The prince leans to the girl in scarlet heels,
Her green eyes slant, hair flaring in a fan
Of silver as the rondo slows; now reels
Begin on tilted violins to span
The whole revolving tall glass palace hall
Where guests slide gliding into light like wine;
Rose candles flicker on the lilac wall
Reflecting in a million flagons' shine,
And glided couples all in whirling trance
Follow holiday revel begun long since,
Until near twelve the strange girl all at once
Guilt-stricken halts, pales, clings to the prince
As amid the hectic music and cocktail talk
She hears the caustic ticking of the clock.
Sylvia Plath
Source: http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6642&poem=32954 (7.05.06)
He loved her and she loved him.
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains
Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment's brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was
Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin's attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon's gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall
Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop
In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage
In the morning they wore each other's face
Ted Hughes
Source: http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6616&poem=30213 (7.05.06)
Sylvia Plath (1932- 1963) was an American poet who met the English poet Ted
Hughes (1930- 1998) in Cambridge. Despite their apparently differences they
got married in 1956, they had two children, but got separated in 1962 probably
because of her depressions. Plath committed suicide in 1963 and Hughes was
mainly blamed for it (Plath & Hughes, wikipedia).
In this paper I want to analyse two love poems: Cinderella by Sylvia Plath
and Lovesong by Ted Hughes. Cinderella belongs to “The Collected Poems”
which contain everything that Sylvia Plath wrote after 1956 and some of her
early poems. It was edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Ted Hughes
and published in1981 (Amazon). Lovesong was published in 1967 probably inspired
in those memories that remained in Hughes about the relation between Plath
and him (Timeline).
The topic in both poems is “love” but the perspective is completely opposed. I chose these poems because I think that these opinions still exist, they are current and I imagine that they will exist forever, at least as intimate thoughts.
Cinderella is a poem that is based on the idea of the perfect love story. There is a prince that loves a woman; there is a beautiful setting and a romantic environment. The problem appears when the clock strikes twelve. We already know the end of the tale, but why does Plath not write it? I think that there are three possible reasons. One of them could be that she thought that the reader would already know about it. Another one could be because in her case she knew that in the end it would be different. And, for me the most possible one, that she was already aware of her future and that the clock that was striking was her own, her life was arriving to its end. That’s the key of the poem for me. Because of its belonging to her early poems, probably before she met Hughes, she expected a romantic first date, a happy engagement and a full and consummated marriage. This is a kind of tradition but hardly ever occurs that way. Happiness is difficult to find and if you expect an almost impossible wish and it doesn’t get true you probably get depressed. Nowadays women still believe in this dream, but we also realize that nothing is perfect so we try to be happy and to find our way. Plath uses nouns like violins, a glass palace hall, candles, and couples while she is explaining the setting, but she uses guilt- stricken, pale, and caustic when the problem comes up. When the clock strikes twelve we know that the spell has expired and that the real situation will arise. That’s like a metaphor for the situation Plath was living. We can interpret that her spell expires when she finishes writing. While she is writing she is just in another world, her imagination is her leader and she forgets about her problems, her real life. But when she is arriving at the end of the poem she realizes that it was just like a dream and she has to wake up.
Lovesong is very different from Cinderella. In this poem Hughes writes about two people, a man and a woman that loved each other. If we take into account that Hughes was with another woman, Assia Wevill, and that they have had a daughter together (Timeline) when he wrote this poem, we can suppose that the characters of the poem will probably be Sylvia Plath and Hughes himself in their marriage days. The difference with Cinderella is that Hughes doesn’t write a poem based on a tale. He writes about (what we call in Spanish) a “love- hatred” relationship. That means that both loved each other but they also tried to hurt their partner. They couldn’t live with or without the other one. The poem is written in past tense so we can support the idea that it’s the description of those past days with Sylvia. In the first stanza, it seems that both the man and the woman loved each other in a passionate way. The second stanza continues with the same theme, their love was extremely possessive but none of them seemed to disapprove it. But in the third and the longest stanza the description of that strange, possessive love relation turns into an aggressive and harmful one. Hughes explains in detail all the signs between beloved couples, looks, smiles, caresses, but now in a wounding and offensive way. We can imagine that in this kind of relation love doesn’t exist anymore. There is dependence between them, it is impossible to break, but it needs to finish. At the beginning there are little cries (7), then the cries are deep (30) and at the end the screams stuck in the wall (39). Maybe this is a confirmation or a reason of their separation, they simply couldn’t stand each other and the situation was unbearable. When the poet describes what happened when they used to go to bed: “Their heads fell apart into sleep” (41), we remind this situation as a usual one when a couple has had an argument and the reconciliation is mostly obvious because love is hard to stop (42).
I don’t completely understand the end of the poem. I don’t know how to interpret it because on the one hand it can be a kind of nostalgia of those days and a way of saying openly that he loved her and on the other hand it can be an admission that what happened to Plath has happened also to him in a spiritual way, a part of his past has gone with Sylvia.
If we have a look into nowadays relationships we can find a great variety of loves. There are real loves, interest loves, loves like this one (love- hatred)…I have to admit that men and women have different points of view of love depending on each relation, but I think that the types of love at present are not exclusive of one genre. Men, as well as women, have changed their mind and there is a mixture of thoughts. For me, those differences are what make us get attracted independently of our genre.