Sylvia's
surface perfection was however underlain by grave personal discontinuities,
some of which doubtless had their origin in the death of her father (he was
a college professor and an expert on bees) when she was eight. During the
summer following her junior year at Smith, having returned from a stay in
New York City where she had been a student ``guest editor'' at Mademoiselle
Magazine, Sylvia nearly succeeded in killing herself by swallowing sleeping
pills. She later described this experience in an autobiographical novel, The
Bell Jar, published in 1963. After a period of recovery involving electroshock
and psychotherapy Sylvia resumed her pursuit of academic and literary success,
graduating from Smith summa cum laude in 1955 and winning a Fulbright scholarship
to study at Cambridge, England.
In 1956
she married the English poet Ted Hughes , and in 1960, when she was 28, her
first book, The Colossus, was published in England. The poems in this book---formally
precise, well wrought---show clearly the dedication with which Sylvia had
served her apprenticeship; yet they give only glimpses of what was to come
in the poems she would begin writing early in 1961. She and Ted Hughes settled
for a while in an English country village in Devon, but less than two years
after the birth of their first child the marriage broke apart.
The winter
of 1962-63, one of the coldest in centuries, found Sylvia living in a small
London flat, now with two children, ill with flu and low on money. The hardness
of her life seemed to increase her need to write, and she often worked between
four and eight in the morning, before the children woke, sometimes finishing
a poem a day. In these last poems it is as if some deeper, powerful self has
grabbed control; death is given a cruel physical allure and psychic pain becomes
almost tactile.
On February
11, 1963, Sylvia Plath killed herself with cooking gas at the age of 30. Two
years later Ariel, a collection of some of her last poems, was published;
this was followed by Crossing the Water and Winter Trees in 1971, and, in
1981, The Collected Poems appeared, edited by Ted Hughes.
Lady Lazarus
I have done it
again.
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 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 in foot ------
The big strip tease.
Gentleman , 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
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 on 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.
excerpt
from: "LETTER IN NOVEMBER"
"Love,
the world
Suddenly turns, turns color. The streetlight
Splits through the rat's tail
Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning.
It is the Arctic,
This little
black
Circle, with its tawn silk grasses -- babies hair.
There is a green in the air,
Soft, delectable.
It cushions me lovingly.
I am flushed
and warm.
I think I may be enormous,
I am so stupidly happy,
My Wellingtons
Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red."
Read
Book Review
"Letters
Home: Correspondence, 1950-1963"
by Sylvia Plath,
Aurelia Schober Plath
-
Saturday Review
"One is left willing to bestow on Sylvia Plath the compassion and charity
she so relentlessly and fatally denied herself."
-
Adrienne Rich
"Finally now, young women writers can cease to identify with the apparent
self-destroyer in Sylvia Plath and begin to understand the forces she had
to reckon with."
Buy
Now from Amazon.com
