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.