A Favourite Poet (or Two)

The problem in choosing one poet from the legions that have had an influence over a lifetime is the feeling that there are ghosts gathering in the room, perhaps displeased with my choices. So it must be those alchemists of the language who “ blew me away “ on first reading them, who made me fall in love with poetry when I had no intention of writing any.

Dylan Thomas drew me to visit Laugharne and I still have a painting of him sitting in his workroom overlooking the estuary of the river Taff writing the wonderful “Fern Hill,” “And Death shall have no Dominion.” The dissolute lifestyle and too - young death were part of the attraction for me. Brendan Kennelly was a poet who I felt connected with, each time I read him something different emerged. Someone said a poem should move the head, the tongue and the heart and I try to remember this as a guide. Another Irish poet, whose eccentric style was a joy to read was Paul Durcan, who I was lucky to meet on a course and really enjoyed his company.

So after this preamble I have selected the two greatest influencers, in my honest but totally unoriginal opinion as mind-blowers. They are Ted and Sylvia. I was hooked years ago by Plath, not having read anything to compare with her, and Hughes’s affinity with nature has produced some of the best writing on this subject I have read.

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston Massachusetts USA in 1932 and was educated in that country until she received a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge England. It was here she met Ted Hughes and an immediate relationship was formed. Sylvia wrote poems tied to her personal experience and used starkly expressive work tied to a feeling of alienation. Her well known poems are “Daddy” “Lady Lazarus” and the novel “The Bell Jar”. She was a major poet of the Confessional school which Robert Lowell belonged to.

Ted Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd in 1930 deep in the Calder Valley of West Yorkshire and was heavily influenced by the huge overhanging cliff there and his adventures in the countryside making him have a realistic, non sentimental view of nature. He had an attachment to folklore and mythology. He went to Cambridge University in 1951 and married Plath in 1956.

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

Their story is not a happy one although their meeting of hearts, souls, body and mind produced strong, passionate poetry, Ted didn’t fit the restrictions of children and marriage and escaped from their farm in Devon to commence an affair with Assia Wevill, who although giving birth to a daughter couldn’t get him to commit to her.

Sylvia, left with two young children in a London flat in the extremely harsh winter of 1962//3 killed herself. Ted was devastated and stopped writing for 3 years but then Assia also took her own and her daughter’s life.

It is a high octane tragedy and you wonder how Hughes recovered enough to carry on, remarrying eventually and becoming The Poet Laureate in 1984 .One tale he told was of studying English at university and the essay wouldn’t gel so he went to bed and a fox in his dream showed him its charred paws saying “ Look what you are doing to us”, He changed his course the next day to Anthropology. He died in 1963.

This poem was written after that dream and is his first animal poem –

The Thought Fox

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest: 

Something else is alive 

Beside the clock’s loneliness 

And this blank page where my fingers move, 

Through the window I see no star: 

Something more near 

Though deeper within darkness 

Is entering the loneliness: 

Cold, delicately as the dark snow 

A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf; 

Two eyes serve a movement, that now 

And again, now and now, and now

 

Sets neat prints into the snow 

Between trees, and warily a lame 

Shadow lags by stump and in hollow 

Of a body that is bold to come

 

Across clearings, an eye, 

A widening deepening greenness, 

Brilliantly, concentratedly, 

Coming about it’s own business 

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox 

It enters the dark hole of the head. 

The window is starless still, the clock ticks, 

The page is printed. 

                                Ted Hughes

You’re

Clownlike, happiest on your hands, 

Feet to the stars and moon-skulled, 

Gilled like a fish. A common-sense 

Thumbs down on the dodo’s mode 

Wrapped up in yourself like a spool, 

Trawling your dark as owls do, 

Mute as a turnip from the Fourth 

Of July to All Fools' day, 

O high-riser, my little loaf. 

Vague as fog and looked for like mail, 

Farther off than Australia. 

Bent-backed Atlas, our travelled prawn. 

Snug as bud and at home 

Like a sprat in a pickle jar. 

A creel of eels, all ripples, 

Jumpy as a Mexican bean. 

Right, like a well-done sum. 

A clean slate, with your own face on. 

                                  Sylvia Plath 

A more cheerful one during her pregnancy.

Thanks for reading. Cynthia Kitchen