I invite myself in for tea.
I seem to cheer her. She talks about the future
as though it were a bright, clear day.
I grow tired, promise to drop in tomorrow.
When I climb into my cab it smells different,
stale, sour, and it's cold as a ghost.
Besides Sylvia's children and her downstairs neighbor, Trevor Thomas, Gerry Becker was the last person, and certainly the last friend, to see Sylvia alive and to witness her state of mind. Gerry's account is well documented by his wife, Jillian, in her book Giving Up.
Sunday Night, Monday Morning
Trevor Thomas, Sylvia's downstairs neighbor at Fitzroy Road
February 10-11, 1963
Eleven-forty-five p.m.
and rat-a-tat-tat
on my door,
Sylvia wonders
if I have airmail stamps
she can buy.
I tell her calmly
that the post
won't be picked up
until tomorrow,
when she can buy
her own stamps.
“But no,” she slurs,
“I want to put the letters
in the box tonight.”
Sylvia staggers,
medication
on her breath.
No point in arguing,
I hand her my stamps,
refuse her payment.
She stomps her foot,
sighs, “No.
I must pay you
or I won't be right
with my conscience
before God, will I?”
Well, hell's bells,
if I didn't find her
a strange bird before.
Whatever that Dr. Horder prescribes
makes her hatter mad tonight.
Sylvia asks what time
I leave for work.
I scratch my elbow, tell her
half past eight.
We lock gazes
and I almost invite
her in for a drink
to calm her down,
but the hour's late
and I'm a working man.
I bid her well,
bolt the door.
Ten minutes pass
and Sylvia stands
in the same place,
stamps in hand.
She peers up
at the lightbulb
like it is the Star
of Bethlehem.
I'm in my stockings,
but I open the door.
I inform her
that I'm phoning
Dr. Horder. She smiles
like a babe, radiant,
pleads, “Oh no,
I'm just having
a marvelous dream,
a most wonderful
vision.” Befuddled
and cold in the hallway,
I blow on my hands
and close the door.
I convince myself
that she seems happy
and shuffle into bed.
But I can't rightly sleep.
Sylvia bangs about
upstairs, her feet run
like mice in the walls,
no, more like elephants
on stampede. Clump-
clump-bang. Were
it not below freezing
I'd ring her bell
and tell her the racket
must cease. God sakes,
it's half past midnight.
But thankfully
her feet or something
rhythms me to sleep.
This account of Trevor Thomas's interaction with Sylvia right before her death comes from interviews the biographer Paul Alexander conducted with Thomas and is recorded in Alexander's Rough Magic.
Winter's End
Imagining Sylvia Plath
In the style of “Edge”
February 11, 1963
She is determined, ready as a knife,
Her letters sealed.
The hall light smiles, a halo calling her
To flame. She wings into the kitchen,
Spreads mustard on their crustless bread,
Pours two pure white glasses of milk.
She kisses the children's foreheads,
Folds over their sheets.
The streetlamp clicks off.
She opens the window to dawn,
Wedges a towel under the children's door.
Righteous, happy as a rose,
She knows her place in the garden.
Her black petals curl underground.
She tidies her desk, leaves her manuscript,
Ariel and Other Poems, to the moon,
To the world of bone. The sun breaks
Like yolk. It is time.
She unlatches the oven door. The gas
Fills her nostrils, sweet as blood, pungent as a sword.
“Edge” is the final poem in Ariel as the collection was first arranged by Ted and initially published. (Sylvia intended Ariel to end with the poem “Wintering.”) “Edge” focuses on the image of a dead mother and her two dead children. Written on February 5, 1963, it is a chilling, exquisitely crafted work and perhaps the last poem Sylvia wrote.
Monday Morning
Myra Norris, nurse hired to care for Frieda and Nick
February 11, 1963
Nine sharp and I ring all the bells,
can't read the patient's name
on any box, covered as they are in frost.
Not a soul answers my buzzing.
It's as if the whole building sleeps,
spellbound like Sleeping Beauty's kingdom.
I phone my agency. They confirm
that I've the right address,
23 Fitzroy Road.
I circle the building, hear a small
cry like a hungry baby bird,
whimpering from the second-floor window.
As I round the corner, the cry
turns to a roar loud as a midnight
wolf. It's the children screaming.
I dash to find help, anyone big
who can break down doors. A builder,
a Mr. Langridge, wrenches off the front-door lock.
We smell it right away, gas,
cover our mouths with kerchiefs,
leap the stairs two at a time.
Inside the flat, we rush to turn off the gas,
Mrs. Hughes's head inside the oven
like another awful fairy tale, the one
where the witch dies inside the stove.
We pull her into the front room
and I push on her heart, blow
all my breath into her mouth,
but she's stiff-limbed, pale purple,
without pulse, without air.
Mr. Langridge rescues the children
from their frozen beds, swaddles them
in blankets, and carries them from the flat.
One match and the whole building
could have gone
up like a mushroom cloud.
Sylvia's body was discovered sometime after nine a.m. Dr. Horder identified her body for the coroner, and Ted claimed it on February 15, 1963. He took it to Yorkshire to be buried in his family's cemetery in Heptonstall.
The Hughes children were freezing that morning but did not suffer from exposure to the gas. Trevor Thomas, however, almost died of carbon monoxide poisoning, as the gas had seeped down into his room and knocked him out as he slept. He did not wake until the afternoon and was then taken to the hospital.
Failure
Dr. Horder, Sylvia's London doctor, and Dr. Beuscher, Sylvia's American therapist February 1963
1. Him
February, the most terrible month, a cold so complete I have nothing
good to wake for. The phone that morning pierces me like a bullet.
Stunned, I toss on my shoes, grab my doctor's bag,
and open the door to death, to man's professional failure.
Sylvia was a hospital bed away from help. I should have tucked her under my own covers,
but I am a limited man. A doctor, I suppose, is saddled with limits.
I can't cry over her death, but the rage inside knifes at my heart.
2. Her
When you act against your heart and mind, only dumb luck
can save you. My luck dries up. I have given up sleep
like it is a present I don't deserve. Sylvia haunts me when I close my eyes,
she says, “Don't worry, Dr. Ruth. I will be fine. I am fine.”
After Sylvia's death, Ruth was deeply sad and plagued by guilt. When she sought professional counsel, a senior therapist told Ruth that Sylvia's death was not her fault, that in fact Ruth had likely kept her alive five or six extra years. When Ruth divorced her second husband, she burned a lot of things, including Sylvia's letters, which she later regretted. Ruth devoted much of her life to maintaining an accurate portrait of Sylvia as she saw her. Ruth died in 1999, poor, depressed, and before she could go on her much-anticipated Alaskan cruise, a cruise she sold her signed first edition of The Colossus to take.
What She Left Behind
Ted Hughes
February 1963
The carbon she left
on her desk of Ariel
will leave a fossil record.
She read me only
a few of these poems.
I hold the papers, astonished.
She did not tell me
what she wanted to do
with these last words,
publish them, perish with them, or both.
Her poetry cuts me to the spine,
beautiful and brutal.
Her words startle my eyes.
She has etched down parts of me,
of us, of her.
Her voice records its final,
triumphant symphony.
And I know, slumped
over her desk, my head
so heavy in my hands
I can barely read her lines,
that it was either her or me,
one of us had to go.
Ariel was published in 1965 at Ted's behest, first in Britain by Faber and Faber and then in 1966 in America by Harper & Row. Ted did not use Sylvia's previous publishers because he secured a better deal with his own British publisher, Faber and Faber, and negotiated a more profitable contract with Harper & Row as well. Ted removed some poems and rearranged the order of the poems included in the first editions of Ariel, but subsequent printings of the collection are truer in their arrangement to Sylvia's intentions.
Ted and Assia remained together for nearly seven years. On March 25, 1969, As-sia killed herself and the daughter, Shura, whom she had with Ted. After taking sleeping pills and dissolving some in water for Shura, she gassed herself and the child in their kitchen. Assia was forty-one and Shura was four at the time of their deaths. Ted and Assia never married, and by some accounts he was planning at this time to marry Carol Orchard, who became his second wife and stepmother to Nick and Frieda.
Funeral
Margaret Plath, Sylvia's sister-in-law, Warren's wife
February 16, 1963
Ted arrives in the same black car
as her coffin,
snow remnants glimmer off the tires.
Ted chose this burial place,
Heptonstall, beside the moors,
where his family rots underground.
So few people in attendance:
the Beckers, Ted's parents,
a local churchgoer named Joan,
Ted, Warren, and me.
You'd think Sylvia was a social
recluse, all those guests she welcomed
to her home, all those men
who published her work
missing like pages torn from a journal.
Ted's sister is down with the flu,
Frieda and Nicholas are too young
for this horror, and Aurelia
hasn't the strength to fly.
The rector's spectacles glare.
No friend to Sylvia or Ted,
he reads scripture about lilies
and valleys. I clutch Warren's arm.
I did not get to know Sylvia,
though I wanted to. I wish now
that Warren had sailed me
across the Atlantic a few months ago
when Sylvia SOS'ed for my help.
I would have picked up her babies
when her arms grew weak,
held her hand when her words
failed her.
In the cemetery
the snow hides most of the markers
of death. A brown, moist hole
in the ground where Sylvia
will be laid.
It is so silent
the wind stops its whirl.
Warren's eyes
hold a pain I have never
before seen,
a vacancy beyond torture,
with no hope for release.
I purse my lips in silence,
there is nothing I can say.
After the burial Ted tells us
that Sylvia's gravestone will read
“Sylvia Plath Hughes 1932-1963,”
with the inscription:
“Even amidst fierce flames
the golden lotus can be planted.”
Warren and I nod,
there is nothing we can say.
The epitaph on Sylvia's headstone comes from the book Monkey, written by Wu Ch'Eng-En in the sixteenth century. Spoken by a patriarch who is teaching Monkey the best way to live a long life, the full quotation is: “To spare and tend the vital powers, this and nothing else is sum and total of all magic, secret and profane. All is comprised in these three, Spirit, Breath and Soul; guard them closely, screen them well; let there be no leak. Store them within the frame; that is all that can be learnt, and all that can be taught. I would have you mark the tortoise and snake, locked in tight embrace. Locked in tight embrace, the vital powers are strong; even in the midst of fierce flames the Golden Lotus may be planted, the Five Elements compounded and transposed, and put to new use. When that is done, be which you please, Buddha or Immortal.”
Silent as the Snow
Warren Plath
February 16, 1963
Strangers in a half crescent
around the hole that will
hold my sister's body.
They look at me like
I should pull words
of comfort from my jacket pocket
for them.
But my mourning is private,
a vault I seal here
at her grave.
Warren Plath became an executive in the research division of IBM. After Sylvia's death, he never communicated his experiences with or feelings about her publicly.
Posthumous
Aurelia Plath
February 1963
Grief, my dears,
is a necklace choked
around my neck.
They say there's nothing
worse than the loss of a child
and I concur.
I buried a husband
too soon. And now I remain
an ocean away as they lower Sivvy
under foreign earth. My heart
rains enough tears
to flood the Atlantic.
I can still feel Sylvia's first kick
in my gut. I will never
lose the feeling.
I clutch the letters, bundled
in ribbon and string, that I have
stowed away all these years.
I straighten her books on my shelf,
stare at that last photograph snapped
of Sylvia, Frieda, and Nick.
Oh, the masterworks she birthed.
Letters from friends and admirers torrent in.
I expect the postman will never stop
delivering them until I, too, lie underground.
Oh, m
y darling, my dearest,
my child, I failed to help you
in life. I pray for the strength
to do right for you in death—
to remember your smiles,
your curls—to love you daily
through your boy and your girl,
to bring your words into the world
so they might do some good,
might save someone
lost, keep her breathing,
keep her head above the tide.
Aurelia was forbidden to publish Sylvia's letters until 1975, lest she risk never seeing her grandchildren. Ted briefly considered letting Aurelia raise Frieda and Nick, but he opted instead to move back to Court Green and have Olwyn, his sister, “mother” them.
Olwyn not only mothered the children, but also managed Sylvia's literary estate. Few biographies existed about Sylvia until the last twenty years, because Olwyn and/or Ted often demanded the ability to edit the biography (as Olwyn did with Anne Stevenson's Bitter Fame) or else they denied biographers' requests to see Sylvia's work and journals or have permission to reprint her fiction and poetry. Ted Hughes remained silent on the subject of Sylvia, never granting interviews, until 1998 when he published Birthday Letters.
Ted destroyed the last journal Sylvia kept during the final months of her life, partly because he thought it would hurt their children. Dr. Beuscher burned the letters Sylvia wrote her. So several pieces of Sylvia's life remain unknown. The largest collections of Sylvia's writing are housed at Smith College and at Indiana University.
Your Own, Sylvia
Imagining Sylvia Plath
In the style of “Child”
She could not help burning herself
From the inside out,
Consuming herself
Like the sun.
But the memory of her light blazes
Our dark ceiling.
She could not know how long
Her luminary would map the sky,
Or where her dying would lead the lost.
But for those who gaze heavenly
Or into the reflected pool of night,
She is fuel. She is dust. She is a guiding star.
Written on January 28, 1963, “Child” is about motherhood. Composed for her children, the poem catalogs what Sylvia wished to bestow upon them and what she hoped to shield them from. “Child” can be found in both Winter Trees and The Collected Poems. Sylvia Plath is an influential presence not only in the bookstore, library, and classroom, but also in the vast realms of cyberspace. There are blogs, teen discussion sites, and Web sites devoted entirely to her life and work. One of the best is www.sylviaplathforum.com.
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