nder Place, Hughes recalls Plaths shock-therapy sessions. He poses the question of whether or not Plath was mad, or merely a victim of her own upbringing. The poem is not much more than an account of her sessions, but the reader can see through the concrete and find out what Hughes thought himself of this method of treatment; they can see that he was a bit fascinated by it. Hughes writes, Once to check / I dropped a file across the electrodes / Of a twelve-volt battery it exploded / Like a grenade. He calls the electrodes the thunderbolt in your skull (12).This poem focuses on the intensity of Plath, both as a woman haunted by her father, and as a profound writer. Hughes has in some way deified her into a goddess from Hell. With all the dark images of war, death, mayhem, and Armageddon in this poem, the reader can tell that Hughes sees Plath as a victim of both the shock therapy and her father.In Childs Park, many interesting things happen. In the first stanza, the reader may interpret Plaths falling in the water as literal. But looking closer, it could be seen as figurative, where Plaths fever was so hot that she had to be cooled off. Hughes writes, Your fury / Had to be quenched. Heavy water, / Deeper, deeper, cooling and controlling / Your plutonium secret. You breathed water (69). In this passage, Hughes refers to plutonium, one of the most deadly substances on the planet. He correlates it with Plaths secret. Does Hughes view his wife and her demons to be so bad that they are radioactive, deadly? In the second stanza of the poem, Plath has cooled off. The verse is loaded with naturalistic imagery, with words like dragonflies, woodpecker, and garden. Hughes describes the setting on the literal, and then turns to describe the setting of Plath' mind. He says, You were never / More than a step from Paradise. / You had instant access, your analyst told you, / To the core of your Inferno (69). Plaths Paradise and Inferno are one in the...
