A Picture of Otto by Ted Hughes

Question 1

Context

Answer 1

-Published in Birthday Letters.
-Example of intertextuality
-Hughes uses as a stimulus WW1 poet Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting” (1917) in which the speaker comes face to face in Hell with a German soldier he has killed in battle,
“Down some profound dull tunnel”

“one sprang up,”

Question 2

Form and Structure

Answer 2

Form

• Dramatic monologue addressed to Otto who never replies.
• A sort of dialogue of one.

Structure

• Regular quatrains and loose iambic pentameter gives poem a controlled, reasoned tone.
• This is not a terrified speaker.

Question 3

Language Techniques

Answer 3

Imagery
-Inter-play between dark and light effectively capturing the confusions, complexities, guilt and pain of the speaker’s journey through hell.

Extended Metaphor of Hell.
-Probably an illusion to Dante’s Inferno too or even Goethe’s Faust.
-Hughes is identifying with someone who gained riches but will suffer forever.
Remember his letter to Aurelia Plath in 1963:
“But if there is an eternity, I am dammed in it.”
The speaker is in a chamber of hell as Hughes has been for quarter of a century.