Melancholy and Infinite Sadness

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes had a bad marriage, and were probably both rather difficult people. I don’t know. I do know that I love their poetry, and reread both their work often. Hughes’ last collection, Birthday Letter, might not be his best, but it’s impossible for me to resist. As a commentary on Plath’s life and poetry, I don’t like it, because it seems to simplify and reduce her work, but as a collection of poems in its own right, I adore it.

Birthday Letters are poems of regret. As such, they fill the reader with almost unbearable sadness, but because the poems are so good, they have to be read and read again regardless. My favorite varies from time to time, but right now,  it’s Daffodils:

“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 ephemera –

Our own days!”

Or perhaps Grand Canyon: “Nothing is left. I never went back and you are dead.” Or maybe all of them.

This is not a perfect collection. Some of the poems are overlong and unwieldy, inelegant. Some read as excuses, some whiny and resentful. But it’s powerful and moving nevertheless.