Ted Hughes is a incredibly successful poet in his own right, but he is perhaps most notable as being the once-husband of Sylvia Plath. He is criticized by her fans as contributing to her death through being unfaithful and later by destroying some of her unpublished works. There is a lot to be said for his work and his attempted marriage to Plath. He kept a strict media silence about their relationship, even till his death. In 1998 he published "Birthday Letters" which is a collection of poetry dedicated to his relationship with Plath.
Fever is a part of that publication.
Fever - Ted Hughes
You had a fever. You had a real ailment.
You had eaten a baddie.
You lay helpless and a little bit crazy
With the fever. You cried for America
And its medicine cupboard. You tossed
On the immovable Spanish galleon of a bed
In the shuttered Spanish house
That the sunstruck outside glare peered into
As into a tomb. 'Help me,' you whispered, 'help me.'
You rambled. You dreamed you were clambering
Into the well-hatch and, waking, you wanted
To clamber into the well-hatch - the all-clear
Short cut to the cool of the water,
The cool of the dark shaft, the best place
To find oblivion from your burning tangle
And the foreign bug. You cried for certain
You were going to die.
I bustled about.
I was nursemaid. I fancied myself at that.
I liked the crisis of the vital role.
I felt things had become real. Suddenly mother,
As a familiar voice, woke in me.
She arrived with the certain knowledge. I made a huge soup.
Carrots, tomatoes, peppers and onions,
A rainbow stir of steaming elixir. You
Had to become a sluice, a conduit
Of pure vitamin C. I promised you,
This had saved Voltaire from the plague.
I had to saturate you and flush you
With this simmer of essences.
I spooned it
Into your helpless, baby-bird gape, gently,
Masterfully, patiently, hour by hour.
I wiped your tear-ruined face, your exhausted face,
All loose with woe and abandon.
I spooned more and you gulped it like life,
Sobbing 'I'm going to die.'
As I paused
Between your mouthfuls, I stared at the readings
On your dials. Your cry jammed so hard
Over into the red of catastrophe
Left no space for worse. And I thought
How sick is she? Is she exaggerating?
And I recoiled, just a little,
Just for balance, just for symmetry,
Into sceptical patience, a little.
If it can be borne, why make so much of it?
'Come on, now,' I soothed. 'Don't be so scared.
It's only a bug, don't let it run away with you.'
What I was really saying was: 'Stop crying wolf.'
Other thoughts, chilly, familiar thoughts,
Came across the tightrope: 'Stop crying wolf,
Or else I shall not know, I shall not hear
When things get really bad.'
It seemed easy
Watching such thoughts come up in such good time.
Plenty of time to think: 'She is crying
As if the most impossible of all
Horrible things had happened -
Had already happened, was going on
Still happening, with the whole world
Too late to help.' Then the blank thought
Of the anaesthesia that helps creatures
Under the polar ice, and the callous
That eases overwhelmed doctors. A twisting thought
Of the overload of dilemma, the white-out,
That brings baffled planarian worms to a standstill
Where they curl up and die.
You were overloaded. I said nothing.
I said nothing. The stone man made soup.
The burning woman drank it.
For me, this poem is obviously about Plath. "the burning woman" is a direct reference to her poem Lady Lazarus. In which she refers to herself like a phoenix, "I turn and burn...Out of the ash/ I rise with my red hair/ And I eat men like air." In LL she also admits attempting to kill herself once a decade. Plath was notoriously tortured by the idea of her own mortality. Fever I believe is Hughes expression of his frustration with her condition. Like in genesis it says the world was created in 7 days and we know that not to be true, this poem is the evolution of their relationship - or I should say his patience with their relationship. He goes from being the care-giver to the "stone man." You can read some fear from him here, how the consistency of her condition frightened him. He manages to make himself seem a little victimized, the constant care-giver whom "hour by hour" had to stay and nurse someone to health.
I find myself re-reading the first verse over and over again. It's made clear that he knew, or alternatively now knows, that she was indeed ill. How much of that is hind-sight and how much of that was in the moment is hard to tell. The way the poem is structured - with these four verses, two shorter ones bracketing two longer narratives, allows me to speculate. In my opinion the first and last verses are his opinion of what happened at the time this was written, well after Plath's death. Additionally, the first long narrative is a retelling of the time she had gotten sick in Spain and he had nursed her back to health. This section is arguably a metaphor for their entire marriage. The following narrative is his reasoning. His fears for her making him cold. In a way it is a convenient excuse, in a way it makes him very human.
A question to you: when he speaks of anaesthesia, do you think he is referring to himself or Plath? why?
Iceland is by far one of the most gorgeous places I have ever been. They call it the land of a thousand rainbows, though that could be because they have over 10,000 waterfalls dotting the countryside. Your first impression getting off the airplane may not be the greatest. The airport is located near the water, some ways away from Reykjavik, surrounded by lava fields. Not that the lava fields aren't neat, but if you land on a rainy day like I did you won't get to see much else. That is until the sun comes out (check out the pic to the right).
Iceland's rocky landscape is mostly black, which just enhances the color of the shrubbery. It's craggy and the clouds are often low. It is reminiscent some ways of Scotland, and it brings the same feeling of the supernatural.
Anyway you slice it or dice it there is a little bit here for every adventurer. And for those afraid of flying - flights from NY are shorter to Iceland then to San Fransisco!