♥ Loving Sylvia Plath ♥

Today marks what would have been Ted Hughes’ 96th birthday.

Edward James Hughes

(17 August 1930, Mytholmroyd, England – 28 October 1998, London, England)

“I saw my world again through your eyes

As I would see it again through your children's eyes.

Through your eyes it was foreign.

[…]

You were a camera

Recording reflections you could not fathom.

I made my world perform its utmost for you.

You took it all in with an incredulous joy

Like a mother handed her new baby

By the midwife. Your frenzy made me giddy.”

―Ted Hughes, from “The Owl“, in Birthday Letters (1998)

Photo: Ted Hughes with his and Sylvia Plath’s children Frieda and Nicholas in Connemara, Ireland, in 1966, three years after their mother’s death 1966; photographed by Jane Bown

Meadows of gold dust. The silver Currents of the Connecticut fan And meander in bland pleatings under River-verge farms where rye-heads whiten. All's polished to a dull luster

In the sulfurous noon. We move With the languor of idols below The sky's great bell glass and briefly engrave Our limbs' image on a field of straw And goldenrod as on gold leaf.

It might be heaven, this static Plenitude: apples gold on the bough, Goldfinch, goldfish, golden tiger cat stock- Still in one gigantic tapestry— And lovers affable, dovelike.

But now the water-skiers race, Bracing their knees. On unseen towlines They cleave the river's greening patinas; The mirror quivers to smithereens. They stunt like clowns in the circus.

So we are hauled, though we would stop On this amber bank where grasses bleach. Already the farmer's after his crop, August gives over its Midas touch, Wind bares a flintier landscape.

Through fen and farmland walking With my own country love I saw slow flocked cows move White hulks on their day's cruising; Sweet grass sprang for their grazing.

The air was bright for looking: Most far in blue, aloft, Clouds steered a burnished drift; Larks' nip and tuck arising Came in for my love's praising.

Sheen of the noon sun striking Took my heart as if It were a green-tipped leaf Kindled by my love's pleasing Into an ardent blazing.

And so, together, talking, Through Sunday's honey-air We walked (and still walk there-- Out of the sun's bruising) Till the night mists came rising.

PSA!

I keep seeing this quote shared again and again all over the internet labeled as coming from Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar (1963)!

No clue when or how or even why it happened, but it has been wrongly attributed to Plath a very long time ago!

And yet, you won't find it in The Bell Jar, because it's coming from Oscar Wilde's short story "The Canterville Ghost", written in 1887!

The whole paragraph reads:

"Virginia's eyes grew dim with tears, and she hid her face in her hands.

"You mean the Garden of Death," she whispered.

"Yes, death. Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one's head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forget life, to be at peace. You can help me. You can open for me the portals of death's house, for love is always with you, and love is stronger than death is."

Virginia trembled, a cold shudder ran through her, and for a few moments there was silence. She felt as if she was in a terrible dream."

You can check both texts for yourself here:

&

The night is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole -- A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things. Under the eyes of the stars and the moon's rictus He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie Exposes embarrassment -- the mizzling days Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams, Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful, A garden of buggy rose that made him cry. His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks. Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue -- How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening! Those sugary planets whose influence won for him A life baptized in no-life for a while, And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby. Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods. Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of gray mirrors. Each gesture flees immediately down an alley Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance Drains like water out the hole at the far end. He lives without privacy in a lidless room, The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments. Already he can feel daylight, his white disease, Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions. The city is a map of cheerful twitters now, And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank, Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

It's here!! IT'S FINALLY HERE!!!

The Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by Amanda Golden and Karen V. Kukil was published by Faber today! 1,000 pages!!!

"A landmark publication: the definitive edition of the poet’s work for scholars, students and general readers. Sylvia Plath’s first Collected Poems was published in 1981. This new volume draws on decades of research and almost doubles the content of that edition.

The book is in two parts: the first contains the poems Plath composed in the last ten years of her life and upon which her reputation is founded, and the second includes those poems written in childhood and through her student years. In both sections, the editors have dated, corrected and arranged each poem chronologically, drawing on manuscripts, typescripts and related archival material. Critical notes document and cast new light on Plath’s extraordinary evolution as a poet, from her childhood compositions, through the early blossoming of her talent and ambition, and into the molten core that was to shape the poems of her last few years, securing her place in literary history."

...

HAPPY 66th BIRTHDAY Frieda Rebecca Hughes!!!

(born 1 April 1960 in London, England)

…

SECOND THOUGHTS

There was a moment In a hot bath of teenage umbrage With a razor blade, When I thought arterial blood Might attract a mother's love. But the mind's eye Knew death better For making nothing but empty spaces.

– Frieda Hughes, in Stonepicker and The Book of Mirrors, 2009

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Sylvia Plath's biographer Heather Clark - author of the epic biography Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, 2020 - in interview with the Polish writer Karolina Sulej in the newest issue of the women’s lifestyle and culture magazine Wysokie Obcasy

Today marks the 63rd anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death! RIP!

27 October 1932 Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, USA - 11 February 1963, Primrose Hill, London, England

…

"Why can't I try on different lives, like dresses, to see which one fits me and is most becoming?"

–from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, diary entry no. 121, September 1951

…

Anne Sexton (on the right) with Robert Frost (in the middle) as well as with Elizabeth Baker, Irene Orgel and George Lea at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Middlebury College, Ripton, Vermont in 1959