birthday letters

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, 1958 by James F. Coyne

Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes is a collection of poems addressed to Sylvia Plath, written over a period of more than 25 years, all after her suicide in 1963. A powerful telling of their life together and his recollections of her. I'm loving it.

The Owl
I saw my world again through your eyes
As I would see it again through your children's eyes.
Through your eyes it was foreign.
Plain hedge hawthorns were peculiar aliens,
A mystery of peculiar lore and doings,
Anything wild, on legs, in your eyes
Emerged at a point of exclamation
As if it had appeared to dinner guests
In the middle of the table. Common mallards
Were artifacts of some unearthliness,
Their wooings were a Lypnagogic film
Unreeled by the river. Impossible
To comprehend the comfort of their feet
In the freezing water. You were a camera
Recording reflections you could not fathom.
I made my world perform its utmost for you.
You took it all in with an incredulous joy
Like a mother handed her new baby
By the midwife. Your frenzy made me giddy.
It woke up my dumb, ecstatic boyhood
Of fifteen years before. My masterpiece
Came that black night on the Grantchester road.
I sucked the throaty thin woe of a rabbit
Out of my wetted knuckle, by a corpse
Where a tawny owl was enquiring.
Suddenly it swooped up, splaying its pinions
Into my face, taking me for a post.

- by Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters