Her words.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival.  New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety.  We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses.  I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's.  The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars.  And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

That poem is called Morning Song; I search it for a clue.

It was written after the birth of Plath’s first child, Frieda, in 1960.

And now you try your handful of notes, she writes. I can’t imagine a mother who was not in love being able to write that. Her heart must have been as swollen as any new mother’s. I wonder, did she know what her fate had in store? Or, in new motherhood, did she experience a string of moments that were a reprieve from swimming in so many sad words.

These peculiar, private and taboo subjects, she called them in an interview.

Her second child, Nicholas, was born two years later, in 1962. That same year, Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes, left her.

The following year, 1963, just shortly after publishing The Bell Jar (under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas), Plath wrote a note to her downstairs neighbor, instructing him to call the doctor. Then she committed suicide using a gas oven.

Gentility is a strangle hold, the neatness, the wonderful tidiness…which is more dangerous than it appears on the surface, she said.

She had a one-year-old and a three-year-old in her home at the time. She was 30 years old.

There are few scenarios that are quite as heartbreaking. She said,

“I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except, you know, a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience. That one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.  I think that personal experience is very important,  but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of shut box and sort of a mirror-looking, narcissist experience. I believe it should be relevant and relevant to the bigger things.”

Sylvia was a confessional poet. She made her livelihood writing poems from her grief, her longing, her exquisite depression. Her readers could tear out pages from her books and take them someplace else. Fold and re-fold them, call on them only when necessary.

But, ultimately, Sylvia was unable to remove herself from it.

She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1982, after her death.

To hear Sylvia read on of her most famous poems Daddy, click here.

When I consider Sylvia, I can’t help but to wonder if she applied the same exquisite poetry to her suicide. Did she know that morning that she would no longer be alive to tuck her children into bed that night? Did she have her toast and coffee with two creams for breakfast? Did she stare are her reflection in the mirror for longer than on an average day? Did she pick our her clothing with focused intention?

Then I have to stop—I just have to stop.

I can dip my toe in it, at most. She lived in a pool of thoughts like these.

Sylvia Plath would have been 81 last month, on October 27th. Her daughter, Frieda Rebecca Hughes, is now 53.  She is a poet and painter. She has published seven children’s books and four poetry collections and has had many exhibitions. She never had any children.

Plath’s son, Nicholas Farrar Hughes was a fisheries biologist known as an expert in stream salmonid ecology. He committed suicide in 2009, at the age of 47.

He, also, never had any children.

So—why write all this?

Perhaps it is my way of saying, good night, Lady Lazarus.

I want you to know that your words are still nestled in books on our shelves, graffitied into our minds. They leave fossilized imprints when pulled from our hearts. You didn’t just vanish.

You left bits of yourself behind, like the cast-out pieces of a shattered, and re-shattered, mosaic.

Lady Lazarus

One year in every ten
I manage it--

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?--

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot--
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

'A miracle
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart--
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash--
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--

A cake of soap, 
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

(23-29 October 1962)

To here Sylvia read this aloud, go here.

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Ed: Bryonie Wise

Photo: screenshot of self-portrait by Sylvia Plath