6 June 2022 – Womankind Poets

Sylvia Plath: A Woman Perfected

Today, begins a series of posts featuring representatives of Womankind and their poetry. I haven’t stopped to count the number of women featured in these Monday poetry posts over the years; however, a swift -and-muddy tally reveals that out of roughly 208 posts (not counting 2022) less than ten women were represented, excluding the poems offered by yours truly. Imagination! An oversight on my part, to be sure.

In her poem, “Edge,” Sylvia Plath’s first line (in italics) is “The Woman is perfected.”  What about the “Woman” is “perfected.” “Perfected” means thoroughly done, finished, completed, finalized – no more to add or change. Plath’s suicide is widely known. Could “perfected” be a precursor to her choice to end her life, as in, “I am finished” with the pain; “thoroughly done” with life?

Here is the entire poem for your investigation, followed by a few more to partially reveal the enigma that is Sylvia Plath.

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.

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.

Daddy

You do not do, you do not do   

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot   

For thirty years, poor and white,   

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.   

You died before I had time——

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,   

Ghastly statue with one gray toe   

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic   

Where it pours bean green over blue   

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.   

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town   

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.   

My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.   

So I never could tell where you   

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.   

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.   

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.   

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna   

Are not very pure or true.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck   

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.   

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.   

Every woman adores a Fascist,   

The boot in the face, the brute   

Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,   

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot   

But no less a devil for that, no not   

Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.   

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,   

And they stuck me together with glue.   

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.   

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I’m finally through.

The black telephone’s off at the root,   

The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——

The vampire who said he was you   

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart   

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.   

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

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, Sylvia Plath 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, Sylvia Plath 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. Plath 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 Plath 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.

Exploration 1: Why is the term “womankind” used so much less than “mankind.” Think carefully before you answer and the arc of time and cultural alterations.

Exploration 2: Compare how many positive and how many negative images are in “Nick and the Candlestick.

Exploration 3: Plath uses images and words from Germany under Nazi rule in her poem, “Daddy.” Why the juxtaposition between the usually soft word, “Daddy,” and the harshness of the Nazi terms and impressions?