Ariel: The Last Days

Sylvia Plath's life changed dramatically with the death of her father, Otto Plath, who was suffering from diabetes He was a genius in the science of bee keeping and Sylvia would often reflect on her father's interactions with bees as she flipped through his presendent setting book, Bumblebees and Their Ways. The memory of her father would become a prominent figure in her poems.

Even before her father's death Plath was a poet, writing whole poems by the age of 5. As the years went by she excelled in her schooling and won a scholarship to Smith College, where she continued to achieve success in her academics and writings. Plath went to New York during her junior year of college as part of a writing contest she had won through Mademoiselle. The trip turned out to be tough for her as she battled with an editor at the magazine. Plath returned home very depressed and attempted suicide by taking a handful of pills and hiding under the stairs. Aurelia Plath could not find her daughter anywhere as they looked all over the house for her. Hearing noises from the stairs, they found her weak and weary; she was only still alive because she had vomitted from taking too many sleeping pills.

After the suicide attempt Plath had to undergo an intense treatment of electro-shock therapy. Weary, Plath returned to Smith College, but was still able to graduate Summa Cum Laude. She received a Fullbright Scholarship and travelled to Cambridge University in England to continue her studies. There, at a party, she met Ted Hughes, who later became the Poet Laurate of England. When they met it was love at first sight: Hughes ripped off Plath's hair band and she bit him on the cheek until he bled. Hughes and Plath were married in 1956, lived a few years in Boston, and then returned to London where Plath published her first book of poems, The Colossus. Plath also had a daughter and a son at this time and wrote her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, which was published under a psuedonym.

Hughes and Plath began to argue over his infidelities at their Green Court home and Ted soon moved out. Plath planned on living in Ireland, but decided to stay in England. With Ted's help, Plath found a flat in London to live in that used to belong to W.B. Yeats. She loved the house and thought it provided her with inspiration. Plath, alone to take care of her children and depressed, began writing poems at an alarming rate, sometimes composing two or three a day. From 1962 to 1963 Plath wrote as often as she could, only taking time to pause and take care of her two children.

In February 1963, one of the coldest winters London has ever endured, Plath awoke early one morning and went to the kitchen to prepare a plate of cookies and two glasses of milk. She carried the tray to her children's room and sat it beside their bed. They were still asleep. Plath quietly closed their bedroom door and stuffed towels into the cracks of the door. With her head wrapped in a towel, Plath went to the kitchen and knealt to the floor, resting her head on the open oven door. She began to breathe in the toxic gas fumes of the unlit oven.

The fumes from the oven were so strong that a neighbor had passed out in his bed that morning as well. Plath's house lady arrived to find the door still locked and called the police when she could get no answer. Plath's body was found in the kitchen. The poems that she had so furiously written during those final months, published three years after her death in a volume called Ariel, would become her Magna Opus and launched her name into the realm of literary martyrdom.

Some say that Plath had planned the suicide attempt in hopes of having Hughes come to her rescue. The house lady had arrived late that morning, and it is said, if she would have been at the house on time, she may have been able to save Plath. Was this her plan? Did Plath want the house lady to find her so Hughes would return to her out of sorrow? We will never know.

Ted Hughes' mistress, Assia Wevill, would later commit suicide in a very similar fashion to Sylvia Plath. With her daughter, Shura (fathered by Hughes), in tow, Wevill dragged a mattress into the kitchen, feed Shura and herself sleeping medicine, and then turned on the unlit oven's gas.

Ted Hughes died of cancer in 1998 shortly after the release of his book Birthday Letters which contained poems about his relationship with Plath and his subsequent mistress. Throughout his life Ted Hughes would never talk about Plath, and it was a shock when the book was released to an eager public that has always wanted to know his thoughts about those tragic events. I think he continuously wrestled with the demons of Plath's suicide and saw how his serial-adultery affected the world's affinity for her work and the world's disgust for him. Admirers of Plath make it a point to continuously chisle off the name "Hughes" from her headstone so it simply reads "Sylvia Plath."

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