Red

Yesterday afternoon I finally laid to rest my copy of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. It's a beautiful book about the state of the mind, the ways in which it pulls and pushes, and the fluidity with which this can rush. The fact that it's semi-autobiographical is simply the marrow inside the bone.

Late last night I picked up the Ted Hughes poem collection Birthday Letters, and sat poised in bed flicking backwards through the anthology and sporadically stopping on one of the 88 poems. On my part, Birthday Letters was a complete whim of a purchase from Waterstones a couple of years back. Poetry isn't like a novel or play, where there's a resolution of some kind towards the end, it's a chunk of language that can be entered from any angle and can pass straight through you. So to that end, I've always found poetry less gratifying than other strands of literature. But I think some of Hughes' pieces are really wonderful, and you get a real grasp of the weight that his relationship with Plath had upon him.

'Red' is one of my favourites. It comes last in the collection, and so there's a part of me that believes it is last for a reason and out of all the verses this should seemingly present a conclusion of some sort. It doesn't any more than any of his other poems, but, as Seamus Heaney quotes of the text, "To read Birthday Letters is to experience the psychic equivalent of 'the bends'. It takes you down to levels of pressure where the under-truths of sadness and endurance leave you gasping."


Red

Red was your colour.
If not red, then white. But red
Was what you wrapped around you.
Blood-red. Was it blood?
Was it red-ochre, for warming the dead?
Haematite to make immortal
The precious heirloom bones, the family bones.

When you had your way finally
Our room was red. A judgement chamber.
Shut casket for gems. The carpet of blood
Patterned with darkenings, congealments.
The curtains - ruby corduroy blood,
Sheer blood-falls from ceiling to floor.
The cushions the same. The same
Raw carmine along the window-seat.
A throbbing cell. Aztec altar - temple.

Only the bookshelves escaped into whiteness.

And outside the window
Poppies thin and wrinkle-frail
As the skin on blood,
Salvias, that your father named you after,
Like blood lobbing from a gash,
And roses, the heart's last gouts,
Catastrophic, arterial, doomed.

Your velvet long full skirt, a swathe of blood,
A lavish burgundy.
Your lips a dipped, deep crimson.
You revelled in red.
I felt it raw - like the crisp gauze edges
Of a stiffening wound. I could touch
The open vein in it, the crusted gleam.

Everything you painted you painted white
Then splashed it with roses, defeated it,
Leaned over it, dripping roses,
Weeping roses, and more roses,
Then sometimes, among them, a little bluebird.

Blue was better for you. Blue was wings.
Kingfisher blue silks from San Francisco
Folded your pregnancy
In crucible caresses.
Blue was your kindly spirit - not a ghoul
But electrified, a guardian, thoughtful.

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

But the jewel you lost was blue.