The Poetry of Life and Death on February 11

In her iconic poem Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath writes:

Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

She succeeded in her calling on February 11, 1963 – her second suicide attempt. She was 30.

My first child was born February 11, 1999. I was 25.

Now every February 11 as I celebrate the anniversary of my son’s birth; I take moment to think about Plath, an amazingly talented but deeply-troubled writer, probably known more for her tumultuous personal life and mental health struggles than her poetry, written in the confessional style. This just means she wrote diary entries in stanzas with rhyme, meter and a Smith College educated vocabulary.

On the anniversary of her death, I also wonder about the children who she left behind. The children who miraculously did not die on the day their mother ended her life. Plath carefully sealed the rooms between herself and her sleeping children before she took her life by turning on her gas oven. Frieda was 2 and Nicholas was 1.

Many interesting facts exist about Plath and appear repeatedly in publications: Married to English poet Ted Hughes; posthumously awarded a Pulitzer for her Collected Poems; completed a guest editorship at Mademoiselle; first tried to commit suicide at the age of 20; father died when she was 8; and, she experienced a difficult relationship with her mother. Typically, the children are nothing more than a footnote for the hundreds of publishers, scholars, and biographers who have profited and made careers by capitalizing on Plath’s struggle with mental illness, her disastrous marriage to Hughes, and her tragic death,

With so much drama, the innocent are easily forgotten. I was guilty of the oversight too. During my 20s, when I didn’t make much distinction between leaving behind 2 children and leaving behind 2 books of unpublished poetry, I would have believed that not being around to receive a Pulitzer was a far greater tragedy than not seeing some kids reach adulthood. In those days, I consumed Plath’s poetry, the way Lady Lazarus consumed men, like air. I was a self-indulgent college student who hated my mother for no good reason; wrote horribly bad self-absorbed poetry; and, amused myself by scaring friends and family with vague insinuations about suicide. Whining, not dying, was my art.

Being a good Catholic girl, I feared a vengeful and wrathful God who takes self-murder pretty seriously. And even more terrifying than the threat of an eternity in hell was the possibility of not succeeding and dealing with my vengeful and wrathful mother. My mother was much like Aurelia Plath but meaner. I imagined that she would hand me knife and say: “Do it until you do it right.” Or, she would lock my crazy ass up indefinitely and tell people that her loving, selfless daughter became a missionary in Afghanistan—never to be heard from again. With those thoughts to guide me, I stayed far away far from sleeping pills and gas ovens. I made it into adulthood safely and eventually became both less whiny and a mother of four children.

Now when I read Ariel, I am still amazed by the urgency, the beauty of language and unrelenting tragic desperation in each verse, but that is where my celebration of her poetry now ends. Ariel immortalizes for Frieda and Nicholas their mother’s history of depression, anger, hopelessness, tragedy, and suicidal obsessions.

In her forward of Ariel Restored, Frieda Hughes writes about her mother: "She used every emotional experience as if it were a scrap of material that could be pieced together to make a wonderful dress." For her children, Plath’s wonderful dress is more like corset that is fascinating and strangely beautiful on the exterior but brings excruciating pain to the core.

In a 2007 interview with Time, Andrea Sachs asks: If all of this had happened to your mom now, what people know now, do you think it would have resulted in her death? With modern pharmacology, could somebody have helped her?

Frieda replied: “I think there's no doubt about that. The advancements in the past 30- or 40-odd years are huge. I don't believe there's any way that that situation would have arisen now. She'd still be here.”

If Plath would have gotten the medical attention that she needed, chances are the literary world would have been denied one the best poetry collections of the Twentieth Century. And without her illness, there probably wouldn’t been much art from Plath and most likely no great art. Sylvia Plath would have been another 1960s mother on mood-altering drugs. Frieda and Nicholas Hughes would have just been kids with a mom, who was living with a little help from antidepressants.