Favourite Poem - Ted Hughes ''Last Letter''

‘’Last Letter’’ by Ted Hughes is one of my favourite poems because it is evidently different from all of the other poems we have studied for our ‘Love Through the Ages’ theme. ‘’Last Letter’’ is more about the reality of love without the fancy comparisons, the difficulties you can face with the one you love. Most of the poems we have studied or analysed in class have usually been about being with the one you love or about the future with them or love ‘beyond the tomb’. The difference between Hughes’s ‘’Last Letter’’ and poems by John Donne, Aphra Behn, Dryden or others in comparison is that Hughes is perhaps the most realistic in the sense that he does not present love or life as easy or even pretty. ‘’Last Letter’’ is about losing someone you have loved, the truth about what it feels like to go through the pain of sudden death or separation.

Throughout the whole poem Hughes keeps questioning himself as if to come to some sort of conclusion about what had happened the night she died, had she ‘plotted it all’, had he ‘bungled’ her ‘plan’. It is possible to read the poem and recognize his emotions as if they were your own, his ‘love-life’- ‘numbed love-life’, ‘with its two mad needles’. Hughes might’ve tried to find the answers in his sleep, his ‘escape’, ‘sleepless, hopeless’.  

From ‘’Last Letter’’ we know that there are a mixture of emotions present, he had told the Observer after her death "I felt as if I'd been punched in the stomach."

The poem doesn’t seem finished to me as it may not to others also. I don’t believe that it is finished because of the complete confusion and jumbled emotions; there is no clear conclusion on how he feels about the event, there are no clear cut answers to his constant questions. On the other hand, perhaps the poem is finished, because this confusion and guilt may not have an ending, Hughes may not find a conclusion or answers to his questions and maybe this will remain the way it is. He might forever be questioning and feeling those same emotions that he had felt from those ‘four words’, ‘coolly delivered’- ‘your wife is dead’.

iH