My favorite poem we have studied in class has got to be Ted Hugh’s The
Tender place. His writing is a part of a series addressing his wife and her
depression, it’s really like a big love letter to her. Before Sylvia Plath met
Ted Hugh’s she had ETC in the past and this poem is about her having this
treatment. In this poem, Hughes contemplates the mechanics and
symbolism of what seems so brutal and elemental a treatment. He focuses on
the fragility and beauty of her body "Your temples, where the hair crowded
in, Were the tender place" and then makes us imagine the effect of
electrodes there, in ever more shocking images: "They crashed thunderbolts
into your skull," "They dropped you", "A rigid bit of bent
wire" Across the Boston City grid." He then suggests that there
is a link between this treatment and the kind of poet she became: her
"voice" was scarred and "over-exposed / Like an x-ray," and
when her words returned they were distorted and vulnerable. Ted talks of how
the therapy was like used against her will like she was forced to have it. It
is a very moving poem in which Ted Hugh’s dislikes a lot and expresses his
hatred and how it has changed her. He uses great imagery and really gets across
to the reader of how horrible it is. The poem has a tone of anger and but yet
hopelessness and helplessness, and as much as he hates this therapy he realizes
that to be with Sylvia he has to endure this brutality.
By your fav boy, Tim <3 xxx luv ya! :D
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