This morning, I woke at 6. It was unusually early for me, and still dark out. I turned the radio on. Something Understood was just starting. The long running show on BBC’s Radio 4 has a different theme every week. In this episode, the poet Kenneth Steven reflects on poetry that brings healing to the heart. Steven selects poems by Edwin Muir, Robert Frost, WB Yeats, Ted Hughes and others (mostly or all men?) to explore the idea of why people are drawn to poetry at moments of crisis.
I was dozing, and didn’t hear all of the programme, but I woke properly, sat up, when I heard mention of Syliva Plath and Ted Hughes. What would Steven say about Hughes, and his response to Plath’s death, and, crucially, his role in it? Steven says that ‘Daffodils‘ is the most beautiful of all the poems that became the Birthday Letters volume, published in 1998. The poem, he says, is a love poem that reaches out to the long deep scar of death.
I hadn’t heard the poem before, and I wonder, now.
Where have I been?
Where has it been?
Why is this poem not pinned to my desk, folded in the backpage of a notebook, dog eared in a volume that I proffer and parry? Have you seen this? You must read this. Borrow my copy. No no, have it, I don’t need it back, I’ll buy myself another one. Take it, just take it.
This intimate tender poem catches at my throat.
It talks to me now of the suicide of my partner in Edinburgh when I was just twenty years old.
It talks to me now of sun-bossed springs and doughty dreams and naivity and lost landscapes and a time before we understood climate change and the devastating impacts of modern agriculture.
It talks to me now of aging, weathering, withering even, stems cut and sliced, a gathering in, ephemeral beauty, transience, and old grocers curtailed by a winter, concrete in its frigidity.
It talks to me now of keepsakes, the keepsakes I didn’t keep, keeps I tried to treasure but failed, keeps that dulled and muted and curled, pulled out of the blue leather wallet less and less, until finally the keep, the passport photo with its soiled pale frame, wasn’t there and isn’t there and though I search for it most octobers it has gone, as if, as Hughes wrote, ice had a breath.
I don’t know this poem ‘Daffodils’ because I blamed Hughes for Plath’s death and I stopped reading Hughes’ work once the grudge cantankered and coagulated. Plath died before I was born. But somewhere along the way, having studied both Plath and Hughes in English at school, something I read somewhere laid the blame for her suicide on him. I didn’t stop to analyse this. Didn’t ask myself about Plath’s long struggle with mental illness. It was convenient to look at his behaviour, both before and after her death, and to point the finger. The dreadful suicide of Assia Wevill, and her killing of Wevill and Hughes’ four year old daughter, some six year’s after Plath’s death, also with a gas oven, merely cemented my conclusions.
But is this why I blamed Hughes for Plath’s death? Or was it because, for years, I blamed my partner’s death on myself? Was my default to look for external influences, for obvious explanations?
I don’t know. This seems too glib, too neat. And it’s irrelevant. It doesn’t add or take away anything from this extraordinary poem.
Read ‘Daffodils’. Hughes wrote more than one poem with the same name. Ensure you find the correct one.
Through the sod – an anchor, a cross of rust.
SANDERLINGS 