

Nail

“The Tender Place”

6 The Lovers 7 The Chariot

Zain

Sword

Cheth

Fence

“St. Botolphs” “The Shot”

8 Justice

Teth

Serpent

“Trophies ”

9 The Hermit

Yod

Hand

10 The Wheel of Fortune 11 Strength

Kaph

Palm/Fist

“18 Rugby Street” “The Machine”

Lamed

Ox Goad

12 The Hanged Man 13 Death

Mem

Water

Nun

Fish

Samekh

Prop

14 Temperan ce

“The Earthenw are Head” “Wutheri ng Heights” “The Chipmun k” “Horosco pe”

“A Dream” “The Minotaur ” “The Pan”

“Robbing Myself “Blood and Innocence ” “Costly Speech” “The Inscriptio n” “NightRide on Ariel” “Telos”

“Flounder s” “The Blue Flannel… .” “Child’s Park”

“Error”

“9 Willow Street” “The Literary Life” “The Bird”

“The Afterbirth ” “Setebos”

“A Short Film”

“The Coat”

“Astringe ncy”

“The Rag Rug”

“Fate Playing”

“The Badlands”

“The Table”

“The Owl”

“Fishing Bridge”

“Apprehe nsions”

“The Ventriloq uist” “Life After Death” “The Hands”

“God Help the Wolf…” “Fidelity”

“The Lodger” “Daffodil s”

“Brasilia”

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15 The Devil 16 The Tower 17 The Star

A’Ain

Eye

Pé

Mouth

Tzaddi

Fish-hook

18 The Moon

Quoph

Back o’head

19 The Sun 20 Judgemen t 21 The World

Resh

Head

Shin

Tooth

Tau

Tau Cross

“A Pink Wool…” “Your Paris” “You Hated Spain” “Moonwa lk”

“The 59th Bear” “Grand Canyon” “Karlsbad Caverns”

“Drawing ” “Fever”

“Portraits ” “Stubbing Wharfe”

“55 Eltisley”

“Remissio n”

“Black Coat”

“Dream Life” “Perfect Light” “The Rabbit Catcher” “Suttee”

“The Bee God” “Being Christlike ” “The Beach”

“The Prism” “The God” “Freedom of Speech” “A Picture of Otto” “Fingers” “The Dogs are Eating…” “Red”

9 Hughes & the Female Addressee Neil J.Roberts

The first words of Hughes’s earliest collected poem are “O lady:” a formal apostrophe, as saturated as possible with the signs of poetic convention. Remember that Crow had his head cut off for singing “O leaves.” The female addressee is completely sublimated: she is the lost or unattainable lover of Elizabethan sonnets, the sinister “ladie” of traditional ballads and above all, as many critics have remarked, the White Goddess of Robert Graves. If this poem was in any way inspired by a relationship with a real woman or girl, that empirical situation has left almost no trace. As Ekbert Faas says, she is “some oceanic goddess…the White Goddess to whose youthful worshipper Graves’ book…had already turned into a kind of Bible.” Faas also reports that the poem was written “as if to dictation” and that Hughes was left, Coleridge-like, “with the frustrating recollection of a lost line he failed to jot down” (Faas 71). It is a classic example of what Graves calls a Muse poem, directly inspired by the Muse and taking her as its subject. Graves writes: “a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust” (24). In The Hawk in the Rain this poem, “Song,” was placed first. In the various selected volumes it is pushed into second place by “The Thought-Fox.” This is certainly a more appropriate introduction to the poems that immediately follow it in Hughes’s oeuvre: Faas points out that such direct representation of the Goddess almost disappears from Hughes’s poetry until Gaudete. But if we focus on the second half of his career, and especially on Gaudete, the “Uncollected” section of New Selected Poems, and Birthday Letters, the female addressee is of central importance. At the same time, the mere mention of these texts signals that the female addressee has crucially different forms and meanings at different stages, or in different projects. In these different forms and meanings can be seen something of the gender struggle that Hughes’s oeuvre enacts. The peculiar characteristic of apostrophe as a poetic device is that someone who is absent is addressed as if she were present, (I am excluding here apostrophes to inanimate addressees such as the “Ode to the West Wind” which conventionalise an equally absurd form of address). The addressee is usually dead or has deserted the speaker: hence it is particularly associated with funeral elegy and love poetry. Jonathan Culler has written that in apostrophic poetry

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“something once present has been lost or attenuated,” and that apostrophes “replace this irreversible structure by removing the opposition between presence and absence from empirical time and locating it in discursive time” (Culler 49– 50). This shift from the empirical to the discursive is very convenient for the kind of apostrophic poetry typified by “Song,” in which the addressee is sublimated, even apotheosised, and stripped of empirical characteristics. I want to contrast this highly specialised form of address with the normative conception of social utterance—including literary utterance—espoused by the School. In Marxism and the Philosophy of Language Voloshinov wrote that Orientation of the word toward the addressee has an extremely high significance. In point of fact, word is a two-sided act. It is determined equally by whose word it is and for whom it is meant. As word, it is precisely the product of the reciprocal relationship between the speaker and listener, addresser and addressee… I give myself verbal shape from another’s point of view (86). Bakhtin himself insisted that the speaker himself is always also a “respondent” who presupposes “the existence of preceding utterances” (1986 69), and that the word “break[s] through to its own meaning and its own expression across an environment full of alien words” (1981 277). In other words, addressivity is bound up with intertextuality. The removal of the apostrophic addressee from “empirical time” to “discursive time,” especially when accompanied by the kind of sublimation that we have seen in “Song,” drastically affects the poem’s intertextual bearings. The immediate allegiance of “Song” to The White Goddess obviously relates it to a vast network of poetic and religious imagery and ideas. It lends itself to the notion of intertextuality espoused by Barthes, for whom “the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read” (160). Although Barthes derives this anonymous conception of intertextuality via Kristeva from Bakhtin, Bakhtin’s own understanding of the relations between texts was very different. For him “the meeting of two texts” was “the meeting of two subjects and two authors” (1986 107). This definition of intertextuality seems to me to apply to apostrophic poems such as Tony Harrison’s elegies for his parents, where the addressees are not sublimated, and their words (or words attributed to them) have a function that would be completely dissipated if they were “anonymous.” The crucial case in Hughes’s oeuvre is of course Birthday Letters. As I have said, the female addressee, having disappeared after “Song,” reappears abundantly in the Epilogue to Gaudete. More than half the poems use the device, which contributes powerfully to the sequence’s impression of withdrawal, loneliness and concentration. It appears again in the “Uncollected” section of New Selected Poems, where poems addressed to Sylvia and to Assia are presented in such a way that a reader without biographical information would not be able to identify the addressees. Finally, the fact that all but four of Birthday

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Letters are addressed to Sylvia was one of the most frequently remarked features of the book when it was published. The Gaudete epilogue poems are addressed to “a nameless female deity.” Hughes wrote in a letter that in them “Lumb adds up several women in his life, assuming them, as he does so, into that female in the other world (or hidden in this world)—and naturally I could only lend him people I have known.” He was particularly informative about the poem “I know well.” Hughes’s response to an admittedly rather insensitive criticism of this poem was to ask whether it made any difference to know that “the girl in “I know well” was Susan Allison, who died very slowly of Hodgkins’ disease, very aware of what was happening to her” (Letter to Neil Roberts and Terry Gifford, October 1978). My answer to that question is yes, it does make a difference, and ever since I have had this information I have thought this one of Hughes’s most moving pieces of writing. I don’t think this is because I am sentimentally importing into the poem a vicarious feeling about a real-life situation. It is not that the information adds something to the poem, but that the sublimation, the “assuming” as Hughes puts it of people he has known into the “female in the other world” obscures what is in the poem, distracts the reader from the particular human reality. Another problem, again arising from Hughes’s comment, concerns the best known of these poems, “Waving goodbye from your banked hospital bed.” The reason why this is the best known of them is that most readers assume it is about Sylvia Plath, mainly because of the lines, “You knocked the world off, like a flower-vase./It was the third time. And it smashed” which seem to allude to “Lady Lazarus.” In a letter to Leonard Scigaj however Hughes denied that the poem had anything to do with Plath (Brandes 187). An interesting intertextual point arises here, which reminds me of Bakhtin’s conflict-filled conception of the life of the word which “break[s] through to its own meaning and its own expression across an environment full of alien words” (1981 277). The words “the third time” do not literally occur in “Lady Lazarus,” where Plath writes “The first time,” “The second time” and “This is number three.” In most contexts such a commonplace phrase would not remind a reader of the poem, even if he or she were very familiar with it. But in the context of a Ted Hughes poem addressed to a dead female, it is almost as if Plath herself momentarily speaks. It is Bakhtin’s “alien word,” which Hughes’s word has to “break through.” But it fails. His attempted sublimation, his assumption of the women he has known into a “nameless female deity,” breaks down and the simple words which he cannot compel to serve his own meaning draw the poem into the gravitational field of Plath’s text. This could not happen if intertextual relations were, as Barthes claims, always “anonymous.” The situation is however more complex than this. It is not a question simply of one text, “Lady Lazarus,” ambushing Hughes’s poem. The peculiar malignity with which the poem seems to be hijacked by one little phrase owes not a little to the many other texts, mostly hostile to him, which have intervened between Plath’s writing and his own. Few cases could better

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exemplify the Bakhtinian word that “enters a dialogically agitated and tensionfilled environment of alien words, value judgements and accents.” (1981 276) We could say the same of Birthday Letters, though the relationship of these poems to the “word” of Sylvia Plath is very different from that of “Waving Goodbye.” In the Gaudete poem Hughes’s alleged intention of writing a poem that is not about Plath is subverted by the intertextual word. Birthday Letters are the most intensely and intimately but also the most deliberately intertextual of Hughes’s poems. Again and again he cites Plath’s poems, stories and journals, sometimes to startling effect. This manner of citation is intertwined with the often elaborately circumstantial character of the poems. These words of Plath’s are represented as belonging to the dramatic situations evoked by Hughes’s poems. At one level this could be seen as an indirect answer to one of the most resonant polemics in the Hughes—Plath wars, Marjorie Perloff’s comparison of the published Ariel with the collection that Plath prepared before her death. Perloff argued that the original sequence had a “narrative structure” centring on Hughes’s affair with Assia Wevill and his “actual desertion.” The published volume however is arranged to suggest that Plaths suicide was inevitable, caused by “her essential and seemingly incurable schizophrenia” (Perloff 313–4). In other words, in rearranging Ariel, removing some poems and adding others, Hughes suppressed its circumstantial basis. In Birthday Letters poems such as “The Rabbit Catcher,” “The 59th Bear” and “Black Coat,” he seems to be doing the opposite: restoring the poems and prose of Plath to the most minutely circumstantial context, one that only he knows because only he was there, and so outflanking the feminist argument. In “The Rabbit Catcher” Hughes writes lines that play intriguingly round those of Plath’s poem, but studiously ignores the sexual parallel, and with it the implied identification (according, as it were, to Perloff’s narrative) of himself with the rabbit catcher. Plath’s erotic language is replaced by an unsexualised and even sentimental family scene. By asserting his own perspective in this overt way Hughes answers not only Plath’s reaction to the traps but also the popular image of himself as a violent and sexual predator. The most direct echo, the image of the hands round the mug, is perhaps even more interesting. The brilliant detail of “blood in the cuticles” suggests that Hughes has immersed himself in Plath’s vision to the extent of retrieving from her consciousness a graphic image that did not find its way into her poem. This introduction of an element of horror that even exceeds that of the poem could be interpreted, again, as an outflanking manoeuvre. And why does Hughes change the colour of the mug from white to blue? In any other writer this could only be a mistake; in Hughes, however, it could be interpreted as a sign of access to an authentic reality not available in Plath’s poem. “Black Coat” narrates, in a more circumstantial way and from his point of view, the incident that inspired Plath’s poem “Man in Black.” His words, “Watching me/ Pin the sea’s edge down” echo hers, “riveting stones, air,/All of it, together.” But the significance of “Man in Black” is of course Plath’s later allusion to it in “Daddy,” where the hero of the earlier poem, and the rivets that

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image his power to create wholeness, are transformed into “a model of you,/A man in black with a Meinkampf look/And a love of the rack and the screw.” The manoeuvre of Hughes’s poem is to suggest that this transformation was already predetermined at the moment when Plath watched him at the sea’s edge: the moment, he imagines, when her father “crawled” from the sea and “slid into me.” The most audacious of these allusions is in “A Dream”: “Not dreams, I had said, but fixed stars/Govern a life.” This is more than an appropriation: it is a claim that Plath’s famous words are a quotation from himself.” Fixed stars/ Govern a life” are of course the last words of the poem “Words,” with which Hughes chose to conclude Ariel. It is neither the concluding poem of her proposed collection, which she drew up before it was written, nor the last poem she wrote. If Hughes really spoke these words, then here he is claiming—or confessing—that he literally gave himself the last word in Ariel. But “claim” and “confess” both miss the mark as attempts to describe Hughes’s tone here. He seems indifferent to the issue, leaving the tardy scholar to pick it up. The urgency of the lines is all to do with his communion with Plath, not at all with textual politics. He plays so blithely into the hands of his critics that he conveys his contempt for them far more effectively than in the prose polemics he occasionally yielded to, or the embarrassing poem “The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother.” I may seem to have strayed from the topic of the female addressee, but the questions of intertextuality that I have been discussing are closely bound up with those of addressivity. The second person of lyric poetry is notoriously nonspecific. To tie it to particular circumstances as Hughes does in Birthday Letters requires a great deal of work that lyric is traditionally reluctant to do. This can be illustrated if we think by contrast of the “Uncollected Poems” in New Selected Poems. These include eight poems later collected in Birthday Letters, followed by eight that are apparently about Assia Wevill: of each group seven are addressed to Sylvia or Assia respectively. This publication aroused nothing like the interest of Birthday Letters, although it was both a strong foretaste of that volume and, in the Assia poems, offered an additional frisson. This is partly a matter of marketing, but it also reflects the strong pull of this kind of poem towards anonymity and universality, the norm of “Song” and the Gaudete epilogue. The first “Assia” poem, “The Other,” which like many of the Birthday Letters borrows its title from Plath, concerns the envy of “you” for “her,” who is dead. These pronouns are entirely relational in their reference—“shifters,” as Jakobson called them. If we begin with the assumption that “you” is a particular person, Assia, the poem fits a particular set of circumstances. But it takes a reader specially attuned to the Hughes biography to make this assumption. There is no compelling reason why most readers should understand that the “you” of this poem is not that of the preceding sequence, even taking into account the interposition of “The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother,” addressed to Hughes’s

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children.” The Other” is followed by “The Locket” which refers to “Your death.” The references in this poem to the Song of Songs, Berlin and the swastika presumably signify Assia’s Jewishness and her Eastern European antecedents, but to a reader not aware of this they are strongly suggestive of well-known motifs in Plath’s poetry. The circumstantial differences between the two groups of poems are obscured, and the pull of this kind of poetry towards the anonymous and universal asserts itself. As I have pointed out earlier, apostrophic poetry is characterised by a peculiar and paradoxical temporality: the absent is addressed as if it were present, the dead person as if she were alive. This is a device which Plath herself used to profound effect, as Jacqueline Rose has argued, in “Daddy.” In most elegiac lyrics, however, this paradox is weak because the empirical, circumstantial pastness of the dead person is obscured in the ways I have been discussing. One of the great strengths of Birthday Letters is its management of this paradox, the exceptional sense of actuality with which the poems present the grieving writer conversing with his dead wife. Among the best examples of this are the poems that dwell on an incident in March 1956 when, after the notorious meeting at the St Botolph’s Review party, Hughes returned to Cambridge but failed to see Plath. Late at night he and his friend Lucas Myers threw mud at a Newnham window thinking it was hers, but they were mistaken. Plath knew he was in Cambridge, and waited in torment for him to visit her. Later he read her account of this in her journal. Hughes attaches a surprising importance to this episode, as if it stands for his general failure towards Plath: it figures much more prominently in Birthday Letters than his affair with Assia. In “The Machine” Hughes quotes directly from the journal: “A huge dark machine” and “The grinding indifferent/Millstone of circumstance.” (cf J 131) These words “Had come to you/When I did not.” Hughes’s account of his inactivity recalls the guilty heedlessness of the protagonist of Cave Birds in “Something Was Happening.” “Visit,” another poem about this incident, superimposes the moment of his failure to see her, that of her writing in the journal, a remembered moment when his daughter asked for her mother, and the moment of reading the journal ten years later. Plath’s writing in the journal is described in a remarkably phonocentric way: “Your actual words, as they floated/Out through your throat and tongue and onto your page.” These words are not mere signifiers but the literal traces of her presence. His remorse for his former absence is made the more poignant by his being there in the presence of these traces now, at the moment of reading the journal. The phonocentrism also intensifies the account of Hughes’s feeling as he reads: “I look up—as if to meet your voice/With all its urgent future/That has burst in upon me.” The illusion that the words in the journal are literally traces of her voice allows for a moment the even more tormenting illusion that the unachieved future is still just that: a future. Then the journal shrinks back into mere signification: “printed words. /You are ten years dead. It is only a story.” In “The Machine” the moment of his guilty absence, drinking in the pub, is

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imagined as the moment in which he is swallowed by Plath’s fate and passes into another time in which, again, the dead possibilities of the past are still alive. In an important way these poems owe their poignancy to something that is uncharacteristic of Birthday Letters: they are concerned with, indeed obsessed with, Hughes’s absence from Plath at the moment they return to. In the more typical Birthday Letters poem Hughes and Plath are both present, and the circumstances are once shared memories that are now only his. In two cases he uses the fiction of her presence to ask her to “Remember.” In “The Bird,” which takes as its central image that of “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,” he writes, “Remember,/Circling Boston Common together,/The defective jailbird walk we perfected,” and in “Daffodils,” “Remember how we picked the daffodils?” In normal circumstances devices such as this are touching; in Hughes’s case they are also polemical. The shared memory that is now only his, so that he can appeal to her for confirmation, is part of the rhetoric of authority that runs throughout Birthday Letters. This is a man who wrote to Alvarez, protesting about The Savage God, “It is infuriating for me to see my private experiences and feelings re-invented for me, in that crude, bland, unanswerable way, and interpreted and published as official history” (Malcolm 125). It is not only Alvarez’s memoir that aroused this reaction, and one can only too easily imagine his response to, for example, Marjorie Perloff’s “bland, unanswerable” reference to his “actual desertion,” which she claimed his version of Ariel obscured. In their treatment of the female addressee Birthday Letters are at the opposite extreme from “Song” and the Gaudete epilogue. In them Hughes abandons his project of obliterating the identities of the women he has known while subsuming them into the figure of the Goddess. His sense of failure is not merged with a generalised lament about man’s violation of nature, unlike Lumb, responsible for the deaths of at least three women, when he writes, “The trousseau of the apple/Came by violence into my possession… I forestalled God —/I assailed his daughter.” Birthday Letters’ insistence on actual circumstances resists the pull of apostrophic poetry away from empirical time and into discursive time. The fiction of the dead person’s presence does not have its usual consolatory effect. This insistence, which I have suggested is counter to the generic norms of lyric poetry, also accounts for the uncharacteristic flatness of much of the language, the comparative absence of the specifically linguistic energy that we normally expect from Hughes. I have also suggested that it is polemical, an attempt to answer the “bland, unanswerable” feminist reading of Ariel according to a narrative that “reinvents” his private experience. The citation of Plath’s poetry and prose is a part of this polemic. It is not a dialogue in the sense that her words answer his. By attaching her texts to circumstances of which he is the only surviving witness he asserts his authority, claiming back ownership of his own experience. In doing so, however, he also claims ownership of the meaning of Plath’s words—even, as we have seen, in one case literally claiming them as his own. It is a deeply moving but also a deeply obdurate work.

10 Ted Hughes’s Anti-Mythic Method Joanny Moulin

In his 1923 article “Ulysses, Order & Myth,” T.S.Eliot hailed James Joyce as the inventor of “the mythic method,” saying that “Mr Joyce’s parallel use of the Odyssey has a great importance. It has the importance of a scientific discovery” (175), He also said that it was “a method for which the horoscope is auspicious,” (176) and it is easy to rush and see Hughes as one of the continuators of this mythic method. Still, a closer scrutiny of the issue ought to have been brought about by a 1975 article by Stuart Hirschberg, “Myth and Anti-Myth in Ted Hughes’s Crow.” For Ted Hughes’s way is rather an anti-mythic method in several respects. This jarring note might well break the nice crystal “mythos” of an unproblematical rapprochement of Ted Hughes with T.S.Eliot. The “Tributes to T.S.Eliot” that Hughes has published in A Dancer to God, and his dubbing Eliot “a great literary shaman of the spiritual tradition of the West” in Shakespeare & the Goddess of Complete Being (89) are most certainly the expression of a genuine admiration. But a pig should not be bought in a poke. For it is a very convenient cover-up of the fact that T.S.Eliot was an active defender of “The Idea of a Christian Society,” which Ted Hughes has insistantly declared himself not to be. Besides, in his 1970 interview with Ekbert Faas, Hughes explained that an artist may develop both outwardly and inwardly. He picked the example of T.S.Eliot, in words which in many ways echo his definition of the “mythic method” as “simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (177). Hughes said that a poet must “develop inwardly”, which means to find out the patterns to organise the “inner world.” This may lead to the creat tion of an “original mythology,” or, failing that,. “you may uncover the Cross as Eliot did” (Faas 204). Incidentally, Hughes’s own “mythology” turned out to be hardly more original, for it is simply the radical opposite. In fact, the difference between Eliot and Hughes in this respect rests on a conceptual bind. For the word myth does not mean exactly the same thing for the two of them. And this is mostly because they speak on the two sides of a major transformation in the history of ideas. In 1923, T.S.Eliot wrote that “Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a

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few years ago” (178). But, in the 1950s, Jungian psychology and Sir John Frazer would be part of the staple reading of a Cambridge student in English and social anthropology like Ted Hughes. Still, they did agree at least on one word to qualify myth—it is the word dodge. Eliot, while criticizing Adlington’s criticism of Ulysses, expressed what would then become a widespread opinion concerning Joyce’s “parallel to the Odyssey” saying that “it has been treated as an amusing dodge, or scaffolding erected by the author to the purpose of disposing his realistic tale, of no interest in the completed structure” (175). As T.S.Eliot saw it, myth was still very much a tool to be used in a method, that is to say as a means to an end. Eliot’s “mythic method” can be read as an extension and a variant of the “objective correlative.” There is only a difference of degree between “finding the formula of that particular emotion” (48) and using myth as “a way of giving a shape and a significance to” something else (177). Now it first seems that Ted Hughes is saying the same thing when he writes that “mythologies are dodgy things,” which for him are “nothing more than the picture language that we invent” to express “the deeper shared understandings which keep us intact as a group” (WP 310). But he is speaking of “mythologies” and, in his vocabulary, “myths” are more precisely defined as those “deeper shared understandings.” The difference is extremely important, yet it remains evasive and unclear, as nearly all the concepts Hughes makes use of are “dodgy,” provisional scaffoldings. Yet, very graphically, he goes on using the word “mythologies” between inverted commas, saying: “one ‘mythology’ that I found ready to hand was the natural world—all the various creatures of the world, and their doings, in their places or out of them” (312). Hughes’s definition of myth is very close to that of the referent, that is to say an extra-linguistic fact, of which a given group of people may have a common experience, or mytholoy. A set of such given references, which amounts to the common “picture language” of a poet and his readers, is what Hughes calls “mythos.” But the words “mythology” and “mythos” have here undergone a reversal of their etymological and commonly accepted meanings. “Mythology” or “mythologia” is either the history and the study of fabulous tales, or such fabulous tales themselves. A “myth” or “mythos” is a fabulous story, or such a use of language. But this is not what Hughes means here—he does not mean mythos as “legend,” in the sense of Pindaros of Thebes who opposed it to logos. Hughes operates an implicit reversal of values, and for him mythos is truer than logos. This key tenet of Hughes’s poetry has been understood and established by Keith Sagar, as early as The Art of Ted Hughes, with such assertions as, for instance: “To see something as real, in all its fullness of being, is to recognise it as a manifestation of the sacred, a hierophany” (210). To translate Sagar’s assertion into Hughes’s vocabulary of Shakespeare & the Goddess of Complete Being, seeing something as “real” or “sacred” is tantamount to seeing it on what Hughes calls “the mythic plane” (219) or in “the mythic dimension” (221). In a sense, Hughes is turning Plato’s cave inside out. For, to him, logos is the pseudos, and mythos is closer to essential truth. One might even go as far as to

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say that, for Hughes, myth itself stands for an ontological absolute. Myth, according to Hughes, is actually anti-myth. It is not at all a random element of some “myth-kitty,” as Larkin would have it, out of which the poet might pick and choose, as in a creative-writing tool-box, to express whatever ineffable emotions. On the contrary, myth is emotion. In short, for Hughes, myth is not a method, it is the target. That is because, for Hughes, there is no real solution of continuity between words and things, any more than between physics and metaphysics. Mythos is for him, as it were, the connective side of logos. At face value, Hughes agrees with Derrida that “There is nothing outside of the text” (158). Simply, Hughes makes no difference between “the referent or the transcendental signified” and what would be a transcendental signifier. Even Nature, even the Goddess, is always already a myth, that is to say a text—or, to be more accurate, a tissue. This biological metaphor of myth as living text pervades and sustains the whole of Hughes’s poetry. It is verified as early as The Hawk in the Rain where the Thought-Fox is a literal-cum-animal hybrid. And it is verified still in Birthday Letters where “a poem unfurled from you/Like a loose frond of hair from your nape/To be clipped and kept in a book,” (61) or where the “sacrifice” that Sylvia’s hands make when she writes is a “story,” and therefore a mythos. This basic tenet of Hughes’s vision of the world was expounded as early as his two “Myth and Education” papers. In the second of these, the 1976 text then partly reprinted in Ekbert Faas’ The Unaccommodated Universe and now in Winter Pollen, it reached a form of conceptual expression with the antithetic phrase of “true myth.” Hughes wrote that “the unspoken definition of myth is that it carries truth of that sort” (152). And the sort of truth in question is given by the definition of myth as “tribal dreams of the highest order of inspiration and truth” which give “a true account of what really happens in that inner region where the two worlds collide” (151). Hughes’s philosophy can be defined as a psychology, and more precisely a historicist psychology in which myth is the closest possible approximation of transcendental truth, but is fundamentally the product of human history. There is no saying why this upside-down definition of myth as truth should remain “unspoken,” except, perhaps, that if it were more clearly stated it would run the risk of meeting some serious critical contradiction. But, be it as it may, these considerations lay the basis for an unobtrusive shift from an epistemological to an ethical ground. This revised definition of myth enables a discreet progression from the question of what is [the] truth—which, incidentally, is also the title of one of Hughes’s books of poetry for children, echoing Pilate’s last question to Christ (John 18:38)—to the question of what is good. In his first “Myth and Education” paper, a 1970 article which has never been reprinted, Hughes propounded a surprisingly black-and-white appreciation of literature. He declared that the “great works of imaginative literature” may either be good, in which case “they are hospitals where we heal, where our imaginations are healed,” or “evil works,” in which case “they are also

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battlefields where we get injured” (67). By extension, this medical metaphor of literature casts some light on how to understand Ted Hughes’s idea of the poet as a shaman. By his dealings with the “mythic plane,” a shaman, that is also to say, in Hughes’s vocabulary, a “mythic poet” may heal his cultural community. That is why these “shamans” appear, or so Hughes says, in moments of severe crisis (see, e. g. SGCB 89–90). To the question of how to tell whether a shaman’s influence is good or evil, it is to be feared that the only one to know the answer is the shaman himself. Hughes says that “priests continually elaborate the myths, but what is not true is forgotten again” (WP 152). Therefore, supposedly, if the shaman’s myths were not true, and therefore not good, then they simply would not rouse any reader’s interest to speak of. Ted Hughes is a moralist, and it is too easily forgotten that he is one with an axe to grind. One of the main points of Stuart Hirschberg’s “Myth and AntiMyth in Ted Hughes’s Crow,” corroborated by Hughes himself in his interviews with Ekbert Faas, is that we are dealing with an anti-Christian polemist. Ted Hughes is, so to speak, a latterday Celsus, or an English Nietzsche of sorts,. and his method has quite overtly been to launch mythic antidotes to the Christian myths. In the first “Myth and Education” paper, he defined the story of Saint George, which in his opinion is “the key symbolic story of Christianity,” as “the symbolic story of creating a neurosis,” saying that it was “the key to the neuroticmaking dynamics of Christianity.” He went on to explain that it was “exactly the story and exactly the symbolic condition” that, in his story of The Iron Man at least, he was “trying to reverse” (66). Needless to say that this is not exactly the kind of point of view that could easily be reconciled with T.S.Eliot’s favourite values. It goes without saying that The Iron Man is far from being the only one of Hughes’s texts to which this anti-Christian ethos applies. There is no need to repeat how the poems of Crow wage systematic attacks against the Old and the New Testament, from Genesis to the Gospel of Love (which God ridiculously fails to teach Crow) and to the cartoon resurrection of the Trickster. Needless to recall how Gaudete is a burlesque attempt at showing how “Christianity’s something about women,” (65) and a stubborn mistaking of agape for eros. There is no need to more or less admiringly reassert how River literally reeks with New-Age neo-paganism, towards the climactic proclamation of the mating salmons at the hour of their death as the “Arks of an undelivered covenant,” (CPH 667) in “The dance orgy of being reborn” (254). But it might be worthwhile to make a pause on this particular detail. I have quoted from the poem “The Gulkana,” such as it is printed not in the first, 1983 edition of River, but in the New Selected Poems 1957–1994 and the Collected Poems, or in the 1984 American edition of River where the poet had already amended his text to the version he was to keep. One of the changes consists in having, for example, chosen to write “covenant” instead of “promise,” and introduced the vision of the “dance-orgy” in the textual vicinity of the notion of resurrection here revised as palingenesic rebirth. Whatever the motivations for these minor textual

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amendments, the net result is that here we have a resolutely neo-pagan poem which comes to flirt, as close as it can, with a key Christian myth and its accustomed vocabulary. The same remark applies to “Salmon Eggs,” for instance, where “tidings” (R 122) has been changed for “advent” in “This is the liturgy/Of Earth’s advent” (CPH 681). This could be merely coincidental, but it is in fact an instance of textual tuning which is part of a systematised tactic. Ted Hughes’s anti-mythic method is a strategy of brinkmanship and subliminal influence. One prototype of an anti-myth in character form is Gog, the Old Testament fiend from Ezekiel recycled as an avatar of the Anti-Christ, saying: “Hearing the Messiah cry/My mouth widens in adoration” (W 150). In like manner, an antimythic poem strives to mimic the myth it is targeting. Unlike a pastiche, which is a declared instrument of satire or of simple Jamesonian play, an anti-myth works by stealth and chameleonic camouflage. It often seems to be tapping, or rather harnessing, the ready-made energy of a pre-existent myth, the better to subvert it, in a quasi viral way. That is equally true of isolated textual instances, as of the larger mythic bases, the “blueprints” or projects, of which Crow and Cave Birds are the superstructures. This is the subtextual pattern of the shamanic flight, which I have suggested to call Hughes’s monomyth after Joseph Campbell, the author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, who derived it from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (581) and defined it as “The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: separation—initiation—return: which might be named the nuclear unit of the monomyth” (Campbell 30). Now Hughes’s compulsive riding of this hobby-horse of eternal return is repeatedly done in terms that keep verging on Christian imagery, which generates the strong implicit impression that the Christian myth of the Resurrection is just another avatar of the same. The unspoken, and all the more potent, poetic discourse is that Christianity (1) has invented nothing very new and (2) has drawn the wrong conclusions from its discovery. One of the clearest examples of this can be found in a series of poems which tackle the Crucifixion. The realisation that we are dealing with crucifixion poems, which are in fact anti-crucifixion poems, is likely to dawn on the chronological reader with “The Contender,” (C 41–2) who is said to “lay crucified with all his strength/On the earth.” “The Contender” is a simple antimyth of a poem, which revises the crucifixion from a non-Christian point of view, which is also that of the poet of “Mount Zion” (RE 62) for whom “Christ was only a naked bleeding worm/ Who had given up the ghost.” The same item of poetic discourse is conveyed in a later Crow poem, “Crow Blacker than Ever” (69), where the sacrifice of the Son of Man on the Cross is depicted as a stupid prank of Crow’s and a gangrenous, stinking blind-alley. But these simple anti-Christian poems are still an early stage of the global antimyth, which will then develop and grow, although in an altogether linear, chronological way. Within the Crow collection itself, a solution has already been

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found out of the impasse of the crucifixion myth and the deadlock of radical antimythic opposition. The solving of this problem is what Crow is really about. And the mythic tissue starts growing perceptibly in “Crow’s Battle Fury” (67–8), which is really an extension of stanza VIII in the final_version of “Skylarks” (CPH 173–6), for the myth of the crucifixion is being yoked to, and begins its hybridisation with, the Irish myth of Cuchulain. So that, for the first time, we are presented with a positive crucifixion poem, with a hero of a new type, whose vision has evolved—“One of his eyes sinks into his skull, tiny as a pin” —and who is beginning to take into account the non-conceptual energies that Christianity allegedly suppresses. By a process of iteration, Ted Hughes’s poetic writing has thus gone at least one step beyond “uncover[ing] the Cross,” as he once said T.S.Eliot merely did. Crow remains Ted Hughes’s masterpiece collection, for the reason that it is the locus of his work where a literal solution, or dissolution of the Christian myth of the crucifixion is being invented. The anti-myth is here a kind of thaw. The mythic construct is literally beginning to melt down and away. On the “objective correlative” plane of the imagery, the Promethean body of the crucified, which is the human body qua structural concept, is tearing free and liquefying, on its way back to the womboneness of oceanic presence. This barely incipient anti-mythic change will have acquired a fuller and more visible momentum in a later poem of Wolfwatching, “Take What You Want But Pay For It,” (42–4) which is both a crucifixion poem and a pieta. That revised crucifixion poem becomes a major stereotype in Hughes’s poetry, in the sense that, like an intratextual Auerbachian “Figure,” it recurs again and again in Hughes’s work under various guises. And it is one of the stereotyped representations of what he would later call the “Theophany” in Shakespeare & the Goddess. The “bleeding worm” of the Crucified in “Mount Zion” (RE 62) has eventually achieved its metamorphosis, or, as Hughes puts it when speaking about Shakespeare: “The muddy, dragonish tragic larva has suddenly split—and this shimmering nuptial insect (the Theophany) rises out of it, in a halo.” (SGCB 329) Another occurrence of the same is to be found at the end of Prometheus On His Crag, which is the same as Orghast, when Hughes’s Prometheus Unbound, like Shakespeare’s Adonis, blooms on the bosom of his motherly crag. Exactly as Cuchulain in “Crow’s Battle Fury” (C 68) is “a hair’s breadth out of the world” and “comes forward as step,/and a step,/and a step—” Prometheus “treads/On the dusty peacock film where the world floats” (M 92). And yet another occurrence of the same, which is probably the most accomplished, is to be found at the end of Cave Birds, in the hatching out of “The Risen” (60), where Hopkins’ aviary symbol of the Cross is being burnt out—“when he soars, his shape/Is a cross, eaten by light,/On the Creator’s face.” Hughes’s anti-mythic discovery can thus be traced in this movement from Crucifixion Poems to Theophany Poems. On a minor mode, Hughes had made an earlier attempt at analysing his own mythopoetic method, in a 1977 interview with Ekbert Faas. He was then trying to use the concepts of the “masculine” and

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the “feminine,” to explain the underlying blueprint narrative which was to Crow what the Odyssey must have been to Ulysses. This mythic pattern, or “Crow project,” is expounded in the appendix to Keith Sagar’s The Laughter of Foxes. In short, the gist of the matter was for Crow, the hero-poet, to “move from one pole of total disaster in the relationship between him and the female to the opposite pole of totally successful, blissful union” (Faas 213). The marriage poems of Cave Birds and the alchemical conjunctio oppositorum that they exemplify are the theoretical link between the gender issue and the metaphysical issue. Still, as Keith Sagar’s development implicitly corroborates, the gender issue is a corollary, or, rather, it is already a thematic metaphor of a more general philosophical thesis. This theological thesis, this recognizable progress or change at the centre of his work, is what is essential to Hughes’s specific poetic genius and individual talent. It happens in Crow. But it has been made more visible by the light that has been cast on it by Birthday Letters. Remarkably, the “Ted Hughes” character of Birthday Letters is the persona of a previous self, over whom the later Hughes is reflexively pondering, in the manner, too, of the Rousseau of the Confessions. One of the outstanding features of Hughes’s last collection of poems is the powerful resurgence, towards the end, of crucifixion poems. Foremost among those is “Life after Death” (182–3), where the Crucified, “The Hanged Man,” is overtly equated with the earlier “Ted Hughes” character. Hughes identifies his former self as being in a Christ-like position on the mythic plane—“I fancied the pain could be explained/If I were hanging in the spirit/From a hook under my neck-muscle.” This poetic statement is complemented by another, made most clearly in the two poems “Being Christlike” (153) and “The God” (188–91), where it is “Sylvia Plath,” the poetic figure, who is construed as being caught in a Christlike spiritual attitude, offering herself up in sacrifice, as a transparent answer to the enigma of “a Salvia/Pressed in a Lutheran Bible.” The way of Hughes’s poetry is then no longer to be seen as the ever iterated construction of new myths, but as the ideal sloughing off of the chrysalis of words. It is the ultimate antimythic method of Khepry, the Egyptian beetle, the scarab-god and verb of metamorphic, literally amorphous being.

11 In Search of the Autobiography of Ted Hughes Diane Wood Middlebrook

In June 1999 I received a contract from Viking Press to write a book about Ted Hughes, with the expectation of completing a manuscript by the end of the year 2000. Explicitly stated in the prospectus was my intention not to write a biography. Ted Hughes would have been dead for only fourteen months and three days when the new Millennium arrived; members of his family and many of his friends were still in mourning for him. Yet because Hughes was now dead, those of us without personal relationships to negotiate were free to be curious about him. Hughes had invited that curiosity in one of his last books: Birthday Letters, a meditation on his famous marriage. But Ted Hughes had been producing autobiographical writings steadily, if sotto voce, throughout his career. By the time of his death, Hughes—much like his early master W.B.Yeats—had devised a persona of himself that I believe was meant as a legacy to posterity. Ted Hughes established the means of pursuing the project of piecing together the history of this persona by selling a very large collection of his papers to the Robert W.Woodruff Library at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.1 Hughes organized the archive himself, and prepared an annotated inventory to accompany it to Atlanta. Visitors were permitted to see this interesting document, even before the archive had been completely catalogued by the library staff. The manila file folder containing the inventory was an inch and a half thick. Open it, and the first sheet to meet your eyes was an 8x10 glossy photograph: Ted Hughes at home, surrounded by boxes, composing the very notes you are about to look at. The date is late autumn 1996.2 Hughes is sitting forward on a wooden chair, elbows on his knees, turning the pages of what appears to be a business letter. A heavy gold wedding band shines prominently on the ring finger of his left hand. His mouth is closed in a firm relaxed line, chin and jaw blurred by a couple of days’ growth of beard. On his nose are large spectacles with dark amber frames from which a cord runs under the collar of an olive shirt that has been left unbuttoned at the neck far enough to disclose the gray hair on his chest. He is wearing light-colored khaki pants. One dark brown shoe is in evidence, the other is lost behind the ranks of cardboard cartons that fill the foreground of the picture, covering much of the tweedy carpet and an Oriental rug (in the archive

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later you will find letters negotiating the acquisition of this rug). On the table to Hughes’s right, a chinoiserie lamp illuminates the pages in his hand, and a red magic marker lies within reach. On the wall behind him hang several prints. One is identifiably an image by Leonard Baskin: either a cave-bird or a crow, with feathers like plates of Japanese armor. Here is a man surrounded by his life’s work, which he is itemizing in preparation for sale to a library. It is finished, says this pose; and at Hughes’s back we notice a wooden door. If the picture conveys a sense of pathos, though, it is entirely in the eye of the beholder who knows the date of Ted Hughes’s exit. The man we are looking at will go on to publish six more books, we remember. And at this particular moment he is completely unselfconscious, ignoring the camera, intent on the business at hand, boxing a jigsaw puzzle of 108, 000 pieces. 3

I began with this image because it is a view widely held in the world that Hughes was a man who protected his privacy. Such was the theme of commentary that followed the publication of Birthday Letters, early in 1998, ten months before Hughes died of cancer. Two sample headlines from the front pages of prestigious newspapers suffice to convey the way journalists defined the book’s importance: “Revealed: The Most Tragic Literary Love Story of Our Time” was the headline in the London Times. The New York Times inserted an American angle: “In Poetry, Ted Hughes Breaks His Silence on Sylvia Plath.” The reporter Sarah Lyall gave a typical slant to the story: “It has been nearly 35 years since the poet Sylvia Plath put her head in a gas oven, killing herself at age 30 soon after her husband left her for another woman. And for all that time, her widower, the poet Ted Hughes, has maintained an implacable silence about their life together, emerging from his self-protective cocoon only occasionally, mostly to correct errors or to write prefaces to Plath’s work… Mr. Hughes said through his British publisher, Faber & Faber, that he wanted his work to speak for itself and did not want to be interviewed.” Implacable: odd choice; means “cannot be appeased or pacified.” She probably meant inexorable—“cannot be prevailed upon to yield to request” — for Hughes was a famous avoider of journalists, except when he was promoting one or another good cause: the need for poetry in the schools, the need for clean

1. Emory began acquiring Ted Hughes manuscripts in 1985, and made a series of small purchases in the late 1980s and early from a variety of different manuscripts dealers. In late 1995 or early 1996 Stephen Enniss, Curator of Literary Collections at Emory, received a phone call from Roy Davids, Hughes’s agent, inquiring whether Emory would be interested in acquiring Hughes’s literary archive. In November Ennis went to England to see the materials first-hand. Negotiations continued over the Winter, and in February 1997 Ennis returned to pack and ship materials to Emory. The archive was officially opened for research in April 2000. 2. Steve Enniss dated the photograph in a conversation with DM, 14 October 1999. 3. Steven Enniss” estimate, e-mail to DM, 17 February 2000.

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waterways. At one point he explained himself bluntly: “My silence seems to confirm every accusation and fantasy… I preferred it, on the whole, to allowing myself to be dragged out into the bullring and teased and pricked and goaded into vomiting up every detail of my life with Sylvia” (Lyall). But I would say that both Hughes’s sale of his papers to Emory, and Hughes’s own published contributions to our information about him speak otherwise. I speculate that his refusal to be interviewed was motivated not so much by a desire for privacy as by a rejection of the rhetorical position of respondent. He will allow no one else to establish the terms of his self-presentation. And in presenting himself in print, he was willing to be usefully forthcoming. My initial survey indicates that on eight occasions between 1965–1998 Hughes made significant published contributions to an autobiographical account of his marriage to Sylvia Plath: • 1965: interview with John Horder in The Guardian. • 1966: publication of “The chronological order of Sylvia Plath’s poems’ in a special issue of the literary journal, TriQuarterly. • 1974: correspondence with the Yale graduate student Judith Kroll, which he permitted to be published in the book that emerged from her doctoral dissertation, Chapters in a Mythology. • 1975: publication of Letters Home, with which Hughes took an active editorial role. • 1981: publication of Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, which Hughes edited and introduced. • 1982: an edition of the Journals of Sylvia Plath, on which Hughes served as Consulting Editor. • 1994: correspondence with Jacqueline Rose, Anne Stevenson and Janet Malcolm, which he permitted to appear in Malcolm’s book The Silent Woman. • 1998: publication of Birthday Letters.4 The narrative goes this way: they shared an apprenticeship; Plath completed her apprenticeship in the creation, in her poetry, of a “real self,” and Hughes was the privileged witness of that process; Plath’s suicide left Hughes the steward of that self. He is qualified for this role because he understands poetic genius. Hughes began elaborating this story in print as early as March 1965, at the time of the posthumous publication of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel. Here is an excerpt from the interview that appeared in The Manchester Guardian, 25 March 1965, in which Ted Hughes discusses his relationship to the author of Ariel:

4. Full publication details: John Horder, “Desk Poet,” Ted Hughes, “The chronological order of Sylvia Plath’s poems,” Judith Kroll, Chapters in a Mythology, Sylvia Plath, Letters Home, The Collected Poems and The Journals of Sylvia Plath; Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman.

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There was no rivalry between us as poets or in any other way. It sounds trite but you completely influence one another if you live together. You begin to write out of one brain. Sylvia was completely original though. She may have been influenced by Stevens and Lowell in a couple of poems but she had found her own voice. She wrote an enormous amount, eight or nine books before Heinemann took “The Colossus,” and every nine months or so the body of her manuscripts would undergo a complete change. You see, she needed to write—she could produce a characteristic poem at any time she liked. After we’d returned to England and were living in Chalcot Square near Primrose Hill, we would each write poetry every day. It was all we were interested in, all we ever did. We were like two feet, each one using everything the other did. It was a working partnership and it was all absorbing. We just lived it. There was an unspoken unanimity in every criticism or judgment we made (Horder). Further developments of this narrative occurred in conjunction with economic opportunities that emerged from the successful marketing of Plath’s work. Though Ted Hughes’s sister Olwyn served as the business manager of the Plath estate, Hughes remained firmly in control of editorial issues. His introduction to Plath’s Collected Poems is remarkable for the attitude of entitlement with which he reveals his editorial interventions on Plath’s behalf. “The Ariel eventually published in 1965 was a somewhat different volume from what she had planned… omitted some of the more personally aggressive poems from 1962… Several advisers had felt that the violent contradictory feelings expressed in those pieces might prove hard for the reading public to take” (CPP 15). Collected Poems, Hughes notes, contains “not merely what verse she saved but—after 1956—all she wrote” (13). It also contains, in a set of notes by Hughes, a considerable amount of quotation from Plath’s journals, which Hughes was currently preparing for publication in the USA (though not in the UK). Hughes’s “Foreword” to the journals carries the story yet another step along. Speaking from the vantage of the intimacy provided by marriage, he offers an idealizing characterization of Plath’s development as an artist, in an explanatory trope. “One can compare what was really going on in her to a process of alchemy. Her apprentice writings were like impurities thrown off from the various stages of the inner transformation… The negative phase of it, logically, is suicide. But the positive phase (more familiar in religious terms) is the death of the old false self in the birth of a new real one. And this is what she finally did achieve, after a long and painful labor.” (J xi–xii) This narrative has many subtexts. The most significant, in my view, is the unexpressed comparison Hughes communicates: She became “real” in her work; how “real” am I? What kind of “self” could be comparable to hers? What would it mean to be “real” —in words?

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I believe that the last works of Ted Hughes constructed an answer, when, in the poems of Birthday Letters and his other “last” works, Hughes exchanged the position of critic for that of husband. In surviving his accomplished wife, a writer like himself, Hughes joined a small but important coterie: Robert Browning. John Middleton Murry, the husband of Katherine Mansfield. Scott Fitzgerald, husband of Zelda. Leonard Woolf, husband of Virginia. Even, it might be argued, T.S.Eliot, husband of Vivien. Like several of them, Hughes held the position of legal executor of the woman writer’s literary estate. Like a couple of them, he used that position to promote her posthumous reputation. But Hughes differs from all of them in having embraced the role of husband with his imagination. His last works, even the translations in which his own subjectivity seems absent, offer a searingly personal register of the vicissitudes of living through the late 20th century as the partner of a culturally influential woman whose importance increased with the development of the feminist movement in the last quarter of this century. Crucial to this development in Hughes’s self-presentation was his appointment in 1984 as Poet Laureate to the Queen. During all the years since Plath’s death in 1963 Hughes had managed to make a living by shrewd management of his own publications, and by investing income earned by the estate of Sylvia Plath. His letters to friends indicate, however, that during the 1970s and 1980s he felt stalled and unfulfilled as a writer of poetry. Nonetheless, Ted Hughes had become a greatly esteemed public figure, partly because of the popularity of his writings for children, and partly because of his advocacy on behalf of writers. The Laureateship gave new impetus to his critical work. He began to pursue what was a perhaps unconscious program of writing for the British public a unified field theory5 of British poetry. He offered the hypothesis6 that the voice of poetry is the voice of the god the Greeks called Eros, the god of sensuous love, and claimed that, in Britain, this voice had been suppressed at the time of the Puritan Revolution. Hughes observes that Puritanism invested all attributes of the Creator in a Jehovah of extreme, militant rationality, banishing the claims of bodily pleasure, divesting religion of its goddesses. The erotic, associated with femaleness, could not be adored, so it was repressed; split off, it returned in demonized form, as lust. Thus, according to Hughes, Shakespeare’s poetry “has its taproot in a sexual dilemma of a peculiarly black and ugly sort.” (WP 106) Again and again in a Shakespearean plot, “the newly throned god and the deposed goddess tore each other to pieces” (WP 111) at the mythic level. Translating this thesis into more contemporary language, Hughes says that Shakespeare’s work “dramatizes the biological polarity of the life of the body and the archaic nervous system and the life of the reflexive cortex.” (WP 120). In other words, the black and ugly conflict between the sexes is an outcome of

5. Hughes applied this phrase to the work of T.S.Eliot in “The Poetic Self: A Centenary Tribute to T.S.Eliot,” (WP 268).

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identifying mind with masculinity, and setting it in dominance over the female, a Western cultural ideology so pervasive it seems natural. Hughes first roughed out this thesis in 1971, in an introduction to a selection of Shakespeare’s verse. In 1992, speaking as Poet Laureate, he elaborated the argument in the massive tome Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being. Like many poet-critics, Hughes seems to have lavished his critical skills on the work of another writer the better to clarify something inchoate in his own imagination. Completing this exhaustive work on Shakespeare did indeed unblock Hughes’s own creativity. From this time forward, Hughes began to explore as his own the sexual dilemma he had pinpointed first in Shakespeare’s tragedies. In all of Hughes writings from 1994 until his death, he reveals an obsessively personal engagement with discoveries about human being that emerge in the dynamics of a marriage, but cannot be understood until the marriage is over, has become an object among others on a wide horizon of social meanings. In the last works of Hughes’s Laureateship, the former themes of his writings are replaced by a focus on the partnership of a man and a woman bound by, and struggling within, a sexual love. Birthday Letters (1998) is the obvious, primary example. But under this rubric can also be included the translations Hughes produced after releasing his big Shakespeare book. First came Tales from Ovid (1997), selections from Metamorphoses that depict human beings who are catastrophically transformed by fateful sexual entanglements. This was followed by Hughes’s adaptation of Racine’s Phèdre (1998), the play from which Sylvia Plath drew an epigraph when she wrote her first poem for Ted Hughes, “Pursuit” (a factoid that is not as trivial as it sounds). Posthumously published were The Oresteia of Aeschylus (1999), which Hughes recast as a pair of plays that explores the foundation of the war between the sexes; and Euripides’ Alcestis (1999), in which a tragic plot is reversed by the wife’s return from the dead. On first inspection, these translations do not seem to be of a piece with the intimate domestic realism of Birthday Letters. Yet all are focused on marriage, and are thickly planted with analogies to Hughes’s marriage to Plath, as theatre reviewers have been quick to notice. And though the original dramas are tragic by genre, Hughes’s versions pull them into the gravitational field of his own exulting discovery of the sexual dilemma that he himself had been inhabiting unconsciously for years, and that he discovered first in his history-oriented reading of Shakespeare and then by re-reading the works of Sylvia Plath. Not just Plath’s poetry—re-reading everything she wrote. The poems of Birthday Letters, addressed to Plath, draw copiously from the Plath archive of journals, letters, drawings and photographs that “rescued” the time they had spent together, as he says in the poem “Drawing” (BL 44). Sometimes he appears to

6. Ted Hughes, “The Great Theme: Notes on Shakespeare’s Verse,” reprinted in (WP 103– 121).

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misremember—as when he recalls that on the night he first kissed her he stripped a blue headband from Plath’s hair—Plath says it was red—and when he mistakes the date on which they first made love—he says it was Friday the 13th of April,7 but the actual date was 25 March—and, more subtly, when he describes her at their wedding as “a nodding spray of wet lilac” (BL 21): he had given her a pink rose that he doesn’t mention. And so forth. What is the point of these rather insignificant departures from Plath’s texts, and from established facts? If Hughes had been writing as a critic, he would have double-checked such allusions for accuracy. No: in the aftermath of thinking about Shakespeare he returns to his wife’s words to pay them a different kind of attention. Before, he had been a self-appointed sponsor of her reputation, painstakingly calling to public notice a select array of poems in which her distinctive gift reached full expression. We have observed how completely he admired them for their artistic purity. At the same time, he speaks as if these poems could have nothing to do with him. Now, writing Birthday Letters, Hughes turns to Plath’s voluminous records of daily life as to invaluable depositions of their life together. As Plath’s survivor Hughes winced when he encountered the Lawrencian prose in which she described him to her mother. As her editor, Hughes required the omission of passages that he thought would not add to her luster in the world’s eyes. But as the voice of Birthday Letters, he takes on the whole range of the subjectivity that can be discovered in Plath’s writings. His apparent misquotations of her words are deliberate, ostentatious substitutions, for he is not remembering her words, he has been prompted by her words to enter his own, different memories. Obviously, he occupies a time different from the time he shared with her. But he also remembers things differently from the way she set them down. Then too he is reconstructing events from a different intellectual perspective than the one he brought to bear as her editor. Taken altogether, then, his substitutions can be seen evidence of interventions excited by historical insight into their “sexual dilemma,” the one they shared with characters in Shakespeare. Yet Birthday Letters is not a work of uxorious nostalgia. The strongest impression given by these poems is that of contact with the terrible strangeness that intimate partners can reveal to one another in the ordinary course of sharing their lives. Like most couples in the 1950s, Hughes and Plath did not live together before marriage. Birthday Letters shows how disquieting revelations began unfold between them during the first days of their honeymoon. These were not always disquieting revelations about Sylvia Plath. Under the pressure of their union, Hughes found himself exhibiting character traits and dispositions that seemed to originate somewhere else: in his mother, sometimes; at other times, in a kind of stupid, animal passivity he labels “sleepwalking.” So, from the first

7. In “18 Rugby Street,” Hughes recalls the “night in London on your escape to Paris” as “April 13th. Your father’s birthday. A Friday.” (BL 21)

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days of marriage, awareness of extreme and disturbing difference flows dreadfully beneath the surface of their happiness. Hughes captured this disturbance poignantly in the poem “9 Willow Street.” Birthday Letters attempts to explore these experiences—of, we might say, normal estrangement—in the first person. Hughes, it seems, recognized that his own historical importance resided in having been a husband; moreover, that his obligations lay far beyond that of serving as the manager of his dead wife’s estate and the steward of her posthumous reputation. He had to embrace their struggle with his creativity, find words for what had been experienced as intensely, incoherently personal. To elaborate this perspective is the purpose of the book I am undertaking. My working hypothesis is that Hughes, like the thief in Edgar Allan Poe’s detective story “The Purloined Letter,” has hidden something in plain sight. So far, readers and commentators have been successfully put off the scent by Hughes’s foxy stratagem of claiming to be a very private man. His withdrawal into Devon and Yorkshire, where he lived for nearly forty years far from the hub of literary life, preserved his privacy within a wide penumbra. Gossipy memoirs that began to appear immediately after his death—such as a memoir of an affair with Hughes by the English writer Emma Tennant—have not penetrated that penumbra very far, as yet. But while he was still alive and holding off the journalists, Hughes was steadily cooperating in the coherent organization of a very large amount of information about himself, aimed at posterity. That’s the man I’m looking for: the one who left the materials of his autobiography hidden in plain sight.

12 “Earth-Moon:” Ted Hughes’s Books for Children (& Adults) Claas Kazzer

I am going to talk about one of the most intimately personal aspects of Ted Hughes’s work: his writing for children. At its heart, as in most of his works for adults, lies his myth of the Goddess of Complete Being. Her laws shape and govern Hughes’s characters, motivate or animate them, while providing the overall background for his distinct cosmology. Embracing all human conflict, the laws of the Goddess are the ones to which his protagonists must adhere or ultimately fail. But they are also laws, this is also a cosmology, to which Hughes’s children’s writings offer a most open access and of which they give a surprisingly full account. Doubtlessly, any reading of Ted Hughes’s work will benefit greatly from an awareness in the reader of what he regarded as the creative/destructive powers of the world we live in, and hence of the Goddess. Yet, it would be false to claim that the stories, poems or plays could not be enjoyed or understood without such an awareness. Far from it, as the image of the Goddess, her aspects and the laws of her world are easily recognisable under different names as aspects, laws and an image of the world we live in. What she presents in Hughes, however, is a powerful, historically and psychologically charged image that unifies key conflicts under one common name and in one particular set of associations. Inseparable form the Female as a muse, the Goddess was the major creative force in Hughes’s writing. In her devouring/loving principle he saw “the key to all mythologies” (Shakespeare and the Goddess). Her laws he considered as those governing our own “inner worlds,” herself as presiding over the forces of the Unconscious (cf. esp. WP 136–53). In her image he saw combined the aspects of Venus, of the “the Queen of Heaven,” of “Isis, mother of all the gods, and all living things” but equally of “the Queen of Hell,” of “Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, all magical operations, the underworld, spirits, the moon, darkness, hounds etc.” (111– 2). He saw her as “Nature” in the widest, all-embracing sense, as the bringer of life and of death. As such, for Hughes she was inseparably linked with his concepts of creativity, sexuality, myth, poetry, music—with the healing potential of art. Modern Western society Hughes diagnosed as being repressive against anything associated with the Goddess. He saw an overvaluation of rational, abstracted thought. He saw how centuries of “enlightenment” had lead to the

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suppression of the Female and her “darker” worlds, how the mistaken notion of Man as the Crown of Creation had effected (and was used to justify) an increasing abuse and destruction of Nature. Moreover, Hughes saw all this as going hand in hand with a loss of contact to the “inner world” of the human psyche, to our inner selves (148–9). He felt that there was a terrible imbalance. Lacking in contact to our inner selves meant lacking access to the most “important half of our experience” (144). Imbalanced, we mutate into half-men (and women), half-beings, like those described in “Moon-Freaks” (Earth-Owl 39) or “What will you make of half a man” (G 110). Yet Ted Hughes was as far from condemning the world of “objective,” rational thought, the “outer world of man-created technology (and culture)” (“Parables” 149), as he was from romantic escapism into a world of cosy subjective fantasy. What he was after was the re-creation of a balanced relationship between “outside” and “inside,” between “objective” and “subjective imagination,” male and female, humankind and our natural environment. The ultimate goal of art, he thought, was healing, making whole (cf. WP 136–53). Consequently, Hughes wrote a poetry of life and of hope. He tells us that Life doesn’t just give up, even under the worst of circumstances, that Nature doesn’t just give up. Industrial ruins “must fall. into earth” to “flower again” (RE 14), the severed head of a dead lamb is given “all earth for a body” (M 33)—and though what has happened is hard to take, Life continues, Life will try again. Even Hughes’s early protagonists get to experience this redemptive aspect of the Goddess. Having offended or failed her, Lumb (Gaudete), Prometheus (Prometheus on His Crag) or the nameless protagonist of Cave Birds are given a second chance, while Crow must search for his creatrix/bride. Finally, there are the rare “marriage” scenes as in “Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days” (CB, originally intended for Crow) or in The Iron Woman, where the actual balance between male and female, humankind and nature, inner and outer world is achieved.1 In Hughes, the Goddess is given the force of a natural law—a force we may recognise as such in most of the spheres we live in. In psychoanalytical terms we may encounter her force in the powers of C.G.Jung’s Unconscious or of Anima/ Animus. Or we may see what the inner world may come to, mutated, in the terrible forces of neuroses. In terms of environmentalism (the “Goddess as Nature”), we may realise the inevitability of the Goddess’ laws in the results of human misuse of natural resources or of environmental pollution. In social-historical terms, we may be aware of the effects of male domination of most areas of Western society over the last centuries. Clothed in story and myth, the level of communication which Ted Hughes considered most appropriate as a background for imaginative

1. The rarity of such marriage scenes is matched by the difficulty, which Hughes ascribed to achieving the task. It does not seem incidental in this context, that “Bride and Groom,” with

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literature, the Goddess influences and haunts the whole canon of Western literature and culture. This is a sphere, in which she appears in the prominent guises of Isis, Hecate, Venus or the Moon-Goddess (cf. WP 111–2). But we may also find central aspects of her projected into the shapes of mermaid, seductress, witch, hag, madwoman, etc., and of course, into nature. In Hughes’s works, the Goddess appears as all of these and more. She emerges as much from his experience of the natural world as from real and imagined women. As such, she also presents the “feminine side” of his inner world. In this paper, I will investigate her presence in the inner “moon world” of Hughes’s children’s books—a world, in which she is described with affection, adoration, fear, horror or respect, but a world in which she is also known and visited for her consoling, healing power. The Moon is one of the most frequently recurring images in Hughes’s poetry for adults. Often, she occurs in significant conjunction with the Sun, and clearly represents an image of the Female as Hughes perceived her. From such early pieces as “The Bull Moses” (L 37), “Gog,” “Full Moon and Little Frieda” (W 192), she makes her appearance at frequent intervals in more or less openly mythic connotations. There is the famous “Two Legends,” in which “Sun and moon alternate their weathers” to hatch Crow (C 14), or “The Plaintiff” from Cave Birds, who is “Your moon of pain” (20). She makes her appearance in Gaudete, (cf. e. g. 34) and in Elmet, where a visit to the rocky outcrop “Bridestones” has a sensitising effect so that “from now on/The sun/Can always touch you/With the shadow of this finger./From now on/The moon can always lift your skull/On to this perch, to clean it” (E 65), or where “Mount Zion,” a chapel, is “blocking the moon” (ibid. 75). She shows herself in Moortown and is more fully present in River, were the Moon (again in conjunction with the Sun) is responsible for the “Creation of Fishes” (R 56). Birthday Letters more than any of the books for adults is littered with moon imagery—there are “Moonwalk,” “Isis,” “NightRide on Ariel,” or “The God,” for example,—just as Sylvia Plath’s poetry is full of moons.2 However, apart from some obvious links in Hughes’s prose writings (cf. esp. WP 373–465 and SGCB), the Moon’s most frequent and telling occurrence is in the moon poem books and the Creation Tales and stories for children. While we might be acquainted with the more threatening side of the Goddess from such works as Gaudete, Cave Birds or Crow, Hughes’s children’s books present her with her loving/creative aspect intact. The portray the balance

its metal imagery, reads like an account of the construction of his children’s story characters, The Iron Man and The Iron Woman. 2. Interestingly, the connotation of the moon in Plath and Hughes is different. In Plath (and subsequently in Birthday Letters), she is more of a foreboding, sometimes malicious, threatening presence, while a more positive, though immensely powerful moon prevails in Hughes.

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between outer and inner worlds, humankind and nature, male and female as an initial state of being or as a state that is achieved much more easily than in his books for adults. But Hughes does not shy away from presenting the “dark” side of the Goddess to his desired child audience. Many of his children’s poems are about death (and therefore about life), and a book like The Iron Woman shows how the Goddess’ destructive energy—provoked by human ignorance and abuse —can be turned into something good. On the whole, the children’s books present Hughes at his most open and personally revealing—they show an approach to writing, imagining and remembering, which offers a key to his work as a whole. Writing for children, Hughes thought, offered the rare opportunity of communicating in a most open and direct manner. It afforded him with a carefree mode of playful exploration of the themes that most concerned him. Writing for adults, he felt, was about “smuggling” the message “past a tremendously vigilant defence system.” But children he could “get through to openly” (Hughes, Morrison).3 And Hughes was aware that through this open mode of communication he was “intimately, intimately, giving something away,” that it alerted him to what was false to himself. And his essays suggest that he considered such awareness and the subsequent shedding of false selves, as a precondition to creativity.4 Those are exactly the parts of oneself that must “die” if one is to gain access to the creative world of the Goddess. For Hughes, the childhood world offered possibilities that he found largely lost to an adult outlook. He thought of it as a world of excitement, “not just a miniature world of naive novelties and limited reality” but “still very much the naked process of apprehension, far less conditioned than ours, far more fluid and alert, far closer to the real laws of its real nature.” (WP 29). Like all children’s writers Hughes was faced with the problem of how, if at all, anything like such a “child nakedness” of perception could be achieved in an adult. His approach was the most simple and most frequently employed by children’s writers: to remember the “feeling of what it was like to be the age of my imagined reader” (Hughes, Neill 12). He knew that trying to conjure that feeling, tying to remember, offered him opportunities for discarding his own adult defences, shedding some of his own false securities. He was aware that this was as good

3. Hughes knew that there were no fixed boundaries between writing for children and writing for adults, that their division was more or less an artificial one. From his teaching practice and his encounters with children he also knew that concepts of childhood (and adulthood) were changing along with the rest of society and culture. This awareness reflected in his selections of poems for the New Selected Poems, the Collected Animal Poems, or The Rattle Bag and The School Bag (both with Seamus Heaney)—accounts for what Canadian scholar Lissa Paul so aptly called the “children’s Hughes” (Paul, 1999 43): poems originally written with an adult audience in mind but staying “within the easy hearing of children” (Hughes, Neill 12) or moving there. 4. Cf. Hughes’s essays on Coleridge, Shakespeare, Plath, or Dickinson, and on children’s writing, like “Concealed Energies.” (WP)

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as it gets for an adult, who wants to look at the world with a “comparatively unconditioned eye” (cf. Hughes, Paul 222–3). The shedding of false adult securities, false selves, is also linked to the sense of play which, Hughes felt, was intrinsic to writing for children. “Children’s writing,” he said, “must be very simple and immediate. You’re just playing. I suppose with a lot of adult writing that sense of play goes out and serious responsibilities arrive. Play: maybe that’s what all literature is, or should be.” (Hughes, Morrison). He knew that playing is essential for a child’s learning, for coming to terms with the world, testing oneself and one’s position in it, for rehearsing major social and behavioral patterns or for exploring such puzzling events as death and birth. Then, there is language, one of the favourite human playthings. Sound and word play are enjoyed by children from a very early age. Overflowing and bubbling, such child playfulness is essentially creative while inseparable from “finding one’s voice,” testing one’s senses, sharpening one’s perceptions. Like other types of play, linguistic play is about getting a grasp on things and (repeatedly) trying to get it “right.” At the same time, it is linked with our need for reassurance, comfort, expressed in sound. It is inseparable from the rhymes and rhythms of lullabies, nursery verse or folk song, or from the tradition of medieval riddles5 and proverbs. Hughes is most at home in this realm of linguistic play. This is a kind of playfulness which is reflected in his repeated attempts at writing about one idea from different angles, playing with it. And he knew that “one poem never gets the whole account right,” that “there is always something missed,” and that “at the end of the ritual up comes a goblin” (Faas 205). But he knew just as well that it was worth trying, that the process would be enjoyable and most rewarding. In all that, Hughes was aware that a playful exploration with its attempts at a “child nakedness” of perception does hold as much excitement as risks. That it meant to deliberately never playing it safe, risking failure and disclosure of the intimately personal (cf. Hughes, Morrison). But while this circumstance may account for the occasional silliness or whimsy of some of his work, it also accounts for some of his most warmly personal and enjoyable writing: true-tohimself poetry and storying. And his late poems for children, like those from The Cat and the Cuckoo and The Mermaid’s Purse (both collected in The Iron Wolf) indicate with all their silliness, and beauty, that Hughes never lost the taste for this kind enjoyment and risk-taking. What all this amounts to is an unmatched communicative openness in Ted Hughes’s books for children. Writing for children afforded him with a means for replenishing his senses, loosening himself, for re-experiencing the world, for breaking free from adult concerns6. The aptness of Ted Hughes’s approach to writing for children is supported by recent children’s literary theory. When, in his Signs of Childness in Children’s Literature, Peter Hollindale writes about the structure of communication between adult writer and child reader, his findings closely match Hughes’s more intuitive

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take: Writing for children, Hollindale says, the author has to bridge a “cultural and historical gap” between himself and his desired reader. In the attempt, “the author must construct childhood from an amalgam of personal retrospect, acquaintance with contemporary children, and an acquired system of beliefs as to what children are, and should be, like” (12). This finds its correspondence in Hughes’s assertion that writing for children: “I imagine the reader I’m telling the story to as a combination of me and one or two children I know well.” (Hughes, Morrison). For such an approach to be successful, Hollindale argues, there must be a shared component between adult writer and child reader—a component he calls “childness:” the “quality of being a child” (47). This quality, which is “dynamic, imaginative, experimental, interactive and unstable,” allows children to grow by experimenting with their identities through interaction with adults and the world around them. As a aspect of adult identity, childness may allow us to tap into that creative, playful approach, thus providing a means by which we may “replenish our mature selves” (46). A successful communication with a child reader is only possible when author and reader share some degree of childness, when the construct of remembered and imagined childhood finds its match in the actual (and constructed) childness of the reader. Moreover, a sense of personal continuity and rootedness, of storying, seems directly connected to adult childness through its dependence on memory: “Effective writers of children’s literature,” Hollindale says, “are often those who retain [a] childhood intensity and urgency of storying, whose childhood is alive in memory and present existence because it is still essential to their mature procedures for articulating the self in time” (70). Such rootedness is clearly evident in Hughes’s more biographical accounts as “The Rock,” “Capturing Animals” and in various interviews like “The Art of Poetry” (Hughes, Heinz) or “So Quickly It’s Over” (Hughes, Pero). It is a rootedness in both, landscape and storying, inseparable from his own remembered childhood experience. If, as I argue, childness was indeed an intrinsic part of Ted Hughes’s identity, it is no surprise that it should directly inform some of his most successful pieces for adults. Here, it must have been especially the “no-holds-barred approach to problems” (WP 29) which he was after. And indeed, much of Crow, which at several occasions he called a “children’s story” (Skea: “Adelaide”; “Timeline”), and in particular the “child nakedness” of approach, the intention of communicating the bare essentials, has been salvaged from the childness of the original narrative behind the poems (cf. Kazzer 192–9). Moreover, Crow’s tricksterish take on the world is more than just “child’s play.” He embarks on an

5. I am grateful to Lissa Paul for pointing this out to me. 6. Significantly, for about three years after Sylvia Plath’s death, while raising their children, Ted Hughes published/wrote next to nothing new for adults while several books for children appeared in very close succession of each other.

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“original, wild, no-holds-barred” exploration (WP 29), which accounts for many of the surprising turns in those fragments of the story that have come down to us. And no matter how his struggles with perceptions and preconceptions, between aspects of his own self turn out, he keeps tackling the world with undiminished optimist zest (cf. also WP 239–43). As childness is shared ground between Hughes’s books for adults and children, so are the fundamental concerns he brought to writing. At the most personal, creative level of this writing, we encounter a poet with an near obsession with healing, redemption, with the balancing of “male” and “female” aspects of one’s being, with making good and resurrecting. We find someone who repeatedly writes about death (and therefore about life), and about humankind’s precarious relationship with nature. Just as the concept behind most of Hughes’s works for adults was the putting together of a healing narrative, his children’s books are concerned with providing psychological/spiritual blueprints for “putting together” little boys and girls (cf. Hughes, Morrison; ME 66–7). It does not seem unimportant that many of them originated from actual stories or poems told to his own children—as such all of them were intended as stories or poems to grow on. The combination of Hughes’s insistence that art should be healing and of his attempts at a child nakedness of perception accounts for the sense that he was giving away some intimate part of himself in his writing for children. He was convinced that a healing potential for a story or poem could only arrive out of a healing process experienced by the author. Hughes knew that attempting to heal himself would mean attempting to heal others. He considered art as “the psychological component of the auto-immune system” which “works on the artist as a healing” and “as a medicine” on those who perceive it (Hughes, Heinz 82). If that is indeed the case, then there should also be a match between the things that needed to be healed in the author and the healing potential a narrative holds for the reader. The mythic aspect of such “healing” narrative, Hughes thought, was an inevitable result of the process (ME 67). If we accept the concept of childness as “shared ground, though differently experienced and understood, between child and adult” (Hollindale 47), it becomes clear that children’s writing can be as enjoyable for adults as it is for children—though with that difference of experience and understanding mentioned earlier, and because of that difference. For the critic, however, the children’s books offer a most valuable source as their openness and honesty, their lack of pretence and clever manoeuvrings makes for some of the most intimate and straightforward writing that Hughes has ever produced. They are books from which emerges a complex but personal picture of their author, complete with little foibles, tragic biographical entanglements, joys, successes and failings—an utterly human picture. “In every moon-mirror lurks a danger./ Look in it—and there glances out some stranger” (“Moon-Mirror,” Earth-Moon 11).

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From what has been said so far it should not seem surprising to find a children’s book of Hughes’s chock-a-bloc with invocations to his Goddess of Complete Being. In the particular set of poems I will talk about, she is symbolised in the common image of the moon and/or discernible as a presence behind the happenings in that inner “moon world” which Hughes explores. Several stories from his Creation Tale collections and Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth can be seen as directly related to these poems in their references to the moon. Ted Hughes’s moon poems were published in a succession of four volumes between 1963 and 1988.7 It may not be incidental that the first of them, The Earth-Owl and Other Moon People (illustrated by R.A.Brandt), came out during a time when the “Lunar Race” was in full progress, when reports of new moon probes and moon exploration projects hit the news at a steady rate. The EarthOwl was a book of rhyming, strongly playful poems, much in the mood of Meet My Folks! The poems, Hughes mentions, were an exploration of the “moon from the bottom of our dreams,” its creatures and oddities, which, since affects us more directly and profoundly, should be “much more our concern” than the “real moon. rolling about in the sky” (PM 110). Some twelve years after that first book, in 1976, Hughes dedicated another publication to the topic: Earth-Moon—a limited edition and the only book fully illustrated by Hughes himself. The powerful combination of images and poems in this book offers a rare glimpse of Ted Hughes’s creative vision. And a simple comparison of the illustrations with Chris Riddell’s magnificent work from 1988, or Leonard Baskin’s, or R.A.Brandt’s marks the starkness of imagery of Hughes’s inner world. Earth-Moon presents the Goddess in all her dark beauty as Hughes saw it. Like many of his poems, his illustrations are marked by circular movements (cf. ill. for “Moon-Walkers”), the integration of seeming opposites into a single whole (cf. the Ying/Yang ill. for “Moon-Whales”). His “Moon-Mares” move in a burst of flame to which the water/wetness imagery of “Moon-Whales” provides a counterpoint. There is an abundance of snakes (and of course moons), and most of the more ferocious beings—but the healing “Moon-Ravens,” too—are fitted with large claws, beaks and fangs. Life’s undiminished zest is presented in the spermy dolphins of his illustration for “Moon-Whales” —the sperm being a central image of survival for Hughes (cf. also WP 240–1 and Gifford 130–1). A pack of wolves—reminiscent of Norse myth8—opens the volume, while a kind of fish-monster is drawn on one of the endpapers.

7. A fifth book, Moon-Bells and Other Poems does not strictly belong with this group as it only takes its title from one of the moon-poems. It collects seven of them and large number of “unrelated” children’s Hughes poems, like “Amulet,” “Coming Down Through Somerset” or “Horrible Song.”

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Though still playful, Earth-Moon contains some markedly darker material— among them two rhymeless poems that were to become the introductory and concluding poems of the subsequent volumes. Also published in 1976, the trade edition of Moon-Whales and Other Moon Poems, illustrated by Leonard Baskin and available only in the US, collected the poems from The Earth-Owl and Earth-Moon. In 1988, finally, appeared a “revised edition” simply called MoonWhales, from which six of the poems had been dropped and which had been reillustrated by Chris Riddell. Already this brief history of the moon poem books hints to a particular interest, which Hughes seems to have had in the topic. They are books about the Imagination, and about Creativity in all her shapes. As such, they are also about the ways of the psyche, the tricks it seems to play, and the merits of close contact with its dream-world. Hughes succeeds in painting a moving picture of the inner world: beautiful, ferocious, sad, funny, consoling—a mirror-world full of surprises. A world full of tiny little stories and parables set to challenge our perceptions of the dream-moon—the realm of the Goddess. And though aiming particularly at children, the poems remain within hearing of adults. Naturally, the inner moon world is “more decisive, and utterly different” from the outer world we know so well (WP 143), and obeying laws which tend to be the reverse of what we are accustomed to. In it, nothing holds fast (“MoonWind,” Earth-Moon 23), ways and roads do not lead to expected or fixed destinations (“Moon-Ways” 17). It is a place of weird and funny monsters, strange plants and creatures (or mixtures thereof) and strange occurrences. A place where the imagination is presented as so powerful that it can immediately bring things into existence (“Moony Art” 61), but also a place that can be or appear menacing, threatening and dangerous. It is a world that, separated from the outer world, neglected, may easily become “a place of demons” (WP 149). Placing the reader at the collision of these worlds, Hughes provokes communication between them, confronts us with our own “Moon-Mirror.” Clearly, Hughes’s moon world presents the laws of the Goddess, who appears more threatening the more alienated she has become. And it represents the dark and light of the “female side” of his own inner being. In his second “Myth and Education” essay Hughes describes how the adult “inner world” is under threat to “become elemental, chaotic, continually more primitive and beyond. control,” a “place of demons” (WP 149). So that, “if we do manage to catch a glimpse of our inner selves, by some contraption of mirrors, we recognize it with horror—it is an animal crawling and decomposing in a hell. We refuse to own it.” But the world of moon-poem books has not degenerated, but has retained a cheerful, childly9 aspect. And in a delightful play with our perceptions, Hughes shows that it is often just our (mis)interpretation that makes this world appear

8. Cf. eg. Sol and Mani (Sun and Moon), being pursued by wolves or Fenrir who is to swallow the Sun at the Ragnarök.

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threatening (cf. e. g. “The Moon-Hyena,” “Moon-Walkers” or “The MoonMourner”). One of those cheerful and a most prominent characteristics of Hughes’s moon world is its creatures’ affection to music (cf. e. g. “Moon-Whales,” “Music on the Moon,” “The Moon-Mare,” “The Moon-Hyena,” “Singing on the Moon”). Singing on the moon, for example, attracts moon-monsters, which, though looking terrible and seeming furious, are just ferociously passionate about and grateful for music: “At your song’s end the monster will cry out madly/And fling down money, probably far more than you can spend,/And kiss your shoe with his horrific frontend,/Then shudder away with cries of rapture diminishing sadly (“Singing on the Moon,” Earth-Moon 37). “The Moon-Hyena” presents another “musical” example of how misleading our perceptions of the moon world can be. Though it has “A laughter of dark hell/Mad laughter of a skull/Coming to devour the living ones.” It is not by accident that Hughes ascribed to music an even greater healing capacity than to poetry (cf. Hughes, Heinz 82). Poetry, music, myth and female sexuality, he thought, ultimately rose from the same creative source (cf. “Battling Over the Bard”). His children’s poetry has a strong leaning towards music. Though apparently stompy, and clumsy at times, the poems are at once tuneful, earthy, joyous and memorable10, while rhyme and rhythm (as striking qualities of most of them) place them in the close proximity of medieval riddle, lullaby or nursery verse. There is fun to be had, there are thrills and, very importantly, there is comfort. Apart from the connection between the inner moon world and music, Hughes explicitly links his moon to poetry. In “Visiting the Moon,” one of the most puzzling of the poems, the poetic persona finds himself in a tower, where “the moon, molten silver in a great cauldron,/Was being poured/Through the eye of a needle//Spun on to bobbins and sold to poets/For sewing their eyelids together/ So they can sing better.” (Earth-Moon 57). Likewise, a “Moon-Marriage” produces only poems as offspring. This is described as a process, in which the person to be married is being chosen by an (apparently totemic) animal, as “there’s no telling what bride/May choose you from the inside” (39). In “MoonTheatre” (48–9), Hughes even mentions the Adonis type hero, who plays such an important role in what he called Shakespeare’s mythic/tragic equation (cf. SGCB, e. g. 7–18). The poem makes clear to its audience that a story (or play) can be conjured out of virtually nothing. A princess is invoked, who is abducted by an ogre from whom she escapes (disguised as a wolf) to find herself hounded until a flower-hero saves her. Moreover, “Moon-Theatre” gives a clear hint

9. Like “childness,” I borrow this adjective from Hollindale. (45) 10. Tellingly, Hughes had his Iron Woman fall into a stomping dance when expressing her strongest emotions, while bringing both, his Iron Man and The Iron Woman to a consoling musical end with the Space-Bat-Angel-Dragon providing music of the spheres.

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towards (shamanic) ecstasy/magic as “tap[ing] a drum and fix[ing] your eyes in a glassy stare” (Earth-Moon 48) is a precondition for the story/play to take off. Typically for Hughes, there are poems in the moon books that deal with death or threats with extinction (cf. e. g. “A Moon-Lily,” “A Moon-Witch” or “A Moon-Hare,” in which the moon crashes into earth). As in his books for adults, his imagination does not flinch from such topics. Rather, he seems aware of the fascination, which death and extinction hold for children, and which is also apparent as a popular theme of nursery rhymes and fairy tales. Moreover, by not falsely “sheltering” his desired child audience from such topics, just as by allowing silliness and whim into the poems, Hughes brings a great honesty to the books. An honesty and openness, that greatly furthers communication with his desired child readers, while being central to his idea of the “child nakedness” of perception. Like his other books for children, the moon-poem collections bear witness to the fascination certain images and dramatic constellations held for Hughes. Simultaneously, the many echoes of other poems and poetic sequences in the moon books provide further proof of the Goddess’ central place in the work, and indeed, they show that the books for children and those for adults belong together in the single body of the work. The idea of the all-importance of the moon-goddess and her world to Hughes’s views gains further momentum when we take a look at the many animals that are linked with the inner moon world in his poems and stories for children. It is striking to see, how he places his favourite mythic (or personally totemic) animals next to God’s Mother and Woman in a close relationship to the moon-goddess and her realm (cf. e. g. “The Guardian,” Tales of the Early World 16–29). And as we might have expected all along, there is a bond between Moon, Woman and Fox, which Hughes writes about in “The Secret of Man’s Wife” (Dreamfighter 138–50). Many other mythic animals traditionally linked with moon-worship make their appearance in Earth-Moon. There are the white “Moon-Bull,” who thinks Night is his bride, and the “Moon-Hare,” or the “Moon-Mare,” who “moves like nightfall./ Beautiful, beautiful,” running “On human mountains.//Wild as a ghost/ She is here, she is past,//In her lunatic fury./The only sure lure is//The music stolen/ From stars that have fallen” (58–9). And though all of these animals are in some way or other associated with darkness, the moon or the Goddess, Hughes must have felt a desire to write about them, to present them in their full beauty. Naturally, Ted Hughes’s moon-mirror world is as varied as the daylight natural world human beings prefer to inhabit. It is a mad, silly, funny, sad, or cruel world, in which life and death are entwined. Most of all, however, it is a world that has a healing, consoling power, one where sadness and mourning are not suppressed but lived through (cf. e. g. “The Moon-Lily,” 7–8). It is the sacred space of night and dream, in which the reader must confront beings like the “Snail of the Moon” or the “Moon-Mourner” or “The Silent Eye.” But there are

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the “Moon-Ravens,” too, who swallow illnesses that leave your mouth in the shape of a moth (24). The overall healing capacity of the poems comes from the collision of the moon world with one’s own actual experience. Many of them address the reader directly, thus bridging the gap between outer and inner world, making themselves felt. The strong affection, which so unmistakably shines through the descriptions of most of his moon-creatures—even such unlucky “beings” as the haggis— finds its match in the “real,” daylight world of Hughes’s animal poems. In both groups of poems, rhyme and rhythm occur for several important purposes, sometimes simultaneously. On the personal, creative level, they served Hughes “amuse [him]self” (PM 111) while opening a door to the childly imagined self/ reader—but there is no denying that rhyme and rhythm also helped Hughes to control some of the energies evoked. In other cases the cheerful verse forms are used, conversely, to counterpoint a violent story, as in “The Moon-Haggis” (Earth-Moon 60). But most of all, the use of rhyme and simple rhythm serves the collections’ overall consoling purpose. It allows the reader to maintain a hold and, like the author, to control that inner mirror-world that is being conjured. The similarities with the use of strongly alliterative lines in Hughes’s contemporary verse for adults are striking. Counterpointing Anglo-Saxon with Latin-based vocabulary, he was trying to tap into a primeval linguistic/mythic source, was looking for access to the realm of the Goddess in the clash of two traditions. And though he sometimes ended up with a clanking, verbal suit of armour, shielding much of the energy he was trying to evoke, his most successful pieces from that time never fail to provoke a strong inner response (cf. also Bishop 18–21). It does not seem difficult imagining Hughes telling the poems to his own children at bedtime. It is them, to whom the poems are dedicated, and it must have been them who helped the warm tone in Hughes’s writing for children to come to the fore. Comparing the earliest book, The Earth-Owl, with the later ones, the change in tone is striking. From its overall design, The Earth-Owl and Other Moon-People seems to have been intended as a book similar to Meet My Folks!—a happy jumble of descriptions of “people.” Most of its twenty-odd poems are funny, interesting in some of their associations, usually quite easy to digest but somehow undistinguished, detached. His many moon-plant descriptions, for example, almost make the impression of empty off-hand doodles or, even worse and similar to some of the early poems for adults, some come across as constructed, shielding off energies rather than evoking them. There is not enough of Hughes himself in them, so that one gets the impression of something being withheld.11 With Earth-Moon and the books that follow, it is

11. In his 1993 interview with Blake Morrison Hughes says: “My notion was always that it’s the one thing you don’t do: you don’t write about yourself. The shock of Sylvia’s writing, when she really began to write, was that she was doing the very opposite of what she would

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otherwise. We find them peopled as a typically laterHughesian universe. It is as if the dark beauty of that inner moon needed to grow on Hughes, as if he needed to gain the inner strength not to flinch from her glare. In the later books she has become more fully visible in detail and proper access to her world seems to have been gained. But most importantly, Hughes’s voice in the poems has become more compassionate, less detachedly descriptive. Yet, as early as 1963 we meet some of the most charged beings and images that recur in Hughes later books, like the “half-man” of “Moon-Freaks” (a poem that also features the “galloping” hand which recurs in The Iron Man) whose double is described in the opening poem of the “Epilogue” of Gaudete (177), and the origins of which date back to around the same time (cf. Difficulties of a Bridegroom, ix). Or the “tree-disease” (Earth-Owl 31), which recurs in Crow’s “Magical Dangers” (52). Another familiar feature is the deadly threat from numbers on the moon. “Moon-Horrors” (Earth-Owl 15–6) depicts numbers in a way we might be familiar with from “Crow’s Account of St. George.” As horrors in the moon world, numbers have specialised in killing and devouring people. Worst of them all is “the flying strangler, the silent zero,” “that specializes in hunting down the great hero” (16). In “Crow’s Account of St. George” the protagonist “sees everything in the Universe/Is a track of numbers.” Obsessively he dissects every new “nest of numbers” he manages to find. Fighting off monsters that try to interfere, he ends up slaughtering his wife and children (C 32–3, cf. also ME 66). One of the most striking features of the inner moon-mirror, which Hughes confronts us with in his poems and stories, is its capability to bring out the Truth. 12 Moon poems, like “Moon-Mirror” describe this more covertly (much of it tied to the reader’s response) than his stories for children. In Ffangs the Vampire Bat and the Kiss of Truth, however, Hughes writes most openly about the kind of Truth most closely associated with the Goddess, and closest to his intentions in writing. It is the Truth of finding out who one really is. It does not seem incidental that he felt Ffangs was a very personal story, one that exposed very much of himself (cf. Hughes, Morrison). In the story, the Truth is found on the moon, where the protagonists meet a girl, Selena, who has a snake in her mouth! Whomever the moon-girl kisses is instantly transformed into who he/she really is by the snake’s “deadly bite” (Ffangs 89). This is a context, which makes clear that whatever we might see in our own moon-mirror is a part of our selves. It may be a part that urgently needs to be re-invited into our life before it becomes rotten, dangerous, deadly. In all that, Hughes presents a challenge to our perceptions, presents books that both, adult and child, can grow on. In their variety and playfulness, they can open a door to the inner world. They can—even if only momentarily—put us back in touch with that “child nakedness” mentioned at the beginning of this paper. Losing in “child nakedness,” losing in our openness of approach to the world, Hughes believed, we would “begin to lose validity as witnesses and participants in the business of living in this universe” (WP 29).

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Yet, from the moon world just visited, inevitably, we must fall to Earth, where any other moon than the one rolling in the sky tends to threaten us. With the poem “Earth-Moon” we reach the end of a book, the end of a story. It is a very Hughesian end, in its meaning fully dependent on the readers’ response, much like the “Finale” of Cave Birds. With “Earth-Moon,” Hughes gives us a parable in the shape of “Bedtime Story,” “Existential Song,” “Bedtime Anecdote” or “Love Song,” all of which belong to the original Crow context. It describes a state we may recognise or one, which we may see as a warning. Moreover, it can be seen as describing a condition which could easily be interpreted as that of the literary critic.

normally have considered a proper thing to write about. I’ve often wondered how she would have gone on from there. What she’d done was to reclaim her entire psychology. It’s almost like a myth in itself, a very pure, clear story” (Hughes, Morrison). Noted by many critics, the change in tone from his earliest books to those written after the midsixties must be linked to that realisation. From that time on, Hughes was allowing more of himself to enter his poetry. For his children’s books it seems indisputable that the bringing-up of his own children had a decisive influence as regards tone, content and intimacy. 12. Cf. also Hughes’s concern with the various shades of Truth in a poem like “Truth Kills Everybody” (C 84) or “The Snag” (Tales of the Early World 62–71), where the moon features as a fortune-teller whom Eel turns to, to find out the truth of whether he is a snake or a fish a truth that does indeed lead to a killing. Cf. also his children’s book What is the Truth?, which plays out the search for objective truth (cf. Paul, 1992 70).

13 Ted Hughes & the Folk Tale Paul Volsik

If all poets are pattern makers, they are themselves caught up in patterns— movements, periods, intertextual constellations. Today it is essentially the intellectual background of Hughes’s poetry that I wish to discuss—the question of ideas and the history of ideas, and the history of literary forms. I will be concerned not so much with what might be called his mythical readings (one thinks, for example, of his reading of Shakespeare which brought him into headon conflict with academia) but with his reading of “tales,” a word that appears regularly in his poetry—more specifically a particular form—the folk tale, whose relation to the myth—and other forms like the fable or fairy tale or wonder tale— is problematic. I will begin by placing Hughes in a pattern, that is by seeing him as a neoRomantic, or rather a neo-neo-Romantic with all that this implies in the space where the aesthetic roots itself in the epistemological. It is Romantic literary “science”—of which nineteenth century anthropological folk tale studies were a prototype—that will interest me here, for though the poetic work of any poet—as we know—transcends because it escapes, frustrates, criticises and deconstructs the necessarily conflictual pattern of ideas and preferences that structures his vision (I use the word deliberately) of the world and literature, it is perhaps useful to suggest hypotheses about the way this vision might be structured. If, however, this paper is more than simply intellectual curiosity about the more obscure corners of a particular poets’ work, it will be because I am convinced that the problem of narrative in poetry is a vital problem and very little understood. This is largely because narratological studies, with rare exceptions, have concentrated on the novel, seeing narration as a secondary problem in poetry—if not fundamentally and structurally in conflict with it. Jakobson’s famous analysis of poeticity has encouraged critics of poetry to follow narratologists in marginalising the syntagmatic axis in poetry. To my mind, this is a mistake. My hypothesis therefore is that, since all poetry begins as narration, the syntagmatic axis cannot be structurally in conflict with the poetic (though of course it can be backgrounded in certain periods, notably, I would say, the period during which Jakobson was writing). More particularly, in his poetry Hughes both uses a form (free verse) whose forward movement is intensely syntagmatic and also dialogues with canonical narrative forms in many explicit

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and implicit ways. He does so thematically in his use of the quest pattern, but he does so also in, for example, titles of poems like “Two Legends” (C 13) or “Revenge Fable” (70) or “Bedtime Anecdote” (CPH 262), “Japanese River Tales” (R 14) or “Folktale” (CPH 788). In addition he uses canonical narrative strategies (“Crow’s Elephant Totem Song,” for instance, begins with the traditional opening: “Once upon a time” (C 57); the diary is a miniature narrative form as Hughes’s uses it and so are certain letters in Birthday Letters). More explicitly even, Hughes underscores this dialogue intertextually when, on the one hand, a poem like “February” begins with a reference to Little Red Riding Hood (“the wolf with its belly stitched full of big pebbles” (L 13)1) and, more subtly, on the other when, for example, he refers in “Gnat-Psalm” to “little Hasids” (W 181) subtly echoing the fact that Polish Hasidism used folk tales and parables as major entrances to religious understanding. To understand how and why poetry uses narrative, how and why the organization in lines and stanzas and collections, as in Crow, for example, influences our perception of narrative, how our sense of sequence (beginnings, middles and ends) is constructed, particularly in the postModernist age, we need to study more and over a much wider range of types of poets, including a poet like Hughes who has made such brilliant use of the coyote tale2 and Ovid’s narratives in Metamorphoses. As Hughes himself rightly pointed out, what is characteristic of poetry, one of its most important structuring axes, is rhythm and particularly what he called mysteriously, but absolutely rightly I think, narrative rhythm—the deployment of text along a horizontal syntagmatic axis. Only when we are better able to make the relationship between the two axes (syntagmatic and paradigmatic) dialectic will we progress as analysts of poetry. I will proceed as follows: I will first try to root more historically the idea that Hughes is to a large extent a neo-Romantic poet, I will then work out of particular texts to show how Hughes reworks a major structuring aspect of Romanticism: organicism. Through organicism I will, via Seamus Heaney, look at Romantic attitudes to folk tales which I think Hughes has reinvested and reactivated. Finally I will suggest some of the ways in which Romantic attitudes to the functioning of folk tales might suggest priorities in our reading of Hughes’s poetry—or at least priorities in Hughes’s own reading habits. Neo-Romanticism To begin with, I would like to stress that when I say that Hughes was a neo-neoRomantic, I mean precisely that—in two ways. Firstly, of course, neoRomanticism is not Romanticism, just as neo-Gothic is not Gothic, the Houses of

1. It is perhaps worth noting in view of what will follow, that Hughes here uses Grimm’s version of the tale and not Perrault’s or the existing oral folk versions. 2. It is interesting to compare his use of the form to Paul Muldoon’s.

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Parliament not a gothic building any more than a nineteenth century Parliament was a folk-mote (though the period liked to think it was) or Tex Avery’s retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood” a folk tale. The reasons for the difference between the two such as the limitations in the freedom of a “folk” teller of folk tales, are beyond the scope of this article. Secondly, it is my conviction that Hughes was at least partially molded by the specific literary movement called neoRomanticism. Firstly, then, I would like to recall that Hughes’s formative years—the forties —are precisely the years when neo-Romanticism as a movement was achieving the status of the dominant aesthetic mode in Great Britain. I will here mention just a few of the elements that might constitute the planets in a galaxy (which like all galaxies of this sort, requires a justification I cannot attempt here): Herbert Read’s The Green Child (1935); “The New Apocalypse” (1939); David Jones’ series of Arthurian legend drawings (1940); Carl Jung’s The Secret of the Golden Flower (1941); Vaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony (1943)3; Bill Brandt’s “Brontë country” (1945); Bacon’s “Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” (shown 1945); Eric Hosking and Cyril Newberry Birds of the Night (1945); Sutherland’s “Crucifixion” (1946); Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan (1946) and his gothic drawings; Dylan Thomas’ Deaths and Entrances (1946)—of which Hughes said “it was my holy book” (Faas 202)—Robert Graves’ The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1948); and Eric Hosking and Cyril Newberry’s Birds in Action (1949). If one may be a little flippant, Hughes’s looks as a young man remind one inescapably of those of the neo-Romantic icon in the British cinema of the 1940s: James Mason. Hughes, in one sense, does what the poets of the forties (Treece, Henry, etc.) tried to do but did not succeed in doing—though more could be said, for example, about the analogies between certain aspects the work of Hughes and that of other poets of the period (R.S.Thomas’ lago Prytherch, for instance or Kavanagh’s Paddy Maguire recall Hughes’s Billy Holt). The importance of this rooting in Romanticism, or rather Romanticism at it was being reconstructed by both creative writers and the academic critics of the forties and fifties (Frye and Abrams for example), is that it gives access to an articulated intellectual and aesthetic universe. It is in this respect important that Hughes should recognise in “Fantastic Happenings and Gory Adventures” (WP) that “When [his] craze for comics fizzled out,—I was about thirteen [in 1943]—a craze for folk tales took their place. The discovery of these things came as a deep shock” (5–6) It was this discovery, he says, that led him to Yeats and “the right kind of metre.” Hughes’s interest in the folk tale was thus born in the heart of the neoRomantic movement and was to continue unabated for the rest of his life. I would now like to enter his intellectual work via what could be seen as a back door by suggesting that the strength of Hughes attachment to what might be called a Romantic epistemology is revealed in his constant use of biological metaphors.

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A national legend, the legend of nationality—Hughes on poet, myths and nation My point of departure here is two particular quotations by Hughes the first dating from 1964, the second from 1993, spanning thus his entire career as a poet. In 1964, reviewing a book entitled Myth and Religion of the North by E.O.G.Turville-Petre which, he claims, is constructed on very much the same lines as Jacob Grimm’s founding, but in many ways problematic, Teutonic Mythology (Deutsche Mythologie), Hughes writes that unlike the “Greek-Roman pantheons that came in with Christianity, and again with the Renaissance…these other deities of our instinct and ancestral memory” the “Anglo-Saxon-NorseCeltic” alternative “belongs to our blood” (WP 41, my italics) Twenty-nine years later, in his very fine text on “Myths, Metres, Rhythms,” talking of Celtic culture he writes that it has survived to this day, “like powerfully active glands, secreting the genetic remnants of a poetic caste selectively bred through many centuries.” (368 my italics). I would like to subject these passages to serious but I hope not polemical scrutiny—though the texts themselves are intensely polemical. I would add that they constitute only one—though to my eyes an important—thread in Hughes’s intellectual life. The first reproduces, on the basis of a protoypical Romantic space, a typically Romantic we. Hughes states that “we” —whoever “we” exactly are—are more at home in the art, literature and mythology of the North, that this art is ancestrally ours and instinctually close to us; in a word that this mythology “belongs to our blood” beyond and below chosen and constructed inheritances. In the second quotation, two things interest me: firstly—and least urgently—its cavalier attitude to the facts as we know them; secondly the fact that it too is structured around an important biological metaphor, and, since poetry is what matters most, metaphors have to be taken seriously. Firstly then, Hughes is not accurate about the Celtic tradition of bardism—his “inaccuracy” is, like the slip of the tongue, the symptom or the trace of his sense of the urgency of the issues at stake. The idea that the Celts—and I use the word as Hughes uses it, not Gaels or Bretons or Welsh or Scots, but Celts: a “people” or “peoples” who occupy land from Bohemia to the Isle of Arran,— were “nations” (I insist on what I would see as an anachronistic word, but a mainstay of Romantic historiography) and not “a people” or peoples or “a culture” or a “civilisation” is extremely problematic. Secondly, though I do not have time to prove this here, the idea that the “arduous” poetic schools existed well into the seventeenth century is untrue, as the Welsh themselves in the seventeenth

3. see, for example Vaughan William’s essays, on “National Music” and “the Folk-Song,” notably the structural importance of melody (as opposed, say, to “harmonics”) or the appearance of the word “race” as in his approving quotation of Cecil Sharp (1859–1924), famous collector of folk-dance and folk-music: “Folk-music is the product of a race and reflects feelings and tastes that are communal rather than personal” (32)

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century regretted4. Indeed it is comprehensible that a structure as complex as bardic schools, with their years of study, required stable political structures (the patronage of great Princes) which Wales, for example, lost in the thirteenth century. This problem is, however, secondary to that of Hughes’s constant recourse to biological metaphors of which “blood” is only one example. In the second extract the nation is seen as a biological entity, and this biological entity secretes, thanks to a residual genetic structure, its own art and its own poets-who are bred “selectively,” by which Hughes presumably means “eugenically.” To take the one example I know well, Wales, the introduction of hereditary (as opposed to non-hereditary) court poets (bards) was a late (twelfth century) import from Ireland and not “traditional” or “genetic” in the culture (any more than the functioning of the Laureateship is biologically rooted in the English “nation,” and not a social fact which has changed in content and implication from AngloSaxon scop to Andrew Motion). Briefly then this is a fantasy, in many of its central articulations. These Celtic “nations,” says Hughes, survive political dismemberment—a constant Hughesian theme—like “glands.” It is important to insist on the word “gland,” etymologically from acorn as in French—hence oaktree—for a gland is strictly an organ which separates certain constituents for use in the body and—and this is central—“naturally” rejects and ejects others. This, of course, is a Romantic nationalist idea, and—for better or worse—still with us. The idea that poets somehow “incarnate” this nation (that they are secreted by the nation, like amber from a tree, as a sort of quintessence) is also historically datable. Historians of ideas and notably the idea of nation, have shown how this idea is a strategic moment in the genesis of the idea of the nation state in the late eighteenth century, directly linked to the imposition of a “national” “mothertongue.” Indeed, the expression in French which says that English is “la langue de Shakespeare” is an example of this trope and all that it carries politically, an idea that has as one of its main sources the German thinker Herder, to whom we shall return. As we know, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, great nations were felt to be those that had a great founding poet; indeed “nations” without a great poet tended to invent one like Ossian. Fundamentally, of course, the fact that Hughes should be on shaky historical ground is of no real importance—what is important is that he should choose that ground and the particular way in which he configures its topography. What interests him, as we know from others sources, is a vision—whose roots I see in Romanticism—of the poet as a central sacred function in a pre-Modern, pre-Industrial, and thus “natural” because “unified” society. To put it even more simply what is at work here is a form of Romantic organicism which uses biological metaphors to include and to exclude, to articulate past and present, citizen and society5, poet and society, society and

4. See Dillwyn Miles, The Royal National Eisteddfod of Wales (Swansea: Christopher Davies, 1977)

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its texts, text and poet, poetic text and religious text etc. This is the triumph of a certain vision of the “natural” —at the heart of Hughes’s visionary centering on the natural world. More particularly, insofar as the poetic text itself is concerned, the idea that the artistic work is a “living thing” is as old as Aristotle, but its most systematic development was precisely the Romantic period notably in Germany, and then in Great Britain, through Coleridge. In the nineteenth century the triumph of this idea is total. I do not have time to analyse all the implications of this belief, but we know it functioned for the Romantics, as for Hughes, in a binary opposition with the idea of a “mechanical poetry,” that is by definition foreign, French often in Hughes’s legend of the history of English metre. The organic poem is where— among other things—the particular and the universal, the biologically national and the Universal—as well as content and form—are in some sense coalesced and fused. In this the poem is an analogue of the folk tale. Folk tales, myths and legends To progress in my argument I would now like to return to a quotation from the remarkable address given by Seamus Heaney during the Memorial Service for Ted Hughes in Westminster Abbey, the locus of the legend of England. Here Heaney said another part of him looked through the microscope and telescope into the visionary crystal, and could see Dante’s eternal margherita, the pearl of foreverness, in the interstices of the DNA. This is the part of him that recognized that myths and fairy tales were the poetic code. As always with Heaney, under what might seem a preconstrained code of discourse (the memorial service), there is immense precision and that extraordinary ability of his—so different from Hughes’s magnificent forcefulness —to pick up, chameleonlike, another’s discourse notably in his use of the DNA metaphor, also a textual metaphor. But it is the idea that the poetic code is to be found at its purest and equally in myths and fairy tales that most interests me. It is vital, I think, to remind ourselves in a University context of the importance of this placing of myths and fairy tales in the same breath at the heart of the poetic code and on an equal footing. It is again quintessentially Romantic and would thus have been generally incomprehensible to earlier periods, notably to mainstream Enlightenment. One of the great aesthetic and epistemological breakthroughs of Romanticism lay in its ability to see folk tales as themselves intensely, mysteriously, and essentially poetic and central to the culture. It is this

5. In fact the notion of “citizen” here is problematic, we are in fact in vision of society that is essentially “tribal.”

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idea that fairy tales are as important if not more important (because they are “ours”) than the Greek myths that had nourished Renaissance and Enlightenment culture that marked a turning point, involved a mythical “return home,” a movement away from the “foreign” Mediterranean to the “native” North. Indeed in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth, at the very moment when the Welshman Iolo Morganwg was collecting (and rewriting if not inventing) old Welsh texts, Herder, for example, saw in folk art the expression of national identity (see, for example, his “Correspondence on Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples” 1773). The collecting of folk tales was undertaken originally with a view, precisely, to the creation of a national identity and flowers in the remarkable collections of the Grimm brothers in 1812–1815, texts which themselves were rewritten texts, offering none of the guarantees of scientific rigour that we now expect of anthropologists and folklorists, but reworked by men who saw themselves as the direct inheritors of an ancient Germanic culture and who were searching to rediscover it. It was with Grimm that collection of folk tales, and folk art (the ballad, for example, another vital influence on Hughes and another narrative form) begins in earnest all over the world, for what was felt to be at stake here was more than the survival of undeniably beautiful and fascinating art-objects; it was something infinitely vaster—something infinitely more “sacred”. Thus this process of collection (that dialogued with other analogous Romantic priorities like philology) had spin-offs notably in the science of anthropology. Anthropology is also, in a sense, the child of the Romantic revolution. In England, we may remember, anthropology is said to begin with E.B.Tylor (1832–1917) who drew massively on folklore in his two great works: Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865) and Primitive Culture (1871), both of which, as their titles suggest are part of a general nineteenth century Romantic, concern with origins. It is interesting to note that his theories were one of the questions in the Cambridge Anthropological Tripos exam called “The History of Ethnological and Sociological Theory” in May 1954. Anthropology is, it will be remembered, the Tripos that Hughes took. Tylor’s theories in turn contributed to the growth of a school of so-called anthropological folklorists. It is the interesting leader of this school, Andrew Lang (1844–1912), writer of poetry, founder member of the society for psychic research, writer of fairy stories for children, translator of French poetry, who concerns me here. Lang, in many essays and books elaborated a theory of “survivals” based on Tylor’s hypothesis that from the beliefs held and customs and art-objects of agricultural communities and contemporary “savages” the folklorist could reconstruct the ideas of prehistoric man. To take one example which finds echoes in Hughes’s work, Lang writes: In psychology, the savage is he who (extending unconsciously to the universe his own implicit consciousness of personality) regards all natural objects as animated and intelligent beings and, drawing no hard and fast

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line between himself and the things in the world is readily persuaded that men may be metamorphosed into plants, beasts, and stars. and that the lower animals especially may be creatures more powerful than himself, and, in a sense, divine and creative (31). In this perspective the folk tale is a paradoxical archaic object, firmly and deeply rooted in a particular culture yet manifestly universal in distribution, thus giving almost direct access to the (Ab)Original and the Universal and—for Hughes this is particularly important—to that mythic primitive moment when man was in unmediated contact with the natural world. Did Hughes read Lang? I have no proof either way, and it is perhaps not important as Lang’s hypothesis has survived in the way that Grimm’s, for example, about the Indo-European origins of the folk tale have not. Only future scholarship, only a detailed study of Hughes’s course work at Cambridge, and perhaps his letters will prove it one way or another. Nevertheless I would maintain that there is at least an analogy; Hughes is working in a similar intellectual space to Lang (though his vocabulary has changed). How did Lang read folk tales? I do not have time to go into the detail, but essentially he argues that the folk tale appears in all animistic and totemic societies all over the world. Since it appears all over the world, the folk tale presupposes the unity of mankind (all cultures, for example investigate the problems of “good” and “bad” relatives—the jealousy of sisters or mothers-in-law for daughters-in-law that one finds in the story of “Cupid and Psyche” for example). Moreover, and innovatively, Lang argued that folk tales are older than myths which are literary reworkings of them. What Hughes adds, what perhaps distinguishes him—as poet—from the anthropologist, is that the myth/legend/fairy-story/folk tale is not presented as an object of scientific study but has an important social and psychological regulative function. It is here that Jung enters into the complex of ideas that constitute Hughes’s intellectual background. How precisely does all this influence Hughes’s use of the folk tale? For one thing, it makes rigorous definition of the categories myth, legend, folk tale, fable, ballad, fairy story—even certain forms of historical anecdote—difficult. The nineteenth century was, in this domain, like much of the twentieth (cf. Franz Boas), concerned essentially with continuity. There is little attempt by folklorists to define these categories by exclusion of the sort which asserts that myth contains the serious beliefs of a community, folk tales do not. Indeed it could be argued that Hughes’s choice of the “coyote tale,” whose social significance is often obscure, suggests that he did not want to work within a framework that is too clearly defined. Indeed, in this area as in many others, he reproduces a sort of (English?) cultural tradition of which Robert Graves would be another product: articulating a massive sweep of hypotheses with extreme pragmatism at the level of the use of individual concepts. It would be possible, from the outside and in a discriminatory perspective, to suggest that paradoxically and despite their extremely anecdotal base, the Birthday Letters are more mythical than the earlier

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texts, in the sense that there is in them more of the tragedy of defeat than in the legends and folk tales associated with Crow which are invested, one feels, despite their blackness, with a certain type of vigorous optimism. But this is arguable both in principle and in detail. Before concluding I would like to look at two less obvious textual examples of the way “narrative” enters into Hughes’s works in what I would consider to be central ways. The first is the poem “The Gulkana,” (R 78) which enters and leaves its central space through the territory of the primitive, the “pre-Columbian,” Indian: “Strange word, Gulkana. What does it mean?/A pre-Columbian glyph./A pale blue thread—scrawled with a child’s hand/Across our map.” “The Gulkana” articulates two metatextual metaphors, on the one hand our (modern) map, the trace of (Western/Scientific) man’s reading of the Universe, and, on the other, the glyph. I would like to suggest that Hughes’s writing needs the map but is itself often “glyphic.” Centrally one needs to remember that the glyph is not simply a picture (as people often understand the word and indeed Hughes’s poems) but that the pre-Columbian glyph, according to the anthropological work done by Sir John Thompson which was contemporary to Hughes’s presence in Cambridge, contains historical (i. e. narrative) as well as ritualistic and religious information. “The Gulkana” is thus, a poem which is at the same time a picture, a sacred ritual, and a tale—an account of a particular fishing trip to a particular place. My second example is taken from “Astrological Conundrums,” Section I —“The Fool’s Evil Dream.” (Ww 2)By listening to a story or tale, says the poem, one is not simply witnessing some distant event that can be analysed (is Hughes here telling a tale about himself and a particular woman?); one is being dissolved into it, one is undergoing something, one is involved in a complex process (the word is central) of parturition. Thus, structurally, in all senses of the word, being told a tale, like reading a poem, is a rite of passage, a journey of initiation, a metamorphosis into a radically modified state. This is the story that Hughes tells, of course, in the poem “Go Fishing” (R 44). However dim the land and violent the experience—perhaps all the more so if the story does tell of dark lands, of the shadow—one is born again, after a Tragic catharsis, desolate but renewed. But folk tales also, and this is why the Romantic background is so important, enable Hughes to take on several other issues which I have only time to list here. For one thing the myth and the folk tale for Hughes is manifestly a political problem, for it is the means by which we have access to “the deeper shared understandings which keep us intact as a group—so far as we are intact as a group” (WP 310). Our inability to negotiate with myth is the sign of that we are socially and thus politically fallen. It is for this reason that he can talk of myths as being “tribal dreams of the highest order of inspiration and truth, at their best” (151). The myth/folk tale supposes a community, says Hughes, and exists in opposition to a “high culture” less rooted, less authentic, the product of a nontribal, modern, “shallow” society and thus less able to negotiate with fundamental

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issues. Linked to this is the fact that the folk tale is also a “popular form”. For one thing the “hero,” like Crow, rarely has that inaccessible grandeur associated with the mythical, at least the mythical as enlightened—indeed Enlightenment— high culture understood it, though not as the Greeks understood it—the Greeks whose gods cheat, cuckold, rape and know fear with a lack of decorum that is fundamentally alien to the Christian tradition. The creatures in authentic folk tales are thus beings who speak our dialects, who, like us, confront the forbidden with cunning rather than from the protected Archimedian distance of an absolute moral system. Then again, the folk tale enables Hughes to refer to a “natural,” and manifestly pagan art-object, something he can use tactically against Christianity as one of his major enemies, just as the marvellous in folk tales, which had been a crucial issue in nineteenth century debates about folk tales (cf. the category “wonder tales”), folk tales that were used tactically against mechanistic and positivistic science, the bane of Romantic thought. Finally, the folk tale is, in Hughes’s terms like his poetry, a space which uniquely occupies the complete aesthetic, social and psychological nexus, not simply the object of scientific interest: “This literature is still, after all, what it primarily was— imaginative art, visionary accounts of profound psychological dramas, and entertainment” (76). The telling, for example, of the story of “Little Red Riding Hood” or of “Apple Tragedy” (C 78) is thus a social act: it is entertainment, and generally public entertainment, it is imaginative in that it involves complex aesthetic choices, and it is healing—telling us notoriously how to negotiate with the “wolf” or the “cider” inside us if we are men, or in the opposite sex if we are women. It is thus of the order of a shamanistic healing device. In conclusion, it will be obvious, I imagine, that I do not share Hughes’s epistemological or political views. Perhaps it is a sign that he is a really great poet that as with Eliot or Pound or Lawrence or Larkin, one can be profoundly reticent about a poet’s intellectual universe (in this instance the constant recourse to biological metaphors for political issues) and still profoundly concerned by his work. Perhaps this comes from a stance that is not unlike that of Hughes’s watching Crow, Frieda pointing at the moon in “Full Moon and Little Frieda” (W 182) or a child listening to a story in which fierce and sometimes deadly creatures are let loose. It is all, no doubt, as Hughes’s suggests, the fierce and deadly creatures within ourselves that we are watching with awe and trepidation. In this respect I find myself in the position of the Czech poet Miroslav Holub (Gammage 219) who marks his distance, as a scientist, from Hughes’s particular form of “darkness”.

List of Contributors

Carol Bere began her research on Ted Hughes for her doctoral dissertation at New York University. She taught English literature, writing, and poetry for several years at New York University and Rutgers University, and was an officer in the corporate communications department of a New York investment bank. She is a writer specializing in both international finance and literature, has written for several venues including The Economist Group, and published articles on Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and other contemporary poets in Critical Essays on Ted Hughes, The Literary Review, Ariel, Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage, Southern Humanities Review, and Concerning Poetry. Her article, “Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes’s Sibylline Leaves,” was published in 1999 in Lire Ted Hughes: New Selected Poems, 1957–1994, (ed. J.Moulin). Her most recent article, “The Road Taken: Adrienne Rich’s Poetry in the 1990s,” was published in the Summer 2000 issue of The Literary Review. Stephen Enniss is Curator of Literary Collections at the Robert W.Woodruff Library of Emory University in Atlanta. In that role he oversees the literary archive of Ted Hughes, as well as other leading American, Irish, and British poets. Terry Gifford, Research Co-ordinator, School of Cultural Studies, Bretton Hall College of Leeds University. He is the author of Pastoral, Green Voices, (1995, Manchester UP), and co-author with Neil Roberts of Ted Hughes: A Critical Study, (1981, Faber & Faber). He has been publishing on Hughes since 1978, contributing six chapters to other books on Hughes. He has five collections of poetry, most recently Whale Watching With a Boy and a Goat, (1998, Redbeck Press) and is currently writing a collected essays for University of Georgia Press, The Legacy of John Muir. Claas Kazzer is working for the British Council Leipzig (Germany). He worked as a research assistant and teacher at the University of Leipzig, where he has completed his Ph.D. Thesis on “Ted Hughes’s Books for Children (and Adults).” He occasionally works as a freelance translator into German, currently collaborating on a translation of selected essays by Ted Hughes. Since 1996, he has maintained the Ted Hughes’s Page website: www.uni-leipzig.de/~angl/ hughes. His most recent publications are articles on fantastic elements in

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Hughes’s children's books for the Inklings Jahrbuch 1999 and on the links between “Crow and the Creation Tales” for QWERTY. Christian La Cassagnère is Professor Emeritus at Université Lumière-Lyon 2. He is the author of La mystique du Prometheus Unbound de Shelley (Lettres Modernes), Introduction a la poésie de Coleridge (Aubier Flammarion), and the editor of collections of essays on English Romanticism, of which the latest volumes are Byron, lectures du Don Juan (Didier Érudition), William Blake, des Chants d’lnnocence au Livre d’Urizen (Didier Érudition), Wordsworth ou l’autre voix, (Presses Universitaires de Lyon). Joanny Moulin is Professor of English literature at the University of Provence. On Ted Hughes, he has published two monographs— Ted Hughes; la langue rémunérée (L’Harmattan 1999) and Ted Hughes; New Selected Poems (Didier Érudition, 2000)— and edited a bilingual collection of essays— Lire Ted Hughes (Editions du Temps, 2000). He is also the author of Seamus Heaney; l’éblouissement de l’impossible (Honoré Champion, 1999) and editor of the ejournal EREA, www.e-rea.org. Axel Nesme is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure of the rue d’Ulm, he is a Senior Lecturer in English and American literature at Université Lumière Lyon 2 and has written his thesis on the poetry of Theodore Roethke. Neil J.Roberts is Professor and Head of the School of English at university of Sheffield. Co-author with Terry Gifford of Ted Hughes: A Critical Study. Author of numerous other essays on Hughes and other contemporary poets including his most recent book Narrative and Voice in Postwar Poetry (which has chapters on Crow and Gaudete). He is also the author of books on the poetry of Peter Redgrove and the novels of George Eliot and George Meredith. He is the editor of the Blackwell Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry in English and is currently working on a study of D.H. Lawrence, Travel and Cultural Difference. Leonard M.Scigaj completed his Ph.D. at the University of WisconsinMadison in 1977. Since 1978 he has taught twentieth century literature, science fiction, and “Literature and Ecology,” a new course he developed in 1994, at Virginia Tech. He has published two books and edited a volume of critical essays on the poetry of Ted Hughes. He has also published an essay on the poetry of Sylvia Plath. His most recent work is Sustainable Poetry, a volume that defines “ecopoetry,” evaluates the most recent poetry of four American ecopoets (Ammons, Berry, Merwin, and Snyder) and attempts to counter the textual solipsism of Derrida with the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Ann Skea has published a number of papers on Ted Hughes. Her “Timeline,” listing Hughes’s major works and the interests and life events associated with their creation is included in Keith Sagar’s new book (now available). Her own book Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest looks at the influence of William Blake and the traditions of alchemy in Cave Birds, Elmet and River. Many of Ann’s papers can be read at her web-site at www.ann.skea.com. Ann is a writer and reviewer who lives in Sydney, Australia, when she is not travelling or living in London.

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Paul Volsik is Professor of British Literature at Paris 7 University. His major research area is British Modernist Poetry (notably Dylan Thomas and the relationship between linguistics and literature). He also has an interest in, and has published articles on, translation theory and twentieth century poetry generally. His recent articles include “I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels… Laying my host in metal,” on Dylan Thomas & the painter Ceri Richards in Interfaces (N° 15 1999) and “Dreams of Innocence and “Raptures of Submission; An Aspect of Late Nineteenth-Century Catholic Poetry” in Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens, (October 2000). He is now writing on “Baudelaire” & “French Poetry since Baudelaire” for The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation Diane Wood Middlebrook is a professional writer and a Professor of English at Stanford University, where she teaches courses in poetry and poetics. Her Anne Sexton, A Biography (1991) was a finalist for the National Book Award and for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Diane Middlebrook is the author of Her Husband; Hughes & Plath, A Marriage (Viking 2003). Discussions of her work are posted on the website www.dianemiddlebrook.com. Gayle Wurst was a Senior Researcher with the Swiss National Science Foundation and a Fellow in the English Department of Princeton University until September 1999, where she was working on a project in American literature. She was a fellow at W.E.B. Du Bois Institute of Harvard University from 1997– 1999. Her publications on Plath include numerous articles in French and English as well as Voice and Vision: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. From 1985 to 1995, she taught American and English literature at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and she has also taught at the Universities of Geneva, Orléans and Bordeaux.

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Rich, A. (1976). Of Women Born: Motherhood as Experience & Institution. New York: Norton. Robinson, C. (1989). Ted Hughes as Shepherd of Being. London:Macmillan. Rose, J. (1991). The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. London:Virago. Ryle, G. (1949). The Concept of Mind. New York:Barnes & Noble. Sagar, K. (1994). The Challenge of Ted Hughes, Basingstoke:Macmillan. Sagar, K. (2000). The Laughter of Foxes, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Sagar, K & Tabor, S. (1998). Ted Hughes: A Bibliography, 1946–1995, 2nd edition. London:Mansell. Sagar, K. (Ed.) (1978). The Art of Ted Hughes. 1975. Cambridge University Press. Sartre, J.P. (1947). Existentialism. Trans. Bernard Fechtman. New York:Philosophical Library. Scigaj, L.M. (1988, Summer). The Painterly Plath That Nobody Knows. Centennial Review 32, 220–49. Scigaj, L.M. (1999). Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets. Scigaj, L.M. (1991). Ted Hughes. New York: G.K.Hall/Twayne. Scigaj, L.M. (1986). The Poetry of Ted Hughes’. Form & Imagination. Iowa City: University of lowa Press. Scigaj, L.M. (Ed.) (1993). Critical Essays on Ted Hughes, New York:Macmillan. Skea, Ann. (1999). Adelaide Festival Transcript. 1976. From a reading by Ted Hughes at the Adelaide Festival Writers’ Week. July. . Skea, Ann. (2000). Timeline. 20 February . Snyder, G. (1995). A Place in Space, Washington:Counterpoint. Stevenson, A. (1989). Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. Boston:Houghton Mifflin. Strathern, M. (1992). After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. Sutcliffe, M, Cockroft L. & Pease, D. (1980). William Holt 1897–1977, Todmorden: Estate of William Holt. Tennant, E. (1999). Burnt Diaries. Edinburgh:Canongate Books. Torrance, R M. (1999). Encompassing Nature: A Sourcebook, Washington, D.C. : Counterpoint. Uroff [Dickie], M. (1979). Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes. Urbana:University of Illinois Press. Van Dyne, S. (1984). More Terrible Than She Ever Was:The Manuscripts of Sylvia Plath’s Bee Poems. InL.W.Wagner. (Ed.) Critical Essays on SylviaPlath (pp. 154– 70). Boston: G.K.Hall, Originally part of a 1982 facsimile edition pamphlet of Stings available at the Smith College Library Rare Book Room. Vaughan, R.W. (1987). National Music & Other Essays. 2nd ed. Oxford:Oxford University Press. Vendler, H. (1973). Raptures & Rendings, New Yorker 31 December: 66–70. Voloshinov, V.N. (1984). Marxism & the Philosophy of Language, tr. Ladislav, Matejka & I.R. Titunik, Cambridge Mass. & London, Harvard University Press. Wagner-Martin, L. (1987). Sylvia Plath: A Biography. New York:Simon & Schuster. Wilcock, D.T. (1927). Reprinted 1989. A Present from Hebden Bridge Comprising a Collection of 18 Local Stories & Folk-lore from the District called Hardcastle

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Grags with Complete Guide to the Crags & Heptonstall. Hebden Bridge:Nexus Publications. Wurst, G. (1999). Voice & Vision: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Geneva:Editions Slatkine. Yates, F. (1991). Giordano Bruno & the Hermetic Tradition. Chicago:University of Chicago Press. Yeats, W.B. (1933). Collected Poems. London:Macmillan.

Abbreviations

Ted Hughes Birthday Letters Cave Birds Collected Poems (The) Crow Dancer to God (A) Elmet Flowers and Insects Gaudete Hawk in the Rain (The) Lupercal Moortown New Selected Poems 1957– 1994 Poetry in the Making. Remains of Elmet. River Selected Poems 1957–1994 Shakespeare & the Goddess of Complete Being.

BL CB CPH C DG E FI G HR L M NSP

PM RE R SP SGCB

136 ABBREVIATIONS

Tales from Ovid Winter Pollen Wodwo Wolfwatching. Children’s Literature in Education [1] (mars 1970)

TO WP W Ww ME

Sylvia Plath The Journals of Sylvia Plath Letters Home Collected Poems The Bell Jar

J LH CPP BJ

CONTEXT AND GENRE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE ISSN 1573–2320 1. Ted Hughes: Alternative Horizons Edited by Joanny Moulin 2004 ISBN 90 265 1973 7

Index of Names and Titles

100 Poems to Learn by Heart 57–8 18 Rugby Street 32, 108n 59th Bear (The) 90 9 Willow Street 109 Abram, D. 41 Aeschylus 108 Alexander, P. 9 Allison, Susan 89 Alvarez, A. 93 Amulet, 117n Animal Poems 72 Anniversary, 80, Apprehensions, 22 Apple Tragedy, 133 Ariel 1, 5, 7, 9, 11, 23, 63n–64, 73, 75, 90– 91, 93, 106, 113, 135 Aristotle 49 Astringency, 61 Astrological Conundrums, 132 Auden, W.H. 17 Avery, T. 127 Axelrod, S.G. 19, 24?

Bird (The) 92 Birthday Present (A) 27 BirthdayLetters 1–15, 19–22, 28–30, 32– 33, 35n–37, 57–61, 63–65, 69n, 72, 74– 75, 88–93, 97, 101, 103, 113, 126, 132 Black Coat 22, 90 Black Rook in Rainy Weather 23 Blackbird (The) 64 Blake, W. 20, 50, 55, 58, 104–105, 107– 109 Boas, F. 132 Bone, J. 68 Booze, L.E. 25n Brandes, R. 89 Brandt, B. 127 Brandt, R.A. 117 Bride & groom lie hidden for three days 35–36, 112 Broe, M.L. 21 Brontë, E. 40 Browning, R. 107 Brueghel, P. 2 Bruno, G. 57 Bull Moses (The) 113 Bundtzen, L. 9 Burke, W. 50, 52 Burning the Letters 70

Bacon, F. 127 Bakhtin, M. 88–89 Bardo Thodol (The) 69 Barthes, R. 88 Baskin, L. 34, 70 Battersby C. 24n Bedtime Anecdote 123, 126 Bedtime Story 123 Bee God (The) 11 Being Christlike 101 Bell Jar (The) 1, 2, 5–9, 15, 64 Beuscher, R. 3

Campbell, J. 99 Capriccio 29–37, 31–32, 43 Capriccios 32 Capturing Animals 68, 72, 116 Caryatids (1) 13, 60 Caryatids (2) 21, 60 Cat & the Cuckoo (The) 115

138

INDEX 139

Cave Birds 3, 35–6, 58, 72, 92, 99, 100, 112–114 Chaikin, C. 30, Chinese History of Colden Water 42, 44 City (The) 37n Coat (The) 35 Coates, P. 41 Cockroft, L. 44 Cohen, M. 70n Coleridge S.T. 51, 55, 114n, 128 Collected Animal Poems 114n Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath (The) 1, 6, 10–11, 15, 17, 20–22, 105–106 Collected Poems of Ted Hughes (The) 32, 80, 98–99 Colossus (The) 106 Colossus (The) 17 Coming Down Through Somerset 117n Concurrence, 71 Contender (The) 79, 99 Conversation Among the Ruins 20 Creation of Fishes 113 Crow 3, 29, 33, 51, 98–101, 113–114, 116, 126 Crow Blacker than Ever 99 Crow’s Account of St George 122 Crow’s Battle Fury 99–100 Crow’s Elephant Totem Song 126 Culler, J. 88 Cullingford, E.B. 25n Daddy 3, 9–10, 23, 90, 92 Daffodils 93 Dancer to God (A) 95 Davids, R. 68, 73–74, 104n Davies, W. 12 De Chirico, G. 20, 26 De Quincey, T. 27 Dead Farms, Dead Leaves 39, 41 Deaf School 79, 81 Della Mirandola P. 58 Derrida, J. 41, 97 Descartes, R. 4 Descent 31, 34 Dickinson, E. 114n Difficulties of a Bridegroom 122 Disquieting Muses (The) 23, 26

Dogs Are Eating Your Mother (The) 12, 37, 64, 91 Dorr, J. 78 Dostoevsky, F. 6 Drawing 108 Dream (A) 91 Dreamers (The) 29, 33 Dreamfighter 120 Du, L. 13 Dust 71 Earth-Moon 118–120, 122 Earth-Moon 123 Earth-Owl & Other Moon People (The) 112, 117, 121 Edge 28 Egg Head 50 Egyptian Book of the Dead (The) 36 Eliot, T.S. 17, 20, 74, 95–96, 100, 107 Elm 27, 63 Emory (Archives) 13, 30, 67–69, 104–105, 135 Enniss, S. 104n Error (The) 31, 35, 37 Euripides 108 Existential Song 123 Faas, E. 3, 35, 51, 72, 87, 95–96, 100, 115 Fairy Tale 64 Falcon Yard 69 Fallgrief s Girlfriends 71 Familiar 35, 43 Faun 18 February 126 Female Author 20 Fern 79 Ffangs the Vampire Bat & the Kiss of Truth 117, 122 Ficino, M. 58 Fidelity 61 Fitzgerald, S. 107 Flame 31, 34–35n Fletcher, K. 69 Flowers, B.S. 25n Folktale 31, 35, 126 Fool’s Evil Dream (The) 132 For Billy Holt 45

140 INDEX

For the Duration 80 Frazer, Sir J. 96 Freud,S. 10, 54, 79, 81 Friedan, B. 8 Fromm, E. 7 Full Fathom Five 28 Full Moon & Little Frieda 113, 134 Galileo 4 Gammage, N. 44, 134 Gaudete 52, 88–89, 91, 93, 98, 112–114 Gifford, T. 89 Gilling, J. 2 Go Fishing 133 God (The) 101, 113 Godwin, F. 44 Gog 56, 99, 113 Gold, J. 69n–70 Graves, R. 35n, 87–88, 127, 132 Grimm, J. 126n, 128, 130 Guardian Angel 64 Gulkana (The) 80, 98, 132 Gutman Assia 1, 29–30, 33–35n, 37, 91 Lonya 14 Hamilton, Edith 1 Hanged Man (The) 11, 101 Hargrove, N.D. 23n–24n Harlow, J. 67 Harraway, D. 41 Harrison, T. 88 Hawk in the Rain (The) 3, 19, 49, 53, 69, 71, 78, 87, 97 Heaney, S. 80, 114n, 126, 129 Heinz, D. 116–117, 119 Herder, J.G. 130 Hesiod 39, 41 Hill-Stone Was Content 43 Hirschberg, S. 95 Hollindale, P. 115, 116, 117, 119n Holub,M. 134 Horder, J. 12, 105, 106 Horrible Song 117n Horse (The) 53, 71 Hosking E. 127 House of Aries (The) 69

Howls & Whispers 30, 36–37, 72 Hughes Albert (uncle) 44 Carol (wife) 65n Frieda (daughter) 12, 14, 134 Gerald (brother) 69n Nicholas (son) 12, 63n Olwyn (sister) 106, Shura (daughter) 30n, 33 Walt (uncle) 44 William Henry (father) 44 In Memoriam M.K.H. 80 Ingold, T. 46–47 Iron Man (The) 98, 119n, 122 Iron Wolf (The) 115 Iron Woman (The) 112–114, 119n Isis, 113 Italie, H. 13 Jaguar (The) 53 Jakobson, R. 126 Japanese River Tales 126 Jenny, L. 82 Johnny Panic & the Bible of Dreams, 93 Jones, D. 127 Journals of Sylvia Plath (The) 5, 7, 10–11, 17–19, 22, 24, 26–27, 62–63, 68, 105– 106 Joyce, J. 95–96, 99, 100 Jung, C.G. 77–78, 113, 127 Juranville, A. 78–79, 81 Klee, P. 25626 Kristeva, J. 88 Kroll, J. 105 Lacan, J. 49, 52, 55, 78–79, 81 Lady & the Earthenware Head (The) 23, 26 Lady Lazarus, 89 Lang, A. 131 Larkin, P. 97 Lawrence, D.H. 5–6, 41 Laws of the Game, (The Other) 31 Lesbos 27 Letters Home 2, 13–15, 17–19, 63, 69, 105 Life After Death 33, 101

INDEX 141

Listening & Writing 71 Little Fugue 9, 10 Little Red Riding Hood, 127, 133 Locket (The) 30, 31, 35 Love Song, 123 Lowell, R. 106 Lucretius, T. 41–2 Lumb Bank 45 Lumb Chimneys, 42 Lupercal 3, 69 Lyall, S. 104–105 Macbeth 27 Machine (The) 92 Macnaghten P. 45 Malcolm, J. 70n, 93, 105 Man in Black, 22, 28, 90 Mansfield, K. 107 Meet My Folks! 118, 121 Meeting 51 Mermaid’s Purse (The) 115 Merwin W. & D. 14 Middleton Murry, J. 107 Miles, D. 128n Milesian Encounter on the Sligachan 81–82 Milton 50 Moon Art 119 Moon-Bells & Other Poems 117n Moon-Freaks 112, 122 Moon-Haggis (The) 121 Moon-Hyena (The) 119 Moon-Lily (The) 121 Moon-Mirror 117, 119 Moon-Mourner (The) 119, 121 Moon-Ravens 121 Moon-Theatre 120 Moonwalk 113 Moon-Walkers 118–119 Moon-Ways 118 Moon-Whales 118 Moon-Wind 118 Moortown 41 Morganwg, I. 130 Morrison 114–117 121–122 Mort, Graham 41 Moulin, J. 37, 77 Mount Zion 99–100, 113

Muldoon, P. 126n Music on the Moon 119 Myers, L. 30, 32n, 69n, 70 Myers, W. 69 Myth & Education (1) 97, 117, 119, 122 Mythographers (The) 32-s33 Negev, E. 30 Neill, 114n Neumann 33 New Apocalypse (The) 127 New Selected Poems 29–31, 35, 37, 50, 88– 89, 98, 114n Newberry C. 127 Night-Ride on Ariel 113 Ode for Ted, 19, 21 Offers (The) 37n Old oats 80 On the Decline of Oracles 23 On the Difficulty of Conjuring up a Dryad 23–24 On the Plethora of Dryads 22, 24n–25 Once upon a time 126 Open to Huge Light 40 Opus 131, 31 Orghast 52, 56, 100 Ossian 129–130 Other (The) (Laws of the Game) 31, 35, 91 Ouija 23 Ovid 39, 41, 126 Owen, W. 14 Paul, L. 114n–115, 122n Peake, M. 127 Pease, D. 44 Pero, T. 116 Perseus 23 Pibroch 78 Picture of Otto (A) 14 Pike 70 Pindaros 96 Pit & the Stones (The) 35 Plaintiff (The) 113 Plath Aurelia (mother) 12–13, 69n, 73 Otto (father).1–4, 12–13

142 INDEX

Sylvia 1–15, 17–28, 30, 35, 37, 60–64, 68–69, 72n–75, 89, 93, 104–106, 107– 109, 113–115n, 121 Warren (brother) 12, 15 Poe, E.A. 109 Poetry in the Making 49, 54, 79, 118 Portraits, 64 Pratt, A. 23 Prayer for my Daughter (A) 25 Prometheus On His Crag 100, 112 Public Bar TV, 69 Pursuit 18, 20, 108 Quaritch, B. 70n Queen’s Complaint (The) 21 Rabbit Catcher (The) 90 Racine, J. 108 Rackham, O. 40 Rag Rug (The) 62–63 Raine, K. 58, 65 Rattle Bag (The) 114n, Read, H. The Green Child 127 Recklings 43 Remains of Elmet & Elmet 39–47, 56, 58 Revenge Fable, 126 Rey-Flaud, H. 84–85 Rich, A. (Of Woman Born) 9 Risen (The) 100 River 58, 81, 98–99, 113 Roberts, N. 89 Rock (The) 116 Roethke, T. 73 Roof (The) 30, 35 Rose,J. 25, 92, 105 Rota, B. 69 Runaway, 69n Ryle, G. 4 Sacrifice 44 Sagar, K. 32n, 40, 44, 55, 97, 100 Salmon Eggs 98 Sam, 69n School Bag (The) 114n, Scigaj, L. 20n, 35n, 40–41, 89 Secret of Man’s Wife (The) 120

Shakespeare & the Goddess of Complete Being 58, 59, 77, 95, 97– 98, 100, 108, 112 Shakespeare, W. 20, 35n, 64, 107–108, 114n Sharp, C. 127n Sheep in Fog 73–74 Shelley, P.B. 55, 88 Shibboleth 31, 35 Silent Eye (The) 121 Singing on the Moon 119 Skea, A. 30n, 36n, 116 Sky Furnace 72 Skylarks 81, 99 Slump Sundays 43 Smell of Burning 30, 35 Smith, P. 70n, 73 Snag (The) 122n Snail of the Moon l21 Snow 31, 35 Snyder, B. 43 Something Was Happening 92 Song 71, 87–89, 91, 93 Sonnenberg, B. 69 St. Botolph’s Review 5, 92 St. Botolph’s 18 Stevens, W. 106 Stevenson, A. 12–14, 105 Stings 11 Stone, B. 70n Strange Meeting 14 Strathern, M. 46, Strumpet Song 23 Sutcliffe 44 Table (The) 63 Take What You Want But Pay For It 100 Tales form Ovid 40–41, 108 Tales of the Early World 120, 122n Ted Hughes: A Bibliography 31n, 36n, 43 Telegraph Wires 44 Tennant, E. 110 The Moon-Mare (The) 119 There Was a Boy (The) 19 Thistles 82, 84 Thomas, D. 51, 73, 127 Thomas, R.S. 58, 127

INDEX 143

Thought Fox (The) 54, 71, 87, 97 Three Books 43 Three Caryatids Without a Portico 13 To Eva Descending the Stair 21 Trance of Light (The) 42 Truth Kills Everybody 122n Turville-Petre, E.O.G. 128 Two Legends 113, 126 Tylor, E.B. 131 Uncle Walt, 44n Uroff, M.D. 24 Urry, J. 45 Van Dyne, S. 11 Ventriloquist (The) 63 Virgil 39 Virgin in a Tree 23, 25–26 Voloshinov, V.N. 88 Wagner-Martin, L. 12 Walt 46 Waving goodbye from your banked hospital bed, 89–90 Wevill, D. 30 What is the Truth? 122n What will you make of half a man?, 112 What’s The First Thing You Think Of? 44 When Men Got To The Summit 43, 45 Wilcock, D.T. 45 Williams, V. 127 Wind 49–56 Winter Pollen 1, 9, 52–53, 55–56, 63, 74, 79, 84, 96, 98, 107, 112–114, 116, 119, 123, 128, 133, Wodwo 3, 55, 69 Wolfwatching 100, 132 Woodruff, R.W. (see Emory Archives) 103–104 Wordsworth, W. 19 Yeats l7, 24n–25, 51 You Hated Spain, 36n, 80 Your Paris 13