Ted Hughes’ “Last Letter”: Raw and Unfinished

There are just some things that are not meant for public consumption. A man’s suffering. A man’s grief. A man’s guilt. These things should be kept private. But unfortunately, greed or personal glory prevails over privacy sometimes, especially when there is a captive audience waiting for any delicious tidbit of confession, gossip, or proof. It is true that the literary world’s ravenous appetite for anything and everything related to Sylvia Plath afforded Carol Hughes the opportunity to expose the personal torment of her late husband, Ted Hughes. There has been no shortage of critics, scholars and poetry readers ready to consume and scrutinize not only Plath’s work but also the work of Hughes in order to comprehend her tragic life that ended so abruptly when she gassed herself on February 11, 1963.

Thanks to scholar Melvyn Bragg with the assistance of Carol Hughes, the followers of the Plath/Hughes saga have received the most important document to date, “Last Letter.” This poem was published in the New Statesman recently. The poem was intended to be a part of the Birthday Letters, an award-winning collection of the poems that explores Hughes and Plath’s relationship. The collection was published a few months before his death and is considered to be his masterpiece. Critics and scholars are describing the “Last Letter” as the “missing link” that completes the collection.

Although it is may be the missing link, “Last Letter” is not exactly a poem and not exactly a diary entry. “Last Letter” exists within the menacing shadows of the confessional poem. This work is confessional but not in the confessional style seeped with the dark metaphors that Plath helped make famous along with Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and John Barryman. Hughes’ poem is part diary entry, part biographical sketch, part remembrance, and part admission of guilt. It is confessional in terms of actual confession. It fully recounts the horrendous missteps and horrific oversights that occurred during the days leading up to Plath’s suicide. According to the poem, Plath mailed her estranged husband a suicide note that was intended for arrival after her death. As Hughes explains:

Your note reached me too soon---that same day,
Friday afternoon, posted in the morning.
The prevalent devils expedited it.
That was one more straw of ill-luck
Drawn against you by the Post-Office

After receiving the note, he rushed to her home where they had some type of argument. She convinced him that she was no longer suicidal and she burned the letter, according to Hughes, “with that strange smile.” Based on his poetic re-telling of events, she begged him to leave and promised to call the doctor. Hughes did not bother to put up a fight. He left Plath and his two children that day to meet his lover, poet Susan Alliston. Hughes and Alliston travelled to Rugby Street where Plath and Hughes were married; they stayed in the same hotel and in the same bedroom where Plath and Hughes honeymooned, according to the poem.During his weekend with Alliston in the Hughes/Plath marital bed, he claims to be haunted by imagined phone calls from Plath. His imaginary is haunting:

Did the phone ring there in my empty room,
You hearing the ring in your receiver---
At both ends the fading memory
Of a telephone ringing, in a brain
As if already dead. I count
How often you walked to the phone-booth
At the bottom of St George’s terrace.
You are there whenever I look, just turning
Out of Fitzroy Road, crossing over
Between the heaped up banks of dirty sugar.
In your long black coat,
With your plait coiled up at the back of your hair
You walk unable to move, or wake, and are
Already nobody walking
Walking by the railings under Primrose Hill
Towards the phone booth that can never be reached.
Before midnight. After midnight. Again.
Again. Again. And, near dawn, again.

She never did call for his help, and his worry was never enough for him to leave his lover in order to rescue Plath. Instead he stayed in the arms of his lover while Plath suffered through her final days. On her final morning, Plath taped the doors of the bedrooms where her one-year-old son, Nicholas, and her three-year-old daughter, Frieda, slept. She placed biscuits and milk beside their beds and then proceeded to use the carbon monoxide from her oven to end her life. Hughes remained unaware of the situation until the phone finally rang and he answered. He writes: 

Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection,
Coolly delivered its four words
Deep into my ear: ‘Your wife is dead.’

This is the ending that we all know but have never seen in such detail from Hughes. This is the document that has the Plath/Hughes community abuzz. But, it is hard to be exuberant about a work so raw and tragic. It is stated that Hughes excluded this poem from the Birthday Letters because it was too personal. This poem has an unfinished feel to it. Moments in the poem are glorious and evocative, but it is clear that he grappled and struggled with every line. How does one convey their darkest hours in exquisite artfulness? Hughes really does not create high art with this poem and, therefore, this work should be examined more in terms of a biographical document than poetry. So, the question becomes: Are there some documents just too personal to share?

This poem is infinitely fascinating and revealing but incredibly personal. I felt like a voyeur reading this work, and I couldn’t help but think of the effect that the release of this poem will have on Frieda Hughes. Over the years, she has given many interviews to change public opinion about her father. She speaks highly of her mother as poet, not as a parent. Frieda was just toddler and Nicholas was an infant when their mother abandoned them through suicide. Hughes is the only parent that they knew and for that reason Frieda vehemently defends her father. She has pointed out that Hughes was not the only volatile and difficult figure in that explosive marriage. Plath, who suffered from mental illness, destroyed Hughes’ poetry on two different occasions. Their marriage was complex, passionate and hostile. Their marriage was not as simple as the critics, scholars and readers would like it to be. She was hardly the dutiful poet/housewife who tolerated his constant cheating. But unfortunately, this guilt-ridden poem portrays their marriage in exactly those terms. This poem will be damning to Hughes’ already sullied reputation. It does not show him as a great man or a great poet. This poem is personal art and private ruminations. It is does not congeal in either style or tone with the other exceptionally polished poems in Birthday Letters. Although it may be caused for celebration among biographers and scholars, the tremendous tragedy that devastated the Plath-Hughes family resonates in this poetic confession. 

Author’s Note: This poem along with two early handwritten drafts of this poem appear in the October 11 issue of the New Statesman. Many unreliable versions of this poem appear on the Internet. For an authoritative and legal version of the poem, I recommend purchasing the periodical or going to your local public or academic library to access it in print or electronic form. I found the full version of the poem, from the comfort of my office chair, by using my library card and remote access to the EBSCO Database, Academic Search Premier .