Sylvia Plath - a plea for humanity in leadership?
Sylvia Plath was an American poet and writer who died in 1963. I first became familiar with her when I was eleven years old and upon my mother's recommendation read The Bell Jar. In retrospect that seems pretty heavy reading for an eleven year old, but I already understood how depression descended upon an smothered one as though trapped under a bell jar. The image remained and helped me make sense of the suicides of heroes along the way, people I would not otherwise have guessed like Robin Williams and Jeff Austin, as well as those I personally loved... and I was able to look back at others, like Marilyn Monroe who'd chosen to exit a painful world before I was fully aware of the range of emotions we endure.
Sylvia Plath too chose to end her life. Still, one act, even if the final one, should hardly define a person's life. She offered so much to the world. Consider this poem:
Morning Song
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.
Her vision, her depth of comprehension, and not only the facile ability to find the words but the integrity to voice such honest and complex feelings is, surveying the current US political scene, I'm afraid a bit more than we can hope for in a candidate at this time.
Maybe some day?