lovesong read by ted hughes

Ted Hughes reading his poem Lovesong

Lovesong

He loved her and she loved him.
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment's brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was

Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin's attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon's gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall

Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other's face

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Ted
• Hughes
• Sylvia
• Plath
• lovesong
• poetry

[McoldMan]

Cheers for putting this up. Far better to hear the author read it than someone else :)

[greenberetgirl]

Damn you Ted Hughes! No one deserves to write poetry this good!

[marmas58ink]

After hearing him read Eliot's Burnt Norton... seems he reads his own things w/ a lot more assuredness, passion, authority

[2010MahaKhan9700]

beautiful!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Lyssios]

Crow certainly is a dark book, but it's also terribly funny. One of my favorite books, period.

[RussMoxham]

@marmas58ink Donne isn't exactly easy reading either but I wouldn't call that depressing or advise people to skip it. I think of Donne because in my opinion both he and Hughes had this kind of rough masculinity bristling under the surface of their verse (Hughes perhaps a little the more obviously); both deserve to be numbered among the greatest of English poets; and both deserve to be read.

[marmas58ink]

I checked online. Seems the poem itself comes from Crow, pub-ed in 1972.

(Crow was most depressing volume I ever read -- my advice, skip it. Or read things like "O leaves, Crow sang trembling, O leaves..." --- skip things like "Water wanted to live... it came weeping back..." - When I read this around 83 by chance I'd recently written similarly about a journey of water...mine perhaps more 'fanciful' was freeing... & he once found Plath's Yew tree depressing!)

[m8roth]

"...in the morning they wore each other's face." Great poets say a thing in such a way that their words become the definition for the thing. Hughes was a brilliant man. I can't imagine the the direction his work would have taken, had he never run into Sylvia.

[troilus1966]

He wrote so many things of this high high quality that it is certain that his work will (like Faulkner's Dilsey), endure.

[rubyrose456]

I love hearing him read!!! So Great!! Thank you for putting this on youtube