Birthday Letters

Birthday Letters is a 1998 poetry collection by the English poet Ted Hughes, a sequence of poems addressed to his late wife Sylvia Plath that revisits their meeting, their marriage, her father Otto and her death. It is prescribed for HSC English Extension 1 in the elective Confessional Worlds.

Published in 1998, months before Ted Hughes's death, Birthday Letters broke a silence of thirty-five years. Hughes had married the American poet Sylvia Plath in 1956; they separated in 1962, and in February 1963 Plath took her own life. While Plath's posthumous collection Ariel made her the defining voice of confessional poetry, Hughes said almost nothing in public about the marriage - until this sequence of eighty-eight poems, most addressed directly to Plath as "you", revisited their meeting, their marriage, her father Otto, and her death.

The prescribed selection is seven poems. "The Shot" re-reads Plath's whole life as the flight of a bullet, fired by grief for her dead father. "Trophies" answers her early poem "Pursuit", turning its panther of desire loose on both lovers. "Moonwalk" remakes the Spanish honeymoon as a lunar nightmare, like a photographic negative. "Error" is the sequence's plainest self-accusation, confessing that Hughes led Plath into an isolated Devon dreamland that could not hold. "A Short Film" watches a home movie of Plath as a child and finds in it a delayed detonation of grief. "The Beach" records the failing marriage of November 1962, and "A Picture of Otto" descends into the underworld to address Plath's father directly, replacing the monster of her poem "Daddy" with a mild bee-keeping scholar and claiming kinship with him.

Read together, the poems are less a chronological story than a set of confessional strategies - ways of addressing the dead, re-reading a marriage, and setting a survivor's memory against Plath's own famous account.

The foundation of the sequence is that it speaks to the dead. Almost every poem is a sustained apostrophe to Plath as "you", a "you" who cannot answer, and this single grammatical choice builds the whole confessional world. The address creates intimacy and asymmetry at once: the reader overhears a private letter, while the survivor keeps the relics and the microphone. In "A Short Film" she survives only as a few seconds of film, a measure of how little of her remains.

Grief in Birthday Letters is always belated, and memory is never a clear record. The home movie of "A Short Film" turns dangerous only because the survivors now know the grave it is wired to, its pain felt for something that has already happened. "Moonwalk" develops the honeymoon like a photographic negative, a romantic memory arriving drained and estranged, and in "The Beach" Hughes's attempt to brighten a failing day only deepens the gloom.

The sequence's most contested feeling is guilt, and it moves in two directions at once. "Error" is direct self-arraignment: Hughes takes responsibility for bringing Plath to Devon, even as he reaches for a mitigating unconsciousness, as though he led her there while sleepwalking. "The Shot" moves the other way, relocating the cause of Plath's death in her father - "When his death touched the trigger" - and casting Hughes as an unwitting casualty of the bullet's flight.

Rather than expose feeling directly, Hughes translates it into myth. The clinical opening of "The Shot", "Your worship needed a god. / Where it lacked one, it found one", recasts Plath's life as a psychology to be explained; "Trophies" lets a beast, the panther of Plath's "Pursuit", carry the passion; and "The Beach" makes even her unhappiness instinctive, an animal's struggle for release. Myth dignifies the grief with the scale of tragedy, and it quietly serves the defence, because a life governed by fate or the father is a life for which the surviving husband is less to blame.

Finally, the sequence is written against a prior text. "A Picture of Otto" re-enters Plath's "Daddy" at its most famous image - "You stand there at the blackboard: Lutheran / Minister manqué" - to overwrite her fascist tyrant with a limited real man, a scholar of bees, before fusing husband and father into one fate: "Your ghost inseparable from my shadow". Hughes's confession is always also an argument about hers, a contest over whose account of a single life the world will believe.

• Life on Mars
• Selected Poems
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
• As I Lay Dying
• The White Album
• Northanger Abbey
• Memento
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