Songfacts®:

• Most definitely not to be confused with the Thijs Van Leer composition of the same name, this short number is a tribute song to Sylvia Plath. McTell wrote: "I read her book of poems Ariel like you would read a story and sat down and wrote the song. Tony [Visconti] made me drink a couple of glasses of red wine to steady my emotions and my hands when we put that song down at Sound Techniques Studios, live in one take piano and vocal."
• Sylvia Plath was born in Massachusetts in 1932 and after graduating with honors from Smith College crossed the Atlantic to study at the prestigious Cambridge University on a Fullbright Scholarship. Almost exactly a year later she married Ted Hughes, who would later go on to become Poet Laureate. The marriage was complicated by a miscarriage and her husband's infidelity with Assia Wevill, and they separated in 1962. The affair must have been particularly humiliating for Plath as Wevill was not only older than both her and Hughes but was already on her own third husband. She also became pregnant with Hughes' child, but the baby was aborted.
  
  Sylvia Plath committed suicide in London the following year, although the nature of her death suggests it may not have been suicide but a bizarre ritual that went tragically wrong. Hughes then moved his mistress into the home he had bought with his late wife where she was to become a mother to the two children the fateful Sylvia had borne him, Frieda and Nicholas. In March 1965, his new bedmate presented Hughes with a daughter, but on March 23, 1969, she committed suicide in strikingly similar fashion to Plath, taking the four year old Shura with her.
  
  Sylvia Plath was buried at Heptonstall, West Yorkshire - Hughes was born in Yorkshire - her gravestone, which bares the name Sylvia Plath Hughes, has been repeatedly vandalized by supporters who have chiselled out the name Hughes. Ted Hughes died from natural causes in 1998; the following year his son Nicholas committed suicide in Alaska. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Alexander Baron - London, England, for above 2