Whatever You Will Go - The Calling
Patti Smith once wondered what Sylvia Plath might have tought in those final moments, whether her mind, so fiercely alive on the page, drifted toward her children, toward Ted, toward the bright wreckage of her own becoming. It is impossible not to follow that question into the quiet room where morning had not yet fully broken.
What does a poet think at the edge of her own unwritten line?
Perhaps she did not think in sentences at all. Perhaps language, her faithful instrument, her blade and her balm, fell away, and what remained was something rawer. A sensation. A memory. A flicker of bees humming in the mind, those tireless architects of sweetness and sting. The bees of Ariel, swarming and sovereign. The bees she tended in Devon, as if tending some fractured republic within herself.
Or perhaps she thought of her children sleeping in the next room. Frieda's breath, Nicholas's small hands curled like unopened petals. A mother's mind does not relinquish its orbit easily. Even in despair, love remains, a tether, a weight, a costellation. Did she picture their futures the way poets picture landscapes, luminous, distant, possible? Or did she feel, with unbearable clarity, the terrible paradox of loving fiercely while believing oneself unfit to remain?
Sylvia Plath's life was always split between brilliance and fracture. She was both the girl who won prizes and the woman who pressed her pulse against the hard glass of expectation. She was the scholar of Smith College, the wife in a cold London flat, the writer rising befor dawn to carve her voice into the dark. She knew the architecture of ambition. She also knew its collapse.
There is a line in Lady Lazarus: "Dying / Is an art, like everything else." Readers have wrestled with it for decades, accusing, defending, mythologizing. But perhaps the line was never about spectacle. Perhaps it was about control. About shaping the narrative when everything else feels shapeless. The poem performs resurrection, yes, but performance is not peace. Art can transform suffering into beauty; it cannot aways dissolve the suffering itself.
Did she think of Ted Hughes? Or the early days when language braided them together, when metaphors passed between their mouths like shared breath? Love, especially love between artists, is rarely gentle. It burns, consumes, demands witness. In the aftermath of betrayal, what lingers is not only anger but the ghost of who one was while loving. Did she mourn him, or the self she had been beside him?
Or perhaps she did not think of the past at all. Perhaps she was suspended in a stark and wordless present. A winter morning. The kind of cold that stiffens resolve. The kind of silence that feels absolute. There is a moment in Virginia Woolf's diaries, another woman who walked toward the end, throgh the water, where clarity feels almost crystalline. Not joy, not relief, but a narrowing. A corridor of certainty.
And yet, it is dangerous to romanticize corridors.
We return to Sylvia Plath because her poems remain incandescent. Because Ariel did not fade with her. Because the voice that seemed to extinguish itself became, paradoxically, immortal. There is tragedy in that irony, that the world finally listened with full attention only after she was gone.
But I wonder if, in those final minutes, she thought not of fame, nor of critics, nor even of the long arc of literature. Perhaps she thought of something small. The smell of bread. The scape of a pen across paper. The memory of the sea at Winthrop, glittering and indifferent. Perhaps she remembered her father, looming and lost, the figure who hounted so much of her work. Perhaps she whispered a line only she could hear.
Or perhaps there were no grand thoughts at all, only exhaustion. The kind that sinks into the bones and refuses negotiation.
We project onto her because we cannot bear the void of not knowing. Patti Smith asks the question not to solve it, but to sit beside it. To honor the human beneath the myth. To remember that before Sylvia Plath became a symbol, she was a woman in a room, carrying too much.
The final thoughts of a poet may not be poetic. They may be fragmented, ordinary, painfully human. And maybe that is what unsettles us most, that even the most luminous minds are not spared from darkness.
What remains is the work. The fierce music of her lines. The way she wrote herself into fire and frost and refused to be small. Whatever passed through her mind in those last moments, the poems endure, alive, electric, uncontained.
And perhaps that is the only answer we are allowed.
- Midnight thoughts...
