Birthday Letters Quotes

“Nobody wanted your dance,
Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your floundering
Drowning life and your effort to save yourself,
Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil,
Looking for something to give.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“The dreamer in her
Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it.
That moment the dreamer in me
Fell in love with her and I knew it”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“What happened casually remains -”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“Do as you like with me. I'm your parcel. I have only our address on me. Open me, or readdress me.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“In the pit of red
You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness

But the jewel you lost was blue.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“And you will never know what a battle
I fought to keep the meaning of my words
Solid with the world we were making.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“I had let it all grow. I had supposed
It was all OK. Your life
Was a liner I voyaged in.
Costly education had fitted you out.
Financiers and committees and consultants
Effaced themselves in the gleam of your finish.
You trembled with the new life of those engines.

That first morning,
Before your first class at College, you sat there
Sipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not,
What eyes waited at the back of the class
To check your first professional performance
Against their expectations. What assessors
Waited to see you justify the cost
And redeem their gamble. What a furnace
Of eyes waited to prove your metal. I watched
The strange dummy stiffness, the misery,
Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, ugly
Half-approximation to your idea
Of the properties you hoped to ease into,
And your horror in it. And the tanned
Almost green undertinge of your face
Shrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaited
Head pathetically tiny.

You waited,
Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezers
Of the life that judges you, and I saw
The flayed nerve, the unhealable face-wound
Which was all you had for courage.
I saw that what you gripped, as you sipped,
Were terrors that killed you once already.
Now I see, I saw, sitting, the lonely
Girl who was going to die.

That blue suit.
A mad, execution uniform,
Survived your sentence. But then I sat, stilled,
Unable to fathom what stilled you
As I looked at you, as I am stilled
Permanently now, permanently
Bending so briefly at your open coffin.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“You were overloaded. I said nothing.
I said nothing. The stone man made soup.
The burning woman drank it.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“But the jewel you lost was blue.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“But inside your sob-sodden Kleenex

And your Saturday night panics,

Under your hair done this way and that way,

Behind what looked like rebounds

And the cascade of cries diminuendo,

You were undeflected.

You were gold-jacketed, solid silver,

Nickel-tipped. Trajectory perfect

As through ether.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“So missed everything
in the white, blindfolded, rigid faces
of those women. I felt their frailty, yes:
friable, burnt aluminium.
Fragile, like the mantle of a gas-lamp.
But made nothing
of that massive, starless, mid-fall, falling
heaven of granite
stopped, as if in a snapshot,
by their hair.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“We were where we we had never been in our lives.
Visitors--visiting even ourselves.

The bats were part of the sun's machinery,
Connected to the machinery of the flowers
By the machinery of insects. The bats' meaning

Oiled the unfailing logic of the earth.
Cosmic requirement--on the wings of a goblin.
A rebuke to our flutter of half-participation...

Those bats had their eyes open. Unlike us,
They knew how, and when, to detach themselves
From the love that moves the sun and other stars.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“In my position, the right witchdoctor

Might have caught you in flight with his bare hands,

Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other,

Godless, happy, quieted.

I managed

A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“Your journal pages. Your effort to cry words”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“And as if reporting some felony to the police they let you know you were not John Donne.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“But red
Was what you wrapped around you.
Blood red.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“I invoked you, bribing Fate to produce you.
Were you conjuring me? I had no idea
How I was becoming necessary,
Or what emergency surgery Fate would make
Of my casual self-service.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“Their homeopathic letters,
Envelopes full of carefully broken glass
To lodge behind your eyes so you would see”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“Day by day his sister grew
Paler with the wound
She could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed it
Each day with her blue Breton jacket.

- from Life After Death”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“The Tender Place

Your temples , where the hair crowded in ,
Were the tender place. Once to check
I dropped a file across the electrodes
of a twelve-volt battery -- it exploded
Like a grenade. Somebody wired you up.
Somebody pushed the lever. They crashed
The thunderbolt into your skull.
In their bleached coats, with blenched faces,
They hovered again
To see how you were, in your straps.
Whether your teeth were still whole .
The hand on the calibrated lever
Again feeling nothing
Except feeling nothing pushed to feel
Some squirm of sensation . Terror
Was the cloud of you
Waiting for these lightnings. I saw
An oak limb sheared at a bang.
You your Daddy's leg . How many seizures
Did you suffer this god to grab you
By the roots of the hair? The reports
Escaped back into clouds. What went up
Vaporized? Where lightning rods wept copper
And the nerve· threw off its skin
Like a burning child
Scampering out of the bomb-flash. They dropped you
A rigid bent bit of wire
Across the Boston City grid. The lights
In the Senate House dipped
As your voice dived inwards
Right through the bolt-hole basement.
Came up, years later,
Over-exposed, like an X-ray --
Brain-map still dark-patched
With the scorched-earth scars
Of your retreat . And your words ,
Faces reversed from the light ,
Holding in their entrails.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“So this was the reverse of dazzling Nauset.
The flip of the coin - the flip of an ocean fallen
Dream-face down. And here, at my feet, in the suds,
The other face, the real, staring upwards.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“Now I wanted to show you such a beach
Would set inside your head another jewel,
And lift you like the gentlest electric shock
Into an altogether other England--
An Avalon for which I had the wavelength,
Deep inside my head a little crystal.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“And as it grew up and began to enjoy itself
What would we do with an unpredictable,
Powerful, bounding fox?
That long-mouthed, flashing temperament?
That necessary nightly twenty miles
And that vast hunger for everything beyond us?
How would we cope with its cosmic derangements
Whenever we moved?

...If I had grasped that whatever comes with a fox
Is what tests a marriage and proves it a marriage--
I would not have failed the test.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“And the knowledge
Inside the hill on which you are sitting,
A moated fort hill, bigger than your house,
Failed to reach the picture. While your next moment,
Coming towards you like an infantryman
Returning slowly out of no-man's-land,
Bowed under something, never reached you--
Simply melted into the perfect light.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“What can I tell you that you do not know
Of the life after death?

Your son’s eyes, which had unsettled us
With your Slavic Asiatic
Epicanthic fold, but would become
So perfectly your eyes,
Became wet jewels,
The hardest substance of the purest pain
As I fed him in his high white chair.
Great hands of grief were wringing and wringing
His wet cloth of face. They wrung out his tears.
But his mouth betrayed you — it accepted
The spoon in my disembodied hand
That reached through from the life that had survived you.

Day by day his sister grew
Paler with the wound
She could not see or touch or feel, as I dressed it
Each day with her blue Breton jacket.

By night I lay awake in my body
The Hanged Man
My neck-nerve uprooted and the tendon
Which fastened the base of my skull
To my left shoulder
Torn from its shoulder-root and cramped into knots —
I fancied the pain could be explained
If I were hanging in the spirit
From a hook under my neck-muscle.

Dropped from life
We three made a deep silence
In our separate cots.

We were comforted by wolves.
Under that February moon and the moon of March
The Zoo had come close.
And in spite of the city
Wolves consoled us. Two or three times each night
For minutes on end
They sang. They had found where we lay.
And the dingos, and the Brazilian-maned wolves —
All lifted their voices together
With the grey Northern pack.

The wolves lifted us in their long voices.
They wound us and enmeshed us
In their wailing for you, their mourning for us,
They wove us into their voices. We lay in your death,
In the fallen snow, under falling snow,

As my body sank into the folk-tale
Where the wolves are singing in the forest
For two babes, who have turned, in their sleep,
Into orphans
Beside the corpse of their mother.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“You carried it all, like shards and moults on a tray,
To be reassembled
In the poem to be written so prettily,
And to be worn like a fiesta mask
By the daemon that gazed through it
As through empty sockets – that still gazes
Through it at me.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“How could Fate stage a scenario so symbolic without having secreted the tragedy ending and the ironic death?”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“The lawn lay like the pristine waiting page
Of a prison report.
Who would write what upon it
I never gave a thought.

A dumb creature, looping at the furnace door
On its demon’s prong,
Was a pen already writing
Wrong is right, right wrong.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“The rag rug
That had heaped out onto your lap
Slid to the floor. There it lay, coiled
Between us. However it came,
And wherever it found its tongue, its fang, its meaning,
It survived our Eden.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters

“Like a newer or much older religion
In me alone, to be carried
Everywhere with me -- deeper catacombs,
And with a stronger God.”
― Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters