Ted Hughes: Remembering Teheran

Relationship to Classical text Atossa  (Aeschylus' Persians) in image of the Manageress of the 'Shah's Evin Motel'  (CP p. 624). Comic figure ( 'Tragic Persian / Quaked her bosom ' p. 624)  but the allusion signals Hughes' desire to look at the history of Persian civilisation ('I knew I was in the wrong century' p.625).