Sylvia

As a young adult, I thought of England as stately and tailored, but I also imagined it as a wild, tangled place, like the moors that Ms. Emily Bronte describes in Wuthering Heights. Oh that book! And oh the song that inspired me to read it!

I am a firm believer that certain song writers compose like poets, and Kate Bush is one of these artists for me. Several of her songs are narrative. Some are playful, others are truly disturbing. Her song, “Wuthering Heights,” is haunting and passionate, just like the characters Heathcliff and Catherine.

I listened to Kate and read Emily’s book during the summer between my junior and senior year in high school. I lived in Florida then, and I was in and out of a tumultuous relationship. The combination of Florida’s steamiest season and my own romance woes made both the song and the book perfect mirrors for me. Maybe it’s strange to say that literature about a jealous ghost who haunts her lover offered comfort for me, but it did. I could relate to Catherine’s passion, and if I am to be completely honest, her anger.

During the same year, I read Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Volumes have already been written about her life, her marriage, and her decision to take her own life, so I will not write about any of that here. It was her work, her poetic voice that struck me. She has been called confessional, and yes, she turns herself inside out on the page, but she does not rant or whine. There is a reserve, a sophistication, and I have to say, a somewhat supernatural quality to her poems. She is scholarly, yes. She was an educated woman, so why wouldn’t her poems have some high brow to them? But there is a different kind of knowledge or awareness in her poems. I heard this when I first read her, and I still hear it whenever I pick her up. Perhaps the best way to describe this is to say that Sylvia reads like she understood her own ghost. As strange as it may sound, she wrote like she knew she was out of place and needed to return somewhere.

I visited the apartment where she composed her last poems. There is no marker for her. There is a blue plaque to honor Yeats, but nothing for her. So I left a small offering of her picture and lines from her poems to let her know I admired her still. I sat on the steps outside her building quietly thinking of the sound of her voice, how she may have looked out the window while she wrote. Then, I walked with my love in the park nearby, thought of how she may have strolled there too, and I said goodbye to one of my favorite heroines.