"Anniversary" is an autobiographical poem by the English poet Ted Hughes that elegizes his mother, Edith, who died in 1969. On the anniversary of her death, Hughes envisions his mother surrounded by "feathers of flame" walking alongside her sister, Miriam, who died many years earlier. As they move through a kind of afterlife, Edith shares memories of her life and family. She relates how much she cherished her children, but Hughes also reveals that she favored his older brother and that her love could sometimes be a burden. Even as he honors his mother, Hughes wrestles throughout the poem with resentment, grief, and guilt about their relationship. "Anniversary" was written sometime in the early 1990s, but the poem remained uncollected until Hughes published New and Selected Poems, 1957-1994 in 1995.
The speaker, Ted Hughes himself, describes seeing his mother surrounded by feathers made of fire and getting taller. He pictures her every year on May 13th, the anniversary of her death, alongside her sister, Miriam. All Hughes has to do is pick up the page ripped from a diary where his brother wrote down that their mother had died and it's like she and Miriam are suddenly right in front of him. His mother is now the same height as Miriam. In the afterlife, where it's like it's always Sunday morning, they walk together listening to the early morning birdsong as it echoes above them. The work of the universe surrounds them, energy pulsing and flaring as new things are made and other things are destroyed. It's like a colorful curtain of light running through their feathers.
Hughes's mother is telling Miriam all about her life—which really means she's telling Miriam all about Hughes's life. Her voice ripples as though reverberating through a deep forest gorge. She shows Miriam a mark on her dress and explains that's the water stain from a time she had to pull Hughes out of a reservoir. Then she points out a horse that she rode far across a field just to bring her son a new pen. And here's the pen itself, which she sacrificed for him. She points out the multiple weddings of Hughes and his brother, to which she wasn't invited. Now she's tossing red-hot coals with her bare hands to see where Hughes had fallen down again for the third time. She can't help but laugh until she cries. Miriam died when she was only 18, and she's astonished, almost saintly, hearing about all the things she wasn't around for. Hughes's mother shows her sister all her worries, which she counts out like rosary beads, trying on one after the other like a pair of shoes or a dress. She wore those worries all the time, and she liked it like that. She spent a lot of her time just sitting and looking out the window, perfectly content just to know that Hughes and his brother were out there living their lives. She still feels like that now, in fact, and tells Miriam to look at Hughes.
The two women stop for a moment, at the edge of the afterlife, where the stars are like tiny sparkling dewdrops. They're watching Hughes. His mother, who died more recently, looks more vibrant than Miriam, with her bright red hair and her ethereal, olive skin. Miriam, meanwhile, is now a transparent flame at her side. Shimmering light pulses in the feathers in their wings. Hughes's mother's face is wet and shiny, as if she was trying to spot her son through a strong wind. Hughes does this (writing, living, elegizing) for her.
She uses Hughes like an instrument—her love for Hughes is really just a way for her to feel her sorrowful love for his brother more intensely. It's like Hughes is just a shadow, while he's the real deal.
Once, when Hughes reached her after walking a mile through the fields, he discovered that she was crying over his brother. She had believed it was his brother coming towards her the whole time.
“Anniversary” is an autobiographical poem in which Ted Hughes explores the complexities of family relationships and how they are remembered and interpreted after a loved one's passing. The anniversary of the title is that of the death of Hughes’s mother; all he has to do is "lift / The torn-off diary page" where his brother recorded the date of her death, and she appears in his mind. Hughes sees her draped in "feathers of flame," walking alongside her sister, Miriam, who died many years earlier.
Hughes notes that his mother is "now as tall as Miriam," an image suggesting that his mother's legacy has grown in his mind in the years since her death. In the same vein, he describes her "Red Indian hair," her "piping" voice, and "her skin / So strangely olive and other-worldly"; her features are striking, no longer of this world, as she talks to her sister "In the perpetual Sunday Morning / Of everlasting" (that is, the afterlife). Miriam, meanwhile, is now "Madonna-like with pure wonder" to hear Hughes's mother talk about her life and children. He imagines her and his mother watching Hughes and his brother from beyond the grave, "their feathers throb[bing] softly, iridescent."
This is no hazy portrait. Clearly, his mother's presence hasn't dulled with time but remained vivid and arresting. She and Miriam are like towering, fiery angels whose intense love transcends the grave. Hughes describes them "looking at" him from the afterlife, his mother explaining the satisfaction she got—and "still" gets—from simply knowing he and his brother "were somewhere." Hughes glorifies both women in his memory, illustrating the way the dead may be warped, mythologized, and magnified in the minds of those they left behind.
Yet as the halo of flame around his mother "grows taller," Hughes's complicated feelings about her seem to become sharper and more painful as well. He can't escape her presence, which means he also can't escape old grievances that plagued their relationship. More specifically, he still can't step out from "the shadow cast" by his brother, whom Hughes argues she favored. Though he envisions his mother "looking at" him from beyond the grave, he ends the poem by revealing that, once again, she is only seeing his brother. Memory, then, becomes a kind of double-edged sword in Hughes's grief. For Hughes, his mother, in death, becomes a larger-than-life figure whose lingering presence is both a comfort and a burden. While the poem reaffirms how much his mother cared about the speaker and his brother, it also hints that the memory of her love is as painful as it is comforting.
In “Anniversary,” Ted Hughes depicts his mother's love and worry for her sons as a constant presence in her life. She clung to those worries as one might to “rosary prayers,” a metaphor that makes those worries seem like a form of devotion. Such devotion even follows her into the afterlife, where Hughes imagines her reuniting with her sister Miriam and catching her up on the children Miriam never got to meet. In these conversations, Hughes presents himself and his brother as the main source of their mother's happiness and fulfillment. Though her own day-to-day life didn't seem particularly exciting, she derived tremendous satisfaction from simply knowing that he and his brother were out in the world, living their lives. Yet the poem also implies that, because her happiness was so wrapped up in her sons' lives, it could be challenging for them (or, at least, for Hughes) to feel as if their lives were ever truly their own. "[H]er life," Hughes says, "was mine," an admission conveying both the depth of his mother's love and how burdensome—"how laden with expectations"—that love could feel.
Hughes's mother clearly made sacrifices for her children. Hughes imagines her in the afterlife telling Miriam about pulling a young Hughes out of a reservoir, staining her dress in the process, and how she once rode through the countryside just to bring him a pen. At the same time, she notes how her children seem to have shut her out: she takes care to mention “the mass marriages of him and his brother / Where I was not once a guest." Readers can sense some resentment here regarding the fact that neither Hughes nor his brother allowed her to fully be a part of their adult lives. (Recall that Hughes is imagining this whole scene, however; her snide comment about not being invited to their weddings suggests his own lingering guilt for how he treated her.)
And yet, this resentment seems to have gone both ways. Although Hughes describes several ways his mother expressed her love, and he accepts how she was always "looking towards me" to find meaning in her life, he understands, bitterly, that the person she really longed for was his brother. Her love for Hughes himself was just practice, a way to "tune finer / Her weeping love for my brother." In other words, she was unable to love Hughes simply for his own sake.
Illustrating this, Hughes recounts an incident when his mother saw him moving towards her across a mile-long field and allowed herself to believe, or pretend, "for all that distance" that he was actually his brother. This "distance" evokes the emotional space between them. And yet, he accepts his obligation, as a son, to "do this for her" and honor her memory the best way that he can—by writing this elegy. Thus even as "Anniversary" has many tender details, Hughes doesn't shy away from illustrating the more complicated aspects of his relationship with his mother. Her love was genuine and profound, the poem implies, but it could also be all-consuming, even smothering—and her supposed preference for Hughes's brother seems to have left Hughes himself feeling overshadowed and even used.
In “Anniversary,” Ted Hughes describes an afterlife that is intimately intertwined with the cosmic processes of creation and destruction. The poem’s vivid imagery suggests that everything in the universe, human souls included, is part of an endless cycle of life and death, of creation and destruction.
Hughes imagines his mother and her sister Miriam calmly “strolling / together” in the “perpetual Sunday Morning / Of everlasting.” The afterlife, here, is a place of peace and tranquility where the dead are reunited with loved ones. The mention of Sunday morning recalls Jesus’s resurrection, while the presence of “larks,” birds symbolically tied to the morning, also brings to mind new dawns. This isn’t necessarily the Christian Heaven, but the mention of “Sunday Morning” and the larks' presence does imply that the women's spirits or souls have arisen or been reborn. Note, too, that this morning is “perpetual” and “everlasting.” Likewise, the larks’ song is "Ringing in their orbits." An orbit doesn't have a clear beginning or end; the birds’ singing, like this afterlife, goes on and on, around and around, in an endless loop.
The poem further ties this afterlife to the “work” of the universe itself—that is, to the “Creation and destruction of matter / And of anti-matter.” As the women stroll, the universe "pulses and flares, shudders and fades" all around them. This imagery evokes a sense of the eternal movement and energy within the universe. The women themselves are surrounded by (or, maybe, have become) “feathers of flame”: imagery that links their own souls to those pulses and flares, to that cosmic “work.” Even in death, the poem suggests, they continue to exist within the cosmic order, their essence fused with the universe's.
Having been in the afterlife for much longer than her sister, Miriam is in fact “now sheer flame.” This image suggests she has been almost completely consumed or transformed by the fire. Alternatively, “sheer” here means transparent, suggesting that her flame has grown weaker. Either way, the implication is that her soul has become more and more entwined with the cosmos—that her essence is becoming part of or dwindling back into the universe from which it came. Ultimately, then, the poem envisions an afterlife where souls are reborn yet continue to exist within the cosmic cycle; an afterlife that remains connected to the natural processes of the universe.
My mother in ...
... there they are.
Ted Hughes begins "Anniversary" with a surreal description of his mother in the afterlife. She appears, Hughes says, "in her feathers of flame": a phrase that suggests she is framed by fiery wings. The fricative alliteration of "feathers of flame" evokes the flickering of those flames, which transform Hughes's mother into an imposing (maybe even frightening) presence. Indeed, she "grows taller," Hughes continues: a nod not to literal growth but to the idea that she has become a more towering figure in Hughes's mind.
Line 2 then introduces an important date: May 13th. This is the anniversary of the poem's title, but it's not clear yet of what. The speaker withholds the answer for another three lines, generating suspense. That suspense is drawn out through the use of caesurae. Each caesura forces the reader to pause, to take an extra beat, as with the full stops in lines 2 and 3:
Grows taller. Every May Thirteenth
I see her with her sister Miriam. I lift
Finally, in line 5, Hughes reveals what's so important about May 13th: this is the day his mother died. (Hughes's mother, Edith, died on May 13th, 1969.) The date has been recorded on a page torn out of a diary (a British term for a daybook or calendar), having been "jotted" down by Hughes's brother. When Hughes goes to "lift" the page, he sees his mother and his aunt, Miriam, appear before him.
Hughes presents all this quite matter-of-factly. The language throughout these opening lines is remarkably casual given their subject. Hughes doesn't say that his brother somberly recorded the date of death, but simply that he "jotted" it down—a word that makes it seem almost like an afterthought. The phrase "Ma died today" is similarly blunt and straightforward; there's nothing dramatic or particularly emotional about this recording.
Hughes also doesn't seem surprised or astonished to see his dead mother and her sister. Instead, the apparitions are described plainly, as though their appearance is natural and expected. The speaker's mother is dead, and yet, the speaker's mother is here; that's simply how it is. It's unclear whether Hughes deliberately conjures his mother in his mind (i.e., by flipping to that "torn-off diary page") or if she arrives unbidden, pulled by the force of his grief. Either way, it sounds as though Hughes has come to anticipate this vision every year.
She is now ...
... in their orbits.
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... in their feathers.
My mother is ...
... from the reservoir.
And that is ...
... on the altar.
And these ...
... the third time.
She laughs ...
... all she missed.
Now my mother ...
... to wear best."
And: "Much of ...
... Look."
And they pause, ...
... flame beside her.
Their feathers throb ...
... this for her.
She is using ...
... think me him.
The pen symbolizes the young Ted Hughes's literary ambitions. It's the poet's instrument, the tool of his trade, and it represents his commitment to his art. Hughes's mother describes to her sister, Miriam, how once she rode a horse through the countryside and "out over the heather simply / To bring him a new pen." This is her way of explaining how she championed the young Hughes as an artist. She understood the pen's power (that is, she knows it's not "just" a pen) and went out of her way to deliver it to him. And this is the same pen which, she says, "I laid on the altar." Here, Hughes's mother doesn't mean a literal altar. She's speaking in a symbolic register about sacrifice: she is offering up the pen. This seems to stand in for all the other sacrifices she made for her children over the years, perhaps even putting aside her own literary ambitions to support her son's artistic talent.
"Anniversary" doesn't use rhyme or a steady meter, but it's still a very lyrical poem. This is in large part thanks to consonance (and, sometimes, alliteration), which make the poem's language sound more intense, musical, and memorable.
In stanza 1, for example, /f/ alliteration highlights the image of the speaker's mother surrounded by "feathers of flame." Those fricative sounds might also evoke the flickering of a flame itself. Later, soft /s/ and lilting /l/ sounds make the image of the afterlife more reassuring. There's something hushed and comforting about the sounds of this passage:
In the perpetual Sunday Morning
Of everlasting, they are strolling together
Listening to the larks
In this way, the poem's sounds often enhance its imagery. For another example, listen to the pounding /d/ alliteration and consonance of line 17:
Down a deep gorge of woodland echoes:
These sounds evoke the power of Hughes's mother's "piping" voice as it "echoes" through the afterlife.
Hughes also uses consonance to control the emotional register of the poem. In lines 25-30, for example, sibilance (as well /f/, /th/, and /sh/ sounds, which are often considered sibilant in their own right) illustrates his mother's anger and grief as well as his own sadness. Speaking about himself in the voice of his mother, he writes:
Are the mass marriages of him and his brother
Where I was not once a guest." Then suddenly
She is scattering the red coals with her fingers
To find where I had fallen
For the third time. She laughs
Helplessly till she weeps [...]
All these hissing, slippery, hushed sounds evoke both bitter anger and deep sadness.
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In British English, "diary" refers specifically to an appointment book or datebook.
"Anniversary" is an elegy: Hughes is somberly reflecting on his mother on the anniversary of her death. Unlike many elegies, however, the poem doesn't end on a particularly hopeful note. On the contrary, "Anniversary" leaves the reader with a sense of Hughes's disappointment and bitterness at being overshadowed in his mother's eye by his brother.
The poem also doesn't follow a standard structure. Each stanza is a different length:
The result is a kind of shaggy poem, one that passes freely back and forth between Hughes's memories of his mother and his vision of the afterlife. The long second stanza, in particular, pulls the reader into the details of Hughes's mother's life. Like Miriam, who is listening "Madonna-like with pure wonder," the reader finds themselves absorbed in the mother's recollections. It's almost as if, in stanza 2, Hughes's mother hijacks the poem as she goes on and on about her life.
But Hughes gets things back under control in the final two stanzas and fits his ideas into neat tercets. It's possible that the poem's form is telling the reader something about how grief works—how sometimes it looms large and threatens to take over everything. After reflecting on his mother, Hughes has to work hard to discipline his feelings and pinpoint why her loss feels so complicated. Perhaps the tercets are his way of getting those feelings back under control and rationalizing his grief.
"Anniversary" uses free verse, meaning that it has no strict meter. Instead, it has an easy, conversational rhythm. The poem uses frequent enjambment, which pulls the reader down the page, while frequent caesurae prevent things from ever tumbling out of control. The poem's loose, lyrical rhythms are appropriate for a speaker who is lost in thought remembering a loved one.
Very occasionally, the speaker lapses into a formal iambic meter. An iamb is a foot with two syllables arranged in an unstressed-stressed pattern (da-DUM). Iambic meter sounds very natural in spoken English, so these lines don't necessarily stick out. This meter does, however, underscore the weight of simple, profound statements, as in line 5:
"Ma died | today" | —and there | they are.
Just as the speaker's brother recorded his mother's death in the plainest possible terms, the speaker is equally straightforward and direct about how their mother and Miriam appear in their mind's eye. Each half of the line is equal in terms of stressed beats. It's perfectly balanced, suggesting that even though the speaker's mother is dead, it's equally true that the speaker sees her clear as day.
"Anniversary" doesn't use a rhyme scheme. Because it also lacks a formal meter, Hughes's poem is an example of free verse. Rhyme usually adds emphasis to the final words of a line, but this poem has a very natural, almost conversational flow. Since the poem describes an imagined conversation taking place between the speaker's mother and his aunt Miriam, that choice seems fitting. It's also pretty typical of Hughes's work. Although Hughes was interested in sound (and plays with sound in other ways), he rarely used strict rhyme schemes in his poetry.
"Anniversary" is an autobiographical poem, and it's fair to consider Ted Hughes himself its speaker.
Throughout the poem, Hughes contemplates the loss of his mother, his aunt Miriam's early death, and his fraught relationship with his older brother. Although he's writing about loss, Hughes doesn't seem to be overly emotional. He notes the date of his mother's death matter-of-factly and is unsurprised at how vividly he sees her and Miriam "strolling together" in some realm beyond the living. Hughes is writing about his own family (at least, an imagined version of them), but he doesn't let his own grief eclipse the main subject at hand: his mother and her life experience.
In this poem, then, Hughes attempts to be primarily a restrained observer (though readers can likely sense the love, bitterness, grief, and resentment bubbling beneath the poem's surface). He's sketching out details of his mother's life, and even though it seems as if their relationship wasn't always easy, it's clear that he's still working hard to understand her. The long second stanza, for example, is an exercise in writing from her point of view. Hughes adopts his mom's voice to illustrate how her own happiness was intimately intertwined with the hopes, fears, and desires she had for her sons. For example, he imagines her in the afterlife telling Miriam, "Truly / Wonderful it was, day after day, / Knowing they were somewhere."
As the poem's speaker, Hughes is very aware of just how complicated his relationship with his mother was. He seems to recognize his own ambivalence—perhaps he even subtly acknowledges that this isn't how a bereaved son is expected to feel. By the end of the poem, though, Hughes's focus seems to shift. Instead of just being concerned with the loss of his mother, Hughes hones in on a lifelong rivalry with his brother, who, as far as the reader can tell, is still alive. As the poem's speaker, Hughes is dealing with competing feelings for different family members. His grief is complicated by his frustration with his mother's "weeping love for my brother," and the knowledge that his brother was so obviously the favorite son.
The setting of "Anniversary" moves seamlessly between Hughes's vision of the afterlife and his memories of Yorkshire, England. As Hughes imagines it, life after death is a "perpetual Sunday Morning," endless and serene. Larks are singing overhead, their voices echoing forever "in their orbits."
It's peaceful, but it isn't quaint: all around, fierce cosmic energy is on display as matter is created and destroyed. "The work of the cosmos" is an awe-inspiring spectacle woven into the fabric of the afterlife. The dead have wings of fire and ethereal displays of light and color ripple through their feathers like the "Northern Lights." They still look human, but they're no longer fixed inside their bodies. Hughes's mother's voice, for example, "comes, piping, / Down a deep gorge of woodland echoes" as though it were a stream swiftly tumbling through a forest. Similarly, she "Grows taller," while Miriam fades into a translucent pillar of flame.
In Hughes's mind, the afterlife seems to be a place of fluidity and flux where matter is changed and transformed. It's positioned somewhere just beyond the realm of the living: Miriam and Hughes's mother reach the end, "the brink / Of the starry dew," some sort of cliff or vantage point from where they can look down at him. But Hughes's mother also refers to a reservoir and fields of heather as well as to a house with a view of the horizon. Likewise, Hughes calls up the memory of the British countryside, when he walked "a mile over fields and walls" in the direction of his mother. His vision of the afterlife reflects the idyllic countryside of his native Yorkshire and is grounded in memories of that place.
The English poet Ted Hughes (1930-1998) is one of the best-known writers of the 20th century. His 1957 debut, The Hawk in the Rain, was a shock to the system of British poetry; it was seen as a challenge to poets of the older generation, who often wrote with greater emphasis on formal structure and emotional restraint.
Hughes grew up in West Riding, Yorkshire, a relatively rural part of England, and he cultivated an early interest in the natural world that would influence his poetry. Hughes was both reverent and unsentimental about nature, seeing it not just as a source of wisdom and beauty (as 19th-century Romantics like William Wordsworth often did), but also as an environment full of instinctive violence and danger.
Hughes was also captivated by the idea of mythological archetypes, including the theme of the rival brothers. He was obsessed with the idea of a ghostly double, which he seems to have found in his older brother, Gerald Hughes, who left home at 18 before emigrating to Australia. The last two stanzas of "Anniversary" point to the lasting hurt his mother suffered in Gerald's absence as well as to Hughes's complicated relationship with his brother.
Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd in Yorkshire, England, in 1930. This poem offers just a glimpse of the rural landscape of his upbringing. "Anniversary" is a particularly personal poem for Hughes, as it deals directly with his family. Hughes's mother, Edith Hughes, died on May 13, 1969, when Hughes was 39 years old. This was a devastating time for Hughes, who was already reeling from the sudden loss of his romantic partner, the poet Assia Wevill, and their four-year-old daughter, Shura. It's possible that Hughes obliquely references their deaths, as well as the loss of his first wife, the poet Sylvia Plath, in lines 27-29:
She is scattering the red coals with her fingers
To find where I had fallen
For the third time. [...]
Edith appears in several of her son's poems from this period. She was a tremendous influence on Hughes, and she also played an important role in the family lore. After the death of her older sister, Miriam, Edith claimed she had developed the extraordinary ability to predict if and when another family member was about to die. Hughes wrote:
[...] through the years, just before any member of her family died, Miriam would appear at my mother's bedside. But as the years passed, her ghost changed. She became brighter and taller. "Gradually," said my mother, "she has turned into an angel." [...] My mother described her as being made of flame. As if she were covered with many-colored feathers of soft, pouring flame.
The imagery Hughes uses in "Anniversary" closely reflects Edith's own description of Miriam's ghost. Although Edith believed herself able to foretell tragedy, she often described Miriam's spirit as a comforting presence. Perhaps, in the wake of so many terrible losses, Hughes was also looking for consolation when he conjured his aunt and his mother on the page.
Gerald Hughes's Obituary — An obituary for Ted Hughes's older brother, which sheds light on the Hughes's family life and the relationship between the rival siblings.
More About Ted Hughes — A short overview of Ted Hughes's life and work via the Academy of American Poets.
The Art of Poetry with Ted Hughes — An interview with the poet which appeared in The Paris Review shortly after the publication of "Anniversary."
Portraits of Ted Hughes — The National Portrait Gallery offers a variety of looks at the poet throughout his career.
Ted Hughes's Obituary — The New York Times's 1998 obituary of Hughes explores the poet's controversial life and career.