The snowflakes are falling on her face, melting in her hair, dusting the thick wool of her winter coat as she stands, ready, on the step outside her house on Fitzroy Road. She’ll have to be patient. She can’t expect miracles. Not like Cordelia: Love, and be silent. But still she can close her eyes and see it all: the dripping feathered yellows of the laburnum brushing her skin. The daffodils waving, sturdy on their stems. The tulips and the lilacs and the poppies. Her cherry blossoms, pure and white. Her apple trees in bloom, their hypnotic spring perfume, the tender blossoms snowing down on her shoulders, in her hair. She can imagine her family on the sand near Appledore, at the northern mouth of the Taw, the Atlantic sun edging her daughter, her son, and Ted in gold—their shoulders, the crowns of their heads—and the loud pounding and sighing of the waves. If she could stand where the sun stands, would they be fronted entirely in gold, their souls exposed? Frieda runs and runs, chased by the waves and Ted, and little Nicholas drags a stick in the sand, her family’s footprints, blue before the tide, so quickly erased. And when they turn to her, carrying shells and pebbles to her, running ahead of the foaming waves, they are still golden in the late light.

Snowflakes catch in her eyelashes at each step. There is no more waiting. It’s here. Here, now, her moment of truth. And it falls like grace, only for her.

Postscript

POSTSCRIPT

On December 31, 1962, Sylvia Plath began writing poetry again, turning first to the revision of two poems left incomplete from the autumn: “Eavesdropper” and “Sheep in Fog.” During the next five weeks, she went on to write “Totem,” “Child,” “Paralytic,” “Mystic,” “Kindness,” “Words,” “Contusion,” “Balloons,” and finally “Edge” on February 4, 1963, which she composed on the back of a draft of “Wintering.” On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath took her own life.

Author’s Note

AUTHOR’S NOTE