Title

MORNING SONG (1966)

Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.

In a drafty museum, your nakedness

Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother

Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow

Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath

Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:

A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

In my Victorian nightgown.

Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try

Your handful of notes;

The clear vowels rise like balloons.

(From ‘Ariel’)

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

The Academy of American Poets – Morning Song

academy@poets.com 1997-2005

http://www.uv.es/~fores/PoesiaUK2005/1Plath,%20Sylvia/morningsong.html (6-5-06)

FULL MOON

AND LITTLE FRIEDA (1967)

Ted Hughes

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket -

And you listening.

A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.

A pail lifted, still and brimming - mirror

To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm

wreaths of breath -

A dark river of blood, many boulders,

Balancing unspilled milk.

'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!'

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work

That points at him amazed.

(From ‘Wodwo’)

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Earth/ Moon – Ted Hughes: Publications/ Bibliography

claas.kazzer@web.de 1995

http://www.uni-leipzig.de/~angl/hughes/th_publications.html#wodwo ( 6-5-06)

POETIC COMENTARY

The two poems that I’m going to compare are “‘Morning Song’ by Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) and ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’ by Ted Hughes (1930-1998). “The first one was published in 1966 and it belongs to ‘Ariel’.” (The Academy of American Poets) “The second one was published in 1967 and it belongs to ‘Wodwo’.” (Ted Hughes)

“Plath and Hughes were married for 6 years and they had two children. They had a very stormy relationship. Sylvia was a mentally unbalanced person and Ted a real womanizer. When she was eight her father died and since then, she was a depressive person. Finally, he abandons her and their children for another woman. In this age, she wrote many of her most famous poems: ‘Ariel’, ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Daddy’ and others. One year later of the splitting up, she committed suicide and her late works were published some years later by Ted Hughes.”(A Brief Guide to Confessional Poetry)

She was a ‘feminist-martyr in a patriarchal society’ (Sylvia Plath). The gender conflict was one of the obvious differences between Plath and Hughes. Although they were both excellent poets, she had many more problems than he to be recognised. Very few women were outstanding in literature. Women and men wrote in a different way because their roles in society were not the same. Women were brought up to have babies and to do the housekeeping and men were who worked outside the home to earn money. For this reason, they dealt with different themes in their poems and, if they dealt with the same themes, they talked about them in a different way. Women wrote more about their role in society and their fight against sexism. In the case of Plath and Hughes, she writes more about her own life, her experiences as a woman, her feelings and emotions than he. As Plath argued: ‘I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have’ (The Poet Speaks) and, on the contrary, ‘he did not soften his themes of life and death with sentimentality’ (Ted Hughes)

“Her early poetry was ‘under the influence of her husband and the work of Dylan Thomas and Gerald Manley Hopkins’ (Sylvia Plath). Ted Hughes was influenced by Plath’s poetry too. Plath wrote poems regarding her husband and their relationship and Hughes did the same in his last years as a poet. The difference is that she wrote these poems when they were married and in the year that he abandons her and he wrote about her about thirty years later. Then, he analyzes the relationship from a less realistic and more objective point of view.” (Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath) and (Sylvia Plath)

“To begin with the poems, they are clearly related because they both have the same theme. They talk about the children that Sylvia and Ted had in common. The first poem is referred to their second son Nicholas and the second poem to their first-born Frieda.”(From Mourning Song to "Morning Song") ‘Private experiences with and feelings about death, trauma, depression and relationships were addressed in this type of poetry, often in an autobiographical manner.’ (The Academy)

Both poems are autobiographical. But they talked about their children in a different way:

“On the one hand, Plath wrote ‘Morning Song’ after Nicholas’s birth in 1962, when she discovered Hughes’s infidelities. The poem starts remembering the moment when she gave birth to the baby boy. Nicholas was a long-awaited son because Plath and Hughes conceived him lovingly. Supposedly, a mother loves her son as a treasure ‘fat gold watch’ but she was in postnatal depression. She is conscious about that she has created a separation between mother and son because she looks at him as a foreigner who has arrived in her life and that needs all her attention.” (The Greater Nomadic Council) ‘Plath had the courage to admit she was confused, and her poem, "Morning Song," focuses on one woman's mixed senses of apprehension and of awe upon the birth of her child which create both feelings of separation and affection that contend to determine the strength of her maternal bond’. (From Mourning Song) She thinks that the most important thing in her life at that moment is her problem with her husband and not her baby. The baby is like an object: ‘New statue’. The immaculate baby frightens her. In the 3^rd stanza, she comes out as a bad mother who wants to die. The baby’s cry is the symbol that makes her come back to reality. It is like a song in which he demands his mother’s attention. She is who has mammal glands and who has to provide her son with mother’s milk. She compares herself like a ‘cow-heavy’.

On the other hand, ‘Full Moon and Little Frieda’ is a dialogue with Plath’s diaries. Hughes reproaches Sylvia for committing suicide, leaving two little children. He loves his children more than Plath did. He adores feminine sex and then he writes about his daughter and not about his son. When the evening comes, Frieda remembers her mother and she calls her looking at the sky because when a person dies, people tell children that she/he is in the sky. The little girl thinks that her mother is the biggest star of the sky: the Moon. The ‘Full Moon’ has an imposing presence. Frieda misses her mother because mother and daughter’s union is as strong as a ‘spider’s web’. The worldly representation of Plath in this poem is the cow and the poet generalizes this term ‘Cows’ because he had another son with his second woman. The two women fed their children with their milk. The spiritual representation of Plath is the Moon, a big star that shines like the artists.

Plath’s perspective as a mother would never be the same as Hughes perspective as a father because she is who was pregnant, who gives birth to the children and who can breastfeed them, that maybe is the most close moment between mother and son. In her poem, she is referring to her son although her own worries result from the problems with her husband. However, Hughes addresses his ex-wife to talk about their daughter.

A common point between the two poems is that Plath is compared to a cow which is a symbol of maternity and they have a treasure in their possession that men never will have, the mother’s milk. Another similarity is that in both poems, the situation that they describe develops during the night and the poets use the word ‘star’. Woman is reflected on a mirror that shows her own reality.

As for the poems structure, he is less formal in structure and metre than Plath. She uses a more thorough and subtle vocabulary than Hughes. Moreover, her adjectives and comparisons are wittier. He bases his poem in juxtapositions and subordinate sentences.

In conclusion, women and men could be equal regarding quality and they both are influenced by the opposite sex but their style and vision of life is different.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

- The Academy of American Poets ‘Sylvia Plath’

academy@poets.com 1997-2005

http://www.uv.es/~fores/PoesiaUK2005/1Plath,%20Sylvia/morningsong.html (6-5-06)

- A 1962 Sylvia Plath Interview with Peter Orr

From The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets Conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press, and Ian Scott-Kilvery. London: Routledge (1966)

http://www.uv.es/~fores/PoesiaUK2005/1Plath,%20Sylvia/orrinterview.htm (7-5-06)

- Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath

2004 Nadeem Azam, London

http://www.uv.es/~fores/PoesiaUK2005/1Hughes,%20Ted/HughesPlath.html (7-5-06)

- Ted Hughes

Edward J. Hugues

http://www.uv.es/~fores/PoesiaUK2005/1Hughes,%20Ted/thughesbio.htm (6-5-06)

- The Academy of American Poets – Morning Song

academy@poets.com 1997-2005

http://www.uv.es/~fores/PoesiaUK2005/1Plath,%20Sylvia/morningsong.html (6-5-06)

- The Academy of American Poets ‘A Brief Guide to Confessional Poetry’

academy@poets.com 1997-2005