"Fulbright Scholars" is the first poem in Hughes's final poetry collection, Birthday Letters, which deals primarily with his marriage to the American poet Sylvia Plath. This marriage was intense and complicated; it ended with Hughes's infidelity, and Plath, who struggled with mental illness, died by suicide not long after. Hughes made very few public statements regarding her death or his role in it until the publication of Birthday Letters.
The poem begins with Hughes posing a question: "Where was it, in the Strand?" This question drops the reader right into his thought process, as if he were already in the middle of remembering something. In order to find out what he's referring to (what "it" is), the reader has to continue on to the second line. Enjambment across lines 1 and 2 helps pull the reader into the poem:
Where was it, in the Strand? A display
Of news items, in photographs.
So the speaker is recalling a group of photographs, one of which grabbed his attention. It was "A picture of that year's intake / Of Fulbright Scholars." This refers to the Fulbright Scholarship, a program that allows students from the United States to attend graduate school in other countries. Hughes met Plath while she was in England on a Fulbright, so it starts to become clear why this memory holds significance for him.
Hughes says that the people in the photo were "Just arriving— / Or arrived. Or some of them." Polyptoton (the repetition of "arriving"/"arrived") and anaphora (the repetition of "Or") creates a hesitant, stammering effect, highlighting his uncertainty about what the photo was actually showing. Were these students all just getting off a plane, or had they each arrived separately and were now meeting up to take the picture? His equivocation suggests the slipperiness of memory, and his desire now to pin down what he actually saw (or what the truth of the photo was). His self-revisions also suggest that memory is altered by later perceptions and knowledge; the photo stays the same, but his understanding of what he saw evolves.
From these opening lines, it's clear that the poem is written in free verse. Instead of following a set meter or rhyme scheme, it sounds natural, casual, and true to how people think (or think aloud). It contains no stanza breaks, either; it all runs together into a single block of text, perhaps evoking the way memories blur together with later feelings and perceptions. The poem's short, often fragmentary sentences and frequent caesuras create a choppy rhythm, which also helps convey the speaker's uncertainty. These aren't fluid, confident statements but cautious assertions that quickly break off and turn on themselves. All of these effects suggest that Hughes doesn't entirely trust his own memory regarding this photo—which didn't seem all that important when he first saw it, but has come to seem fateful with time.