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Sylvia Plath, summer of 1953, Lamayer Mss.

by Gordon Lamayer.
The Sylvia Plath Papers, The Lilly Library, The University of Indiana, Bloomington, Indiana.

Sylvia Plath: 1932-1963

ylvia Plath died at age thirty in 1963, on the

cusp of an era that saw great changes for
womens rights and womens roles in society.
Growing up in the 1940s and 50s, Plath raged against
the confining cultural expectations which threatened
to stifle her voice as a writer. Plath wanted freedom
and respect, as well as the right to choose a career
exhibiting her genius to its full extent. She understood
that the era held unequal prospects for women (most
were expected to put their careers aside to care for
their husband and children). The culture in which she
was raised exacerbated her dissatisfaction.

As the wife of the much-lauded poet Ted Hughes,

Plath suffered in his shadow and, grew increasingly
frustrated by their unequal fame. Their marriage
disintegrated in 1962, and has since accrued legendary
proportions. Her final volume of poetry, Ariel, is an
outstanding record of the pain she endured during
her time as a single mother living in London. Sylvia
Plath committed suicide on February 11, 1963. She
received a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for The
Collected Poetry.

Otto Plath,
the Father of Sylvia Plath

tto Plath was born on April 13, 1885 in Grabow, Germany. The young
Otto immigrated to the United States by himself in 1900. He did have
relatives here; his grandparents had settled in Watertown, Wisconsin in
1885. When he arrived in New York City from Hamburg, Germany, he stayed
with his uncle, who ran a liquor and food store. Otto audited classes at a grade
school in order to learn English. His parents, Theodore and Ernestine Platt, joined
Otto in the United States in 1901 with their younger five children.
Ottos grandparents expected him to become a minister in the Lutheran church,
and offered to pay his tuition at Northwestern College, located in their community
of Watertown, Wisconsin. When Otto discovered the writings of Charles Darwin
during college, he decided to study the sciences instead. Aurelia, his wife, later
wrote of his grandparents reaction: If he adhered to this infamous decision, he
would no longer be a part of the family. His name would be stricken from the
family Bible. And so it was done. He was on his own for the rest of his life. In the
wake of graduating from college and being disowned in 1910, Otto enrolled at the
University of Washington in Seattle, where he earned his Master of Arts degree.
In 1912, he married a friends sister, who left him after three weeks.

Otto Plath, 1930s

Helle Collection of Plath Family Photographs, Mortimer Rare Book

Room, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

During WWI, Otto was put on an FBI watch list as an alien enemy with proGerman leanings because he could not afford war bonds. Patriotic Americans
were expected to support the war effort, but Otto was in debt and struggled to
keep a teaching job. At the time, he was studying at the University of California
Berkeley, which prohibited Germans from teaching. Lacking that assistantship
for teaching while working toward his doctorate, he moved to the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, where he taught German. From 1921-1925, Otto studied
zoology at Harvard with an assistantship in entomology. He earned a Ph.D. in
applied biology from Harvard in 1928. In 1929, he was an entomologist and
professor of biology at Boston University. Ottos primary research interest focused
on bumblebees; he was especially interested in transferring bees into artificial hives
to gather honey. In 1934, he published his book, Bumblebees and their Ways.

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Aurelia Schober Plath,

Sylvia Plaths Mother

urelia Schober Plath was born on April 26, 1905 and

grew up in Point Shirley, Massachusetts. Her parents
were hardworking Austrian immigrants who only spoke
German in their home, making it difficult for little Aurelia to
integrate socially with her English-speaking peers. The young girl
experienced much prejudice from her schoolmates during WWI;
they called Aurelia spy face. She escaped from their bullying
through reading literature. Deep down, she nursed a desire to
write, yet, as she later told an interviewer, she didnt feel that I
could expose my children to the uncertainty of a writers success
or failure. Aurelia stuck to a more practical ambition, and hoped
to teach high school English and German. She worked to afford
the tuition at Boston College in their College of Practical Arts
and Letters.
Otto Plath was her professor in Middle High German when she
attended Boston University for a summer course. After the class
ended, the two began dating. Because Otto had had a brief,
unconsummated marriage earlier in life, he had to obtain a divorce.
The Plaths were married on January 4, 1932. Aurelia briefly
taught at Brookline High School, until her husband suggested
she quit to take over a housewifes duties. She was an invaluable
help to Otto as they collaborated on his bumblebee book, and he
noted her help in the books preface, commenting on the service
of my wife, Aurelia S. Plath, who has aided me greatly in editing
the manuscript and proofreading.

Plath Family (Aurelia, Sylvia, and Otto Plath)

Helle Collection of Plath Family Photographs,

Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

Otto was 20 years older than Aurelia, who was 27 when she
married her 47-year-old former professor. When Sylvia was
born, her father was 48, and not particularly affectionate toward
his children.

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The Plath Children

ylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932

in Boston, Massachusetts. Her mother kept
extensive records of the childs development
Plaths baby book was meticulously recorded in
Aurelias neat, cramped handwriting. Because Otto
pressured Aurelia not to work, all her efforts went
into doting on Sylvia. Locks of Sylvias hair were
collected by Aurelia throughout her childhood and
are now housed at the Lilly Library at the University
of Indiana. Aurelia noted Sylvias first words in
September 1933, and by December she was shouting
the word, Daddy! When Aurelia became pregnant
again, Sylvia would sit on her mothers lap and listen
to the baby.
Warren Plath was born on April 26, 1935. At first,
Sylvia was jealous of her new brother, who she
perceived as a rival for her parents affections. In
early years, Sylvia would bully her brother and use
her growing vocabulary to confuse the child, and
they maintained a healthy sense of sibling rivalry.
This changed in later years and the two were close
throughout her life.

Baby Sylvia Sitting on her mothers lap

Helle Collection of Plath Family Photographs,

Mortimer Rare Book Room,
Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

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Plaths Childhood

n her essay, Ocean 1212-W, recorded for BBC in 1962, Sylvia

Plath recalled her childhood landscape as not land but the end of
the landthe cold, salt running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes
think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own. Plaths early
identification with the ocean would inspire themes in her poetry and
fiction. The Atlantic Ocean seamlessly fit into a comparison with Plath
herself: Like a deep woman, it hid a great deal; it had many faces,
many delicate, terrible veils.
Pictured here are young Sylvia and Warren on a sailboat. Sylvia was
8 years old. Otto Plath died on November 5, 1940 from complications
from diabetes mellitus a few months after this photograph was taken.
Originally, Otto believed he was suffering from lung cancer, and
refused to be treated. The diseases symptoms appeared in 1936, and if
he had been properly diagnosed with type II diabetes, Otto may have
lived. By the time he was given proper medical attention, his foot had
to be amputated.

Ottos death would haunt Sylvias poetrynotably Full Fathom

Five, The Bee Keepers Daughter, and Colossus from her first
poetry collection, The Colossus and Other Poems. In the poem Daddy,
from Ariel, we see Plaths disturbance with her fathers absence in her
life. The character of Esther in Plaths novel, The Bell Jar, was also a
fatherless woman.
Aurelia returned to work after her husbands death, and the stress from
teaching German and Spanish at Braintree High School, along with
another job at the junior high school, caused a reoccurring duodenal
ulcer that plagued her throughout difficult periods in her life.

Sylvia and Warren Plath on a sailboat in Winthrop, Massachusetts

Helle Collection of Plath Family Photographs,
Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

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I Thought That
I Could Not be Hurt
By Sylvia Plath
I thought that I could not be hurt;
I thought that I must surely be
impervious to sufferingimmune to pain
or agony.

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My world was warm with April sun

my thoughts were spangled green and gold;
my soul filled up with joy, yet
felt the sharp, sweet pain that only joy
can hold.
My spirit soared above the gulls
that, swooping breathlessly so high
oerhead, now seem to brush their whirring wings against the blue roof of
the sky.
(How frail the human heart must bea throbbing pulse, a trembling thinga fragile, shining instrument
of crystal, which can either weep,
or sing.)
Then, suddenly my world turned gray,
and darkness wiped aside my joy.
A dull and aching void was left
where careless hands had reached out to
destroy
my silver web of happiness.
The hands then stopped in wonderment,
for, loving me, they wept to see
the tattered ruins of my firmament
(How frail the human heart must bea mirrored pool of thought. So deep
and tremulous an instrument
of glass that it can either sing,
or weep).

t the age of 8, Plath had

her first poem published by
the Boston Sunday Herald.
The four-line stanza poem captured
her impressions of a summer night:
The moon is a lock of witchs hair
/ Tawny and golden and red / And
the night winds pause and stare at
the / Strand from a witchs head. I
Thought That I Could Not Be Hurt
is another work from Plaths early
juvenilia, written when she was 14.
Aurelia wrote that it was Sylvias first
piece of writing containing tragic
undertones. It was inspired by the
hurt Plath felt after her grandmother
accidently smudged the pastel on a
still life drawn by Plath.
Works that inspired Plath during her
childhood included: Mathew Arnolds
The Forsaken Merman, other
poems by Eugene Field, A. A. Milne,
and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well
as Dr. Seuss Horton Hatches an Egg
and J. R. R. Tolkiens The Hobbit.

Frame Size 16 x 20

Plath family home, Wellesley, Massachusetts

Helle Collection of Plath Family Photographs, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

A Promising Adolescent:
Her High School Years

his is the house where Sylvia Plath lived

following her fathers death. She lived at 26
Elmwood Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts until
she left for college. Sylvia Plath was a popular and
outgoing adolescent who excelled academically. She
took dancing lessons, and played the viola. Despite her
accomplishments, Plath harbored feelings that were
self-critical and contradicted the outgoing appearance
she presented, referring to herself at a point in her
journal as an ugly introvert. Writing created a positive
outlet. Her heroine was Scarlet OHara from Gone with
the Wind.

with a rigorous curriculum. She compiled her own

extensive reading list, including: George Eliot, Jane
Austen, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes, and Henry Miller,
among others. Plath paralleled her academic interests
by diligently studying young men. She was constantly
involved in relationships with the right young men.
The double standard for male and female sexuality
bothered her.

Sylvia Plath possessed many fine qualities: she was

smart and beautiful, she served as an editor for her
high school newspaper, and she was a tennis player and
a visual artist. In high school, she started studying the
Plath enrolled at Gamaliel Bradford High School in Writers Year Book to learn the writers market, and sent
September, 1947. Her teacher, Willbury Crocket, poems and stories to Seventeen Magazine.
further inspired her love for reading and writing fiction

Sylvia becomes a Smith Girl, Fall 1950-Spring 1953

lath began attending Smith College

in Northampton, Massachusetts
in September 1950.
Excited
about her upcoming collegiate future, she
wrote: I still cant believe Im a SMITH
GIRL! Her choice to attend Smith
instead of staying at home and studying
at Wellesley taxed her familys meager
finances.
Fortunately, novelist Olive
Higgins Prouty endowed Sylvia with an
$850 scholarship for promising young
writers. Prouty was best known for her
pioneering consideration of psychotherapy
in Now Voyager (1941), made into a movie
the next year starring Bette Davis, and for
the novel and radio serial Stella, Dallas. She
supported Plath financially in the wake of
Plaths unsuccessful 1953 suicide attempt.
Prouty would remain a mentor, benefactor,
and friend to Plath throughout the young
poets career. Some believe that Sylvias
memories of Prouty were the basis for the
character Philomena Guinea in Plaths
1963 novel, The Bell Jar.

high standards and feeling stretched by

the range of course subjects open to her.
Throughout her college career, Plath
continued her prolific prize-winning
magazine publications with Seventeen,
Mademoiselle, and The Christian Science
Monitor. She was able to partially finance
her clothing and dining expenses with the
money she earned writing.

However, her personal life wasnt quite so

polished. Plath suffered from sinusitis, low
moods, and emotional insecurity from her
hefty workload. Consequently, her social life
was rather bland, earning her a reputation
as a grind, which was 1950s vernacular
for someone who works too hard in school.
When she began dating an older Yale
student, Plath commanded respect from her
fellow housemates. She told Aurelia that
Dick was the most stimulating boy Ive
ever known, yet she feared showing him
her true self. Sylvia maintained a sexually
frustrated relationship with Dick Norton
for two years; she was simultaneously awed
Sylvia continued to receive As and Bs at by his scientific knowledge and annoyed
college, struggling to adhere to her own that he trivialized her writing ambitions.

The couple was not exclusive. They were

also highly competitive with each other;
since Dick had more sexual experience
than Sylvia, she tried to challenge him in
other ways.
By the end of the relationship, Sylvia could
barley stand Dick. When he contracted
tuberculosis and was sent to Ray Brook
Sanatorium in Saranac, New York, Sylvia
showed more jealously over the fact that he
had time to read and write than she showed
concern about his health. During his time
at the sanatorium, Dick wrote to Sylvia
that he planned to give up his dream of
becoming a doctor in order to write instead.
This change of heart infuriated Sylvia.
He would later reappear as the character
Buddy Willard in The Bell Jar. In the novel,
Buddy expected Esther to become his wife
and the mother of his children, a role that
Esther found repugnant.
Because she was invited to a number of
parties given by her more socially prominent
classmates, Plath dated a string of handsome,
wealthy, and well-connected men while she
was involved with Dick Norton.

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Plath, center in black shirt and white hat, at Haven House, Smith College in May 1951.
The Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

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Plaths Guest Editorship at Mademoiselle Magazine, Early Summer 1953

he now-infamous summer of 1953which

generated nearly all the material captured in Plaths
The Bell Jar, from her six week guest-editorship in
New York to her failed suicide attempt in August 1953
commenced in an exited whirl for Sylvia as she completed
her sophomore year. Plath was selected as a guest editor for
Mademoiselles College Issue. Mademoiselle was a fashion
magazine read by professional women which also
featured works by outstanding writers such as Dylan
Thomas, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers, James
Baldwin, and Tennessee Williams. Plath herself
frequently had stories published in magazine. Her
criticisms of the magazine in The Bell Jar neglected to
consider the professionalism, respect, and good pay
that fiction editor Margarita Smith provided to her.

editorship in the writing category and were anxious to meet

one another. Once Sylvia learned that Janet was studying
at Knox, a liberal arts college in Galesburg, Illinois, she lost
interest in her. Rafferty said of Plath: We both laughed
a lot, but it was obvious to me that she thought nothing
existed in the USA west of Lake Placid but American Indian
reservations. She thought Knox was way out in the boonies

The caviar was supposed to be for everyone on the

table, but Sylvia reached out for it, pulled it in front
of her, and began eating. She proceeded to eat the
whole bowlful of caviar with a spoon. I remember
thinking to myself, how rude, but she didnt seem to
be paying attention to anyone else.
In the novel, when Esther downed the caviar, the rich
food represented the wealth and stress-free education
that she had been denied in early life. Another symbolic
component was the character Doreen, based on guest
editor Carol LeVarn, who symbolized the sexual
freedom which both enamored and disgusted Plath.
Ann Burnside Love revealed LeVarns reaction to
The Bell Jar: Sylvia really did a number on Carol
LeVarn. I thought she was the one whose life was
rather smashed around by The Bell Jar.

Plath arrived in New York City on May 31, 1953.

The college editors were housed at the renowned
Barbizon Hotel. To Plaths disappointment, she was
selected to be the guest managing editor under a stern
taskmaster, Cyrilly Abels. Abels was the managing
editor for Mademoiselle from 1950 until she left to start
her own literary agency in the early 1960s. Sylvia
would have preferred working as fiction editor. As
part of the internship, Plath interviewed Irish author
Elizabeth Bowen. She attended parties, plays, and
luncheons after work with her fellow editors. At a
lunch with an ad agency, the girls contracted food
poisoning, an incident which Plath recounted in The
Bell Jar.
Janet Rafferty, who was the basis for the character
of Betsy in the novel, remembered Plath as being an
Ivy League snob. Both women had won the guest-

and always introduced me as being from Kansas. In The Bell

Jar, the character based on Janet Rafferty was imported
straight from Kansas with her bouncing blond ponytail
and Sweetheart-of-Sigma-Chi smile. Ann Burnside Love,
another guest editor who worked with Plath remembered
Sylvia devouring an entire bowl of caviar:

Sylvia Plath interviewing Elizabeth Bowen for her

Mademoiselle guest editorship, May 26, 1953

The Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room,

Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

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Art Ford, LeVarns DJ boyfriend, served as the basis

for The Bell Jar character Leonard Shepard. As in
Plaths novel, he introduced her to a Peruvian man,
Jose Antonio LaVias, Marco in The Bell Jar. As in the
novel, LaVias may have actually raped Plath after a
country club dance. What really happened is unknown.
Before leaving NYC, Sylvia Plath poignantly dumped
her entire wardrobe off the Barbizons roof. She was
in a near state of emotional collapse.

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Sylvia Plath before her suicide attempt in the summer of 1953,

by Gordon Lamayer
Lamayer Mss., The Sylvia Plath Papers, The Lilly Library, The University of Indiana, Bloomington, Indiana.

Sylvia Plaths 1953 Suicide Attempt and

Yearlong Hospitalization at McLean Hospital

hen she returned to Wellesley in July 1953,

Sylvia was met by dispiriting news from
Aurelia. Frank OConnor had rejected her
from his short story class at Harvard University. Aurelia
herself was physically ill with intestinal problems and a
permanent ulcer on her ankle. Andrew Wilson, in his
2013 Plath biography Mad Girls Love Song, argued that
Plaths mother lied about Plaths rejection from the class
to keep her daughter home. If Plath had actually been
accepted, this may explain her mounting murderous
resentment of Aurelia. Plaths character Esther in The
Bell Jar contemplated stopping her mothers snoring:
The piggish noise irritated me, and for a while it seemed
to me that the only way to stop it would be to take the
column of skin and sinew from which it rose and twist it
to silence between my hands.

ECT prompted Plath to suspend further treatment.

Aurelia would later blame this botched ECT session for
the spiteful caricatures in The Bell Jar, which her mother
claimed, twisted Sylvias personality.
On Monday August 24, 1953, while placed under her
unwitting grandparents supervision, Sylvia broke her
mothers lockbox containing a bottle of sleeping pills.
She hid herself in the basement and downed the bottle.
An extensive, well-publicized search for the missing
Plath ensued. Warren Plath discovered his sister on
Wednesday, August 26, two days after she disappeared.

Round the clock care for Sylvia was expensive for

Aurelia. Olive Higgins ProutyPlaths benefactor
at Smithoffered to defray the costs. Prouty moved
Plath to a more expensive psychiatric treatment facility,
McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, which
Sylvia Plaths mental health deteriorated as the 1953
was considered a Ritz-Carlton for the mentally ill. The
summer progressed, and Aurelia found slashes on her
country club atmosphere had helped Prouty recover
daughters legs on July 15. She took Sylvia to see a
from a breakdown earlier in life.
psychiatrist. Plath tried to keep up her social appearances
by dating Gordon Lameyer and working at a hospital. At McLean, Plath was under Dr. Ruth Beuschers care.
In the interim, she struggled to read James Joyces Sylvia struggled to recover. Beuscher was only nine
mammoth Ulysses. Her attempts to understand Joyces years older than Plath, and was regarded by the poetess
novel only increased her frustration. She could neither as a friend and mother figure. The young doctor was
still training as a resident, and would later question the
sleep nor concentrate on her reading and writing.
effectiveness of Plaths cure. Insulin treatments were
Dr. Kenneth Tillerton, her psychiatrist in Wellesley,
given frequently, but had little effect on Plath. Eventually,
tried to shake her depression by administering
Dr. Beuscher decided to try ECT on Plath, which this
electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). The badly managed
time, had apparent positive results.

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Sylvia Plath after winning The Glascock Poetry Prize

with Marianne Moore at Mount Holyoke College, April 15, 1955.

The Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

Rising Again:
Plaths Return to Smith 1954-1955

The research and writing of her honors thesis

dominated Plaths senior year at Smith. The Magic
Mirror was a 60-page study of doppelgngers, which
is a paranormal double of a person that may also be a
harbinger of death, as demonstrated in Dostoyevskys
The Double and The Brothers Karamazov. She further
audited a fiction writing class with novelist Alfred
Kazin. Determined to attend graduate school, she
applied for a Woodrow Wilson fellowship at Harvard
but was rejected. Following the disappointment, in
She vigorously returned to her old routine of
mid-February 1955, Sylvia received the news from
schoolwork and student involvement. Yet Plath
a professor that she had been accepted to Newnham
shed her controlled behavior, and thoroughly
College, Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship.
enjoyed acting out. According to Mad Girls Love
Song, on weekend trips to NYC, she drank, smoked Cresting on elation about her future at Cambridge,
marijuana, and partied. Richard Sassoon, her new Plath was buoyed by winning the prestigious Glascock
steady boyfriend, was a wealthy Yale graduate from Prize at Mount Holyoke College in the spring of 1955.
England. He was also a relative of leading WWI poet Poet Marianne Moore was a judge. On the flyleaf of
Siegfried Sassoon. Richard wrote Plath passionate Sylvias copy of Moores Collected Poems, the seasoned
letters, calling her an enchantress who made him poetess wrote to the rising star: Sylvia Plaths turned
down corners and underlinings make me feel there was
irrational and a pure beast.
some reason for the collecting of these poems.
eleased from McLean in 1954, Sylvia
returned to Smith College that fall. To all
appearances, she was the picture of health.
Gossip about Plaths suicide attempt and yearlong stay
at a mental hospital had spread on campus. A new
friend at Lawrence House was so shocked by Plaths
appearance that she blurted out: They didnt tell me
you were beautiful. To her classmates, Plath was a
strange, charismatic figure.

Moving to England,
Fall 1955-Spring 1956

lath was immediately enamored with Cambridge when she arrived on

October 1, 1955. From her attic room, she had a picturesque view
of rooftops, gardens, sycamore trees, and enormous ravens. Poor
English technologya gas fireplace and a small cooking ringdid not deter
the resilient graduate student. Her depictions of the meager fare served to
the female students seemed little changed from the rations Virginia Woolf
complained about in A Room of Ones Own.
Dorothea Krook, Plaths graduate supervisor, remembered her as eager,
and mobile, tranquil and serene, all at once, one of her most responsive
pupils. Plath referred to Krook as a genius saint. Initially, Plath joined the
Amateur Drama Club and found pause from her studies. Sinusitis, colds,
and challenges with her mood ensued during the 1955-56 winter. Her studies
only compounded the strain. Although she had romantic involvements at
Cambridge, she longed for her old beau, Richard Sassoon.
In 1955, Sassoon was studying at the Sorbonne in Paris. Over the Christmas
holiday, the couple toured the Louvre, the Tuileries Garden, the Champslyses, the Arc de Triumphe, and Notre Dame Cathedral. They traveled
to Nice on New Years Eve. From there, they went on to Venice to see the
Matisse Chapel, which inspired Plaths short story by the same name.
Plath told her mother that Sassoon was the only boy I have ever loved
so far. However, he did not believe himself financially secure to propose
marriage and planned to enlist in the army for two years. He tried to sever
ties by refusing to see her when she visited Paris over spring break in 1956.
Plath complicated the situation by traveling with another former boyfriend,
Gordon Lamayer, to Germany. She repelled Sassoon further by reporting
that she had met another man, one who, as Plath wrote in her journal, could
blast Richard by his hulking presence and forceful poetry. This new man
was Ted Hughes.

Sylvia Plath in her backyard before leaving

for Cambridge, England, September 11, 1955

Helle Collection of Plath Family Photographs,

Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

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Sylvia Plath in Cambridge, England, 1956.

The Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College,
Northampton, Massachusetts.

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14

An Historic Moment:
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
Meeting and Whirlwind
Courtship, 1956

n her short story Stone Boy with Dolphin,

Sylvia Plath recounts the moment she met
Ted Hughes: Room and voices hushed in the
first faint twirl of a rising wind. Air sallowed, the
storm to come. Air sultry now. Leaves turning up
white-bellied sides in the queer sulfur light. Flags
of havoc.
Hughes was a Cambridge graduate in town for the
St. Boltoph Reviews release party. He was a Yorkshire
native born on August 17, 1930. Plath met him on
February 25, 1956. She approached him by quoting
his own poetry to him. He responded: You like?
They broke into a violent make-out session, during
which he pulled off her headband and she bit his
cheek until blood was drawn. Two days later, she
wrote Pursuit. Within four months, the couple
had a simple marriage ceremony in London on
June 16, 1956, attended by Aurelia. Plath took
pride in her accomplishmenttaming Hughes
into monogamy and ending his womanizing ways.

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath

in Yorkshire, England, 1956

The Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room,

Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

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Ode for Ted

By Sylvia Plath, 1956
From under the crunch of my mans
boot
green oat-sprouts jut;
he names a lapwing, starts rabbits in a
rout
legging it most nimble
to sprigged hedge of bramble,
stalks red fox, shrewd stoat.
Loam-humps, he says, moles shunt
up from delved worm-haunt;
blue fur, moles have; hefting chalkhulled flint
he with rock splits open
knobbed quartz; flayed colors ripen
rich, brown, sudden in sunlight.
For his least look, scant acres yield:
each finger-furrowed field
heaves forth stalk, leaf, fruit-nubbed
emerald;
bright grain sprung so rarely
he hauls to his will early;
at his hands staunch hest, birds build.

Ted Hughes, in front of mountain, 1959

Ted Hughes Papers, 1940-1999, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library,
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

Ringdoves roost well within his wood,

shirr songs to suit which mood
he saunters in; how but most glad
could be this adams woman
when all earth his words do summon
leaps to laud such mans blood!

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Sketches of a Spanish Summer

for The Christian Science Monitor
November 5 - 6, 1956.

The Christian Science Monitor magazine article

Sketches of a Spanish Summer details the
Hughes honeymoon in Spain during the summer
of 1956 from the time they arrived in early July.
Sylvia drew all sketches accompanying this article.
She wrote to her mother: Wherever Ted and I go
people seem to love us. In a letter to her brother
Warren, she referred to Ted as a male counterpart
to herself. However, Plaths version of her Spanish
honeymoon is idyllic, glossing over her disgust at
a bullfight that she witnessed, and frustration with
frequent lapses in electrical and water service. The
couple met Warren Plath in Paris on August 25 on
their way home, and then continued on to Yorkshire,
England, where Sylvia met Teds parents.

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Return to the United States and Sylvias Career as a Smith Professor

nce Sylvia returned to Cambridge, she had to

keep her marriage a secret, fearing that her
Fulbright scholarship would be reneged by the
committee. Ted remained in London. He was miserable
when she was away, unable to sleep or to concentrate.
Similarly, Sylvia wrote to her mother: I am living for Ted.
In November 1956, they finally notified the Fulbright
committee of their marriage, and to Sylvias relief, she was
able to keep her scholarship.
Her poem Pursuit was published in The Atlantic Monthly
in January 1957. She also began writing the unfinished
novel Falcon Yard. With his new wifes help, Ted sent his
poetry collection Hawk in the Rain to be considered for the
New York City Poetry Centers Harpers prize. He won,
and with his first book ready for publication, Ted achieved
the notoriety needed for literary success in America. Faber
and Faber accepted for publication a British edition of
Hawk in the Rain on a recommendation from T.S. Eliot. On
March 12, 1957, Sylvia was offered a teaching position at
Smith College for $4,200 per annum. She accepted.
Following Sylvias graduation from Cambridge in May
1957, the Hughes sailed to the United States on the
Queen Elizabeth on July 20, 1957. Ted was not enamored
by Sylvias homeland. He criticized the conformist
atmosphere of the 1950s. They took an apartment in
Northampton in September of 1957 as Plath prepared for
her role as teacher.
Plath was a tough professor easily frustrated by her
young students deficiencies. Although she was teaching
freshmen and sophomores, Plath tried using the Socratic
method, which involved asking students open-ended

questions intended to help them understand their own was popular in the 1950s and 1960s, is defined as: An
belief systems by eliminating contradictions. This method autobiographical mode of verse that reveals the poets
was practiced at Cambridge. If students did not meet her personal problems with unusual frankness.
high standards, she regarded the young
women as spoiled and lazy.
Furthermore, she lamented that teaching
left little time for her writing. She refused
the schools offer to return a second
year. Softening her technique during
her second semester, Plath ended her
teaching period at Smith on a positive
note. Ted, who had been teaching at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst,
also quit teaching.
On June 25, 1958, The New Yorker
published Plaths poems Mussel-Hunter
at Rock Harbor and Nocturne.
Plath and Hughes moved to Boston
in September. Plath took a job typing
psychiatric records at Massachusetts
General Hospital, which provided an
income as well as the material for her
story Johnny Panic and the Bible of
Dreams. Johnny Panic is widely
regarded as her finest short story. In
early 1959, she began taking a class with
poet Robert Lowell at Boston University,
where she met and befriended the poet
Anne Sexton. Plath, Lowell, and Sexton
would later be considered confessional
poets.
Confessional poetry, which

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, 9 Willow Street, Boston, 1958-59

Ted Hughes Papers, 1940-1999, Manuscript,

Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

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Frame Size 16 x 20

Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, Ted Hughes, T.S. Eliot, and Louis MacNeice, A pride of Poets, April 21, 1960.
Ted Hughes Papers, 1940-1999, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

Frieda is Born, and Ted Joins Englands Literary Lions,

Winter 1959-Spring 1960

ylvia and Ted returned in England in December

1959, where they planned to have their first
child. Now six months pregnant, Sylvia
hoped to find a home in the country, but instead they
settled in London at a flat in Chalcott Square. Poet
W.S. Merwin and his wife Dido helped them find the
apartment. Supported by a Guggenheim fellowship
given to Ted, they were able to continue writing.
Meanwhile, the National Health Service would cover
all expenses for their childs birth. Sylvia decided to
have a natural birth at home with the help of a midwife.
Before the childs birth, Ted expressed the first doubts
about his marriage to Lucas Myers, a close friend
and a fellow writer from Cambridge. Teds second
volume of poetry, Lupercal, was published in England
on March 18, 1960.
Frieda Hughes was born on April 2, 1960. Sylvia
praised Hughes for his devotion during her pregnancy,
especially during her hours of labor and childbirth.

Hughes had helped deliver the baby himself. Plath

rejoiced in having Frieda, and hoped to provide her
with many brothers and sisters.
In May, the couple entertained famed British poets
T.S. Eliot and Stephen Spender, accompanied by their
spouses, at the Hughes Chalcott Square apartment.
Spender remembered Sylvia as a pretty and intelligent
woman. However, the poet being celebrated most in
the company of these great English men was clearly
Ted Hughes, whose two poetry collections published
by Faber and Faber were quickly achieving notoriety
in literary circles. A. Alvarez, the poetry editor at
The Observer in London, also paid a visit to Hughes.
Meeting Sylvia instead, since Ted was out, Alvarez
was surprised to learn that Mrs. Hughes, the charming
housewife was really the poet Sylvia Plath. He had
already published several of her poems in The Observer.
Alvarez became a friend and confidante to Plath, and
a champion of her work.

19

Publication of
The Colossus and Other Poems
The Colossus and Other Poems was published in late 1960
by the William Heinemann publishing house. Plaths first
book of poetry was a critical success. A. Alvarez wrote
a shining review: [Plath] steers clear of feminine charm,
deliciousness, gentility, super sensitivity and the act of
being a poetess. She simply writes good poetry. Other
critics ranked her talents next to those of her husband as
well as Theodore Roethke.
The title poem, The Colossus, refers to Plaths
monumental memory of her dead father. She says in
the poem: I shall never get you put together entirely,
lamenting his early departure from her life. Otto Plath
was a man she could never really know. A supplicant to
the enormous loss, in the poem she crawls like an ant in
morning trying to mend the immense skull plates of the
statue and dredge the silt from your throat so that he
may speak to her.

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Plath further explores her relationship with her father in

The Beekeepers Daughter. Lorelei reflects the Greek
myth told to Plath in childhood of a young woman who
threw herself into a river after her lovers betrayal. Instead
of dying, Lorelei is transformed into a siren, an alluring
woman at sea who lured sailors to their deaths.

The Beekeepers Daughter

By Sylvia Plath
A garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet-speckled, black
The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks.
Their musk encroaches, circle after circle,
A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in.
Hieratical in your frock coat, maestro of the bees,
You move among the many-breasted hives,
My heart under your foot, sister of a stone.
Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds.
The Golden Rain Tree drips its powders down.
In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red
The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings
To father dynasties. The air is rich.
Here is a queenship no mother can contest
A fruit thats death to taste: dark flesh, dark parings.
In burrows narrow as a finger, solitary bees
Keep house among the grasses. Kneeling down
I set my eyes to a hole-mouth and meet an eye
Round, green, disconsolate as a tear.
Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg
Under the coronal of sugar roses
The queen bee marries the winter of your year.

Lorelei
By Sylvia Plath
It is no night to drown in:
A full moon, river lapsing
Black beneath bland mirror-sheen,
The blue water-mists dropping
Scrim after scrim like fishnets
Though fishermen are sleeping,
The massive castle turrets
Doubling themselves in a glass
All stillness. Yet these shapes float
Up toward me, troubling the face
Of quiet. From the nadir
They rise, their limbs ponderous
With richness, hair heavier
Than sculptured marble. They sing
Of a world more full and clear
Than can be. Sisters, your song
Bears a burden too weighty
For the whorled ears listening
Here, in a well-steered country,
Under a balanced ruler.
Deranging by harmony
Beyond the mundane order,
Your voices lay siege. You lodge
On the pitched reefs of nightmare,
Promising sure harborage;
By day, descant from borders
Of hebetude, from the ledge
Also of high windows. Worse
Even than your maddening
Song, your silence. At the source
Of your ice-hearted callingDrunkenness of the great depths.
O river, I see drifting
Deep in your flux of silver
Those great goddesses of peace.
Stone, stone, ferry me down there.

Sylvia Plath Writes The Bell Jar

and Nicholas Hughes is Born

n February 6, 1961, Plath

suffered a miscarriage and a
subsequent appendectomy. Ted
brought her a first-reading contract from
The New Yorker to sign while she was staying
at the hospital. This public recognition of
her work meant that Sylvia was obliged to
send her poems to The New Yorker before
any other publication.
Both poets continued to earn an income
through poetry prizes, publications, and
poetry readings with the BBC. Knopf
agreed to publish Colossus in America in
May 1961. Sylvia was now working on
a novel, and received a Eugene F. Saxton
Fellowship. The Bell Jar was based on
her summer at Mademoiselle in 1953, her
suicide attempt, and hospitalization at
McLean Hospital. Though an outstanding
first novel, it contained distorted versions
of close friends and family members that
Plath feared would ignite libel suits and
wounded feelings. She kept the novels
contents a secret from Aurelia while it
was being composed. The Bell Jar was
published under the pseudonym Victoria
Lucas just a month before Plaths death.
Aurelia would plead with Ted and his

sister Olwyn not to publish the novel in the

United States until after her own death.
Despite her wishes, Hughes published the
first American edition of The Bell Jar in
1971, while Aurelia was still alive.
Brimming with literary accomplishments,
Sylvia and Ted had finally found their
dream home in July 1961. Court Green
was a spacious nine-room house with an
attic and wine cellar located in Devon.
Though slightly dilapidated, Court Green
was expensive for the young couple, who
had to borrow money from their parents.
Plath and Hughes now had more time
and space to write at their country home.
Sylvia was already carrying their second
child. Nicholas Hughes was born January
17, 1962 at home in Court Green. The
labor was exhausting for everyone, but
Sylvia was pleased and in her full motherly
element. In American Isis, biographer Carl
Rollyson states that the balance of power
in Sylvia and Teds relationship began to
shift, with Sylvia taking control creatively
and domestically. Plath was enamored
by her new son, jotting down that he was
craggy, dark, quiet & smiley.

The opening paragraphs of The Bell Jar, originally published under the
nom de plume Victoria Lucas. This was Sylvia Plaths only completed novel.
Chapter I
t was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs,
and I didnt know what I was doing
in New York. Im stupid about executions.
The idea of being electrocuted makes me
sick, and thats all there was to read about
in the papers goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at
the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every
subway. It had nothing to do with me, but
I couldnt help wondering what it would
be like, being burned alive all along your
nerves.

Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I
felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like
some black, noiseless balloon stinking of
vinegar. I knew something was wrong with
me that summer, because all I could think
about was the Rosenbergs and how stupid
Id been to buy all those uncomfortable,
expensive clothes, hanging limp as fish in
my closet, and how all the little successes
Id totted up so happily at college fizzled to
nothing outside the slick marble and plateglass fronts along Madison Avenue.

I thought it must be the worst thing in the I was supposed to be having the time of my
world.
life.
New York was bad enough. By nine in the
morning the fake, country-wet freshness
that somehow seeped in overnight evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream.
Mirage-gray at the bottom of their granite canyons, the hot streets wavered in the
sun, the car tops sizzled and glittered, and
the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and
down my throat.
I kept hearing about the Rosenbergs over
the radio and at the office till I couldnt get
them out of my mind. It was like the first
time I saw a cadaver. For weeks afterwards,
the cadavers head or what there was left
of it floated up behind my eggs and bacon
at breakfast and behind the face of Buddy

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I was supposed to be the envy of thousands of other college girls just like me all
over America who wanted nothing more
than to be tripping about in those same
size seven patent leather shoes Id bought
in Bloomingdales one lunch hour with a
black patent leather belt and black patent
leather pocket-book to match. And when
my picture came out in the magazine the
twelve of us were working on drinking
martinis in a skimpy, imitation silver-lam
bodice stuck on to a big, fat cloud of white
tulle, on some Starlight Roof, in the company of several anonymous young men
with all-American bone structures hired or
loaned for the occasion everybody would
think I must be having a real whirl.

Among the Daffodils,

Spring 1962

his picture of Sylvia, Frieda,

and Nicholas among the
daffodils was taken in the
spring of 1962. Ted Hughes poem
Daffodils from his collection
Birthday Letters gives his perspective of
his last spring with Sylvia when they
were together as a family. Birthday
Letters is a series of poems about
Hughes relationship with Plath, and
is in conversation with her poetry. It
was published in 1998, and won three
major British poetry awards. Hughes
died a few months after Birthday
Letters was published.

Sylvia Plath, Frieda and Nicholas, 1962

by Siv Arb,
Ted Hughs Papers,
Special Collections and Archives,
Robert Woodruff Library, Emory University

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22

Remember how we picked the daffodils?

We piled their frailty lights on a carpenters bench,
Nobody else remembers, but I remember.
Distributed leaves among the dozens
Your daughter came with her armfuls, eager and happy,
Buckling blade-leaves, limber, groping for air, zinc-silvered
Helping the harvest. She has forgotten.
Propped their raw butts in bucket water,
She cannot even remember you. And we sold them.
Their oval, meaty butts,
It sounds like sacrilege, but we sold them.
And sold them, sevenpence a bunch
Were we so poor? Old Stoneman, the grocer,
Boss-eyed, his blood-pressure purpling to beetroot
Wind-wounds, spasms from the dark earth,
(It was his last chance,
With their odourless metals,
He would die in the same great freeze as you),
A flamy purification of the deep graves stony cold
He persuaded us. Every Spring
As if ice had a breath
He always bought them, sevenpence a dozen,
So we sold them. We worked at selling them
A custom of the house.
We sold them, to wither.
As if employed on somebody elses
The crop thickened faster than we could thin it.
Flower-farm. You bent at it
Besides, we still werent sure we wanted to own
Finally, we were overwhelmed
In the rain of that Aprilyour last April.
Anything. Mainly we were hungry
And we lost our wedding-present scissors.
We bent there together, among the soft shrieks
To convert everything to profit.
Of their jostled stems, the wet shocks shaken
Still nomadsstill strangers
Every March since they have lifted again
Of their girlish dance-frocks
To our whole possession. The daffodils
Out of the same bulbs, the same
Fresh-opened dragonflies, wet and flimsy,
Were incidental gilding of the deeds,
Baby-cries from the thaw,
Opened too early.
Treasure trove. They simply came,
Ballerinas too early for music, shiverers
And they kept on coming.
In the draughty wings of the year.
As if not from the sod but falling from heaven.
On that same groundswell of memory, fluttering
Our lives were still a raid on our own good luck.
They return to forget you stooping there
We knew wed live for ever. We had not learned
Behind the rainy curtains of a dark April,
What a fleeting glance of the everlasting
Snipping their stems.
Daffodils are. Never identified
The nuptial flight of the rarest ephemera
But somewhere your scissors remember. Wherever they are.
Our own days!
Here somewhere, blades wide open,

We thought they were a windfall.
April by April
Daffodils
Never guessed they were a last blessing.
Sinking deeper
By Ted Hughes
Through the sodan anchor, a cross of rust.

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Lady Lazarus Manuscripts from Ariel

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24

Daddy Manuscripts from Ariel

Vitrine ???

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25

July 9, 1962-February 11, 1963

hen the phone rang at Court Green on July 9, 1962, Sylvia rushed to
answer. Assia Wevill, an aspiring poet and the wife of the Canadian
poet David Wevill, had been meeting Hughes in London during June
of 1962. Carl Rollyson, in his Plath biography American Isis, describes the phone
call incident: [Plath] recognized the woman asking for Ted, even though Assia
lowered her voice, pretending, Sylvia thought, to be a man. After Ted hung up,
Sylvia ripped the phone from the wall. To Plath, the call confirmed her suspicion
that Ted was having an affair. Even more embarrassing to Sylvia, was that her
mother, who was visiting in England at the time, overheard the entire fiasco.
Plath and Hughes had been renting their old London apartment to the Wevills,
and were friends of the couple. After David Wevill learned of the affair between
Assia and Ted, he threatened his rival with a butcher knife and then unsuccessfully
tried to end his own life with a bottle of sleeping pills. Assia and David continued
their marriage on and off until divorcing in 1966.
Sylvia could not forgive Teds infidelity. They tried to reconcile over the summer,
but by fall 1962, she was intent on divorce. Taking Frieda and Nick to London,
she relocated to a flat once owned by W.B. Yeats, where she planned to live in
the literary limelight and hold salons. The weather did not agree with her plans.
In the story Snow Blitz, Plath recalls her worst winter in England plagued by
unshoveled sidewalks, frozen pipes, and frequent losses of electricity. She and
her children were constantly sick with fever.
Dr. Horder, her English psychiatrist, prescribed an antidepressant for her at the
end of January. Meanwhile, Aurelia suggested that she move to America with the
children. Plath refused. By February 8, 1963 Dr. Horder scheduled a hospital
rest for her, but she spent the weekend with friends instead. Three days later,
in the early hours of February 11, 1963 while her children were sleeping, Sylvia
blocked the kitchen door with towels and rags. She turned on the gas, knelt
before the oven, and took her own life.

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26

After Sylvias Death

ylvia had not divorced Ted before her death, and

as a result, he held the title of her literary executor
until he passed away in 1998. Feminists were
offended that he maintained control of her complete
writings, but Ted insisted that only he knew her own plans
for her writing well enough to make the proper publication
decisions a fact made all the more controversial due to
the popular belief that Hughes burned Plaths final journal
and another new novel she was working on at the time of
her death. Ted made the decision to protect his children,
who did not know that their mother committed suicide
until they were teenagers.

Frieda and Nicholas Hughes, ca. 1980s

Ariel was published in 1965 with an introduction written

by Robert Lowell. Ted Hughes rearranged Plaths original
order for the poems in Ariel and cut poems from the volume.
This was another grievance to Plaths feminist fans. Frieda
Hughes published a version of Ariel in 2004, using her
mothers original manuscript order and the poems excluded
from earlier additions. Friedas new introduction defended
her fathers original decision in selecting the order. Ted
Hughes also published two collections of Plaths poetry not
included in Colossus or Ariel. These volumes, Winter Trees
and Crossing the Water, were published in 1971. In 1977,
Hughes published Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, a
selection of Sylvia Plaths short prose
works and journal entries. Sylvia Plaths
The Collected Poems were published
in 1981 and garnered a posthumous
Pulitzer Prize for her in 1982.

Ted Hughes Papers, 1940-1999, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library,
Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

the contentious decision to omit passages from Plaths

journals, especially instances where Plath describes sexual
encounters. Karen Kukil, supervisor of the Sylvia Plath
and Virginia Woolf collections at the Mortimer Rare Book
Library at Smith College, edited The Unabridged Journals of
Sylvia Plath, which was published in 2000.

Frieda and Nicholas Hughes were raised by Ted and his

second wife Carol. Frieda followed her parents career
paths by becoming a poet and author in her own right.
She has published seven childrens books and poetry
collections, and she is also a visual artist whose artwork
has appeared in several exhibits in London. From 20062008, Frieda wrote a weekly poetry column in Londons
The Times newspaper. Her poems have been published
by such periodicals as The New Yorker, Tatler, The Spectator,
Thumbscrew, The Paris Review, First Pressings, The London
Magazine, The Times, The Guardian, and The Daily Telegraph.
Some of her poetic material examines her mothers death,
and shows a marked dislike for the publics fascination
With Teds consent, Aurelia Plath with Sylvias suicide. She openly criticized the 2003 BBC
arranged letters sent from Sylvia film Sylvia. Frieda now lives in Austria.
to her mother, brother, and Olive
Higgins Prouty into the volume Letters Nicholas Hughes earned a PhD in biology from the
Home: Correspondence 1950-1963. Since University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF). He became a
Sylvia whitewashed her emotions and fisheries expert who studied stream salomid ecology and
descriptions of her life events to her conducted research in the Alaska Interior and in New
family and Ms. Prouty, Ted Hughes Zealand. From 1998 until December 2006, he was a
decided to publish an abridged version professor in the School of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences
of her journals in 1982. The Journals of at UAF. He resigned from this position but continued his
Sylvia Plath offers an inside look into research on king salmon. On March 16, 2009, Nicholas
the conflicts between her outward Hughes succumbed to depression and hung himself.
and inward thoughts, her desires, Ted Hughes held the title of Poet Laureate of England
and a personality that Plath could not from 1984 until 1998.
disclose to her mother. Hughes made

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Pursuit
By Sylvia Plath
Dans le fond des forts
votre image me suit.
RACINE
(In the bottom of forests your image follows me)

There is a panther stalks me down:

One day Ill have my death of him;
His greed has set the woods aflame,
He prowls more lordly than the sun.
Most soft, most suavely glides that step,
Advancing always at my back;
From gaunt hemlock, rooks croak havoc:
The hunt is on, and sprung the trap.
Flayed by thorns I trek the rocks,
Haggard through the hot white noon.
Along red network of his veins
What fires run, what craving wakes?
Insatiate, he ransacks the land
Condemned by our ancestral fault,
Crying: blood, let blood be spilt;
Meat must glut his mouths raw wound.
Keen the rending teeth and sweet
The singeing fury of his fur;
His kisses parch, each paws a briar,
Doom consummates that appetite.
In the wake of this fierce cat,
Kindled like torches for his joy,
Charred and ravened women lie,
Become his starving bodys bait.

Now hills hatch menace, spawning shade;

Midnight cloaks the sultry grove;
The black marauder, hauled by love
On fluent haunches, keeps my speed.
Behind snarled thickets of my eyes
Lurks the lithe one; in dreams ambush
Bright those claws that mar the flesh
And hungry, hungry, those taut thighs.
His ardor snares me, lights the trees,
And I run flaring in my skin;
What lull, what cool can lap me in
When burns and brands that yellow gaze?
I hurl my heart to halt his pace,
To quench his thirst I squander blood;
He eats, and still his need seeks food,
Compels a total sacrifice.
His voice waylays me, spells a trance,
The gutted forest falls to ash;
Appalled by secret want, I rush
From such assault of radiance.
Entering the tower of my fears,
I shut my doors on that dark guilt,
I bolt the door, each door I bolt.
Blood quickens, gonging in my ears:
The panthers tread is on the stairs,
Coming up and up the stairs.

Vitrine

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28

Studio portrait of Sylvia Plath 1952,

caption in her journal reads: Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it. It was written during a period of depression.
Helle Collection of Plath Family Photographs, Mortimer Rare Book Room,
Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

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29

Aurelia flanked by Sylvia and Warren Plath, September 1949.

Helle Collection of Plath Family Photographs, Mortimer Rare Book Room,

Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

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30