“What quirky twist of the Moon’s blade had set us, so early in the day, bleeding each other?”
Hughes begins his poem in a setting before that of Plath’s. Her poem begins with her describing the cliffs around her, whereas Hughes details the car journey up to the area.
“In your dybbuk fury, babies hurled into the car, you drove.”
This allows him to detail the ingrained sense of negativity his wife was feeling before they even got there, that she was looking for something to lash out against, making her actions seem more irrational.
Plath moves into the first person as the poem progresses. It allows her to better convey her feelings of the time, in a more direct way than metaphor. She describes a scene, intertwining quite aggressive themes with that of natural beauty to form a consistently negative outlook on the scene.
“I tasted the Malignity of the gorse, its black spikes…”
She uses the theme of colour to essentially foreshadow the coming events of her discovering the traps with the uses of ‘black spikes’ and ‘yellow candle-flowers’, as these two colours in combination are a sign of caution.
Hughes, when he came to describe the same scene, describes it as tranquil place, offsetting the ‘blue push of the sea-wind’ with the natural beauty of forests and great cliff tops scenes.
“It seemed perfect to me…”
This line seems to sum up how differently the two poets contrasting perspectives on events can effect how they describe the place.
Plath often switches from narrative to first person throughout her poem. This gives the effect of showing that is not only her inner self that is torn with emotional strife, but that the whole world around her is in some degree of turmoil, at that time, in that place.
Hughes chooses to stay in the first person perspective, choosing to view Plath’s actions of that day from a distance as he felt he could get no nearer to her, which is summed up well in the penultimate stanza of his version.
“You were locked into some chamber gasping for oxygen where I could not find you…”
Upon finding the rabbit traps, they once again differ greatly in opinion. Plath sees the trapping of the rabbits as heartless murder, whereas Hughes sees it as a necessity for country life.
There is a big mood change in both poems when the traps are discovered. Plath’s poem sudden focuses all it’s malice directly on the rabbit traps, as if everything else had suddenly ceased to exist. When reading this poem it is important to note that is was likely that Plath was suffering from Post Natal Depression, which has direct links to the language she chooses in her poem.
“Set close, like birth pangs. The absence of shrieks…”
The feelings of loss and sorrow caused by the PND are relayed onto the rabbits, so she tears all the traps from the ground and throws them away. She felt her husband wanted to see the rabbits dead out of sheer bloodlust, ‘They Excited Him.’
Hughes, in his version of the poem, sees rabbit catching as an unpleasant but none the less necessary act. He feels that she was looking for something to vent her anger at, but he had endeavoured to maintain their ‘simmering truce’ so when the rabbit traps were discovered she let fly.
“You were weeping with a rage that cared nothing for rabbits…”
In the last stanza of each poem, the marital problems they were having are addressed. Plath chooses to use the traps themselves as metaphor for the issues they were having, showing us that she felt that she was caught in the relationship and it was killing her slowly.
“Tight wires between us…sliding shut on some quick thing, the constriction killing me also.”
Hughes chooses to explore what she was feeling by talking of what she had metaphorically caught in the snare. He makes out that in those traps she had discovered something inside her self, something dark that she did not wish to address, switching the blame for all the negativity back to her.
“You’d caught something… Was it your doomed self, your tortured, crying, suffocating self?”
The over-riding impression each poem gives us completely contradicts the other, which we can assume was the point. Plath and Hughes lived at opposite ends of the spectrum, neither of them fully knowing how to deal with their relationship, so the only thing left was to express their individual thoughts and feelings in their poetry.
