Books

Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes: Poetry haunted by Sylvia Plath

These poems capture a sense of the too-lates and never-quites that make up existence

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in 1959

Lucy Sweeney Byrne
Sat Oct 3 2020 - 00:00

Published in 1998, just months before his own death, the poems in Birthday Letters are a staggeringly beautiful account of Ted Hughes’ reckoning with the life and suicide of his late wife, Sylvia Plath. Their turbulent marriage, and her decision to kill herself, would haunt Hughes’s life both publicly and privately for the next 35 years – during which time he was famously (and admirably) reticent.

The poems, written over time, are in a loosely sequential order, opening with Hughes’s first possible sighting of Plath (although he’s not sure) in a photograph of that year’s Fulbright scholars, which ends with these lines:

Was it then I bought a peach? That's as I remember.
From a stall near Charing Cross Station.
It was the first fresh peach I had ever tasted.
I could hardly believe how delicious.
At twenty-five I was dumbfounded afresh
By my ignorance of the simplest things.

The poems in Birthday Letters contain everything, in that they contain love and pain, life and death, human weaknesses and strengths, glory and regret. They capture a sense of the indomitable passage of time; all the too-lates and never-quites that make up existence. They are bold and stark and brutally honest, full of both a poet’s empathetic comprehension and a husband’s ever-perplexed grief. There are no villains and victims in these poems, only people struggling to play and overcome the roles in which they’ve been cast.

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These are letters to Plath, for her children, for poetry, and for their shared legacy, asking forgiveness, offering forgiveness, and understanding that, between the two of them, forgiveness isn’t needed. Understanding, rather, that they were two people who loved each other intensely, for whom that love went wrong:

Somewhere
Inside that numbness of the earth
Our future trying to happen.
I look up – as if to meet your voice
With all its urgent future
That has burst in on me. Then look back
At the book of the printed words.
You are ten years dead. It is only a story.
Your story. My story.