Ted Hughes in his reflective poem In your pink wool knitted dress describes the day of his marriage to Sylvia Plath on 16th June 1956; Bloomsday. The poem appears in Birthday Letters which was a surprise poetry collection released only months before Hughes’s death in 1998. The Birthday Letters collection gives his poetic voice on his life with Sylvia Plath. The collection won multiple awards. Here is the poem –
In your pink wool knitted dress Before anything had smudged anything You stood at the altar. Bloomsday. Rain - so that a just-bought umbrella Was the only furnishing about me Newer than three years inured. My tie - sole, drab, veteran RAF black - Was the used-up symbol of a tie. My chord jacket - thrice-dyed black, exhausted, Just hanging on to itself. I was a post-war, utility son-in-law! Not quite the Frog-Prince. Maybe the Swineherd Stealing this daughter's pedigree dreams From under her watchtowered searchlit future. No ceremony could conscript me Out of my uniform. I wore my whole wardrobe - Except for the odd, spare, identical item. My wedding, like Nature, wanted to hide. However, - if we were going to be married It had better be Westminster Abbey. Why not? The Dean told us why not. That is how I learned that I had a Parish Church. St George of the Chimney Sweeps. So we squeezed into marriage finally. Your mother, brave even in this US Foreign Affairs gamble. Acted all bridesmaids and all guests, Even - magnanimity - represented My family Who had heard nothing about it. I had invited only their ancestors. I had not even confided my theft of you To a closest friend. For best man - my squire To hold the meanwhile rings - We requisitioned the sexton. Twist the outrage: He was packing children into a bus, Taking them to the Zoo - in that downpour! All the prison animals had to be patient While we married. You were transfigured. So slender and new and naked, A nodding spray of wet lilac. You shook, you sobbed with joy, you were ocean depth Brimming with God. You said you saw the heavens open And show riches, ready to drop upon us. Levitated beside you, I stood subjected To a strange tense: the spellbound future. In that echo-gaunt, weekday chancel I see you Wrestling to contain your flames In your pink wool knitted dress And in your eye-pupils – great cut jewels Jostling their tear-flames, truly like big jewels Shaken in a dice-cup and held up to me. Ted Hughes (1930 - 1998) from Birthday Letters
The title is based on the dress Sylvia wore at her wedding. She didn’t have a dress organised and her mother, who had arrived from the States, had bought this for herself and ended up giving it to Sylvia to wear.
S1 … well, there was certainly some smudging going on in their relationship as the years unfolded. TH and SP chose Bloomsday because of their budding poetic interest. Bloomsday being the day associated with the 1992 James Joyce novel Ulysses based on the one day Thursday 16 June 1904.
S2 … TH had old clothing from his RAF days … a little tattered … perhaps appropriate not to be concerned with attire … like a true bohemian poet.
S3 … Utility was a key term after the war, something fit for purpose. I think Sylvia was stronger in the desire for marriage. It is interesting that TH identifies with the Swineherd. In Homer’s Odyssey, the swineherd, named Eumaeus, is a loyal servant of Odysseus. Much later in their marriage that loyalty was sorely tested. He may have felt he was stealing Sylvia from family in America. Sylvia had informed her brother Warren about the marriage who was in France at the time.
S4 … It was wishful to try for Westminster Abbey so TH was duly told he had to use his parish church. An interesting name St George of the Chimney sweeps. Apparently the Church was known for giving Christmas dinners to Chimney sweeps from all over London.
S5 … They had such difficulty in making it happen with just Sylvia, Ted and Sylvia’s mother the only family to attend. Squeezing into marriage a very appropriate verb. TH’s family were magnaminous or so it seems when TH reports after the actual event. I don’t think TH’s sister Carol had a particular liking for Sylvia.
S6 … He didn’t have a bestman organised and had to requisition the sexton who had to holdup taking children on an outing to the Zoo. Presumably all the children had to wait on the bus while the sexton performed the bestman duties inside the church. The prison animals could have a double interpretation. Both children and animals had to wait.
S7 … We finally get to that crucial moment in the ceremony likened to the beauty of SP’s slender naked body in a transfiguration. Appropriate metaphor given the church setting. Sylvia levitating God like with all heaven before her in total happiness. TH thinking of the future. The strange tense of a spellbound future with Sylvia. It was a very tense future. TH unaware that he had experienced an extreme SP emotional state akin to a bi-polar high. This association reflected appropriatley by TH’s dramatic choice of words in this stanza..
S8 … TH an emotional bystander to Sylvia in her euphoric state as Sylvia wrestles to contain her happiness. Her eyes dazzled like clear cut tear flamed jewels held up for Ted in the shaken dice thrown future.
my word in your ear 