The poem
The mahogany table-top you smashed Had been the broad plank top Of my mother's heirloom sideboard- Mapped with the scars of my whole life.
That came under the hammer. That high stool you swung that day Demented by my being Twenty minutes late for baby-minding.
'Marvellous!' I shouted, 'Go on, Smash it into kindling. That's the stuff you're keeping out of your poems!' And later, considered and calmer,
'Get that shoulder under your stanzas And we'll be away.' Deep in the cave of your ear The goblin snapped his fingers. So what had I given him?
The bloody end of the skein That unravelled your marriage, Left your children echoing Like tunnels in a labyrinth.
Left your mother a dead-end, Brought you to the horned, bellowing Grave of your risen father And your own corpse in it.
This is a particularly vicious example of Hughes' poetic diatribes against his wife Sylvia Plath, evidently after one of their pitching-matches. Toward the end he casts himself as Theseus regretting he married Ariadne, the "goblin" being the god Dionysos who became her next husband, and the "skein" her famous thread that had led him in the labyrinth where he killed the Minotaur. The end itself is a mishmash of…
Read the whole commentThis is a particularly vicious example of Hughes' poetic diatribes against his wife Sylvia Plath, evidently after one of their pitching-matches. Toward the end he casts himself as Theseus regretting he married Ariadne, the "goblin" being the god Dionysos who became her next husband, and the "skein" her famous thread that had led him in the labyrinth where he killed the Minotaur. The end itself is a mishmash of allusions to her parents Minos and Pasiphae at the "horned" Palace of Knossos in Crete. Oddly the poem has nothing directly to do with the Minotaur, except that it perversely appears to equate the monster with the children (his own too) by linking them with a labyrinth. Thus although it makes some use of the Greek myth's characters to vilify his relatives, it adds nothing to the myth's long tradition in Western literature and art, while subtracting further from Hughes' value as both a bard and a human being.