Jessica Chung

How well a composer controls textual form and language features will affect the perspective presented. Discuss.

Ted Hughes’ anthology Birthday Letters is a skilful display of poeticism, offering his own personal mythology on his
dysfunctional marriage with Sylvia Plath. Through the confessional poems “Your Paris” and “Red”, Hughes offers a
conflicting perspective on Plath, persuading the reader that it was he who was the victim suffocating under Plath’s mental
instability and her manipulative, obsessive nature with the men in her life. Robert Olen Butler’s “Mr. Green” also explores
the complexities of conflicting perspectives within a relationship, focusing on the conflict between ancient, honourable
but constricting values of women and the modern assertion of femininity. Plath’s poem “Tulips” contrasts Hughes’ feelings
of victimisation, voicing the anxieties of being a dutiful wife, mother and poet through an unnamed, hospitalised patient.

Writing his poems as letter to Plath, Hughes indicates that, from the beginning, their outlooks were different, even
antagonistic in “Your Paris.” Hughes emphasises their conflicting perspectives through the repetition of “your Paris” and
“my Paris”, foreshadowing the impending doom of their already culturally conflicted relationship, as well as accusing
Plath’s Paris as excessively and immaturely “American”: “Your Paris, I thought, was American.. you stepped, in a shatter of
exclamations..”. He juxtaposes Plath’s aestheticised city, “your immaculate palette,/The thesaurus of your cries,” with his
infinitely more serious approach to Paris: “My perspectives were veiled by what rose like methane from the
reopened/Mass grave of Verdun.” As the poem progresses, another conflict arises: the conflicting views on Plath by the
young, uncomprehending and naive Hughes and the retrospective, sympathetic perspective of the older Hughes. Like the
Maquis, Plath has an existence “underground, your hide-out”. This metaphor is constructed to highlight the duality of
Plath and the conflict between her perceived counterfeit facade and her true self. Hughes comes to understand that what
he experienced with her, traversing the “plain paving” of Paris with its “odd, stray, historic bullet” was, for Plath, a painful
process of “searching miles” for the alleviation of pain, only relieved by the “anaesthetic” of her aesthetic sense.

The conflict between perspectives within a relationship is also examined in Butler’s short story “Mr. Green,” which
presents an antiquated, patriarchal male perspective and a youthful, modern female perspective on female identity. The
simplicity of the narrator’s grandfather’s use of language creates tension within the narrator and the reader, who remarks:
"You are a girl... Only a son can oversee the worship of his ancestors." This, juxtaposed with the narrator’s own directness:
“I wanted to protect my grandfather's soul, but it wasn't in my power. I was a girl,” effectively generates a sentimental
response to the narrator from the reader. The grandfather’s parrot becomes a potent symbol of the traditional concept
that men were superior to women, with the narrator noting that despite being bitten by Mr. Green, she still offered her
arm out to him, as “He had no choice” – he had to accept that he needed her despite her being female. Through the
conflicting perspectives of the grandfather and the narrator, the reader reaches a greater understanding of the
complexities of relationships, as the narrator stresses that there is no right or wrong in relationships, claiming that she
does “not bear him any anger.”

In hindsight, Hughes draws attention to the conflicting perspectives of Plath reflected through the young and unknowing
Hughes and the retrospective perspective of the older, mature Hughes. The poet’s own frustration and inner conflict is
highlighted, as he realises that he had assigned “conjectural, hopelessly wrong meanings” to Plath’s every word and
action: it was a pained Plath with “flayed skin,” seeking an alleviation of her painful memories of her lover Sassoon that
was walking beside him in Paris – she was covering her true feelings with the façade of an excited tourist. Thus, Hughes
effectively persuades the reader of his youthful ignorance of Plath’s true, hidden agenda, stating his innocence over
Plath’s suicide through his use of emotive language and conflicting ideas, which underlined their troubled relationship.

In “Red”, which concludes Birthday Letters, Hughes begins by indicating Plath’s obsessive impulse: “Red was your
colour”. To Plath, red is a symbol of vitality and passion, but Hughes’ association of red with wounding, earthen burial and
memorials to a family’s dead intentionally conflict with her interpretation of colour, appropriating red to her suffering,
suicidal tendencies and fixation on her father’s death: “red/Was what you wrapped around you.” Red symbolically shows
Plath’s manic, restless self, and through its symbolism, Hughes crafts his perspective as the victim: “I felt it raw – like the
crisp gauze edges of a stiffening wound” – Hughes’ pain is represented through strong sensory imagery. Furthermore, he
describes their red bedroom as a “judgement chamber”, “a throbbing cell”, evoking a claustrophobic atmosphere caused
by Plath’s obsession with her father through emotive words. Hyperbolic, cumulative language is used to reinforce Hughes’
sense of entrapment, as he continually refers to their house dominated with red walls as “sheer blood-falls”, “like blood
lobbing from a gash”, and “the heart’s last gouts”. He denies his role as the culprit of Plath’s “murder”, using his fatalistic
tone to show how helpless he was with Plath’s mental condition: even from the start, she was “catastrophic, arterial,
doomed.” This perspective is in conflict with pre-estabished beliefs that Plath was the victim. The third stanza, consisting
of one line, emphasises that Plath’s only way of escaping turmoil was to enter the poetic world: “Only the bookshelves
escaped into whiteness.” Here, the whiteness refers to tranquillity and rationality, with Hughes remarking that Plath’s
contrasting poetic side was a redemptive character of hers.
In contrast to Hughes’depiction of Plath as an uncontrollable, manic person, Plath creates a persona of calmness in her
poem “Tulips.” Plath establishes the woman’s surreal, tranquil postoperative state as idyllic; she decides, momentarily at
least, she wants to remain in hospital: “I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.” She thinks of her husband and child
as antagonists. Their smiles in the photos are “hooks” that want to bring her back to a normal life. The character’s
yearning for tranquillity, privacy and sure sense of self is overridden by the “vivid tulips” which “eat” her “air.” She accuses
the tulips of being “too red, they hurt me”, filling the air with “loud noise.” Thus, her sense of calmness is disrupted by the
tulips: “I didn’t want any flowers.” Here, the flowers become an overwhelming reminder of her husband and child’s love,
which burdens her: “their redness talks to my wound.” The personification of the tulips and correspondence to her
wound reinforces the obligations that the character must perform as an attentive wife and mother – the delivery of the
tulips implies the suffocation and loss of self that the patient suffers. In this poem, Plath seems to imply that being the
ideal wife and mother to Hughes and her children has become too much: she is stifled.

Echoing Plath’s calm, quiet voice in “Tulips”, Hughes juxtaposes Plath’s insanity, the “ghoul” of redness, with the colour
blue, displaying Hughes’ conflicting perspectives on Plath. He contemplates that the pacific colour, blue, “from San
Francisco”, should have been her hue: it was a “guardian, thoughtful.” Hughes comments on Plath’s pregnancy, in which
she was enveloped in “kingfisher blue silks.” He then juxtaposes this quiet, content Plath with the “pit of red”, where Plath
hid from her mental illness, “the bone-clinic whiteness.” These conflicting portrayals of Plath map Hughes’ changed
understanding of Plath through age. Hughes evokes a sense of remorse and melancholy over the loss of Sylvia at the end
of the poem, metaphorically associating her calm nature with a jewel, “But the jewel you lost was blue.” This links back to
the earlier reference of the “shut casket,” evoking a sense of pathos and how her obsession with “red” has shrouded her
“blue” and calm nature. This loss of a centre of stability has dragged her to death.

Hughes persuasively presents his conflicting perspective on Plath and their relationship through a range of poetic
techniques. By exposing conflicting perspectives on Plath and comparing his naive, inexperienced self with his older, more
mature self, Hughes emphasises the importance and ambiguities of interpreting and understanding perspectives in any
event.