Birthday Letters

I've hurt someone dear to me. Deeply hurt.

The more I think about it, the excuses I tried to use to deflect blame become thinner and thinner.

Away from the noise and heat of our argument, I suddenly realized I had no ground to stand on. And that sorry may not be enough.

Not this time.

I think of what Ted Hughes felt when he learn about Sylvia Plath's suicide.

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Birthday Letters is the title of British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes's last collection of poems. With these poems, he perhaps ended his long public silence about his wife, the poet and feminist icon Sylvia Plath and her suicide in 1963.

One can forever analyse the complexity of their relationship and marriage, but few can deny the sequence of events (although one may question the cause and effect).

Hughes walked on Plath and their two children for another woman. Soon after she commited suicide by putting her head in a gas oven.


I had bought this book a while back, swept up with tragic mythology and controversy that built up around the couple and around Plath in particular. As A.O. Scott puts it:

Many of Plath's admirers treat her as a martyr and Hughes as, symbolically if not actually, her murderer. Her short life has become, fairly or not, a parable of the stifling of women's self-expression by a chauvinist literary establishment in the years before feminism. Those more sympathetic to Hughes have preferred to see him as a fellow sufferer, a flawed, talented man married to a gifted woman with a history of mental disturbance, who had first tried to kill herself long before she met him.

At first, I only got around to only digesting the first of the 88 poems, "Fulbright Scholars". Hughes speaks to Plath, as in most of the collection, in the second person - telling her how he may have seen her for the first time in the news clipping about that year's batch of Fulbrighters:

Where was it, in the Strand? A display
Of news items, in photographs.
For some reason, I noticed it.
Picture of that year's intake
Of Fulbright Scholars. Just arriving -
Or arrived. Or some of them.
Were you among them? I studied it,
Not too minutely, wondering
Which of them I might meet.
... (continues)

These days I read deeper, losing myself in the sad magnificant verses.

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I think of Ted Hughes picking up the pieces of his life after learning of the tragedy. How he went on, being villified as someone to drove to suicide the woman he once, and probably still, loved. Shouts of 'murderer' at every poetry reading.

But Hughes maintained his studied silence and lived on. He collected and edited Plath's poetry, earning her a posthumous Pulitzer Prize with Ariel. He also edited her journal, which she had kept up until the weeks leading to her death.

Suddenly I read all this -
Your actual words, as they floated
Out through your throat and tongue and onto your page -
Just as when your daugther, years ago now,
Drifting in, gazing up into my face,
Mystified,
Where I worked alone
In the silent house, asked, suddenly:
'Daddy, where's Mummy?'

So in the poet, I find a fellow sufferer.