Ted Hughes

 

 

 

Source: http://marbl.library.emory.edu/Events/hughesconference.html

 

Hawk Roosting

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.

Inaction, no falsyfing dream

Between my hooked head and hooked feet:

Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!

The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray

Are of advantage to me;

And the earth's face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.

It took the whole of Creation

To produce my foot, my each feather:

Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly—

I kill where I please because it is all mine.

There is no sophistry in my body:

My manners are tearing off heads—

The allotment of death.

For the one path of my flight is direct

Through the bones of the living.

No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.

Nothing has changed since I began.

My eye has permitted no change.

I am going to keep things like this.

Source: http://plagiarist.com/poetry/9249/

Sylvia Plath

 

 

 

Source: http://www.literaryhistory.com/20thC/Plath.htm

 

DADDY

 

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

 

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time---

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one grey toe

Big as a Frisco seal

 

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pours bean green over blue

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

 

In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.

My Polack friend

 

Says there are a dozen or two.

So I never could tell where you

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

 

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene

 

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

 

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

Are not very pure or true.

With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

 

I have always been scared of *you*,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You---

 

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

 

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot

But no less a devil for that, no not

Any less the black man who

 

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

 

But they pulled me out of the sack,

And they stuck me together with glue.

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

 

And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I'm finally through.

The black telephone's off at the root,

The voices just can't worm through.

 

If I've killed one man, I've killed two---

The vampire who said he was you

and drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

 

There's a stake in your fat, black heart

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always *knew* it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

 

Source: http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/daddy.html

 

 

 

               In this paper we have to analyse the difference between women and men. To do this, we have chosen two poems, “Daddy” and “Hawk Roosting”, written by a woman and a man.

 

               The poem “Daddy” is clearly viewed as a poem written by a woman. In fact, Sylvia Plath wrote it to express her feelings and her despair related to two figures, firstly to her father and secondly to her husband. Moreover, she describes the state of submissiveness adopted by many women.

 

               In this poem, Plath is describing two men (her father and her husband) who are almost the same person. To understand better this poem it is necessary to mention essential facts of Sylvia’s life. “Sylvia Plath was born in Boston as the daughter of German immigrant parents. Her father was a professor of biology at Boston University and had specialized in bees. His father has been characterized as authoritarian and died of diabetes in 1940, when Plath was eight years old” (1. Pseudonym Victoria Lucas). “It is thought that Plath never fully recovered from the loss of her father. Sylvia suffered from bouts of severe depression throughout her life. At Cambridge she met English poet Ted Hughes and they got married in 1956. But their marriage met with difficulties and they were separated in 1963. Their separation was mainly due to her mental illness, and the affair that Hughes had with a fellow poet's wife. Finally, Plath gassed herself in her kitchen, ending her life at the age of thirty”. (2.Wikipedia)

 

               To refer to the poem itself, “Daddy” is a poem which contains too much hatred. It is divided into 16 stanzas, each one with five lines.

               The first stanza describes the moment in which Sylvia Plath has decided to be free, to live without suffering because of her father and her husband. To express this, she uses a metaphor; “during all her life she has been living in a black shoe” (lines 2 and 3).

               Then, she expresses “Daddy”, I have had to kill you” (line 6), this means that to achieve all her freedom, she has had to forget her father. She feels that she has to kill him because her father has damaged her in two different ways, in life because he was an authoritarian person and in death because Plath has felt as an abandoned child.

               The next stanzas (until the nineth), Sylvia illustrates her father’s figure as a Nazi, a severe and a strict man. And moreover, she describes herself as a Jew (line 33) who never could talk to a Nazi (her father).

               In the tenth stanza, she mentions her husband, when she says in line 48 “every woman adores a Fascist”. Now, she is admitting that although her husband was like her father, she really loves him. And after, she talks directly to her father telling him that she feels much damaged because of his death. Furthermore, she admits that she has tried to kill herself (“at twenty I tried to die and get back, back, back to you” line 58). But then, she got married; “and a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do” (lines 66 and 67).

               Finally, she concludes announcing that she has killed two men (her father and her husband), that she has forgotten them and she has decided to live her life without considering any person. And her final decision is to die, she confesses “I’m finally through” (line 68) and “the voices just can’t worm through” (line 69).

 

               Contrary to Sylvia Path’s posture, Ted Hughes (her husband) in his poem “Hawk Roosting” deals with freedom, serenity and power through the figure of the Hawk. He describes the power and the behaviour of this animal and supposedly, this animal could reflect his own personality.

 

               The poem starts with the image of the Hawk sitting on the top of the wood with its eyes closed (line 1). This animal feels that the earth is under its inspection and it considers itself important and essential when Ted Hughes writes “Now I hold Creation in my foot” (line 12), “I kill where I please because it is all mine” (line 14) and finally, he has the allotment of death (line 17).

 

               There, we can appreciate men’s peace of mind and men’s superiority to the rest of the world. The Hawk shows us its calm “I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed” (line 1). Moreover this poem is well structured; it is divided in six stanzas, each one of four lines. This structure and also the vocabulary let the reader perceive this calm and this feeling of superiority; for example “I kill where I please because it is all mine” (line 14), “the sun is behind me” (line 21) and “I am going to keep things like this” (line 24).

At the same time, Sylvia Plath showed through “Daddy” her pains, her hatred and her repression to two people who disappointed her; her father because of his death and her husband because of his affair. Along “Daddy”, the reader can understand the reason of her anguish and her wishes of dying. She uses a moving vocabulary and strong symbols when she describes her father as a Nazi and herself as a Jew.

 

               As far as I am concerned, I have been deeply moved by Sylvia Plath´s poem. I have understood all her thoughts, her worries and her feelings that she has experienced because of her damage caused by the two men she really loved. And in a way I can imagine those feelings that contributed to her suicide.

Meanwhile Sylvia Plath was writing such a hard poem to explain in some way her desperations, her feelings and her suicide, Ted Hughes wrote a poem in which everything is perfect and peaceful thanks to the Hawk (who could be a man).

               Thus, having read these two poems, we can observe that women and men are clearly different. Women (in general) try to justify everything, they usually take everything that happens seriously and sometimes, when they think too much about their lives, they tend to be disappointed and depressive because reality is not as perfect as they wanted. Whereas men (in general), as the Hawk, are more serene than women and sometimes they face up to reality in a cool and in a calm way.

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

1. Pseudonym Victoria Lucas, “Sylvia Plath”, “Books and writers” this page was last modified 2000. I consulted it 4 May 2006.

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/splath.htm

 

2. Wikipedia, “Sylvia Plath– Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”, this page was last modified 3 May 2006; 3 May 2006 (I consulted it)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath

 

Index	Second Paper
Reading module 01:  William Blake	Reading module 06: Ezra Pound
Reading module 02:  Percy Bysshe Shelley	Reading module 07: Wilfred Owen
Reading module 03:  Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats	Reading module 08: Derek Walcott
Reading module 04:  Elizabeth Barrett Browning	Reading module 09: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
Reading module 05:  Dante Gabriel Rossetti	Reading module 10:  Deconstruction

 

 

Academic year 2006 (May 2006)
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Ana Mª Pardillos Murillo
Universitat de València Press
mailto:aparmu@alumni.uv.es