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Perfect Light | Introduction

What astounds many readers about Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters (1998) is the tender, honest, and confessional voice that rises from the poems. Hughes is known for his emotional detachment from the situations about which he wrote, an aloofness of voice that reveals little about his speaker’s sentiment and even less about his own. His language is often harsh and explicit in describing violence, whether in the natural world of animals or in human society, and his subjects avoid personal experience, particularly any overt reference to his wife, fellow poet Sylvia Plath. But then he published an entire book written in memory of her.

Birthday Letters includes eighty-eight poems composed over a twenty-five- to thirty-year period, and traces the couple’s brief but saturated life together, from the first date and marriage to separation and suicide. Some of the poems are thought to have been inspired by specific letters and photographs of Plath that Hughes rediscovered while preparing her papers for sale to Smith College. “Perfect Light” is one such poem.

Based on a 1962 photo of Plath in a field of daffodils holding their two children, “Perfect Light” describes the physical scene and ends with an ominous metaphor suggesting the mother’s inescapable fate. With atypical softness and sentimentality, Hughes addresses Plath directly as the “you” in the poem, portraying her in angelic terms and comparing her innocence to that of the children, before concluding that such a blissful moment was doomed to fade into a “perfect light.” Birthday Letters is the only collection in which this poem appears.

Perfect Light Summary

Line 1
In the first line of “Perfect Light,” the speaker establishes the second-person address of the poem, talking directly to a “you” and implying that he is looking at a photograph of the person. Though he does not mention a picture specifically in this line, the phrase “There you are” suggests the premise and the rest of the poem confirms it. This opening line also contains the first use of the word “innocence,” which will be used a total of three times and here refers to the innocent appearance of the woman in the photograph.

Lines 2–3
These two lines further establish the setting, explaining that the woman in the picture is “Sitting among [her] daffodils,” the latter word another one that will appear repeatedly in the poem—five times to be exact. In line 2, the speaker reveals the picture specifically, suggesting that its subject appears “Posed” for a photograph that should be called “ ‘Innocence.’” This second use of the word “innocence,” coming so quickly after the first one, serves to emphasize the speaker’s opinion that the woman is a symbol of purity and childlike naiveté.

Lines 4–5
The phrase “perfect light” is not only the title of the poem, but also appears two times within the poem. In line 4, it refers to the sunlight or daylight that shines on the face of the woman sitting in the field of flowers. The light is “perfect” for picture taking, and the speaker compares the woman’s facial features to a daffodil. Line 5 contains the second and third uses of the word “daffodil,” which create an ironic twist in the way they are presented with the word “Like.” The first phrase—“Like a daffodil”—simply makes the comparison of physical beauty between the woman and the flower. The second phrase—“Like any one of those daffodils”— initially seems to make the same point, to be a repetition of the simile just used. The line... » Complete Perfect Light Summary