A Level English Literature

TED HUGHES AND SYLVIA PLATH

Introduction: what you can find here

We begin the discussion of each poet with brief chronologies of the poets’ lives, careful
to avoid too much emphasis on context. The texts and the poetry come first, but always
with the requirements of the exam assessment in mind. Accordingly, the headings under
which the texts and poems are examined are closely linked to the assessment objectives
of Unit 2. So, chronology is followed by a section on themes, ideas and attitudes (AO1),
then effects, how meanings are created (AO2), and contextual influences (AO3). The
discussion of both texts concludes with connections (AO4). From this approach it might
appear that the books are to be studied separately. Instead we suggest from the start
that the reader would benefit from linking poems by the two poets.
For each assessment objective addressed here, the details are only suggestions to get
you started. It is important that you become an autonomous reader and explore the
poetry for yourself.

Ted Hughes Poems selected by Simon Armitage (Faber)

(The poems chosen for study are taken from Hughes’s first six books, with ‘Rain’ the only
poem from Moortown.)

Chronology

1930 Born in Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire; Calder Valley becomes his childhood area,
where he gets to know the natural world intimately, where his brother is a
gamekeeper and he gets to enjoy fishing in particular. His father, a joiner,
fought in WW1 at Ypres and in the Dardanelles Campaign.

1937 Family moves to Mexborough where he attends the Grammar School, is

encouraged to write poetry and wins a place at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

1949-51 National service in RAF, stationed in East Yorkshire, reads widely, especially
Yeats and Shakespeare (later edits a selection of Shakespeare’s poetry and
writes a huge study, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being).

1951-54 Attends Pembroke College, Cambridge. Changes from English to Archaeology

and Anthropology in third year; starts publishing poetry.

1954-55 Works various jobs including gardening and working at London Zoo.

1956 Meets Plath at ‘St Botolph’s Review’ launch party in Cambridge (February);
marries Plath in London, honeymoon in Spain (June).
1957 First book The Hawk in the Rain published, wins the Somerset Maugham
Award; moves to USA.

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1959 Returns to UK.

1960 Lupercal published.

1967 Wodwo; moves to Court Green, North Tawton, Devon.

1970 Crow published.

1976 Season Songs published.

1979 Remains of Elmet and Moortown published.

Themes, ideas and attitudes

(AO1 = 30 marks)

Creatures Especially birds, presented unsentimentally, indifferent to

humans and often imagined from the inside; such as the
hawk, ‘I sit in the top of the wood’, in ‘Hawk Roosting’, or the
wodwo in ‘Wodwo’ which is much less assertive, and seems to
exist purely in a world of sensation, ‘What am I? Nosing here,
turning leaves over / Following a faint stain on the air to the
river’s edge’. (Consider how Hughes uses the cocks’ crowing to
celebrate dawn in ‘Cock-Crows’.)

The world according to In the ‘Crow’ sequence, from ‘Two Legends’ to ‘Littleblood’:
Crow ways of looking at and experiencing the world from the crow’s
perspective, imagining crow myths to explain life’s origins,
nature of life, love, but also some recognisable aspects
of human life in mentions of God, learning to speak and
importance of love. These are dark and violent poems, with
hints of grim humour. (What is Hughes’s attitude to Crow in
these poems?)

Calder Valley ‘The Long Tunnel Ceiling’ of the canal where Hughes
finds loach and a trout; ‘Heptonstall Old Church’ and its
connection to prehistory; sport in the villages in ‘Football at
Slack’ and ‘Sunstruck’; dawn on the moor ridge in ‘Horses’, a
sort of epiphany, ‘Then the sun / Orange, red, red erupted…I
turned // Stumbling in the fever of a dream’.

The elements: wind, In ‘Wind’ so violent even the stones on the hills feel
rain and sun threatened, ‘the stones cry out under the horizon’; the farm,

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 the cattle and fields in ‘Rain’ are soaked in watery language,
‘roof-drumming’, ‘wallowing’, ‘brimming’, ‘sodden soft’,
‘plastered’, ‘pouring’, ‘squelching’ and so on; in ‘Sunstruck’,
a summer cricket match in the Calder Valley is lit up,
transformed by the sun, an afternoon of ‘dazzle’ and ‘sparkle’
so that ‘The bowler had flogged himself to a dishclout. / And
the burned batsmen returned, with changed faces’. (Does
Hughes tend to exaggerate the effects of the weather?
Consider the power of ice in ‘October Dawn’.)

Characters ‘Famous Poet’, ‘November’, ‘Dick Straightup’, ‘Her

Husband’, ‘Emily Brontë’ are all linked to the hard, physical
world; Brontë through the language of ‘curlew’, ‘stone’ and
‘moor’, the coal miner in ‘Her Husband’ through the effects
of coal dust, and of Dick, it is said ‘He survives among hills,
nourished by stone and height’. The tramp in ‘November’
seems part of nature with ‘his hair like a hedgehog’s’. Even
the once famous poet, who is not connected to Yorkshire, is
characterised by imagery from the natural world, though the
creature is ‘obsolete’, ‘a Stegosaurus, a lumbering obsolete /
Arsenal of gigantic horn and plate’.

(Advice: select words and lines relevant to the key words in the questions. Avoid working
through poems from first line to last.)

Effects, the ways in which meanings are created

(AO2 = 30 marks)

Verbs These are important in Hughes’ poetry. They are grouped to

mark a turning point in ‘The Jaguar’, ‘where the crowd stands,
stares, mesmerized, / As a child at a dream’. There’s a similar
moment in ‘Horses’ where language of silence ‘I listened in
emptiness on the moor-ridge’ gives way to ‘Then the sun /
Orange, red, red, erupted.’ Notice how ‘erupted’ includes
‘red’. There’s essential stress on the verb. It’s then followed
rapidly by a series of energetic verbs, ‘splitting’, ‘flung’, ‘Shook’,
‘hanging’, and so on. There’s another similar moment in ‘Cock-
Crows’, again at dawn, when the sound of the crowing soars
‘harder, brighter, higher / Tearing the mist / Bubble-glistenings
flung up and bursting to light’. ‘Wind’ is a poem famous for its
plethora of violent verbs: ‘crashing’, ‘booming’,

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 ‘stampeding’, ‘floundering’ and blinding’ in the first quatrain
alone. ‘Drumming’, ‘pulsing’, ‘wallowing’, ‘brimming’, ‘pouring’
are appropriate verbs for the rain-soaked landscape of ‘Rain’.

Alliteration and In ‘Rain’, the lines, ‘The fox corpses lie beaten to their bare
repeated sounds bones, / Skin beaten off, brains and bowels beaten out’ in
which the repeated ‘b’s sound like a beating, making its effects
all the more convincing. Patterns of sound control most
poems. Look at the short poem ‘Heptonstall’ which isn’t
in a traditional form but creates its own appropriate to the
opening line ‘Black village of gravestones’. What follows are
three verses in each of which ‘Skull of’ is repeated. The poem
ends with four spaced out assertions; ‘Life tries. // Death tries.
// The stone tries. // Only the rain never tires.’ Repetition, then
repetition played with. The surprise makes clear this place is
under the rule of rain.

Rhyme Many of the poems rhyme but not all, like ‘Heptonstall’, many
find their own form. The first two in the book are written in
rhyming quatrains, however, the rhymes don’t always fall on
the same lines in each quatrain. And the rhymes aren’t always
strong rhymes. This approach allows Hughes more flexibility
over where to place his emphasis. In ‘The Thought-Fox’, there
are more run-on lines than end-stopped, appropriate as the
poem is about a process, happening as you read, so to speak.
The rhymes are used with such skill; in the first stanza, ‘alive’
is picked up by ‘move’, in the second, ‘star’ is immediately
contradicted by ‘near’, later on ‘an eye’ is matched to
‘concentratedly’, and, finally once the fox has entered the
poet’s ‘head’, ‘The page is printed’. (Consider the effects of
some of the matching rhyme words in ‘The Jaguar’.)

Comparisons Similes are vivid and clear, so parrots ‘strut like cheap
tarts’, ‘tiger and lion / Lie still as the sun’. Or comparisons
can be extended; so, the thistles are ‘a grasped fistful of
splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up / From the
underground stain of a decayed Viking.’ They are old, fierce
and impossible to hold; think of all the fear that resonates in
the reference to ‘Viking’. It also comes out of the richness of
Hughes’s imagination, and knowledge of that part of England,
once ruled by the Vikings. (Consider the effects of the similes
in the tiny poem, ‘Snowdrop’.)

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Contexts
(AO3 = 20 marks)

(Advice: contextual influences should be used to illuminate the text, to add to the
understanding of meanings and effects. This should always be supported by close reference to
the text and quotation.)
• Childhood in the Calder Valley, Yorkshire

• Landscape, weather and creatures of that Pennine part of Yorkshire

• His interest in prehistory, myth and shamanism

• Literary influences, such as Shakespeare, Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and modern

European poetry
• His experience of outdoor life such as fishing and hunting and farming

Sylvia Plath: Poems selected by Ted Hughes (Faber)

Chronology

1932 Born in Boston, USA, to Aurelia Schober and Otto Plath (emigrated to US from
Eastern Europe as young man, became Professor of Entomology, expert on
bees).

1937 Moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts.

1939-45 WW2

1940 Otto admitted to hospital, left leg amputated, dies of complications from
diabetes.
1941 First published poem in ‘Boston Herald’.

1942 Family move to Wellesley.

1945 Hiroshima

1950-51 Attends prestigious Smith College on a scholarship, majors in English, starts

publishing short stories in magazines.
1950-54 McCarthyism

1953 Execution of the Rosenbergs for espionage, guest editor on ‘Mademoiselle’,

a fashion magazine, her time there satirised in The Bell Jar; subsequent
breakdown and hospitalisation, given electro-convulsive shock treatment.

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1955 Wins Fulbright Scholarship to Cambridge University, begins course at
Newnham College (October).
1956 Meets Ted Hughes at magazine launch party in Cambridge (25 February);
marries Hughes in London (June), honeymoon in Spain; moves to Eltisley
Avenue, Cambridge.
1957 Returns to USA, begins teaching at Smith College.

1958 Poems accepted in the ‘New Yorker’.

1959 Attends Robert Lowell’s poetry course, meets Anne Sexton; returns to UK
(December).
1960 Daughter Frieda born, The Colossus published.

1961 Moves to Court Green in North Tawton, Devon.

1962 Son Nicholas born; Plath and Hughes separate (December). Moves with the
children to flat in Fitzroy Road, London, formerly a home of W.B. Yeats.
1963 The ‘big freeze’ winter; The Bell Jar published under pseudonym of Victoria
Lucas. Writes last poems (11 February), commits suicide by gas poisoning
having first protected the children.

1965 Ariel published.

1971 Crossing the Water published (May), Winter Trees published (September).

1981 Collected Poems published.

Themes, ideas and attitudes

(AO1 = 30 marks)

Characters In ‘Miss Drake proceeds to Supper’, the atmosphere of

‘malice’ is what strikes you; what she looks like, her history,
are much less important than her anxiety and fear. In
‘Spinster’, ‘this particular girl’, is ‘afflicted’, withdraws from the
world, surrounds herself with ‘a barricade of barb and check’.
The poem doesn’t consider what she looks like but what she
feels. ‘The Hermit at Outermost House’ is about endurance,
the harsh world couldn’t ‘flatten this man out’. ‘Among the
Narcissi’ is another poem of endurance, in a world in which
‘octogenarian’ Percy and the narcissi, ‘like children’, both have
to withstand attacks. One of Plath’s similes, ‘The flowers vivid

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 as bandages’, links the man and the flowers. (Consider
whether the characters in these poems are vehicles for the
poet’s own feelings and situation.)

Motherhood ‘You’re’ imagines the baby inside the pregnant mother in a

poem made up of nothing but similes. There is something
joyous about it, the comparisons are so vivid and precise, ‘A
creel of eels, all ripples’. The four strong stresses per line and
the patterns of sound, as in ‘Thumbs-down on the dodo’s
mode’, give the poem coherence and drive. (Consider, does
the poem seem like an exercise? Does it express motherly
feelings?) ‘Morning Song’ seems more personal, shows
recognisable motherly anxiety, ‘One cry, and I stumble from
bed’. In ‘Nick and the Candlestick’, imagery of cold and pain
is countered by Plath’s love for her son. It’s what she counts
on should ‘the stars / plummet to their dark address’, ‘You are
the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious. / You are the baby
in the barn.’

Places There are quite a number of places mentioned, ‘Suicide

off Egg Rock’, ‘The Manor Garden’, ‘The Burnt-out Spa’,
‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘Finisterre’, in different countries,
Spain, USA, Yorkshire, France. Perhaps the poems are as
much expressions of states of mind as descriptions of the
places themselves. In ‘Wuthering Heights’, the poet feels she
is being attacked, ‘The horizons ring me like faggots’, an image
that recalls the burning of witches. The place is hostile, and
she is relieved at the end when she sees ‘the house lights /
Gleam like small change’.

Identity In ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’, imagery of coldness and
darkness create a sense of despair; the poet says, ‘I live
here’ and ‘I simply cannot see where there is to get to’. And
the poem ends on the darkest note imaginable, one of lost
identity; ‘the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness
and silence.’ ‘Mirror’ reminds us how important a woman’s
looks are considered and of the fairy tale. Here the poet
speaks as the mirror and says the mirror ‘is not cruel, only
truthful’. (Consider, if the poet is like a mirror, does the poet
simply reflect what she sees; or is the poet the woman in the
poem, looking at the world/mirror hoping to find her identity
there?) ‘Elm’ is another poem in which the poet speaks
through something else. The tree feels destruction inside; ‘I
am terrified by this dark thing / That sleeps inside me’.

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 ‘Edge’, probably Plath’s last poem seems to suggest that
a woman’s identity is only perfect when she is dead; ‘The
woman is perfected. / Her dead // Body wears the smile of
accomplishment’. But is the tone of this poem cynical or
ironic, or both?

Father Plath explores the relationship with her father in ‘Full Fathom
Five’, ‘Little Fugue’ and ‘Daddy’. In ‘Full Fathom Five’, he is
‘to be steered clear / Of, not fathomed’. In ‘Little Fugue’, Plath
tries to remember her father, she was young when he died;
‘You had one leg, and a Prussian mind…then! / Death opened,
like a black tree, blackly’. In ‘Daddy’, Plath seems to blame her
early suicide attempt on her absent father; ‘At twenty I tried to
die / And get back to you’. Consider whether her identification
of her father as a Nazi, and the identification of herself with
the Jews of the concentration camps, is a way of escaping
from the ‘dark tunnel, my father!’ (Does ‘Daddy’ stand for all
oppressive men?)

Effects, the ways in which meanings are created

(AO2 = 30 marks)

Sound This is important in Plath’s poetry. From the first poem, you
can see how alliteration is used to emphasise the mood of
the situation; ‘To devour and drag her down / Into the carpet’s
design’ is what Miss Drake is trying to avoid. And in the next
poem we find; ‘struck / By the birds’ irregular babel and the
leaves’ litter’ which emphasises the ‘afflicted’ mood of the
poem. It’s no surprise perhaps to find a poem of such hostility
and anger as ‘Daddy’ starting with ‘You do not do, you do not
do’. The ‘you’ sound is repeated throughout the poem linking
‘you’ and negativity, until the last four lines when with the last
word ‘through’ the you and negativity are finally brought to
an end. Sound in this poem emphasises the problem and the
resolution.

Comparisons, similes We have already seen how a poem can be made of a

collection of similes in ‘You’re’. They’re there from the first
poem here; Miss Drake’s footing is ‘as sallow as a mouse’. How
fitting is this comparison? ‘Sallow’ usually means yellow, sickly,
and seems a strange word to apply to movement. But

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 Miss Drake is in a ward, is presumably ill. And there are two
similes here for the price of one. Miss Drake’s movement is
like a mouse’s, that is, tentative, careful, just as you’d expect
if you were trying to avoid ‘malice’. In ‘Medallion’, ‘the bronze
snake lay in the sun // Inert as a shoelace’. Clear and concise.
As are the later comparisons, ‘Tongue a rose-coloured arrow’
and ‘I saw maggots coil // Thin as pins in the dark bruise’.
Notice how the vowel sounds (assonance) strengthens the
comparison.

Comparisons, Plath also uses metaphors, leaving out ‘like/as’, asserting

metaphors the comparison. So the second stanza of ‘Mirror’ begins,
‘Now I am a lake’ and the comparison is developed through
‘searching my reaches’, reaching a conclusion in ‘In me she
has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises
toward her day after day, like a terrible fish’. A striking
metaphor for lost identity and aging. Many poems are shaped
around extended metaphors, such as ‘The Burnt-Out Spa’
and ‘Poppies in July’.

Openings Many poems begin with comparisons (often similes) which

are imaginative and arresting; ‘Clown-like’, ‘Love set you going
like a fat gold watch’, ‘The night sky is only a sort of carbon
paper’, ‘This was the land’s end: the last fingers, knuckled and
rheumatic’, ‘The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolves’
and, slightly different, ‘Words’, ‘Axes / After whose stroke the
wood rings’. (Perhaps consider one of these openings: how
does it set the mood and sort of language for what follows?)

(Advice: avoid making assertions, such as ‘the sounds here show Plath’s anger’. Support
your point with a relevant quotation. Engage with it and analyse the effects of language and
imagery.)

Contexts
(AO3 = 20 marks)

(Advice: contextual influences should be used to illuminate the text, to add to the
understanding of meanings and effects. This should always be supported by close reference to
the text and quotation.)
• 1950s Cold War America, with its misogynistic, repressive attitudes to women

• Literary influences, especially confessional poets such as Robert Lowell and Anne
Sexton

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• Her sense of her German background and the effects of events such as WW2

• Motherhood and its effects on her sense of identity

• Places, such as Devon in ‘The Bee Meeting’ and ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ and
Yorkshire in ‘Wuthering Heights’
• Her treatments for depression and suicidal tendencies and hospitalisation

Connections
(AO4 = 30 marks)

(Advice: connections should always be supported by relevant quotations. Use the quotations to
explore, through detailed examination of language (AO2), the different attitudes and feelings of
the poets.)

Creatures Hughes’s poems are full of creatures, from the hawk in ‘Hawk
Roosting’ to the pike in ‘Pike’. The descriptions of these creatures
show they have been seen. They are presented as powerful,
independent and themselves. Plath does write about a ‘dead’ snake.
Do the comparisons with shoelace, arrow, garnet, and jewels make
it seem more of an object than a creature? The sheep in ‘Sheep in
Fog’ can’t be seen, but in the fog the poet feels ‘the far fields melt my
heart’. The bees in ‘The Bee Meeting’ are not threatening: ‘If I stand
very still, they will think I am cow-parsley’. And, to some extent, the
poet identifies with old queen bee. Is it fair to suggest that in Hughes’s
case, the poet’s imagination creates the creature, a process ‘The
Thought-Fox’ shows us? The interest is less in the mind that does the
creating.

Nature Hughes makes us experience the violent force of wind, the wetness
of rain, the power of ice; nature in Plath, as in ‘The Moon and the
Yew Tree’ (‘The trees of the mind are black’) and ‘Elm’ (‘How your bad
dreams possess and endow me’) often seems to reflect her state of
mind.

Places For Hughes, the Calder Valley can be uplifting, transforming as in

‘Horses’ he describes in detail the breaking of dawn, ‘Slowly detail
leafed from the darkness. Then the sun / Orange, red, red, erupted’,
the syntax emphasises every word, and the repetition of ‘red’
culminates in the explosive verb, ‘erupted’. And when he sees the
horses now, the ‘Grey silent fragments’ have become ‘steaming and
glistening under the flow of light’. In contrast, the sun in ‘Suicide off

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 Egg Rock’ is dangerous, ‘Sun struck the water like a damnation’. The
hermit in ‘The Hermit at Outermost House’ is also in a hostile place,
‘Hard gods were there, nothing else…He withstood them, that hermit’.

Death and Seen with both poets. The hawk and the pike are killers. The pig
Darkness in ‘View of a Pig’ is dead. The ‘Crow’ poems are full of darkness
and death; in ‘Examination at the Womb-door’, the answer to
the question, ‘Who owns the whole stony, rainy earth?’ is ‘Death’. In
Hughes, it’s the poet’s alter egos who do the killing. In ‘Daddy’, it
seems to be the poet herself, ‘Daddy, I have had to kill you’ and ‘If I’ve
killed one man, I’ve killed two –’. (Consider, too, the violence in both
poets). In Hughes, WW1 in ‘Bayonet Charge’, the Vikings in ‘Thistles’;
in Plath WW2 in ‘Daddy’ and the violent history of the USA in ‘Cut’
(‘the Indians’, ‘Redcoats’ and the ‘Ku Klux Klan’).

Characters ‘Dick Straightup’ described in such minute detail; how he looks, his
habits, where he sits in the pub, and, above all, how he seems part of
the natural world, ‘He survives among hills, nourished by stone and
height’. The miner in ‘Her Husband’ is not a kindly character but the
description makes clear the harshness of his work; ‘Comes home dull
with coal-dust’. He and Dick seem to live in distinct, real worlds. The
two women in ‘Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper’ and ‘Spinster’ are
fearful and anxious, not at one with the world. Both Percy and the
narcissi in ‘Among the Narcissi’ are under pressure, ‘they suffer such
attacks’, and look for support in each other. In ‘Lesbos’ the women
fight, hatred fills the lines, ‘Now I am silent, hate / Up to my neck’.
‘These are atmospheric poems – fearful, dangerous.

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