The Full Text of “A Picture of Otto”
The Full Text of “A Picture of Otto”
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“A Picture of Otto” Introduction
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The British poet Ted Hughes published "A Picture of Otto" in his final collection, Birthday Letters, in 1998. This autobiographical collection focuses on the relationship between Hughes and his former wife, the famous American poet Sylvia Plath (who died by suicide in 1963). In this particular poem, Hughes addresses Plath's father, Otto, whom Plath depicted as an overbearing tyrant (and also conflated with Hughes) in her poem "Daddy." Hughes meets Otto in the underworld, and, rather than confront him in anger, expresses sympathy for and solidarity with him. Hughes suggests that Plath's perception of both men was just that: her perception, rather than the objective truth of who they were. In this way, the poem seeks to complicate the mythology surrounding Hughes and Plath's relationship, while also suggesting more generally that there are many sides to any story.
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“A Picture of Otto” Summary
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You, Otto, are standing in front of a chalkboard in this photograph (which Sylvia Plath references in her poem "Daddy"). You're a failed church minister. Your religious beliefs were completely sidetracked by your study of honeybees and their communal way of living.
It must be a big surprise to as much of your stern Germanic character as can be evoked through poetry to realize that you're so mixed up with me. As you rise from your coffin, it must be a surprise to be suddenly face to face with me in this dark underground passage, where I've travelled in order to look for your daughter (Sylvia Plath). You'd figured that this dark passage was your family crypt. I never realized how much mysticism and mythology are attached to our guilt over what happened.
Your ghost and my shadow will remain inseparable so long people read Sylvia's poetry. By the end of her life, she practically thought we were the same person. In this photograph of you, you look just like my son.
I get it now—you could never have set Sylvia free. I came way too late, after a whole load of myth-making had already happened, to take your place. This underworld we are in now, my friend, is where Plath always wanted to be. You and I are stuck down here together.
We forgive everything, and have everything in common. I don't see Sylvia standing behind you; she's like Wilfred Owen (a World War I soldier and poet) in his frightening poem "Strange Meeting." Like Owen, Plath lies beneath the conflict, in the crypt.
She sleeps next to her own German—that is, you, Otto—as if she were alone.
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“A Picture of Otto” Themes
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Truth, Perspective, and Subjectivity
“A Picture of Otto” is Ted Hughes's response to the poetry of his deceased wife Sylvia Plath, who painted a negative portrait of both Hughes and her father, Otto, in her work. In challenging Plath’s portrayal of both Otto and himself, Hughes suggests that there is a gap between people’s perceptions of each other and reality—that is, between how people see or portray each other and who people really are. In other words, the poem implies, there are two sides to every story.
Plath depicted her father as a cold-hearted, authoritarian figure, and Hughes feels her “words” showed him (that is, Hughes himself) in a similar light. “A Picture of Otto” actually begins by explicitly alluding to Plath’s famous poem “Daddy,” in which Plath likens her father to a Nazi and then lumps Hughes into the comparison.
Plath’s poetry, Hughes says, treated the two men as interchangeable, in turn making Otto’s “ghost inseparable” from Hughes’s “shadow.” In fact, Hughes feels that Plath “could hardly tell us [him and Otto] apart” towards the end of her life. This speaks to Hughes's idea that Plath wasn’t seeing either of them as they really were. Instead, Hughes argues that she viewed both men through the lens of her own myth-making.
Hughes thus summons Otto onto the page here to offer an alternative perspective on Plath’s father and, it follows, on himself (given that the two were lumped together in Plath's writing). Hughes descends into the underworld looking for Plath but first meets Otto “face to face in the dark.” Instead of angrily confronting him, however, Hughes expresses sympathy for and solidary with Otto, feeling that both men have been presented in a negative, perhaps unfair light—and that this impression of them will remain so long as people read Plath's poetry.
Addressing “Otto” as his “friend,” Hughes implies that Plath’s perspective is, if not necessarily wrong, at least limited. Hughes softens the image of Otto, noting the visual similarity between him and Hughes’s and Plath’s son, and suggests that Otto couldn’t help his daughter overcome her demons. He then conflates Plath with her depression, saying that “this underworld”—where he and Otto meet—is “her heart’s home.” Strongly implied, then, is that Plath’s depiction of men in the life was the result her mental illness rather than objective truth.
Hughes then ends by alluding to a poem by WWI soldier Wilfred Owen, which depicts a British soldier coming face to face with the German enemy he’d killed the day before. In Owen’s poem, the soldier and the German are united in death, all earthly squabbles rendered meaningless. But in Hughes’s poem, death offers no consolation; Plath is alone “in the catacomb” (or crypt), despite being with her German (that is, Otto, her father). Depending on the reader's perspective, she is either at peace or forever cut off from her family.
Of course, none of this means that Hughes’s perspective is any truer than his wife’s! His confrontation of Otto, his doppelgänger, is possibly a means of grappling with his own guilt over his wife's suicide—a way of convincing himself that he's not who his wife made him out to be. In any case, the poem reveals the slippery nature of truth, and how difficult it can be to truly know another person—or for that matter, oneself.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-25
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “A Picture of Otto”
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Lines 1-4
You stand there ...
... the honey-bee's commune."A Picture of Otto" begins with a direct allusion to another poem: "Daddy," which was written by Hughes's former wife, the famous American poet Sylvia Plath. In her poem, Plath addresses her dead father, Otto, and accuses him of being a cold-hearted, devilish tyrant who brutally oppressed her:
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that [...]In the same poem, Plath declares that she sought out a copy of her father in her husband—Ted Hughes, the author of this poem. Plath compares both men to Nazis and torturers:
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf lookAnd a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.With this one simple allusion, then, Hughes conjures a huge amount of backstory—backstory that he will challenge and complicate throughout the poem.
This is likely to be the picture of Otto to which both poems refer. Hughes sets up the poem with a description of the picture, portraying Otto in his element as a professor and providing some biographical information:
- Otto had initially trained to be a Lutheran minister (Lutheranism is a branch of Protestantism that follows the teachings of 16th-century German Martin Luther), but his interest in biology was far stronger ("manqué" means failed or unfulfilled). He studied and wrote extensively about bees, as the rest of the stanza makes clear.
- This scientific study altered Otto's religious framework—his "idea / Of Heaven and Earth and Hell."
- The enjambment between line 3 and line 4—"radically / Modified"—dramatizes this shift from religion to science.
All of this detail isn't pointless poetic fluff, but rather an attempt to humanize Otto from the start. Hughes is subtly trying to undo Plath's depiction of her father by giving the reader an idea of Otto's life story.
There's also some important symbolism at work here:
- Honey bees behave as a community, one big family in which individuals are in service of a greater goal.
- They also prioritize the protection and well-being of the queen bee, so their mention here might subtly refer to Hughes's implication that Plath's portrayal of the two men lacks context or is somehow unfair (as in, it prioritizes her perspective ahead of theirs).
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Lines 5-7
A big shock ...
... with me — -
Lines 8-11
Rising from your ...
... your family vault. -
Lines 12-16
I never dreamed, ...
... my son's portrait. -
Lines 17-19
I understand - ...
... her heart's home. -
Lines 20-21
Inseparable, here we ...
... in common — -
Lines 22-25
Not that I ...
... as if alone.
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“A Picture of Otto” Symbols
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Tunnels
The poem is set in a vaguely mythological underworld and makes multiple references to tunnels and underground passages. Aside from being a key part of the poem's literal setting, these also symbolically represent the murky nature of truth.
Tunnels are dark places, often maze-like, in which it's easy to get lost. The fact that Hughes meets Otto in such a dark, windy place speaks to the lack of clear, simple truth when it comes to who either man really is/was. The relationships between Otto and his daughter, and subsequently between Hughes and Sylvia Plath, resist clear-cut objectivity, this symbolism implies; instead, each angle on the story is limited by the perspective from which it is told, just as tunnels offer only limited, pre-defined possibilities for the direction travel.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 8-11: “a big shock / To meet me face to face in the dark adit / Where I have come looking for your daughter. / You had assumed this tunnel your family vault.”
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“A Picture of Otto” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
The poem uses alliteration to bring its images to life on the page. There isn't a ton of alliteration here, however, which makes the moments when it does pop up all the more memorable.
In line 2, for example, the shared /m/ of "Minister manqué" adds a little poetic flourish as Hughes describes the image of Otto as a lapsed Lutheran minister. The alliteration at the start of the second stanza is even more striking. Note the loud, percussive /b/, /p/, and /c/ sounds:
A big shock for so much of your Prussian backbone
As can be conjured into poetryThe sharp sounds here add to the portrayal of Otto as a stern and proud individual (Plath's own poetry criticizes her father for this aspect of his personality). These sounds, in other words, bring that "Prussian backbone" to vivid life. (Also note that the consonance of this passage adds to the effect, via the hissing and sharpness of "shock," "Prussian," and "backbone.")
Of course, Hughes implies throughout that this isn't really Otto, and is instead a version of him that has been conjured into being on the page, a kind of phantom made out of poetry. The alliteration here thus subtly reminds readers that they're reading a poetic description of Otto, encountering the mythical idea of the man that Plath created in her work.
The other main example of alliteration comes in line 19, in which Hughes says to Otto:
This underworld, my friend, is her heart's home.
This "her" refers to Sylvia Plath. The suggestion here is that the underworld—the kingdom of death—is where Plath longed to be in life. That alliteration suggests a melding between Plath herself and death.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 2: “Minister manqué”
- Line 5: “big,” “Prussian,” “backbone”
- Line 6: “can,” “conjured,” “poetry”
- Line 14: “can,” “candle”
- Line 19: “her heart's home”
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Allusion
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Assonance
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Apostrophe
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Caesura
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Consonance
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Diacope
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Enjambment
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Metaphor
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"A Picture of Otto" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Lutheran Minister Manqué
- The Honey-Bee's Commune
- Prussian
- Adit
- Your Daughter
- Occult
- Stir
- Your Portrait
- Owen
- Catacomb
- German
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(Location in poem: Lines 1-2: “Lutheran / Minister manqué”)
This is a reference to the fact that Otto Plath trained to be a minister in the Lutheran church. Lutherans follow the teachings of 16th-century German reformist Martin Luther. "Manqué" is an adjective that means having failed to become something, in this case a minister! Otto chose to be a scientist/teacher instead.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “A Picture of Otto”
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Form
"A Picture of Otto" is made up of six quatrains (six-line stanzas) followed by a final line all on its own. That lonely final line evokes Plath's separation from Otto and Hughes.
More broadly, readers might consider the poem a work of ekphrasis—a piece of writing responding to visual stimulus:
- While ekphrasis tends to respond to artwork, it's also possible to write ekphrasis about a photograph.
- Hughes's poem does this, but only really in the opening line—"You stand there at the blackboard"—and in line 16, in which he compares Otto's face to his son's. The photograph is more of a launch-pad for Hughes's exploration of his subject, a way into a discussion of the mythology surrounding him and Otto (as constructed by Plath's poetry in poems like "Daddy").
A classic descent into-the-underworld work of literature is also technically known as katabasis:
- The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, to which this poem alludes, is a quintessential example of the form.
- Here, Hughes is a mythical traveler from the land of the living, who visits the underworld to find his wife (just as Orpheus does).
- Of course, this story doesn't conclude with the neatness of a myth, with everything left unresolved. When Hughes does find Plath, she is depicted in that single-line stanza as "sleeping"—both there and not there, both present and removed. This makes the ending uneasy, peaceful but also unsettling and tense.
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Meter
"A Picture of Otto" is written in free verse, with no steady meter. This makes the poem feel dynamic and responsive, as though the reader is witnessing this conversation in real-time. Hughes addresses Otto's ghost in the present-tense, so it makes sense that the language isn't overly formal or constrained by the demands of meter.
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Rhyme Scheme
There is no rhyme scheme in the poem. The lack of a rhyme scheme makes the poem feel less formal and rigid, which is in keeping with its tone. That is, Hughes expresses sympathy for Otto, and talks slowly but freely as if they are having a heart to heart.
That said, the poem does turn to rhyme in a few moments towards its end:
But like Owen, after his dark poem,
Under the battle, in the catacomb,Sleeping with his German as if alone.
The rhyme/slant rhyme here adds a sense of building music and closure to the poem's final moments.
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“A Picture of Otto” Speaker
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The speaker is the poet himself, Ted Hughes, or at least a literary version of Hughes. And the poem would make little sense to readers without its biographical context!
Here, Hughes tries to address and complicate the mythology surrounding himself, Sylvia Plath, and Plath's father, Otto. As the poem’s speaker, Hughes has misgivings about the way that Plath’s poetry presented the two men, turning them into an inseparable “ghost” (Otto) and a “shadow.”
But Hughes’s criticism of Plath and her poetry remains fairly subtle, with Hughes primarily making his case by humanizing Otto—expressing sympathy for, and solidarity with, a man he never actually met. He addresses Otto familiarly (calling “my friend” in line 19, for example), and points out the visual similarities between Otto and Nicholas, Hughes's son with Sylvia Plath. This is a far cry from the comparisons between Otto and Nazism made by Plath in her poem “Daddy.”
Hughes also brings his own mythological framework to his and Plath’s story. In this poem, he takes on the role of the ancient Greek character Orpheus, who journeys to the underworld to retrieve his dead wife, Eurydice (and ultimately fails). This subtly casts Hughes as a more heroic figure (Orpheus was also, not coincidentally, a great poet!).
Though the poem offers no real comforting sense of resolution, Hughes does seem to express an attitude of resignation and/or acceptance. On the one hand, he wants to confront and complicate the (supposed) myth that Plath created in her poetry, while on the other he feels that “everything [is] forgiven and in common[.]” That is, there is no real use trying to change the past. All this speaks to the fact that there is no single, definitive account of Plath, Otto, and Hughes, only subjective perspectives.
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“A Picture of Otto” Setting
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The poem takes place in the underworld—more specifically in a "dark adit," or tunnel, where Sylvia Plath and her father Otto are buried. Retracing the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Hughes descends to the land of the dead ostensibly to look for his lost wife (although his real intention, it seems, is to confront his doppelgänger, Otto, and to tell another side of the story regarding his history with Plath). The underworld is a murky setting, the darkness of which reflects the difficulty of uncovering the full truth in the poem.
In another sense, the setting of the poem is Hughes’s own imagination as he responds to a literal picture of Otto Plath (the same picture referenced in Sylvia Plath's poem “Daddy”). Poetry itself, here, becomes a kind of supernatural space in which myths and narratives are made—an arena in which vestiges of people long gone can be "conjured" (line 6).
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Literary and Historical Context of “A Picture of Otto”
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Literary Context
Ted Hughes published "A Picture of Otto" in Birthday Letters, his final collection. The book came out in 1998, shortly before Hughes's death, and focuses on his relationship with his former wife Sylvia Plath, the famous American poet who died by suicide in 1963. Hughes remained largely silent for much of his life when it came to Plath, but Birthday Letters tells the story from his perspective, starting with their first meeting and ending with a contemplation of her death.
Birthday Letters caused a sensation upon publication, reflective of the divide between pro-Hughes and pro-Plath readers. Hughes wrote the collection over a period of 25 years or so and revised the poems extensively. He knew they were a departure from his other work because of their autobiographical content, calling them "so raw, so vulnerable, so unprocessed, so naive, so self-exposing and unguarded." The poems were clearly intended to bring Hughes a sense of closure, if not necessarily for his readers: "I published it purely to get it off my chest and I'm indifferent to its fate," he once said.
“A Picture of Otto” is set apart from most of Birthday Letters in being addressed not to Plath but to her father, Otto. Otto died when Plath was only eight, but his death cast a long shadow over his daughter's life and poetry. "A Picture of Otto" is also in part a response to Plath's famous poem, “Daddy,” in which Plath depicts her father as an authoritarian, cold-hearted figure and also equates him with Hughes. While Plath portrays Otto as a tyrant, Hughes seeks to humanize him (and thus, in turn, to humanize himself, given that the men were so "tangled" together in Plath's poetry). Hughes never actually met Otto; everything he knew about the latter man came through his relationship with Plath.
Historical Context
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath first met in 1956 in Cambridge, England. Plath was in England on a grant and had wanted to meet Hughes after reading his poetry. Upon their marriage, they became one of the most high-profile literary couples of the 20th century. And initially, their marriage appeared happy and creatively fruitful. Together they had two children, Frieda and Nicholas.
In 1962, Hughes had an affair. Plath was already struggling with mental illness, and the subsequent break-up of the marriage caused her great psychological pain and trauma. She died by suicide in 1963; Hughes was devastated, writing to a friend that the rest of his life was now "posthumous."
But with the end of Plath's life came the beginning of decades of speculation about Hughes's indirect responsibility for her death. Many Plath readers blamed Hughes for her suicide; some of his readings were even disrupted by shouts of "murderer," and one 1970s visit to Australia found a crowd waiting in protest. Hughes's character was further tainted by accusations that he, in acting as Plath's literary executor, deliberately took out negative references to himself in Plath's collection, Ariel, which includes her most famous poems. Hughes remained mostly silent on the subject until the publication of Birthday Letters.
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More “A Picture of Otto” Resources
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External Resources
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"Stronger Than Death" — Watch a BBC program exploring Hughes's life and work.
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An Introduction to Birthday Letters — A short article exploring the historical context of the collection in which this poem appears.
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Hughes's Life and Work — Read a short biography of Hughes via the Poetry Foundation.
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Hughes and Plath — Learn more about the "most notorious, politicized and doomed literary couple in history."
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Sylvia Plath's Biography — Learn more about Sylvia Plath herself.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Ted Hughes
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