The poem “Epitaph for Fire and Flower” began on the beach at Benidorm on August 18, 1956. Plath’s pocket calendar titled it by its first line: “You might as well string up.” By the next day, she had given it its final name. Plath had begun reading William Shakespeare’s romp about containing masculine sexual desire in Love’s Labour’s Lost, on the second day she worked on this poem. “Epitaph for Fire and Flower” is a darkly sinister poem, despite its passion, and readers have questioned if Plath knew her relationship was doomed from the beginning. To read her letters and journals, a case might be made that Plath did know this subconsciously.
In “Epitaph for Fire and Flower,” Plath compares her love to one in the Hollywood camera’s eye, filmed in black and white, to last beyond their short night of life after the earth swallows their decomposed, dead bodies (CP, 45). The poem opens feeling very much like the classic lovers’ scene in the 1953 movie, From Here to Eternity, starring Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, and Montgomery Clift. And not coincidentally, just a couple of months earlier, on May 12, 1956, Clift had suffered a terrible car accident leaving a party at Liz Taylor’s home. While there were rumors of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor dating, Taylor was actually married to actor Michael Wilding at the time. Nevertheless, Clift and Taylor were called “Hollywood’s Most Beautiful Couple,” and they starred together in the film Raintree County, in production at that time of the accident. In the wreck, Clift suffered severe head and facial injuries (“crack your skull”), and Liz Taylor was said to have cradled his head in her lap and stopped him from choking by removing loose teeth from his throat. Plath’s second stanza portrays this scene well. Taylor was well-known for her diamonds, and Plath’s “museum diamond” and “hoard faith safe in a fossil,” from the third stanza, is the belief in marriage after film producer Mike Todd gave Taylor a 29.4-carat engagement ring that same year.
After a two-month recovery from the accident, Montgomery Clift’s health and looks suffered, and he lost work. This is all well-described in Plath’s final stanza, with its “languor of wax” being makeup’s inability to cover the scars, and the broken contracts for Clift’s future movie deals. “Epitaph for Fire and Flower” should not be looked at therefore as a poem solely about Plath and Hughes, but rather juxtaposing her marriage against the passionate and destructive romances of Hollywood.