I Feel An Obsession Coming On

Every now and again I'll develop a fascination for a particular topic, generally something that has happened in history (for example, when I read 'The Odyssey', I suddenly felt a need to purchase as many books as I could about Greek and Roman Mythology, and when I read 'The Other Boleyn Girl' I spent hours researching the Tudors online). And it seems as I have a new topic!

I've been reading and analysing some poems for my lecture tomorrow afternoon. One of them was Ted Hughes' 'Daffodils'. In order to understand it better I did some research into his life, which was absolutely fascinating.

Ted Hughes went to university in Cambridge, and in 1956 a party was thrown to celebrate the launch of a magazine that he and his friends had started. At the party, he met Sylvia Plath (American poet, notably famous for her singular novel 'The Bell Jar')...and four months later, they were married. They lived quite happily in the United States until 1959 when, upon learning Plath was pregnant, they located back to England (they had two children, Frieda and Nicholas). They lived in London before moving to North Tawton in Devon (bizarrely, this is where my mum lives!). They rented their London home to a couple named Assia and David Wevill, and Ted promptly began an affair with Assia. He later wrote a poem that said:

We didn't find her - she found us.

She sniffed us out.

She sat there

Slightly filthy with erotic mystery.

I saw the dreamer in her

Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it.

That moment the dreamer in me

Fell in love with her, and I soon knew it.

I thought this was quite romantic, even if he was a cheating wanker. Anyway.

The marriage grew difficult, especially when Plath had a miscarriage. Before long, the affair between Wevill and Hughes was public knowledge, and they were not even trying to keep it a secret.

Eventually, one day, Plath sealed her children in their rooms for their safety, before turning on the gas oven, and placing her head into it. She was found later that morning, dead, by the au pair.

At the time of her suicide, Wevill was pregnant with Hughes' child. She aborted this child, presumably due to the timing. Hughes moved her into a house in Devon (not the one where Plath committed suicide) and she cared for his children, even though she was still technically married to David. She then had a child with Hughes, a daughter named Alexandra Tatiana Elise. She was nicknamed Shura. Hughes never actually publicly declared that Shura was his child.

However, Hughes' friends and family all ostracized Wevill, perhaps because she was a contributing factor to Plath's suicide, and she herself was worried Hughes was being unfaithful. In fact, he did reportedly have various other affairs, including a nurse whom he married years later. She was desperately unhappy.

In 1969, Assia Wevill dragged a mattress into the kitchen and sealed the room - spookily imitating Plath's actions. She laid her four-year-old daughter down on the mattress, turned the gas oven on, laid down next to her daughter and waited for them both to die.

It's such a devastatingly beautiful yet haunting story. I will soon be buying as many books as I can get my hands on all about his life, as well as reading all his poems.

This is the poem that started this all off, if you are interested. When you know his background - and therefore that the story is about Plath, and the daughter mentioned is Freida - it's so sad.


Daffodils
Remember how we picked the daffodils?
Nobody else remembers, but I remember.
Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,
Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
She cannot even remember you. And we sold them.
It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.
Were we so poor? Old Stoneman, the grocer,
Boss-eyed, his blood-pressure purpling to beetroot
(It was his last chance,
He would die in the same great freeze as you) ,
He persuaded us. Every Spring
He always bought them, sevenpence a dozen,
'A custom of the house'.

Besides, we still weren't sure we wanted to own
Anything. Mainly we were hungry
To convert everything to profit.
Still nomads-still strangers
To our whole possession. The daffodils
Were incidental gilding of the deeds,
Treasure trove. They simply came,
And they kept on coming.
As if not from the sod but falling from heaven.
Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck.
We knew we'd live forever. We had not learned
What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
Daffodils are. Never identified
The nuptial flight of the rarest epherma-
Our own days!
We thought they were a windfall.
Never guessed they were a last blessing.
So we sold them. We worked at selling them
As if employed on somebody else's
Flower-farm. You bent at it
In the rain of that April-your last April.
We bent there together, among the soft shrieks
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Of their girlish dance-frocks-
Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Opened too early.

We piled their frailty lights on a carpenter's bench,
Distributed leaves among the dozens-
Buckling blade-leaves, limber, groping for air, zinc-silvered-
Propped their raw butts in bucket water,
Their oval, meaty butts,
And sold them, sevenpence a bunch-

Wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth,
With their odourless metals,
A flamy purification of the deep grave's stony cold
As if ice had a breath-

We sold them, to wither.
The crop thickened faster than we could thin it.
Finally, we were overwhelmed
And we lost our wedding-present scissors.

Every March since they have lifted again
Out of the same bulbs, the same
Baby-cries from the thaw,
Ballerinas too early for music, shiverers
In the draughty wings of the year.
On that same groundswell of memory, fluttering
They return to forget you stooping there
Behind the rainy curtains of a dark April,
Snipping their stems.

But somewhere your scissors remember. Wherever they are.
Here somewhere, blades wide open,
April by April
Sinking deeper
Through the sod-an anchor, a cross of rust.

Ted Hughes