“Last Letter” is a previously unknown poem by Ted Hughes, about the night his estranged wife Sylvia Plath killed herself. Actor Jonathan Pryce has read extracts for Channel 4 News (above video).
The poem, “Last Letter” will be published in full in the New Statesman tomorrow.
It begins: “What happened that night? Your final night” and goes on to chronicle the last few days before the former poet laureate’s wife Sylvia Plath killed herself in February 1963, aged 30.
Discovery
The New Statesman discovered the poem in the British Library archive, with help from Mr Hughes’ widow, Carol Hughes.
Ted Hughes died in 1999. His last collection – “Birthday Letters” – was published in 1998 and broke his silence, held since Miss Plath’s death, over their life together and his life after her suicide.
“Last Letter” was the poem he did not include in the collection.
Part of the poem imagines, or attempts to, the emptiness of Miss Plath’s final hours.
“What happened that night, inside your hours
Is as unknown as if it never happened.
What accumulation of your whole life,
Like effort unconscious, like birth
Pushing through the membrane of each slow second
Into the next, happened
Only as if it could not happen
As if it was not happening.”
Miss Plath killed herself a few months after Mr Hughes left her and their two children – Frieda and Nicholas – for another woman. Before gassing herself, Miss Plath made sure the children were safe and left them food and drink.
Six years later, the woman Mr Hughes left with – Assia Wevill – also killed herself and their four-year-old daughter, Shura.