Jessil

Those of you that have had the displeasure of raiding with me know that I do so like a well turned phrase. I thought that I would post some of my work here as well as recommend any poetry or prose writing that I am currently studying at university.

This week: Ted Hughes - Epiphany

It is not usually possible to pass through a tertiary literary degree without being (over) exposed to the poetry of Sylvia Plath. When I started in on this undergraduate course I realised that to make up the required credit points for my major I would be forced to take several subjects with a Feminist subjectivity. Three and a half years later I am pleased to say that it wasn't nearly as painful as I expected and Sylvia Plath is indeed an enjoyable writer. I have not yet read her novel The Bell Jar but am fairly well acquainted with her poetry and it varies from delicate turned to the bombastic (particularly towards the end of her life). Her story is a sad one, having married another writer, Ted Hughes ,she is eventually overcome by grief at his infidelity (now legendary) and commits suicide. Many firebrand academics seem to take up her cause by fitting her life into a neat little story about the opposition of male and female creativity, often arguing that Hughes poetry was somehow emblematic of his lived personal life. Whatever you may think about these events the subsequent notoriety that stuck like so much dung to Hughes has been likened to the boulder that Sisyphus is forced to roll before him. Suffering nearly four decades of dark celebrity he wrote a collection of poems that he planned to have published upon his death as a way of speaking back to the public memory of the Hughes' lives and their writing. The result, Birthday Letters is an amazing collection that hovers somewhere between revenge piece and self-abrogating torture. My favourite poem from the collection is called 'Epiphany; and I transcribe it here without permission.

Epiphany

London. The grimy lilac softness
Of an April evening. Me
Walking over Chalk Farm Bridge
On my way to the tube station.
A new father - slightly light-headed
With the lack of sleep and the novelty.
Next, this young fellow coming towards me.

I glanced at him for the first time as I passed him
Because I noticed (I couldn't believe it)
What I'd been ignoring.

Not the bulge of a small animal
Buttoned into the top of his jacket
The way colliers used to wear their whippets -
But its actual face. Eyes reaching out
Trying to catch my eyes - so familiar!
The huge ears, the pinched, urchin expression -
The wild confronting stare, pushed through fear,
Between the jacket lapels.
'It's a fox-cub!'
I heard my own surprise as I stopped.
He stopped. 'Where did you get it? What
Are you going to do with it?'
A fox cub
On the hump of Chalk Farm Bridge!

'You can have him for a pound.' 'But
Where did you find it? What will you do with it?'
'Oh, somebody'll buy him. Cheap enough
at a pound.' And a grin.
What I was thinking
Was - what would you think? How would we fit it
Into our crate of space? With the baby?
What would you make of its old smell
And its mannerless energy?
And as it grew up and began to enjoy itself
What would we do with an unpredictable,
Powerful, bounding fox?
The long-mouthed, flashing temperament>
That necessary nightly twenty miles
And that vast hunger for everything beyond us?
How would we cope with its cosmic derangements
Whenever we moved?

The little fox peered past me at other folks,
At this one and at that one, then at me.
Good luck was all it needed.
Already past kittenish
But the eyes still small,
Round, orphaned-looking, woebegone
As if with weeping. Bereft
Of the blue milk, the toys of feather and fur,
The den life's happy dark. And the huge whisper
Of the constellations
Out of which Mother had always returned.
My thoughts felt like big ignorant hounds
Circling and sniffing around him.
Then I walked on
As if out of my own life.
I let that fox-cub go. I tossed it back
Into the future
Of a fox-cub in London and I hurried
Straight on and dived as if escaping
Into the Underground. If I had paid,
If I had paid that pound and turned back
To you, with that armful of fox -

If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox
Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage -
I would not have failed the test. Would you have failed it?
But I failed. Our marriage had failed.

~

I won't belabor the point with close reading. I think that Hughes pathos at his blindness towards the unhappy events of his married life are reflexively defended. He seems to me to be saying that he had not known what was required of him. This half confession characterizes much of the poetry in Birthday Letters and makes it a melancholy but nonetheless fantastic collection.

Next post: Some of my fail scribblings. Live in fear.