‘You rescued for ever / Our otherwise lost morning’. Misschien dat Ted Hughes daarom rustig werd van zijn in zijn nabijheid schetsende en tekenende vrouw Sylvia Plath. In elk geval schrijft hij dat in het gedicht Drawing, dat deel uitmaakt van Birthday Letters.
Sylvia Plath tekende, en niet onverdienstelijk. En ze was er zelf zelfs tevreden over. Blijkt uit haar brieven. Zoals in het postscriptum bij een brief aan Hughes, geschreven op 7 oktober 1956:
‘Yesterday I drew a good umbrella and chianti bottle, better chestnuts, bad shoes and beaujolais bottle. Soon I will go fanatically doing exact and painstaking landscapes of grass-blades – but I bet if I covered a page of grass-blades it would sell; I keep seeing Infinity in a grain of sand.’
Die paraplu, flessen en kastanjes staan in Sylvia Plath: Drawings. Het boek bevat tekeningen, door Ted Hughes nagelaten aan zijn dochter en zoon, die in 2011 te zien waren in een galerie in Londen. Tekeningen waar dochter Frieda Hughes zich na de dood van haar moeder, vader en broer ontfermde. Tot die tentoonstelling. Ze hingen er om kopers te verleiden.
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.
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