JAVIER DÍAZ SORIA – GRUPO A

POESÍA INGLESA DE LOS SIGLOS XIX Y XX

Ted Hughes (1930 - 1998)

BRIDE AND GROOM LIE HIDDEN FOR THREE DAYS; Crow, 1972

She gives him his eyes, she found them
Among some rubble, among some beetles
 
He gives her her skin
He just seemed to pull it down out of the air and lay it over her
She weeps with fearfulness and astonishment
 
She has found his hands for him, and fitted them freshly at the wrists
They are amazed at themselves, they go feeling all over her
 
He has assembled her spine, he cleaned each piece carefully
And sets them in perfect order
A superhuman puzzle but he is inspired
She leans back twisting this way and that, using it and laughing
Incredulous
 
Now she has brought his feet, she is connecting them
So that his whole body lights up
And he has fashioned her new hips
With all fittings complete and with newly wound coils, all shiningly oiled
He is polishing every part, he himself can hardly believe it
 
They keep taking each other to the sun, they find they can easily
To test each new thing at each new step
 
And now she smoothes over him the plates of his skull
So that the joints are invisible
 
And now he connects her throat, her breasts and the pit of her stomach
With a single wire
 
She gives him his teeth, tying the roots to the centrepin of his body
 
He sets the little circlets on her fingertips
 
She stiches his body here and there with steely purple silk
 
He oils the delicate cogs of her mouth
 
She inlays with deep cut scrolls the nape of his neck
 
He sinks into place the inside of her thighs
 
So, gasping with joy, with cries of wonderment
Like two gods of mud
Sprawling in the dirt, but with infinite care
They bring each other to perfection. 

BRIDE AND GROOM LIE HIDDEN FOR THREE DAYS;Crow, 1972

http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Ted_Hughes/18557

Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963)

MAD GIRL’S LOVE SONG; The Bell Jar, 1954

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
 
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
 
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
 
I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

(I think I made you up inside my head.)

MAD GIRL’S LOVE SONG; The Bell Jar, 1954

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/sylviaplath/1411

Ted Hughes uses a free verse in his poem Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days, there is no rhyme and there isn’t any fixed structure. He seems to use a construction made by the alternation of the two characters of the poem that he presents to the reader.

For example, we can see it in the final verses, when Hughes changes from line to line the protagonist of each action. This effect also gives a feeling of rapidness to this part of the poem, and it gives a more and more intense impression to the poem. It seems an interchange of life between the mother and the fetus that she is gestating, who is connected to her ‘With a single wire’ (line 23), the umbilical cord.

At the first part of the poem, mother and son are amazed of each other, because they both are finding new things about themshelves, and then little by little the child is forming in the inside of her mother, which is seen by Hughes as a natural and perfect creation, as we can read in the final verse, when he says: ‘they bring each other to perfection’. Ted Hughes also regards them as ‘two gods of mud’, making reference with the mud to the fact that the formation of a child is naturally made only by humans (a woman in this precise case), and it is a perfect sculpted creation.

I have chosen to analyse this poem because it is very difficult to perceive if it was written by the hand of a man or by the hand of a woman. Hughes brings a very good description to the reader of the creation feeling that a mother should feel when she is pregnant, and that is impossible to him. We should expect that this poem had been written by a woman who had experienced these sensations or she was in that moment experiencing it.

In contrast with her husband’s poem, Mad Girl’s Love Song by Sylvia Plath is a more violent poem, which uses vocabulary that makes reference to Satan, hell and death. From a typical point of view, readers would classify Hughes’s poem as a poem written by a woman and Plath’s poem as a poem written by a man. Probably it would be this way because of the choice of vocabulary made by one or the other and the topics that these poems talk about. We could say that both talk about love but from a totally different perspective: while Hughes talks about the good things that love brings to people (the love that a mother can feel for her child), Plath focuses on the insanity that love can represent for us, bringing suffering, pain and madness.

To sum up, from my point of view we can’t distinguish if a poem is written by a man or a woman until we know the name of the author, and I think that there are no clues that help us to differentiate which is the sex of the author.

This occurs mainly because literature provides us with a wider use of language, which helps the authors to express and to create their feelings although they use imaginary or impossible situations.

CONSULTED WEBS:

-A poem by Ted Hughes, Poetry Connection; 9 may 2006; http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Ted_Hughes/18557

-Ted Hughes: Poems and biography; May 9 2006; http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Ted_Hughes

-Sylvia Plath: Poems and Biography; 8 May 2006; http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/sylviaplath

-A poem by Sylvia Plath, American Poets; 10 May 2006; http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/sylviaplath/1411

-Article about Troubled Relationship of the Poets; Nadeem Azam; 10 May 2006; http://1lit.tripod.com/june2001.html

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