sylvia

It probably will come as no surprise to learn that I went through a rather prolonged Sylvia Plath phase, back in my late teens. The Bell Jar, first read in 9th grade, was alright, but it was Ariel in all its brutal, ungainly glory, read during my first year of college, that cut me to the bone:

"I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love."

And then there was Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters, given to a friend as a gift back in the spring of 1999 (me not realizing, perhaps intentionally if not quite consciously, the strangeness of such a gift -- our friendship itself was strange, and weighted with too many things left unsaid):

"I was afraid, if I lost that fight,
Something might abandon us. Lifting
Each of those naked girls, as they smiled at me
In their early twenties, I laid them
Under the threshold of our unlikely future
As those who wanted protection for a new home
Used to bury, under the new threshold,
a sinless child."

And then, a couple years later, there was Wintering, one of those often silly books that fictionalize a real person, a real life -- a genre that I tend to eschew but a book with which I fell a little bit in love.

And then I largely outgrew my preoccupation with suicidal poets, and quite honestly it's been a long time since I gave a thought to Sylvia Plath, to Ted Hughes, to their doomed marriage, their sordid endings, their broken children.

Until yesterday, when news of Nicholas Hughes' death broke in the national media. He, a mere baby when his mother stuck her head in that oven and a mere 7 years old when his stepmother killed herself and her young daughter, grew up to be a biologist in Alaska but could not escape the darkness of his past. He took his life earlier this month, hanging himself at the age of 47.