Yes, Sylvia. You do.
It’s her birthday today. She always hated her birthdays.
Reading the recently published two-volume full correspondence of Plath was an absolute eye-opener for this lifelong fan. Finally: light from the caves! One of the many revelations in those pages was what a massive movie fan Plath was. I never knew! I wrote about it in my column at Film Comment: Sylvia Plath Goes to the Movies.
Here’s a draft of “Stings,” written in the month of October, 1962, the productive (understatement) month when she wrote many of the poems that would make her name (posthumously). It’s written on the back of pink Smith College stationery (her alma mater).
Here’s the final poem:
Stings
Bare-handed, I hand the combs.
The man in white smiles, bare-handed,
Our cheesecloth gauntlets neat and sweet,
The throats of our wrists brave lilies.
He and I
Have a thousand clean cells between us,
Eight combs of yellow cups,
And the hive itself a teacup,
White with pink flowers on it,
With excessive love I enameled it
Thinking “Sweetness, sweetness.”
Brood cells gray as the fossils of shells
Terrify me, they seem so old.
What am I buying, wormy mahogany?
Is there any queen at all in it?
If there is, she is old,
Her wings torn shawls, her long body
Rubbed of its plush—
Poor and bare and unqueenly and even shameful.
I stand in a column
Of winged, unmiraculous women,
Honey-drudgers.
I am no drudge
Though for years I have eaten dust
And dried plates with my dense hair.
And seen my strangeness evaporate,
Blue dew from dangerous skin.
Will they hate me,
These women who only scurry,
Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover?
It is almost over.
I am in control.
Here is my honey-machine,
It will work without thinking,
Opening, in spring, like an industrious virgin
To scour the creaming crests
As the moon, for its ivory powders, scours the sea.
A third person is watching.
He has nothing to do with the bee-seller or with me.
Now he is gone
In eight great bounds, a great scapegoat.
Here is his slipper, here is another,
And here the square of white linen
He wore instead of a hat.
He was sweet,
The sweat of his efforts a rain
Tugging the world to fruit.
The bees found him out,
Molding onto his lips like lies,
Complicating his features.
They thought death was worth it, but I
Have a self to recover, a queen.
Is she dead, is she sleeping?
Where has she been,
With her lion-red body, her wings of glass?
Now she is flying
More terrible than she ever was, red
Scar in the sky, red comet
Over the engine that killed her—
The mausoleum, the wax house.
In October and November of 1962, she worked at a literally insane pace, and the phenomenal part of it is that she did not just toss off drafts carelessly. She worked these poems, bringing each one through multiple drafts, paring down, re-writing, re-organizing. (There is an entire book written about the revising process of the Ariel poems: Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems
There is a myth that the Ariel poems represented a burst of creativity, but that is a misunderstanding of what creativity is all about. Creativity really means work.
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 and wild despair brought on by the dissolution of her marriage. Yes, she was not sleeping, and, yes, she would stay up through the night working on these poems. Sleep deprivation can intensify mania/depression. But as anyone who has experienced it knows, mania can be extremely productive. Beethoven, in his manic phases, composed at a similar white-hot pace. When the mania subsided, depression came, and the leveling-out of moods that go along with that. And in that quieter state, he would look at what he had composed earlier, and start the editing process. It was depression that helped him edit out what didn’t work. A similar cycling may have been happening with Plath, although I find mental health speculations pretty distasteful and over-simplifying the matter. This is merely a defense of some of the BENEFITS of the manic/depressive cycle: productive/get the work out and then calmer mood/edit down what was written before. (Got this idea from Kay Jemison’s Touched by Fire, an excellent – and hugely controversial – book about the connection between bipolar/mood disorders and creativity.) I am going on like this because it is insulting to Plath’s great art to assume that every word was the dashed-off result of a nervous breakdown.
She had the impulse, the inspiration, and she also maintained the cool-headed eye of the editor, slashing out stuff that didn’t work. She only had a couple of months left to live. There’s a beautiful and strange irony of seeing the drafts of these poems written in white-hot fury, appearing on the pink stationery of the college that had tried to turn her into a nice and socially acceptable young lady.
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
She always had talent, although perhaps a bit arch and precocious with it at the start. Ted Hughes gave us the image of Plath composing a poem, Thesaurus balanced on her knee. You can feel the Thesaurus’ presence in those earlier poems. She did not gallop out of the gate a full-blown Genius. You can feel how hard she works.
Her talent burst into full-form seemingly suddenly in the fall of 1962. You can feel it happen when you read her poems in order. She knew it, too. “These poems will make my name,” she declared. Many of her friends were frightened by the poems she wrote at that time. They are among the most ominous poems ever written, the “Gimme Shelter” of poetry.
Although it is useless to speculate I have often wondered: if London hadn’t gone into a deep freeze in December 1962, leaving her isolated and freezing, with two babies to care for, no one to help her, would she have found the strength to make it through? Plath had tried to kill herself before. It was always her trump card. She kept that option open. But her domestic problems in that winter, frozen pipes, the sheer difficulty of day-to-day existence, didn’t help.
Late that fall, she read some of her poems on BBC Radio (“Lady Lazarus”, above, being one of them). Here she is reading “Daddy”, her most famous poem.
I find her voice hair-raising.
Fever 103 (another October 1962 poem)
Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple
Tongues of dull, fat Cerebus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean
The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell
Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright
One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,
But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak
Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,
Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.
Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.
Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.
Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.
I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern —
My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.
Does not my heat astound you. And my light.
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.
I think I am going up,
I think I may rise —
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I
Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,
By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean.
Not you, nor him.
Not him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) —
To Paradise.
In honor of her birthday, here’s one she actually wrote about her birthday in 1962. She wrote this poem, now one of her most well-known, on Sept. 30 1962.
A Birthday Present
What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?
I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want.
When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking
‘Is this the one I am too appear for,
Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?
Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,
Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.
Is this the one for the annunciation?
My god, what a laugh!’
But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button.
I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.
After all I am alive only by accident.
I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.
Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains,
The diaphanous satins of a January window
White as babies’ bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory!
It must be a tusk there, a ghost column.
Can you not see I do not mind what it is.
Can you not give it to me?
Do not be ashamed–I do not mind if it is small.
Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity.
Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam,
The glaze, the mirrory variety of it.
Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate.
I know why you will not give it to me,
You are terrified
The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it,
Bossed, brazen, an antique shield,
A marvel to your great-grandchildren.
Do not be afraid, it is not so.
I will only take it and go aside quietly.
You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle,
No falling ribbons, no scream at the end.
I do not think you credit me with this discretion.
If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
To you they are only transparencies, clear air.
But my god, the clouds are like cotton.
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.
Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,
Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million
Probable motes that tick the years off my life.
You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine—–
Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?
Must you stamp each piece purple,
Must you kill what you can?
There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.
It stands at my window, big as the sky.
It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center
Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history.
Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.
Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty
By the time the whole of it was delivered, and to numb to use it.
Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.
If it were death
I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.
I would know you were serious.
There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.
And the knife not carve, but enter
Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,
And the universe slide from my side.
She sounds so much older than her 29 or 30 years in this recording. I wonder if she had a “Sivvy” voice that went with those Letters Home. That might be even scarier.
Bybee – I know. She sounds so much older. It’s bone-chilling to me to hear her. It’s a great reading.
Letters Home is one of the scariest books ever published, because of that “Sivvy” voice. I mean, honestly. It just nailed the point home that Aurelia was trying to squelch or deny. Creepy as hell.
That last picture of her is so interesting. Both winsome and disturbing.
There are very few pictures of her really laughing.
She does terrify, and I immediately thought about her speaking voice when I clicked on your link. It was powerful to see you started off here with that recording of Lady Lazarus, which I have on cassette tape (!) and have listened to precisely once. I shudder thinking about listening to it again now. A bone-chilling voice.
“Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God.”
I mean. . .
No words.
I know. It’s like she’s staring into the sun. On purpose.
She is a different person in the Ariel poems. I read the Bell Jar in High School and the Colossus and I think her Collected Poems when I was around 20. Then I read Ariel, not the original that Ted published but the one Frieda published as Plath had left it, and that was a whole other world. I read Lady Lazarus so much that I found myself remembering lines in my head when I was grocery shopping and doing everyday errands, so I actually memorized it. I still know it by heart and from time to time recite it out loud or just in my head when I am reminded of it. Sometimes I get on a kick and can’t get it out of my head for a period of days. I don’t mind. I love every word of it. I will never tire of it. And she certainly didn’t just vomit a bunch of words in a state of mania, but yes, she worked those poems, just like she always did. Except with Ariel something cracked and split open during that horrible winter, and it is something to behold. Like she just didn’t give a fuck, she was on the edge (like the poem she write right before she died) and there was no turning back. I think I need to reread those poems. They are like a carefully curated explosion of her life before it ended.
I always like hearing your thoughts about mania, especially because you have actually experienced it. If I’m being honest I have often been envious of mania because I have struggled with the opposite for so long. Like I actually NEED some mania. I would kill for it. Of course I say that realizing that it’s not some fun game and is serious and incredibly dangerous (like mania is sooo cool. yeah right). But saying that it can’t be useful or productive is naive. It’s just one small aspect of it, as you said above. Either way it is complex and fascinating and without it and the circumstances of Plath at the time, we probably wouldn’t have Ariel. And yet the disease that played a part in that great work also cost her life. That’s just the plain reality of it. And we have to contend with the WHOLE, messy, incredible reality of her life and work.
Brooke –
// but the one Frieda published as Plath had left it, and that was a whole other world. //
I had a similar experience. I also took the same path you took – Bell Jar to Collected Poems. The re-release of Ariel – in the order she intended – was huge.
// And she certainly didn’t just vomit a bunch of words in a state of mania, but yes, she worked those poems, just like she always did. Except with Ariel something cracked and split open during that horrible winter, and it is something to behold. //
Totally agree. It’s so obvious when you read her stuff in strict chronological order – the way they’re laid out in Collected Poems. Some of her earlier stuff is good. Colossus has some good poems. Full Fathom, Man in Black – but then you come to the summer of 62 and it’s like a volcano exploding.
It really is incredible, like: WHAT happened to let her VOICE come out?
I mean, we all know what happened … but plenty of people have a husband who cheats on them, and a judgmental mother … and don’t write anything like the “bee poems” sequence in October 1962. You know? She was such a careful and precocious writer – and so nothing prepares you for what comes next. There aren’t too many other writers where something like this happens. Yeats had it a little bit – much of his early stuff is so Twee you want to put a frog in his bed. and then – BOOM. we get some of the greatest poems ever written. One after the other after the other …
In re: her mania – I think the PACE of her output at that time was alarming her friends – I’d have to back and check – not to mention the frightening tone and content of the poems. (Even more creepy are the letters she wrote home to her mother during this time. Still chipper, cheery, Sivvie. Total disconnect.)
// Like I actually NEED some mania. I would kill for it. // hahahaha
There is nothing like the productivity of mania. I just finished this WONDERFUL book called “Trip to Echo Spring” about writers and drinking – and John Berryman is one of the writers profiled, and he was clearly a manic individual – with depression too – although who the hell knows, he was such an alcoholic it’s hard to tell what was happening. But his mania meant he got work done, he followed his inspiration, he went higher, deeper, flung himself into passions/obsessions with no fear … and his Dream Songs are the result. Not JUST of the mania – but the art and the affliction do go hand in hand. And then came the crashes which were horrifying and then his eventual awful end. I read the sections of the book about him – and I don’t drink – I have maybe 3 glasses of wine a year – hahaha – but his mania, his excitement, his ENERGY, his PLANS … it’s all so familiar to me.
I think of Plath alone that freezing winter – writing stuff like “Child” – with one of the saddest lines she ever wrote – that her child looking up at her from out of his crib would see “a ceiling without a star.” I mean, that just goes right through me with its horror. And to think of her alone, and freezing, with those kids … and Ted is nowhere to be found …
I am thankful for her art.
I wish she had been saved! I wish we could have seen what would have happened after Ariel.
I am VERY excited that FINALLY the Plath Estate is loosening the reins a bit. Just the fact that there’s finally been a collection of Plath’s letters published – this summer I think. I mean, she is a MAJOR poet. She died over 50 years ago. And there’s been NO proper biography of her and NO collections of letters (except the hugely edited collection from her mother). And the diary has been edited too. Such a major figure. It’s a disgrace. (I blame Olwyn Hughes – Ted’s sister – who was executor of the estate and always disliked Sylvia.) Anyway – now that Olwyn is gone, and Frieda is taking over – I have hopes for the future. Sylvia deserves it.
Sheila,
// (I blame Olwyn Hughes – Ted’s sister – who was executor of the estate and always disliked Sylvia.)//
I completely forgot about Olwyn! Ugh, yes, she didn’t like Sylvia at all. Your blog this week is like a trip down memory lane. I remember trying to find decent bios on Plath but there aren’t any great ones. I think I did read one but knew to take it with a grain of salt. I also read some of her unabridged diaries and other poetry collections I think. I forgot that I was slightly obsessed at that time. I even remember writing out parts of her poems that I loved, especially from the Colossus. But of course, that was before Ariel. Although I didn’t read Letters Home, but we all know the relationship she had with her mother. Your mention of the disconnect between those letters and the Ariel poems is even more fascinating. I think she was looking into the abyss with complete abandon, but as Nietzsche said, the abyss stares back. I hope that things change with the estate now that Olwyn is gone. I am so grateful to Frieda for republishing the “real” Ariel and am hopeful there’s a bit of a renaissance or revisiting of her work. She does deserve it and so do the rest of us.
My sister referred me to this site today, and I just wanted to second your assertion that mania is not the source of her astounding last poems. Plenty of people are bipolar and do not produce art of this quality. Like Van Gogh, whose genius is often attributed to his mental illness, these artists worked on their craft and technique, practiced and studied many art forms in depth, before producing their greatest works. In addition to their diligence, they also had that thing called talent. While a mental state may have triggered some of their bursts of creativity (but isn’t that always true one way or another?), all the pieces were in place before the work that “made their names” burst forth. So, it would be misguided for a bipolar person to think that their illness in and of itself will be the catalyst for great art, or for a gifted artist to believe they need a mental disorder to bring their muse to life.
You’re new here. I am bipolar. Just FYI. I know the subject inside out and when I speak about the illness I speak with authority. And the same goes for Plath. Which is why I wrote the Film Comment piece about Plath’s cinephilia. It’s the internet, so maybe there’s something missing in translation, but I dislike your tone. You wanna try starting over?
Well, I’m taken aback at your reaction. I read and appreciated both of your posts on Plath today, and was agreeing with your premise in this piece that: “There is a myth that the Ariel poems represented a burst of creativity, but that is a misunderstanding of what creativity is all about. Creativity really means work.” Sorry if my tone was offensive but I am a little unclear as to why it was. I respect your knowledge on these subjects, and I have what I thought was a somewhat similar take on the perceptions around Plath’s later work. I apologize for any unintended offense that apparently occurred in my expression of my perspective on this subject.
I owe you an apology, Patricia. I am so sorry. I hope you can forgive me – I misread your tone (obviously). so sorry!!
I get so frustrated in re: commentary on Plath sometimes – there’s an investment in her as a victim – and I find it alienating and damaging. Of course, when someone commits suicide, everyone is left holding the bag – people want explanations – so Ted Hughes gets the blame – but there were so many other factors going into it – AND she was a meticulous craftswoman at her work – When I read that book REVISING ARIEL, I was stunned at how many drafts she put all of those autumn 1962 poems through – it wasn’t just stream of consciousness rage.
The thing about the full correspondence (just published) … it made me sad, for the first time in a LONG time, that she didn’t make it rhough that terrible winter. I burnt out on being sad about Plath a long time ago – I had to step back. But reading those letters, I started to feel that mournfulness again. She was wildly swinging from mood to mood – but she could have stabilized, if she had had some help, and the pipes didn’t freeze, and all the rest.
Have you read the full correspondence yet? It took me about 8 months to get through it – sometimes it’s monotonous because she writes four letters to four different people about the same event – but it’s so so good to have it all.
and again, I am very sorry.
Thank you; I know that words sent through the ether of the internet can be misconstrued! I have read the newly published correspondence and felt it added so much to the record. And, I, too, have felt the deep sadness of the tragedy of her suicide, especially when my children were young and the full impact of what they lost hit me. Then, again, when Nicholas Hughes committed suicide. She was a great poet whose work has meant a lot to me, but I would be willing to live in a world without it, if she could have just lived.
Thank you for understanding.
Oh gosh, yes, my heart broke when I heard about Nicholas. A friend of mine had been corresponding with him. I can’t even imagine what that family – both sides, really – went through.
and yes, the overwhelming feeling I got as I read the correspondence of those final months of her life – was that this could have been avoided. If her friend Marcia had come in early February instead of early March as planned – she might have made it. I understand about suicide and about the anguish of the pain experienced by the person who decides they can’t take it anymore.
But the correspondence really drove home all kinds of other things. It was just too. damn. much – that winter. But there are all these other letters – like her sending a letter to Stevie Smith – !!! – and her plans, and reading on the BBC, and putting together the Ariel collection – even doing okay with Ted, him helping her find the apartment, and all that. I remember thinking, as I was reading, “Maybe she’s going to make it!” and then I remembered.
It’s just brutal.
Dear Sheila,
I read with great interest your essay about Sylvia Plath and the exchange. No other poet has ever had the same effect on me as Sylvia Plath. When I was a freshman in college, I used to listen to recordings of her reading her poetry. Like you, I was terrified and mesmerized. I still remember her intonations in “Fever 103” though I haven’t listened to the recording of it in decades. I had such a strong reaction that I gave away my copy of Ariel because I was afraid to have it in my room. (I later bought another copy.)
I also believe that her suicide could have been prevented. Anthony Alvarez thought so. People tend to take sides between Plath and Hughes, but of course the reality is more complicated. I happen to love Birthday Letters. I don’t know if you saw the exhibit about 15 years ago at the Grolier Club celebrating Plath and Hughes. It was wonderful. I went to the opening and Frieda Hughes was there. I met the curators from Smith College library and Emory University, where Plath’s and Hughes’ papers are. I haven’t made it to the Plath collection, but a few years ago when I was in Atlanta, I spent a wonderful afternoon with the rare books and manuscripts at the Woodruff Library. They have a great collection of the Irish poets. You would love it. They have Seamus Heaney’s papers and the reason they have Ted Hughes is because Heaney and Hughes were good friends. If you are ever in Atlanta, you should try to get there.
I wrote a poem about the Grolier exhibition. It is in my Blessings and Curses collection, and it is a blessing.
Blessing XXVI
The lovers were reunited after 42 years
in The Grolier Club catalog
and exhibition, No Other Appetite:
he almost impossibly handsome,
she, protean, with a different appearance
in every picture, intensely alive
and in thrall to death,
her imagination on fire,
and he drawn to magic, with a shaman’s power,
skilled in productive trance,
the two doomed and blessed “to
go round the dark of the mind’s moon
and come back to us as poetry.”
Completing her part of the catalog,
curator Karen fell ill. “You have to be hardy
to take on Plath and Hughes.”
When curator Stephen visited Hughes
at Court Green in 1996,
it felt familiar from Plath’s descriptions
of the life they’d hoped to make there.
“Of course that all went bust,” said Stephen,
“but there he is, I thought,
in the house they picked out together.”
Book designer Bruce worked 12 days straight
till he was done. Driving home
in the White Mountains he saw
a pair of black bears off the road.
“It was a couple,” Karen recalled he’d said,
as she recounted in her lecture,
“Soon after, I was driving near my house
in Easthampton. There in an orchard
I saw my two black bears, a couple also,
and the male looked at me right in the eye.”
Then for a sign that we were where we were
Two gold bears came down and swam like men
Beside us. And dived like children.
And stood in deep water as on a throne
Eating pierced salmon off their talons.
So we found the end of our journey.
So we stood, alive in the river of light
Among the creatures of light, creatures of light.
the last two stanzas are a quote from Hughes. they should be italicized.