Today, we memorialize war veterans. We’ve made this a holiday, even though military ceremonies are still held. Warfighters endure the obvious external battle, and if the war is deemed just by the populace back home, s/he may come home a “conquering” hero. (The internal struggle of a military person is just as real, but that’s a subject for another time.) I bring up warfighters because some of us wage continual war within ourselves, as did Sylvia Plath.
“I feel certain that I’m going mad again . . .” began Sylvia Plath’s (1932-1963) final writing just before she positioned her head inside a gas oven and died. Her death is, perhaps what she is most remembered for – its method of self-destruction, the haunting presence she left, the husband (Ted Hughes) who had recently left her, and the fact that she was just thirty years old when she ended her life, leaving behind a body of work that remains read and praised.
Below, please consider a few poems from Plath’s collected work, each with a short introduction. Background on Plath’s life appears after the poems. The usual “explorations” are inserted before each poem.
‘Poppies in October’ (1962 – written on SP’s last birthday) This poem touches on Plath’s suicide attempts before the final, successful act. Here, an ambulance transports a woman. Her heart is compared to poppies in bloom. But is the woman the focus of the poem or is it more straightforward – a celebration of brilliant red flowers, and nothing more. This piece exhibits Plath’s facility with concrete imagery.
Exploration: What is the “love gift / Utterly unasked for”?
Poppies in October
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly –
A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By the sky
Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.
Oh my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frosts, in a dawn of cornflowers.
‘Edge’. Six days before her suicide, SP write this poem (Feb 1963). Speculation is that this was the final poem she ever wrote. The subject not surprisingly is death, and surprisingly about the perfection in death. To the end, Plath remained the expert of colorful, brilliant images, no matter her subject.
Exploration: Consider each concrete image in this poem and attempt to translate the image into some person or thing inn SP’s life.
Edge
The Woman is perfected.
Her Dead
Body where is the smile of accomplishment,
The inclusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga.
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odours bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flowers.
Her Dead
Body where is the smile of accomplishment,
The inclusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga.
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odours bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flowers.
‘Lady Lazarus’. (Oct 1962) As most people know, Jesus is said to have raised Lazarus from the dead. Again, we have SP’s perennial focus on death, including one of her most well-known lines: “dying is an art.” Intriguingly, the poem juxtaposes coming back from the dead (i.e., living) with the opposite state: obliteration
Lady Lazarus
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot——
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart——
It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Exploration: SP writes, “Like the cat I have nine times to die.” Is this statement purely literal or does it have more abstract meanings?
“You’re" Note how the single-word title of the poem repeats throughout the verses. Is SP addressing someone in the second person? If so, who might it be. Hint: In 1960, Plath was pregnant with her daughter, Frieda.
Exploration: The tone of most of Plath’s work is somber to dark. This poem is an exception. Picture SP in this happier place and why she could not dwell there.
You’re
Clownlike, happiest on your hands,
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,
Gilled like a fish. A common-sense
Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode.
Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,
Trawling your dark as owls do.
Mute as a turnip from the Fourth
Of July to All Fools’ Day,
O high-riser, my little loaf.
Vague as fog and looked for like mail.
Farther off than Australia.
Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn.
Snug as a bud and at home
Like a sprat in a pickle jug.
A creel of eels, all ripples.
Jumpy as a Mexican bean.
Right, like a well-done sum.
A clean slate, with your own face on.
Source: Collected Poems (HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 1992)
Background
Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Boston. Early on, she exhibited a strong attraction to writing which manifested in many journals. She won a scholarship to the prestigious Smith College in 1950.
In addition to her poetry, Sylvia Plath wrote one novel, The Bell Jar the story of a mentally challenged young woman, and which is still read and acclaimed. She published two poetry collections: The Colossus and Ariel. In 1982, SP won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously, the first person to do so.
Living as a woman in the 1950s could very well have been a poet’s worst nightmare with that era’s expectation for women to be content as housewives and mothers. Plath abhorred and feared such a fate. She serves as one of the precursors of a dilemma still faced by modern women: how to do everything, all the time, perfectly. The mother. The professional worker. The adoring wife. And so on. Where lies the space for creativity and self-actualization? Such situations are highly likely more problematic for an artist like Plath.
In summer 1953, SP worked as a “guest” editor for Mademoiselle magazine. Almost concurrent with that work, SP attempted suicide by taking sleeping pills. She recovered and finished her degree at Smith in 1955. She then won a Fulbright Fellowship and went to England’s Cambridge University. SP returned the U.S. where she studied with the poet, Robert Lowell, and made the acquaintance of poet Ann Sexton. Plath went back to England in 1959.
While at Cambridge, she met Ted Hughes, also a poet. They married the following year and had two children. Their relationship was always rocky, and eventually, Hughes left Plath for Assia Wevill. although to the end, he and Sylvia spoke of giving their marriage “another try.” During this period, Plath lived alone with her two young children resulting in little time for her writing. Simultaneously, she had an incredible burst of creativity, and some say her best work is a product of this time.
Her final “attempt” to kill herself was successful in 1963. Today, she probably would be diagnosed as bipolar. Six years later, Wevill committed suicide using the same method as Plath. She killed her four-year-old daughter, Shura, at the same time. Wevill gave herself and her daughter a concoction of sleeping pills, and then positioned herself and Shura so that oven gas would assure death. Ted and Sylvia’s son, Nicholas, born in 1962, hung himself in 2009.
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