Drawing
Drawing calmed you. Your poker infernal pen
Was like a branding iron. Objects
Suffered into their new presence, tortured
Into final position. As you drew
I felt released, calm. Time opened
When you drew the market at Benidorm.
I sat near you, scribbling something.
Hours burned away. The stall-keepers
Kept coming to see you had them properly.
We sat on those steps, in our rope-soles,
And were happy. Our tourist novelty
Had worn off, we knew our own ways
Through the town’s runs. We were familiar
Foreign objects. When he’d sold his bananas
The banana seller gave us a solo
Violin performance on his banana stalk.
Everybody crowded to praise your drawing.
You drew doggedly on, arresting details,
Till you had the whole scene imprisoned.
Here it is. You rescued for ever
Our otherwise lost morning. Your patience,
Your lip-gnawing scowl, got the portrait
Of a market–place that still slept
In the Middle Ages. Just before
It woke and disappeared
Under the screams of a million summer migrants
And the cliff of dazzling hotels. As your hand
Went under Heptonstall to be held
By endless darkness. While my pen travels on
Only two hundred miles from your hand,
Holding this memory of your red, white-spotted bandana,
Your shorts, your short-sleeved jumper —
One of the thirty I lugged around Europe —
And your long brown legs, propping your pad,
And the contemplative calm
I drank from your concentrated quiet,
In this contemplative calm
Now I drink from your stillness that neither
Of us can disturb or escape.
What I find most enticing about this poem is the unsettled and unsettling feeling that runs through it; it is a feeling that hangs over this entire collection, from the personal narratives that are presented, to the juxtaposition of domestic familiarity and the embers of volatility in this particular poem. In ‘Drawing’, Hughes invites us to remember something with him - a single memory stretched out across three perspectives. There is the imagined present of Hughes as he makes the poem, a recalled past of the scene itself embodied by the repeated addresses of a first person 'I', and the 'you' who is the third figure in the poem. Hughes creates a nestled box of scenes. The poem is a memory of one scene in which the Hughes-speaker recalls another scene of Plath drawing the market-place, which itself is being 'tortured into final position' by Plath and her 'branding iron.' For Hughes, 'time opened' as Plath drew, and for the reader it opens as he writes.
For me, Hughes associates the feeling of ‘release’ with a sense of gratifying exhilaration as well as a sense of calm. The semantic field of suffering, torture and imprisonment is almost sadistically pleasurable for Hughes, in that it offers him the ‘release’ and ‘calm’ he needs to write, both in the moment recalled in the poem, and when writing the poem itself. The tone of instability is underpinned by Hughes’ language – the ‘poker infernal pen’, the ‘branding iron’, the ‘hours burned away’, the ‘screams’ of the ‘migrants’ and the ‘lip-gnawing scowl’ of Plath in the ‘endless darkness’ create a hellish scene. Equally, the word ‘suffered’ is subject to a shifting meaning; the idea of something suffered into position reinforces the meta-poetic trope that runs through the poem. To be suffered is to be passive, to endure pain, to be manipulated by a dominant force. In this case, Hughes and Plath both represent a dominant creative force, suffering each other and their surroundings into position like artistic parasites. This parasitic nature is epitomised by their description as ‘familiar foreign objects’ in the market. A foreign object is something unnatural, something that invades the body, something that must be repelled. The phrase perfectly captures the strong duality running through the poem – the juxtaposition between the calm scene and its fiery undertones, the sleepy market and the ‘dazzling’ tourist hotspot, the past and present memory, and between the two writers themselves. To my mind, this neat little utterance perfectly captures the relationship between Hughes and Plath – inextricably drawn together in work and reputation, though constantly at odds.
Drawing calmed you. Your poker infernal pen
Was like a branding iron. Objects
Suffered into their new presence, tortured
Into final position. As you drew
I felt released, calm. Time opened
When you drew the market at Benidorm.
I sat near you, scribbling something.
Hours burned away. The stall-keepers
Kept coming to see you had them properly.
We sat on those steps, in our rope-soles,
And were happy. Our tourist novelty
Had worn off, we knew our own ways
Through the town’s runs. We were familiar
Foreign objects. When he’d sold his bananas
The banana seller gave us a solo
Violin performance on his banana stalk.
Everybody crowded to praise your drawing.
You drew doggedly on, arresting details,
Till you had the whole scene imprisoned.
Here it is. You rescued for ever
Our otherwise lost morning. Your patience,
Your lip-gnawing scowl, got the portrait
Of a market–place that still slept
In the Middle Ages. Just before
It woke and disappeared
Under the screams of a million summer migrants
And the cliff of dazzling hotels. As your hand
Went under Heptonstall to be held
By endless darkness. While my pen travels on
Only two hundred miles from your hand,
Holding this memory of your red, white-spotted bandana,
Your shorts, your short-sleeved jumper —
One of the thirty I lugged around Europe —
And your long brown legs, propping your pad,
And the contemplative calm
I drank from your concentrated quiet,
In this contemplative calm
Now I drink from your stillness that neither
Of us can disturb or escape.
What I find most enticing about this poem is the unsettled and unsettling feeling that runs through it; it is a feeling that hangs over this entire collection, from the personal narratives that are presented, to the juxtaposition of domestic familiarity and the embers of volatility in this particular poem. In ‘Drawing’, Hughes invites us to remember something with him - a single memory stretched out across three perspectives. There is the imagined present of Hughes as he makes the poem, a recalled past of the scene itself embodied by the repeated addresses of a first person 'I', and the 'you' who is the third figure in the poem. Hughes creates a nestled box of scenes. The poem is a memory of one scene in which the Hughes-speaker recalls another scene of Plath drawing the market-place, which itself is being 'tortured into final position' by Plath and her 'branding iron.' For Hughes, 'time opened' as Plath drew, and for the reader it opens as he writes.
In his opening lines Hughes initiates several
core ideas. This poem is about capturing images, about seeing, witnessing,
recording and remembering. We have Hughes' own 'scribbling', Plath's 'arresting
details', stall-keepers checking up on their painted doubles - this is
anecdotal ekphrasis. To me, this act of ekphrasis denotes a repeated transfer
of creative energy, as the various figures feed off one another’s vitality and
artistic output. Plath desperately arrests her characters into position, and
many years later Hughes molds her into one of the characters she originally
sought to capture, as she becomes the focus of this particular piece of art. At
first Hughes leads us to believe that this is a poem of tranquility, of a quiet
moment shared between two lovers. The tone is outwardly peaceful and the
simplicity of the opening statement ‘Drawing calmed you’ emphasises that idea.
In the fifth line Hughes’ own emotions mirror his description of Plath’s, as he
felt ‘released, calm.’ Yet, the half-line ‘I felt released, calm’ is emblematic
of the shifting meanings operating in the poem. In the ostensibly peaceful
scene there is an undercurrent of energy that is both creative and unstable.
The parataxis of the half-line places the two units of meaning alongside one
another, and so it initially appears that in this context, Hughes’ ‘calm’ is
synonymous with his ‘release.’ However, the enjambment of the line connects the
idea of ‘release’ with the language of the preceding clause, in which Hughes
uses this striking sentence:
Objects
Suffered into their new presence, tortured
Into final position.
For me, Hughes associates the feeling of ‘release’ with a sense of gratifying exhilaration as well as a sense of calm. The semantic field of suffering, torture and imprisonment is almost sadistically pleasurable for Hughes, in that it offers him the ‘release’ and ‘calm’ he needs to write, both in the moment recalled in the poem, and when writing the poem itself. The tone of instability is underpinned by Hughes’ language – the ‘poker infernal pen’, the ‘branding iron’, the ‘hours burned away’, the ‘screams’ of the ‘migrants’ and the ‘lip-gnawing scowl’ of Plath in the ‘endless darkness’ create a hellish scene. Equally, the word ‘suffered’ is subject to a shifting meaning; the idea of something suffered into position reinforces the meta-poetic trope that runs through the poem. To be suffered is to be passive, to endure pain, to be manipulated by a dominant force. In this case, Hughes and Plath both represent a dominant creative force, suffering each other and their surroundings into position like artistic parasites. This parasitic nature is epitomised by their description as ‘familiar foreign objects’ in the market. A foreign object is something unnatural, something that invades the body, something that must be repelled. The phrase perfectly captures the strong duality running through the poem – the juxtaposition between the calm scene and its fiery undertones, the sleepy market and the ‘dazzling’ tourist hotspot, the past and present memory, and between the two writers themselves. To my mind, this neat little utterance perfectly captures the relationship between Hughes and Plath – inextricably drawn together in work and reputation, though constantly at odds.
In
the second half of the poem the temporal shifts become more apparent, indicated
by the mirrored phrases ‘just before’, ‘as your hand went’ and ‘while my pen
travels’. From Plath’s frantic attempts to imprison the life of the market
scene, we see Plath herself become imprisoned in death, in the ‘endless
darkness.’ The reference to Heptonstall and the site of Plath’s grave is an
example of the repeated synecdoche in the poem, including the paralleled
phrases of ‘my pen’ and ‘your hand’ representing Hughes and Plath themselves, the
descriptions of Plath’s clothing and her ‘long brown legs.’ There is a poignant
intimacy in these lines as Hughes searches for something tangible to cling to
in these long-gone objects, impossibly ‘holding’ the ‘memory’ as he holds the
painting: ‘here it is.’ As Hughes moves through time, seeking and replicating
his moments with Plath, his syntax becomes increasingly complex. The caesura in
the final ten lines creates an anecdotal tone; the nod to carrying Plath’s
luggage around Europe is an almost banal example of married life, stressing the
aforementioned juxtaposition between domestic familiarity and the volatility of
their relationship. Equally, the anaphoric repetition of ‘and’ drives the
meditative sense of recollection, as though Hughes is trying to get closer and
closer to a disappearing moment, much like the image of the dissolving market
and Plath’s hand in the endless darkness.
Finally,
the repeated phrases of ‘contemplative calm’ and ‘concentrated quiet’
structured around the past tense ‘drank’ and present ‘drink’ take us back to
the key concept of a continual transfer of creative and emotional energy from
Plath to Hughes, even in her ‘stillness.’ Perhaps it is even evocative of the
vampiric persona Plath bestows upon Hughes in her own ‘Daddy.’ Despite the
enjambment, the final line jars – despite the time passed, Hughes and Plath are
still the ‘familiar foreign objects’ they were in that Spanish market, and so
neither of them can ‘escape’ one another, or Plath’s fate. In ‘Drawing’, we move
deftly from shifting perspectives and time frames to a suspended, bittersweet
moment created by and inhabited by Hughes and Plath together. From the sweet
recollections of a red-spotted bandana, to the rumbling imprints of a concentrated
moment left behind in on a piece of paper, it is a surprisingly heated poem
that for me provokes a disconcerting sense of voyeuristic pleasure, even comfort. It's an invitation to be intimate with the pair, as is the whole collection.
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