Ghost in the Black Box: Analysis of ‘Black Coat’ by Ted Hughes

In ‘Black Coat’, Ted Hughes poignantly portrays himself as failing to become a ‘blank slate’ upon which Sylvia Plath projects her father. Through a series of meaningful juxtapositions and philosophical allusions — such as tabula rasa and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s beetle in the box — Hughes effectively emphasises the multiplicity of truths and the imperviousness of the human mind.

Written as a response to Plath’s ‘Man In Black’, ‘Black Coat’ is a four-stanza poem which contains no distinguishable rhyme scheme. Through the use of structural contradictions and juxtaposing imageries, the poet enables readers to easily empathise with the persona — Hughes, himself — as he struggles and fails to step out of the shadow of Plath’s father. The philosophical allusions will be analysed in relation to the juxtapositions which are evident throughout the poem. The conclusion will then be as thus: ‘Black Coat’ calls to attention society’s haphazard judgement while successfully establishing reality as consisting of subjective truths.

The language used in this poem is often dark and blunt, yet multifaceted, juxtaposing the clinical with the sentimental, the natural with the manmade, the monosyllabic with the polysyllabic and the living with the dead. The first stanza deals with the idea of new beginnings which becomes apparent when the persona says, ‘Me and the sea one big tabula rasa … Might be a whole new start’. Tabula rasa, as defined by John Locke (1947, p.45) in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, is the state of the human mind at birth which resembles a ‘white paper, void of all characters’. In ‘Black Coat’, the persona attempts to return to such a state, hoping that the ‘horizon-wide’ sea would ‘wipe’ his slate clean. And as the persona tries ‘to feel thoroughly alone’, it becomes evident that he is burdened by the ‘double image’ which the ‘you’ in the poem superimposes onto him.

Moreover, by calling the sea a ‘scrim of gleam’, the idea of having his past scrubbed clean is further accentuated. Scrim is definable as both a coarse fabric which can be used for scrubbing, or something which obscures something else. By the latter definition, to step out ‘of that scrim of gleam’ could perhaps mean to no longer be obscured, or overshadowed, by Plath’s memory of her father. Double meanings are not exclusive to language, however, and can also be created through structural contradictions. For instance, the use of the line break in the first stanza leads the readers to believe that the persona’s ‘sole memory’ is of the ‘good feeling’ of ‘nostalgia’, only to find out in the next line that the persona’s memory is actually of his ‘black overcoat’.

Furthermore, the use of an em dash as a medial caesura in the line ‘To the quick of the blood — that outer-edge nostalgia’ foregrounds the burden of memory and seems an attempt to concretise the abstract through the concrete — ‘nostalgia’ through ‘blood’. This creates a sense of tangibility, wherein nostalgia becomes a real, palpable object which pertains the fluidity of blood. Furthermore, by adding ‘I suppose’ to the persona’s recollection of having been ‘staring at the sea’ the uncertainty of the persona’s own memory is then demonstrated, which indicates that the human mind is paradoxical, prone to mistakes and discrepancies. By the end of the first stanza, it becomes clear that the persona has failed to become a ‘blank slate’.

The imperviousness of the human mind is then exemplified in the second stanza wherein Hughes introduces the idea of the ‘black box’. In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1958, p.100) uses this same analogy to embody the impenetrability of the human mind, exemplifying the inability to experience the world from someone else’s point of view. True to this allusion, whether accidental or not, throughout the poem, Hughes successfully refrains from imposing his morality upon the readers, and instead leaves them to play judge and jury as they so often do when it comes to matters concerning his private affairs.

The discrepancies and multifacetedness of public conjectures are reinforced structurally through the fluctuating syllable count which cleverly mimics the ebb and flow of the sea. For instance, the mostly monosyllabic lines ‘My shoe-sole shapes / My only sign’ are immediately followed by the lengthy polysyllabic ‘My minimal but satisfying discussion’, which then return to the monosyllabic ‘With the sea’. Such structural inconsistency seems to further argue for the unpredictability of both the internal and the external world, prefacing reality as unknowable in its most objective form.

Moreover, with the sibilance, ‘My shoe-sole shapes / My only sign’, it is as if the persona is insinuating that his existence is shaped entirely by external forces — he is no more than what the world believes him to be. Furthermore, the lines, ‘Like feeding a wild deer / With potato crisps’, effectively juxtaposes the natural with the manmade, which further demonstrates the many incongruities of the world. Hughes has also pitted the clinical language against the sentimental one when he chooses ‘diplopic error’ to diagnose Plath’s ‘two-way heart’.

And with the use of phrases like, ‘I suppose’, ‘might’, ‘maybe’ and, on three different occasions, ‘no idea’, it is safe to say that Hughes refuses to rationalise his side of the story, and this perhaps suggests that he, himself, believes there is no such thing as the objective truth from which any moralising can derive; his hazy memory is merely the other side of that one coin. The imagery most prominently evoked is indisputably the last line of the third stanza — ‘Against that freezing sea / From which your dead father had just crawled’ — which is intensified in the last stanza when ‘the ghost’ of Plath’s father ‘slid into [him]’.

Consequently, through the notion of tabula rasa, ‘Black Coat’ sets up the ‘narrative’ for the rest of the poem by foreshadowing ‘the body of the ghost’. And through the notion of the ‘black box’, Hughes further exemplifies his failure at distancing himself from ‘the ghost’ of Plath’s father. Due to the many forms of juxtapositions, which seem the only constant in the poem, by the time the readers arrive at the last stanza, they have already been conditioned to dichotomise any two imageries which exist alongside each other.

And so even as ‘the ghost’ of Plath’s father becomes one with Hughes, the readers see this as a ‘diplopic error’, a misidentification, and so rebel against that unsettling imagery, even as they grudgingly accept such imposition in the same manner Hughes does — as the newest resignation, and also the oldest. By this logic, and due to the reasons expatiated above, ‘Black Coat’ by Ted Hughes implicitly calls to attention the precariousness of society’s judgement and proposes that there is no such thing as the objective truth.

Works Cited

Hughes, T., 1998. Birthday Letters. London: Faber and Faber.

Locke, J., 1947. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London: Everyman.

Wittgenstein, L., 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell & Mott.

Originally written in Mar 2018 for ‘Playing Parts’

First published on Medium.