love letter by Sylvia Plath
October 10, 2009 by Carol
Filed under Famous Love Letters
Love Letter
Not so much a romantic love letter written to a person whom she loves but a poem she wrote with that title. The words are moving when you know the problems she had in her life.
Even before she graduated she suffered a major long lasting bout of depression and on at least one occasion attempted to take her own life.
Her marriage to the author Ted Hughes (with whom she had two children) ended when he left her to live with another writer Assia Gutmann Wevill. Within a few weeks Sylvia sank into yet another great depression again involving suicidal thoughts and eventually took her own life using the gas oven. Her youngest child was less than 6 month old at the time and led to suggestions of post natal depression as the starting point.
Not easy to state the change you made.
If I’m alive now, then I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it,
Staying put according to habit.
You didn’t just tow me an inch, no
Nor leave me to set my small bald eye
Skyward again, without hope, of course,
Of apprehending blueness, or stars.That wasn’t it. I slept, say: a snake
Masked among black rocks as a black rock
In the white hiatus of winter
Like my neighbors, taking no pleasure
In the million perfectly-chisled Cheeks alighting each moment to melt
My cheeks of basalt. They turned to tears,
Angels weeping over dull natures,But didn’t convince me.
Those tears froze.
Each dead head had a visor of ice.And I slept on like a bent finger.
The first thing I was was sheer air
And the locked drops rising in dew
Limpid as spirits. Many stones lay
Dense and expressionless round about.
I didn’t know what to make of it.
I shone, mice-scaled, and unfolded
To pour myself out like a fluid
Among bird feet and the stems of plants.
I wasn’t fooled. I knew you at once.Tree and stone glittered, without shadows.
My finger-length grew lucent as glass.
I started to bud like a March twig:
An arm and a leg, and arm, a leg.
From stone to cloud, so I ascended.
Now I resemble a sort of god
Floating through the air in my soul-shift
Pure as a pane of ice. It’s a gift.
