Birthday Letters or Me Fangirling over Ted Hughes

So, for my Advanced Poetry writing class we are reading Ted Hughes' book Birthday Letters.  For those of you that aren't familiar with Ted Hughes, I'll give you a brief summary of what I know about him from this class...

Ted Hughes was married to one of my favorite authors, Sylvia Plath, the woman who many of you probably know as the "one who put her head in the oven."  He was also poet laureate of England.  After Sylvia died, he wrote her a poem every year on her birthday, compiling them into the book Birthday Letters a year before he died.

Let me just say right now....the poems are gorgeous.  And tragic.  They make me all emotional and stereotypically mushy and girly-feeling.

Here are a couple of my favorites.

Visit  (if you read nothing else, read the last two stanzas, particularly the bolded part at the end. I had to go get a lot of ice cream to soothe myself after I read them.)

Lucas, my friend, one

Among those three or four who stay unchanged

Like a separate self,

A stone in the bed of the river

Under every change, became your friend.

I heard of it, alerted. I was sitting

Youth away in an office near Slough,

Morning and evening between Slough and Holborn,

Hoarding wage to fund a leap to freedome

And the other side of the earth -- a free-fall

To strip my chrysalis off me in the slipstream.

Weekends I recidived

Into Alma Mater. Girl-friend

Shared a supervisor and weekly session

With your American rival and you.

She detested you. She fed snapshots

Of you and she did not know what

Inflammable celluloid into my silent

Insatiable future, my blind-man's-buff

Internal torch of search. With my friend,

After midnight, I stood in a garden

Lobbing soil-clods up at a dark window.

Drunk, he was certain it was yours.

Half as drunk, I did not know he was wrong.

Nor did I know I was being auditioned

For the male lead in your drama,

Miming through the first easy movements

As if with eyes closed, feeling for the role.

As if a puppet were being tried on its strings,

Or a dead frog's legs touched by electrodes.

I jigged through those gestures -- watched and judged

Only by starry darkness and a shadow.

Unknown to you and not knowing you.

Aiming to find you, and missing, and again missing.

Flinging earth at a glass that could not protect you

Because you were not there.

Ten years after your death

I meet on a page of your journal, as never before,

The shock of your joy

When your heard that. The then shock

Of your prayers. And under those prayers your panic

That prayers might not create the miracle,

Then, under the panic, the nightmare

That came rolling to crush you:

Your alternative -- the unthinkable

Old despair and the new agony

Melting into one familiar hell.

Suddenly I read all this --

Your actual words, as they floated

Out through your throat and tongue onto your page --

Just as when your daughter, years ago now,

Drifting in, gazing up into my face,

Mystified,

Where I worked alone

In the silent house, asked, suddenly:

'Daddy, where's Mummy?' The freezing soil

Of the garden, as I clawed it.

All round me that midnight's

Giant clock of frost. And somewhere

Inside it, wanting to feel nothing,

A pulse of fever. Somewhere

Inside that numbness of the earth

Our future trying to happen.

I look up -- as if to meet your voice

With all its urgent future

That has burst in on me. Then look back

At the book of the printed words.

You are ten years dead. It is only a story.

Your story. My story. 


This next one is the last poem in the book.  I cried, I'll admit it.  Take my imaginary man-card if you must.

Red

Red was your colour.
If not red, then white. But red
Was what you wrapped around you.
Blood-red. Was it blood?
Was it red-ochre, for warming the dead?
Haematite to make immortal
The precious heirloom bones, the family bones.

When you had your way finally
Our room was red. A judgement chamber.
Shut casket for gems. The carpet of blood
Patterned with darkenings, congealments.
The curtains -- ruby corduroy blood,
Sheer blood-falls from ceiling to floor.
The cushions the same. The same
Raw carmine along the window-seat.
A throbbing cell. Aztec altar -- temple.

Only the bookshelves escaped into whiteness.

And outside the window
Poppies thin and wrinkle-frail
As the skin on blood,
Salvias, that your father named you after,
Like blood lobbing from the gash,
And roses, the heart's last gouts,
Catastrophic, arterial, doomed.

Your velvet long full skirt, a swathe of blood,
A lavish burgandy.
Your lips a dipped, deep crimson.

You revelled in red.
I felt it raw -- like crisp gauze edges
Of a stiffening wound. I could touch
The open vein in it, the crusted gleam.

Everything you painted you painted white
Then splashed it with roses, defeated it,
Leaned over it, dripping roses,
Weeping roses, and more roses,
Then sometimes, among them, a little blue
bird.

Blue was better for you. Blue was wings.
Kingfisher blue silks from San Francisco
Folded your pregnancy
In crucible caresses.
Blue was your kindly spirit -- not a ghoul
But electrified, a guardian, thoughtful.

In the pit of red
You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness.

But the jewel you lost was blue.