“This is the Light of the Mind, Cold and Planetary.”

It’s Sylvia Plath’s birthday today. The line in the title is from her poem “The Moon and the Yew Tree”, which she considered a breakthrough in her work (it was composed in 1960). She’s written a lot of startling lines, with images that reverberate and stick (“the blue pour of tor and distances”, etc.), but that line from “Moon and Yew Tree” is one of her best.

Other posts I have written about Plath:

“Death opened like a black tree, blackly.”

The letters of Ted Hughes

Being a Plath fan

On The Bell Jar

On the re-issuing of “Ariel”

The Plath/Hughes exhibit

On Assia Wevill

And please, for your own sake, read this explanation, and then go read this. Perhaps only Plath fans will truly understand, but that’s okay.

In 1962, England had the coldest winter it had had in decades. The country shut down. Pipes froze. The roads were iced over. There was like one snowplow in all of London. The bureaucratic infrastructure was paralyzed. Sylvia Plath and her husband Ted Hughes had split up in the fall of 1962, and he had moved out. They had two small children, Frieda and Nicholas, who stayed with Sylvia. In October and November of 1962, Sylvia, distraught, began to write the poems that would make her famous (after her death, of course, since she killed herself in February 1963). Sometimes she wrote 3 poems a day. Astonishing terrifying brilliant poems. Her pace was frantic. And these were not just dashed off in one draft : she worked these poems. It’s incorrect to assume that the “bee sequence” poems, or “Lady Lazarus”, or “Ariel”, “Daddy”, “Fever 103”, her most famous poems now, were only the result of a manic despair brought on by the dissolution of her marriage. It is true that she was not sleeping, and would stay up through the night working on these poems, but they were not just the dashed-off result of a nervous breakdown. She went through drafts of these poems, she worked them hard. (There’s a very interesting book called Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems, which analyzes all of her drafts, showing how she worked, and what she threw away, what she kept.) If you read Sylvia Plath’s poems chronologically (from the beginning, I’m talking, from before her first published collection The Colossus and Other Poems), it does seem that the October/November 1962 poems do come from somebody else, an entirely new person. She always had talent, that’s clear, although she may have been a bit arch and precocious with it, but her talent burst into full-form suddenly in the fall of 1962. She knew it, too. “These poems will make my name,” she declared. Many of her friends were frightened by the poems she was writing at that time, they seemed ominous. Indeed, they are ominous. I often wonder what kind of poet she would have become if she had not killed herself. What other phases would her talent have gone through? This is sheer speculation on my part, but I have also often wondered if London hadn’t gone into a deep freeze in December 1962, leaving her isolated and cold, would she have found the strength to make it through? Obviously, Plath had tried to kill herself before. It was always her trump card. It never left her. She always kept that option open. But her domestic problems in that winter, being alone and poor and cold, with frozen pipes, the sheer difficulty of day-to-day existence, certainly didn’t help.

Late that fall, she read some of her poems on BBC Radio. Here she is reading “Daddy”, her most famous poem.

And here she is reading “Lady Lazarus”, another famous one (now, I mean. Then, she was just a poet reading her latest work.)

I find her voice positively hair-raising.