Hughes offers a poetic resurrection of Sylvia Plath

By Jenna Baddeley

Sylvia Plath killed herself a quarter of a century ago. Early this year, her widower, Ted Hughes, published a series of poems that bring her back to life in a complex and compelling exploration of her emotionally torn character. Hughes has compiled these poems, all written after her death, in a collection entitled Birthday Letters. Deftly hewn works of art, these poems reminisce about Plath's poetic brilliance and drive as well as her extreme vulnerability to external and internal pressures--a vulnerability that formed the core of her now-famous emotional turmoil.

There must be a great temptation for poets writing about the loss of their loved ones to dwell on their own heartbreak and mourning. In his other poems, Hughes portrays himself as a stereotypically phlegmatic Brit, but his portrait of Plath resonates with volatile, extreme emotions. Plath's character is an eclipsing presence throughout--Hughes appears more commonly as a receptacle for Plath's turbulent anguish than a character in his own right.

Still, he devotes a great deal of space to examining the difficulties of comforting, controlling, and sympathizing with a lover whose misery he could never fully understand. His writing is infused with an obvious fondness, affection, and reverence for Plath, emotions which take root partly in her inscrutability, her strangeness and foreignness both as an American and as an emotional other. Hughes synthesizes a highly- wrought portrait of Plath with a careful examination of their complicated relationship, allowing the collection to function as both a tragic story of lost love and a poetic realization of Plath's character. Despite the tragedy of Plath's death, Hughes depicts his grief in subdued terms, figuring it as a heavy burden looming over the text rather than as an invitation to poetic catharsis.

Tragically, the closer Hughes comes to focusing this multi-dimensional image of Plath, the more we are reminded of her decision to render herself permanently unreachable to him, and indeed, to everyone. The finality of her death resounds throughout Hughes's brilliant poetic resurrection, and the intimacy he recreates with her in the space of his poetry is truly poignant. Plath is the most real and most deeply explored character in the book; the others are one-dimensional, sketched in only one or two contexts. Plath's own children exist as little more than foils for the dominating figure of the poet herself.

Hughes's poetic skill is remarkable. On a superficial reading, his poems sweep the reader along in their flow, sometimes disturbing but never jarring. Given the attention they deserve, Hughes's eye-opening metaphors unfold and give the works shape and depth on many different levels. His poems span a range of moods, a range of experiences shared with his lover. In "Chaucer," he reminisces fondly about the time Plath "declaimed Chaucer to a field of cows." With the combined force of a lover's and a poet's attention to detail, he captures Plath at her most vulnerable and frazzled: "the tanned/ Almost green undertinge of your face/ Shrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaited/ Head pathetically tiny." In the poems examining Plath's poetic ambition, Hughes surges forward with extended sentences that convey Plath's kinetic, tireless drive.

Hughes's writing straddles a line between prose and poetry; he writes sometimes in complete sentences, sometimes in run-ons or fragments. The structure of his sentences reflects the clarity with which he remembers an event or conveys the event's energy and pace. Often, fragments serve the purpose of conveying details that remain sketchy in his mind, background information about Plath, or contexts for their experiences together. With the full sentences, he lingers over the things he remembers clearly: special moments they shared or his particular perceptions about her character.

Although Hughes brings Plath alive with perfect clarity, inviting us to understand each facet of her character, he also makes us very aware of our status as outsiders; distant from Hughes's relationship with her. Hughes addresses most of the poems directly to Plath, never referring to her in the third person, never calling her by name, but always addressing her as "you." Hughes always accompanies his "yous" with specific, intimate memories, thwarting any notion we as readers might have had that he was addressing the poem to an open-ended audience. The poems foster an atmosphere of private communication between the two poets, causing the reader to feel like something of a voyeur. Like eavesdroppers, we feel as if we should be treading quietly to avoid making our presence felt.

It even leads us to question to what extent we can and should try to decipher the more obscure passages, very likely references to private details the two poets shared. And like eavesdroppers, we remain captivated not only by the mildly illicit feeling of reading something that wasn't written for our eyes, but also by the magnetic pull of a classically tragic love story.

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