Within the poem Red, the poet Ted Hughes writes about his wife, Sylvia Plath, and how the colour red connotes her vitality and her life, together with the connotation of anger and pain, opposed to the colour white which connotes his wife’s death and demise.
Throughout the poem, the imagery of red used often, creating an overwhelming sensation for the audience. The narrator also notices the mass amount of red in the couple’s lives. The quotation “red was what you wrapped around you” suggests that the narrators wife is always surrounded by this colour, indicating that she feels comfortable, hence wrapping herself in the colour red. It also suggests that his wife always had the colour of blood around her, which could represent her internal suffering, yet she needs red around her to feel safe and in control. This makes the reader feel concerned towards the wife’s well-being and why her favourite colour is blood-red, which commonly symbolises death. This further shows that the wife could have mental issues if she sees the colour red as a positive connotation opposed to the negative connotations that red would ordinarily symbolise, such as anger or death.
In the seventh stanza, the husband states that his wife would hide all the white with red roses – “painted white then splashed it with roses, defeated it,” This quotation suggests that his wife often slipped into her demise (which is represented by the colour white) and she struggled to keep healthy mentally. However, when she started to realise that something was wrong, she would camouflage the white away by “splashing” the colour red everywhere in the form of roses. This suggests that the wife wants to instantly hide away the foreshadowing of her demise; hence drowning her life back into redness again to feel secure, as she knows nothing except redness in her life. The verb “splashed” indicates that the red overpowers the white, hence the quick motion of splashing all the white at once. This further proposes the splashing of blood could be occurring, which represents the wife’s mental struggles. This makes the audience feel discomforted as a vast amount of red is being used to cover up the white, further suggesting that the wife is drowning herself in her mental illness, hence dying quickly, yet she’s attempting to cover it up and impersonate normality.
The structure and form of the poem is in a story-telling form as the couple move into a house together and are decorating. It also reveals that the husband discovers that the wife has an obsession with the colour red, which acknowledges her illness, and slowly merges into insanity and foreshadowing her death. Within the last three stanzas, Hughes addresses the preference of the colour blue on Plath, which could be a reference to the poem The Blue Flannel Suit. It could also suggest that the husband paired the colour blue to his wife as he wanted her to be free from her struggles, hence using a more calming colour opposed to the harsh red that has suffocated their lives. The poem builds to a climax, nonetheless ends with a resolution, as the husband comes to the conclusion that the wife’s more profound colour was blue. This indicates that the husband distinguished that his wife was mentally ill later after her death, and as he is replaying the events, Hughes concludes the poem with a bittersweet denouement.
Kayleigh Jones 