“I am a lantern— My head a moon of Japanese paper.”
— Sylvia Plath ,'Fever 103'
In those early months of 2020, in those COVID times when the world often shrank to the size of a laptop screen and friendship was conducted in little squares on Zoom, I was part of a small college group which found itself talking about everything and anything literary or culturally.
Someone would recommend a documentary; someone else would watch it that evening; someone would suggest a poem; or a novel; someone would suggest a video of a dance performance; by the next call after each and any of these ideas, we were all deep into it.
On one occasion the subject of Sylvia Plath came up, with a reading of Ted Hughes’ ‘Night Ride on Ariel’. I made some notes afterwards:
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Ted Hughes' Night Ride on Ariel (Jun 16th 2020)
I suppose as one who has looked into the fortunes of some famously troubled women in my time ( Vivienne Eliot, Sophie Brzeska, Judee Sill, even Ida Nettleship back in the day) I should also have looked more deeply into the life of Sylvia Plath, and especially through her poetry. I have no idea why I have only scraped the surface of who she was. I know the broad outline of her story of course, and the "Monday" - 11 Feb 1963 (harshest of winters, not a great time to be in other than meteorological desperation). I even spent time downloading and listening and keeping lots of her poems, read by her, at the time I discovered I had a new sister.
So I am miles behind anyone who knows her story fully and has thought about it through the prism of The Birthday Letters. I suppose when the book was published I baulked at the furore it seemed to engender. Even much later, I believe, people were hacking off the name on Ted Hughes' memorial in Dartmoor sometime after his death. ( More memorial desecration....).
I do know about her horse Ariel. And I think I get the point of her poem, which Hughes' references in his. Her fantasy ride into the creative Sun finds in Hughes' counterpoint response poem, a ride into the everlasting night. That is the simple basic framework isn't it? The rest would take reams of words! Anyone up for that?
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Later, one of the group sent this message: “You may already have seen this, but we watched an excellent documentary about Ted Hughes on iPlayer…” And so we watched it — Hughes’s face in still photographs, Plath’s voice in recordings, the long shadow of their marriage, the tragedies that followed.
I remember a mental double-take when Frieda Hughes said, almost offhandedly, that her father had been “vulnerable to women.” I joked in reply: ‘Did I hear the words “Ted was vulnerable to women”? Now there is a title for a thesis. Was Ted Hughes vulnerable to women?” Discuss’. But I probably won’t'. But beneath the humour was something else: a reminder of the shifting perspectives of individuals in any life story.
It was Simon Armitage’s point in the documentary — that biography matters as one way of entering the imaginative world of the poet. Eliot scholarship, for example, for all Eliot’s protests, has moved in the same direction.
And so the documentary, and our conversation about it, was helpful. Amongst all else we were reminded of Plath’s poem 'Ariel' and how it describes an uncontrolled horseback ride that becomes a symbol for emotional release and personal change.
Hughes’s answer is a ride into the everlasting night — two visions of the same moment. A shared life split into incompatible narratives. A trail of desperation and tragedy, as one of our group put it, left in Hughes’s wake.
And then the further sadnesses: Frieda's brother Nicholas Hughes was a renowned expert in stream ecology and behaviour of species like trout and salmon.Frieda remembered him with affection and his achievements with pride. His life ended early and in shadow, a fact unmentioned in the programme.
It was a little later that I realised how closely the perspectives of the documentary mirrored aspects of other conversations we were having at the that time — about Churchill, about Edward Colston, about the toppling of statues. Our conversations seemed to converge on the selectivity and the volatility of memory.
And so, in those few days, I found myself checking Colston’s Wikipedia page almost daily. On 17 June 2020, at 10:49, a new line appeared: that his philanthropy had been directed only toward causes aligned with his political and religious views. The moderators were busy; the footnotes bristled with warnings — ‘unreliable source’, ‘failed verification’. A few days earlier, none of this had been there. Here were scrambled attempts to fix the meaning of a man whose legacy was built on both charity and the slave trade.
I wrote these notes:
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Edward Colston (Jun 17th 2020)
I looked up Colston a few days ago on various sources including Wikipedia. I am still looking forward to learning more about the 1895 debate about the raising of a statue to him in his native Bristol, over 170 years after his death. But meantime I see that the latest update to the Edward Colston Wikipedia entry was made ( as I write this June 17 2020) today at 10.49. Something new is this:
"He was promoted as a local benefactor in his native city of Bristol[1][unreliable source] in part due to having donated money to charities which supported people aligned with his political and religious views.[1][unreliable source][2][failed verification][3]:7-10"
Thus the Wikipedia moderators are kept busy. Someone is saying that Colston's philanthropy was directed only to causes dear to him. Is this true? Only a few days ago, the entry made no such differentiation about his philanthropy. One can go slightly barmy if we follow these things too closely.
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Yet the volatility of that Wikipedia page felt familiar. It echoed the instability I felt in the Plath–Hughes story: the way narratives yield to pressure, the way memory shifts when the present demands a new accounting of the past. Literary biography, civic controversy — both revealed how fragile our stories become when they are forced into the light.
The pandemic seemed to magnify this effect. It stripped away the illusion of normality, and so also of memory . Everything was provisional, subject to revision, open to reinterpretation.
And so, looking back, I was mindful in those days, how we were being drawn repeatedly to contested figures — people whose lives resist simple moral categorisation, whose stories have been misread, weaponised, or oversimplified. A troubled woman whose voice has been distorted. A poet whose memorial was defaced. A philanthropist whose statue was toppled. Churchill, whose legacy was being re-examined in the heat of public protest.
Each of them became, in their own way, a site of struggle: between competing narratives, competing moral frameworks, competing visions of what the past should mean.
And perhaps that is why those fragments from 2020 still feel connected, despite their differences. They belong to a moment when the past began to be rewritten in real time — by poets, by historians, by activists, by anonymous editors tapping at keyboards in locked-down houses.
Those times were unsettling, sometimes exhausting, occasionally absurd. In that suspended season, we saw the fractures, the revisions, the contested edges of memory — the places where the narrative is still alive, still shifting, still capable of surprise.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” — Faulkner
