St Ted's

This parodic poem was published by the Guardian in November 1998, in its Digested Read slot, to coincide with publication of Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters, his book of poems memorialising his intense and troubled relationship with fellow poet Sylvia Plath.

FOR forty years he wrote of other things:
Of crows and calves, of cows and sows,
Became the poet of beauteous beastliness,
Used words to cover nature’s rawest wounds.
The laureate of vigorous life, he farmed, reformed,
Found phrases to festoon royal rituals,
Dodged interviews that tried to probe his early love,
And never wrote about it either,
That making-and-breaking of a life,
At least not publicly. In private
He was struggling with it, making sense
Of the beauty and the horror and the love,
Early but eternal, imprinted on the soul.
And then, when he knew that death was close,
He published his love letters, marking her passing,
And his, telling a doubting world he’d cared,
But could not cure her madness,
That he was her lover, not her killer.
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: a love affair
That had spawned battles, books and broadsides.
Now it was his turn, in eighty-eight poems,
Epistles to the wife he loved but left,
And who, without his heat, his heart, chose death.

THEY meet at a party in Cambridge; she bites him,
Leaving marks that will not fade.
She shows him how to live and love
Untrammelled.
Her American vivacity, his English reserve:
A match, at first. They marry, have two babies,
Travel, lost in the vastness of America.
But soon it will unravel:
She is always the caged bird, the snared rabbit,
The solitary mouse, in a terrifying landscape.
She cannot escape the shadow of her dead father,
Her god, her nemesis. She is going mad.
Her husband leaves her for another woman.
She kills herself, securing her children.
Now he would have us know he never left her,
That from their first lustful meeting
Their destinies were joined, their futures fixed.
We want so much to believe him,
To let his soul rest in peace with hers.
Do we?

← Mislaid in Wales
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