The biographies of the two excellent poets, TED HUGHES and SYLVIA PLATH, are linked since they were a couple and had a life t

Revolving in oval loops of solar speed,

Couched in cauls of clay as in holy robes,

Dead men render love and war no heed,

Lulled in the ample womb of the full-tilt globe.

No spiritual Caesars are these dead;

They want no proud paternal kingdom come;

And when at last they blunder into bed

World-wrecked, they seek only oblivion.

Rolled round with goodly loam and cradled deep,

These bone shanks will not wake immaculate

To trumpet-toppling dawn of doomstruck day :

They loll forever in colossal sleep;

Nor can God's stern, shocked angels cry them up

From their fond, final, infamous decay.

Anonymous submission.

http://plagiarist.com/poetry/7894/

©1998-2006 Plagiarist.com. All rights reserved.

The biographies of the two excellent poets, TED HUGHES and SYLVIA PLATH, are linked since they were a couple and had a life together, it is unavoidable that, where there is life, then there is death too. The life of Ted Hughes was marked by the tragic death of his wife, who commited suicide. Death will become central in Hughes’ life and, of course in his writings.

One of the poetic manifestations of Hughes’ view of death is THE CROW. This symbolic animal has been used in different occasions to make reference to the world of darkness, of death. “Hughes himself was such a mythic poet. Through myth he had all the intensity and drama of life and death; to recognisable patterns of human behaviour“.TED HUGHES HOME PAGE.

This way Hughes, as once Poe did with his Raven, seeks in the roots of his own culture to find a character that could express all the feelings, all the dark thoughts that a human being could not.

In this poem Hughes makes a series of questions, of transcendetal questions that seem to have no answer in the real touchable world, questions that will only find one answer: DEATH. Here we see how obsessed the mind of a person can be by the repetition of the linguistic structures, the same than in Poe’s poem. Death is one of the keys to understand Hughes’ poetry. With these questions he transforms death as the most powerful being in this world. It is stronger than any kind of feeling:

This way he deletes humanity as independent thinking subjects. He gives all the power to Death. He was so fearful so afraid of that unknown element, and his fear was justified by those tragic events named below.

Making reference to the real world in the two first verses, “earth and space”, death becomes the owner of the natural elements, nature is under his control. Another important aspect we can take from his poem is that he has a very symbolic and mythological view of Death. He sees it as a strong powerful element that is present through out all of his life.

“Ted Hughes ‘ Crow presents an alternative theological paradigm that rescues certain elements of Being- in particular the femenine and the demonic- often repressed within the Christian tradition.” OXFORD JOURNALS.

The only character that can face Death is the Crow, which is more powerful and stronger. The Crow is a symbol which is between the world of the living and the dead, that is why it is the owner of the two worlds.

In co0ntrast to this, Sylvia Plath had a different view of Death. The poem chosen for analysis is Death. After reading this poem, the reader gets a feeling of solitude, some kind of loneliness. It is a sad vision of dead people who fight no more, who have ended their own way in the world.

The semantic field of the poem is clearly related to that pessimistic vision of death: 2 couched, 4 lulled, 7 blunder, 7 bed, 9 cradled, … this fills the mind of the reader with passivity, rest, like an unacoidable end.

But the most important word is 8 Oblivion. Plath sees Death as the end of thought, and the eternal oblivion, a very sad vision if we take into account that she ends her lifeby commiting suicide. This bitterness is expressed in all of her poetry.

But not only oblivion is important in the poem. “Plath has been considered a deeply honest witer, whose ceaseless self-security has given an unique point of view to psychological disorder and to the theme of the feminist-martyr in a patriarchal society”

In verse 5 we read :”they want no proud paternal kingdom to come” making direct reference to mthe paternal figure and stating that, even in life after death, they don’t want to be in the hands of the masculine symbols and rules.

This way Plath links two basic themes in her poetry as in her life, which are Death and Feminism. She was one of the first female poets which got fame during her lifetime as a writer.

The point here is that she evokes Death by describing an image of dead men, going to lie, to rest, as defeated men who are going to end in oblivionj, who will be forgotten in time. It is a very sad end, nothing to do with Hughes’ description of Death, as an almighty being that is beyond human forces, beyond the natural world. It is a power which is stronger than anything, than anyone, except for the figure of the Crow, an in-between animal which observes this world, and the other.

While one writes a very sad expression of her most intimate feelings and fears, advocating the expected solitude of the dead bodies travelling to rest in total oblivion, the other one raises the power of that fundamental and so important element in everyone’s life, which is Death.