Cultural Capital

Reflections on books and the arts from the New Statesman culture desk

Responses to Ted Hughes's "Last letter"

Michael Rosen and a close friend of Sylvia Plath write to the NS.

By Daniel Trilling Published 16 October 2010 14:49

This week's magazine features two intriguing responses to our publication of a previously unseen poem by Ted Hughes. First of all, the poet Michael Rosen has written a sensitive, thoughtful analysis of "Last letter", Hughes's only poem to deal directly with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath. You'll have to pick up the magazine to read the full thing, but here's an excerpt:

I suppose nothing concentrates the mind on questions of human agency more than being around suicide. Hughes finds explanations in mechanistics, Hardyesque fate and deterministic mythoi. I sense that he isn't completely convinced by this. From the first line onwards - "What happened that night? Your final night." - the poem is packed with repetitions of words. Within many of the lines and between pairs of lines, sounds repeat too [...] On one level this is the cohesion of poetry. On another, it feels like a special pleading: if I say something twice, you will be more convinced.

The other response comes from Elizabeth Sigmund, who knew the couple in the early 1960s, and became a close friend and confidante of Plath in the months leading up to her death. Below is her letter to the magazine, reproduced in full:

I got to know Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath after they moved to Devon in 1962. So much joy in getting close to such exceptional minds - until the terrible break, until the anguish and chaos and desperate end. Ted's poem betrays guilt, confusion and the howling of a trapped animal.

My escape
Had become a hunted thing
Sleepless, hopeless, all its dreams exhausted
Only wanting to be recaptured...

He had such faith in dreams, that was where he searched for answers and prophecies, and with Sylvia's death she had gone beyond Ted's comprehension.

From no world,
Beyond actuality, feeling, or name.

Attempting to escape repeated agonising events, Ted searched for forgetfulness in other complex relationships, each one involving yet further chaos and pain.

One could only stand by and watch the result of this tragedy. Death after death, young and old, male and female. It has been beyond tears, beyond words, although words are all that are left to us to remember that they were real, living beings. And what words.

Elizabeth Sigmund
Callington, Cornwall

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9 comments

Mon, 2010-10-25 07:29 — growltigerkat (not verified)

Dear Cate: Whose bed was he in if not Assia's?

Mon, 2010-10-25 19:54 — pugetopolis (not verified)

Ted Hughes was obviously in bed with Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot that night—working on his next book for Faber.

Sat, 2010-10-16 17:14 — lightacandle (not verified)

Although much was revealed and much has been interpreted from the haunting words of both poets - once it can be accepted by all that Sylvia Path was in fact suffering from a condition that seems to correpsond with a form of bi-polar affective disorder or manic depression and because she wasn't taking the right medication or getting the sort of therapy she needed to help her all of which contributed to her suicide attempts and the final suicide then I hope that those who lay the blame soley at Hughes's door will now accept that this was not the case and let them both rest in peace.

Let us now instead focus on the love and joy they both celebrated in each other's company before the arrival of those dark days that cruely intervened.

Thu, 2010-10-21 12:17 — Cate (not verified)

I have lived with and suffered from living with a partner with bipolar disorder so I do not say the following lightly: Please, for pity sake, stop answering anything and everything about Sylvia Plath with the knee-jerk "Well she was bonkers ...etc". You belittle her and you belittle Hughes's anguish with your "see, it can all be explained thus...". There are no simple answers just life and all our silly, wretched mistakes and bitter regret.
And please, for a moment just look at a quickly buried fact that has indeed been well-buried underneath the usual Plath vs. Ted jargonese of the last couple weeks; what utter anguish- to a far from home, young woman, in the hormonally drenched aftermath of birth and breastfeeding - did abandonment stir?
Hughes, people, was a player - on the night Sylvia died he was in another's bed - and that other was not Assia. Since his death it has been revealed that he has repeatedly been a player, a player who wreaked havoc and hurt to the woman he was involved with. Poor bloody Carol, poor bloody Assia and poor bloody Sylvia - and they were just the "official" woman.
Ye Gods, parking bipolar to one side, that must've been hell on earth to deal with as a young woman, in those times, in that winter - and then, of course to have the literati gossiping about it on and on - sheer hurt, sheer humiliation, sheer hell to deal with, and that is with or without bipolar disorder.
So next time one reads the all too-easy "Well what do you expect she was mad" tirade, one can counter- balance it with the equally all too easy "Well what do you expect, he was a sleazy player" argument. Then perhaps, then the all too easy positions might cancel each other out - and we can move slowly forward into an understanding of their work, and the complexities of hurt and regret that both poets's works bravely attempt to delineate.

Sun, 2010-12-12 09:37 — K.Braithwaite (not verified)

Ted Hughes must have been naive to assume his wife could cope alone [with no family near] with two tiny children.He and they have paid a terrible price.Let's just remember them by their poetry.