Birthday Letters also reveals how little Hughes knew of his wife’s inner turmoil until, like her biographers, he could read her journals and accompany her on that last desperate pursuit of Richard Sassoon in Paris. And like Plath’s biographers, Hughes can only re-create her suffering. He, too, was not there. He guesses and speculates, presuming that poetry, rather than biography, has license to re-create Plath’s life. And he falls for the Plath myth just like so many others, in “18 Rugby Street” imagining her visiting the “shrines” of her sojourns with Sassoon. How, Hughes wonders, was Plath “conjuring” him?

Was it Plath’s death that made Hughes write in such a supplicating way? In an astonishing scene of abasement, he refers not to his weapons but to her “artillery,” as he imagines her climbing the stairs of his flat after her failed effort to secure Sassoon. Plath practically gives off sparks with the “pressure” of her “effervescence,” suggesting an eruptive nature that fairly overwhelmed Hughes. Even if this is the hyperbole of hindsight, it reveals how all encompassing the Sylvia Plath myth had become for more than just her biographers. It is Plath, a goddess with “aboriginal” thick lips, who initiates Hughes into the mysteries. She flies about his London flat like a spirit he cannot contain, her face like the sea, subject to all sorts of weather and the play of sun and moon. A devotee of astrology—its vocabulary suffuses Birthday Letters—Hughes seems bound by the charts of her moods, merely “hanging around” until she can shape him. What is odd here is the absence of Sylvia’s Ted Hughes—at least the one she thought of as a god. Why is the titan Plath described in her letters, poems, and journals absent from Birthday Letters?

Hughes occasionally provides striking vignettes of their mythologized daily life, such as one involving Sylvia’s distress when she does not find him at their meeting place and rides a taxi like a chariot, in search of him. He marvels in “Fate Playing” at her “molten” eyes and face when she greets him as though he had “come back from the dead,” the answer to a priestess’s prayer. Then he “knew what it was / To be a miracle.” Here Hughes discloses why Sylvia Plath was so irresistible. He even turns her taxi driver into a “small god,” treating her eruption of joy as an act of nature drenching the “cracked earth” in the “cloudburst” of her emotions. In “The Owl,” the childlike abandon Plath took in nature awakened Hughes’s own “ecstatic boyhood,” bringing back to him an elemental rapture he had previously experienced only with his beloved older brother. In “A Pink Wool Knitted Dress,” Hughes pictures his wedding as the marriage of the swineherd to the princess, the postwar threadbare “not quite … Frog-Prince” bound to Plath’s transfigured and flaming personage. On their honeymoon, described in “Your Paris,” he is like her dog, sniffing out the fear and corruption in the collaborationist city, while she basks in the aura of her expatriate predecessors: Miller, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Stein. While he is mired in history, she soars into the mythos of her own making.

During their Benidorm honeymoon in Spain, Hughes seems for the first time to emerge from Plath’s spell, noting in “You Hated Spain” how the primitive cult of the bullfight frightened her. In contrast, he felt quite at home, perceiving clearly—perhaps for the first time—the part of her that was still a “bobby-sox American.” Drawing calmed her and was also an assertion of her mastery that had a beneficial impact on Hughes, who felt “released”—an apparent allusion to the stress her fluctuating moods inflicted on him. When Plath fell ill (a case of food poisoning) he felt empowered, enjoying the role of mothering her as he had been mothered—although her fevered fear of death, her crying “wolf,” aroused his distrust of her overwrought sensibility. How would he know when she was truly at the last extreme? That question haunts the persona Hughes creates for himself in Birthday Letters, as he tries to read Sylvia Plath, who has tied him to her quest for fame. Otherwise, he might have been, as he puts it in “Ouija,” “fishing off a rock / In Western Australia.”

In “The Blue Flannel Suit,” Hughes describes Sylvia aboard a liner taking them off to America, once again invoking a life that seemed plotted for him. In “Child’s Park,” Plath is so potent that she has a “plutonium secret”—a phrase reminiscent of those 1950s articles that saluted Marilyn Monroe as the “atomic blonde.” It seems from these poems that what really undid Hughes in America was his feeling that he was feeding off of Plath. His humiliation is palpable in “9 Willow Street,” where he calls himself a “manikin in your eyeball.” Unlike his wife, Hughes explains in “The Fifty-Ninth Bear,” he had no need to make their “dud scenario into a fiction,” aggrandizing their brief brush with the beast outside their tent in Yellowstone Park into a story of a husband hounded to his death by his importunate wife. There is in Hughes, as there was in Arthur Miller, a primordial dread of becoming entirely absorbed in his wife’s imago. He treats their trip to the Grand Canyon as Plath’s pilgrimage to the Delphic oracle, seeking a sign about the fate of her six-week old pregnancy. Is it any wonder that this couple came to grief, trying to live on the level of the gods? Before their embarkation for America, Sylvia had dreamed that country would make Hughes an even greater poet. But poems like “Grand Canyon” suggest the vastness of American geography only made him yearn for the narrow cobbled streets of home.

“Haunted” is hardly the word for what Hughes has to say in “Black Coat” about Plath’s penetrating “paparazzo sniper” eye, as she lined him up against a seascape, pinioning him with her camera, and transforming him—in his imagination and hers—into her father, crawling out of the sea and sliding “into me.” This poem amplifies the thrust of Plath’s autobiographical essays, which transform Otto Plath into a powerful sea beast that in Hughes’s retrospective poem sends a shiver through him, freezing him forever in her lens. Caught in Plath’s double vision, Hughes realizes he has become a palimpsest of her memories and desires.

Hughes concedes in “Stubbing Wharfe” that Plath had a reach like the Atlantic, but that whereas he reveled in the idea of a home in the dark valleys of his boyhood, she saw there “blackness,” the “face of nothingness.” She triumphed because, as he announces in “Remission,” she submitted to an “oceanic” pregnancy, becoming the very type of the fruitful woman of time immemorial, the Venus of Willendorf. When Hughes mentions Plath’s Indian midwife, who appears to be a deity from the Ganges, the image of voluptuous female idols hanging off of Indian temples comes to mind. No wonder, then, that in “Isis” Hughes imagines childbirth as his wife’s stripping of her “death-dress”—or was this only an interruption of her attraction to death as the father of herself? Hughes can be no more certain than her biographers, but he pictures her here as a vessel of life, an Isis carrying “what had never died, never known Death.”

In “The Lodger,” the move to Court Green becomes an announcement of Hughes’s disintegrating life, which makes him feel “already posthumous.” The change of venue is part of the “wrong road taken” theme that pervades this part of Birthday Letters. Images of him digging a garden are transformed into images of him digging his own grave. He treats his betrayal of himself very much like the story of the self and its double that so entranced Plath. Indeed, Hughes presents himself as being overtaken by another, an “alien joker.” In “The Table,” his double becomes her father, so that Hughes pictures himself not as Plath’s salvation, but as her doom, an actor deprived of his script on an “empty stage.” He had lost, in other words, his own conception of their marriage.