Words

The poem is about the power of words, though in this case a destructive power. To me this is a very direct poem. Words are like axes, powerful and sharp, loud, emitting echoes, everyone can hear them, everyone can see their effect. Words can be like axes, if they are used cruelly. They hurt. They drag her and wound her, bringing her to the surface sap, like tears, or like the blood-jet of poetry, trying …

…poems each word is like a stone dropped in a pond, the meanings and symbolism of words travelling out from them like ripples. This sense of fatalism, the inevitability of her death is, in my opinion, a legacy she inherited from Ted Hughes. This poem encapsulates in it the whole task that she set for herself and her work, and, in spite of the triumph of her poetic accomplishment, the ultimate failure of that task.