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.