Flowered Memories: An Analysis Of Ted Hughes' Daffodils

'Imagine what you are writing about. See it and live it.'

-Ted Hughes, Poetry in the Making

Edward James Hughes was English Poet Laureate from 1984 to his death in 1998. Famous for his violent poems about the innocent savagery of animals, Ted Hughes was born on Mytholmroyd, in the West Riding district of Yorkshire, which became "the psychological terrain of his later poetry" (The Literary Encyclopedia). He was married to the famous Sylvia Plath from 1956 up to her controversial suicide in 1956. Believed by many to have pushed his wife to suicide, Hughes maintained 35 years of silence on the issue.

And on February 1998, Ted Hughes finally broke the silence with the release of Birthday Letters a collection of 88 poems written over 25 years, published by Faber and Faber; Farrar Straus & Giroux. Birthday Letters received the T.S. Eliot Prize and " re-ignited the famous controversy and met with mixed critical response" (Poets.org). In it, he addresses Sylvia Plath directly, in a conversational manner, which calls to mind an image of an old man leafing through an album with a ghost.

Daffodils, one of the poems featured in Birthday Letters, expressively depicts the initial years of the couple's union. In the said poem, the act of harvesting daffodils becomes the catalyst for the persona's recollection of the early days of their marriage. In it, the persona of the poem looks back on his past, but with a modern perspective.

Composed of 68 lines written in simple conversational free verse, Daffodils, like most of the poems included in Birthday Letters, was written using the first person point of view and addresses the "you" (Plath) directly.

The poem starts with the persona's recollection of memories from the early days of his marriage with Plath, particularly in the instance where they were harvesting daffodils together with their daughter. A sense of nostalgia pervades the poem, especially in the first two lines:

Remember how we picked the daffodils?

Nobody else remembers, but I remember.

The next few lines (lines 5-13) describe how the young couple used to sell the harvested daffodils for sevenpence a dozen, a deed that the persona now realizes as something tantamount to sacrilege. Starting from this point, the poem then becomes increasingly introspective as the poem's narrative progresses, with the poet going on to justify their choice by listing several factors that prompted them to put the daffodils up for sale, even while recognizing that they did make a mistake in selling the flowers. First of all, he states that back then, they were poor and "were hungry to convert everything to profit" (line 16). Furthermore, they thought that daffodils were a "windfall " and would continue to come forever. However, the persona makes it clear that he realizes that they were naпve in their assumptions, and that the daffodils were, in fact "a fleeting glance of the everlasting", a final, ephemeral blessing for a happy marriage, before all comes spiraling downward. The poet's portrayal of Nature as a way to communicate with the Divine is particularly highlighted in this part of the poem.

Meanwhile, the persona juxtaposed their earlier ideas regarding the daffodils with their former attitudes regarding their marriage by stating how they (the couple) used to believe that they would " live forever" (line 25). This concept of invincibility and/or immortality however, is revealed to be a misconception as the persona realizes that like the daffodils, their union and even their lives, were transitory.

The poem then moves back again to discussing the process of harvesting and preparing the daffodils for the market (lines 32-47). The act of harvesting daffodils, though innocent enough for the happy couple, can be taken as an act of desecrating Nature while the selling of the said flowers may be an illustration of how Nature is corrupted/desecrated by commercialism.

The termination of this conjugal project (harvesting and selling flowers) was brought about by two things: the overwhelming number of flowers for picking and the loss of their wedding-present scissors used in harvesting. The end of this venture, and the factors that influenced it may be interpreted as the end of the lifestyle that the young couple was used to. The innocent act of harvesting flowers was a bonding activity for the young family and the end of the said project can result in alienation between the members of the family. The innocence prevalent during the first few lines of the poem are now gone, along with the disappearance of the scissors. What remained was a number of problems (symbolized by the large number of daffodils which meant