"Morning Song" & "Full Moon & Little Frieda" Jacks

Juxtaposition of clumsy and unpoetic imagery versus elevated metaphors

• Prosaic imagery such as “fat gold watch”, “slapped your footsoles” and “cow-heavy and floral” de-romanticises motherhood and childbirth, a topic which (especially in the 1960s) was supposed to be seen as the feminine ideal

• This juxtaposes sophisticated imagery, such as “new statue. in a drafty museum, your nakedness shadows our safety”, which plays into said tropes.

• This may exemplify Plath’s mixed feelings about the experience.

Elemental metaphor

• Plath alludes to elemental imagery — namely, clouds and wind: this is seen in the “drafty museum” as well as “im no more your mother than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow effacement at the wind’s hand”. This may allude to feelings of instability and uncertainty, creating an uncomfortable undertone that mimics such emotions. Her clouded mind.

Cloud Metaphor

• Compares motherhood to a cloud producing a puddle so that it can watch itself. She is concerned that she will become like that, a mother who projects her self onto her daughter so that she can possibly right the wrongs she made.

Auditory imagery

• Plath continually refers to auditory imagery — particularly focusing on the child’s cries; for example “I wake to listen: a far sea moves in my ear. Once cry, and I stumble from bed” — this portrays a rather quiet and intimate moment wherein she nevertheless is drawn away, and is then further perturbed by the child’s cry.

Consonance & perspective

• Plath mixes plosive consonance amidst notes of sibilance which again mirrors her mixed emotions

• Plath introduces the poem with the 2nd person personal pronoun “you” — indicating a personal note

Ariel (1965)

• Enjambment

• Consonance (words sounding / looking similar) & sibilance that mirrors the conflicted mood of the poem

• Mist/fog is often used to replicate derealisation or a clouded identity in Plath’s poetry — e.g. in “Sheep in Fog” — therefore the clouds here may replicate such feelings

• Confessionalism

• Elements of absurdism — both in imagery and ideology

• Alison Barrett: She quotes Betty Friedan who suggests that after WWII ideas surrounding women returned to Victorian ideology — i.e., women should be innocent and submissive & are defined by their capacity to procreate. She says this explains why Plath feels estranged from her role as a mother in “Morning Song”.

• Letters Home (1975): Published by Hughes and Plath’s mother (Aurelia) posthumously, shows letters between Plath and family revealing intimate details such as tensions with her mother, her marriage, and being a mother herself.

• At the time of writing this, Frieda would have been learning to speak

"Plath was a symbolic artist persistently misread as a confessional one." 

Juxtaposition of clumsy & unpoetic imagery versus elevated metaphors

• Hughes uses similarly prosaic imagery such as “A dog bark and the clank of a bucket” which also uses simplistic auditory imagery & fricative consonance that perpetuates the unmelodic tone

• This juxtaposes more complicated imagery such as the moon being personified

Tension (incl. structure)

• “A pail lifted, still and brimming — mirror to tempt a first star to tremor” — this creates a sense of the sublime which juxtaposes the “Small evening” with his daughter yet connects the two variations of awe and nervousness

• This is replicated in “A dark river of blood…balancing unspilled milk”, which similarly draws upon tension with more explicitly grim symbolism

Celestial symbolism

• Hughes uses epistrophe to draw further upon the subliminality of parenthood in alignment with celestial bodies: “The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work, that points at him amazed” — this simile personifies the moon which draws it closer to the concept of parenthood

Sibilance & perspective

• Sibilance throughout the poem draws upon typical conventions of suspense

• Hughes also uses the 2nd person pronoun “you” — again creating a touch of familiarity and intimacy in his address of Frieda.

Wodwo (1967)

• Hughes warps the structure amidst the metaphor of the cattle which again disrupts familiarity and conventions and therefore creates disillusion and discomfort

• Enjambment

• After that, the stanzas are all a single line — jumpy and fragmented. Shows the personal nature of the poem as it is coming straight from himself

• Celestial figures to convey the sublime

• Motif of violence — blood

• Modernism — Hughes slightly strays from typical poetic structures by indenting a middle stanza

• Romanticism — finding the sublime in nature

• Birthday Letters (1998)

• The Wodwo collection was composed after 3 years since Plath’s suicide where he did not write anything. In it, he tends to ask the question “What am I?” — this poem explores his fatherhood

• Hughes described the Wodwo collection as a descent into madness

• Frieda’s first word was “moon”

FMALF is “a poem about primal wonder … reciprocated wonder on the part of the universe”

• Both poems show a mix of awe and fear in relation to parenthood — however, Plath seems more uncomfortable and disillusioned with the idea, feeling that her identity is being erased, while Hughes seems more disoncerted and miniscule in comparison to the feat, which moreso reflects fear

• Both draw upon sounds & elemental/celestial imagery to convey this

• Hughes’ poem was written after Plath’s death — this may be why the poem seems more fearful and sinister as he dwells on his regrets and the uncertainty of single parenthood