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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