When compared, the ways that Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes write about nature and quite similar and quite different at the same time. They both share the same gloomy and depressing view on nature, their poems on the topic not really showing giving off any positive themes or vibes. However both differ in the sense that with Plath, the majority of her poems on nature are easily relatable to her own personal life and struggles whereas with Hughes, they are more literal, and you cannot really connect his poems on nature with his own personal life: there is less additional meaning.
When it comes down to their poems about nature, Plath and Hughes write about the same quite depressing themes: death, total silence and pain. The first of these is well illustrated in Tulips by Plath and Snowdrop by Hughes. In Tulips by Plath, the speaker is making reference to her deathbed “I didn’t want flowers [...] and be utterly empty”, suggesting that she only wants death, not flowers or anything else. This view is also shared by published critic Jeannine Dobbs who states “Not Tulips but death is the gift she wants”. In Snowdrop, a mouse has died, “Her pale head as heavy as metal.” And it clearly resembles Tulips “She too pursues her ends”: the mouse wants death, like Sylvia Plath. The silence and darkness is shown well in The Moon and the Yew Tree by Plath and Full Moon and Little Frieda by Hughes. In the former, Plath is describing her senses as she looks up from the grave “blackness-blackness and silence”. The repetition of blackness and the use of synesthesia on the first line, “light of the mind, cold and planetary” helps convey the deathly silence that reigns in the poem to reader. In Full Moon and Little Frieda, the silence that reigns is conveyed through personification of the evening “small evening shrunk to a dog bark” and an onomatopoeia “clank of a bucket”. And also later on, with the sudden contrast of sounds “Moon!, you cry suddenly”. The final main theme that is prominently shown in both Hughes’ and Plath’s nature poems is pain. It is best illustrated in Plath’s Poppies in July, where she is craving for it “If I could bleed”. She uses the metaphor “little bloody skirts”, referencing the red petals of the poppy and also alluding to pain. The color red is very vivid in this poem, which symbolizes pain. The pain that Hughes expresses is not as vivid and as colorful as Plath, but you feel it just as much because of the very powerful metaphors he uses “heart [...] as if moulded in brass”. It’s as if the mouse’s heart is being prevented from beating.
The same gloomy themes also come up when you look at all Plath’s nature poems. Almost all of them resemble each other in the themes that they transmit. For example, if you compare The Burnt Out Spa (written in 1959) with Winter Trees, which was one of her last poems, written in 1962. Despite them being written at the two extremities of her career, both have an identical theme: falling apart. In Winter Trees, it is already present in the title: a tree in winter is bare, and it’s leaves fallen off. In The Burnt Out Spa, this theme is transmitted metaphorically throughout the whole poem, “rusty teeth” and “eyes” could be interpreted as the pipes and the glass windows respectively. Pamela Annas, published author, states that “The dialectical tension between self and world is the location of meaning in Sylvia Plath’s late poems”. This could be interpreted . Another good example of nature poems with almost identical themes are Tulips and Poppies in October. Desperation and death are both very prominent. The desperation is shown through the idea that mouths are crying out, in Tulips, “They are opening like the mouth of a great African cat” and in Poppies in October, “That these late mouths should cry open”. The fact that a simile was used in Tulips makes the sense of desperation even more powerful. Death appears in Tulips in many ways, but most powerfully through the colour red “bowl of red blooms”. The alliteration here also helps make it powerful. Again, it appears in Poppies in October through the colour red very vividly, “whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly”. Plath’s choice of words here is also interesting: if she had said heart blooms though her shirt, it would not have been as powerful. A coat is a thick bit of clothing, whereas a shirt is light and thin.
Despite the apparent similarity between the nature poems of Plath and Hughes, there is also one main difference. When you look at Hughes’ poems, they are quite literal and not that personal, Plath’s on the other hand, it’s really the contextual and personal meaning that Plath is trying to convey and not the literal one. Plath’s The Moon and the Yew Tree and Hughes’ The Jaguar share a common theme: being trapped. In one, the speaker is trapped, looking up from the grave and in another there’s a jaguar pacing around his enclosure. The former is way more personal: there is a first person speaker, in The Jaguar it is third person. We can also associate the location in The Moon and the Yew Tree to the graveyard by Plath’s house in Devon whereas in The Jaguar, it’s just an unspecified zoo. Plath’s poem could also be interpreted as a slight attack on men, as she does not use any pronouns in the poem when referring to the yew tree. Two other nature poems which are deeply personal for Plath are Tulips and Poppies in July. In the former she shows this through the use of particular metaphor “a country as far away as health”. She is saying that at the time of writing she was not in the best of states whether it be mentally or physically. In reality, she had just suffered a miscarriage prior to writing the poem. In Poppies in July, she is expressing a rage powerfully, using the colour red as a medium of doing so: “clear red”, “bloodied” and “If I could bleed”. Her rage in this poem, and her search for more pain, is probably because she found out at around the time this poem was written that Ted Hughes was having an affair. This view is shared by the Sylvia Plath specialist and published critic Jack Folsom. He writes “she only hints at it in the poem, but we know the underlying truth-her husband’s betrayal of trust”. When we look at, arguably, Hughes’ most personal poem, Theology, it does contain clear references to his life “Adam ate the apple. Eve ate Adam. The serpent ate Eve”. Adam being Hughes, Eve being Plath and the serpent representing depression and anger. But the effect it has on the reader is no way near the effect that Plath’s personal nature poems do.
If we look at Plath’s poetry alone, we also see that it has changed. Some her early nature poems were quite literal, like Medallion. All she is doing is describing a dead snake, and you cannot really relate to anything in her personal life. The descriptions themselves are powerful, they employ many literary techniques like oxymorons “star and moon”, metaphors “jewels” and similes “inert as a shoelace” but they don’t imply anything special. Another of her quite early poems, The Burnt Out Spa, can also be interpreted literally. It describes a spa which has burned down “A monster of wood and rusty teeth”, “Are esplanade for crickets”. And like Medallion, a part from quite powerful descriptions using literary techniques, you can read the poem and not really see a second meaning. When these are compared with later poems, again using Tulips and The Moon and the Yew Tree as examples the obvious difference is that the latter poems are more personal. In The Moon and the Yew Tree, she is trapped and sees “blackness-blackness and silence”, which you could argue was very close to her situation in real life at the time. And again, in Tulips she shows that she is quite depressed talking about her deathbed, “I didn’t want flowers [...] and be utterly empty”.
In conclusion, Hughes and Plath and similar and different at the same time when writing about nature. Plath was really a confessional poet whereas Hughes was more descriptive, however they both clearly had the same view of things. One of the main reasons that Plath’s poetry is more interesting is that she almost always uses a first person speaker, whereas with Hughes, he also uses a third person speaker, which makes the poem less vibrant. In general, there were arguably more differences than similarities between the poetry of Plath and Hughes, but this just proves the famous saying is absolutely correct: opposites attract.
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