(no subject)

[vriad_lee]

The Minotaur by Ted Hughes


The mahogany table-top you smashed
Had been the broad plank top
Of my mother's heirloom sideboard-
Mapped with the scars of my whole life.

That came under the hammer.
That high stool you swung that day
Demented by my being
Twenty minutes late for baby-minding.

'Marvellous!' I shouted, 'Go on,
Smash it into kindling.
That's the stuff you're keeping out of your poems!'
And later, considered and calmer,

'Get that shoulder under your stanzas
And we'll be away.' Deep in the cave of your ear
The goblin snapped his fingers.
So what had I given him?

The bloody end of the skein
That unravelled your marriage,
Left your children echoing
Like tunnels in a labyrinth.

Left your mother a dead-end,
Brought you to the horned, bellowing
Grave of your risen father
And your own corpse in it.

Comments

[wickenden.livejournal.com]

put that rage into your poem --

[vriad-lee.livejournal.com]

ahhhh, and then 'And we'll be away', what does that mean? so now i see it in a different light, his saying 'Get that shoulder under your stanzas' was the 'bloody end of the skein', i didn't get it first

[wickenden.livejournal.com]

it's largely ambiguous to me. I just thought that the shoulder line seemed to work that way in one reading. I'm interested now to ask my friend who did her dissertation on Plath. She loves/hates Hughes.

[wickenden.livejournal.com]

I guess what I mean about it being largely ambiguous is:

-- I read it quickly, and blurted out a suggestion. It's an interesting enough poem to keep reading, but I blab quickly, before I've thought much.

-- It bugs me to have to take hermenuetical readings of poetry, even though I can't not do it. I know only a teensy bit about these two, actually less than that, just a bunch of factoids, and the poem or two I've bothered to actually read. Do I need to know anything about them specifically -- no unless I want the sort of reading that comes close to one he might have intended. Too much work, I'm interested in what bubbles out without any insight into their lives other than the evidence of the poem.

God, I'm flatulent today.

[vriad-lee.livejournal.com]

i hate analysing poems, they never become better for being analysed, for one thing. but one can't help wondering you know!

[wickenden.livejournal.com]

to have been a fly on their wall!

[vriad-lee.livejournal.com]

oh fuck thanks a lot