I just finished watching Sylvia, a film about the doomed, jeopardous relationship between poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes that ultimately led to Plath's melancholic suicide in 1963.
I have been intrigued by Plath's life story, as well as her work, which are basically one in the same. She was her own subject when it came to most of her writing. It's gut-wrenching that she always felt sophomoric and inferior to Hughes. She ached to be first in his eyes, and when she finally realized he'd never be fully hers, she gave up. The saddest part of it is that she probably was; he was just incapable of expressing his desire and passion for her.
Nick and the Candlestick
Sylvia Plath
I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalacmites
Drip and thicken, tears
The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs
Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.
Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,
Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish-
Christ! they are panes of ice,
A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking
Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,
Its yellow hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo
Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean
In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.
Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs-
The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,
Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,
You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious,
You are the baby in the barn.
