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
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
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)
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.
13-8 is not equal 7....
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