Scorpio: la femme fatale 5

Halloween approaches. Oct. 27's Scorpio femme fatale must be poet SYLVIA PLATH (born 1932). This is one of her drawings. The night she met her husband-to-be, poet Ted Hughes, she bit his cheek to blood . . . at a party! He wrote "This lightning pass through all the walls of the maze was her real genius. Instant confrontation with the most central, unacceptable things." Fiercely felt female scorpionic imagery, clustering around death, sex, and the Pluto/Persephone story, pours out of Plath as from a wound. In her hair-raising, career-making poem "Daddy”, she cast her dead father as a jackbooted Nazi murderer. ("A cleft in your chin instead of your foot / But no less a devil for that . . ."