"Last Letter" once again

What more is there to say about "Last Letter?" The previously unpublished Ted Hughes poem that chronicles the days before Sylvia Plath's suicide (and his dalliance with poet Susan Alliston) has already been sufficiently poked and prodded by critics. Mark Ford finally has his say in the New York Times Review of Books, and though he does a lot of re-hashing, (poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy compares the poem to a Shakespearean tragedy, Guardian critic Al Alvarez thinks it's "uncooked" and not meant to be read) he also adds a few hearty morsels to chew on about what we now know - and also what we never will - about one of the most intriguing poetic couples of all time:

Of course we don’t know, and surely never will, if Plath really made numerous trips to the phone booth down the road to call Hughes the night she killed herself, as the penultimate verse of “Last Letter” imagines. Nor if she really sent him a suicide note in the post on the morning of Friday, February 8 (three days after writing her final poem, “Edge”); “Last Letter” tells us he received it that very afternoon, rushed round at once, and “wept with relief when [she] opened the door.” In the course of their talk, the poem reveals, she burnt the letter in an ashtray, which he took as a sign for him to release her and “escape.” But there was to be no escape, as he found out on Monday morning on his return from 18 Rugby Street to his own flat; there he got out his papers and started to write, when the phone “jerked awake”:

Then a voice like a selected weapon
Or a measured injection,
Coolly delivered its four words
Deep into my ear: “Your wife is dead.”