Ted plays Ouija while we sleep,
slips out the next day. She launches
excuses for his departure,
but they are so weak
a breeze knocks them down.
He abandons her again.
Under the table Sylvia brushes
my knee. I ask her to leave—
will not be scratched
by those claws,
will not have her dropping
dead birds at my feet.
Richard Murphy's epilogue “Years Later” to his poem “The Cleggan Disaster” won first prize in the 1962 Guinness Awards. More information on Sylvia and Ted's last-ditch vacation to Ireland can be found in Paul Alexander's biography Rough Magic.
Disappear
Aurelia Plath
Autumn 1962
I feared this—
his black demeanor,
towering silence,
sporting the superior
threadbare jacket of the artist.
He doesn't even
phone to inquire
about the children.
Sylvia opens the wounds
she has hidden from me—
the deep lacerations in her back—
Ted neglects Nicholas,
Ted tells her he never wanted children.
Ted has left her,
and her alone darkens
like a cellar door
drawing closed.
Aurelia suggested that Sylvia move back home, but Sylvia refused. She could not face her mother after Aurelia had witnessed the dissolution of her marriage. Sylvia's mind-set is conveyed in her October 9, 1962, letter, published in Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963:
“… America is out for me. I want to make my life in England. If I start running now, I will never stop. I shall hear of Ted all my life, of his success, his genius … I must make a life of my own as fast as I can …”
The Arrival of Poetry
Imagining Sylvia Plath
In the style of “The Arrival of the Bee Box”
October 1962
She wakes shaking, her coffee
Rattles its cup like a brass bell, her babies
Rattle their prams, but she cannot
Stop her pen writing.
Her words arrive, a box to be opened.
Pretty on the outside, blue-bowed
And wrapped in the crisp paper of autumn,
Her words resonate danger.
Her poems are like a box of apples,
Sour and tart in her mouth,
They predict a fall.
She feels like a medium.
She catches lines like a sieve. She slices a vein and poetry flows,
Blood dark, blood dirty,
A river into Hades.
She blocks Ted out, the rake, her children's
Unfaithful father, invisible as the man who draws
The stage curtain, who ties up the show.
She doesn't need him
To tell her when to begin, when to end.
Poetry taps beat after beat
From her typewriter keys.
She studies the page, astonished
At her maniac poems, buzzing real as an ear.
She cannot send them back.
She cannot remember writing them down.
She can only remember the way
The words felt, honest as a morning moon.
And she is their creator,
Standing alone in her laurel crown.
She escapes this way.
Her early-morning pen
Breaks the kill hours, cleanses her in blood,
Burns the wrinkles from her face.
She radiates language.
She will not be shut up, will not be eclipsed.
October 1962, the month of Sylvia's thirtieth birthday, would prove to be Sylvia's most prolific month of writing poetry. Most of the poems in Ariel were written in this month, in the early mornings between three a.m. and dawn, when the children awoke. She called these hours “the kill hours.” During the first week of October Sylvia wrote five poems she collectively called “Bees.” They deal—if not overtly, then inadvertently—with her father. Otto had studied bees, was a beekeeper, and had authored Bumblebees and Their Ways.
All the Bitter Things
Ted Hughes
October 11, 1962
On the train I wish
I had swallowed my tongue,
that I had suffered laryngitis,
anything not to have said
all those horrible things to her.
But she witches me, her superior
mug of the bitch, her pointy finger,
she clings to blame like a mantra.
She never knew how nightmarish
living with her was.
All the years I spent jailed
in a narrow hallway, responding
to her thousand daily calls,
trying to scrawl my poems
between her spasms, her charcoal moods.
My hands form a noose,
I wanted to crack her neck
when she refused to give me
the remainder of her Saxton Grant.
Oh, the wicked part of my heart flared.
Assia and I think perhaps
Sylvia will kill herself;
David, Assia's husband,
attempted suicide when Assia left him,
and he was strong.
Boarding the train, Sylvia's judgment
eyes catch me and I say it—
I had never hated living in London,
I only hated living there with her.
A crevasse of hurt runs across her cheek,
but she puckers up, contents
herself by hurtling through
the locomotive's glass, “Let's
divorce.” I toss my bags under the seat
as she yells, “Bastard,” at me.
The train chugs slowly down
the tracks. Her bitter tongue does
not penetrate the window, merely
smudges it with spittle I can turn
away from. I can ignore.
In November 1961 Sylvia was awarded a Eugene Saxton Grant of $2,000 to write prose fiction to be delivered in four installments over the next year. She delivered to the Saxton Foundation what would be published as The Bell Jar. At the time she was awarded the Saxton, The Bell Jar was mostly written and had already been signed (on October 21, 1961) to be published in Britain by Heinemann under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas.
Mania
Aurelia Plath
October 1962
Sylvia's letters terrify
and so I telegram Winifred Davies,
her midwife, nurse, and friend.
I ask Winifred to find Sylvia good help,
a proper nanny for whom I will pay.
My Sivvy's back on that pendulum,
swings from her high genius
who composes brilliant poems
before Baby Nick's first morning cry
to her low immobile slug,
that cave of disgust and exhaustion.
I beg her to come home.
I want to stretch my arms across the ocean,
shelter my baby and my grandbabies.
But Sivvy's stubbornness
won't be undone. A vault of iron,
she can't be cracked.
She hurls her venom at me—
how dare I interfere, how dare I care.
I thought being a mother herself,
Sivvy would understand, but she
dives and flies so fast, so furious,
that she loses touch with herself
as mother and daughter,
becomes the writer, the great artist,
the loner. I bite my pen,
what should I do?
What can I do when I'm so far away?
Sylvia wrote her mother this alarming letter, dated October 16, 1962, which can be found in Letters Home: Co
rrespondence 1950-1963:
“I need help very much now. Home is impossible. I can go nowhere with the children, and I am ill, and it would be psychologically the worst thing to see you now or to go home.”
Part of Them
Susan O'Neill Roe, Sylvia's favorite nanny
October 1962
Sylvia treats me as a daughter and a sister and a friend.
And I love Frieda and Nick the first moment I hold them.
Sylvia is lovely frail, wild, and brilliant. I have never met a woman like her.
She doesn't hide emotions. She pours it all onto the table
when the vase tumbles, the mess and the flowers.
She needs me like a sick child, like the nurse I am schooling to become.
I love her like my mother, like my sister, like my friend,
like I am part of them.
Susan O?Neill Roe, a twenty-two-year-old found by Winifred Davies, started working for Sylvia on October 22, 1962. She was a mother's helper for Sylvia until mid-December, when Sylvia moved to London. Susan was studying to become a nurse.
Thirtieth Birthday
Imagining Sylvia Plath
In the style of “Ariel”
October 27, 1962
She writes
Into the cauldron of morning.
Eyes red, hands furious.
She does not blow out candles.
She lights them, grateful
For the mania of language,
For the fire-red poppies
Lifting their skirts.
They curtsy for her, bid her welcome
To a new decade.
There is no man in this house
Anymore. Only ladies and babies.
She can make a world of this.
He cannot. She can ride alone.
He cannot.
She rides her horse, Sam, ragged,
Clutches his mane.
When he bucks, she holds on,
Embeds her thighs
Into his back.
She is strong-legged.
She never knew she was this strong.
She blazes into sunrise.
She arrives, a woman of thirty.
Her mind unloads its words.
She must write it all down
Before the day unravels
Its fury and magic,
And she wakes, a sweet nymph,
A slave, a creature of air,
Fading quickly into ether.
“Ariel” demonstrates Sylvia's keen insight into her own art, reversing the prior death-in-birth obsession that had haunted her life. Out of those ashes, in the same early-morning hours that used to bring her such despair, Sylvia was now creating art, not suicide. Ariel was the name of the horse Sylvia rode in Croton, and the poem refers to the almost fatal ride Sylvia had on a horse named Sam when she was at Cambridge.
London at the End of October
A. Alvarez, poetry editor of the Observer
1962
We sip whiskey.
Sylvia squats beside the fire
as there is nowhere proper
to sit in my little studio flat.
She tells me that she
and Ted have separated.
I slug back a good portion
of whiskey don't reveal
that Ted spends many nights
on my sofa.
Her eyes have closed.
She talks of writing her latest poems,
a woman possessed by demons
and angels, a muse to herself.
She produces a sheaf of poems
from her black shoulder bag,
says they must be read aloud.
I inch closer to her as she reads.
Her voice like the pied piper,
raw and wicked, draws me in.
I tell her she is writing strong
and new work—poems that amaze.
The poems Sylvia read to Alvarez were later published in Ariel, including “Berck-Plage,” “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” and “Elm.”
Divorce
Suzette Macedo, a friend of both Assia's and Sylvia's
Late October 1962
Sylvia sobs in her sleep,
announces her intent to
divorce Ted as though
we are telephone
lines to his ear. I want to
cup her in my palm
like a baby bird.
She is that frantic, wild-winged,
with a fragile bald head
and a starving, gaping beak.
I restrain myself from phoning Assia,
from holding the mouthpiece
above Sylvia's loud tears
so Assia can hear
what unbearable sounds like.
Though English divorce rates generally climbed during the post-war years, divorce was not considered common in 1961. That year, there were 27,224 divorces in England.
Her Poetry
Peter Orr, interviewer of Sylvia and recorder of her poems
Late October 1962
Her voice older than her birth years,
controlled intonations—
she lets the punch of her words
catch one's attention. Her voice is merely
a shop window's dummy
displaying a dashing new frock of words.
She has been a professional
poet since she was eight,
admires the other confessionalists,
Lowell and Sexton, and challenges
always that her own work must transcend
the personal, be relevant,
not a shut box, not mirror-looking.
Her poetry is essential to her,
like bread or air. Nothing, she says,
is more fulfilling than writing a poem.
“Nothing?” I question her.
“Nothing,” she affirms.
She does not speak of husbands
or children, thank God, only of verse.
Orr's interview, which included Sylvia's reading of her poems, was recorded for the British Council and the British Broadcasting Company's archives. Sylvia's reading of “Berck-Plage” was also recorded for a program called The Weird Ones, which aired on November 17, 1962.
Finally, a New Home
Susan O'Neill Roe, Frieda and Nick's nanny
November 1962
She hums over the collected poems
of William Butler Yeats, the green
bound volume in front of her
as she sits cross-legged before the fire.
I see how much she needs magic to happen,
desperate as a child wishing
St. Nick to bring her Christmas bicycle, Sylvia
pines for a sign that Yeats's old flat is meant for her.
She flips open the volume,
her finger catches on the page
containing The Unicorn from the Stars.
She lights up like a flare
suddenly flamed, streaking sparks.
Her forefinger quivers
and she reads me the line
sent to her by the master poet:
“Get the wine and food
to give you strength and courage
and I will get the house ready.”
And there it is, the miracle she requires,
the London flat will be hers, it is destined,
tea-leaved, preordained by the stars.
I exhale, my departure now eased
because the city will care for her.
She will not be isolated
on acres of frost and silence.
I pick up her teacup, head upstairs
before Baby Nick begins my day.
There was a blue plaque to denote that the house at 23 Fitzroy Road was a historic London structure. It read, “William Butler Yeats 1865-1939 Irish Poet & Dramatist Lived Here,” alongside the sign announcing, “Flat for Let.” Sylvia had long admired Yeats's poetry. He was one of her favorites, and she felt that she was
meant to live in his apartment. Sylvia also believed that she could communicate with Yeats's spirit.
November of Rejection and Rage
Imagining Sylvia Plath
In the style of “Winter Trees”
November 1962
Will these poems dissolve, blotted ink
On a journal page? She knows this work of Ariel
Exceeds her previous poems, published so readily,
But when huddled into a volume, received winter-cold.
Her Colossus fades under-read, buried on the library shelf
Beneath a blanket of snowy indifference.
The magazine editors brutalize her new poems.
Too extreme, bitchy language, personal squawks.
Her novel, The Bell Jar, rejected by American publishers,
Written under pseudonym, because her semi-
autobiographical
“Potboiler” might scald her loved ones.
Every day the post delivers another “No,” another ego
blow.
November rages in her throat. She cannot hear
The name Ted without cracking and hissing
Like burning leaves. She chants ill will to the bastard,
To the deadbeat dad. She wonders how she failed at
marriage,
Failed at bringing her poetry into the world.
Still she writes.
“Winter Trees” is part of the collection Winter Trees and is included in The Collected Poems. The poem examines the effortless way a tree seeds, even in winter, and contrasts it to the barren feelings Sylvia suffered at this time.
Moving
Susan O'Neill Roe, Sylvia's favorite nanny
December 10, 1962
The Morris loaded full as a stuffed bird,
we fight the December wind
all the way to London.
The children howl in the backseat.
No heat, no gas, no apartment keys.
No help from her downstairs neighbor,
the scruffy Mr. Trevor Thomas. This does not
bode well for Sylvia's promised city.
She wearies from slogging the kids
up two flights of stairs. Prams and nappies
and bottles—cold and flu running their noses
and temperatures. Sylvia may not be able to go this alone.
I fear for her, but then the gas boys show up,
jimmy open a window, and let her in.
Sylvia begins to settle, paints her furniture
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