zaterdag 30 juli 2016

Perfect Light, an analysis of a poem of Ted Hughes



PERFECT LIGHT   a poem about innocence (Ted Hughes) 

Leen Moelker

Perfect Light
There you are, in all your innocence,
Sitting among your daffodils, as in a picture
Posed as for the title: ‘Innocence’.
Perfect light in your face lights it up
Like a daffodil. Like anyone of those daffodils
It was to be your only April on earth
Among your daffodils. In your arms,
Like a teddy bear, your new son,
Only a few weeks into his innocence.
Mother and infant, as in the Holy portrait.
And beside you, laughing up at you,
Your daughter, barely two. Like a daffodil
You turn your face down to her, saying something.
Your words were lost in the camera.
                                                           And the knowledge,
Inside the hill on which you are sitting,
A moated fort hill, bigger than your house,
Failed to reach the picture. While your next moment,
Coming towards you like an infantryman
Returning slowly out of no-man’s-land,
Bowed under something, never reached you –
Simply melted into the perfect light.

Ted Hughes[1]

Guidelines.
The English poet Ted Hughes and the American author Sylvia Plath married in 1956. Sylvia suffered from manic-depressions, and although Ted had been advised not to marry her, he did it secretly.
The situation worsened very soon after the marriage. Sylvia became a suspicious women without reason to be jealous. She saw in every handsome young woman her rival. Ted was a tall, very handsome and clever man who had a lot of success.
They moved several times to another house to experience quietness (Ted his preferable surroundings) or rumour in the city (Sylvia’s favourite place to be). They have got two children, Frieda and Nicholas. Sylvia visited a psychiatrist but nothing could help her to overcome her mental sickness.
At the end after a lot of problems – Ted fell in love with other women, Sylvia remained angry about the lack of her happiness and success – Sylvia tumbled in a deep crisis. After giving many signals by means of her poetry, she committed suicide in 1963.  
It is necessary to notice, generally speaking, the (literary) public judged Ted as being guilty of Sylvia’s death. Ted kept silence about his version of the relationship with his former wife. Accidentally, all that happened in the Sixties, and the uprising feminism needed a hero. As a matter of fact Sylvia became the feminist example of a victim of men’s manipulations.  Ted (a most famous poet at that time) became the devil himself who mistreated his wife by lying and cheating on her.
Thirty and five years after Sylvia her death, Ted  created eighty-eight poems in which he looks back on that very period with Sylvia, and which collection he called Birthday Letters.  Besides, he enclosed in a safety box a number of secret letters and important documents about Sylvia. Not to be opened before 2023. 

The poem, Perfect Light,  an interpretation.
‘There you are, in all your innocence,
Sitting among your daffodils, as in a picture
Posed as for the title: ‘Innocence’.

This sentence is divided into three verses and presents the object of the lyrical subject. He sees somebody sitting on the ground, among a field of daffodils. It seems like a picture for him, a human figure surrounded by and against a background of yellow flowers. It is an ordinary image that people connect immediately with terms like vulnerability, beauty,  goodness and loveliness. The lyrical subject however gives this ‘painting’ the title Innocence. Why is it that the presentation begins with qualifying ‘you’ as innocent? Is this to affirm the general meaning about such images, or is it to underline a kind of avowal and does the poet implicitly plead guilty?  Does he say sorry?
Context
1961, August 31 Ted and Sylvia moved to their new home in North Tawton, Devonshire. Sylvia            was pregnant with Nicholas who would be born in 1962, January 17. To their great surprise,               in the Spring of 1962 thousands of daffodils coloured their new but long existing garden                yellow. Many pictures had been taken of the daffodils including of Sylvia with their children. 

‘Perfect light in your face lights it up
Like a daffodil. Like anyone of those daffodils
It was to be your only April on earth
Among your daffodils.’ 

In this part  we get some information about the human figure. Like all daffodils need the sun to lift up their ‘faces,’ also this figure needs a perfect light on its face to be able to show its beauty and to emphasize its vulnerability and loveliness.   But then, something like a dramatic prediction follows in the words  It was to be your only April on earth. What is going on?

Context
Ted and Sylvia loved their Green Court at North Tawton in the region of the daffodils. Their            garden produced all they needed and they felt strong together and self-supporting. There was much to do on that huge country-seat but Sylvia didn’t matter. She was happy with her two children and invited many friends and family members to come over. Among them David and Assia Wevill. David was a Canadian poet and a well known translator and professor. Ted fell in love with Assia and betrayed Sylvia which caused, people say, her death 1963, February  15.
Indeed, it was the only one April of the year 1962, this figure would be able to enjoy the daffodils. She had not seen the daffodils before in 1961 (property not bought yet) and not in 1963 because  she died in February.


                                                         Fig.1 Michelangelo, Pietà, 1498-1500, marble,
                                                         St. Pieter, Rome. (Foto Internet)

‘In your arms,
Like a teddy bear, your new son,
Only a few weeks into his innocence.
Mother and infant, as in the Holy portrait.’

The ‘picture’ has got more details now. What we see is a mother with a baby in her arms. Just a few weeks old, the baby is qualified by the words ‘into his innocence’ and he looks like a teddy bear. Like the mother also the child exists into innocence. This is recalling what the poem is actually going about: INNOCENCE. Looking back to the sixties the poet could feel badly about the irreversibility of his former behaviour and decisions. And feeling guilty, he could only see mother and child as holy. Hence the comparison with Michelangelo’s Pietà. Like Jesus was innocent, yet murdered, so the mother was innocent and dead. 

                                                       Fig.2 Innocent Girl in the bulb-field near Sassenheim,  (Foto Ada Markusse) 2012, April 8. 

And beside you, laughing up at you,
Your daughter, barely two. Like a daffodil
You turn your face down to her, saying something.’ 

The picture is now completed with a third figure, a girl, who was born 1960, April 1st  (barely two). Mother and daughter looked at each other. The daughter looked up to her mother like the daffodils to the sun. The mother is looking down, like the daffodils in the evening shadow. She is saying something. What did she say? Was it about happy feelings, she tried to share? Was it about bad compulsive thoughts she has all the time? The lyrical subject cannot hear this because ‘the words were lost in the (silent) camera.


Your words were lost in the camera.
                                                           And the knowledge,
Inside the hill on which you are sitting,
A moated fort hill, bigger than your house,
Failed to reach the picture.’

Then, we have to be alerted by the extreme position of the next verse. It is put out of the centre of the text of the poem where we read something about the knowledge. This must have a special meaning. The knowledge of what? Of the lost words?  If we ignore the next two verses, we read: the knowledge ‘failed to reach the picture.’  This knowledge can refer to a complexity of notions. Facts, reminiscences, experiences, decisions, difficulties, behaviours, routines and education are some elements of our knowledge.

What is the meaning of “And the knowledge inside the hill on which you are sitting?“   Can knowledge be ‘in the hill’? A hill is an area of land that is higher than that surrounds it. Maybe we have to read that the knowledge remains where it is now. Into the inner world of the mother. This particular hill is a ‘moated fort hill’ which means, that the hill is not a friendly place in the landscape but a fort hill to defend the inhabitants from intruders. And to keep things under ones own. That’s why the hill is isolated from its surroundings by a huge ditch. So we can now read this sentence as follows:

And the knowledge (of the unbearable tensions, of the fears for the future, of the deep despair, of losing control, of not being a successful poet, of being cheated on by love ones) cannot be read from the picture. It seems to be a happy family but in fact we see a tormented and isolated mother who is not able to receive help.

While your next moment,
(146)Coming towards you like an infantryman
(147)Returning slowly out of no-man’s-land,
Bowed under something, never reached you –
Simply melted into the perfect light.’

‘Your next moment’  is coming towards you like an infantryman.’ What does it mean? The ‘next moment’ is an expression based on the fact that there is a present moment. Normally these two moments are very different from each other. These moments mostly change rapidly and suddenly. An easy explanation is possible if we ignore  the comparison with an infantryman (146,147), then we read: “While your next moment coming towards you, (it) never reached you.” For there was no next year, no April, no Spring with daffodils that ever would spread their yellow colours  and exhale their odours towards this present happy family.

A little more difficult is to explain that strange comparison between ‘the next moment’ and an infantryman, a soldier. Normally an infantryman make war or  make peace, that depends on his orders. In this poem ‘your next moment”  conduct itself as an infantryman. To bring war? To get peace?  It is unclear. That’s why the infantryman returns out of no-man’s-land.
A no-man’s-land is an area at the edge of the battle-field where none of the opponent armies has any control. It is a place where the fighting has temporarily stopped or kept free of hostilities. Literarily used, is it also a place where different things don’t fit into either the present  moment or into the next  moment.  

I’m  wondering which  kind of ‘infantryman’ is approaching slowly the – unattainable- fort hill?. Will it be another happy moment? Or just an unhappy experience?
Entering the region with the moated fort hill it (= the next moment) is impossible to go forward. There’s  a huge blockade to overcome. Will there be no other moment?
(He/she/it) bowed under something. What is bowing on him? In accordance with the Cobuild English Dictionary (page 187) I learned that when someone is bowed by something, this means, that he/she is made unhappy and anxious by it, and lose hope. It is clear that this moment bows to the inevitable thoughts and strivings, belonging to a compulsive obsessive mind. And that is why it could never develop to the level of a happy moment.  

Is that next moment somewhere visible yet? The poem says, it melted into the perfect light and this happened before it could reach its destination. Obviously the lyrical subject does not use the word ‘light,’ but he calls it ‘perfect light’. The word ‘perfect’ means that the object does not have any marks, lumps, cracks or damage in it. A perfect light is like an aura above the Holy Family by whom we remember the word ‘innocence’ in this poem and the notion of the ‘Holy Family.’ These words  emphasize, together with the word ‘perfect,’ the pureness of  the object and its cleanness of sin.

Let us summarize this analysis.



A lyrical subject describes what it sees:

On a sunny day, a mother and her two children are sitting in a garden, surrounded by daffodils. Mother and daughter like daffodils too, laughing and chatting to each other in the sun. It is like a picture with the title Innocence. It ís a picture,  because  we read their words are lost in the camera. Also the knowledge of what is really going on with this family fails to reach this very picture.
As all events end, this temporary moment will be replaced by another. But it is unclear which kind of moment this will be. Will it bring prosperity? Will it bring misery? Like in a no-man’s-land, expectations are neither good nor bad. This next moment, the poet say, has been bowed under something and has never reached the object. A huge blockade of compulsive thoughts prevent it from improving and developing to another moment of happiness.
In this poem the poet remembers his wife at a moment of heartfelt happiness. He admit she is  innocent, perfect and pure and, while enlightened by a perfect light, he pities mother and children who are waiting for their next( happy) moments which will never reach them.

Middelburg, 2016 July 28th


[1] Paul Keegan ed., Ted Hughes, Collected Poems (London 2003) 1136.

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