(New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1998)



Here is a representative poem from Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters, his bestselling book of poems about (and often to) his wife Sylvia Plath. My comments on the book and the poem follow.

The Table


I wanted to make you a solid writing-table
That would last a lifetime.
I bought a broad elm plank two inches thick,
The wild bark surfing along one edge of it,
Rough-cut for coffin timber. Coffin elm
Finds a new life, with its corpse,
Drowned in the waters of earth. It gives the dead
Protection for a slightly longer voyage
Than beech or ash or pine might. With a plane
I revealed a perfect landing pad
For your inspiration. I did not
Know I had made and fitted a door
Opening downwards into your Daddy's grave.

You bent over it, euphoric
With your Nescafe every morning.
Like an animal, smelling the wild air.
Listening into its own ailment,
Then finding the exact herb.
It did not take you long
To divine in the elm, following your pen,
The words that would open it. Incredulous
I saw rise throught it, in broad daylight,
Your Daddy resurrected,
Blue-eyed, that German cuckoo
Still calling the hour,
Impersonating your whole memory.
He limped up through it
Into our house. While I slept he snuggled
Shivering between us. Turning to touch me
You recognized him. 'Wait!' I said. 'Wait!
What's this?' My incomprehension
Deafened by his language -- a German
Outside my wavelengths. I woke wildly
Into a deeper sleep. And I sleepwalked
Like an actor with his script
Blindfold through the looking glass. I embraced
Lady Death, your rival,
As if the role were written on my eyelids
In letters of phosphorus. With your arms locked
Round him, in joy, he took you
Down through the elm door.
He had got what he wanted.
I woke up on the empty stage with the props,
The paltry painted masks. And the script
Ripped up and scattered, its code scrambled,
Like the blades and slivers
Of a shattered mirror.

And now your peanut-crunchers can stare
At the ink-stains, the sigils
Where you engraved your letters to him
Cursing and imploring. No longer a desk.
No longer a door. Once more simply a board.
The roof of a coffin
Detached in the violence
From your upward gaze.
It bobbed back to the surface --
It washed up, far side of the Atlantic,
A curio,
Scoured of the sweat I soaked into
Finding your father for you and then
Leaving you to him.

This is a fairly typical poem, similar to many other poems in Birthday Letters. It displays both what is good and what is shoddy about the book. The poem has one main, controlling image -- an image borrowed (but not stolen, to use Eliot's distinction) from Plath. Daddy is a ghost who comes out of the grave to take back his "wife," his daughter Sylvia. Hughes is an embittered loser, a haunted cuckold, but at least he can console himself with the fact that he was the one who gave Plath her topic, her homework assignment, the sensational subject (Daddy) that made her a legend.

The poem "The Table" is not really good; it does not hold up on its own and seems completely unlikely to become a "classic" poem. On the other hand, it is an affecting cri de coeur. One cannot read the poem or the rest of the poems in this book, and not feel terribly sorry for Ted Hughes. Clearly he waded in too deep. Clearly he has never "gotten over" Sylvia Plath. If in some sense there is a "war of the books" -- Birthday Letters vs. Plath's Selected Poems, then there is no real contest. No mas (you fight fans will know what I mean). Plath wins hands down. This book suggests that no small part of Hughes' tragedy is that the young female poet he married was a better, more powerful and original poet than he was. Despite all his years of hard work, despite his many honors, his many fairly good poems, he will in the long stretch of time always be Mister Plath.

The poem "The Table," to get back to it, seems hurried and more or less unedited. It seems more prose than poetry, though occasionally there is some attempt to write rhythmically. Most of the line breaks seem pointless. There is quite a mix of metaphors as if the poet is uncertain what he wants to say or how to say it. The timber he uses to make the table is a coffin, it is a ship, a landing pad, and a door.

The really arresting image in the poem is table equals door, the door used by Daddy to emerge into Hughes' bedroom. Of course this image of the vampire daddy comes from Plath's most famous poem. It is the best image in the poem and also the most clearly derivative.

Plath is described as both an animal and a witch who "divines" and raises the dead. She is both sub and superhuman. One gathers that, in a crucial way Hughes never really knew his wife -- thus his tendency to see her as a symbol of magic, of powers, of the Female, of America, of scary Nature, etc. In the same way he sees Daddy as a "German" outside his wavelengths. Hughes is very aware of his Englishness; he is so provincial a poet that even his fellow speakers of English and his fellow Europeans seem terribly "other."

When Hughes awakes from his nightmare (I assume he means the period right after Plath's suicide), he suffers the terrible realization that the "play" is concluded, but he is left on the now empty stage. I take this to be his awareness that he is not Hamlet but Rosencrantz, and was born only to swell a scene or two, not star. He realizes -- and it is a paralyzing realization apparently -- that he is not the hero of his own life, but a supporting actor in Plath's life.by Daddy to emerge into Hughes' bedroom. Of course this image of the vampire daddy comes from Plath's most famous poem. It is the best image in the poem and also the most clearly derivative.

Plath is described as both an animal and a witch who "divines" and raises the dead. She is both sub and superhuman. One gathers that, in a crucial way Hughes never really knew his wife -- thus his tendency to see her as a symbol of magic, of powers, of the Female, of America, of scary Nature, etc. In the same way he sees Daddy as a "German" outside his wavelengths. Hughes is very aware of his Englishness; he is so provincial a poet that even his fellow speakers of English and his fellow Europeans seem terribly "other."

When Hughes awakes from his nightmare (I assume he means the period right after Plath's suicide), he suffers the terrible realization that the "play" is concluded, but he is left on the now empty stage. I take this to be his awareness that he is not Hamlet but Rosencrantz, and was born only to swell a scene or two, not star. He realizes -- and it is a paralyzing realization apparently -- that he is not the hero of his own life, but a supporting actor in Plath's life.

This book's considerable popularity is not hard to grasp. It is not good poetry, but it is good gossip. We "peanut crunchers" can't help but respond to the many striking details about Plath's personal life -- for example, the fact that she swilled Nescafe each morning. Such details prove Hughes really did spend all those crucial years with the star of the play. He earned his spot in literary history the hard way. I find it impossible not to sympathize with the man.

In this poem as in several others there is a profusion of fussy commas, yet the syntax often goes so awry as to be baffling. For example, "The roof of a coffin/ Detached in the violence / From your upward gaze." What exactly is detached, and detached from what? The table (the roof) is detached from the gaze of dead Plath? From the violence of the dead poet's gaze? It is detached in the course of the said violence? By that violence? Take your pick. None of these possibilities seems especially revealing. The image is confused, messy. The poet seems hurried, nearly incoherent. To defend my genuine interest in this book, that incoherence is what fascinates me and makes me think of this book of somewhat inept poems as genuine, as a sincere cri de coeur from a poet who is after all these years still badly wounded.

Jim Cervantes pointed out to me that the poem's first line can be read, "I wanted to make [of] you a solid writing table." Read that way, we see revealed Hughes' deepest motive: to silence his dead wife, to contain and transform her noisy ghost into something useful not to the cult of "peanut crunchers" and Plath worshippers but to Hughes' need for a writing topic. Obviously, Ted Hughes is still angry at his dead wife, but why shouldn't he be? What poet (what father and husband) has ever had a better excuse for anger and incoherence?

The poem ends with Hughes' claim, made in several other poems, that he gave Plath her great topic, or at least pointed her in its direction, and then paid a hideous price for doing her this favor. He found her father for her, then "left" her to him. Although this claim is self-serving, I see no reason not to give Hughes some credit for his wife's accomplishment. For the same reason, we credit Dorothy Wordsworth and Frieda Lawrence.

Like most of the poems in Birthday Letters, "The Table" is addressed directly to Plath. The living man -- confused, hurt -- addresses the dead poet, the sphinx who will not reply except with the painful memories that continually flood Hughes and her unforgettable poems made (to some degree surely) out of Hughes' sweat and blood and semen. This too adds to the book's fascination.