Plath and Hughes Flashcards
Theme: creativity
Plath:
Words
Mirror
The Moon and the Yew Tree
Hughes:
Wodwo
Thought Fox
Famous Poet
Theme: death
Plath:
Daddy
Edge
Death & Co
Elm
Suicide of Egg Rock
Hughes:
A March Calf
View of a Pig
Heptonstall
Bayonet Charge
Mayday on Holderness
Examination at the Womb-door
Theme: nature
Plath:
Elm
The Burnt-out Spa
Sheep in Fog
Wuthering Heights
Finisterre
Winter Trees
Medallion
The Hermit at the Outermost House
Poppies in July/October
Hughes:
Apple Dumps
Pike
Hawk Roosting
A March Calf
The Bull Moses
Barley
Jaguar
Second Glance at a Jaguar
The Horses
Theme: women
Plath:
Sheep in Fog
Winter Trees
Finisterre
Lady Lazarus
You’re
Spinster
Hughes:
Her Husband
Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days
Lovepet
Lovesong
Fragment of an Ancient Tablet
Theme: masculinity
Plath:
Daddy
The Bee Meeting
Hughes:
When Men Got to the Summit
Her Husband
Dick Straight-up
Theme: happiness
Plath:
Edge
Babysitters
Hughes:
Thought Fox
A March Calf
Theme: self-identity
Plath:
Mirror
Tulips
Cut
Elm
Edge
Hughes:
Thought Fox
Wodwo
Pike
The Scream
Famous Poet
Theme: being and becoming
Plath:
Face Lift
The Stones
Crossing the Water
Hughes:
Pike
A March Calf
Two Legends
Heptonstall Old Church
When Men got to the Summit
Theme: role of the poet
Plath:
Words
The Moon and The Yew Tree
Hughes:
Famous Poet
February
Littleblood
Emily Bronte
Theme: place
Plath:
Resolve
Night Shift
The Hermit at Outermost House
The Burnt-Out Spa
Wuthering Heights
Finisterre
Among the Narcissi
Winter Trees
Hughes:
Horses
Wind
October Dawn
Apple Dumps
Barley
Theme: animals
Plath:
Medallion
Sheep in Fog
Hughes:
The Jaguar
Second Glance at a Jaguar
The Bull Moses
A March Calf
Theme: new life/rebirth
Plath:
Ariel
Crossing the Water
Hughes:
Examination at the Womb Door
Theme: death, violence and mortality
Plath:
Suicide off Egg Rock
Death&Co
Edge
Hughes:
Bayonet Charge
Mayday on Holderness
Hawk Roosting
View of a Pig
Heptonstall
Theme: femininity
Plath:
(motherhood)
You’re
Morning Song
Nick and the Candlestick
(domestic)
Lesbos
Munich Mannequins
Hughes:
Fragment of Ancient Tablet
Lovesong
Lovepet
Bride and Groom Lie Hidden
Common nature images in Plath’s poetry
Moon, flowers (tulips, poppies), trees (elm, yew), water (sea, lakes), stones, bees, cold weather, stars
Common colour images in Plath’s poetry
Red, Black, White, Blue, Green
Other common images in Plath’s poetry
fairy tales, Greek myth
borders and blurriness
drowning, kitchens, sharpness
Common nature images in Hughes’ poetry
animals, wolf, Crow, natural forces, water, landscape
Common cosmology images in Hughes’ poetry
sun, moon, stars
Other common images in Hughes’ poetry
Violence, Death, War, Man, conflict, Love, Beauty, Power, Agriculture, writing, mythology, relationships and sex
Eavan Boland on Plath
“she thought little of reality because she thought too much of it”
Eavan Boland on Plath
“she transformed the literal and real world in her poems into fluid and improbable version of itself.”
Eavan Boland on Plath
“not in terms of logical reality, but as a sequence of disjointed impressions that convey feeling rather than literal experience.”
McClanahan on Plath
“Plath’s poetry focuses on the blur between mindscape and landscape.”
Eavan Boland on Plath
“she tested the boundaries of possibility in her images, pushing the edges of logic”
McClanahan on Plath
“a controlled voice for cynicism, plainly delineating the boundaries of hope and reality”
Comment on creativity and Plath
“domesticity had choked her”
Nasrullah Mambrol on Plath
“she had learned that despair must be counterpoised by an almost obsessional attention to detail and disguise.”
Joyce Carol Oats on Plath
“Plath is an identity reduced to desperate statements about her dilemma as a passive witness to a turbulent natural world.”
Janice Markey on Plath
“Plath’s poems about Yorkshire are uniformly bleak and negative.”
Pinsky on Plath
“Plath suffered the airless egocentrism of one in love with an ideal self.”
Hughes on Plath
“Central experience of a shattering of the self, and the labour of fitting it together again or finding a new one.”
Jeanine Dobbs (Tulips) on Plath
“her freedom is both wonderful and terrible because the price is so high. The women must give up her man and her child that hook onto her, as well as her things, her possessions. And the ultimate price – and reward – is death”
Arid on Plath
“Plath presents the dangers of a man made world.”
Perloff on Plath
“the central paradox at the heart of Plath’s poetry is that all human beings are dead…while everything that is non-human is intensely alive”
Emily Berry on Plath
“A death, however tragic, is only a very small part of a life”
Nasrullah Mambrol on Plath
“Some critics have seen her as schizoid, carrier of a death wish that they perceive in everything she ever wrote.”
Nasrullah Mambrol on Plath
“the poems in which the struggle for happiness competes with the forces that bring despair and hopelessness”
Susan Basnett on Plath
“what Sylvia Plath wanted to experience was life to the full”
Susan Basnett on Plath
“the poems are full of pain, of references to suffering and death as release from suffering but to read them as coded references to her suicide seems unfair”
Simon Armitage on Hughes
“Ted’s poetry is electrically charged with an urgency of testimony”
Thomas R Pero on Hughes
“with great difficulty and many retreats. Hughes completely changed his attitude to nature.”
Davison on Hughes
“poetic voice of blood and guts”
Simon Armitage on Hughes
“Hughes aligned himself with the ancient role of the poet. he looked even further than the metaphysical potential of the poetry to a kind of writing that had the power to heal and transform, to change perceptions and to alter states”
Herbert Lomas on Hughes
“His work is full of contradictions…the combat of the death wish and the biological spirit of survival.”
Brian Taylor on Hughes
“the literature of shamanism seemed to encompass everything that was already important to him”
Geoffrey Hughes on Hughes
“Hughes’ comparisons of animals and people serve to raise the beast and debase man”
Sagar on Hughes
“In Hughes poetry post Plath’s death his vision for a while was a world of blood and of nature as monstrous”
Robert B Shaw on Hughes
“Hughes marshalled a language of nearly Shakespearean resonance to explore themes which were mythic and elemental.”
Simon Armitage on Hughes
“a poet whose great exploit was to great exploit was to bring the inner working of the brain onto the wide world, and simultaneously draw the outside world into the mind”
Plath Context about Womanhood
Plath’s poetic self is a subversion of the picturesque 50s housewife who is seen and not heard, who has the domestic realm under her control.
Plath’s defect is her creativity, and by embracing this creativity she rejects the predestined socially reproductive role of women.
She doesn’t like the fact that her domesticity is becoming more prominent as she becomes a wife and then a mother; she resents her children and Hughes for taking away the woman she once was.
Plath Context about her last winter
- When living in Devon in the last October of her life, “the winter of 1962 would become notorious for its harshness… Plath died at the end of it”
Plath Context on ecofeminism
using gender to analyse the relationships between humans and the natural world. It also examines the connections between women and nature, emphasising that both are treated by a male-dominated society.
Plath Context on where she grew up
Plath was born in Boston, and so was used to urbanisation, explaining her struggle to live in the desolate Yorkshire Moors
Hughes Context on where he grew up
His childhood was quiet and dominantly rural.
Hughes had an anthropological interest in mythology, particularly English folklore, due to his mythic Yorkshire ancestors.
Hughes Context on study
Hughes dropped out of studying English at Cambridge (after experiencing a fox in a dream) as he believed it stifled his creativity and was having a detrimental effect on his poetry.
Hughes Context on Shamanism
Hughes’ spiritual connection through shamanism allowed himself to feel free, not confined to religious rules.
Tulips
stanza one
“winter” “white” “snowed-in” = isolated, absence, purity
“i am nobody” = detached, sulky, snarky, loss of self, stripped of personality
stanza two
“will not shut” = forced, no control
“they” = denies others ‘self’
stanza three
“pebble” = objectification
“i am sick of baggage” = sick of identity
“little smiling hooks” = aggressive, juxtaposition
stanza four
cares more for posessions
stanza five
“no idea” = confession, relief
stanza six
“too red” = negative, grief
rejects trappings of family
Elm
stanza one
“i know the bottom” = knows depression, low
stanza two
“the sea” = turbulent mind
“your madness” = insanity
“echoing echoing” = enduring but futile effort
“scorched to the root” = self is fragmented and burnt out
“i break up” = broken
“she would drag me” = fight against the feminine
“inhabited by a cry” = her depression
metaphor for her depression
“that kill” x3 = grim triplet, cry for help?
Poppies in July
“little” = playful
“nothing burns” = numbed, used to constant pain
“exhausts” = drained
“little bloody skirts” = curse of femininity
“opiates” = seeks escape
“dulling and stilling” = dream-like, freeing
Poppies in October
"”skirts” = even nature couldn’t cope with the flaws of femininity
“carbon monoxides by eyes”
Mirror
“searching” = hoping for deeper meaning, desperate
“a young girl” = loss of youth
“terrible fish” = perception of self
Words
“axes” = how blunt and brutal her work is
“echoes!” = desperate to be heard
“mirror” = uses writing to establish truth
“white skull” = words kill OR words kill feelings
“govern” = words control life
Face Lift
stanza one
“silk scarf” “mummy-cloths” = walking corpse, death
“vault” = lock away her past experiences
stanza two
“nude as cleopatra” = known for her beauty, stripped of ugliness
sibilance = drifting out of conciousness
“wipes me out” = lack of control, she is recreated, rebirth
stanza three
“stitches tauten” = scars of the past
stanza four
“mirror” = she is withering away, aging
“laboratory” = disassociates from herself
“mother to myself” = agent of birth death and rebirth
“baby” = creation
Crossing the water
“black” = cannot reflect, dark
“cut-paper people” = fragility
“little light” = no hope
“cold worlds” = death
“valedictory” = farewell address
“lilies” = flower of death but also rebirth
“astounded souls” = river styx, souls cross river to reach afterlife
The Moon and The Yew Tree
stanza one
“black” = devoid of colour
“blue” = sadness, loss of warmth
“g” = guttural evokes grief of reader
“row of headstones” = cut off from life
stanza two
“no door” = no escape, no future
despairing
stanza three
“mother” = comfort, gentle, serene
stanza four
“fallen” = away from motherhood ideals
“nothing of this” = lack of devotion, isolation
“blackness and silence” = only sure of death
Edge
“perfected” “dead” = finds perfection in death, escape, freeing
“it is over” = finality
“a white serpent” = child a threat to women’s liberation
Winter Trees
stanza one
“blue dissolve” = natural, easy
“drawing” = can be rubbed out
“ring on ring” = multiple marriages, sceptic, unfaithful marriage
“weddings” = failure, rebels
stanza two
“neither abortions nor bitchery” = nature is free
“seed” = pregnancy, jealous, envious, can procreate easily, yet women then are categorised as mothers
“footless” = free
stanza three
“ledas” = how women are treated, Zeus was captivated by Leda’s beauty and appeared before her in the form of a swan. He then either rapes or seduces her and impregnates her.
maternal imagery
“pietas” = virgin mary cradling jesus mortal body, only known as a mother and her sex
“chasing nothing” = futile to want to be something else
Sheep in Fog
disinterest in fulfilling a women’s role
Wuthering Heights
speakers feelings of melancholy, knows what depression looks like
battling everything
“leans on me” = pressure, overwhelmed, oppressed in a foreign landscape
1961
You’re
“happiest” = light-hearted and playful
“stars” “moon” = romantic
“O” = soft syllables
“my little loaf” = endearment, bun in the oven
“snug as a bug”
Daddy
“black shoe” = devoid of colour, bleak
“foot” = bottom of the body
“poor and white” = deprived of anything
“God” “ghastly statue” = immense weight of his death
“stuck in my jaw” = cannot communicate
“barb wire snare” = military language, brutal, violent
“brute”
Thought Fox
“something else is alive” = beginning of idea
“see no star” = no validation
“entering the loneliness” = accept the process
“touches” = skittish, wary
“neat prints” = typewriter
“body” “ bold” = like the text
Pike
“perfect” “green” “gold” = powerful, regal
“killers from the egg” = inherently evil
“grandeur” = glamour
“hung” = corpse, death
“fangs” “hooks” = eating machine
expectation that they must kill
predatory, hunter becomes the hunted
Wodwo
“what am i?” = rhetorical, searching for self
“glassy gain” = distorted world view
questioning nature and our experience
“not rooted but dropped” = disorientated, no belonging, individuality
“what am i then” = purpose,
volta
“I am i huge” = primal masculinity
“sit still” = egocentric calm, stoic and steady
“stops to watch me” = top of the food chain
“i’ll go on looking” = hopeful, positive, unending quest, no punctuation
Heptonstall
“black” = colour imagery
“gravestones” = both plath and hughes parents buried here
“die” “born” = juxtapostion, closeness of birth and death, paradox
“skull” = slaughter, repetition
“flies leave it” = lowest of the low, worthless, cruelty of nature
“drained to sutures” = destroy fertile land, corrupt humans
“life tries. death tries.” = futile
“never tires” = nature persistent, immortal
Famous Poet
“monstrosity” = malformation
“very ordinary” = nothing special
“apprentice” = inexperienced
“mouse” = cowardice
“slumps” = run out of creativity
“inner demon” = tortured soul
“black” “funeral” “coffin” = death imagery, death of creativity
“repeat that” = demands of society and trends
“money and praise” = desperate to be recognised
“childs amaze” = puppet for society
“bars at the zoo” = trapped, stifled, end of career
A March Calf
monotony of human experience
“requiring nothing more” = satisfied
“freezes” = fear of possibilities
“God’s thumb” = need guidance
“worn rails” = imprisoned, world constricts creativity
A View of a Pig
“barrow dead” = brutal, stark
“pink white eyelashes” = delicate, contrast, fragile
“stuck straight out” = messy, indignity
“thick pink bulk” = spondee,
“less than lifeless”
“thumped it” = blunt, violent
“remorse” = not human, emotionally distant
“too dead”
“not a figure of fun”
“oppressed me” = resents the dead pig
“gash” “shocking” = some recognition yet no guilt
“squeal” = terror, fear
“scald it and scour it” = unemotional, unsentimental
The Jaguar
“yawn” = disinterested, bored, lethargy
“mesmerised” = commands attention
fascinates speaker
“visionary in his cell” = trapped but mind free
The Bull Moses
Alludes to the story of Moses from the bible
“Blackness is depth” = Deep black eyes, connotations to evil (repetition) but also a space reference.
“Too deep in itself” = He’s so immersed in the in himself that he isnt bothered about the world around him.
“The weight of the sun and the moon and the world hammered” = Even the largest things in our like our small to him and dont bother him.
“I kept the door wide, closed it after him and pushed the bolt” = Trapped in, isolated, alone but still fine
Love Song
“He” “She” = main subjects
“loved” = relationship
“no other appetite” = all-consuming love
“gnawed” “sucked” = physical
“nothing” = rather cease to exist than separate
love tainted by real world
but doesn’t stop their love
“entwined” = intimate
“hostage” = no escape from each other
“face” = can easily take on the other persons face as so close
Lovepet
love personified into a stray, starving animal
all-consuming
Bride and Groom
regenerative passion of love making
tactile language
hides problems/imperfections
Her Husband
“stubborn character” = fed-up
broken nature of the marriage
“he’ll humble her” = spiteful, no love
“insult” = hateful, no sympathy
