Your assignment is to prepare and submit a paper on the poetry of frieda hughes. She emphasizes her point through the use of imagery, metonymy and hyperbole – all of which seek to leave an indelible mark on the reader’s mind about the anguish and pain she feels. In her poem, “Readers,” Hughes shows what the media and critics do to expose the negative past of her mother Sylvia Plath, and how much Hughes hates what they are doing. She demonstrates the hatred that she feels through the use of intense gore and brutal imagery that are somehow understandable from the point of view of a daughter who simply loves her own mother. Towards the middle of the poem, Hughes features a vulture “with its bloody head/ inside its own belly,/ Sucking up its own juice” (8-10). In these lines, the poet somehow regards the vulture as a metaphor for her own mother, and the fact that the bird has its bloody head sucking its own blood somehow serves as a testament to what the media and critics metaphorically do to her mother. This rather masochistic portrayal of the vulture implies that critics further insult the already dead mother of Hughes using the dead woman’s scandals when she was still alive while making it look like it was Plath’s own fault that she is now regarded as an item for negative publicity. Thus, Hughes’ late mother is represented as a vulture killing itself and is therefore responsible for its own death. Although Hughes does not explicitly show her feelings in the lines of the poem, she somehow hints at her own anguish when she further likens her mother to an animal which is being prepared for cooking. Bloody imagery is evident in the lines “They turned her over like meat on coals” (18) and “They had gutted, peeled/ And garnished her” (31-32). In these lines, Hughes somehow shows how mercilessly some critics malign the reputation of her dead mother as if they were just cooking her up like chicken or fish. Moreover, the poet even shows some kind of no-nonsense sexually brutal imagery as she mentions that the critics inspect her dead mother’s “withered thighs” (19) and “shrunken breasts” (20). The imagery in these words somehow shows how indignant Hughes is at this rather unjust, cruel and downright immoral way that these critics would treat her own mother. And as if all these were not enough, the media eat the dead Sylvia Plath by “[scooping] out her eyes to see how she saw” (21), by “[biting] away her tongue in tiny mouthfuls” (22), and by tasting “separate flesh” (24) and “different organ” (25). Perhaps for Hughes, there is nothing crueller than both being cooked up and eaten up. The brutal imagery employed by Hughes in “Readers” is somehow intertwined with its hyperbole. Various lines and expressions in the poem are somehow exaggerated in order to emphasize the poet’s feelings of pain and anguish. The phrases “turned her over like meat on coals” (18), “scooped out her eyes” (21), and “bit away her tongue” (22) are more like exaggerated statements of painful torture and senseless brutality akin only to cannibals and barbarians, and would somehow never happen in present reality. Nevertheless, the intensity of these hyperbolic statements helps express how painful it is for Hughes to see her late mother being treated like such. The hyperboles may sound like an overemphasis of the cruelty but they are a testament to the personal feelings of the author who simply loves her own mother. .  . .
