Poem Analysis: An Analysis Of Ted Hughes's Fourteenth Poems

In the fourteenth poem, the speaker must come to terms with the fact that the relationship is over. He is faced with images of autumnal change and decay but does not want to accept them. The poem features short verses of only three to four syllables that are often connected by enjambments into bigger units of meaning and a concentrated syntactic structure almost without conjunctions. Although George ended the eighth verse with a full stop, the second half does not form a complete sentence but continues the sentence of the first half. The compressed form corresponds to the poem’s images of transience.
As the speaker asks the addressee not to repeatedly speak about the signs of late autumn that he associates with the ended relationship, it seems

Although the text starts with the speaker’s request “Sprich nicht” that should not be sung too soft, we tried to make his resignation palpable. He knows there is no hope. The new tempo made the shaping of the song more difficult at first. For my second singer, who had sung it faster with another pianist, intonation felt differently, whereas I had to get used to a new feeling for the polyrhythms. Despite the more lyrical character it is possible to work out the harsher images of the text through the clear articulation of the piano part and of the singer’s consonants that often need more time in the slower tempo. Schönberg marked the piano part “ohne Pedal” (without pedal) in bars 1 and 7. Although the repeated marking might indicate he wanted or accepted pedal in-between, I wanted to bring out the fragility and “shimmering” instability of the poetic images and chose, therefore, to play the whole song without pedal, apart from the last bar, where I used pedal to connect the final octaves. Schönberg’s illustrations of the smashing, the steps and the trembling are only possible to convey with clear articulation without