Ted Hughes's Letter to Sylvia Plath - Process paper by Ana Fialho and Bárbara Borges

The analysis of Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Child’ provided us with a greater understanding of the poem and thus enabled us to imagine how Ted Hughes would relate it to their son, Nicholas, born in 1962. Further research into the date of the poem also provided evidence that the poem was written only a few weeks before Plath’s death. We then proceeded to create a letter written some years after Plath’s death in which Ted Hughes would tell her how their son was doing, through analogies with the poem ‘Child’.

In the first paragraph we used the images Plath used in her poem – ‘April snowdrops’, ‘Indian Pipes’ and ‘grand or classical’ – they are things Plath wants her child to see and experience, they are also positive things related to nature. However, we introduce some negativity by mentioning that ‘his (son’s) sky is sometimes without a star’ because his mother would be gone. The next sentence expresses what we imagine Hughes would feel, perhaps because of guilt, even though he couldn’t help her. To get this message across we also used the image of a starless sky. We then went on to describe how his eyes have grown older and how despite that fact, they still hold the same beauty she saw in them when he was an infant. Once again, for this we used the idea that Plath uses in her poem ‘clear eye’.

In the second paragraph we use questions that we imagine someone might be left with after such an experience. We used the word “wring” as Plath does in her poem but we associated it not only to her hands but also to her entire body, as wringing implies causing pain, which she eventually did to herself. The second question is also directed to Plath and it is Hughes questioning why she didn’t see some light, some future, in their children, namely their son for whom this poem is written, and why that didn’t make her want to stay alive.

The third paragraph uses other parts of her poem such as ‘stalk without wrinkle’, which Plath uses as a metaphor for her son. However, we change the tone by implying that, with time, the son would have grown and thus experienced more disappointments, hardships, and everything associated with growing up, and as such, would have become wrinkled. ‘She is too’ refers to their daughter who would have gone through the process of growing up, as we all do. Once again, we magnify Hughes’s suffering because, as an adult, he suffered more, both with grief and several accusations of indirectly killing Plath. In the next sentence we use ‘zoo’ as a metaphor for life, the same connotation given to the word in Plath’s poem and, therefore, emphasizing the idea that their lives (Hughes’s and the children’s) became tainted by Plath’s suicide. Furthermore, Hughes wonders where she was, in other words, what realm she was before she killed herself, and the children wonder who she was because they were both so young when she died. The next paragraph introduces the idea that Hughes received a mysterious letter written many years ago.

The letter from the “(…) old, quiet woman” was inspired vy the poem Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath. The letter was written and sent to Mrs. Plath on the 12^th February 1963, a day after her death. The irony of the letter starts right in the first line when it is stated “once upon a time I was dead too”. The description of a similar experience that arrives a day late might have, indeed, prevented what is now a literal death.

Throughout the poem, there were several significant aspects for the construction of an imaginary experience relatable to Mrs. Plath, for instance:

·      Consistent references to time- in the poem -“one year in every ten”-verse 2; “in a day” verse 15; “soon, soon” verse 16; “I am only thirty” verse 20; “the first time it happened I was ten” verse 35; “the second time” verse 37; and in the letter ( “once upon a time”; “as time passed”; “at that time”; “already”; “stopped”; “starting”; “still in space and time”; “so long”; “at a young age”; “I am now old”; “two decades in and is now time”;

·       Rhythm created by rhyme, very short stanzas and verses, and the frequent use of long anaphors “ I do it so it feels like hell/I do it so it feels real” verses 46 and 47; “it’s easy enough to do it in a cell/ it´s easy enough to do it and stay put” verses 49 and 50, and in the letter- “ seeing the dead (…) but like I said”; “I waited. I waited”; I learned how to be the Berlin Wall. I was the Berlin Wall. I am a wasted Berlin Wall;

·      The use of elements related to the second world war, particularly the Holocaust, to relate gender and racial oppression;

·      Macabre or grotesque elements which cause repulsion in the reader, for instance, “the nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?/ The sour breath”- verses 13 and 14; and in the creative piece, “if I was already the corpse, as if my blood had stopped running and my body was starting to smell like the river bottom”;

·      Reference to the stage-like aspect of death, in direct intertextuality in the letter “ it is indeed the theatrical”;

·      The use of metaphors and comparisons such as “I rocked shut/ as a seashell” verses 39 and 40; “my face a featureless, fine/Jew linen” verses7 and 8; “and I eat men like air “ verse 84 and, in the letter, “ the thinnest drop of water would feel me up like the ocean”;

·      The title “Lady Lazarus” metaphorically meaning the woman who resurrects, since it alludes to Lazarus, a figure from the Bible who died and was resuscitated by Jesus himself; in the letter, resurrection is also suggested by the idea of a person who will soon become the Lady Lazarus, who “fights to be alive again” but still isn’t;

·      The poem grows from the point of view of Lady Lazarus herself and almost exclusively focuses on the “I”; in the letter the idea of self is also pivotal but there is a short disruption where a “you” is introduced only to be circled back into the “I”;

·      The poetic subject is quite static as well as the settings described, emulating death, contrasting with “the other” who moves and watches, “the peanut-crunching crowd/ who shoves in to see” verses 26 and 27; the idea of finding herself recurrently  in the starting point, going backwards”; represented in the letter by passages like “I was very still, I waited”; “I am an old, quiry woman, I am still”; and /the contrast between the “I” and the other) “ the world breaths without me”.