Egg-Head and Suicide Off Egg Rock

I'm not going to count it as one of my Official Blog Posts, but I thought it would be good to include my final paper for this class in the blog.

A Comparison of Ted Hughes’s “Egg-Head” and Sylvia Plath’s “Suicide off Egg Rock”

Diane Middlebrook’s article “The Poetry of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes: call and response” details the complex ways that Plath and Hughes communicated with each other through their poetry. From the moment of their first meeting to works published after their deaths, their poetry was in constant dialogue. Some dialogues consisted of several poems by both poets; others were single instances of borrowing. By deconstructing the two poems and comparing their form, it can be made evident that the poems “Egg-Head” by Ted Hughes and “Suicide off Egg Rock” by Sylvia Plath, while centering around two vastly different subjects, have more in common with one another than what may appear at first glance.

In Ted Hughes’s “Egg-Head”, long phrases and bizarre metaphors make a case against a “staturing I am”. The meaning of the poem is not immediately clear— it speaks of blindness and deafness, of only seeing from behind one’s hands, of resistance to the world and “trumpeting one’s own ear dead”. Hughes’s phrasing is paradoxical, winding, and complex.  Sense hangs on to itself by just a couple words, or a change in intonation— it’s easy, so easy, to read “The Egg-Head” and receive nothing but a long jumble of words.   The poem begins in midair— “a leaf’s otherness” hangs above the world (1). It is not part of the earth but, as fall approaches it is not entirely part of the tree, either. Hughes does not open this poem modestly: this first stanza contains the whole of anything that can be learnt by humanity. If this stanza explains the full potential of the Egg-Head, it symbolises his potential as he is introduced: “with manslaughtering shocks” the endless possibilities are “let in on his sense” and not the other way around (4-5). 

The next stanza eludes perfect sense— why would “so many a one [dare] to be struck dead” (6)? Is the Egg-Heads ‘sense’ that many have been afraid to look at the whole truth and have since been punished for it, and so why should he attempt to gain this knowledge, this potential? The next stanza supports the decision of those who dared to not look— their defence was better, the speaker says, than any militant pride. Forgetfulness, madness. These strategies are champions of survival.

The following stanza is full of paradox: shutting the world out with a welcome; wide-eyed deafnesses. These deal with the Egg-Head’s Head— “deft opacities, walled in translucencies” (13-14). If the opacities are deft, then they are swift, clever; defences set up by the Egg-Head himself to protect himself. The translucencies, however, are walling him in— neither solid nor clear, they are uncertain. To tie in the previous stanzas, these uncertainties may be the potential for greatness in humanity and in the Egg-Head, and his unwillingness to try to achieve it. The Egg-Head hides his true feelings of these uncertain things under pleasant, non-threatening expressions— a welcome. His cautious prudence leaves him wide-eyed and deaf in a naïve sense and lets the world speak for him, influence him, and control him. Whatever person the Egg-Head was before that had the ability to receive the possibility of realising those greatnesses in the first stanza has been erased by the influence of these uncertain transparencies that barrage him and the swift opacities that guard him from them.

The next sentence labours on for nine lines, trailing across three stanzas and forming an almost impenetrable sense of meaning:

   Long, the eggshell head’s
Fragility rounds and resists receiving the flash
Of the sun, the bolt of the earth: and feeds
   On the yolk’s dark and hush

   Of a helplessness coming
By feats of torpor, by circumventing sleights
Of stupefaction, jugglieries of benumbering,
   By lucid sophistries of sight

   To a staturing ‘I am’,
To the upthrust affirmative head of a man. (17-22)

A single read-through makes this sentence no easier to parse through: it is necessary to break the monstrosity into independent pieces to decide, sometimes arbitrarily, which clauses are referring to which. The Egg-Head’s fragility “rounds and resists... the sun, bolt of the earth” (18-19). It feeds on a dark yolk, and the “hush of a helplessness coming” by means of “torpor... sleights... juggleries... sophistries” “to a staturing ‘I am’” (20-25).

 The head’s fragility is the subject of the sentence: it rounds, resists, and feeds. The poem itself is speaking about the Egg-Head, whose shells are not known for their resistance to outward force— his vulnerability is his defining feature. With that much agency, the Egg-Head’s fragility is hardly fragile— his insecurities instilled by translucent uncertainties are the biggest thing about him, and they dictate all of his actions. Nothing can overcome it, not divine inspiration from sun or earth. It feeds off of the “yolk’s dark”, the yolk being the Egg-Head’s mind, the dark being the thoughts inside— not dark in a foul way, but secretive, personal. An Egg’s shell has no holes, and so until it is cracked no light enters.

And the “hush of a helplessness coming”: This is the most interesting portion of the sentence, since there’s no one way to assign structure or meaning to this crux between the Fragility and its Hopelessness Coming. ‘Hush’ could be separate from the helplessness, and simply be the second noun to describe the Egg’s yolk. ‘Hush’, however, seems to make the most sense describing the hopelessness that comes “To a staturing ‘I am’”, which brings Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ philosophy to the foreground and the entirety of “staturing” academia along with it. To put one’s self at the centre of one’s existence seems an odd result of the hush of a helplessness: and odder still, regarding the lines the poem passed through to get there.  “Feats of Torpor” “Sleights of Stupefaction” and “juggleries of benumbing” all place their meaning in lethargy, mentally and physically: great acts of apathy, cunning displays of being made dull, and performances of becoming numb readily come from helplessness. Along with “Lucid Sophistries of Sight,” which harks back to the second stanza’s fear of looking through one’s fingers, bring the Egg-Head to his ‘I’.

By the finishing sentence (the longest in the poem at ten lines, with only two marks of punctuation to give the reader pause), the frail Egg-Head must combine his naïve Fragility and the Complacency with which he must conduct his affairs with the world to Confront the “looming mouth of the earth” that threatens to crack the Egg-Head (30). He pours his energy into this feat, using precision and “blank-stare courtesy” that he learned in the forth stanza to combat the world and its expectations (31). He sets in opposition his “eye’s flea-red Fly-catching fervency” to “the whelm of the sun” in his efforts. The ‘eye’ may be a recursion of the sight image (sophistries of sight) or it may be a homonymic play on words: the ‘I’ reappears. “Flea-red, fly-catching fervency” is rage and violent passion: the red blood a flea sucks from its victim and an eager murderer of its brother insect.

And thus, in one great attempt to at least find understanding with the world the Egg-Head puts his potential for achieving the grand endlessnesses introducing the poem against the heavy weight of the sun, which was used as a metaphor for inspiration and greatness earlier (“resists receiving the flash of the sun, the bolt of the earth” (18-19)). This confrontation ends with no distinct resolution: the Egg-Head “Trumpet[s] his own ear dead”. Ear-deadness, deafness, or hearing in general was used before in the forth stanza, where the world is introduced as an acting force against the Egg-Head. When the world knocks in the beginning of the poem, the Egg-Head lets it speak; in the ending the earth’s mouth looms over him and he stops it from speaking by yelling over it.

It is beneficial to read this poem with “The Burnt Fox” in mind— the story of Hughes’ inspiration coming to him in a dream as a burnt, injured fox, telling him to stop writing uncreative essays for his English studies (Winter Pollen, 8-9). With that in mind, “The Egg-Head” becomes an evolution of creativity when it is stifled by academia. The poem opens with limitless potential, to be met with the Egg-Head’s own insecurities. These insecurities are met with established scholars producing a set path to achieve scholarship, which the Egg-Head must push himself through until his creative drive has been put out almost completely. The Egg-Head’s fate seems different from Hughes’, as the poem closes with him mimicking the earth.

Hughes’s poem deals with a semi-autobiographical event, and Plath’s deals with something of a similar nature in that respect. Published two years after “Egg-Head”, Sylvia Plath’s “Suicide off Egg Rock” details the potential suicide of an unnamed man. That both of the poems deal with something vaguely personal to the poet but each use the nondescript “He” as a character in the poem is important, as both of these poems may deal with events each poet actually faced.

            “Suicide off Egg Rock” is divided into four stanzas of decreasing length: the first comprises of more than half the poem at thirteen lines, the next at seven, then three, then one.  There may seem to be little form in this setup, but these numbers are actually a mathematical pattern. The number needed to subtract from the first number decreases each time by two: thirteen minus eight makes seven, seven minus four makes three, three minus two makes one. This format makes for a constant acceleration in reading, as the stanzas become increasingly and mathematically shorter. This acceleration mimics the acceleration the “him” of the poem would feel upon falling from Egg Rock.

The poem opens up as a film, zooming in on the undefined character of “him”. The background surrounding him, “that landscape of imperfections his bowls were part of”, is put into spotlight, showcasing the scene playing about him. Light and seeing are negatives in this poem, as the Sun is equivalent to damnation: there is “no pit of shadow to crawl into”. The shadow, in contrast to the damning Sun, seems more of a comfort to Him than life above the surface, but the word choice makes a reading of comfort as positive problematic— if the shadow is a pit and he must crawl into it, he may have overgrown the small comfort of shadow. Because of this lack of safety, “... His blood [beats]... I am, I am, I am,” in a challenging onomatopoeia (9).   Life teems around Him, children and mongrels and gulls on the beach (9-13). He stands isolated, deaf to these things around him, imagining “His body beached with the sea’s garbage” (15). He yearns for the perfection that nothingness promises to him: “The words in his book wormed off the pages. Everything glittered like blank paper” (19-20). The attention is brought back to the scene as a whole, as “everything [shrinks] in the sun’s corrosive ray but Egg Rock” as he “[walks] into the water” (21-23).

“Suicide off Egg Rock” is much easier to comprehend than “Egg-Head,” but there are still some points not made clear in the poem. The man at the very least attempts suicide, but the manner in which he does so is unclear. The preposition used in the name —“off”— suggests a jump, but there are some unavoidable similarities between what is happening in the poem and what happens in The Bell Jar that may suggest otherwise. In Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel Esther, the protagonist, tries to commit suicide one day during an outing with friends by swimming out to an egg-shaped rock about a mile off the shore until exhaustion took her. “I dived, and dived, and each time popped up like a cork. The grey rock mocked me, bobbing on the water easy as a lifebuoy. I knew when I was beaten” (ch 14).

While Esther’s accounts of attempted suicide are often darkly comic, there is nothing funny about the character’s plight in “Egg Rock”; there is a yearning for nothingness, and an inwardly-directed anger. The background behind the character is full of dirty, urban things— “that landscape of imperfections his bowels were part of” (3-4). “This anger derives from their frustrated desire to find a lasting peace by recovering language from the constriction of suicidal thinking,” says Clare Emily Clifford in her essay   “I Have a Self to Recover: Sylvia Plath and the Literary Success of the Failed Suicide”. In this essay, Clifford states that Plath uses her poetic speakers to explore less the ending of one’s life rather than the reconstruction of one’s life after a ‘failed’ suicide attempt.

            This anger is present in “Egg-Head,” too, and while it does not culminate in the suicide of the Egg-Head, there is the destruction of the unbridled potential inherent in the molding of the new, fragile mind with its over-stifling superego. The tone of the two poems is similar, in pacing and word choice. “Egg Rock” has its mathematic stanzaic structure to accelerate the reading, and “Egg-Head” has its long, dense sentences with little punctuation pushing the reader through the poem with or without meaning earned from the words. Both the poems begin outside of the speaker, focusing instead on hotdogs cooking in the back, or a leaf’s otherness, before introducing the never-defined “him”. While in “Egg-Head” the sun serves as a symbol of inspiration, by the final stanza this inspiration is unwelcome, overwhelming; to the speaker of “Egg Rock”, the sun has been an overwhelming sight long before the incident detailed in the poem. If one compares “Egg-Head”’s “yolk’s dark and hush” with “Egg Rock”’s “pit of shadow”, the speaker’s wish to crawl into it makes more sense, as a desire to crawl into one’s thoughts and remove one’s self from all that exists outside of the self.

            The most striking similarity between the two poems is the simple phrase: “I am”. In Plath’s “Egg Rock”, the ever-repeating “I am” is something the speaker actively fights against: “A machine to breathe and beat forever” is something that he would like to be rid of. In Hughes’ “Egg-Head”, conversely, the speaker fights for some sort of connection with “I am.” There is of course a disparity in what each “I am” means in each poem: For Plath’s speaker, “I am” reduces itself to its most basic meaning of existence itself, as the thrice-repeated phrase mimics the beating of a heart; and for Hughes’s, This “I” is more of a status, allowing him stature in society after the “feats” he had put himself through to get to this point.

            “The Egg-Head” and “Suicide off Egg Rock” deal with different subject matter, deal with them in different ways, and as such feel very different at first glance. However, they hold unshakable similarities in word choice and in tone. Plath’s and Hughes’s works were thickly intertwined through collaboration, sharing and simply through joint experiences, and because of this, connections are to be found throughout both of their collected works.

WORKS CITED

Clifford, Clare E. "I Have a Self to Recover: Sylvia Plath and the Literary Success of the Failed Suicide." The Plath Profiles 5 (Summer 2012): 285-96. PDF file.

Hughes, Ted. New Selected Poems 1957-1994. London: Faber & Faber Limited, 2006. 10-11. Print.

Hughes, Ted. Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose. N.p.: Faber & Faber, 1995. 8-9

Middlebrook, Diane. The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath. London: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 150-70. Print.

Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. EPUB file.

Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. PDF file.