The Applicant

First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch, 5

Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand 10

To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed 15

To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit---- 20

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they'll bury you in it. 25

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that ?
Naked as paper to start 30

But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk , talk. 35

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it's a poultice.
You have an eye, it's an image.
My boy, it's your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days

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 5

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 10
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 15
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 20
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 25

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 30
Like two gods of mud
Sprawling in the dirt, but with infinite care
They bring each other to perfection.

I have decided to focus my paper on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Though the works of Plath and Hughes have very little to do with each other in terms of poetry, both of them were important to each other. Since Plath influenced in Hughes' work as well as Hughes influenced in Plath's. One of Hughes' most famous and important works is called “ Birthday Letters ”, a collection of poems which talk about his marriage with Sylvia Plath.

Sylvia was very concerned along her short life to the role of women inside a society which was governed by men. Moreover, the situation and role of the women in society is the main subject in most of her poems. She confessed in her book “ The Bell Jar” , “My mother kept telling me nobody wanted a plain English major. But an English major who knew shorthand was something else again. Everybody would want her. She would be in demand among all the up-and-coming young men and she would transcribe letter after thrilling letter. The trouble was, I hated the idea of serving men….I wanted to dictate my own thrilling letters.”

Although, she hated the stereotypical role that society had established to women, she broke with her own ideas and decided to be a wife but she had bad luck with her relationship with Ted Hughes, Ted was not the kind of husband Sylvia imagined he could be.

One of Sylvia's poems in which we can observe the differences between men and women is called “ The Applicant ” (1962); it was one of the poems which were included in her book “ Ariel ”. According to Pamela J. Annas “The man in the poem is finally defined by the black suit he puts on, but the definition of the woman shows her to be even more alienated and dehumanized. While the man is a junk heap of miscellaneous parts given shape by a suit of clothes, the woman is a wind-up toy, a puppet of that black suit. She doesn't even exist unless the black suit needs and wills her to”. In this poem Plath is making an appalling critic related to the roles of men and women in society. In this poem, men have form thanks to the work they carry out inside society, whereas the only thing that gives shape to women is the institution of marriage, women are not recognized as workers in benefit of society. They are seen as men's workers, “And do whatever you tell it” (line13), so it can be said that men is the only way that women have to get in touch with the World. To give more emphasis to the depraved situation women were suffering, and to show how women in her time were seen as property of their husbands, Plath referred to woman in her poem as “it”, “It can sew, it can cook/ It can talk, talk, talk” (lines 34, 35), she also referred to women as “a living doll”(line 33). In short, Sylvia made a satire of the institution of marriage in this poem and, as I have said above, she condemned the stereotypes that existed between men and women.

Sylvia Plath, “The Bell Jar” (1966)

Pamela J. Annas, "The Self in the World: The Social Context of Sylvia Plath's Late Poems," in Women's Studies, Vol. 7, Nos. 1-2, 1980, pp. 171-83.

Besides, as I have said above, one important difference between them had to do with their poetry. Sylvia was worried about the position of the woman in society and in the world; she denounced the depravity of women and this matter is reflected in her poetry, because most of her poems are related to this theme. By the other hand, most of Hughes' poems talk about nature and the violence of the natural world. The presence of nature and animals during Hughes childhood was very important; Hughes enjoyed observing the wildlife and landscapes, and these images related to nature, animals, and moors are reflected in lot of his early poems.

In “ Bride and the Groom lie hidden for three days ” compiled in Hughes' book “ Cave Birds” (1978), we observe how different the idea of marriage is for Ted Hughes in contrast to Sylvia's. Since Ted's point of view, there is a perfect combination between man and woman. In this poem, Ted describes a process of creation and transformation through which man and woman reach the perfection, “ They bring each other to perfection ” (line 32). Ted puts men and women at the same level; He sets a homogeneity in which man is not more important than woman in the institution of marriage, but one of them can not survive without the other. The idea that Hughes has concerning to marriage and the roles of men and women is quite different from Sylvia's. Ted does not talk about the depraved situation of women but he speaks of true love, he speaks about a perfect marriage, a marriage in which both counterparts are equal, in which one of the members is not demote by the authority of the other. To him, one of the lovers is the complement to the other and vice versa. I think that what Hughes wants to demonstrate to the reader is that the best way a person has to be able to reach the perfection is by means of marriage and true love because are the only things which are able to creation. On the contrary, Sylvia seems to think that the institution of marriage does not give creation but it causes the destruction of the woman as human being.

In order to conclude with this essay I would like to point out that one main difference from a genre's point of view is that Hughes had not to establish his role as a poet to be successful because he was a man and man's work was more recognized during his generation, while Plath had to fight to get that role. Plath had to wrestle to won the respect and admiration of her colleagues and public, even so, she did not get such a success until after her death.