Perfect Light
What astounds many readers about Ted Hughes’s
Birthday Letters(1998) is the tender, honest, and
confessional voice that rises from the poems.
Hughes is known for his emotional detachment
from the situations about which he wrote, an aloof-
ness of voice that reveals little about his speaker’s
sentiment and even less about his own. His lan-
guage is often harsh and explicit in describing vi-
olence, whether in the natural world of animals or
in human society, and his subjects avoid personal
experience, particularly any overt reference to his
wife, fellow poet Sylvia Plath. But then he pub-
lished an entire book written in memory of her.
Birthday Lettersincludes eighty-eight poems
composed over a twenty-five- to thirty-year period,
and traces the couple’s brief but saturated life to-
gether, from the first date and marriage to separa-
tion and suicide. Some of the poems are thought to
have been inspired by specific letters and pho-
tographs of Plath that Hughes rediscovered while
preparing her papers for sale to Smith College.
“Perfect Light” is one such poem.
Based on a 1962 photo of Plath in a field of
daffodils holding their two children, “Perfect
Light” describes the physical scene and ends with
an ominous metaphor suggesting the mother’s in-
escapable fate. With atypical softness and senti-
mentality, Hughes addresses Plath directly as the
“you” in the poem, portraying her in angelic terms
and comparing her innocence to that of the chil-
dren, before concluding that such a blissful moment
was doomed to fade into a “perfect light.” Birth-Ted Hughes
1998
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