Plath and Hughes Poems

Crossing the Water (1962)

Someone reflecting back on a memory with the knowledge they have now, searching for the signs they missed. Also could be crossing over to the underworld or someone stuck in limbo, reflecting on life i.e. life passing by eyes as dies:

• “Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people”

• “A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand”

• “Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?”

Repeated terminal caesura - death, definitive ends, choppy, prevents flow, could be self-punishment, angry at self for missing the obvious so punishing by not allowing a comfortable rhythm to develop

1959 took road trip across Canada with Ted

Heptonstall

Speaker reflects on the realisation that death is everywhere and in the end everything returns to where it came from, feelings of futility and nihilism

• “Black village of gavestones” - coal mines

• “Great geographies drained to sutures of cracked windowsills”

• “Only the rain never tires”

Final stanza - terminal caesura/series of end-stopped declarative statements to emphasise point, split quatrain to show beginning to dissolve and break apart, everything returns to fragments, pieces they’re made of

Structure - first 2 quatrains are even, uniform, shows control, final quatrain falls away, shows coming apart broken by the spirit of Heptonstall

Hughes grew up here, lived with Sylvia 1956, Sylvia’s gravestone here

Tulips (1961)

Speaker is a woman in hospital content in her anonymity and numbness but is interrupted by the intrusion of a bouquet of tulips which reminds her of her responsibilities

• “I am nobody”

• “They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep”

• “Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks”

• “Their colour, a dozen red lead sinkers round my neck”

• “And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes / Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me”

Asyndeton - omission of connective, allows a consistent rhythm reflecting the harmonious peacefulness felt by the speaker

Plath recovering from an appendectomy, recently miscarried (speculated Ted brutality) - reads like a poem written in 1953 after suicide attempt

Thistles

An extended metaphor for the struggle of human existence as presented by some thistles fighting to survive

• “Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men”

• “Every one manages a plume of blood”

• “Fighting back over the same ground”

For farmers, the presence of thistles in the field was a sign of neglect and poor husbandry; this weed was synonymous with moral turpitude (guardian article)

Vikings ref link to Yorkshire - Hughes’ childhood home

Finisterre

The speaker visits Finisterre (‘the lands end’) and is awestruck by the brutality of nature she witnesses and finds evident, she is drawn into the primality of her surroundings

• “The last fingers, knuckled and rheumatic”

• “Whitened by the faces of the drowned”

• “Other rocks hide their grudges under the water”

• “They stuff my mouth with cotton”

• “When they free me, I am beaded with tears”

• “She is in love with the beautiful formlessness of the sea”

Seascape = troubled mind, land = feminine, sea = masculine and destroying (men not limited by society)

Visited with Ted in June 1961, left Frieda in England

Rain (1973)

It is about rain on a field and how it affects the animals and people in that field, could be a metaphor for Ted feeling like he is drowning in the wake of both Sylvia and Assia’s deaths or just general exploration of death

• “We drive post-holes. They half fill with water before the post goes in”

• “Brains and bowels beaten out. Nothing but their blueprint bones last in the rain”

• “The calves wait deep beneath their spines”

Plurals demonstrate nothing is spared, biblical allusions - Noah’s Ark, sent to wipe out humanity for their sins, so can begin again

Monosyllabic = mimic the pounding of posts/sounds like attacking

Assia and Sylvia dead

Ariel (October 1962)

Speaker is trying to move on from something by establishing a connection with the freedom of raw nature

• “Stasis in darkness. Then the substanceless blue”

• “How one we grow, pivot of heels and knees!”

• “The brown arc of the neck I cannot catch”

• “White Godiva”

• “The child’s cry melts in the wall”

Owned a horse in Devon called Ariel (gave up her voice to get married in myth), written at same time as 25 poems on birthday, Ted gone

Plath feels free again when writing in early hours of morning a feeling she compares to riding her horse in early morning - can forget responsibilities and become lost in writing, unburdened

The Horses (1957)

A man sees some horses in a field and is mesmerised by their transformation in the early morning light

• “Grey silent fragments of a grey silent world”

• “Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun Orange, red, red erupted” - Volta, epizeuxis

• “May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place”

Most lines end-stopped in first few lines adding to the sense of emptiness and darkness

Kept horses in Devon

The Moon and the Yew Tree (1961)

The speaker reflects upon what she can see out of her window, seeking comfort but does not know where to look - Surface = nature but underneath is a critique of the catholic church, expressing a deep and overwhelming sense of despair and an ambivalent attitude towards the traditional expectations of motherhood and femininity (are the Tree and Moon Aurelia and Otto?)

• “The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue”

• “The grasses unload their griefs at my feet as if I were God”

• “The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right”

• “The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls”

• “Clouds are flowering / Blue and mystical over the face of the stars”

• “The message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence”

October 1961, couldn’t sleep so Ted suggested she wrote about what she could see from the window to settle her mind

The Jaguar (1957)

The speaker demonstrates the primality of the human mind through the symbolism of a caged jaguar who despite its cage refuses to become docile

• “The boa constrictor’s coil / Is a fossil.”

• “Cage after cage”

• Stanza 3 = volta, ‘but’, lots of enjambment to move quickly like the jaguar, unlike the heavy caesura of the lifeless animals in stanzas 1 and 2

• “The crowd stands, stares, mesmerised”

• “Hurrying enraged / through prison darkness”

• “On a short fierce fuse.”

• “He spins from the bars”

• “There’s no cage to him // More than to the visionary his cell:”

• “The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel. over the cage floor the horizons come.” - Chiasmus = goes from world to ground then ground to world, lurching effect, Jaguar is powerful

Jaguar = untamable force of nature, power of human imaginations, it is primal, strong and fierce, anthropomorphism

Worked in London Zoo after graduation in 1954, saw jaguars there, made sculptures of them which he gave to his brother and sister

Spinster (1956)

The speaker rejects her suitors, instead entering into a life of isolation and independence from the world around her - could be read as a critique of this defiance of social norms

• “Observed her lover’s gestures unbalance the air, His gait stray uneven”

• “Petals in disarray, the whole season, sloven”

• “She longed for winter then! Scrupulously austere in its order”

• “She withdrew neatly”

• “Round her house she set / such a barricade of barb and check”

• “As no mere insurgent man could hope to break / with curse, fist, threat / or love, either”

SF = violence and aggression (from disorder, surroundings, societal stigmas, men, patriarchy) - ‘struck’, ‘disarray’, ‘bedlam’, ‘frosty’, ‘vulgar’, ‘treason’, ‘barb’, ‘break’, ‘curse’, ‘fist’, ‘threat’

ABCBAC rhyme scheme - close rhyme, doesn’t have order the speaker craves, doesn’t always work

1956 writing each other lustful letters, Adlai Stevenson II = commencement address at Smith’s girls college saying they are meant to be wives and domestic mothers

Wind

Surface = depiction of a brutal storm and its impact on the people who live on a hill, beneath the storm is a metaphor for an argument, the speaker has been inside all night while strong winds, rain and thunder assail the surrounding landscape, storm rages on as morning arrives, at noon the speaker ventures out to get some coal for the fire, the speaker seems both daunted and amazed by the storm - by the way it wreaks havoc on the human and natural worlds alike

• “The booming hills, winds stampeding the fields”

• “I scaled along the house-side”

• “We grip our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought or each other.”

• “Feel the roots of the house move, but sit on”

• “Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons”

1956 - just married Sylvia

A Birthday Present (1962)

Speaker is attempting to guess the contents of a birthday present which sits on the table. A poem about a woman who begs to be told the truth, also a possible criticism of the housewives’ suffocating existence, or as the lament of the death of a relationship

• “I think it wants me. I would not mind if it was bones”

• “Now there are these veils”

• “I am ready for enormity”

• “Let us eat our last super at it, like a hospital plate.”

• “No falling ribbons, no scream at the end.”

• “Veils were killing my days. To you they are only transparencies, clear air”

• “Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger. Let it not come by word of mouth”

• “Only let down the veil, the veil, the veils.”

Birthday present could be: death, breakdown of a relationship, ambiguous (whatever you project onto it)

Poetic voice = angry, resigned, desperate, accepting

Plath very inspired by surrealism movement

The Lovepet (1971)

widely accepted as an extended metaphor for a possessive, all consuming and destructive sexual love, on a conceptual level, the poem arguably charts the disintegration of a marriage or the strain of a child on a relationship

• “She stroked it. He spoke to it softly.”

• “He gave it the blood of his face it grew eager”

• “He gave it the strength of his spine it ate everything”

• “It bolted their diaries / They gave it their sleep it gobbled their dreams”

• “They gave it their double smiles and blank silence”

• “It ate the colour of their hair”

• “They gave it shouting and yelling they meant it / It ate the faces of their children”

• “They gave it a thousand letters they gave it money”

• “It ate their future complete”

Final stanza = structure starts to fracture and fall apart

Punctuation = at beginning lots of end-stopped and caesura to show the order, then no punctuation showing descent into chaos

Published in the New Yorker Jan 2, 1971 - after Assia and Sylvia dead

Lesbos (1962)

Surface = someone visiting a friend but falling out with them and needing to leave, could represent the struggles of women in relationships both platonic and sexual e.g. emotional and societal obstacles, speaker may be jealous of/obsessed with another woman so try to find little things to hate about her, rivalry, competition of bad situations

• “Viciousness in the kitchen! / The potatoes hiss.” - melodrama, sibilance mimetic of anger, in media res

• “It is all Hollywood, windowless”

• “You who have blown your tubes like a bad radio”

• “The smog of cooking, the smog of hell”

• “He lumps it down the plastic cobbled hill”

• “I am packing the hard potatoes like good clothes, / I am packing the babies, / I am packing the sick cats” - anaphora

• “That is that. That is that,”

• “Close on you like the fist of a baby”

Poetic voice = resentful, frustrated, bitter, hate, anger

Title = ironic as speaker is antipathetic towards her friend

Written 1962, supposed to be in Ariel but Hughes excised it, semi-autobiographical, dram mono, Lesbos = island where Sappho grew up, when Hughes left she went to Cornwall to stay with friend Kathy Kane, after WW2 gov keep to return women to domestic sphere, by mid-50s half women who had started university abandoned it to marry, Adlai Stevenson

Her Husband (1961)

Husband comes home from a long day at work intent on showing his wife how hardworking he is, when she does not give him the respect he feels he deserves they argue and then she leaves him

• “Deliberately to grime the sink and foul the towels”

• “Let her learn with scrubbing brush and scrubbing board”

• “Let her learn through what kind of dust he has earned his thirst”

• “He’ll humble her”

• “Hearing the rest, he slams them to the fire back”

• “Her back has bunched into a hump as an insult”

Conflict highlights both partner’s failings, critiquing gender roles and families? (VERY UNLIKE HUGHES), stern, angry, bitter, sinister, could be read as an apology to Plath for all that she endured with him

‘Her Husband’ - gossipy connotations, maybe what Hughes was often referred to as

Written 1961 around time split then published 1967

You’re (1960)

Woman describing her unborn child, title suggests she it trying to work out what the thing inside her is e.g. how it looks/functions - marveling at motherhood

• “Thumbs down on the dodo’s mode”

• “Mute as a turnip”

• “O high-riser, my little loaf”

• “Vague as fog and looked for like mail”

• “A creel of eels, all ripples”

• “Jumpy as a Mexican bean”

• “Right like a well-done sum”

• “A clean slate, with your own face on”

Semi-autobiographical (Confessionalism), accurately predicts Frieda’s birthday as ‘All Fools’ Day’

‘You’re’ = You, are, prefixes each line/simile/metaphor, contraction :)

Inspired by Lowell and Sexton, Plath turned more and more to her own experiences of childhood, marriage and motherhood in her poetry - an honest, intimate poem about the joys and anxieties of becoming a mother

Written 1960 a few months before Frieda was born

Full Moon and Little Frieda

A man outside with his daughter looking at the stars amazed by her

• “A spider’s web, tense for the dew’s touch”

• “To tempt a first star to a tremor”

• “A dark river of blood”

• “The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work”

The lovely juxtaposition of the moo-cows, and the moon, and of course the cow is a moon animal and sacred to the goddess, and the moon herself is a mirror, where we gaze. All the images are perfect. The bucket is made of tin, a moon metal. The wreaths are round, like the moon, like the circle of the spider’s web. (Jeanette Winterson)

Published 1967 after Sylvia’s death, Freida around 2 in the poem

Daddy

Perspective of a woman addressing her father, the memory of whom has an oppressive power over her, the poem details the speaker’s struggle to break free of his influence (Otto and Ted), patriarchy and oppression, speaker desperate to break free from her chains

• “Barely daring to breathe or Achoo”

• “Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time”

• “Ach, du”

• “Wars, wars, wars” - epizeuxis

• “I never could tell where you / put your foot, your root”

• “It stuck in a barb wire snare. / Ich, ich, ich, ich” - lexical borrowing, means ‘I’

• “I have always been scared of you”

• “Your neat mustache / And your Aryan eye, bright blue”

• “Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You”

• “Not God but a swastika”

• “I made a model of you, / A man in black with a Meinkampf look”

• “A love of the rack and the screw”

• “I’m finally through”

• “The vampire who said he was you”

• “Daddy, you can lie back now”

• “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”

Fairytale nature = lack of fact, tentative connections, uncertainty (in ‘oo’ sound)

Childish assonance in ‘oo’, ‘Daddy’ and ‘achoo’ reflecting infantalisation, creates a rhythm and sing-song melody

SF = Holocaust imagery

Apostrophe = calling out to her dead father

Complex family relationships, autobiographical? but in BBC intro she distances self by saying “about a girl with an Electra Complex” - “She has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it” - “In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyse each other” (father a Nazi, mother a Jew - not Plath but the girl)

Nuclear war threat, world coming to terms with WW2, rise of the ‘New Poetry’ (Confessionalism - Lowell, Sexton = more personal and powerful poetry, less genteel old and stuffy nature), baby boom cos society promoting family life and traditional gender roles (Plath found oppressive)