Sylvia Plath, A Lament Poem by Ananta Madhavan

The price of fame is that you are known
To have your life and departure available
To unknown folk who like to be familiar
With privacy you did not want to share
Even with your own inner self, to compensate
For the world's indifference to what you felt.

This poet Sylvia was famous. She was born
Almost exactly a year before me, a link I feel
As a coeval and admirer. Biographers tried
To psycho-analyse her troubled mind.
She killed herself in 1963, aged thirty years,
Married to a famous modern poet, mother of two,
Separated from the husband, writing out
Her passion and agony. She should have lived
To see how later poets and friends of poetry
Have exalted her. Her poems were shadowed by death,
Self-tortured too, and seem to bear the otherness
Of outer worlds and selves we can barely guess.
Perhaps she transmuted her rhetoric of poetry
To the otherness of a might-have-been, thereby
Postponing the day of reckoning.