“And I am married to a poet. We came together in that church of the chimney sweeps with nothing but love & hope & our own selves: Ted in his old black corduroy jacket & me in mother’s gift of a pink knit dress. Pink rose & black tie. An empty church in watery yellow-gray light of rainy London. Outside, the crowd of thick-ankled tweed-coated mothers & pale, jabbering children waiting for the bus to take them on a church outing to the Zoo.
And here I am: Mrs. Hughes. And wife of a published poet.”
—from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, Cambridge Diary, Monday afternoon: February 25 1957
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes first met on 25 February 1956 at party in Cambridge, England. They married only four months later on 16 June 1956 at St George the Martyr, Holborn, Camden, London in honor of Bloomsday with Plath‘s mother Aurelia being the only wedding guest. They have been married for six years and four months until Plath died by suicide on 11 February 1963.
Even though they have been separated for five months since September 1962, they never got a divorce. Maybe today would have been their 69th anniversary, if they were alive and stayed together.
Picture source: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes photographed by Lettice Ramsey at Ramsey & Muspratt in Cambridge, England in 1956.
This picture is one of 13 Plath and Hughes had taken a few moths later in November 1956 as their official wedding photos. They are wearing their actual wedding attire and Plath wore a “pink knitted suit dress”. They both ended up hating the photographs.
Ted Hughes later wrote about that day in his poem "A Pink Wool Knitted Dress", which was published in Birthday Letters (1998):
"In your pink wool knitted dress
Before anything had smudged anything
You stood at the altar. Bloomsday.
Rain - so that a just-bought umbrella
Was the only furnishing about me
Newer than three years inured.
My tie - sole, drab, veteran RAF black -
Was the used-up symbol of a tie.
My chord jacket - thrice-dyed black, exhausted,
Just hanging on to itself."
If you want to find out more about their wedding and the story of these wedding pictures, I highly recommend you to read Ann Kennedy Smith‘s blog post at https://akennedysmith.com/
Photo source: https://www.loftyimages.co.uk/
