Ted_Hughes_-_Birthday_Letters_Anthology

People construct their own perspectives on events, personalities, idea or situations, shaped by their own experiences and memories. Ted Hughes’ anthology Birthday Letters is his perspective about the events between himself and Sylvia Plath and their life together. He published it in attempt to alter ones perspectives on Hughes’ influence in Plath’s suicide and providing emotional insight into their lives, effectively giving him the final say in the events of their relationship. “Fulbright Scholars”, “Sam” and “Your Paris”, three poems within Birthday Letters, represent conflicting perspectives of events in their lives, as well as their contrasting personalities. Through techniques such as first person, metaphors, imagery and rhetorical questions, my perspective of these events has been altered to one of believing Hughes is not the sole contributor to Sylvia Plath’s death, however he was not the patient, long-suffering husband of an overbearing wife either; his actions may have just been the proverbial ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’. Hughes and Plath’s relationship has been scrutinised by biographers, journalists and literary critics since it began in February 1956. Both successful and acclaimed poets, their lives were shrouded in controversy, and even death, they are objects of curiosity and intrigue. Their relationship was tumultuous at best, and his constant extra-marital affairs did little to ease the tension. Even the birth of their two children, Frieda and Nicholas, could not keep this couple together. They separated in 1962 after Plath discovered Hughes’ ongoing affair with a friend. Less than six months later Plath gassed herself in the kitchen, while her two children slept soundly upstairs, and since, Hughes has been labelled by the public as the misogynist husband who pushed his wife to suicide. Birthday Letters is said to be his response to her constantly playing the ‘victim’ within their relationship, and the title of ‘letters’ instead of ‘poems’ indicates the personalisation of the anthology. “Fulbright Scholars” is the first poem in the anthology and, with the use of personal pronouns: ‘were you among them'’ and first person: ‘I noticed it’, is written as an address to Plath, structured as a personal letter. It chronicles Hughes’ first sighting of Plath as he struggles to recall the details of this event that happened forty years prior, impeded by age and time. The poetic is in free verse, allowing Hughes to produce a steady flow of memories without pauses in his recollection. Rhetorical questions, “Where was it, in the strand'” and the repetition of ‘maybe’: ‘Maybe I noticed you. Maybe I weighed you up”, create a tone of uncertainty in the poems has Hughes is constantly questioning his memory, forever undecided of what actually happened. “Fulbright Scholars” contains a variety of conclusive details, which Hughes is certain occurred, and a succession of speculations and presumptions. He unquestionably recalls, ‘I studied [the photograph of the scholars]… wondering/ Which of them I might meet. I remember that thought. Not your face”. He can vividly remember examining the photograph though he cannot recollect seeing Plath’s face within it. However, four lines later he states, “Noted your long hair, loose waves – Your Veronica Lake bang” indicating he did indeed notice her amongst the other scholars; conflicting with his earlier lines. His perspective on the event is shaped by newfound knowledge, experience and hindsight gained from their six year marriage. A further conflict is displayed within line nineteen where Hughes notes that, he “forgot. Yet [he] remember[ed] the picture” – his memory had failed him. “The Shot”, similar to “Fulbright Scholars”, exhibits how someone’s perception of another is altered by knowledge and experience. The title is an extended metaphor for Plath, likening her to a bullet shot from a gun and metaphorically illustrating how she ‘ricocheted’ through life, oblivious to anyone she hit along the way. Again, with the use of personal pronoun, Hughes is addressing Plath throughout the poem, “You were undeflected. You were gold jacketed, solid silver, nickel-tipped”. With his vivid and abundant use of visual imagery, “the fury/ Of a high-velocity bullet” and “rifling groove”, Hughes establishes a perspective of a deadly and powerful Plath. The poem adopts a misogynistic tone, criticising her constant adoration of any man she could, “deif[ying them] by [her] infatuation” until they escaped her possessive ways. A shift in the tone of the poem is evident in the lines, “But inside your sob-sodden Kleenex and your Saturday night panics”, as he is now discussing the fragility of Plath’s psyche, largely attributed by her father’s death; she isn’t such a terrorist after all. Hughes goes on to suggest that her uncontainable nature also led to her suicide attempt, leaving a “cheek-scar/ Where [she] seemed to have side-swiped concrete”. Just as Hughes commented on his obliviousness to Plath’s inner demons when he first encountered her in “Fulbright Scholars” which she hid behind her ‘Veronica Lake bang’, he again observes what she concealed ‘under [her] hair done this way and that’. Without the years of marriage shared between them, Hughes would not have been able to know of her inner anguish and consequent suicide attempts. This newfound knowledge and insight into her mind provides Hughes with a conflicting perspective on Plath’s personality. Contrasting to the previous two poems of a single person’s varying perspectives of the same issue, Hughes’ recollection of their honeymoon in Paris is an example of two different people viewing the same place as completely opposite from one another in “Your Paris”. Plath’s perspective of Paris was of a culturally and socially romantic city that was inspiration to many great authors and playwrights from Hemingway to Henry Miller. Whereas, to Hughes, Paris was a city that had experienced terrible suffering and desperation and was ‘clogged with dregs of betrayal, reprisal, hatred’. The line, ‘I kept my Paris from you’, Hughes sees to be protecting Plath from his version of the city, but it adopts a tone of arrogance and superiority, chastising Plath for her excitement and naivety. The ‘Hotel des Deux Continents’, translating to Hotel of Two Continents, is a metaphor for not only the cultural differences of the American Plath and English Hughes, but of the divided personality of Plath herself, the young exuberant woman he married, contrasted against the overbearing, highly dependent wife who committed suicide. The poem is divided into two sections: the first, deeply discussing the conflicting perspectives the couple have on their honeymoon destination, the second half reveals that Plath’s innocent views were actually a façade, hiding her inner turmoil, “you still hung waiting/ For your torturer”, and Hughes’ perspective on her has now been altered to one of uncertainty and doubt, over how well he knew his wife, similar to his conflicting perspectives of the true personality of his wife in “Fulbright Scholars” and “The Shot”. This poem is written in past tense, as Hughes is looking back through time with new knowledge and the gift of hindsight, two things that have modified his perspective on an event -his honeymoon, and a personality - his wife’s. Birthday Letters is a highly personal and exceptionally intimate collection of poems that Ted Hughes wrote for, and about, his late wife where he shares his ideas, emotions and attitudes towards various events and situations they shared together. “Fulbright Scholars” discussing internal conflict as he struggles to remember details, and his perspective is influenced by memory, “The Shot” where Hughes allows his perspective of his wife to be altered by knowledge of her past, and “Your Paris”, two vastly conflicting ideas on the one city, all explore the idea, in the form of a free verse poem, of how a person’s experience and memories shape and influence their perspective on a situation.