LIFE WAS TOO SMALL TO CONTAIN HER

She was American, he was English. Both very sensitive, both very good poets. But he was lucky, he was a man in the 50s. She, instead, was stuck, entrapped, in the cliché of the female role of the 50s- well it was STILL the long-lasting stereotype inherited from very ancient times. He was a heartthrob, she felt like "a horse in a world without race-tracks". Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes. Two of the greatest poets of the 20th century. The two met at a party in Cambridge in 1956 and got married in the same year. They had two children, Freida and Nicholas. However she was unsatisfied with her life, she desperately wanted to find time for her poetry but her house and her children sucked all her time and her energies. Her life turned into hell one night when she lifted the receiver and overheard a conversation between her husband and his lover, a common acquaintance, Assia. Her turbulent marriage wrecked though their bond of love remained unbreakable.
Sylvia had suffered from depression as a teenager and had even tried to kill herself at 19. She was rescued and treated with electro-shock therapy. A terrible period of her life she wrote about in THE BELL JAR, her splendid, deeply touching autobiographical novel. Her fascination to death ( "blackness and silence") became her favourite subject in her poetry, nearly an obsession, and grew on and on till she decided to try again: she gassed herself, she succeded in committing suicide, on the 11 of February 1963. She was 30. In that last troubled year, she wrote her most beautiful lines, Ted Hughes would later on published.

Sylvia Plath is one of my favourite poets but also a woman whose life has always fascinated me since I first read THE BELL JAR, her only novel. Her poetry, known as confessional poetry, is terribly dark, tragic but so...deeply touching. Here are some lines from "The Moon and the Yew Tree" (Ariel):

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,

Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.

Fumy, spirituous mists inhabit this place

Separated from my house by a row of headstones.

I simply cannot see where there is to get to. (...)

This is instead the letter Ted Hughes wrote to Sylvia's mother after some time from her suicide. Can you imagine his sense of guilt? How difficult could it be to write such a letter? It's extremely moving... LISTEN TO IT. HERE.

(Has any of you recognised the voice reading the letters? Who guesses will win ... MY CONGRATULATIONS!)

In 2003 Christine Jeffs directed an amazingly powerful beautiful film starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig, SYLVIA (in my DVD collection). I know very few people must have seen it but it is a terribly good portray of the two lovers and poets. Critically acclaimed and very moving, it is a must-see movie.

RELATED POSTS AND SITES Ted Hughes: A Talented Murderer March 2009: Sylvia and Ted's son committed suicide My video on Utube: Richard Armitage reads Ted Hughes's letter to Sylvia's mother