It’s quite difficult to establish a good comparison (a simple formal comparison would be easier) between these two poems, these two great works by two of the most representative writers in the English language in the twentieth century.
To begin with, both poems have almost the same title, Love song, adding Sylvia Plath a premonitory and at the same time autobiographical Mad girl (she was demented and died at the age of thirty: she was a little woman, she was still a girl).
Ted Hughes’s poem is much longer than his wife’s one. Love song contains forty-four verses divided into six stanzas: the first stanza has seven lines; the second one, eight lines; the third one (the longest) contains twenty-four; the fourth and fifth ones only have two lines and the last stanza is one single line.
The poem written by Sylvia Plath is composed of five stanzas with three lines and a sixth stanza with four lines.
The rhyme is very different in both works. While in Love song there are four lines with some kind of rhyme (Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks/ And their deep cries crawled over the floors; and Like an animal dragging a great trop/ His promises were the surgeon’s gag), in Sylvia Plath’s poem we can find several kinds of rhyme: in stanzas 1, 2, 3 and 5 the rhyme is ABA; in stanza number 4 the rhyme is ABB and in the last stanza, the only with four lines, the rhyme is ABAA.
Going on with the analysis of the form in the poems commented, we have to say that repetition is the most resource used: articles and possessive pronouns are often repeated: in Ted Hughes’s poem the word he is said seven times: she, six times; his is written fourteen times, and her, nineteen times.
There are also words such as were or their which are repeated several times through the poem. All these words have great meaning in the message of the poem: for Ted Hughes love is a two-people thing. That’s the reason why Hughes uses these words, despite were does not refer to their necessarily. I will explain this later.
Placing so many possessive pronouns and articles at the beginning of so many lines produces a kind of visual effect on the reader.
On the other hand, Sylvia Plath, despite repeating single words, works harder on content and repeats some whole lines, lines that have an important role on the meaning of the poem: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; and (I think I made up inside my head) are repeated four times through the poem.
The way in which Sylvia Plath writes is more the way a woman writes: I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed/ And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane (lines 7 and 8) or I fancied you’d return the way you said (line 13).
For the girl, his beloved is an invention, she’s only one person, while for Ted Hughes, in his poem, the lovers are two, a real man and a real woman, a real couple as Hughes writes in, for instance, the last line of the poem: In the morning they wore each other’s face. Or in the lines where the word their is said: In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs. They is, like were or their, words just commented before, a word that is repeated several times, and it symbolizes the fact that only one person cannot love or be loved.
Sylvia Plath has a more romantic, even fantastic vision of love, while Ted Hughes is more realistic and at the same time more optimistic in his lines. It’s difficult to say what poem is better; it’s a matter of personal taste.