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A POET'S UNMISTAKABLE VOICE : Remembering Ted Hughes
Commonweal, July 16, 1999 by Paul Elie
When I got to the church, on foot, slurping the last of a cappuccino from a Styrofoam cup, half a dozen of those big black hearse-like English taxis had formed a kind of procession in the roundabout out front, and some of the other guests were climbing out: middle-aged people leaning on their umbrellas like canes, the men and the women alike dressed in dark suits, because this was a memorial service, yes, but also because it was another rainy day in London. We proffered tickets in sherbety colors and were shown in through the open doors. Because I had a blue ticket, a docent in a long gown told me to walk all the way up the nave, and so I did, past the rood screen, past the pipe organ, past the plaques put up to honor priests and generals and other first-class English dead, until I reached the north transept, where I claimed a seat on the aisle and craned my neck. I had seen Westminster Abbey before, but from behind a camera as a tourist: It was smaller than I had pictured it, and more delicate, as though built from blocks of shortbread that had improbably withstood eight hundred years of Catholicism, Protestantism, imperialism, liberalism, secularism, tourism-what next?
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Past the altar was Poet's Corner, where, someday soon, a plaque would be dedicated to the poet I had come from New York on the red-eye to remember, though he and I had never met. Today, however, the entire cathedral was dedicated to him. The place was packed. Once Prince Charles and the Queen Mum had taken their seats "God Save the Queen" was sung, and a man in surplice and cassock rose at the lectern to say that because Ted Hughes had been an unusual poet, this would be an unusual service.
When he died last October, Ted Hughes was eulogized as one of the only truly great English writers of his time: poet, translator, interpreter of Shakespeare, author of beloved children's books, handsome husband of the tormented genius Sylvia Plath, and poet laureate to the queen (which is why he was being celebrated at Westminster Abbey that day). I work as an editor with his American publisher, and I had worked with Hughes on his last few books: a volume of astonishing versions of tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses, translations of plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, and Racine, and Birthday Letters, a book of poems written in the form of letters to Plath, who killed herself in 1963. Hughes and I- I never called him Ted-exchanged letters and spoke on the phone every month or so, always about poetry or his books. It was amusing to see him and his wife, Carol, who were said to live in an ancient farmhouse in Devonshire, gradually master the use of a computer and a fax machine; I am proud to have helped nudge him in the direction of the Ovid book, which I think is going to last, and I especially like a letter he wrote to me describing what he was trying to do in his translation of Racine's Phedre: To create "a dialogue like a face-to- face duel with flame throwers."
When he died, I still had a message from him on my answering machine tape, his deep orator's voice thanking me for sending him a book on Shakespeare that he must have known he would never get to read. It was a working relationship, only that, two people on the telephone talking about words on a page, and yet, in the scheme of things, it was one that meant a lot to me.
Maybe it was because I hardly knew him that I looked to the memorial service to reveal his character. It would not be right to say that I was disappointed, for it was a beautiful and moving service. The Tallis Scholars sang music from the English Renaissance, and we all sang Blake's "Jerusalem," faltering in the hard parts; Alfred Brendel played an adagio from a Beethoven sonata; some friends read poems and made remarks, and Seamus Heaney, in a kind of keynote, spoke movingly of his great friend, putting him in the English tradition of King Arthur and Beowulf and recalling the funeral in Devon-the dead poet's coffin, in the hands of family and friends, borne toward its final resting place at knee-height "as though on a current of light and air."
That image, it happened, echoed an image in the scriptural text, from Revelation, that had been read at the other end of the service an hour earlier, and that Her Majesty's Stationery Office had printed in big dark type in the program. It read: "Then he showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations."
The passage is the natural ending of the book of Revelation (the rest is a kind of epilogue), and so the natural ending of the Scriptures; it goes on to describe the attributes of the servants of God-they shall see his face, his name shall be on their foreheads, etc.-and the life promised to them: "And night shall be no more; they need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they shall reign for ever and ever."
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