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, 21st 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.
In conclusion I think that Plath shows
her pain perfectly, she wanted clearly to show that she was suffering during
her life, and although her children gave her a little bit of hope, she was so
injured that she did not want to continue with life. Her husband’s poem shows
his feeling of culpability, but I think too that he wanted to seem innocent, as
if he did not know he was damaging his wife, and because of that, I think he
was criticized by the feminist movement, because he only thought about himself
and his lovers, and he did never think
about his wife’s feelings. We must take into account that his second wife died
as the first one, and also killed the daughter she had with the poet. These two
suicides show the egoism of Ted Hughes.
