Golden Lotus

If I decide to visit Sylvia Plath’s grave in West Yorkshire – after reading Patti Smith’s M Train I am leaning towards saying yes – I will honor the tradition of putting a pen in her bucket. Whoever responsible for the genesis of this tradition is a genius for what if she runs out of pens to write with in heaven? That’s like depriving eternity of her writing! My pen of choice will be a blue one with red ink because she was raised near the sea in Winthrop, Massachusetts and wrote in her poem “Kindness” “The blood jet is poetry, there is no stopping it.” Her love affair with red is immortalized in Ted Hughes’ poem “Red”.

I won’t be erasing the word “Hughes” from Plath's gravestone since I am also a fan of the poet laureate, who was instrumental to the development of her voice as a mature artist who gave birth to Ariel and The Bell Jar. They were each other’s most reliable critic and drafted poems using the same sheet, he on one side and she on the other side. It isn't a stretch to say that not only did they share the same paper but also inhabited the same mind – both were writers yet they seldom wrote each other letters because it was unnecessary as the couple was inseparable until their separation.

Even after her death Plath remained Hughes’ muse, just like her dad Otto the bee expert who died when she was only eight and inspired a lot of her poems, most controversially “Daddy” in her last book of poetry Ariel. Birthday Letters, Hughes' last book of poetry, is about the building up and tumbling down of his relationship with Plath viewed in the rear view mirror perspective and mirroring Ariel, a collection of autobiographical writing. In his interview for The Paris Review, he said, “Why do human beings need to confess? Maybe if you don’t have that secret confession, you don’t have a poem – don’t even have a story.”

Hughes died in 1998, the year that saw the publication of Birthday Letters. His date of death was 28 October, one day after Plath’s birthday.

"Even amidst fierce flames the Golden Lotus can be planted" is the epitaph Hughes chose for Plath