http://youtu.be/plU5FLiiXYQ
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 have a call.
Sylvia Plath
[Mirror]
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful-
The eye of the little god, four cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
—written 23 October in 1961, Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems
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[Apprehensions]
There is this white wall, above which the sky creates itself—-
Infinite, green, utterly untouchable.
Angels swim in it, and the stars, in indifference also.
They are my medium.
The sun dissolves on this wall, bleeding its lights.
A gray wall now, clawed and bloody.
Is there no way out of the mind?
Steps at my back spiral into a well.
There are no trees or birds in this world,
There is only sourness.
This red wall winces continually :
A red fist, opening and closing,
Two gray, papery bags—-
This is what I am made of , this and a terror
Of being wheeled off under crosses and a rain of pietas.
On a black wall, unidentifiable birds
Swivel thier heads and cry.
There is no talk of immortality among these!
Cold blanks approach us :
They move in a hurry.
—written 28 May 1962
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[Lesbos]
Viciousness in the kitchen!
The potatoes hiss.
It is all Hollywood, windowless,
The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine,
Coy paper strips for doors
Stage curtains, a widow’s frizz.
And I, love, am a pathological liar,
And my child look at her, face down on the floor,
Little unstrung puppet, kicking to disappear
Why she is schizophrenic,
Her face is red and white, a panic,
You have stuck her kittens outside your window
In a sort of cement well
Where they crap and puke and cry and she can’t hear.
You say you can’t stand her,
The bastard’s a girl.
You who have blown your tubes like a bad radio
Clear of voices and history, the staticky
Noise of the new.
You say I should drown the kittens. Their smell!
You say I should drown my girl.
She’ll cut her throat at ten if she’s mad at two.
The baby smiles, fat snail,
From the polished lozenges of orange linoleum.
You could eat him. He’s a boy.
You say your husband is just no good to you.
His Jew-Mama guards his sweet sex like a pearl.
You have one baby, I have two.
I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair.
I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.
We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,
Me and you.
Meanwhile there’s a stink of fat and baby crap.
I’m doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.
The smog of cooking, the smog of hell
Floats our heads, two venemous opposites,
Our bones, our hair.
I call you Orphan, orphan. You are ill.
The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B.
Once you were beautiful.
In New York, in Hollywood, the men said: “Through?
Gee baby, you are rare.”
You acted, acted for the thrill.
The impotent husband slumps out for a coffee.
I try to keep him in,
An old pole for the lightning,
The acid baths, the skyfuls off of you.
He lumps it down the plastic cobbled hill,
Flogged trolley. The sparks are blue.
The blue sparks spill,
Splitting like quartz into a million bits.
O jewel! O valuable!
That night the moon
Dragged its blood bag, sick
Animal
Up over the harbor lights.
And then grew normal,
Hard and apart and white.
The scale-sheen on the sand scared me to death.
We kept picking up handfuls, loving it,
Working it like dough, a mulatto body,
The silk grits.
A dog picked up your doggy husband. He went on.
Now I am silent, hate
Up to my neck,
Thick, thick.
I do not speak.
I am packing the hard potatoes like good clothes,
I am packing the babies,
I am packing the sick cats.
O vase of acid,
It is love you are full of. You know who you hate.
He is hugging his ball and chain down by the gate
That opens to the sea
Where it drives in, white and black,
Then spews it back.
Every day you fill him with soul-stuff, like a pitcher.
You are so exhausted.
Your voice my ear-ring,
Flapping and sucking, blood-loving bat.
That is that. That is that.
You peer from the door,
Sad hag. “Every woman’s a whore.
I can’t communicate.”
I see your cute decor
Close on you like the fist of a baby
Or an anemone, that sea
Sweetheart, that kleptomaniac.
I am still raw.
I say I may be back.
You know what lies are for.
Even in your Zen heaven we shan’t meet.
—written October 18, 1962
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queen-0f-moons:
New pointillism tattoo inspired by Sylvia Plath!
"The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.
I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.”
—From Elm, written 19 April 1962
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The Night Dances
A smile fell in the grass.
Irretrievable!
And how will your night dances
Lose themselves. In mathematics?
Such pure leaps and spirals ——
Surely they travel
The world forever, I shall not entirely
Sit emptied of beauties, the gift
Of your small breath, the drenched grass
Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies.
Their flesh bears no relation.
Cold folds of ego, the calla,
And the tiger, embellishing itself ——
Spots, and a spread of hot petals.
The comets
Have such a space to cross,
Such coldness, forgetfulness.
So your gestures flake off ——
Warm and human, then their pink light
Bleeding and peeling
Through the black amnesias of heaven.
Why am I given
These lamps, these planets
Falling like blessings, like flakes
Six sided, white
On my eyes, my lips, my hair
Touching and melting.
Nowhere.
—written 6 November 1962, Sylvia Plath, The Collected Poems
==========================
(Sylvia Plath by Emma F.)
Sylvia's suicide followed the breakdown of her marriage to the poet Ted Hughes in the summer of 1962, largely due to his adultery. Plath had a history of mental illness and depression since childhood, and had been treated by Electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), an experience she recounts in her novel 'The Bell Jar'. She had also attempted suicide twice previously.
On August 24th 1953, aged 20, Plath took the sleeping pills she'd been prescribed, from the safe where her Mother stored them. Then she retreated to the basement of her family home. She took a large quantity and fell into a coma, having left a note suggesting she'd gone for a long walk. After frantic neighbourhood searches, a groan was heard from the basement and she was discovered, many of the pills having been vomited up, and was rushed to hospital, where she recovered.
Additionally, following Plath and Hughes's temporary separation, Plath ran her car off the road in a deserted airfield, she referred to it as an 'aborted suicide', though the danger of this manoeuvre is questionable, as the road is flat and safe and not particularly dangerous anyway.
After the separation, Plath and her two children, Frieda aged 2 and Nicholas aged 8 months took up a flat on Fitzroy Road , London, the site of Plath's eventual demise. Their flat was at number 23. Here is the front door, with mailbox built in, of course.
Against the backdrop of Plath's suicide, January had the worst winter in Britain for 60 years (which has got to be baaad) and Plath's flat was without a phone, unfortunately one was never connected in time. The children and Plath contracted flu and Plath struggled to cope alone. She took on a German au pair (nanny), but she later left and Plath struggled alone again, whilst 'the launch of the Bell Jar 'on January 14th had unfavourable American reviews.
Late in January Plath informed her Doctor - Dr. Horder - that she feared a breakdown and was severely depressed. She was prescribed anti-depressants and he sought a psychiatrist and a hospital place for her. On Feb 7th Plath stayed with her friend Jillian Becker and was reliant upon her pills and feared being alone, and ranted about hating Ted for his infidelity.
On Sunday 10th Feb she chose to return to her home, claiming she felt better. Dr Horder had ordered her a nurse for 9 o'clock the next morning and Plath had a publisher's lunch organised. She cried the whole way home, but wouldn't accept Gerry Becker's offer of returning to the Becker household.
At midnight on Sunday, Plath visited her downstairs neighbour, Professor Thomas to buy stamps and he heard her pacing upstairs later in the night
On Monday 11th Feb the nurse arrived at 9ish but received no answer. A builder let her in, and they broke in to Plath's flat. Plath was found in the kitchen, lying with her head on a cloth in the gas oven, all the gas taps on full. She was given artificial respiration but it was too late, she was dead. Plath's two children were upstairs crying, but she had made provisions for them, leaving bread and milk, opening their window fully, taping and stuffing towels into the cracks in both their bedroom and the kitchen doors.
It was following Plath and Hughes separation and Plath's suicide that she wrote over 40 of the 'Ariel' poems, argued to be her best work. Poems such as 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazurus' amongst others contain unsettling references to Plath's emotional state
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She was buried on February 16th 1963 in Heptonstall Cemetery, West Yorkshire, UK, under the name Sylvia Plath Hughes. The 'Hughes' has subsequently been hacked off several times. Her inscription reads: *Even amidst fierce flames - the golden lotus can be planted*
