Depressed…troubled…and choosing the wrong partner. Ill-fated love. The lesson, be careful with your heart, and choose your partner carefully.
One morning in 2003 I was feeling a little down so I thought I’d go to the local Cinema Noveau and watch the movie Sylvia. It was not a good idea. The tragic story of Sylvia Plath American poet, novelist, and short-story writer with a Mensa intellect of 160. She had tried to commit suicide many times before in her life and she finally succeeded on 11 February, 1963. “They found Plath dead with her head in the oven, having sealed the rooms between her and her sleeping children with tape, towels and cloths.”
After her death there was even more tragedy. Her husband Ted Hughes had been having an affair with a mutual friend, Assia Wevill and at the time of Sylvia’s death, she was pregnant with Hughes child. The child was aborted. She moved in with him after Sylvia’s death and two years later gave birth to their daughter Shura. In 1969 she killed herself and their daughter using the same method which Sylvia Plath had used to kill herself. A gas oven.
On March 16, 2009, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes son hanged himself in his home following a history of depression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath
“Plath had described the quality of her despair as “owl’s talons clenching my heart.””
From bright hub education:
“Sylvia Plath was a torch of a poet: intense, dangerous, destructive and, before long, exhausted and extinguished. In 1958, she wrote in her journal: “It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative—whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.”
Possibly unipolar depression.
From the Bell Jar which was published pseudonymously just before her death.
“I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible; someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up shuddering in horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.”
The posthumous publication of Ariel in 1965 precipitated Plath’s rise to fame.
Ariel – Sylvia Plath
“Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.
God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow
Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,
Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks—
Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else
Hauls me through air—
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.
White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry
Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.”
And her most famous poem.
Daddy
“You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time——
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I’m finally through.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
The voices just can’t worm through.
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”
Laura Vanessa Nunes 