This is Why I Love Poetry

I love the way this poem keeps the reader in a slight sense of "where is this going?" before it reaches its inevitable conclusion. In my opinion, this poem must have been written by Ted Hughes in the immediate aftermath of Sylvia Plath's suicide. The images are so fresh, the pain so obviously close at hand.

Yet, since the author has passed on, we might never know for sure. Do we really need to, though? Sometimes forming one's own conclusions and coming up with individual interpretation without the Cliff's Notes quick capsule summary in review is more fun.

*Still, it would be nice to have gotten Hughes' perspective on this. He died leaving so much unsaid. The pain must have been unbearable.

The Blue Flannel Suit

I had let it all grow. I had supposed
It was all OK. Your life
Was a liner I voyaged in.
Costly education had fitted you out.
Financiers and committees and consultants
Effaced themselves in the gleam of your finish.
You trembled with the new life of those engines.

That first morning,
Before your first class at College, you sat there
Sipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not,
What eyes waited at the back of the class
To check your first professional performance
Against their expectations. What assessors
Waited to see you justify the cost
And redeem their gamble. What a furnace
Of eyes waited to prove your metal. I watched
The strange dummy stiffness, the misery,
Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, ugly
Half-approximation to your idea
Of the proprieties you hoped to ease into,
And your horror in it. And the tanned
Almost green undertinge of your face
Shrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaited
Head pathetically tiny.

You waited,
Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezers
Of the life that judged you, an I saw
The flayed nerve, the unhealable face-wound
Which was all you had for courage.
I saw what gripped you, as you sipped.
Were terrors that had killed you once already.
Now, I see, I saw, sitting, the lonely
Girl who was going to die.

That blue suit
A mad, execution uniform,
Survived your sentence. But then I sat, stilled
Unable to fathom what stilled you
As I looked at you, as I am stilled
Permanently now, permanently
Bending so briefly at your open coffin.