Wintering is shattering and desperate, because there can be no happy ending. Plath ultimately becomes the “Sylvia Suicide Doll” of daughter Frieda Hughes’ adult poetry, and the ghostly recipient of Ted Hughes’ tortured and bitter Birthday Letters. Wintering broke my heart and it will break yours, too.
On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath sealed her two young children, Frieda and Nicholas, in their nursery and placed rags and towels in the cracks of the door and again in the cracks of the kitchen door downstairs. With her children crying upstairs, Plath gassed herself in the kitchen, just days after completing a first draft of the poem, ‘Wintering’ and after months of estrangement from her husband, the future Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes.
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