After reading the story re Ted Hughes being a "satanist" I thought I
would forward this. I only have one book signed by the Poet Laureate
of the USA and this one, I did not like and I do not even remember his
name.
Have always loved poetry - Fitzgerald translated the Rubyait and to this
day it is said he haunts Merton's Rectory - (his real name was Purcell,
but he took name of grandfather Fitzgerald to use the Coat of Arms).
Always loved Shakespeare - believe he did write parts of othe bible -
when he died, some thought in odd in later years, the man had no library
- no books - nothing, but a legacy of great works an that was because,
he was unique, and an original - he did not steal the work of others -
he was also a pagan as was Hughes.
Some called Charles Manson a Jesus Freak - some called him a Satanist -
he studied a lot in prison; and, many great poets went to prison - but
to call Hughes a Satanist? Manson ead a lot on masonry - but never saw
the beauty in the art and he sure as hell had the mind of a killer, for
he thought he had the mind of a great intellectual...give him 80 on the
IQ for like many he never had original thought, in his life. His eyes,
were dead - no soul.
This item at the time of his death speaks for itselfl, for I think
Hughes was a beautiful man - well to each his own, some people prefer
rap music and "kill old whitey" to the works of a great man such as
Hughes.
Saba
A POET'S UNMISTAKABLE VOICE
Remembering Ted Hughes
By: Paul Elie
When I got to the church, on foot, slurping the last of a cappuccino
from a Styrofoam cup, half a dozen of those big black hearse-like
English taxis had formed a kind of procession in the roundabout out
front, and some of the other guests were climbing out: middle-aged
people leaning on their umbrellas like canes, the men and the women
alike dressed in dark suits, because this was a memorial service, yes,
but also because it was another rainy day in London. We proffered
tickets in sherbety colors and were shown in through the open doors.
Because I had a blue ticket, a docent in a long gown told me to walk all
the way up the nave, and so I did, past the rood screen, past the pipe
organ, past the plaques put up to honor priests and generals and other
first-class English dead, until I reached the north transept, where I
claimed a seat on the aisle and craned my neck. I had seen Westminster
Abbey before, but from behind a camera as a tourist: It was smaller than
I had pictured it, and more delicate, as though built from blocks of
shortbread that had improbably withstood eight hundred years of
Catholicism, Protestantism, imperialism, liberalism, secularism,
tourism—what next?
Past the altar was Poet's Corner, where, someday soon, a plaque would be
dedicated to the poet I had come from New York on the red-eye to
remember, though he and I had never met. Today, however, the entire
cathedral was dedicated to him. The place was packed. Once Prince
Charles and the Queen Mum had taken their seats "God Save the Queen" was
sung, and a man in surplice and cassock rose at the lectern to say that
because Ted Hughes had been an unusual poet, this would be an unusual
service.
When he died last October, Ted Hughes was eulogized as one of the only
truly great English writers of his time: poet, translator, interpreter
of Shakespeare, author of beloved children's books, handsome husband of
the tormented genius Sylvia Plath, and poet laureate to the queen (which
is why he was being celebrated at Westminster Abbey that day). I work as
an editor with his American publisher, and I had worked with Hughes on
his last few books: a volume of astonishing versions of tales from
Ovid's Metamorphoses, translations of plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, and
Racine, and Birthday Letters, a book of poems written in the form of
letters to Plath, who killed herself in 1963. Hughes and I—I never
called him Ted—exchanged letters and spoke on the phone every month or
so, always about poetry or his books.
It was amusing to see him and his wife, Carol, who were said to live in
an ancient farmhouse in Devonshire, gradually master the use of a
computer and a fax machine; I am proud to have helped nudge him in the
direction of the Ovid book, which I think is going to last, and I
especially like a letter he wrote to me describing what he was trying to
do in his translation of Racine's Phèdre: To create "a dialogue like a
face-to-face duel with flame throwers."
When he died, I still had a message from him on my answering machine
tape, his deep orator's voice thanking me for sending him a book on
Shakespeare that he must have known he would never get to read. It was a
working relationship, only that, two people on the telephone talking
about words on a page, and yet, in the scheme of things, it was one that
meant a lot to me.
Maybe it was because I hardly knew him that I looked to the memorial
service to reveal his character. It would not be right to say that I was
disappointed, for it was a beautiful and moving service. The Tallis
Scholars sang music from the English Renaissance, and we all sang
Blake's "Jerusalem," faltering in the hard parts; Alfred Brendel played
an adagio from a Beethoven sonata; some friends read poems and made
remarks, and Seamus Heaney, in a kind of keynote, spoke movingly of his
great friend, putting him in the English tradition of King Arthur and
Beowulf and recalling the funeral in Devon—the dead poet's coffin, in
the hands of family and friends, borne toward its final resting place at
knee-height "as though on a current of light and air."
That image, it happened, echoed an image in the scriptural text, from
Revelation, that had been read at the other end of the service an hour
earlier, and that Her Majesty's Stationery Office had printed in big
dark type in the program. It read: "Then he showed me the river of the
water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of
the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also on either
side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit,
yielding its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree were for the
healing of the nations."
The passage is the natural ending of the book of Revelation (the rest is
a kind of epilogue), and so the natural ending of the Scriptures; it
goes on to describe the attributes of the servants of God—they shall
see his face, his name shall be on their foreheads, etc.—and the life
promised to them: "And night shall be no more; they need no light of
lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they shall reign
for ever and ever."
I learned all that a few days later when I checked my Jerusalem Bible
back in New York.
That morning in Westminster Abbey, as Seamus Heaney returned to his seat
and I sat fidgeting in mine, I thought to myself that something was
missing here, and not just the spirit of the dead. It was the
expectation that such a service should reflect the dead at all.
Had I brought that with me from America? Or was it a Catholic
expectation, the impulse to measure the distance between the liturgy and
the life actually lived? I wondered if Ted Hughes, who had had cancer
for a couple of years before he died, had taken a part in planning the
service. It was beautiful, yes, and moving, and yet the service—not
just the cathedral or the pomp and circumstance but the whole enterprise
of Christian memorial—seemed to me to stand between us and the man we
had come to remember.
Ted Hughes, as I understood him through his books, was no vague or
vestigial Christian, someone who had believed in some fashion once upon
a time and still bore the mark of the Lamb on his forehead; no, as far
as I knew he was his own kind of pagan—and I use the old, charged word
because it seems to me to convey his vital relationship to the works of
nature and those of classical antiquity, which, along with Shakespeare,
were the deepest sources for his poetry.
In Hughes's work, the mythological is the real: the doomed heroines in
his versions of Phèdre and Alcestis seem to come straight out of his
own life (his second wife killed herself as well), and the mythological
superstructure of Birthday Letters, in which Plath's father looms
spectrally as a god of the dead calling his daughter to join him there,
is arguably the most personal aspect of those frankly personal poems,
there as the author's idiosyncratic reading of an episode that has been
scrutinized every which way—as his effort to reclaim, through
inscrutable imagery, the story of his own life and the lives of those
who were close to him.
My question, then: How do these things, the pagan and the Christian, fit
together? Will they cosmically reconcile, as in the passage at the end
of Revelation, the two shores joined by the river that runs through
them? Or is reconciliation an earthly affair—is it the business of
believing Christians to try to reconcile the two impulses in our own
lives and the world around us? Or is no reconciliation necessary,
because in the end one set of stories and symbols is as good as another,
and you work with what is at hand?
The service was coming to an end; the program indicated a song from
Cymbeline, followed by the Lord's Prayer. I could see Prince Charles
clutching his own program across the way—a man who, like Ted Hughes,
had seen his own wife die young and had been blamed for her death, the
whole episode taking on the stature of a twentieth-century myth—and it
occurred to me that he had sat through her funeral in this very place.
Watching Princess Diana's funeral on television, I had been struck by
the fact that Westminster Abbey seemed to gain in aura the further its
Christian origins and purpose receded into the distance; and now I felt
that it was no longer a Christian place at all but a sort of natural
wonder, erected in the thirteenth century and maintained for seven
hundred years so that modern English people would have someplace grand
and solemn in which to pay tribute to their dead.
"Fear no more the heat o' the sun, / Nor the furious winter's rages; /
Thou thy worldly task hast done / Home art gone, and ta'en thy
wages...." It was Shakespeare, of course, instantly recognizable. "No
exorcizer harm thee! / Nor no witchcraft charm thee! / Ghost unlaid
forbear thee! / Nothing ill come near thee! / Quiet consummation have; /
And renowned be thy grave!" But I could hardly hear the words for the
sound of my thoughts. Only later, standing in the courtyard outside the
cathedral chatting with some of the other guests, did I realize that the
voice reading them aloud had been Ted Hughes's voice, the voice I had
supposedly gotten to know him by these past few years.
The others exulted: How wonderfully strange it had been to hear Ted
speak from beyond the grave! It had been the high point of the service,
hadn't it? I nodded agreement. I had missed him, alas; and as I imagined
him, near death, reading those lines about death into a tape recorder as
though to make sure that he would be present at his own memorial, I
recognized what I had admired in Ted Hughes—the craftiness, the
fidelity to his great precursors, the unabashedly large sense of
himself, the attention to last things; and, though I had never really
known him, I missed him all over again.
Paul Elie, editor of A Tremor of Bliss: Contemporary Writers on the
Saints, is a frequent Commonweal contributor.
Commonweal
home page7/16/99
table of contents7/16/99
EDITORIAL
http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/1999/990716/990716.htm
