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Birthday Letters...

I am reading Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes. I am not typically a reader of poetry (I do love Shakespeare and Yeats though), but I am finding this book completely amazing and evocative. I suppose it's a sort of rebuttal for the Plath-ivists (who have chiseled the name "Hughes" off of Sylvia's headstone so many times that it is now engraved in bronze) out there . It's been years since I've read Plath but I am finding Ted Hughes' account of their marriage fascinating. So far my favorite poem is Ouija and if you will forgive me, I'll copy some of it here.

More often serious. Once, as we bent there, I asked:
'Shall we be famous?' and you snatched your hand upwards
As if something had grabbed it from under.
Your tears flashed, your face was contorted,
Your voice cracked, it was thunder and flash together:
'And give yourself to the glare? Is that what you want?
Why should you want to be famous?
Don't you see - fame will ruin everything.'
I was stunned. I thought I had joined
Your association of ambition
To please you and your mother,
To fulfil your mother's ambition
That we be ambitious. Otherwise
I'd be fishing off a rock
In Western Australia. So it seemed suddenly. You wept,
You wouldn't go on with Ouija. Nothing
I could think of could explain
Your shock and crying. Only
Maybe you'd picked up a whisper that I could not,
Before our glass could stir, some still small voice:
'Fame will come. Fame especially for you.
Fame cannot be avoided. And when it comes
You will have paid for it with your happiness,
Your husband and your life.'

See what I mean?