High above the Calder val­ley in West York­shire lies the vil­lage of Hep­ton­stall, and in its church­yard lies, rather incon­gru­ous­ly, the grave of famous Amer­i­can con­fes­sion­al poet, Sylvia Plath. Hers is a wretched tale of depres­sion, end­ing ulti­mate­ly in her sui­cide in Feb­ru­ary 1963, but her lit­er­ary lega­cy is a pow­er­ful one, albeit only ful­ly recog­nised posthu­mous­ly (she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982, twen­ty years after her death). The major­i­ty of the poems on which her rep­u­ta­tion now rests were writ­ten dur­ing the final months of her life.

Plath had arrived at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty from her native Mass­a­chu­setts and had already won awards for her poet­ry when she met young York­shire poet Ted Hugh­es in Feb­ru­ary 1956. By June they were mar­ried. They moved to the States for a cou­ple of years before return­ing to Lon­don, where Sylvia had her daugh­ter Frie­da, and lat­er Tawn­ton in Devon, where her son Nicholas was born. In July 1962, she dis­cov­ered that Hugh­es was hav­ing an affair and the cou­ple sep­a­rat­ed.

Plath had already expe­ri­enced dif­fi­cult prob­lems with her men­tal health and had already under­gone elec­tro­con­vul­sive ther­a­py by the time she’d met Hugh­es. The sep­a­ra­tion pre­cip­i­tat­ed an even-fur­ther down­ward spi­ral. She con­sult­ed her GP, who pre­scribed her anti-depres­sants and also arranged a live-in nurse to be with her.

The nurse was due to arrive at nine on the morn­ing of Feb­ru­ary 11, 1963, to help Plath with the care of her chil­dren. Upon arrival, she found Plath dead with her head in the gas oven, hav­ing sealed the rooms between her and her sleep­ing chil­dren with tape, tow­els and cloths. She was 30 years old.

I have select­ed this poem, Dad­dy, read aloud by Plath her­self. Its theme is her com­plex rela­tion­ship with her Ger­man father, Otto Plath, who had died short­ly after her eighth birth­day. It is haunt­ing and dis­turb­ing, with dark imagery and the expres­sion of an inscrutable emo­tion­al trau­ma that we can only guess at. Plath’s ren­di­tion of her poem, with its dis­qui­et­ing mul­ti­ple use of “oo” vow­el sounds, gripped me, when I first heard this, all the way through to its raw and bru­tal con­clu­sion.

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.