Nicholas Hughes, son of tragedy-scarred British Poet Ted Hughes and US Poet Sylvia Plath, has killed himself at age 47 years old. "It is with profound sorrow that I must announce the death of my brother, Nicholas Hughes, who died by his own hand on Monday 16th March 2009 at his home in Alaska," his sister Frieda Hughes said in a statement published by The Times of London.

Unmarried and childless, the 47-year-old Hughes had recently left his teaching post at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks' school of fisheries and ocean sciences to make pottery in a home studio -- an "unusual choice," said Lanny Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology. His mother Sylvia Plath committed suicide

When Nicholas Hughes was one years old his mother US Poet Sylvia Plath, took her own life by breathing in fumes from the gas oven in her kitchen while her two children slept in a nearby room. Six years later when Assia Wevill -- the woman for whom Ted Hughes had left Plath -- gassed herself and their young daughter on March 23, 1969.


Source Yahoo News

Plath addressed one of her last poems, "Nick and the Candlestick" to her son:


Nick and the Candlestick

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish -
Christ! they are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs -

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

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