The darkest poem

It seems to me to be the darkest poem that he wrote about the death of Sylvia Plath. There is a kind of deafening agony, blinding agony to this new poem. It seems to touch a deeper, darker place than any poem he’s ever written.

There’s undoubtedly plenty of agony in the poem, but its power to move is closer to that of an uncontrolled diary entry than of a speech by King Lear or Macbeth.

“Last Letter” is unlikely to do much to rehabilitate Hughes with those who hold him responsible for the death of the great young star of American poetry—and for the suicide of Assia Wevill, his companion after Plath’s death, some six years later. (Like Plath, Assia gassed herself, and killed her four-year old daughter by Hughes, Shura, as well.) It was his affair with Assia, begun in the summer of 1962, that precipitated his separation from Plath, and a decisive moment inBirthday Letters, his narrative of the events leading up to Plath’s suicide, comes in the poem “The Inscription,” which recounts an occasion when husband and wife nearly got back together; in the course of this almost-reconciliation, however, Plath’s eyes happen to fall on Hughes’s edition of Shakespeare, a volume that in a fit of fury she had earlier ripped to pieces. The book has been miraculously “resurrected”:

Wondering, with unbelieving fingers,
She opened it. She read the inscription. She closed it
Like the running animal that receives
The fatal bullet without a faltering check
In its stride.

The resurrector of the book who inscribed it was of course Assia.

Well, Assia Wevill, or so “Last Letter” tells us, was not the woman in whose arms Hughes spent the weekend his wife committed suicide; he was in fact with one Susan Alliston. Alliston, like Plath, was a poet who would die young—not by her own hand, but of Hodgkin’s disease, in 1969.

Mark Ford, The New york Review of Books. Ted Hugues's "Last Letter".

Yellow leaves, wind and rain

Ill-fated is my poem Precious Sword in its strife;

I'll be a vagabond till the end of my life.

Yellow leaves still suffer much in the wind and rain

While in blue chambers nobles themselves entertain.

Biased customs have my new friends unjustly hit;

My old acquaintances leave me as fated have it.

Now I long to have Xin Feng wine for a good drink;

It may cost dear but it helps my heart not to sink.

Li Shangyin, Wind and Rain.

Like a boat on wave's top (a farewell poem)

Sadly to my dear friend I say good-bye,

and into the vast mist my boat passed by.

For my native place Luoyang now I'm bound,

still froom Guanling woods come faint tolling sound.

This time and at this place we bid farewell,

where we can meet once again, who can tell?

Human life is like a boat on wave's top

Its gliding this or that way, who can stop?

Wei Yingwu (737-791). Just setting out from Yangzi Ferry.

(translated by the great Wang Yushu)

When a new planet swims into his ken

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific — and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

John Keats, On first looking into Chapman's Homer.