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At the end of Part 2, I reported that Jonathan Bate, a preeminent scholar of English literature, calls Ted Hughes "one of the two or three greatest poets of the Twentieth Century".
Sylvia Plath, herself an excellent poet, recognized that she never would be able to keep pace with her husband Ted's achievements in poetry.
One of Hughes' greatest achievements was his book Tales From Ovid, published in 1997. The book provides a poetic paraphrase translation of many poems from the Latin poet Ovid's major work Metamorphoses. Ovid's work is the source of many mythological stories that have become famous in the literature of Western Civilization.
Soon after the book was published, I noticed it in the New Books section of my local library. It intended to just browse through it, but I found myself reading, with continual delight, all 250 pages. Later I bought a copy but have not reread it until now.
So that my readers will appreciate Hughes' poetic talent, I will provide here some excerpts from his Tales from Ovid.
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Creation; Four Ages; Lycaon; Flood======
Now I am ready to tell how bodies are changed
into different bodies.
I summon the supernatural beings
Who first contrived
The transmorgrifications
In the stuff of life.
You did it for your own amusement.
Descend again, be pleased to reanimate
This revival of those marvels.
Reveal, now, exactly
How they were performed
From the beginning
Up to his moment.
Before sea or land, before even sky
Which contains all,
Nature wore only one mask --
Since called Chaos.
A huge agglomeration of upset.
A bolus of everything -- but
As if aborted.
And the total arsenal of entropy
Already at war within it.
No sun showed one thing to another,
No moon
Played her phases in heaven,
No earth
Spun in empty air on her own magnet,
No ocean
Basked or roamed on the long beaches.
Land, sea, air, were all there
But not to be trodden, or swum in.
Air was simply darkness.
Everything fluid or vapour, form formless.
Each thing hostile
To every other thing: at every point
Hot fought cold, most dry, soft hard, and the weightless
Resisted weight.
God, or some such artist as resourceful,
Began to sort it out.
Land her, sky there,
And sea there.
Up there, the heavenly stratosphere.
Down her, the cloudy, the windy.
He gave to each its place,
Independent, gazing about freshly.
Also resonating --
Each one a harmonic of the others,
Just like the strings
That would resound, one day, in the dome of the tortoise.
[continues]
Tiresias
One time, Jupiter, happy to be idle,
Swept the cosmic mystery aside
And draining another goblet of ambrosia
Teased Juno, who drowsed in bliss beside him:
"This love of male and female's a strange business.
Fifty-fifty investment in the madness,
Yet she ends up with nine-tenths of the pleasure."
Juno's answer was: "A man might think so.
It needs more than a mushroom in your cup
To wake a wisdom that can fathom which
Enjoys the deeper pleasure, man or woman.
It needs the solid knowledge of a soul
Who having lived and loved in woman's body
Has also lived and loved in the body of a man."
Jupiter laughed aloud: "We have the answer.
There is a fellow called Tiresias.
Strolling to watch the birds and hear the bees
He came across two serpents copulating.
He took the opportunity to kill
Both with a single blow, but merely hurt them --
And found himself transformed into a woman.
"After the seventh year of womanhood,
Strolling to ponder on what women ponder
She saw in that same place the same two serpents
Knotted as before in copulation.
"If your pain can still change your attacker
Just as you once changed me, then change me back."
She hit the couple with a handy stick,
"And there he stood as male as any man."
"He'll explain," cried Juno, "why you are
Slave to your irresistible addiction
While the poor nymphs you force to share it with you
Do all they can to shun it." Jupiter
Asked Tiresias: "In their act of love
Who takes the greater pleasure, man or woman?"
"Woman," replied Tiresias, "takes nine-tenths."
Juno was so angry -- angrier
Than is easily understandable --
She struck Tiresias and blinded him.
"You've seen your last pretty snake, for ever."
But Jove consoled him: "That same blow," he said,
"Has opened your inner eye, like a nightscope. See:
"The secrets of the future -- they are yours."
======
Echo and Narcissus
When the prophetic vision awoke
Behind the blind eyes of Tiresias
And stared into the future,
The first to test how deeply he saw
And how lucidly
Was Liriope, a swarthy nymph of the fountain.
She was swept off her feet by the river Cephisus
Who rolled her into the bed of a dark pool,
Then cast her up on the shingle pregnant.
The boy she bore, even in his cradle,
Had a beauty that broke hearts.
She named this child Narcissus. Gossips
Came to Tiresias: "Can her boy live long
With such perfect beauty?" The seer replied:
"Yes, unless he learns to know himself."
[....]
In his sixteenth year Narcissus,
Still a slender boy but already a man,
Infatuated many. His beauty had flowered,
But something glassy about it, a pride,
Kept all his admirers at a distance.
None dared be familiar, let alone touch him.
[....]
One of these [nymphs], mocked and rejected,
Lifted his hands to heaven:
"Let Narcissus love and suffer
As he has made us suffer.
Let him, like us, love and know it is hopeless.
And let him, like Echo, perish of anguish."
Nemesis, the corrector,
Heard this prayer and granted it.
There is a pool of prefect water.
No shepherd had ever driven sheep
To trample the margins. No cattle
Had slobbered there muzzles in it
And befouled it.
No bird had ever paddled there preening and bathing.
Only surrounding grasses drank its moisture
And though the arching trees kept it cool
No twigs rotted in it, and no leaves.
Weary with hunting and the hot sun
Narcissus found this pool.
Gratefully he stretched out full length
To cup his hands in the clear cold
And to drink. But as he drank
A strange new thirst, a craving, unfamiliar,
Entered his body with the water,
And entered his eyes
With the reflection in the limpid mirror.
He cold not believe the beauty
Of those eyes that gazed into his own.
As the taste of water flooded him
So did love. So he lay, mistaking
That picture of himself on the meniscus
For the stranger who could make him happy.
He lay, like a fallen garden statue,
Gaze fixed on his image in the water,
Comparing it to Bacchus or Apollo,
Falling deeper and deeper in love
With what so many had loved so hopelessly.
Not recognizing himself
He wanted only himself. He had chosen
From all the faces he had ever seen
Only his own. He was himself
The torturer who now began his torture.
[continues]
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Midas======
[....]
Midas said: "Here is my wish.
Let whatever I touch become gold.
Yes, gold, the finest, the purest, the brightest."
Bacchus gazed at the King and sighed gently.
He felt pity --
Yet his curiosity was intrigued
To see how such stupidity would be punished.
So he granted the wish, then stood back to watch.
The Phrigian King returned through the garden
Eager to test the power -- yet apprehensive
That he had merely dreamed and now was awake,
Where alchemy never works. He broke a twig
From a low branch of oak. The leaves
Turned to heavy gold as he stared at them
And his mouth went dry.
[....]
He fell on his bed, ace down, eyes closed
From the golden heavy fold of his pillow.
He prayed
To the god who had given him the gift
To take it back. "I have been a fool.
Forgive me, Bacchus. Forgive the greed
That made me so stupid.
Forgive me for a dream
That had not touched the world
Where gold is gold and nothing but.
Save me from my own shallowness,
Where I shall drown in gold
And be buried in gold.
Nothing can live, I see, in a world of gold."
Bacchus, too, had had enough.
His kindliness came uppermost easily.
"I return you," said the god,
"To your happier human limitations ...
[....]
Midas never got over the shock.
The sight of gold was like the thought of a bee
To one just badly stung --
It made his hair prickle, his nerves tingle.
He retired to the mountain woods
And a life of deliberate poverty. There
He worshiped Pan, who lives in the mountain caves.
King Midas was chastened
But not really changed. He was not wiser.
His stupidity
Was merely lying low. Waiting, as usual,
For another chance to ruin his life.
[....]
Pan lives in a high cave on that cliff.
He was amusing himself,
Showing off to the nymphs,
Thrilling them out of their airy bodies
With the wild airs
He breathed through the reeds of his flute.
Their ecstasies flattered him,
Their words, their exclamations, flattered him.
But the flattered
Become fools. And when he assured them
That Apollo, no less,
Stole his tunes and rearranged his rhythms
It was a shock
For Pan
to find himself staring at the great god
Hanging there in the air off the cave mouth,
Half eclipsed with black rage,
Half beaming with a friendly challenge.
"Tmolus, the mountain," suggested the god, "can judge us."
Tmolus shook out his hair,
Freed his ears of bushes, trees, birds, insects,
Then took his place at the seat of judgment,
Binding his wig with a whole oak tree --
The acorns clustering over his eyebrows,
And announced to Pan: "Your music first."
It so happened
Midas was within hearing
Collecting nuts and berries. Suddenly he heard
Music that froze him immobile
As long as it lasted. He did not know
What happened to him as Pan's piping
Carried him off --
Filled him with precipices,
Lifted him on weathered summits,
Poured blue icy rivers through him,
Hung him from the stars,
Replaced him
With the flourescent earth
Spinning and dancing on the jet of a fountain.
[.... Apollo plays music, favored by Tmolus ...]
Pan was humbled. Yes, he agreed --
Apollo was the master. Tmolus was correct.
The nymphs gazed at Apollo. They agreed.
But then a petulant voice,
A hard-angled, indignant differing voice
Came from behind a rock.
Midas stood up. "The judgement," he cried,
"Is ignorant, stupid, and merely favours power.
Apollo's efforts
Are nothing but interior decoration
By artificial light, for the chic, the effete.
Pan is the real thing -- the true voice
Of the subatomic.
Apollo's face seemed to writhe
Momentarily
As he converted this clown's darkness to light,
Then pointed his plectrum at the ears
That had misheard so grievously.
Abruptly those ears lolled long and animal,
On either side of Midas' impertinent face.
Revolving at the root, grey-whiskered, bristly,
The familiar ears of a big ass.
The King,
Feeling the change, grabbed to hang on to his ears,
Then he had some seconds of pure terror
Waiting for the rest of his body to follow.
But the ears used up the power of the plectrum.
This was the god's decision. The King
Lived on, human, wagging the ears of a donkey.
[continues]
In the mid-1990s Hughes -- as the salaried Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom -- was trying, successfully, to popularize poetry among his country's people. With his translation of Ovid -- paraphrased into simple, casual English -- he introduced or re-introduced many English readers to a poetic, fundamental masterpiece of Western Civilization.
Hughes devoted his entire life to inspiring English-readers with poetry. He was able to do so -- for many years in his early career -- because he had a supportive, poetic wife, Sylvia Plath.
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In the following video clip from the movie Sylvia, the character who enters at 3:50 is A. Alvarez, the poet who after Plath's suicide would write the book The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, published in 1972.
I think that it's likely that Eleanor Bergstein and her husband, poet Michael Goldman, read The Savage God soon after it was published.
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I will continue this article in Part 4.
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