In the letter below, Ted Hughes responds to two scholars about a “mistake” in the final line of his poem, “Walking Bare.” While he agrees that they are technically correct, Hughes explains that the wrong word is “in fact just what I want there.”
26 February 1979
Dear Terry Gifford & Neil Roberts,
Thank you for the typescript. I don’t know whether I ought to read it—anyway, I shan’t be able to for a week or two.
The point you made about ‘corolla’ in Cave-Birds is quite right. Technically, it should be corona. I suspect I was seduced into ‘corolla’ by the underlying image of ‘flower’, and was effectively repelled from ‘corona’ by that word’s more immediate associations—which are more discordant—and by the element of hardness in it. So even now, fully awakened to what I’ve done there, I prefer to leave it as it is. Corolla in fact is just what I want there. If it were absolutely wrong technically, I still wouldn’t use ‘corona’—I’d have to do something else. Many thanks though for drawing my attention to it.
There is a latent conflation of corolla & corona, anyway, in the courtship of ‘l’ &’n’, as in the image of sun’s flame-ring & flower’s petals.
Yours
Ted Hughes