Thoroughly diverted, I gave up career notions, married, had a child, and kept poetry confined to a folder mostly. I avoided Plath's work, knowing she'd killed herself. It was depressing enough being a child of divorce, alcoholism, and finally fatherless at barely 17. Plath, whose father died when she was eight, almost called her book "Daddy", the term I used. I did my best to fulfill a middle-class Midwest society's vision of post-WWII womanhood, as my fierce German Lutheran upbringing dictated: kinder, kirche, und kuchen. All but barefoot and pregnant!

When I first read "Jailor" this month, I reeled from the reverberations. Plath had been there first, trapped and tortured between expectation and expression. Would it have made a difference in my isolated life if I'd read this 40 or 30 years ago, I wondered:

"I am myself. That is not enough.

The fever trickles and stiffens in my hair. My ribs show.
What have I eaten? Lies and smiles.
Surely the sky is not that color,
Surely the grass should be rippling.

All day, gluing my church of burnt matchsticks,
I dream of someone else entirely."

My own love sonnets eventually gave way to children's ditties, then bitter reprises on marriage and death. Plath had the courage to pour out her pain on paper for the world to behold, even as she lacked the courage to face life any longer. I hid my poetry and hadn't the courage to face death, choosing to kill a career and endure the pain. Now I have Plath's book, just as she would have wished it to appear. I can cradle it next to my heart and make her children my own.

Copyright © 2004 Georganna Hancock