Your Own, Sylvia

by Stephanie Hemphill

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.