Hughes vs Plath: Final Version

I am going to analyse one poem by Sylvia Path, written in 1962, one year before she committed suicide, she was injured about the infidelities of her husband and because he had left her for another woman. At this time she and her husband had two children, one daughter of two years and a son who was born at year. The poem is called Years, and I think that this title refers to the years she passed suffering for her husband’s infidelities. She passed a lot of years with a depression. Ten years before her suicide, she tried a first suicide attempt. This poem is from her collection The Collected Poems, published and written in 1962. The other poem I am going to analyse is by Plath’s husband, the also poet Ted Hughes. His poem is called The Minotaur and it is from his volume Birthday Letters, published and written in 1998. Each year after his first wife’s death, he wrote her a poem for her birthday. He felt ( and the feminist movement felt too) he was the responsible of his wife’s death, because he left her. I have looked for the word “ Minotaur” at The Collins English Dictionary, 21^st Edition and I have found this definition: from the Greek mythology, a monster with the head of a bull and the body of a man. It was kept in the labyrinth in Crete, feeding on human flesh, until destroyed by Theseus. I think that the poet felt like a monster, specially as this monster, he feeds with his wife’s pain, and now he feels he must be kept in an avoided site, until he will die.

         I think it is better to analyse Plath’s poem in the first place, because it explains why her husband felt responsible. Years is divided into 6 stanzas; the four first ones have 5 verses each one; stanza 5 has three verses and the last one has two verses ( if we put together the two last stanza we have a poem with 5 stanzas of 5 verses each one). During all the poem Plath talks about her mental illness, she wants to die, but now she has two babies, and they make her happy. In the first stanza she talks about her child as good thoughts that enter her mind, and these thoughts are compared with animals. I think that she wants to compare the entrance of her child, as the entrance of an animal in your life, animals do not know why they are in your life, but they are there, and they make you happy. But she is so depressed that her child will not make her happy. In the second stanza she talks directly to God and she says she is not like Him. He is in Heaven for Eternity, he is surrounded by stars that bright, but she does not like this. She does not want to be in this Eternity, it bores her. I think she says that because in Christian religion, when a person commits suicide goes to Hell, and he/ she spends condemned all Eternity. If Plath tried a suicide attempt in 1953, and probably she already thought to commit suicide while she was writing this poem, she would know she would be condemned. Because this, she says that Heaven bores her, because she would never go there. In stanza three she tells us that her love will live more than her soul. She will love her child forever, and probably she will love her husband forever too, but she is so injured that her soul is already dead. In verses 14 and 15 she talks about the seven Apocalypse riders, who went on their horses, and they gave Death, they show the end of life. I think that Plath knows she is going to die, and because of this she says she is hearing the hooves of the seven horses. In paragraph 4 I think Sylvia thinks that her husband’s infidelity is like a tiger, it seems very exciting at the very beginning, but it can injure someone. This injuring knocks at her door and it provokes the suffering of the poet, as Christ suffered on the Cross. In stanza 5 the poet refers to her husband and his new love. They make Plath bleed, as if God would make judgment. But she knows they are not worried about her pain. The poem was written one year before her death. In the last paragraph the poet thinks that the horses leave her now, and her hope to continue living starts again

         The poem by Hughes is divided into 6 stanzas of four verses each one. In the first one he compares his form of acting with his wife, with an old heirloom that has already cracks. In the second paragraph he says that he has tormented his wife and because of that she is “ demented”. For this their child will be traumatized. He makes so many damage to his wife that she committed suicide putting her head in a gas oven, and their child grew without a mother. In the third stanza he tells us that he has destroyed his wife’s mind as he would made kindling her life. She gave shape to her destruction in her poems, but then, in real life, she tried to hide, and he thought she was calmed. In stanza number 5 he tells us that because his wife committed suicide, their children are always remembering this fact. Her decision ended with the problem of their broken marriage, but their children became traumatized. In the last stanza Hughes talks to his wife and tells her that her mother lost her husband and her daughter, and he tells her that she would not have given her mother this pain ( the pain of losing a young daughter). Her corpse will rest with her father’s.