A description of Nicholas Hughes’s birth from Plath’s journals follows after the jump. And a link here to the New York Times article on his recent suicide:

The black force grew imperceptibly. I felt panic-striken…I had nothing to do with it, It controlled me. “I can’t help it”, I cried, or whispered, and then in three great bursts, the black thing hurtled itself out of me, one, two, three, dragging three shrieks after it: Oh, Oh, Oh. A great wall of water seemed to come with it. “Here he is” I heard Ted say. It was over. I felt the great weight gone in a moment. I felt thin, like air, as if I would float away, and perfectly awake. I lifted my head and looked up. “Did he tear me to bits?” I felt I must be ripped and bloody from all that power breaking out of me. “Not a scratch”, said Nurse D.  I couldn’t believe it. I lifted my head and saw my first son, Nicholas Farrar Hughes, blue and glistening on the bed a foot from me, in a pool of wet, with a cross, black frown and oddly low, angry brow, looking up at me, frown wrinkles between his eyes and his blue scrotum and penis large and blue, as if carved on a totem…I felt very proud of  Nicholas….