trapped in this life
of two kids and a fading husband,
clutching her notebooks
as though they are friends.
She bakes. She gardens.
She follows her routine.
I flit freely among her flower beds
and he chases me, tired
of Sylvia dragging
him along like a can tied
to a bumper.
He cuts her fraying rope,
rolls down the hill
and into my bed.
Assia and her husband, David, leased the Hughes' London flat. Ted and Assia began their extramarital relationship in the summer of 1962.
Losing
Imagining Sylvia Plath
In the style of “Event”
Summer 1962
The night is indigo and she is gray.
He cannot see her among the shadows.
There was a time she was a rabbit he longed to snare.
Now her simmering pot grows cold,
Charcoal crusted. She lifts the lid, there's nothing inside.
The babies waddle the floorboards blind.
The temperature drops. She pulls the blanket over their
heads.
Oh, he is absent as November blossom.
He tends nothing but his own words.
He says it's her fault there's no harvest this year.
He says it with his silent hand.
He won't look at her face long enough to slap her.
She waves the white flag of her soul, her shirt
Damp on the line. She knows the woman of night
And silk stockings bewitches with her musk perfume.
She smells it on him, blood and London and cheer.
All she cooks up is a pot of gloom.
She has no arm to hold out anymore. Gangrene
Settles in. She is without a limb.
In her dreams she still runs after Daddy,
That hair shirt ghost who never looks back.
She screams without sound. She has been muted out.
Plath's poem “Event,” about a relationship that has been dismembered, can be found in The Collected Poems.
Sylvia's Book Doesn't Sell
Knopf editorial assistant
Summer 1962
Predictions like weather reports,
we thought the Plath collection
would sell like summer sun,
but the book languishes, sinks
in a gray rain. I can't explain
why. The buzz is that Sylvia
has not the talent, has not
the emotional depth. Pity
that her language embraces
one like a proud father. Pity
that this father expects so much of her,
is not a parent of love
but of the balance sheet.
Knopf published The Colossus and Other Poems in America on May 14, 1962.
A Letter to the Successful Poet
Mother of Keith Douglas, a little-known English poet
who died in World War II at the age of twenty-four
June 1962
Dear Master Hughes,
I wish to thank you
heartily for my son,
who cannot.
I have read all your books,
your selected works
penned so young,
you are only thirty-one,
and I feel you've just become
my hero.
I want you to know
that Keith is honored by you.
I hope you continue
to shine starlight
on other little-known men,
the work of their pens,
because today success seems dependent
on being recommended
by great writers like you.
So thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
From Paul Alexander's Rough Magic: “Hughes wielded so much power that on his recommendation alone, a whole career could be made—or resurrected. … [I]n late May [1962] [he] broadcast a radio show on Keith Douglas, a British poet killed at the age of twenty-four in Normandy in World War II. On the basis of Hughes's single broadcast, Faber decided, provided that Hughes would write an introduction, to issue a ‘selected’ edition of Douglas's poems, much to the delight of Douglas's impoverished mother, who wrote Hughes to thank him.”
New Affiliates
Charlie Pollard, Devon's best and foremost member
June 1962
Sylvia tends the hive well.
Her husband bumbles
and his back's full of stingers.
Sylvia transfers queens
from one hive to the next
so that a virgin bee ascends
the throne. The old one's
outgrown her little home
and moves on.
Sylvia's husband skips meetings,
absent as summer snow.
I marvel at how she grows
her garden and home alone
and still manages the bees,
cares for their honeycomb.
In a letter to her mother, Sylvia wrote that the local bee meeting was “attended by the rector, the midwife, and assorted beekeeping people from neighboring villages.” In her journal entry of June 7, 1962, Sylvia describes the constituents of the Beekeepers? Society as “a group of miscellaneous Devonians … an assortment of shapeless men in brown speckled bulgy tweeds … [and] two women, one very large, tall, stout, in a glistening aqua-blue raincoat, the other cadaverous as a librarian in a dun raincoat.”
June 1962
Aurelia Plath
1. The Perfect Home
I arrive at Court Green
welcomed by a room
of painted pink hearts and flowers
and a granddaughter who blurts,
“Hello, Granny,” without provocation.
New Baby Nick bounces
smiling into my arms like we are old
friends. The manor, well kept
and lovely, groomed gardens
and flower beds, hand-painted furniture,
a lemon cake cooling on the counter.
But underneath the sweet scent
something bitter simmers,
trapped in the walls—
a festering mold black enough
to make one cough,
an odor rotten enough to stop breath.
Sivvy announces repeatedly
that happiness dances around her bed.
She has the perfect home, the perfect
children, the perfect husband.
But I believe she doth protest too heartily.
Still, I button my lip, dare not contradict
her, but the tension in the air's
thick and deadly as smog.
2. Loss of Faith
When Sylvia's neighbor Percy dies
of cancer, Sivvy crashes.
The strain on my daughter's shoulders
so great she cannot bear
loss or disruption.
Sivvy submits the final section
of her first novel to the foundation
supporting her work. She reveals
that she's nearly finished her
second novel, about a young American
girl in England who falls for a heroic man
and marries him. She intends to give
a first draft of the new book to Ted
as a birthday present.
She frets that the writing
on this novel stagnates lately.
Sylvia can't bring her pen
to the page. I fear she has lost faith
in her male protagonist.
Sylvia had never been to a funeral before she attended Percy Key's on June 29, 1962. An excerpt from her Journal 1962, Appendix 15 found in The Journals of Sylvia Plath: 1950-1962, illustrates some of her reactions:
“… Rose [Percy's wife] rapt and beau
tiful and frozen, the Catholic dropping a handful of earth which clattered. A great impulse welled in me to cast earth also, but it seemed as if it might be indecent, hurrying Percy into oblivion. We left the open grave. An unfinished feeling. Is he to be left there uncovered, all alone?”
As to Sylvia's novel:
The central events of Sylvia's early life, particularly those of the summer and fall of 1953, when she was a guest editor for Mademoiselle, attempted suicide, and underwent hospitalization, form the basis of her only novel, The Bell Jar. Sometimes referred to as a confessional novel, The Bell Jar is a fictional autobiography that Sylvia often called her “pot-boiler,” as she did not consider it to be a “serious work.” The novel follows Esther Greenwood, a sensitive young artist, as she questions the world around her, searches for identity, and descends into madness. It has become a widely read and seminal work.
Shopping in Exeter
Aurelia Plath
July 9, 1962
Sylvia steers the Morris,
chipper as a baby bluebird,
proclaims that she has everything
in life she has ever wanted.
I nod and stare out the window,
green hills roll like waves
across the countryside.
We tire of shopping early,
decide to return to Court Green
after lunch. Sylvia hears the phone
blare when she enters her house.
She rushes to grab the receiver.
Ted tops the stairs, startled
by our presence, stares at the phone,
dashes toward it. He misses a step,
falls backward, and bumps down
each stair, a snowball gathering speed,
until he crashes onto the floor.
Sivvy picks up the phone
with a calm “Hello.”
A pause the length of an epic poem
and she accuses the caller, “
I know who this is, Assia,
no need to disguise your voice.”
Sylvia hands Ted the phone.
He swiftly rids himself of his lady
caller. Sivvy's anger inflates her
ten feet tall. She yanks the telephone
wire out of the wall. I back up,
my arms around Frieda, covering
her eyes from the scene in the hallway.
The house is so quiet you hear only the wind.
Sivvy bundles up Baby Nick,
bolts from the house, leaving
Frieda under my care.
Ted stands ten seconds
in the hallway watching Sylvia go
and I am left without words.
I want to exit, but my legs stick to the floor.
I wish he would vanish,
burst into oblivion
like a soap bubble.
Should I scold him like a child,
should I pretend that nothing's awry?
I fume that he has made me awkward
in my daughter's house.
I decide not to make him tea,
clutch my grandbaby to my chest
and back away from it all.
Sylvia and Ted had bought their Morris station wagon the previous summer (1961). Aurelia visited Court Green from June 21 until August 4, 1962. After the incident in the above poem, Aurelia stayed with Winifred Davies, Sylvia's midwife and friend, for the last few weeks of her trip. This vacation was the last time Aurelia would see Sylvia alive. In the summer of 1962, Frieda was two and Nicholas was six months old.
Sylvia Begins to Tell the Truth
Elizabeth Compton,
Sylvia's friend and neighbor in Devon
July 1962
Sylvia looks as though she's been hit
by a hailstorm.
Nick gurgles in his carry cot.
She speaks fast
and loud, no sun in her tone.
She can't feed Nick, her milk
has dried up, her milk
is gone. Nick will starve. She drops
the baby in the front hall,
shakes off her outer garments, gloves,
scarf, hat, overcoat
as she marches into the parlor.
She weeps, “Help me.” Her eyes never
stop flowing tears.
Ted loves another woman, Assia.
Ted lies to her.
I grab her hand, don't know what to say,
don't know how to calm her.
She flinches at my touch. I stick my finger
in Nick's mouth
so at least the baby soothes, becomes quiet and calm.
I tell Sylvia she should stay the night
with us, then haul out
the guest linens, tuck Sylvia
into bed like a child.
She stares blankly, eyes swollen red,
her nose drips.
She says, “When you give someone
your whole heart
and he doesn't want it, you cannot
take it back.
It's gone forever.”
Sylvia's quote at the end of this poem is from “Sylvia in Devon: 1962,” written by Elizabeth (Compton) Sigmund in Sylvia Plath: The Woman and the Work, edited by Edward Butscher.
Burning: Summer of Bonfires
Imagining Sylvia Plath
In the style of “Poppies in July”
1962
She starts with the stack of wood he chopped,
Logs and planks piled high. Adds in a bit of kindling.
But the ingredient that makes the flames rise
Is words. Her papers and letters crinkle and pop,
Shrivel and ravel like withered blooms.
Each week she shovels in something new.
Slaughters the novel she etched of their love.
Destroys the stationery she posted across an ocean—
Her hope set sail, now ash. The fumes,
The smoke catch in her throat.
She burns his papers too, the typed manuscripts
She secretaried. She dances Rumpelstiltskin
Round the pyre of poetry, incants his name.
Maybe a new phoenix will rise from the flames,
From the cold, colorless char.
“Poppies in July” can be found in Ariel and is included in The Collected Poems. It was the second poem Sylvia wrote after Assia's phone call. The poem questions whether poppies, the flower and the opiate, do harm when they numb and dull. It is a poem of anger and resignation.
Pretense
Ted Hughes
August 15, 1962
She burns my work
so I leave no papers in the house,
so I leave the house now,
return to Court Green weekends only.
See and tend the children weekends only
as my “home” is an infirmary,
a place of colds and flu.
I am not running away, I am running to.
Sylvia and I agree to play
happy couple for her patron,
Mrs. Prouty, force smiles
through an evening of dinner and theater.
But a night alone at the Connaught Hotel
with Sylvia's dagger eyes
and venom tongue pantomiming, “
Bad father, bad husband, bad man,”
no wonder I can't stand
to be in her presence.
She incinerates herself with anger,
cannot write knee-deep in spite.
When Sylvia asks for a legal separation
I am relieved.
Sylvia believed that Ted maintained a secret flat in London where he stayed during the week over the summer. However, most likely he stayed with his friend the renowned poet W. S. Merwin, and his wife, Dido, or on A. Alvarez's sofa. He confided in the Merwins, Alvarez, and obviously in Assia about the problems he had with Sylvia.
Child Support
Elizabeth Compton,
Sylvia's friend and neighbor in Devon
August 1962
Nick needs male tending.
Fatherless, he hides under
her skirt.
Sylvia rages hot as coal
though the weather chills. She says
she wishes Ted were dead.
It's easier for a child
to understand a father
underground. Not a runaway.
She scrubs his scent
from the sheets,
from the house.
She cashes his little checks—
the only thing
he gives his children now.
In August 1962 Ted was mostly living in London, though he spent weekends at Court Green, and when Sylvia fell ill with a terrible fever he returned to Devon to help with the children.
On August 25, 1962, John Malcolm Brinnin, Dylan Thomas's biographer, courted Ted about replacing him at the University of Connecticut the following year, but Ted turned the offer down. The unsettled matters in his personal life likely contributed to his decision.
Can a Vacation in Ireland Rescue Their Marriage?
Richard Murphy, Irish poet whom Sylvia awarded
first prize in the Guinness Awards
September 1962
A couple of warring cats—
Sylvia hisses and claws. Ted silent, sneaky,
lurks about the house.
They sleep in separate twin beds,
tell me, over pints,
too much about their marriage.
We ferry out to see Yeats's Coole Park.
Sylvia insists Ted etch his initials
next to Yeats's, but Ted's pants leg
catches on the spiked fence. We huff up
the tower's spiral staircase instead.
Sylvia tosses coins, throws back her arms
howling, sniffs up the spirit
of the master. Ted doesn't react
as though her behavior's abnormal.
They each pull me aside,
ask me to play marriage counselor.
He's seeing another woman.
She wants to separate.
I have been stuck
in the molasses of divorce before
and advise her, as a friend,
to make the break clean—
but Sylvia talks to herself,
desires me to simply play mirror,
nod when she nods, laugh when she chortles,
cry out the tears dried
in the corner of her eyes.