her brow-sweat for medicine,
but the baby is too far along.
Mr. Hughes rubs her back
and the baby arrives quickly,
slides out of its mother
without agony, with only a bitty cry.
I tell Mrs. Hughes what fortune
smiles in her home, only
four and a half hours of labor.
She must have birthed many children
in a previous life. I scrub the baby
in a Pyrex bowl, swaddle her
in the cradle beside her parents' bed.
I advise Mrs. Hughes to rest,
keep her feet under cover, sleep
like the deceased, but I see devil
in her eye, she will disobey.
This birth was too easy.
Restless as a kitten, Mrs. Hughes must
leap about, bat at her balls of string.
Frieda Rebecca Hughes was born April 1, 1960, in London at home in the flat at Chalcot Square. In England in 1960, the National Health Service provided free prenatal care and midwife services for home delivery and the first fourteen days of a baby's life.
Baby Girl
Imagining Sylvia Plath
In the style of “Morning Song”
April 1960
I have waited for you, your heartbeat
Inside me like the clock's ticking
Second hand. I still feel your pulse when I sleep.
You are your father's daughter, just like I was.
He loves you like a fine sentence.
He feeds you and you feed him.
I do not own you, my little one,
But I hope to rent space in your heart, hold tight
Your small hands that clench and mimic my own.
I write between bottles and nappies
And the breakfast table. I type while your daddy
Wheels you through the first blooms of spring.
Send me lines deeper than my tired, wrinkled brow.
Teach me innocence and beginning
And I will sing you my music, rhythm you to sleep.
A little starling, you yawp for my drizzle of milk.
I fill you, helium you into the sky like a pink balloon
So that you soar, our family a trinity of heaven, sun, and song.
“Morning Song” is the first poem in Ariel. Sylvia wanted to begin the collection with the word “love.” “Morning Song” opens “Love set you going like a fat gold watch.” Written on February 19, 1961, the poem is about her daughter, Frieda Rebecca. In a letter, Sylvia wrote that the “whole experience of birth and baby seem(s) much deeper, much closer to the bone, than love and marriage.”
Mr. and Mrs. Ted Hughes
A. Alvarez, poetry editor of the Observer,
later became one of Ted's drinking buddies
Summer 1960
Two tall people and baby crammed
into a flat so small you must maneuver it
sideways. Yet the Hughes? home burbles
with productivity, happiness.
I so loved Ted Hughes' second book,
Lupercal, that I determined to befriend the man.
We walk our children through the zoo
and plan to do a BBC program together.
Mrs. Hughes seemed nice upon first meeting,
offered me cherry torte and tea,
a pinafored mother,
her home clean and warm.
When she shakes my hand and thanks me
for publishing her poem, I nearly choke
on my chamomile tea. She laughs awkwardly,
“I'm Sylvia Plath.”
A year before their meeting, Alvarez had accepted Sylvia's poem “Night Shift.” A lot of Sylvia's poems were being published in 1960. In June her poems appeared in the Critical Quarterly, the London Magazine, and the Partisan Review. In July her verses were published in Harper's and the Atlantic Monthly. In August the New Yorker printed her poem “The Net-Menders.” Ironically, she wasn't able to create any new poetry during this period.
Alvarez is best known for his 1972 book The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, which gained added resonance from his friendship with Sylvia Plath and discusses her suicide.
Appendectomy
Ted Hughes
February-March 1961
Sylvia loses another part
of herself, first the miscarriage
and now an organ—two
large holes in her center.
Frieda cries, tosses her potatoes
on the floor; and I can't manage
to wash a single dish.
How does Sylvia do this and write?
The hospital is peace to her.
She's free within the nurse-
watched ward, white and cleaner
white—shoes, hats, bedsheets.
Sylvia stares at the tulips
sent courtesy of her mentor,
the renowned poet Ted Roethke.
She writes reclined in bed.
The quiet, still, germy air
allows her to think.
She breathes by tubes,
but her mind is unbound.
She writes and writes and writes and writes …
Sylvia miscarried on February 2, 1961, the day after she and Ted had attended a party for Theodore Roethke, an acclaimed American poet. Sylvia was depressed, but turned out seven poems in the days following her miscarriage, including “Parliament Hill Fields,” “Morning Song,” “Face Lift,” and “Barren Woman.” Frieda Rebecca Hughes was ten months old at the time. You can feel the push and pull of Sylvia's joy over Frieda and sadness about the miscarriage in some of these poems. Because of the miscarriage, her appendectomy was performed earlier than scheduled. During her recovery Sylvia wrote the poems “Tulips” and “I Am Vertical,” among others. Sylvia's longer poem “Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices” was inspired by her hospital stay. All of the aforementioned poems can be found in The Collected Poems.
Theodore Roethke (1908-1963) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for his book The Waking.
BBC
Lucas Myers, Ted's closest friend
March 1961
They talk—
her chatterbox,
his fierce tongue and low sonar,
Britain's poet couple.
I lost part of Ted
when they married,
could not see gold
on Sylvia's page,
but he assured me,
she will become
stardust,
a voice remembered.
I'm shocked to learn
she included my work
in that anthology
of promising poets she edited.
I hope this does not
place me in her debt.
I flip on my radio,
hear the rebroadcast of Sylvia and Ted.
The BBC show that Ted and Sylvia were on was called Two of a Kind, a program that featured interviews with married couples who worked in the same field. Sylvia and Ted's show was titled “Poets in Partnership” and was taped on January 18, 1961, and aired March 19, 1961.
The Hughes' Plan to Buy a Home in Devon
Aurelia Plath
1961
I cash another CD
as though I have no future to save for,
nothing at home to repair,
to help them purchase a house,
two acres in the country,
a big thatched cottage,
a storybook manse.
Sylvia rhapsodizes, “Oh, the flowers,
Mother, the daffodils.
So bountiful we'll sell
cartloads of them.
We can grow carrots and cabbage,
be self-sufficient out there
and pay you back.
Someday, we'll return to you
all that we have borrowed.”
I shake my head across the ocean.
A mother doesn't
lo
an. She gives.
From Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963:
In a letter to Warren dated July 30, 1961, Aurelia conveys excitement about Ted and Sylvia's new home, but admits:
“Both Edith [Ted's mother] and I are each loaning 500 pounds so they won't be snowed under by the terrible interest rate. … I was willing to take the whole mortgage at 3 percent, but Ted would not listen to it, and I admire his determination to be as independent as possible.”
Ted and Sylvia bought Court Green for 3,600 pounds, what was roughly the equivalent of $10,000 at the time.
Christmas at Yorkshire, 1961
Elizabeth Compton, Sylvia's friend and neighbor in Devon
The other side of this
I know nothing about, but Sylvia
tensed as she unwove the tale,
her hands rock-rigid and her tongue
lashing rapid speed.
Sylvia had asked Olwyn, Ted's sister,
finally, why she hated her so.
And Olwyn unleashed among
the cranberries and fruitcake
that Sylvia was a spoiled interloper,
trying to usurp Olwyn's role
in the Hughes family.
Sylvia cried, banged her once-again-pregnant
body up the stairs, believing they
all hated her. She waited for Ted,
who had witnessed the row,
to ascend the stairs and comfort her.
Ted remained in his armchair,
read his book, played Switzerland,
did not want to enter the catfight.
Sylvia, eight months heavy with his child,
felt betrayed. She dashed from the house
in light overcoat, slippered feet,
and waded into the foggy moor.
She awaited her husband,
but again his outline did not appear
in the mist. Hours passed like weeks,
the ground wet. Frigid air knocked
her over. She laid down in the fern grass,
drowsy as though drugged, clutched
her belly, and shut her eyes.
Ted, candlestick in hand,
found her halfway up the moor,
a Catherine turning blue as a ghost.
He carried her home.
Olwyn left
the next morning for Paris
before Sylvia woke,
before the family
finished their coffee.
Ted and Sylvia and Frieda returned
to their home at Court Green.
Sylvia breathes over her tea,
fills the pot, smells her leaves.
She examines the bottom
of her cup, says, “Things
will never be the same,”
as she crafts a thank-you
letter to Ted's parents.
I stir cream and honey
into my cup, almost tell Sylvia
that in-laws are boiling pots
on everyone's stove
and need to be handled carefully
but I don't want to stick
my two farthings in a bank
I really know nothing about.
Sylvia chronicled her difficulties with her husband in her journals and then later in letters she wrote to Aurelia and others.
Son
Ted Hughes
January 1962
Nick jumped into the world
cold in Nurse Davies's hands,
shriveled skull with a thatch
of dark fuzz. He fusses little.
Sylvia says he's quiet
like his father. I guess we've
become that station-wagon family
they advertise on the American tube.
Sylvia claims she feels poetry in childbirth.
I love my daughter, but she and her brother
are too little to hold my pen,
let alone guide it into words.
Nicholas Farrar Hughes was born January 17, 1962, at the Hughes' home, Court Green, in Devon.
Woman of the House
Sylvia Crawford, a Devon neighbor,
mother of three daughters
Winter 1962
I don't know how she does it
(except that she hires both a nanny and a maid,
unusual for around here,
very upper crust and city-folkish).
I don't know how she manages
that manor with needlepoint precision
and writes her poems too
(of course, her husband
minds the children mornings
so she can lock herself up in her study,
a sign on her door that says
“Leave Me Alone”).
We talk about nappies and prams,
what temperature to heat bottles,
groan together over our exhaustion
and our babies? teething tantrums.
Sylvia strains to maintain interest
in us and our baby talk.
She's not like my other friends,
an exiled queen on her little estate.
I don't know how she gets by,
she is so singular, so unusual, so alone.
Court Green, the Hughes' home, was a large cottage located at the summit of the town of Croton. Croton was more cement-gray and plain than the lush and green Devon, but the church across the street dated from the twelfth century, and Sylvia loved living among the daily evidence of Croton's medieval history. Sylvia was considered a “lady of the house,” as the town still kept to class distinctions at that time. However, Sylvia's friendly American ways broke down those boundaries and she was well liked by most in the village. Still, she and Ted were artists first and therefore always considered outsiders.
Routine
Aurelia Plath
Winter 1962
Recovered from surgery,
childbirth, and her usual
winter maladies, Sylvia
reinstates a schedule.
Nick sleeps through the night,
which allows her to write mornings.
I call this dedication,
my daughter claims it's survival.
Without poetry she would crumble
like a dried-out lemon cake,
stale and inedible. She talks
bright, but something in her has hardened.
I think this life of two children,
two literary careers, multiple gardens,
and too many rooms to dust
must exhaust her weak constitution.
On the surface Sivvy looks the same,
long, swept-up hair, red smile,
poems published every month.
She stands beside her husband,
stalwart, like the day they married,
but I know something
in the photo she mailed me
is off.
Aurelia expressed some of her concerns about Sylvia's life directly to Sylvia in letters. In the introduction to Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, Aurelia illuminates retrospectively her concerns about Sylvia's marriage in 1962.
Elm
Ruth Fainlight, poet, London friend of Sylvia and Ted's
May 1962
We drink it black,
mud-thick, steam misting
over our cups.
I see something bitter
as coffee in Sylvia's eyes,
wish that London were not so far
from Devon. Sylvia pines
so for a friend who is her equal.
We read each other our latest
poems, and I can't breathe
when she finishes “Elm.”
I shiver. Her words like porcupine
quills prick my skin. They haunt
and possess me like a shadow.
I touch her hand, so cold
the coffee cup can't warm it.
She unravels a bit, her hemline
hangs low in back and I fear
she might lose t
hat rhythm that kills, that kills.
And that might kill her.
Ruth Fainlight married Alan Sillitoe, the novelist best known for his book The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner. Sillitoe had won the Hawthornden Prize the year before it was awarded to Ted Hughes, and the couples met as a result. Sylvia and Ruth became close, and Sylvia expressed in letters how much she missed London and city life. In May 1962, Ruth and Sylvia had both recently given birth to sons, another link that brought them closer together.
Ruth Fainlight is an award-winning author who has published thirteen collections of poems in England and the United States, as well as two volumes of short stories.
Her Fan
A. Alvarez, poetry editor of the Observer,
one of Ted's drinking buddies
May 1962
I read her first collection, The Colossus.
Unlike most critics, I like it.
I find her work unfeminine.
She, like her husband, writes good poetry.
I do, however, wish she'd settle on her own style.
She shies from her true voice. Her poetry withholds
like she does—Sylvia presents as competent,
kind, excellent with her children,
a well-crafted housewife, but like a photo
out of someone else's magazine.
Her poetry too executes beautifully,
flawless rhythms, but it smacks of others—
Roethke, Wallace Stevens. And she stands
in the shadow of her own Ted Hughes.
There is more to her, bubbling quietly on the stove,
ready to scream, if only she'll release it.
Female poets of note who were Sylvia's contemporaries and whose work endures today include Adrienne Rich, Anne Sexton, Stevie Smith, and Maxine Kumin.
Sylvia
Assia Wevill, a married woman who will become
Ted's mistress
May 1962
She is poetry,
that mother of language,
and I am a Gypsy,
wandering, thieving what I fancy.
She is cunning
like an old watchdog,
she sees the scene
without being present.
I am experienced.
I have thrown my nightgown
over more than one man's head.
She snarls,
tries to make me squirm,
and I pity her,
Your Own, Sylvia Page 9
