“The Last Letter” of Ted Hughes

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It was supposed to be one of the greatest marital unions in history. When poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath married in 1956, it could only be assumed that they would be a powerhouse of literary genius. However, Plath’s infamous suicide and subsequent release of her collection of poems, Ariel, painted a different picture of married life with Hughes. His affairs and general lack of commitment to the marriage has kept Hughes under a dismal light in the eyes of Plath enthusiasts.

But for avid followers of the Plath/Hughes controversy, things are about to change.

A harrowing, previously unseen poem written by Hughes, “The Last Letter” was discovered by Melvyn Bragg in the British Library. It was published in the first week of October, in the British magazine, The New Statesman, eleven years after Hughes’ death. “The Last Letter” is said to document the three days leading up to Plath’s death. It begins with “What happened that night? Your final night,” and ends with the line “Your wife is dead.” Though the poem in its entirety can only be found in The New Statesman, excerpts have been released on the internet.

After Plath’s suicide, Hughes maintained a fairly quiet life and did not comment on the matter of his highly publicized marriage and her death. Although estranged, their marriage granted Hughes master of Plath’s literary estate. The manuscript that Plath left after her death, eventually published as Ariel, had poems removed by Hughes, as he felt them too personal and too much of an attack on himself. The only poems he did release that served as a response to Plath’s death were in the form of a collection of poems, Birthday Letters. Even so, the collection was released shortly before his death, and there is speculation as to whether he was aware of a terminal illness that would eventually kill him a few months later, thus prompting him to release his poems when he did.

Professor Sarah Madsen-Hardy of Boston University, who teaches Writing 150: Sylvia Plath and Her World, lends a scholarly view on the release of Hughes’ poem. While there is question as to why Hughes did not include “The Last Letter” in Birthday Letters, Madsen-Hardy says:

“It’s very hard to say. Hughes was extremely private about the Plath relationship…It may be that he viewed this poem as too intimate, not something he wanted to share with a public that sometimes reviled him.” There is also the more technical issue as to whether he felt that it was good enough to include in the collection of poems. “He may not have thought it fit in with the rest of the Birthday Letters in some way. But it’s interesting that he also chose not to destroy it,” says Madsen-Hardy.

What is always a crucial point in poetry, and especially in Plath’s and Hughes’ poetry, is the issue of the speaker. Poems such as “The Last Letter,” and even Plath’s own poems such as “The Jailer,” which are often attributed to being a diatribe to her relationship with Hughes, due to their confessional style. What is written is taken in the literal sense of the events that truly happened in their relationship.

“I’m surprised that readers are so quick to read this poem as in any literal way a clarification of what really happened,” Madsen-Hardy says. “Plath’s deployment of personae is always so complicated, and through their poetic “correspondence” she has drawn Hughes into that.” By automatically assuming that the speaker of “The Last Letter” is Hughes, it tells a the story of Plath’s suicide that was unknown to the public.

LINE BY LINE, A HUSBAND’S TORMENT

WHAT happened that night, your final night? Double, treble exposure over everything. Late afternoon Friday, my last sight of you alive, Burning your letter to me in the ashtray with that strange smile.

What did you say over the smoking shards of that letter So carefully annihilated, so calmly, That let me release you and leave you to blow its ashes off your plan.

Off the ashtray against which you would leave for me to read the doctor’s phone number. My escape had become such a hunted thing, Sleepless, hopeless, all its dreams exhausted.

What happened that night, inside your hours Is as unknown as if it never happened. What accumulation of your whole life, Like effort unconscious, like birth Pushing through the membrane of each slow second Into the next, happened Only as if it could not happen As if it was not happening.

And I had started to write when the telephone Jerked awake, in a jabbering alarm, Remembering everything. It recovered in my hand.

Then a voice like a selected weapon Or a measured injection, Coolly delivered its four words Deep into my ear: ‘Your wife is dead.’

“The Last Letter” describes a scene in which a woman (assumed to be Plath) is burning a letter, the ashes crumbling around it. In explicating the poem, Madsen-Hardy says that “the letter and its ashes…are clearly on some level metaphorical. Letters and their burning are recurring images for Hughes…Yet Hughes obviously knew that they would be taken literally by readers—and must be playing with that assumption, just as Plath did in so many of her poems.”

Amongst Hughes’ collections of poems, “The Last Letter” is so far one of the darkest that he has written. Even after the death of Plath, Hughes continued to experience tragedy in his life. The woman he was having an affair with while he was married to Plath, Assia Wevill, took her own life in an eerily similar to that of Plath’s. Six years after the death of Plath, Wevill used a gas oven to kill herself and her four year old daughter that she shared with Hughes. Hughes gained a reputation of being an abusive husband and father. Despite his reputation and his lack of comment on any of the tragic events in his life, “The Last Letter” still touches a nerve on Hughes that was previously unseen before. No one will ever really know what happened on the day of Plath’s suicide, or what really went on in Hughes’ and Plath’s marriage. That still though, cannot take away from the darkness of such previously unseen work.

One Comment on ““The Last Letter” of Ted Hughes”

  1. “”General lack of commitment” ? So Hughes’ part in the marriage is dismissed and reviled almost at the start of this piece. But at the end we have “No-one will ever really know. . .what really went on in Hughes’ and Plath’s marriage.”

    If you read SP’s Journals (esp. the unabridged ones) you get a picture of a complex relationship (and what relationship isn’t ?) in which SP sometimes rails against Hughes but clearly loves him too. Also, she is also appreciative of him (“Who else would put up with me ?”) and appreciative of his encouragement of her writing. What I don’t get in that picture is a “general lack of commitment.” As for his much-publicized affairs, we know that he was having one with Assia Wevill in the last year of Plath’s life, and we now know (thanks to “Last Letter”) that he was also seeing Susan Alliston. But anything before 1962 is conjecture.

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