Whose side are you on...?

OK, most of us know the story but it still worries us when we wake in the middle of the night and find the moon watching us through the window...

Sylvia Plath was an American poet. She met Ted Hughes at Cambridge in 1954. They fell in love after a bite at a party.. They married in `56. They had two children.

The marriage was troubled from the start. Sylvia was already a troubled lost soul -- having lost her father when she was just eight years old. Suicide attempts would follow in adult life.

Hughes was unfaithful -- with Plath`s best friend. They split. Plath poured her feelings into her poetry, producing some of her best work.

Her only novel `The Bell Jar` came out in January 1963, published under the pen name Victoria Lucas.

On February 10th 1963, in the early lonely darkest empty haunting hours of the morning, Sylvia Plath placed a tray in the children`s room, with bread and butter and glasses of milk. She kissed them. She closed the door and placed towels against it on the floor.

She went into the kitchen. It was 4.30am

She knelt down -- put her head in the oven -- rested her face on a towel -- and turned on the gas...

Plath`s supporters and legions of readers blamed Hughes. When his mistress killed herself and her own daughter in '69 the hatred against Hughes intensified. Plath`s headstone was vandalised as people tried to chisel off Hughes name. As Hughes and Plath were legally married at the time of her death, Hughes inherited the Plath estate, including all her written work.

Hughes died on the 28th October 1998.

Nicholas Hughes -- the son of Hughes and Plath, committed suicide on 16 March 2009 after battling depression...

Electra on Azalea Path / Sylvia Plath

The day you died I went into the dirt,
Into the lightless hibernaculum
Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard
Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.
It was good for twenty years, that wintering -
As if you never existed, as if I came
God-fathered into the world from my mother's belly:
Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity.
I had nothing to do with guilt or anything
When I wormed back under my mother's heart.

Small as a doll in my dress of innocence
I lay dreaming your epic, image by image.
Nobody died or withered on that stage.
Everything took place in a durable whiteness.
The day I woke, I woke on Churchyard Hill.
I found your name, I found your bones and all
Enlisted in a cramped stone askew by an iron fence.

In this charity ward, this poorhouse, where the dead
Crowd foot to foot, head to head, no flower
Breaks the soil. This is Azalea path.
A field of burdock opens to the south.
Six feet of yellow gravel cover you.
The artificial red sage does not stir
In the basket of plastic evergreens they put
At the headstone next to yours, nor does it rot,
Although the rains dissolve a bloody dye:
The ersatz petals drip, and they drip red.

Another kind of redness bothers me:
The day your slack sail drank my sister's breath
The flat sea purpled like that evil cloth
My mother unrolled at your last homecoming.
I borrow the silts of an old tragedy.
The truth is, one late October, at my birth-cry
A scorpion stung its head, an ill-starred thing;
My mother dreamed you face down in the sea.

The stony actors poise and pause for breath.
I brought my love to bear, and then you died.
It was the gangrene ate you to the bone
My mother said: you died like any man.
How shall I age into that state of mind?
I am the ghost of an infamous suicide,
My own blue razor rusting at my throat.
O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at
Your gate, father - your hound-bitch, daughter, friend.
It was my love that did us both to death.



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