Ted_Hughes

Conflicting perspectives are different points of view expressed and influenced by ones context and values. “Birthday Letters” by Ted Hughes is an anthology of poems challenging the accusation that he was responsible for his wife, Sylvia Plath’s death. We are viewing or possibly representing an issue, incident or event from a particular point of view. This article is evaluating the representation of events and personalities in whether the composers are being biased or unbiased. “The minotaur’ written by Ted Hughes opens with violent action. There are two personalities on whom the focus is within the poem, the focal point is the action and dialogue between Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Sylvia Plath is represented as being somewhat violent and crazy, smashing Hughes’s mother’s heirloom sideboard. I find that Hughes ties her anger and violence to her personality rather than to his tardiness, sarcastically suggesting that she fails to include these emotions and destructive tendencies in her poetry. Hughes paints himself as the calm, placid one encouraging her in her creative pursuits, “get that shoulder under your stanzas and we’ll be away”.  Where as ‘pursuit’ by Sylvia Plath is conflicting towards ‘the minotaur’ almost saying that Ted Hughes was actually the violent one saying in the poem “He prowls more loudly than the sun”, “advancing always at my back”. It also seems like she’s trying to say that he had a big ego, his poems were better then her’s but he always was trying to push her to write with her emotions like the way she expressed herself when she got angry.  ‘Fulbright Scohlars’ also written by Ted Hughes describes where Hughes as a young man saw a photograph of the new Fulbright scholars. We see the day through the eyes of Hughes and are taken back into time through flashbacks of his memory. Does Hughes faulty memory influence his perspective of the truth' He is so unsure of what actually happened on that day, whether what he remembers is actual or affected by later events and other memories.  The tone, though reflective, is not nostalgic, rather searching for answers. This is a poem filled with tension: his feelings then, contrasted with his feeling later. This appears to be a confessional non-judgmental poem describing the reflective memories of a poet with someone he once deeply loved but now is separated from. ‘The shot’ triggered by Plath’s father’s death and culminating in her desire to both return to him and to punish him fatally for deserting her. Conflicting the way she felt about her father and how he left her. Hughe’s presents his truth of the way Sylvia Plath handled her father’s death. He indicates his helplessness in the face of her psychosis. Sylvia’s Fathers death was like a repetition of events, he haunted her, her whole life because she couldn’t quite rid the memory. The only way of overcoming this feeling was to once again re-unite with her father. The poem ‘Sam’ by Ted Hughes is conflicting towards Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Whiteness I Rememeber’ and the way she wrote about her first experience riding a horse. Is again talking about Sylvia Plath and wanting to see her father but more about her first suicide attempt.  “What saved you' Maybe your poems saved themselves”. He uses a horse imagery to portray her suicide. “That gallop was practice, but not enough, and quite useless. Suggests how she failed to kill herself the first time.  Ted Hughes talks in this poem like she is still alive. Plath also wrote a poem ‘Whiteness I Remember’. The reality of the situation and her perspective on life was that she had no control over it (the horse), and in that life and death situation, the world suddenly came into focus. All that mattered in the world, was holding on, hanging between life and death, and focusing on the power and the visual part that mattered...which in this case was what she remembered most...the "whiteness". Trying to hold onto her memories and not let them overcome her and lead her into suicide. She was trying to grasp onto her life with the good memories that were left with her.  ‘You’re Paris’. The title immediately alerts us to the fact that this is Hughes’s perspective of Plath’s perspective! The two perspectives presented here are of their differing appreciations of Paris. This is evident in the opening lines, “Your Paris, I thought, was American”. The words “I thought” are another way of saying “in my opinion” or “from my perspective”. In this line he belittles or discredits Plath’s appreciation of Paris. This idea is sharply contrasted with the line, “I kept my Paris from you”. It is implied within the poem that his Paris was much more valid than hers. In short, we see that his appreciation of Paris was definitely vastly different from hers- thus conflicting perspectives. Hughes describes his Paris as being characterised by the scars of World War II, which for him, were visible not only through the damaged buildings but also through the eyes of people who still ‘wore’ the impact of the devastation on their faces, “ I was a “ghostwatcher”. There is a contrast between the war graves that dominated his conscious appreciation of Paris and the ‘grave’ of her father which dominated her subconscious. Once again Hughes constructs the image of himself as a loyal dog “happy to protect you”. He compounds this idea with the simile “like a guide dog”. This positions him as a positive force in her otherwise negative life. ‘Red’ the last poem in the famous book ‘Birthday letters’. The end of the road. An example of conflicting perspectives is portrayed through colour imagery. Plath associated negatively with the colour white, yet Hughes uses it in a positive manner in the poem. Maybe interpreting their marriage. Ted Hughe’s expresses himself in this poem through his emotions and the death of his wife. His poetry and expressing his emotions was an escape “only the bookshelves escaped into whiteness’’. It was how he truly was able to overcome her death and try and make people see that it wasn’t his fault. It is conflicting in that way but that is something that us being the reader will never really know what the cause of her suicide was we can only build up our own perspectives. In conclusion, versions of ‘conflicting perspectives’ can be changed each time it is told due to where the information came from, the emotions that are involved and the meaning that is trying to be conveyed. We can see that Plath was full of emotion and often exaggerated her feelings when she wrote her versions in her poems. Hughes took a lot of information from his own anger and emotions and from his perspective when he told his version. He also then added information from Plath’s journal and her version of the truth. So by this time it has been told, told again and changed to suit different perspectives and the emotions involved. We can also see that the story and truth can be changed to convey a different meaning all together. So it is hard for these two poets to not write without conflicting perspectives as they both had their own views and thoughts and both expressed these emotions differently. The truth ends up being a story that is being told about the original story that may have or may have not happened. ALECIA REINHARD