A Life Extinguished in the Same Hour as JFK

I felt a burden for Sylvia Plath as a teenager, who took her life in 1963, the same year JFK was assassinated, because the collection of poems she left on her desk for her husband to discover, entitled “Ariel,” would capture my imagination. Ted Hughes published that collection after her death, granted, out of order with other poems she had written inserted. But for whatever misdirection “Ariel” may have received, it reached me when her daughter, Frieda Hughes, published it in the early 2000s as her mother wished it to be seen.

Sylvia Plath – October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet and author. Giovanni Giovannetti/Grazia Neri, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It is hard to pick a favorite. “Ariel” is saturated with images of Shakespeare’s phoenix rising from ash, death, and rebirth. These images shaped me as an adolescent who was becoming more keenly aware of his own mortality. Her poem, Daddy, so immediately moved me that I committed it to memory. This antagonistic relationship with the swastika pierced me to my core. A Nazi-sympathizing father who is so preoccupied with his illusion of power had certain ramifications for my own life. The desire to get through to him, to make myself heard, was parallel to Plath’s.

I suppose everywhere I went, I was striving to make myself heard. After two failed attempts to graduate at evangelical schools, followed by a streak of success in the midst of which my own father took his life, I honored “Ariel” and finally used it as my capstone project.

Plath was a woman who considered it important to translate her perceptions, even about the most mundane things, into words which gave her a sense of permanency, because others would read them. I imagine everyone can relate to that. I certainly did.

So, as we look back on the anniversary of JFK’s assassination, we can remember Lady Lazarus, who imagines herself as a resurrecting phoenix, turning and burning, taking into consideration her audience’s “great concern.” All of this could be seen as esoteric. But maybe there is a gem of truth embedded here insofar as we have the capacity to not only remember but rewrite our history. Could Front Royal be a place among many where a movement starts, reflecting Plath’s libertarian imagination? It is important to take prophets seriously. In her poem, Wintering, she describes the bees going into hibernation: “They taste the spring.”

What is a poet’s death compared to a president’s? It is only extraordinary that they occurred in the same historical weave. “I’m no more your mother,” she writes in Morning Song, “than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow effacement at the wind’s hand.” We all play roles for which we may not receive recognition—the role of a mother chief of all. As the mother of confessional poetry, Plath sets the tone for a chapter of history which in many ways represents the rite of extreme unction. And how do we find hope in that penultimate moment? Somehow, life goes on. The bees taste the spring. And strangely, that military-industrial complex may not entirely be the enemy.