from "The City," by Ted Hughes

 

 

Your poems are like a dark city centre.

Your novel, your stories, your journals, your letters, are suburbs

Of this big city.

The hotels are lit like office blocks all night

With scholars, priests, pilgrims. It's at night

Sometimes I drive through. I just find

Myself driving through, going slow, simply

Roaming in my own darkness, pondering

What you did. Nearly always

I glimpse you - at some crossing,

Staring upwards, lost, sixty year old.

 

 This poem is from a collection called Birthday Letters, which Ted Hughes published after the death of his wife, Sylvia Plath, who committed suicide.  These poems are written like letters to his wife, and are included in a genre of poetry called “Epistolary Poems.”  It is also part of a larger genre of literature that is epistolary writing.

 

Read more about Ted Hughes here.