Goodbye, Mr Hughes

Hughes favourite metaphor for man was the crow. He saw the crow as an appropriate representative of the generation that had survived the violence of the two world wars. It was both a symbol of violence and a survivor of it,
writes Manju Jaidka

Ostensibly it was a day like any other. The sun rose the way it did everyday. The twilight set in early, the way it always did in the final days of October. Winter still remained standing undecided at the world’s threshold, wondering whether to knock politely or just barge in. It was a day — Wednesday, October 28, 1998 — like any other.

Except for the BBC news in the evening. The last bits of the news announcing the death of Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate to the English Queen. Some pictures, some video clippings accompanied the news item. Messages from the British Prime Minister and from his publishers flashed across the screen. And then came the weather forecast. Poetry, or the cessation of it, did not change the weather. Ted Hughes came and went. The news of his death did not reach his poems. As Auden lamented on the death of W.B. Yeats, poetry made nothing happen.

The Internet gave some more details. Yahoo flashed back: Poet Laureate Ted Hughes has died aged 68 following an 18-month battle against cancer, his publishers, Faber and Faber, said. Mr Hughes died peacefully at home in Devon yesterday. He had kept his cancer battle a secret from all but those very close to him. Matthew Evans, chairman of Hughes’ publisher Faber and Faber, said: "After an 18 month fight against cancer, Ted Hughes died Wednesday. The loss to his family is inestimable."

A life was thus summed up. Summed up boldly in just a few words.

Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II, was the author of more than 40 books of poems, prose, and translation. Among other honours he received were the Queen’s Order of Merit, the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, the Forward Poetry Prize for Birthday Letters, and the W. H. Smith Award for his Tales of Ovid. However, he was dogged by controversies for a major portion of his life. It all started with the death of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, a brilliant poet with a self-destructive passion. In 1963, Plath committed suicide and the entire literary world, feminists in particular, held Ted Hughes responsible. There were other charges against Hughes. He was accused of abusing the Plath estate, bringing out her poems in gradual money-spinning instalments.

He was not forgiven for burning one volume of her journal. His explanation that he destroyed it to protect his children from pain was never accepted by Plath aficionados. All the while, the Plath myth grew. It did, indeed, have all the makings of a cult: the love and the hate, the betrayal and the anger, with the sensationalism climaxing in suicidal violence.

The world failed to realise that every suicide claims two victims: the one who dies, and the one who is condemned to live on. Condemned to live on as a survivor, for many years Hughes wrote nothing but children’s verse.

At the same time he concentrated on bringing out Sylvia Plath’s poems, her letters (edited by her mother, Aurelia Plath) and her journals. And then, when he did turn back to poetry, it was not surprising that he focused on the negative side of life, the darker forces in the universe forever threatening man. He studiously kept personal experiences out of his work. He did not write of his wife’s suicide, or of emotional and other disasters he surely must have suffered. And yet the sense of doom crept into his poetry through symbols from the animal world: the jaguar, the the hawk, and the crow-- masks from the world of nature that the poet donned to hide the pain he lived through.

Born and brought up amid the Pennines of west Yorkshire, Ted Hughes had a close kinship with nature. For him nature was an extraordinary, mysterious world, more powerful than man could ever fully comprehend. In the poems of Hawk in the Rain, Lupercal, Crow, Prometheus on his Crag, Cave Birds, and Gaudete, an overriding concern was violence and inseparable from the idea of violence is power.

Together, they reflected the kind of life that one lives in an age characterised by brutality. Hughes’s poetry remains a witness to an age which bears the cumulative scars of violence since the turn of the century.

In the early poems of Hawk in the Rain and Lupercal, Hughes portrayed hidden diabolic forces inimical to man. The poetry grappled with these forces successfully and related them to primal instincts in all living creatures. In the Crow poems, Hughes looked at the world in the guise of the trickster crow: a grotesque survivor in a mutilated world.

In a later stage, in Prometheus on his Crag, Cave Birds, and Gaudete, Hughes wrote from the victim’s point of view. At this point, he became the Scapegoat.

Hughes favourite metaphor for man was the crow. He saw the crow as an appropriate representative of the generation that had survived the violence of the two world wars. It was both, a symbol of violence and a survivor of it. It was a means whereby Hughes tried to grapple with the forces of doom. At the same time, the crow was a stylistic convenience, being a symbol that gave the poet a sense of liberation, freeing him from the demands of rhyme and rhythm which are irrelevant to the cacophony of the crow. Thus it enabled him to fulfil his aim of writing "songs with no music whatsoever, in a super-simple and a super-ugly language." The extreme simplicity and ugliness of the crow were reflections of the age stripped of its glitter and glamour, its veneer of superficial attractions. The crow was, thus, a bird that suffered all, and — most importantly — survived all.

The last book that Ted Hughes published, Birthday Letters, addressed to Sylvia Plath thirty-five years after her death, strikes a very different note. Here, for the first time we have Ted Hughes coming across as a vulnerable human being, a husband and a lover. A man without his mask. As the survivor who lived on, Ted Hughes had silently borne his private hell over a long period of 35 years. Why then did he feel the need to break his silence? To give his side of the story? Was he trying to exonerate himself through this collection?

Writing these last poems must have been a painful process. Compiling them for public consumption could not possibly have been easy. And so the Letters speak of the Old despair and new agony / Melting into one familiar hell. Birthday Poems stands out like a picture-album, with some of the snapshots yellow and fading. Snapshots of happier times not so long ago. The poems speak of the early days of the Hughes-Plath courtship, and then the growing intensity of their relationship. But there hangs a sense of foreboding over the poems, an aura of gloom pointing to the tragic shape of things to follow:

Nor did I know I was being auditioned
For the male lead in your drama,
Miming through the first easy movements
As if with eyes closed, feeling for the role.
As if a puppet were being tried on its strings,
Or a dead frogs legs touched by electrodes.

When Birthday Letters appeared earlier this year one mistakenly felt that this sense of fatality was related to the haunting memory of Sylvia Plath’s death. Now, in retrospect, one knows better. It is evident that what prompted the publication of a grief so intensely private, and what gave it so tragic an air was the cancer raging in the survivors body. Ted Hughes, like his winged survivor, the crow, knew he had to lay down his cards once and for all. But some letters still remained to be written. He had to write them and post them before going gentle into that good night.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;
|In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

(W.H. Auden)