Pink Wool Knicted Dress, By Langston Hughes

due to Hughes, as a modern figure, writing about his own personal experiences; his bitter sadness is bound up with the bright side of love and positivity that has come in the wake of their relationship. ‘Pink Wool Knitted Dress’ references this happiness, as he recalls Sylvia “you sobbed with joy”. The use of the word ‘pink’ in the title is deliberate, denoting femininity, innocence, and happiness, things that are all destroyed eventually. There is contrasting motivation to write this text compared to the other two, as this appears to be Hughes way of dealing with his feelings of sadness following Plath’s suicide. The journey through their relationship from the happiness of their marriage in ‘Pink Wool Knitted Dress’ starkly contrasts some of the later poems. For example the poem ‘Epiphany’, with the title meaning sudden moment of realization, shows the deterioration of their relationship, as Hughes epiphany is that “our marriage had failed”. The use of the word ‘had’ shows the certainty that the marriage was finished, and they were no longer right for each other.

Within Birthday Letters, there is a rich dialectic that is not evident in the other texts. Dark melancholic thoughts such as in ‘The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother’ where Hughes says “I buried her where she fell” shows his bitter sadness. Thoughts such as these battle against bright love, as they both shape and affect each other, competing in a mutual and dynamic way. The poetry collection produced by Plath at the time. ‘Ariel’ may be a source allowing further understanding of the relationship. Within her poem ‘Lady Lazarus’, Plath presents herself as a “phoenix” stating “I eat men like air”. In this first meeting, she bites him and scars him. Evidently, this hints how th...

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...dark side of love has a common thread within all three texts, of jealousy and obsession, but it appears in different shades. For Birthday Letters, the mental turmoil of Plath that is ignited by her obsessive love for Hughes appears to have cast a dark shadow over him, and their relationship. The dark side of love in Rebecca, is not as psychologically deep as the others. The darkness instead is jealousy and obsession characterized by gothicism and the supernatural, made for dramatic entertainment. Above all, the dark side of Othello is the jealousy and obsession that he feels over his wife and her actions, of which Iago acts as a catalyst, only speeding up the destruction of their relationship, shownt through the dramatic superiority of Othello. All shares the common thread of obsession and jealousy, affecting the characters and bringing about negative repercussions.