New Poem Reveals Platt’s Suicide on Hughes

The New Statesman publishes a previously unseen work by the late poet laureate.

Ted Hughes, pictured in Maine, USA in 1978. All images copyright The Estate of Ted Hughes.

In tomorrow’s New Statesman, which has been guest-edited by Melvyn Bragg, we publish a previously unseen poem by Ted Hughes. “Last letter” is a poem that describes what happened during the three days leading up to the suicide of his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath. Its first line is: “What happened that night? Your final night.” — and the poem ends with the moment Hughes is informed of his wife’s death.

Hughes’s best-known work is 1998′s Birthday Letters, a collection of poems that detail his relationship with Plath. Though the published poems make reference to Plath’s suicide, which occurred in February 1963, when she and Hughes were separated but still married, none of them addresses directly the circumstances of her death. This, then, would appear to be the “missing link” in the sequence.

The earliest draft of “Last letter” held in the British Library’s Ted Hughes archive appears in a blue school-style exercise book, which is believed to date from the 1970s. The book contains drafts of several poems that appear in Birthday Letters. A more refined draft of the poem is found in a hardback notebook. After drafting poems by hand several times, Hughes would usually type out poems when they were near completion, adding notes in the margin where necessary.