Frieda Hughes > Quotes

“I found my home in books,
Where dreams were realised...”
― Frieda Hughes, Forty-Five: Poems

“My Mother

They are killing her again.
She said she did it
One year in every ten,
But they do it annually, or weekly,
Some even do it daily,
Carrying her death around in their heads
And practicing it. She saves them
The trouble of their own;
They can die through her
Without ever making
The decision. My buried mother
Is up-dug for repeat performances.

Now they want to make a film
For anyone lacking the ability
To imagine the body, head in oven,
Orphaning children. Then
It can be rewound
So they can watch her die
Right from the beginning again.

The peanut eaters, entertained
At my mother’s death, will go home,
Each carrying their memory of her,
Lifeless – a souvenir.
Maybe they’ll buy the video.

Watching someone on TV
Means all they have to do
Is press ‘pause’
If they want to boil a kettle,
While my mother holds her breath on screen
To finish dying after tea.
The filmmakers have collected
The body parts,
They want me to see.
They require dressings to cover the joins
And disguise the prosthetics
In their remake of my mother;
They want to use her poetry
As stitching and sutures
To give it credibility.
They think I should love it –
Having her back again, they think
I should give them my mother’s words
To fill the mouth of their monster,
Their Sylvia Suicide Doll,
Who will walk and talk
And die at will,
And die, and die
And forever be dying.”
― Frieda Hughes, The Book of Mirrors

“Give me the raw materials; the black holes,
The cold floors and confusion of needles-as-thoughts
That make me feel myself,
Over any stupefying potions
That would turn me into someone else.”
― Frieda Hughes, The Book of Mirrors

“I suppressed my fury at his verbal probings
As he attempted entry
Of my inner self. My anger was
A thing he wanted too much
As if it pleasured him, his touch
Sent ants marauding
Beneath my teenage skin.
My instincts clawed me back
From the precipice of him;
His vile dark eyes accompanied his oh,
Too personal breath upon my face
As he studied my reaction to his question,
As if to say 'I'm a man
And I am touching you, I am, I am.'
My momentary sorrow taught me
That in future visits I'd present
A show of mediocrity.
I'd be blank, without a trait,
Devoid of personality
For him to finger and manipulate.”
― Frieda Hughes, The Book of Mirrors

“I do not want my mother's death to be commemorated as if it had won an award. I wanted her life to be celebrated, the fact that she had existed, lived to the fullness of her ability, been happy and sad, tormented and ecstatic, and given birth to my brother and me.”
― Frieda Hughes, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“Did you die for me? Was the voice in your head, that uglied you, So loud it would drown me out? Tulip-red you took yourself to bed And slept without me. Precious dream, More than I was, took you from me.”
― Frieda Hughes, Out of the Ashes

“The joy of such a purpose is that it gives you a reason to ignore everything else. There is nothing so effective in taking one's mind off the practical concerns of our lives as a living creature that needs immediate care, without which it will die, if we are so inclined to try and save it. And I was.”
― Frieda Hughes, George: A Magpie Memoir

“But the point of anguish at which my mother killed herself was taken over by strangers, possessed and reshaped by them. The collection of Ariel poems became symbolic to me of this possession of my mother and of the wider vilification of my father. It was as if the clay from her poetic energy was taken up and versions of my mother made out of it, invented to reflect on the inventors, as if they could possess my real, actual mother, now a woman who had ceased to resemble herself in those other minds. I saw poems such as "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" dissected over and over, the moment that my mother wrote them being applied to her whole life, to her whole person, as if they were the total sum of her experience.”
― Frieda Hughes, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“Since she died my mother has been dissected, analyzed, reinterpreted, reinvented, fictionalized, and in some cases completely fabricated. It comes down to this: Her own words describe her best, her ever-changing moods defining the way she viewed her world and the manner in which she pinned down her subjects with a merciless eye.”
― Frieda Hughes, Ariel: The Restored Edition

“My disease will be stripped out Like the rotten lining of a leather coat, And, neatly sewn, I will end here.”
― Frieda Hughes, Out of the Ashes

“and his third mother Was a brittle thing, seen through like glass.”
― Frieda Hughes, Out of the Ashes