At the Lighthouse

I’ve been wondering all day why my blog was getting so many searches for “Nicholas Plath” and “Nicholas Hughes” and why my review of Christine Jeff’s Sylvia and my post “Sylvia Plath on Youtube” had so many readers today.

So I did a Google search, and it turns out there was a sad occasion: It has been announced today that  Nicholas Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s son with Ted Hughes, has committed suicide and died at the age of 46 last Monday.

The thorough and respectufl obituary from Times that I’ve linked to above quotes the beautiful poem ”Nick and the Candlestick” that Sylvia Plath wrote about her infant son (and her pregnancy) shortly before her own death by suicide. I imagine that bloggers will be posting this poem all over the place today, but I thought I’d do it, too, in honour of the memory of both this man and his talented mother whose writings I’ve loved since I was very young.

“I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish -
Christ! they are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs -

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.”