The Minotaur was a fabulous beast, half man half bull, which was fed with human flesh and kept in a labyrinth in King Minos of Crete’s cellar. Theseus, the son of the King of Athens, enters the labyrinth to kill the Minotaur and Ariadne, Minos’ daughter, gives Theseus a skein of string to help him find his way out of the labyrinth if he should manage to kill the Minotaur. He succeeds.
Hughes, as well as Plath, used mythology quite extensively in their poetry. In this poem, Hughes refers to Plath’s father as “The Minotaur”. He is the “horned, bellowing” beast that she is locked in combat with.
One of the aspects of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath’s relationship was a mentor student relationship. Plath had an immense respect for Hughes’ intellect and valued his advice. They often worked together, sometimes sitting back to back and writing poetry. Hughes would give her a line or a topic to write about and they would then analyse and discuss her efforts. Hughes has written that her poems written before the Ariel poems were “thin and brittle, the lines cold”.
The first stanza of “The Minotaur” describes one of Sylvia Plath’s violent rages, and sets the violent and ultimately tragic tone of the entire poem. Hughes believes it is this release of physical energy that she needs for her poetry to be expressive of her inner or real self. He seems to be suggesting that he was responsible for showing her how to show her real self in her writing. It was at his insistence that,
“Deep in the cave of your ear
The goblin snapped his fingers.
What had I given him?”
The last two stanzas provide the tangible answer to that question. Hughes constructs an image of Plath’s descent into isolation, despair and eventual suicide by employing the metaphor of the descent into the Minotaur’s lair.
The Minotaur
The mahogany table-top you smashed
Had been the broad plank top
Of my mother's heirloom sideboard-
Mapped with the scars of my whole life.
That came under the hammer.
That high stool you swung that day
Demented by my being
Twenty minutes late for baby-minding.
'Marvellous!' I shouted, 'Go on,
Smash it into kindling.
That's the stuff you're keeping out of your poems!'
And later, considered and calmer,
'Get that shoulder under your stanzas
And we'll be away.' Deep in the cave of your ear
The goblin snapped his fingers.
So what had I given him?
The bloody end of the skein
That unravelled your marriage,
Left your children echoing
Like tunnels in a labyrinth.
Left your mother a dead-end,
Brought you to the horned, bellowing
Grave of your risen father
And your own corpse in it.