In another of Ted Hughes’ poetry, entitled, ‘ Wind‘ he describes their marriage as a house stranded out to sea. Perhaps it often felt like one or more would die. It could be that the green hedge in ‘Bayonet Charge’ represents the chasms that Hughes felt between his wife and himself. Plath and Hughes married only four months after they met, and Hughes admitted that while they seemed relatively happy for the first few years, there were definite “chasms” between them. Although it is certainly hyperbole to compare marriage conflict to national conflict, it is common for Hughes to make such striking analogies. It is not a private matter that Hughes’s marriage with Plath was a battle. This is the kind of battle Hughes seems most familiar with. The soldiers in the first world war would have experienced face to face combat and would have been so close to their enemies that they may have had to use their bayonets to stab the enemy across from them. The title “Bayonet Charge” shows that Hughes is using a World War I soldier as the main subject of this poem. Although he was not likely to have ever been marching head-on into death, it is clear that he could empathize with the feelings of the soldiers.
Since Hughes did not serve as a soldier himself, it is likely that he felt he was able to imagine what a soldier might have felt simply because of the battles he had faced in his own life.
Ted Hughes, a British poet who wrote ‘Bayonet Charge’, is probably best known for his tragic marriage to the American poet, Sylvia Plath.
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