Your Own, Sylvia

by Stephanie Hemphill

  to her throat. Only the one

  who grips the handle can lower the blade.

  John Malcolm Brinnin was an American poet and biographer, probably best known for his personal memoir Dylan Thomas in America. Brinnin brought Thomas, a Welsh poet, to America and accompanied him on his reading tours. Dylan Thomas loved to carouse and misbehave, and was an outspoken, foul-mouthed alcoholic. The implication in the above poem is that Brinnin, as one of Thomas's close friends, should have gotten Thomas help, not enabled his destructive behavior. Lots of controversy surrounds Thomas's death, but whether he drank himself into a stupor and then slipped into a coma or a doctor gave him a medical overdose that induced a coma, Thomas was destroying himself with alcohol and drugs and reckless behavior. The medical record cites pneumonia as the cause of Dylan Thomas's death.

  Theodore

  Imagining Sylvia Plath In the style of “Ode for Ted”

  April 1956

  She loves that he names the trees,

  all the creatures and leaves

  of the forest and fen, receives

  his knowledge like a corsage,

  never has she known a man so large;

  she believes he's her Adam and she's his Eve.

  When she first drank his blood,

  she knew no other man would taste so good;

  knew what coursed his veins could

  kill her. He dwarfed her previous lovers

  with his talent and his hands. Only her father

  was a figure so grand, a bard of the land, a druid.

  She twirls around him on tiptoes,

  polishes her lines like leather shoes;

  he wears her on his lapel like a blue rose—

  a cut flower weathering drought, she withstands

  the squinty eyes of his poet friends,

  is she worthy of Mr. Hughes?

  Evangelical about his words, his worth,

  she will spread his poems like fine marmalade, birth

  his name to greatness, expand him breadth and width;

  she breathes Ted, feeds and writes

  him; they dream each other day and night;

  she feels like the moon, a muse, orbiting Ted's earth.

  “Ode for Ted” was written April 21, 1956, about Ted Hughes when Sylvia and Ted were courting and falling in love. Ted had an extensive knowledge of indigenous flora and could identify most countryside plants. “Ode for Ted” is a tribute to that skill of his and to his rugged, masculine character. Ted and Sylvia met in February 1956. They were married June 16, 1956, less than five months later.

  Falling in Love with America

  Ted Hughes, poet, Sylvia's future husband

  May 1956

  She is grand. She is

  literature. She is beauty.

  She masks a vast brain

  under her blondness,

  but when she reads her poems,

  her great sheaf of verse,

  I see genius. She

  has been netting words longer

  than I. She ignites

  my writing like gales

  spread forest fire. We sit

  without a comma

  of breath between us.

  Her hands cup my face and I

  devote everything

  to her, move closer

  to Cambridge, dream her thick lips,

  her native tongue, her

  language on the verge

  of immortal. She's hungry.

  She needs to be fed.

  Most men can't handle

  Sylvia's banging of plates.

  Her appetite for

  blood, poetry, sex.

  But I am spun. She gives me

  a new world, new words.

  Edward James Hughes (Ted) was born on August 17, 1930, in Mytholmroyd, an English village in the narrow cleft of the Yorkshire Pennines. Ted had never been to America when he met Sylvia.

  June Wedding

  Aurelia Plath

  June 1956

  I could not predict,

  did not expect,

  that only three days

  on the Isle of Britain

  I would play witness

  as Sylvia gives her hand

  to this Ted Hughes

  she mentioned in a few letters

  and whom I have just met.

  I smile, iron the pink knit

  suit I bought myself,

  give it to my daughter

  to wear as a bridal gown.

  Sivvy vows her love to this Ted,

  embraces his life of poetry and poverty.

  I smile, my teeth tremor

  behind my lips. I wished an easier

  life for Sylvia, a doctor or lawyer

  to support her as she creates

  writing and children. But Sivvy

  is not a child anymore—

  she traveled an ocean, put

  that much salt water between us

  and then did as she wanted.

  I never could control her tides

  or her will. I hug Ted.

  My arms wrap awkwardly

  around the back of this tall

  man that I must now call

  my son.

  Sylvia and Ted were married in London near Queen's Square in the Church of St. George the Martyr at one-thirty in the afternoon on June 16, 1956. Ted had purchased the marriage license from the Archbishop of Canterbury that morning. They told no one except Aurelia, who was their only guest, that they were getting married. The curate stood as second witness.

  Benidorm

  Ted Hughes, Sylvia's husband

  July-August 1956

  Spanish honeymoon on half a farthing.

  The harbor at Angel's Bay salivates

  my pen and I am hungry for words

  to capture this scenery, to snare

  the maiden flight of our love.

  I am not sentimental,

  but when Sylvia sketches the rock cliffs

  in precise ink lines, I am grateful

  she traps our memories. Our daily fish

  and fruit, the French doors open to sea

  as we roll nightly under covers

  and stars. This union explodes,

  dangerous but irresistible.

  I school Sylvia, prescribe daily

  writing exercises, set our schedule

  by the clock of the sun.

  We discipline ourselves to a life

  of poetry. I cannot breathe

  any other way. My Sylvia is an A student,

  she toils away, hopes that someday

  her work will be on a level with mine.

  Benidorm, a Spanish town along the Mediterranean Sea, has become a vacation hot spot, but at the time of Ted and Sylvia's honeymoon it was still a quaint seaside town.

  In-Laws in Brontë Country

  Elinor Klein, one of Sylvia's friends from Smith

  Late August 1956

  Heptonstall rolls, English countryside

  cobwebbed by precise fences and little

  houses huddled at hill peaks

  like question marks. Ted hails from here.

  Ted and Sylvia host well, but something

  in the country air alters her, ignites

  her outsider feelings. Sylvia raves

  about the fat happy pigs, says her marriage

  is like those contented hogs rolling

  in the trough. Ted storytells of country

  madness, the farmer who murders

  all he owns and loves.

  We visit a country witch,

  but she reads the changing winds

  of my life like an almanac,

  not a crystal ball.

  We traverse Wuthering Heights,

  Sylvia sketches its glum remains.

  We lose ourselves in the moor,

  no end to the soft earth, no end to the fog.

  Ted helps Sylvia fuse language with the land.

  She trails him like a sheepdog,

  picks up
whatever he drops

  or desires with her canine teeth.

  She rubs her nose against his cheek,

  and they do resemble contented pigs,

  rooting around their mucky heaven

  of stewed rabbit and Yeats.

  This is not the Sylvia

  I remember, that solo star,

  that media darling. This Sylvia

  is a sidekick, wife of the male lead.

  Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily Brontë's only novel, is a story of doomed love and revenge and is considered among the masterpieces of English literature. Emily Brontë (1818-1848) was born in Thorton, Yorkshire, the moorland setting of Wuthering Heights visited by Ted, Sylvia, and Elinor Klein.

  Boundless

  Ted Hughes

  Fall 1956

  Her adoration

  astonishes me.

  Whether I merit it or not,

  I don't know.

  She leaps,

  full throttle,

  into this,

  can't be stopped.

  She needs me.

  I umbrella her rain.

  Shelter her

  from pain.

  I could devour her

  but she has formed

  this “We”

  I live inside,

  a clean house

  where my muse settles,

  where we gorge literature

  and write well.

  My poetry, my wife,

  and I'm content,

  that roly-poly hound,

  bone clenched between my teeth.

  According to his friend Michael Boddy, Ted was quite experienced with women and willingly offered dating advice. The night Ted met Sylvia, his girlfriend, Shirley, accompanied him to the St. Botolph party. He had been serious enough with Shirley to introduce her to his parents, but the relationship fell apart after he met Sylvia. Shirley, by most accounts, was the opposite of Sylvia—very English, very reserved.

  Secretary

  Aurelia Plath

  Fall 1956

  I tried to school her in shorthand

  that dreadful summer of 1953

  when my Sivvy slipped beneath the surface

  of language and breath.

  Now she types and agents for him,

  follows my footsteps in directions

  I did not wish for her.

  She manages the business of his writing,

  but these efforts go underappreciated.

  She feels refracted elation

  when his work is accepted

  as though his publishing, his poems were hers.

  She sees Ted

  as the larger talent

  and herself as the vessel,

  cargoing his work to the world.

  How does a mother teach a daughter

  to prize herself, not stand behind

  the curtain of her man?

  I have been a poor role model.

  Sivvy must know

  she is the star, no less bright

  and necessary to the sky

  than her husband.

  She writes less, feels clogged

  as a kitchen disposal.

  She asks me for recipes,

  not constructive literary criticism.

  He may smother her.

  His pillow of need

  hangs softly over her head.

  I fear he may cut off her breath.

  During the fall of 1956 Sylvia was still attending Cambridge full-time and living at Newnham Hall. She submitted not only Ted's work, but also her own. Sylvia also found time to write fiction, poetry, and correspondence. Ted's poems appeared in The Nation, Poetry, and The Atlantic, and he was reading his work regularly on the BBC. While Sylvia was living apart from Ted, a lot of her work was being accepted and published as well. In this poem, Aurelia's fears are conveyed more as a prediction of what lay ahead when Sylvia and Ted moved in together.

  Secret

  Professor Dorothea Krook, Sylvia's mentor and supervisor

  in philosophy at Cambridge University

  December 1956

  Sylvia frantics, her breath short.

  Words jet from her mouth.

  She seeks advice. I tell her

  to quell her anger over Cambridge rules,

  plead love and passion, and come clean

  about her unauthorized marriage to Ted.

  I advise her to prostrate herself

  before her tutor, strike a deal.

  Sure enough, Sylvia is granted approval,

  does not lose her scholarship, can live with Ted.

  Her pride soars like a fire-stoked balloon.

  She is the only married undergraduate.

  She slips around Cambridge's stodgy policy

  like a royal spy. Happiness flushes her skin.

  I feel the heat of it when she enters my office.

  I do wonder, like my fellow faculty,

  whether Sylvia has chosen well for herself,

  that maverick man, uncouth in culture and clothing.

  Ted is rumored to annihilate—will he fuel

  Sylvia or snuff her out? Marriage can box

  an ambitious girl like Sylvia. She is more

  than just a Mrs. Ted Hughes.

  She cannot deny her largeness, or madness may ensue.

  Edward Butscher's Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness provides further insight into this event, as does Dorothea Krook's unpublished memoir, housed at Smith College in the Edward Butscher Collection of Plath materials.

  Complaints

  Ted Hughes

  Winter 1957

  Sylvia skulks about the flat,

  cloaked in heavy sweater,

  says the cold eats her bones.

  She scours the floors,

  but can't clean away the scum.

  She can warm the bath

  to only just above room temperature.

  She rarely washes her hair

  as it can't dry in this English rain and gloom.

  She crouches soggy before the coal fire.

  Her teeth chatter like cracking ice.

  She grays, even amidst the robin's egg

  blue walls of our first flat. Her numb

  limbs pale against the bright davenport,

  the streaming yellow light.

  She needs sun to cheer,

  needs space to breathe.

  Sylvia, little princess of lament,

  misses central heating, frozen food, refrigerators,

  stoves that heat, new pipes, carpet sweepers.

  Her list rolls farther than the horizon.

  But when she calls our English literature

  the academic's graveyard, I agree, what prevails in London is dead poetry.

  We will sail for America when the tulips bloom.

  Ted chronicled his experiences of Sylvia in his poetry. He did not give interviews about Sylvia after she died until he brought out his collection Birthday Letters in 1998, a bestselling book of poems about his relationship with Sylvia.

  Their Flat Creaks and Cries, “Money, Money”

  Aurelia Plath

  Winter 1957

  There is never enough.

  Even on my small income I still have more.

  I send them on holiday, deny myself

  the tartan wool coat from the Sears catalogue,

  make do with my old thrice pocket stitched

  camel one, so that Sivvy can sun and write.

  If only I had a son-in-law who provided,

  steady as a plow horse, so their home held heat,

  bread, and meat on the table. Sylvia writes

  that Ted secured a job reading for the BBC

  as though I should be jumping in my britches.

  He radios Yeats's words and his own over the wires.

  His audience expands. Sylvia posits that all

  will soon be lovely, that success knocks

  on their front door. But when I inquire

  as to the frequency of these radio casts,<
br />
  Sivvy admits the work is intermittent

  as London sun, not to be relied upon,

  a tiny windfall here and there, not security,

  nothing that will accrue in a bank account.

  From Sylvia's November 21, 1956, letter to her mother (found in Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963):

  “… it has been a difficult time for both of us with no money coming in and the double expenses of Newnham and the new flat …”

  “… Thanks for the money; we'll have a good picture taken this vacation, you may be sure …”

  At this time, Ted and Sylvia often used a Ouija board to try to pick winning lottery numbers. From her letter to Aurelia dated February 8, 1957:

  “I do wish we could win the pools. Pan (our Ouija imp) … tells us more and more accurately. … If we won, we would deposit the money and live off the interest and write when and wherever we wanted and not get desperate about jobs.”

  Brute

  Ted Hughes

  February 1957, Sylvia's last year at Cambridge

  Sylvia mythologizes me

  to the little Cambridge lasses

  swirling at her feet.

  I am a David, a lone rebel

  fighting the English literary elite,

  slaying monsters with my words.

  Syl tells and retells how I drank

  from a broken wine bottle when

  no corkscrew could be found.

  She crowns me as rugged and unruly,

  a man's man brooding about

  with my buddy Lucas Myers—

  unsavory among the intellectuals,

  carving my poems in wood,

  inking them in boar's blood.

  When I win the Poetry Center Award,

  learn that Harper & Row will publish

  my first book, The Hawk in the Rain,

  in America and Faber's will bring it out

  in Britain, Sylvia cannot be contained.

  Rabid, frothing at the mouth, she announces

  these successes as though we have

  given birth to a son, a legacy.

  I curl under my desk, exhausted

  by her enthuse. I try to sit up straight

  in my chair like the tower

  of a man she constructs.

  The Hawk in the Rain received plentiful and positive reviews. For example, according to Paul Alexander in Rough Magic:

  “Library Journal contended that Hughes's poems had a ‘striking field of vision’; [and] The New Statesman called Hughes a ‘clearly remarkable poet.’ ”