Ted Hughes’s Pike versus Sylvia Plath’s Mirror Essay -- Ted Hughes Syl

Hughess Pike, Plaths MirrorAbstract Sylvia Plaths 1961 poem Mirror can be read as a reappearance to TedHughess 1958 poem Pike. Plath shrinks her husbands mythic grandeur toreveal a psychodrama of the self as a vanishing faade.Sylvia Plaths 1961 poem Mirror builds up to the appearance of a terriblefish, an internalized counterpart of the watching consciousness under the darkpond of Ted Hughess 1958 poem Pike. Whereas Hughess poem evokes thespirit of the place and the genetic proportion of Englands violent past, a versionperhaps of Clarences dream of the sea of fish-eaten victims of the Wars of theRoses in Shakespeares history play Richard III, and the sunless sea from whereancestral voices prophecy war in Coleridges Kubla Khan, Plaths Mirrornarrates a lifetime of interactions with a nameless, faceless woman and imaginesaging as disfigurement. In Hughess poem, pike are both weapons (cf. a pikeas an instrument of warfare) and vital presences in the physical world thatprovide inspirati on for his poetic vocation. In Plaths poem, a fish resides in themirror, a monstrous figuration of coming to recognize oneself as an aging,vanishing faade. The poet speaks through the voice of her mirror.Exploring timeless, primitive, ruthless fish, Pike chronicles a series ofvignettes that, observes Matthew Fisher, begin in plain diction, big(p) anobjective, scientific description Pike, three inches long, perfect/ Pike in all parts,green tigering the gold. The word tigering in the second line, pace Fisher,perhaps evokes William Blakes Tiger, tiger, enthusiastic bright/In the forest of thenight, an image of the destructive, devouring element of Creation. The greenand go... ...Hughess Pike, Explicator 474 (Summer 1989) 58-59.Freud, Sigmund. (1919) The Uncanny, trans. James Strachey, StandardEdition of the established Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. JamesStrachey (London Hogarth, 1955), XVII 218-252.Hughes, Ted. Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London Faber, 2004).Hughe s, Ted. Letter to Leonard and Esther Baskin, January 1959 (LondonBritish Library manuscripts).Hughes, Ted, ed. Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems (New York HarperPerennial1982).Keegan, Paul, ed., Ted Hughes, Collected Poems (London Faber, 2004).Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (New York 1982).La Belle, Jenijoy. Herself Beheld The Literature of the looking Glass (IthacaCornell University Press, 1988).Porter, David, Beasts/Shamans/Baskin The Contemporary Aesthetics of TedHughes, Boston Review 22 (Fall 1974) 13-25.