Poetry by Ted Hughes

Capriccio (The Gehenna Press: Northampton, Maine, 1990)

Poems by Ted Hughes, artwork by Leonard Baskin 

Collected Poems (Faber & Faber: London, 2003) pp. 781-799 (poems only)

Steve Ely reveals the contexts and significances of one of Hughes’s most mysterious works. 

Capriccio is one of the most singular, fascinating and rich books in Hughes’s oeuvre.  It is also one of the least studied, comparatively speaking. The twenty-poem sequence is Hughes’s account of his relationship with Assia Wevill, the woman for whom he left Sylvia Plath in 1962, and who was his partner until her suicide on March 23rd, 1969. However, the book is not a straightforward confessional or autobiographical account of the relationship, but a highly subjective, expressionist narrative informed by a fatalistic, teleological view of Wevill’s life and death.  A Jew of Russian descent, she was born in Berlin and escaped Nazi Germany with her family as a child, thus avoiding the fate of the gas chambers and crematoria.  However, having rebuilt her identity as a cosmopolitan intellectual and bon vivant, in a life-journey that took her from Tel Aviv to London via Vancouver and Rangoon, she ended her life at the age of 41 by gassing herself, and was cremated. This horror—and Hughes’s self-flagellating consciousness of his role in its unravelling—is at the heart of Capriccio.   

The Capriccio poems draw on, are informed by and allude to a range of other texts and works of art.  The original edition of the book was a very expensive ($9,000 dollars) large folio, limited edition of fifty published by Leonard Baskin’s Gehenna Press, in which the poems were juxtaposed with twenty-five engravings by Baskin.[1]  The intertextual and ekphrastic relationships between poems and artwork in this stunning collaborative artefact greatly enhance, enrich and inform their mutual interpretations, creating a whole that is far more than the sum of its parts. Accordingly, Capriccio should ideally be encountered in the Gehenna Press edition, although the opportunity to do so will involve a trip to the British or Bodleian libraries, or the few other libraries and archives across the world that hold copies. The only other place we may encounter the sequence (unfortunately, without Baskin’s artwork) is in the Collected Poems—however, the poems carry their own, independent charge and, of course, are well-worthy of study in their own right.  

The poems also draw on and allude to a range of other artworks, including Goya’s annotated aquatint sequence Los Caprichos, Richard Strauss’s opera Capriccio, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and works by Tolstoy, Turgenev and Pushkin.  There is also significant interaction with the Hebrew Bible, Jewish, Babylonian & Norse mythology and the occult in the sequence. Ann Skea has written extensively on the Cabalistic structure she sees as operative across the piece.[2] This degree of referentiality, combined with an often deliberately cryptic utterance, does not always make Capriccio an easy read.  The intensely private Hughes was clearly not comfortable in revealing the intimate details of his and Wevill’s lives together—although he clearly could not resist what seems to have been an overwhelming artistic compulsion to write about it—and his mode in this book might be described as ‘concealing whilst revealing’.[3]

The sequence begins with ‘Capriccios’—a poem identical to ‘Superstitions’, the closing poem of another Gehenna Press limited edition, Howls & Whispers, the poems of which are about Sylvia Plath.[4]  The poem sets up the book’s dark tone by suggesting that Wevill’s suicide is connected to that of Plath, and that the deaths of both were somehow prefigured in the date both they and Hughes allegedly first made love—‘Friday the thirteenth’.  This sense of foreboding is echoed in the second poem, ‘The Locket’, in which Hughes introduces and exploits the Jewish/ Nazi binary that underpins the sequence to paint a picture of a mischievous and knowing Wevill, idly playing with a swastika button she seems to have kept inside a locket, providing the basis for the poem’s conclusion that her life ‘was a quarter century posthumous’ and that her future death was already a ‘fait accompli’. 

Subsequent poems give potted histories of Wevill’s life (‘Descent’), accounts of the overpowering attraction that existed between her and Hughes (‘Folktale’) and Wevill’s frequently repeated assertion that she would one day take her own life (‘Fanaticism’). ‘Snow’, perhaps the finest poem in the sequence, is an account of one of the last experiences Hughes and Wevill shared—walking down a steep cobbled hill in the Brontë’s Howarth three days before she died. 

            Snow falling.  Snowflakes clung and melted

            In the sparkly black fox fur or your hat.

Soft chandeliers, ghostly wreckage

Of the Moscow Opera […]

                                     […]  An unending

Walk down the cobbled hill into the oven

Of empty fire.  Among the falling 

heavens.  […]        

                 […] Down, on down

Under the thick, lose flocculence

Of a life

Burning out in the air. 

[…]                                 (CP 789)

The imagery of burning in ‘Snow’ suggests that this Yorkshire memory is infected with the memory of Assia’s London cremation, just over a week after the event described in the poem. Hughes describes his horrible experience of the cremation in an unfinished, untitled poem held in his archive at the British Library, in which he recalls the smoking chimney of the crematorium, and the downpour of soot-soaked rain that poured on mourners as they left the building.[5]

 Other Capriccio poems imagine Wevill’s attitude to and relationship with Sylvia Plath, (‘The Other’) and the hostility and suspicion directed at Wevill—by friends of Plath in the wake of her death, by members of Hughes’s family and by upper class English racists in the Hughes/Wevill social circle (‘Possession’, ‘Smell of Burning’ and ‘Shibboleth’). ‘The Coat’ describes the ferocity of Hughes and Wevill’s desire for each other as akin to being seized by a tiger,

           Gripping him by the broken small of the back

          And forcing him through the brambles […]

                                   […] Nobody 

Can deter what saunters 

Up the ferny path between 

The cool, well-ironed sheets, or what spoor 

Smudges the signature of the contract.  (CP 792)

However, in Capriccio, sex is always associated with disaster and death—the poem moves to a culmination in ‘the bed horror/Of the Passover night.’ (CP 792). The sequence moves to a conclusion with a series of empathetic poems that speculate about the reasons why Wevill chose to remain with Hughes amid the chaos and recrimination attendant on them both in the aftermath of Plath’s suicide (‘The Error’) and other poems based on specific vignettes of memory which reimagine Wevill in the closing months of their relationship, tired, depressed and losing hope (‘Opus 131’, ‘Familiar’ & ‘Flame’).

The final, sad and lovely poem, ‘Chlorophyll’, returns to the fatalism of ‘Capriccios’, rooting the deaths of Wevill, Plath and Shura (Hughes and Wevill’s four years-old daughter, who Assia murdered when she killed herself) in Hughes’s decision to risk his marriage to Plath by initiating the affair with Wevill. ‘Chlorophyll’ ends in the following evocative image, in which Wevill’s ‘ashes’ and Shura’s ‘smile’ are somehow contained inside,

                                  […] the keys

            Of a sycamore.

Inside those, falling

The keys

Of a sycamore. Inside those,

Falling and turning in air the

Keys

Of a sycamore. (CP 799)

Of course, at one level, the sycamore keys are a touching image of new life or rebirth, as the title of the poem, ‘Chlorophyll’ suggests.  However, recent research has revealed that the ‘sycamore’ is actually an allusion (and a deliberately planted clue) to the previously unknown location where Hughes buried the ashes of Assia and Shura—in woodland near Lumb Bank, below Heptonstall in Yorkshire.[6]  The insight allows not only an enriched understanding of Capriccio, but provides the ‘key’ to the patternings of imagery that might be used to identify other poems about Wevill in Hughes’s wider oeuvre.

Steve Ely lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Huddersfield where he is Director of the Ted Hughes Network. He has published several books of poetry, including Incendium Amoris (2017),  I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heauen (2019), The European Eel (with art work by Ruth Palmer, 2021, forthcoming), and Lectio Violant (2021). He is the author of Ted Hughes’s South Yorkshire: Made in Mexborough (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Notes