To embalm in word.
And keep the ghost of them alive.
To make them more flesh than phantom,
and yet held in a particular frame of time.
Every word spoken,
every gesture made replayed
with every word written, then read.
The story of their life, however short or long,
repeated whenever the book or document is opened.
These heroes and heroines embalmed within pages,
in youth, in angst, in maturity,
with all their problems of life or personality laid bare,
entangled as it were with the bias of the biographer,
for pale figures, like myself,
to gorge on.
Picture credit: Sylvia Plath
A journal entry upon finishing a biography on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, April 2021.
