Reading "Last Letter" again, I think I was wrong in my piece earlier this week about why Ted Hughes had trouble with a final version to include in Birthday Letters. His problem was less with bad poetry than with bad conscience.
He was indeed a man in the dock, but the crimes he was pleading guilty to were treachery, double-dealing and shabby behaviour, and there was nothing noble or tragic about them. He had abandoned Sylvia and gone off with Assia Wevill; now he was betraying Assia for a fling with Susan Alliston. The poem implies it was not his fault: his "numbed love life," he writes, was being fought over by two crazy tattooists, each trying to mark him as her own; what could he do? What indeed? In the end, making good poetry out of the mess he had created was beyond him.
But what did that matter compared to the mess his behaviour had created for Sylvia? The real, heartbreaking poetry is in the long passage about her coming and going through the frozen streets to the public phone, calling again and again and never getting an answer.
