This chapter was published in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath (2022)

‘Not the colleges, or such precincts’ – The Cambridge of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath

Ted Hughes omitted from Birthday Letters the poem simply known as “X” ^[1] which can be found in a notebook in the British Library archive.  It begins –

Cambridge was our courtship.

Not the colleges, or such precincts,

But everything from the Millbridge

Towards Grantchester.

 

The Cambridge of Plath and Hughes, as pictured in Birthday Letters (Hughes’s award winning 1998 poetry collection and this unpublished poem) is a place where the university and the academic life of the city are all but absent.  The landscapes of Hughes’ earlier poetry are also largely missing. No untamed Ireland, primitive or rural Devon; no ancient Elmet here, indeed, when such landscapes do make an appearance they tend to be used as a backdrop only for the central player on stage, who like Godot, never arrives. Sylvia Plath, Hughes’s first wife is however very much present in the poetry. Erica Wagner recounts in Ariel’s Gift ^[2] that Hughes in writing the work was not consciously writing poems, but the process was essentially about trying to, “evoke (her) presence to myself, and to feel her there listening.” ^[3]  The collection travels from Spain to America, home to Devon and to Yorkshire, but when looking at the importance of Cambridge in Hughes’ work, the poem “X” has offered an entirely new and different pathway through the university city of the two poets and through Birthday Letters itself.

 

Before publication of the collection, Hughes had sent copies of the book to a select few friends and family members. In response to a warm review from Seamus Heaney he explained how he had battled with the incubation of the collection and how for the previous twenty-five years he had tried to deal with his thoughts and feelings about Sylvia Plath’s suicide in 1963:

 

I’d come to a point where there seemed no alternative.  Given the funny old physical corner I’ve got myself into, and the mysterious rôle in my life that SP’s posthumous life has played-and that our posthumous marriage has played-publication came to seem not altogether a literary matter, more a physical operation that just might change the psychic odds crucially for me, and clear a route. […] I always had some idea that the real accounting for my dealings with Sylvia would have to emerge inadvertently, in some oblique fashion, through some piece only symbolically related to it – the authentic creative way. But there they are. (LTH 703)

 

Birthday Letters is an intensely personal collection; accepting the forward Prize in 1998, Hughes described it as:’a gathering of occasions on which I tried to open a direct, private, inner contact with my first wife’ ^[4] This then, as Hughes is only too aware, is not his accustomed way of working where he would protect his feelings and memories using nature, landscape and myth to fashion a final product, often a world away from the original experience. Neil Roberts summarises this succinctly in his blog on Birthday Letters: ‘ He despised the direct use of autobiographical material, and believed that to make poetry of any value experience needed to be imaginatively transformed.’^[5] In this collection though, Hughes uses place to confront and uncover the personal whether it be Spain, America, Yorkshire, Devon or Cambridge. Landscape and imagination are not distancing devices in Birthday Letters, but instead, vehicles for confronting and accessing the inner life, and this is nowhere more pronounced than in the poems about the city in which the couple met.

 

‘St Botolph’s’ is probably being the best-known of the Cambridge based poems in Birthday Letters; it is Hughes’s recollection of the meeting of the couple on February 25th 1956 at the Women’s Union in Falcon Yard in the city. Demolished in the late sixties to make way for a shopping mall, Falcon Yard was a very old part of the city, down cobbled alley ways and close to Alexandra House where Hughes shared a room with the ‘girls that helped to run it’ as he describes in ‘Fidelity.’ (CP 1060) In this poem he remembers his life after the meeting in Falcon Yard and he tastes the fidelity he describes, sleeping in the true sense of the word with one of the waitresses from the British Restaurant which was situated on the ground floor. His room is ‘Overlooking Petty Cury’ where having left his job in London and returned to Cambridge he says he, ‘laboured/Only at you’. There is a hopeful air; he is remaining true to his new love, with pared back belongings, his notebook and a mattress. His fidelity became a ‘holy law’ but writing in the future and looking back at this time he still wonders whether to ‘envy’ or ‘pity’ himself. He thinks of this period: ‘ As a kind of time that cannot pass,/That I never used, so still possess.’ He is twenty-five, ‘Free of University’ but he admits he: ‘ dangled/ In its liberties.’ Cambridge is a place where one can do such a thing; the anthropologist Alan Macfarlane describes it as ‘a secure environment within which to take risks.’ ^[6] Whilst the biographical element is strong in these poems, Hughes clearly notes in ‘Visit’: ‘It is only a story./Your story. My story.’ (CP 1049)

 

The collection tends to follow a timeline beginning with ‘Fulbright Scholars’ – Hughes, recalls seeing a photograph of the new intake and although, years later, he cannot recall if Plath were included, he connects that memory with his first taste of a fresh peach: ‘At twenty-five I was dumbfounded afresh/ By my ignorance of simplest things.’ (CP 1045)  This is the young man who then meets Plath in Cambridge and as he continues in the two ‘Caryatids’ poems which follow ‘Fulbright Scholars’ his pre-meeting preparation moves from a photograph to reading her first poem and then the confession that his group planned, ‘An attack, a dismemberment’ (CP 1047) of her poetry. It is an odd courtship. In ‘Caryatids 2’ Hughes repeats the metaphor of artifice in his description of the group of young men, ‘Playing at friendship’ (CP 1046) and then that they were, ‘playing at students.’ Nothing appears authentic in the university element of Cambridge for Hughes and whilst he had long-term relationships with several of his Cambridge group, the tone of his retrospective writing appears to position his companions as part of the unreal nature of the colleges. Liz Hicklin/née Grattidge, Hughes’s Cambridge nursing girlfriend received a letter from Hughes in August 1955 where he writes:

 

I have an idea for a book. Two books in fact. One is about Cambridge. An autobiography of a student written from I’m not sure what angle, during three years, and to sell as a soft back popular thing… The book about Cambridge would be very cynicial, [sic] I feel, very cruel to every one I knew – but the interesting things about everyone I knew, now I look back, seem to have been their absurdities. I don’t think I remember that with much affection. ^[7]

 

Four years then before Plath starts writing ‘Falcon Yard’, her unfinished novel about Cambridge and Hughes, he is also planning a Cambridge story; from this letter though and from ‘Caryatids 2’ it is clear that Hughes’s memories of Cambridge are not of his university education which he calls, ‘A dramaturgy of whim.’ Another anthropologist, Tim Ingold in,The Perception of the Environment, observes that to better understand our relation to place, we tend not to passively accept knowledge from a culture such as in this case Cambridge University, but instead we actively engage with the ‘process of knowing’ as we make our ‘negotiation of a path through the world.’ ^[8] Hughes did not adhere to what Ingold terms the ‘corpus of rules and principles’ given by the much celebrated culture of Cambridge, but instead, he carved out his own pathway through it, aware that always there were other ways he could have travelled. Cambridge bears witness to the world’s opportunities, centring here on the university and into the core arrives the woman who changed Hughes’s path for the rest of his life:

 

The world

Crossed the wet courts, on Sunday, politely,

In tourists’ tentative shoes.

All roads lay too open, opened too deeply

Every degree of the compass.

Here at the centre of the web, at the crossroads,

You published your poem

About Caryatids. (CP 1046-7)

 

But the poem that captures most powerfully the Cambridge of Hughes and Plath remains unpublished. Whilst I maintain that Hughes gained far more from the University than either he admitted, or critics have credited, the poem simply marked as ‘X’ in a school exercise book, with the address ’18 Rugby Street’ on the front, shows a different focus to the city. Inside the front cover of the book is a list of poems under the title ‘The Sorrows of the Deer’ which was the earlier title Hughes used for Birthday Letters. ‘X’ is found on the list between ‘IX’ which is called, ‘You despised my girlfriend’, a poem about Shirley, whom Hughes was seeing when he met Plath at the ‘St Botolph’s Review’ party and ‘XI’ which starts ‘I saw the world again through your eyes’; this became ‘The Owl’ in Birthday Letters. All three of these poems are Cambridge-based and describe places particular to the 1950’s lives of the two poets in Cambridge. The poem ‘X’ ^[9] though is seminal and describes an area of Cambridge away from the university: ’Three or four square miles’ of ‘river meadows’ which fall either side from the Mill Bridge, or as Hughes has it, ‘Millbridge’, situated just down Silver Street from Pembroke College, close to the Anchor pub where Hughes would drink and sing with his peers in his student days. He charts the development of his early relationship with Plath through the poem, describing the nature of the area he cites in the opening lines. Poem ‘X’ was brought to light by Jack Malvern in an article in The Times on Friday October 17 2008 (p.18) entitled ‘Rough-hewn genius of Hughes laid bare in unfinished verses.’ Jamie Andrews from The British Library is quoted as saying the poem was probably omitted from the final selection to balance the poems between earlier and later life. We remember though as well that Hughes said the writing of the poems over the years was done with no view to publication and indeed in a letter to Keith Sagar in June 1998, he reflects that he is fascinated by the interpretations other people make of the poems:

 

I’ve been intrigued, I must say, by the maze of interconnections between those BLs. Considering how I wrote them, months often years apart, never thinking of them as parts of a whole – just as opportunities to write in a simple, unguarded, intimate way – to release something! Nor can I recall how I came to shuffle them into that order – following chronology of subject matter was the only rule, I think. (PC 267)

 

This poem then was surely one Hughes needed to write, but it appears that having experienced castigation for his extra-marital relationship during his time with Plath and on the editing of her work after her death, he decided against publishing it. It is important to note that it is one which has no amendments, but is simply written out as though from dictation; the other poems in the exercise book bear the scars of much reworking; it may of course be that this poem is unmarked and unpublished, because Hughes did not think it of quality, but I believe that it is because it is so localised, too personal and specific. Unless you live or had lived in Cambridge, this area just outside the city centre would not be known or be of any real importance to you, although Grantchester and Newnham do feature in the collection.

In a sceptical review of Birthday Letters, James Wood in Prospect magazine, claims that there is a lack of specificity in the Birthday Letters poems:

 

His pagan doom, the suckling gods and bloody crypts, do not absolve but dissolve. A real, particular Plath disappears; and a real, particular Hughes disappears too, drowned in a sud of images borrowed from their own poetry, or from the most familiar dirty magics. Particularity is secular, and these dank poems show us why.^[10]

 

Wood has concluded that Hughes’s specificity in this collection is lost because of his recycling of past writings and his self-constructed mythologies; because of this Wood suggests that the poet alienates the reader from the spirituality he is attempting to communicate. Whilst I would disagree with Wood on this in relation to the collection, I assert that in ‘X’ particularly, Hughes is describing the spiritual and sacred through the landscape. With analysis of the poetry and exposure of the specific character of this part of Cambridge, Hughes’s writing embraces particularity and the poetry reveals the experience. However, in collecting the poems for publication, Hughes appears to have decided that ‘X’ is one of the poems he used for dealing with his experience, rather than for a reading public. In that June 1998 letter to Sagar, Hughes says that when he deals with a difficult experience in his poetry, especially a:

 

traumatic event – if writing is your method – has to be dealt with deliberately. An image has to be looked for – consciously – and then mined to the limit: but not in autobiographical terms. My high-minded principal [sic] was simply wrong – for my own psychological & physical health. It was stupid. (PC 271)

 

He tells Sagar in the same letter: ‘God knows what sort of book it is, but at least none of it is faked, innocent as it is.’ It is not faked; it is innocent and surely then, it is essentially, Hughes’s voice about this experience. With an understanding of the place in the poem, the piece draws up the real significance of what Cambridge meant to both Hughes and Plath; in this small, peripheral area of the city boundaries, the two poets fell in love and revealed to each other their past, their influences and their writing which would all have an impact upon them both for the rest of their lives.

From the Mill Bridge then in Cambridge, the Cam flows with Coe Fen on the left bank, a green grazing area with small tributaries and sluices, rough pasture and meadow vegetation and on the right, as you walk away from the city, the meadows open out into Sheep’s Green and the old course of the Cam, underneath Fen Causeway and across to Lammas Land; the river then strikes out to skirt around Newnham and then on to Grantchester Meadows. It is the Cambridge of the meadows that holds the earthenware head that Plath disliked so very much; this was a gift made by a friend, earlier in her life at Smith College.  Plath wanted to rid herself of this image, but was superstitious about throwing it away, so at Hughes’s instigation, they found a bole of a tree in which to place it:

 

Just past where the field

Broadens and the path strays up to the right

To lose the river and puzzle for Grantchester,

A chosen willow leaned towards the water. (CP 1079)

 

It is also in this area that the Hugheses found their first married home, remembered by Hughes in ’55 Eltisley’:

 

Our first home has forgotten us.

I saw when I drove past it

How slight our lives had been

To have left not a trace. (CP 1076)

 

Academic Cambridge, like the earthenware head, remains in Hughes’s memory as a representation of something absent, indeed almost of someone absent. The colleges are described by Hughes in terms of an alien world, a surreal panorama, or unimportant places such as his siting of the story of the exploding tumbler in ‘The Bird’ where he casually refers to a sherry party they attended ‘In some Cambridge College’. (CP 1093)

 

In ‘X’, this unpublished poem about the area, Hughes describes the landscape as:

Ornamented with willows, and green level,

Full drooping willows and rushes, and mallard and swans,

Or stumpy pollard willows and the dank silence

Of the slippery lapsing Cam. That was our place.

 

The alliteration and repetition of ‘willows’ and the sibilance throughout the poem describes the Cam as a slow and natural river, with the wildlife that throngs to a country river and takes us away from the hard consonance of ‘Cambridge … courtship’ and ‘colleges’ which are alien to the pair. Instead, Hughes focuses on the wildlife of the meadows, much less wild or blasted than his Yorkshire landscapes. The three part description of the willows is significant; first they ornament the fen and one is reminded of Plath’s description in ‘Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows’ : ‘It is a country on a nursery plate.’ ^[11] There is something quaint and unreal about the picture of river, willows and cows, reminding us of the Chinese willow pattern design, where the lovers are threatened by the woman’s father, until the gods intervene and the lovers are turned into doves, rather than being killed. Hughes finishes the poem, ‘ Were what we felt wings?’  The second set of willows here are ‘Full drooping’ almost Pre-Raphaelite in their evocation of sadness and elegiac fecundity; again, in relation to the symbolism of the willows, one might note Psalm 137 for its equation of sadness and an inability to sing in a land which is strange to the Israelites:

 

By the waters of Babylon,

there we sat down and wept,

when we remembered Zion.

 

On the willows there

we hung up our lyres…

 

How shall we sing the lord’s song

in a foreign land? ^[12]

 

Cambridge as the world knows it appears in the poem as a strange land to both poets, but Hughes describes this separate patch of land just outside the city as though it were the couple’s own enchanted garden. Finally in the set of three, the willows have become, ‘stumpy pollard’ and cut back much like the archaic symbolism of rebirth that enthralled Hughes, for example in his description of Shamanism in ‘Regenerations’ in Winter Pollen:

 

a magical death, then dismemberment […]From this nadir, the shaman is resurrected, with new insides, a new body created for him by the spirits. (WP 57)

 

Robert Graves tells us that in mythology, the name of Mount Helicon (a mountain sacred to the poet’s muse) originates from ‘helicë, the willow-tree sacred to poets, as from the stream which spiralled round it).’ ^[13]

Hughes’s tone chimes with the ‘dank silence’ of this environment, a strange and forbidding description for what was the poets’ chosen Cambridge: ‘That was our place.’ It is a strange use of the adjective ‘dank’ which suggests dark, dampness and decay, hardly an appropriate place for courtship and love one would have thought. Hughes is fond of this word ‘dank’, using it in an earlier unpublished Cambridge poem, inserted into his original composition, which was submitted for Part 1 of his English Tripos as an undergraduate. He opens the poem:

 

The year’s dank rag is smouldering under the trees.

The shattered sunlight sleeps against a root

Where sunlight never alit all the green days.

Autumn comes touching at both heart and thought. ^[14]

In this poem the Autumn is dark and ghostly with witch-like screams from foxes and a deathly tone. Writing years later, but reimagining Cambridge, it is as though this area of the city is wet, fen-like and even submerged in Hughes’s mind, ‘Sinking below sea level’ as he describes in ‘X’. It is therefore discordant somehow to have this dankness describing a private place, for a lovers’ tryst in a university city. The Cam is a long way from, for example, the river in ‘August Evening’ (CP 671) in his collection River. Here, the waterway, ‘Cools early, star-touched’ and the mist, ‘Breathes on the sliding glass.’ In the same collection, ‘The River’ shows the water being personified into an immortal god who will ‘wash itself of all deaths.’ (CP 664) Again, in ‘That Morning’ (CP 663) Hughes has a transcendental experience, stimulated by the crowds of salmon around him in the river as he fishes. He describes the fishermen, approached by the swarming salmon: ‘As if we flew slowly, their formations/Lifting us toward some dazzle of blessing’. Closing the poem are the lines which are on Hughes’s commemoration stone in Westminster Abbey:

 

So we found the end of our journey.

So we stood, alive in the river of light

Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.

 

This is a world away from the, ‘slippery lapsing Cam’ of the Cambridge poem, but the closing lines of this work themselves recall the image of flight as something divine, here this time found in a relationship rather than Hughes’s traditional spiritual affinity with nature. It is also a more questioning, more tentative youthful remembrance of such elevating love: ‘We did not know what wings felt like./Were what we felt wings?’ The adjectives ‘slippery’ and ‘lapsing’ are also problematic when imagining this courtship landscape; slippery could mean that the river curls and winds through the fen, or that the wetness literally makes the banks slippery underfoot. The word though can also suggest something deceitful, elusive and untrustworthy with lapsing being used as falling into decay with lack of use; the latter also has moral connotations especially to the Bible and the prelapsarian lives of Adam and Eve before their fall . This vocabulary does not build a landscape of courtly love, but I would suggest that the reason for this less than idyllic description becomes clearer when Hughes announces, ‘That was our place.’ The poets appear to have chosen this as their Cambridge because it was, ‘Not spoiled by precedent, for either of us.’ In this landscape they do not need to match expectations of the past, or of academia, but instead they can indulge their love ‘In the watery weedy dream’ which as Hughes describes, is metaphorically, ‘An aquarium’. Hughes as ever, with his attention to place, is clearly aware that Cambridge rises only slightly above sea-level with much of the fens to the north, falling below sea-level:

 

Waltzing figures, among glimpses

Of crumbling parapets, a horizon

Sinking below sea level.

 

Flat and low-lying, Cambridge is depicted by Hughes as a water land from a dream, with other people beyond the couple merely performing a dance across the set. The scenery and the horizon for Hughes, like an ancient monument, decaying under its own historical and cultural weight, has little relevance to him and his lover; indeed there is a nightmarish and chthonic quality to the vision. He weaves a spell of this scene with an insistent repetition of ‘w’ showing that their place was ‘willows[…]watery weedy dream[…]Waltzing figures[…]world[…]we[…]what[…]when[…]were,’ and ‘wings.’ The poem finishes with the rhetorical question cited above, but this is the final question of several; Hughes asks the ghost of Plath if she can recall what they talked about; if they were actually going somewhere: if they were ‘exploring’ or if they were actually:

 

talking away

Bewilderment, or trying word shapes

To make hopes visible.

 

Hughes contends that both poets started to formulate their futures, there, along the Cam and across the meadows. Both poets used words, signifiers, dialogue and poetry to create the vision of their future together, just as Hughes uses the same method to understand their past in Birthday Letters. In Cambridge the couple forged their future, influencing and aiding each other to make the dream real and then over forty years on and in earnest after the death of Plath, Hughes again uses poetry and dreams, talking and words to settle in himself his responsibility for the vision of a shared future that like the university in the poem, becomes, ‘crumbling parapets’ and sunken horizons. He dares to return to this murky, nightmarish world in the hope that he can find a better understanding of and expiation from the pain of loss and culpability.

 

Plath was living at Whitstead, a Newnham college hostel set back from Barton Road at the time of their courtship, so one presumes that in the poem, when Hughes speaks of ‘When we walked past the gate, talking and talking’ he is speaking of the gate at her lodgings, probably at the back of the college where Whitstead is situated. There is no gate there now, but perhaps Hughes is also talking about the gate to the secret garden, the walled garden, the ‘locked garden’ of Paradise that the world offered them in the future? The description of the garden though is not paradisiacal; instead, with its ‘pollard willows… neat macadam’ and permanent darkness, ‘It was always dark.’ Perhaps this is a postlapsarian garden, with our poetic Adam and Eve, excluded from its delights. The garden also chimes with the Garden of the Hesperides, where Hera’s orchard was sited with the nymphs of evening tending the garden. The darkness of Hughes’s Cambridge can be explained because the area he is describing in the poem is the area in which they would walk once the day’s work and studies were done, so the nymphs of evening in the West with the sunset sit well with this image of the garden in the city. It is the benches in the area which ‘One by one’ become ‘Sacred to us.’ This resonates with Birthday Letters ‘Fidelity’ where Hughes shared a bed with a young woman, but both of them respected his relationship with Plath like ‘A holy law’ with the woman serving the goddess, Hughes’s fidelity, ‘like a priestess’. (CP 1060-2) Hera, being the goddess of women and patroness of married women, is often depicted with a cow, one of her sacred animals and in the Cambridge poems of Birthday Letters, Hughes aligns the cows of Grantchester Meadows with his future wife; in ‘Chaucer’ when Plath is reciting from ‘the Wyf of Bath’ he recalls them being:

 

enthralled.

They shoved and jostled shoulders, making a ring.

To gaze into your face…

Keeping their awed six feet of reverence (CP 1075-6)

 

Plath had written to Hughes in their forced separation in the October of 1956, describing her serenity and admiration of the cows in the Meadows:

 

Yesterday, straight after lunch, I took my sketch-paper and strode out to the Grantchester Meadows where I sat in the long green grass amid cow dung and drew two cows; my first cows… I got a kind of peace from the cows; what curious broody looks they gave me… I shall go back soon; I shall do a volume of cow-drawings. (LSP1 1284)

 

After having given birth to both children, Plath describes herself in her letters as, ‘cow-tired’ (LSP2 778) and as having, ‘cowish amnesia’ (LSP2 521) and in 1961she describes herself responding to baby Frieda’s hunger in ‘Morning Song’: ‘One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral/In my Victorian nightgown.’ ^[15] Again, in ‘The Owl’ also set in Grantchester Meadows, Hughes opens up to Plath the world of nature, which she took in:

 

with an incredulous joy

Like a mother handed her new baby

By the midwife. (CP 1064)

 

Hughes conflates Plath’s relish of this new experience as one of a mother, which is in keeping with the goddess Hera and her protection of marriage and motherhood and also her vengeful spirit in relation to Zeus’s lovers and their illegitimate offspring. Plath is passionately expressive in her letters when decrying the affair that took Hughes away from their Devon home:

 

She is the barren & frigid symbol of sex. […] What has this Weavy Asshole (her name is actually Assia Wevill) got that I haven’t, I thought: she can’t make a baby (and really isn’t so sorry), can’t make a book or a poem (LSP2 797)

 

The locked garden imagery in the poem ‘X’ though derives most clearly from the ‘Song of Solomon’ in the Old Testament. Hughes, drawing to a close in the poem, asks if what the couple felt in their courtship were indeed wings with which they could fly over the locked gates of the garden and into the future and the world. Certainly Plath indicates that huge changes took place in their characters at this early stage in their relationship:

 

Ted has changed so in the past two months I’ve known him that it is incredible, just as I’ve changed too: from being bitter, selfish, despairing of ever being able to use our whole selves, our whole strengths, without terrifying other people, we have turned into the most happy magnanimous creative pair in the world: (LSP1 1189)

 

In ‘The Song of Solomon’ ^[16] the author speaks to his beloved and equates her beauty to nature, saying that her eyes are like doves, her cheeks like ‘halves of a pomegranate’ and her breasts ‘like two fawns’. Then, in his adoration of his beloved, he writes in chapter 4, verse 12: ‘A garden locked is my sister, my bride, a garden locked, a fountain sealed’.  In his poem Hughes cites this locked garden; the couple have not flown into their future, but are in a form of limbo, waiting for their future to become. A commentary on the Song explains:

 

We must bear in mind that these words are supposed to be spoken on the journey in the marriage procession. The bride is not yet brought to the royal palace. She is still travelling in the royal palanquin. The idea of a paradise or garden is carried from the beginning of Scripture to the end, the symbol of perfect blessedness. The figure of the closed or shut-up garden represents the bridegroom’s delight in the sense of absolute and sole possession – for himself and no other. The language is very natural at such a time, when the bride is being taken from her home. ^[17]

 

Plath and Hughes are in courtship in Cambridge; how appropriate that Hughes appears to cite ‘The Song of Solomon’ in ‘X’ in that the bride is in waiting and the bridegroom lauds his future bride in natural terms. It is though in ‘Fidelity’ that he describes himself as the sister of the woman with which he shared a bed; whilst the woman is not his beloved, it is as though Hughes has embraced the language of ‘The Song of Solomon’ and devotion to his goddess: ‘You have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride’.^[18] It would appear that Hughes in hindsight, contemplates that he may have been considering a marriage close to perfection, but still he questions whether he was wrong in identifying this, or understanding its power. Just along from their usual walks across Coe Fen is Paradise Island where trees and undergrowth block the walkers’ path along the Cam towards Grantchester. Again, Hughes may be remembering this place and contrasting the name and its symbolism with the reality of what became their relationship and their future. The couple however, are not walking; instead they are part of the nature in these meadows; they are the ducks or swans of the natural world:

 

Suspended

We hung there moving our legs, seeing

The scenery flow past like the silent river.

 

As in ‘Fidelity’ where Hughes writes: ‘

Free of University I dangled/In its liberties. (CP 1061)

 

So in ‘X’ Hughes writes:

The University was a delay, a sentence

To be borne with and escaped.

Our only life was to come.

 

This poem shows that Hughes prized Cambridge beyond his undergraduate years and outside the universally revered walls of the colleges; in a languid flow of the Cam’s willows and ‘watery weedy dream’ we find a landscape as personal and compelling as any that Hughes wrote of in earlier works and one of significance for him throughout his life.

 

^[1]Ted Hughes “X” in notebook of the Hughes collection, labelled “18 Rugby Street” (Add. MS 88918/1/6 in the British Library) and published in an article in The Times  p.18 “Rough-hewn genius of Hughes laid bare in unfinished verses” Friday October 17 2008

^[2] Erica Wagner Ariel’s Gift (Faber London 2000) 2001 paperback edition page numbers follow, hence forward abbreviated to AG

^[3] AG p.22

^[4] Ted Hughes speaking when he won the Forward Prize for poetry in 1998 quoted in Erica Wagner Ariel’s Gift (Faber London 2000) p. 22

^[5] British Library Literature 1950 – 2000  online dated 25 May 2016

^[6] Alan Macfarlane Reflections on Cambridge (Social Science Press New Delhi 2009) p.29

^[7] Ted Hughes to Liz Grattidge 22 August 1955 (British Library Manuscript Collections Add MS 89198)

^[8] Tim Ingold The Perception of the Environment (Routledge Oxon 2000) Quoting from the 2011 edition pp.145 – 6

^[9] All references to the poem ‘X’ are from the exercise book of Ted Hughes labelled ’18 Rugby Street’ which is part of the Hughes archive Add. MS 88918/1/6 from the British Library

^[10] James Wood ‘Dead Letters’ in Prospect Magazine #30 (May 1998)

^[11] Sylvia Plath ‘Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows’ in Collected Poems (Faber London 1981) pp. 111-112

^[12] The Bible Revised Standard (Collins London 1972) Psalm 137 pp. 501 – 502

^[13] Robert Graves The White Goddess (Faber London 1948) p. 432

^[14] Ted Hughes Unpublished Poem from ‘The ear-witness account of a poetry-reading in Throttle College, before the small poets grew up into infinitesimal critics.’ (Cambridge University Library ENGL1/155)

^[15] Sylvia Plath ‘Morning Song’ CP pp. 156 – 7

^[16] ‘The Song of Solomon’ from The Old Testament Collins Revised Standard Bible (Collins London 1952) pp. 536 – 8

^[17] biblehub.com Song of Solomon 4:12 Pulpit Commentary

^[18] ‘The Song of Solomon’ 4:9

Cambridge can be cruel in the Winter as Sylvia Plath tells us in her letter of January 1956: “the atrocious food, the damp cold & the unsimpatico people” . During the worst of times then, meeting up with the archivist at Newnham College recently (we became friends after finding much in common after my first visit to the archive) she told me that because of building work that had taken place at the college, she had uncovered a file which might cheer me a little. As luck would have it, Anne Thomson found the file of alumna, Sylvia Plath, who had attended the college as a Fulbright student from October 1955 to June 1957. Anne read through the file and appreciating that it contained very personal information, consulted with the college records board and suggested that she advise Frieda Hughes, Plath’s daughter, of the finding. Frieda looked at copies of the file and found it poignant; she agreed that it could be viewed by Plath scholars, but because of its intimate nature, she asked that copying and photography should not be allowed. Later then, in February, Anne allowed me to see these papers as she knew that my thesis on the Cambridge of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes would benefit from such material. She was right.

 

The file comprises a college registration form, completed in October 1954, with the date of intended entry to Newnham being the following year. Anne had arranged the enclosed documents chronologically; inside this form and apart from letters of reference from Smith and a statement of purpose by Plath as she applied for her funding, there are three letters which are not included in the excellent Letters of Sylvia Plath. One is to Edith Crystal at Newnham, (dated October 20 1954) requesting affiliation to the college; the second is six months later to the Principal of Newnham at the time, Ruth Cohen and the third, just a month later is again to Ruth Cohen. However, as Plath had now heard that she had been accepted to the college, she is now eager in this letter, to gain suggestions for summer reading and to wonder whether in her room she will need to sort, “bookcases, or lamps.” In her statement of purpose she writes, “I plan to become a college teacher upon completing graduate work abroad and I hope to share and interpret intelligently the knowledge and experience acquired in England by bringing back to America a rich, vital appreciation of British culture as well as British literature.” Plath shows the foresight and determination to achieve her goals that we see of her again and again when she looked, for example, for publication of her work or her husband’s Ted Hughes (she met Hughes in Cambridge in February 1956; they were married in June of the same year.) She gathers together some of her most positive contacts and requests they refer her to Newnham; she also asks that in a medical reference, that the Smith doctor, Marion Booth is brutally honest about the applicant’s attempted suicide in the late summer of 1953. Booth writes that the McLean hospital cites “delayed adolescent turmoil” as the cause for her depression and that the prognosis for recovery is “excellent.” She refers to Plath, saying that she was keen for her to be straight-talking with the university as she wanted “consideration of her to be made ‘with their eyes open.’”

 

The academic and character references are even more poignant: Evelyn Page from Smith writes, “Her fault is to demand too much of herself and to react too intensely”, but she finishes that she has, “no reason to qualify my respect and admiration for her.” Ruth Beuscher, Plath’s psychiatrist claims that during the summer of 1953 Plath was, “suffering from a state of mental turmoil which is highly unlikely ever to recur” and Elizabeth Drew from Smith tells the admissions office at Cambridge: “She is outstanding in both personality and intellectual gifts.” Mary Ellen Chase calls her a “literary artist” and Marion Booth, writing in her medical capacity, but also from knowing Plath from the Student Honor Board at Smith, states that she is “not psychotic” and that she had made a sustained recovery, whilst Gladys Anslow, Director of Graduate Studies at Smith, believes Plath to have the ability to check her own mood and “that she would be the first one to recognise any difficulties and to take measures to offset a recurrence.”

 

When from Cambridge Plath applies to renew her Fulbright scholarship, Irene Morris, Plath’s tutor at the time, describes a student who has settled well, made friends and is, “very easy to deal with; she is reliable and considerate and has an engaging friendly manner. She is an asset to the College.” The college secretary completes the file, updating Irene Morris of Plath’s progress through Newnham; she finishes: “As you remembered, she had a room at the top of the house which she liked very much and she was very thrilled with the view from her window over the gardens.”

 

Some of these documents will not be new to scholars who have studied Plath in the archives of America, but it is important that the file has been uncovered in the college here in England, which Plath describes as the “home of the writers I most admire.”

 

Di Beddow
March 2020

 

My thanks to Anne Thomson for allowing me to study the file and also of course to Frieda Hughes for the permission to use such personal and sensitive material about her mother.

“That was our place.” – The Cambridge of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

Di Beddow’s article:  Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath Experience “Poppy Day” in Cambridge 

Posted August 16, 2019
2019 Rose Library
Fellow Di Beddow  

Di Beddow conducted research at the Rose Library in April 2018 as a recipient of a short-term
fellowship. She is writing up her PhD thesis on “The Cambridge of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath”
under supervision at Queen Mary University, London UK. Di has spoken on the subject at
conferences in Ulster, Huddersfield and Cardiff and she has had articles published in both
journals and the British Library modern literature website. She has had a long career as a senior
leader in secondary education, but now lives and studies in Cambridge. She is mother to two
grown-up lads, Joseph and Billy and the nominal owner of a cat, called Badger.

My study trip from Queen Mary University in London UK to the Smith archives; the Lilly Library
and the Rose Library in April 2018 was designed to further my understanding of my thesis, “The
Cambridge of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath.” Having lived in Cambridge most of my life and
growing up just around the corner from their first marital home together at Eltisley Avenue in
Newnham, I felt a particular connection to the poets’ time here, being the place where they both
went to college; where they famously met at a wild party launching the inaugural and only edition
of the “St.Botolph’s Review” and where they set up home before sailing to America in June 1957,
the month and year that I was born. I was keen to uncover original writing from both poets, which
could be traced back to Cambridge, as this early period is often under-valued, being seen by critics
as a time when little of worth was written and where Hughes especially, feels ambivalent about the
historic place of learning:

Sometimes I think Cambridge wonderful, at others a ditch full of clear cold water where all the
frogs have died. It is a bird without feathers; a purse without money; an old dry apple, or the
gutters run pure claret. There is something in the air I think which makes people very awake. [1]
My particular interest is in the impact that place has upon on the poets and what legacy they have
left for us in and about the city.

In a notebook, held at Emory, Hughes describes the mayhem which is known as Rag or Poppy Day
in Cambridge. Students take control of the city, holding processions, fancy dress events and
performances to raise money for charity. Both Hughes and Plath wrote about the occasion in
November 1956, when they approached the city centre from Newnham:

Everything short of aggressive violence is legal on the 11th of November. Coming in from the
west, the first sign was a barricade across Barton Road, attended by robed, turbanned, redstained figures, young men in pyjamas and dressing gowns. They were holding up every
incoming car … and extorting cash in return for a hefty bucket of water over his windscreen and
a perfunctory stroke or two with a broom. The rattle of money boxes, cans with slits in the top,
began here, and were not going to finish for another 12 hours. [2]

In their journey further into town he describes ropes across Silver Street Bridge, with students
carrying chamber pots and demanding cash from the public who wished to pass over the bridge,
whilst further down the street there were decorated, themed wagons, which Hughes explains as, “…
their loads were the story”. The vehicles held footballers, men in dress suits with fake moustaches
and other characters who were, “… sitting on the edge of the lorry” and “held out dustbin lids and
chamber pots for our pennies.” The lorries would often have jazz bands playing on them and the
bunting and constructed scenes on their backs would travel through the streets of Cambridge at a
snail’s pace with people on the pavements throwing change, often deftly caught in a bucket by the
occupants of the truck. Hughes then reaches the top of Silver Street:

At the top of Trumpington street we were really in the thick of it … Girls robed like Greeks, but
with twig T.V. aerials sticking out of the top of their heads were shaking their tins in the dense
way of people.

In characteristic fashion, Plath’s version of the events is collated in chronological fashion, starting
at 9.30 am on Saturday November 10th when the two poets left Whitstead, Plath’s college lodgings
at Newnham and came across the road block that Hughes describes above. Because Plath is
covering this event for publication, her writing is far more detailed and formal compared to
Hughes’s notes. In the Lilly Library Plath’s article describes:

… five or six Cambridge University students, each one uniformed in white coat and red fez,
were supplying artificial red poppies and a rapid car-polishing in return for contributions from
the drivers. [3]

Both poets observe this piece of university life as though they are outsiders; Plath because she is on
a job, writing as a journalist for an American magazine, so she explains the origins of the Earl Haig
Poppy Fund and describes romantically the colleges around her; Hughes, in spite of attending the
university, seems not to have encountered the student antics until he sees them with Plath, two
years on from his graduation. Where she cites the blockade in the Barton Road as “rapid carpolishing”, he delights in the almost intimidating actions of the students with their, “… extorting
cash … hefty bucket” and “… perfunctory stroke or two with a broom.” These differences echo what
Lucas Myers observes in Ah Youth: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath at Cambridge and After where
he defines the difference in intention between the poets when they write:

What Ted and Sylvia shared was an unsurpassed singlemindedness about their art. They were quite
determined to put into words the best that was in them, but I thought, in somewhat different ways.
Sylvia was determined that it should be read. Ted was determined that it should exist. [4]

In the recording of this event, Plath outlines how different is the Poppy Day event from her
experience of Cambridge University life:

Only recently grown accustomed to the formal Cambridge University teas, the often painful
reserve between men and women under-graduates, and the conservative dress (black gowns
worn to academic appointments and after dark), we were rather startled to find decorum
turned, as it were, completely topsy-turvy: to see students parading in pyjamas and paisley
dressing-gowns under the pinnacles of King’s Chapel …[5]

Whilst these may seem minor details, it is clear to me that both Plath and Hughes do not focus
upon the hallowed halls of the university in Cambridge as the focus of the city, but rather the life of
the streets and indeed the environment surrounding the city. Once more, Plath’s article highlights
areas of the city that do not normally draw interest; note for example,

For a moment we paused on the bridge to survey one of our favorite Cambridge scenes; to the
right: the pale blue buildings of the Anchor pub overhanging the river, the punt landing, Mill
Lane bridge above the white froth of the mill race where students lunch on beer and
sandwiches in fair weather, and then the backdrop of poplars and brindled cows grazing on
Sheep’s Green; to the left: the beginning of the Backs, with the quaint arched wooden bridge
joining the old and new courts of Queen’s College, beyond which, a diminishing vista of grassy
river-banks and sallow, autumnal willows. [6]

Plath draws attention to the area beyond the university centre, which Hughes acknowledged as
more important to the couple, as Plath notes in the passage above. Although the poem “Cambridge
was our courtship” remains unpublished and did not make the cut for Birthday Letters, it is a
hindsight light upon the most important part of Cambridge for the couple. Hughes defines the area
in the poem,

Cambridge was our courtship.
Not the colleges, or such precincts,
But everything from the Millbridge
Towards Grantchester. [7]

From the Millbridge then the Cam flows with Coe Fen on the left bank, a green grazing area with
small tributaries and sluices, rough pasture and meadow vegetation and on the right, as you walk
away from the city, the meadows open out into Sheep’s Green and the old course of the Cam,
underneath Fen Causeway and across to Lammas Land; the river then strikes out to skirt around
Newnham and then on to Grantchester Meadows.

Hughes describes this area as:

Ornamented with willows, and green level,
Full drooping willows and rushes, and mallard and swans,
Or stumpy pollard willows and the dank silence
Of the slippery lapsing Cam. That was our place.

It would seem clear then that Cambridge the university city, globally known as a centre of learning,
was not of key interest to the couple, but rather that the hedonism and disarray of Poppy Day and
the nature and wilderness of the meadows hold more interest for the poets than the tradition and
history of the university.

[1]Ted Hughes Letters (Faber London 2007) To Olwyn Hughes February 1952 p. 12
[2] Ted Hughes All quotations about Poppy Day are from the Emory Notebooks Subseries 2:1 Box
57/MSS 644/FF 1 p. 44
[3] Sylvia Plath “Poppy Day at Cambridge” Lilly Library Plath mss. II Box 8, f.2. Plath’s pocket
notebook records that she sent the article to the New Yorker, but it remained unpublished.
[4] Lucas Myers in the Emory Ted Hughes Archive Box 1 FF23 p. 95
[5] Sylvia Plath “Poppy Day at Cambridge” Lilly Library Plath mss. II Box 8, f.2. p. 3
[6] Ibid. p.2.
[7] All references to the poem “X” are from the exercise book of Ted Hughes labelled “18 Rugby
Street” which is part of the Hughes archive Add. MS 88918/1/6 from the British Library

Although I am secure in the fact that I am researching an area of the Hughes and Plath story that few have covered or recognised in detail, I was very aware that these two great poets engender a huge amount of interest. I felt privileged then to be one of the first researchers to take advantage of the addition of Liz Hicklin’s collection of letters from Ted Hughes. Because my work is on the Cambridge of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath I had informed Helen Melody of the British Library that I would like to see Hughes’s notes from that time. It was she who mentioned Liz’s letters and that the collection was only just about to be catalogued and released. I saw the collection and contacted Liz, now living in Australia, who helped me to understand the time and the relationship in Cambridge in the 1950’s. She calls Hughes and her time with him, “… the gift that keeps giving.” Whilst their relationship did not last, she thinks fondly of it and it is clear from the letters that the feeling was mutual. Many thanks to Helen and Callum of the British Library and Liz Hicklin/Grattidge.

To read the full article from the British Library Website click here:

Hughes & Plath at Newnham College

On arrival in Cambridge, Plath takes up lodgings at Whitstead in Newnham College. Once
married, Hughes first and then Plath, move into 55 Eltisley Avenue. They are frequent walkers at
nearby Grantchester Meadows.

55 Eltisley Avenue and Grantchester Meadows

There is so much to say about this incredibly fruitful time for both poets; during their lives here
(from November 1956 to late June 1957) Hughes won the Harper Poetry Competition for “The
Hawk in the Rain” and Plath graduated from Cambridge with a 2:1. However, Hughes’
“55 Eltisley” is surely the best starting point if one is to gain a poetical understanding 1 of place.
Hughes had clearly returned to Newnham at some point(s) during the gestation of the 1998
publication of Birthday Letters. 2 He tells us that he “drove past it”, so there appears to be no
lingering there. Why would he not have parked up and walked and taken a longer inspection of the
property, which held so many memories? Of course it may be, as I found for myself, that
Newnham is now such a busy, popular adjunct to the city, that there is very little room to park.
Indeed, on one pilgrimage, I had to stop the car, just shy of parked cars on both sides of the road,
take my picture and move on. There was just time to respond in the affirmative to the question
from the woman walking along the pavement with her shopping bags, “Ted Hughes fan?” she
asked. Rebecca Mills cites Aleida Assman (paraphrased and translated by Susan Küchler) who
describes the ‘drive-by’ as a –

spatial metaphor, or animatorical remembering, which initiates a momentary collapse of past and
present by forcing past and present, distance and proximity into a single point that is exploded out
of a linear and narrative time construction.3

The poem adheres to this theory with its mix of tenses, “Our first home has forgotten us” closely
followed by “I saw…How slight our lives had been”.4 Hughes converses with Plath, as though he is
keeping her informed in a paranormal briefing, hence the sliding and merging of past memories;
observations on Plath’s character and his views and comments upon their relationship. He recalls
their adherence to the Ouija board, horoscopes and omens, looking back to conjure up their lives
in the flat, but in doing so, uses prophetic, forecasting symbols. Like Janus, Hughes looks both at
the new beginnings of the marriage and their relationship and Plath’s hopes for their “future” in her
“crystal ball”, but also to the past and how Plath seemed trapped in her lost happiness of being a
daughter and being resident in a country she felt was archaic. Even the arrival of Hughes, like a
pioneer, staking his claim on the Arctic landscape of the flat, symbolises both a remembrance of
the death of the previous owner, but also a looking forward to Plath’s own suicide. He recalls
moving in before their possessions

…had reconditioned
That crypt of old griefs and its stale gas
Of a dead husband.

1 Ted Hughes “55 Eltisley” in Birthday Letters Faber (1998) pp.49 – 50
2 Ted Hughes Birthday Letters Faber (1998)
3 Rebecca Mills “A Knossos of Coincidence”: Elegy and the “Chance of Space” in the Urban
Geographies of ‘Birthday Letters’ in The Ted Hughes Society Journal Vol 3 Issue 1 (2013) pp.8 – 18
4 “55 Eltisley” in BL

We therefore have a man writing this poem of a visit to an old place of residence, looking back to
his time there with his new wife, but also even further back to the previous incumbents and
thenceforward a little into the more recent past of his wife’s death and then forward/back to the
very recent past of his drive by the property. Rebecca Mills summarises this efficiently, “the
projected future is already past, and foreshadowing meets hindsight.”5
Mills goes on to explore the architecture of “Birthday Letters” reading the buildings and homes of
Plath and Hughes, “as products of a mutually inscriptive process where narrative and space shape
each other.” If one accepts this hypothesis, it is hardly surprising then 6 to find that Hughes is
deeply affected by the history of 55 Eltisley Avenue; its previous owners and the impact the place
has upon his wife. The flat then in Hughes’ interpretation of Plath’s feelings epitomises all her
negative thoughts about England –

part
Nursing home, part morgue
For something partly dying, partly dead.7

Here one wonders if Hughes is describing only Plath’s view of England and the effect of knowing
the history of the flat’s previous incumbents, or if he is also thinking of the marriage, starting out at
Eltisley Avenue, but then decaying and dying or already partly dead. Is he not also considering his
wife and her psychological state? She has confided to him her first suicide attempt before they are
married and he would have been aware surely, if only from her poetry, that there is something
inside her that is attracted/drawn to death and the loss of pain through its purgatorial finality. I
therefore conclude that it was not a parking problem that shortened Hughes’ visit to his former
home; the memories he recalls in the poem are not of the first flush of marriage, but instead he
examines a blood stain from the previous incumbent’s dying husband and he sees how the tragic
future was there for them both to perceive,

… Already
We were beyond the Albatross.

The Albatross is not the only sea-faring reference in the poem; indeed, Hughes clearly sees the
house as the beginning of their marital voyage – he describes the kitchen paraphernalia adapting
itself to become part of,

the shipyard and ritual launching
Of our expedition.

Hughes emphasises how much Plath separated her new husband from both her own female
friends and his old flames. He combines grammatical emphasis with the extended metaphor of the
sailing to reflect not only his wife’s country of origin, arriving from across the Atlantic, but also the
watery phobia she developed in her poetry. Hughes tells Plath, “You yourself were a whole
Antarctic sea” between her husband and friends and that she was “pack ice” between him and his
old girlfriends. He also grew accustomed to the conditions needed to keep her “compass steady.”
Two women were accepted into the home in spite of “their faces” but they are “polar apparitions.”
One begins to hear Eltisley Avenue cracking through the ice of Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner,
the Albatross quick frozen in the Arctic cold of Plath’s possessiveness.
Hughes says that the two “plodded’ through that winter “hand in hand.” One has the image of them,
Scott-like, trudging through polar snow, in an attempt to reach the warmth of home. The couple

5 Mills “AKofC” in TTHSJ Vol 3 Issue 1 p.14
6Mills “AKofC” p.8
7 “55 Eltisley”

are already in the dark that early in their marriage and they are looking for a light of understanding,
cohesion and acceptance of each other that is still unattainable. In the use of an oxymoron,
reminding me of Milton’s “darkness visible” from the first book of Paradise Lost, Hughes found
himself trying to move forward in a “rainbow darkness”; all around there are storm clouds gathering
both from earlier on in the day and up ahead on the horizon, but there is also the promise of
complete happiness and the pot of gold of compatibility if only they can reach the end of that
rainbow. Plath was “happy” he tells us in the poem; she had “igloo comfort”, but the warmth inside
was also claustrophobic, one feels for him rather than her. Still, the igloo metamorphoses then into
“Your Bell Jar” and she is destined to be drowned in the icy water of the expedition. What comforts
and warms Plath, paradoxically, can also be freezing cold and lethal.
Whilst living at Eltisley Avenue, Plath wrote “The Lady and the Earthenware Head” 8 which tells the
story of a terracotta bust of Plath, made by a room-mate at Smith. Plath despised the bust, but
apparently felt superstitious about throwing it away. Erica Wagner in Ariel’s Gift 9 cites the
outcome of this dilemma as Hughes’ solution, referring us to Plath’s letter to her mother of 8
February 1957, “Ted suggested we walk out into the meadows and climb up into a tree and
ensconce it there so it could look out over the pastures and river.” 10
Wagner reminds us though that Plath seemed afraid of the head falling into the river and cites
Stevenson’s Bitter Fame 11 where Plath’s biographer finds the fear of the drowned head in poems
Plath was writing at this time in Cambridge. “All the Dead Dears” 12 for example, finished on April
7th 1957, which Plath describes to her mother as, “one of my best” 13 has a subject matter with
little to do with water, but rather –

In the Archaeological Museum in Cambridge is a stone coffin of the fourth century A.D. containing
the skeletons of a woman, a mouse and a shrew. The ankle-bone of the woman has been slightly
gnawn.14

However, Plath sees the skeletons as being “barnacle dead” and she focuses on the human
skeleton’s head and then her hands which she imagines are pulling her in until,

… an image looms under the fishpond surface
Where the daft father went down
With orange duck-feet winnowing his hair –

It would appear that water and its power to kill, or cleanse, are rarely far from her poetic psyche. In
another poem of Birthday Letters Hughes writes a companion, “The Lady and the Earthenware
Head” 15 In it he feels sure that the head has fallen from the tree and the river has become its
purgatorial chapel of rest –

8 Sylvia Plath “The Lady and the Earthenware Head” in Collected Poems Faber (1981) pp.69 – 70
9 Erica Wagner Ariel’s Gift Faber (2000) p.86
10 Sylvia Plath Letters Home Faber (1975) p.294
11 Ann Stevenson Bitter Fame Houghton (1989)
12 Sylvia Plath “All the Dead Dears” Collected Poems (1981) pp.70 – 71
13 Letters Home p.306
14 Epigraph to “AtheDD”
15 Ted Hughes “The Lady and the Earthenware Head” in Birthday Letters Faber (1998) pp.57 – 8

Your deathless head, fired in a furnace,
Face to face at last, kisses the Father
Mudded at the bottom of the Cam,
Beyond recognition or rescue,
All our fears washed from it, and perfect,
Under the stained mournful flow,

For Hughes then, it would appear that Plath’s death has cleansed them both of superstitions, fears
and faults in their relationship, or perhaps Hughes continues to reassure his wife, even after death;
he did after all describe “Birthday Letters” as, “ a gathering of occasions on which I tried to open a
direct, private, inner contact with my first wife – not thinking to make a poem, thinking mainly to
evoke her presence to myself, and to feel her there listening.” It is interesting 16 that like Plath in
“All the Dead Dears” Hughes recalls the importance of the return to the father, whether that be the
father of the skeleton in Plath’s poem, Otto in both poems, or God the Father in Hughes’ poem.
It is also important to note that in early November, Hughes’ poem, “The Drowned Woman”17 was
bought by Poetry (Chicago). A thirty year old woman, Hughes describes as a, “worn public lady”
drowns herself in a park lake; he tells us she came to the park,

Not for the sun’s forgetful look
Nor children running here and there;
On the mud bed of the lake
She found her comforter.

Again, Hughes offers drowning as something of a blessing for a troubled mind and tortured body.
With Grantchester Meadows such a nearby haunt of Plath’s it is with gratitude we read that she
was relatively happy here, or we might well have lost her earlier than her untimely death at thirty,
the same age as Hughes’ subject for “The Drowned Woman.” She explains away her
procrastination from academic work, by reassuring herself that Virginia Woolf staved off depression
with cookery and pottering and although Plath says that she feels, “ (my) life linked to her,” she
also writes in her journal, “But her suicide, I felt was reduplicating that black summer of 1953.
(Plath’s first suicide attempt) Only I couldn’t drown. I suppose I’ll always be over-vulnerable,
slightly paranoid. But I’m also so damn healthy & resilient. And apple-pie happy.” 18
In the first part of “55 Eltisley” Hughes describes the past of the house and its effect upon them
both. I cannot help but recall the notion of “genius loci” in psychogeography; there is an abiding
spirit of the house or flat in the way that Hughes obsesses on the aforementioned blood stain,
believing that the experience of the widow and her dead husband, “Hung – a miasma – round that
stain.” This noxious atmosphere gathers potency with his use of sibilance in “Senility’s sour
odour.” The fetid smell and oppressive air then condenses “Like a grease on the cutlery.” Why
grease becomes singular in this line it is difficult to say, unless Hughes wishes to further personify
and particularise the blood stain and its portent. He wonders from which orifice the blood was spilt
and dramatises the mark by wondering if it was from the head, caused after “some fall.” With all of
these details, the flat grows in size until it is a huge theatre of life; like Hughes returning to his
former residence, I too was disappointed at the lack of “trace.” My photograph of the flat bears a
resemblance I feel to a blitz-torn London building with only the facade standing; it reminds me of
Woolf’s return to Bloomsbury after a bomb has hit during the Blitz –

16 Ted Hughes on winning the Forward Prize for Birthday Letters in 1998, cited by Erica Wagner in
Ariel’s Gift p.22
17 Ted Hughes “ The Drowned Woman” in Collected Poems Faber (2003) pp. 15 – 16
18 Sylvia Plath in The Journals 1950 – 1962 Faber (2000) February 25th 1957 p. 269

‘I could just see a piece of my studio wall standing: otherwise rubble where I wrote so many books.
open air where we sat so many nights, gave so many parties.’ She wrote to Angelica: ‘As for 52
Tavistock – well, where I used to dandle you on my knee, there’s God’s sky: and nothing left but
one wicker chair and a piece of druggett. 19

Small wonder that Hughes feels that 55 Eltisley Avenue from a drive past, offers nothing to him of
the drama; the depth; or the quality of his memories. It is in his interaction with the barren nature
of the building that the reader gains an insight to the lives of the couple in those early days
together.
We know from the letters and journals of both poets, that Hughes took residence before Plath.
Hughes writes to Lucas Myers on 16th November 1956, telling him, “ The flat is good – a
downstairs floor – extremely cheap.” He goes on to describe the chemist who 20 lived upstairs, but
unmentioned is the fact that this scientist was no other than George Sassoon, son of Siegfried and
therefore related to Plath’s previous lover Richard Sassoon. Plath writes to her mother describing
the flat in far more detail than Hughes tells to his friend Myers –

To my chastened eyes, it looks beautiful. We share a bathroom with a Canadian couple (Hughes
says the chemist is South African, but George Sassoon was apparently born in England) upstairs
and have the whole first floor: living room, bedroom, large sort of dining room, antique but sturdy
gas stove and pantry.21

She goes on to tell Aurelia that the landlady, who lives out of town, has agreed that they can paint
the yellow walls another colour and Plath is excited about a “blue-gray” instead. She too, notes the
cheap rent of £4 a week, plus expenses for facilities and she notes the importance of spending
money on keeping the flat warm and making a proper home. “It even has two apple trees in the
ragged little back yard and a bay tree. It’s got pots and pans, old kitchen silver and a few sheets
for the double bed. I’ll make it like an ad out of House and Garden with Ted’s help …”
Wendy Campbell, a Cambridge contemporary of Plath’s, recalls that the flat, “ though it was fairly
small, they made it their own by lining one entire wall with their books and overcoming the
landlady’s effects with their own.” 22 Hughes corroborates this in the poem,

Just so the grease-grimed shelves, the tacky, dark walls
Of the hutch of a kitchen revolted you
Into a fury of scouring. 23

One cannot help but admire Plath for her practical attempts to purge the misery of the flat, whilst
her husband contemplates the blood-stain on the pillow. It is interesting to note the difference in
attitude, the other way round this time, regarding a sofa. On this occasion Hughes seems
delighted with the purchase, stating in the poem,

We splurged ten pounds on a sumptuous Chesterfield
Of Prussian blue velvet.

19 Virginia Woolf to Angelica Bell 26th October 1940 in Hermione Lee Virginia Woolf Vintage (1997)
p.743
20 Ted Hughes to Lucas Myers Letters of Ted Hughes Ed. by Christopher Reid Faber (2007)
21SP to AP November 1st 1956 in CL p. 283
22 Wendy Campbell “Remembering Sylvia” in The Art of Sylvia Plath Ed. Charles Newman Faber
(1970) p. 184
23 “55 Eltisley”

whilst Plath writes to her mother, “We have bought a huge, rather soiled but comfortable, secondhand
sofa for our living room for £9.10s, which we’ll sell next spring,” 24 which sounds far more
measured and most practical as she is already planning ahead to get rid of furniture in the hope
that she will return to America with her husband. She continues in the same letter, “I am sick of
battling the cold and the dirt away from all my friends. America looks to me like the promised land.”
It is a far cry from her earlier expressions of joy at arriving in Cambridge, “…I feel that after I put
down roots here, I shall be happier than ever before, since a kind of golden promise hovers in the
air along the Cam and in the quaint crooked streets. “ 25 It would appear that Plath is forever
searching that which will complete her; there is a lack of satisfaction in the present, even when she
has apparently married the person she feels makes her whole. In another letter home she tells
Aurelia, “ I can appreciate the legend of Eve coming from Adam’s rib as I never did before; the
damn story’s true! That’s where I belong.” 26
They also began to entertain a little, mainly just Wendy Campbell and Dorothea Krooke, Plath’s
“Fairy godmothers,” as Hughes calls them in the poem. They clearly supported Plath and
appreciated her and were hence forgiven, Hughes feels, that they were possible rivals. They
therefore escape being incarcerated in “pack ice.” Throughout the poem he describes their first
home as if it were some sort of “first camp” on the polar expedition of their relationship; Plath
meanwhile, sitting over the paraffin heater, warms herself on a fantastical future. At the end of the
poem, we see again, Plath looking beyond the moment; unable to appreciate the importance of,
“… our first winter”. Instead, she continues to dream ahead and gaze into her snowstorm,

…heirloom paperweight. Inside it,
There, in miniature, was your New England Christmas.
A Mummy and a Daddy, still together
Under the whirling snow, and our future.

24 SP to AP in LH November 13th 1956 p. 285
25 SP to AP October 3rd 1955 in LH p. 184
26 SP to AP October 8th 1956 in LH p.276