Happy birthday, Sylvia Plath

“Death opened, like a black tree, blackly.”

Today is Sylvia Plath’s birthday.

That’s a sketch she did of her own hands. She found drawing very relaxing. She would lose herself in it, and spent most of her honeymoon in Spain (a place she found almost unbearably upsetting – Ted Hughes, her husband, wrote a poem many years later called “You Hated Spain”) – anyway, she spent most of her honeymoon huddled over a sketch pad. She drew the streets, the fruit baskets, the fishing boats. Was there pleasure in it for her? I don’t know. I think it was a way to unhinge her brain for a moment, lose herself in the moment – where all she could do, all she was able to do, was just copy what she saw. She didn’t have to find the right word, or struggle with the poetry muse … she just had to sit down and copy what she saw. Ted Hughes wrote a poem, too, about her drawing.

In honor of the birthday of this eventually astonishing poet (she didn’t start out that way, although she was certainly precocious – but NONE of her early work could prepare you for what her work became in the last 2 years of her life – it’s like another PERSON came out of her ….) – I have dug up some wonderful old photographs of her. She was a chameleon. She was an all-American girl. She was a bleached blonde beach-blanket-bingo girl. She was an intense prodigy. She was a depressive who had survived a suicide attempt her junior year in college. She was the woman who married the big brash English outdoorsman, and suddenly found herself fishing, and hunting, and tromping through the woods in galoshes. Who was she? I have no idea. But you can take a look at all the photographs and see how startling are the transformations.

This is not just about the passage of time, and someone looking different as they grew older … this really seems to be about a shedding of selves (like she writes in Lady Lazarus, in one of my favorite lines: “my selves dissolving, old whores petticoats”) –

I look at the picture of the bodacious blonde at the beach:

This was from her summer of recovery from her suicide attempt in college. She spent months in an institution – and then went back to Smith to finish out her education. When summer came – she bleached her hair. Her mother – the controlling prudish Aurelia Plath – and yes, there’s enough information out there on this woman for me to feel completely comfortable labeling her as that – was shocked. She pretended to be supportive – but deep down, she wanted a conventional daughter. Well, sorry, Aurelia, ain’t never gonna happen. I have had people take offense at my characterization of Aurelia, random drive-by types, and I am not surprised, basically because Sylvia Plath is a DIVIDER, I have found. There are different CAMPS – the “She was a terrible woman” camp, the “Ted Hughes was an evil man” camp, the “Oh, poor Sylvia” camp, and the “Oh, poor Aurelia” camp. I am sure there are more camps out there. It doesn’t matter. I have never felt the need to come down, for good, in one of those camps, because, frankly, I’m in it for the poetry.

My experience of Plath has changed over the years, and I have found myself drifting in and out of different “camps”, as my own experience of life has gone on. It’s hard not to see Ted Hughes’ agony, once you’ve lived a little bit, once you’ve been in relationships yourself. But that’s neither here nor there. Sylvia the woman is, yes, interesting. I’ve read every word ever written about her, and I can say that with complete confidence. BUT, without the poetry, who cares? To toss out the POETRY because you think Sylvia Plath was a crazy beeyotch is stupid. Plenty of crazy disturbed unpleasant people have made art that will live through the ages. I don’t need to “approve” of someone’s character, in order to say “I like their art” – and this is an argument I have had many times on my site. But sometimes, with Plath, it’s really hard to actually talk about the WORK, because of the background noise surrounding her. Her defenders are sometimes the worst! Because THEY don’t want to talk about the poetry either! It’s a cult of personality, plain and simple. I find that fascinating. Very few poets have such a hold on people, and much of it has to do with her suicide, and also the posthumous publication of the “Ariel” poems that she had been writing in the months previous. I don’t think Plath’s death makes the Ariel poems better than they are. Oh, no. These are incredible shattering poems, breathless in their artistry and scope, and would have made a mark regardless. But the suicide definitely added to their power (“the woman who wrote these is now dead!!”), and now it becomes hard to see them as poems at all (for some people, I mean). It’s like an extended suicide note. But no. There is so much more there.

Sylvia tormented herself trying to be conventional (many of her problems arose from what she felt was expected from her – as a daughter, as a wife, as a woman, in general) – and bleaching her hair was part of a necessary rebellion. Also, she started having sex. Left and right. No more good 1950s girl. That “be a good girl” thing had nearly killed her. Her doctor at the time encouraged this rebellion, and taught her about birth control, so she could at least have sex safely. This was a revelation to Sylvia. Any type of artist will always be on the fringe of polite society. If an artist tries desperately to fit in to some mainstream – if an artist really worries about what an uptight person thinks of how he or she lives … then that artist just won’t survive. The strict rules on women at that time were fetters around Sylvia’s wrists. NOT CARING what people thought of her – was one of the biggest breakthroughs in her life. NOT CARING if people whispered, “She’s a slut.”

And they did. Especially when she got to England on her Fulbright. Tapping into her REBEL, into her “I just don’t care” persona … was really important – but ultimately, it didn’t matter at all. Because once she got married and once she had kids – these old conventional “roles” started constricting her again (she writes about it extensively in her poems) … It seemed that there was an incompatability: between the poetess and the woman. Could she be a wife and ALSO a poet? What were the expectations of her? It did not help matters (although she might have thought it would) that she married not just another poet – but one of the most important up-and-coming poets in England – a man who eventually (years later) would be Poet Laureate. Like – Ted Hughes was a big deal. And he was on his way to becoming a big deal when Sylvia met him. How can two poets tryiing to make their names – live together? Was Sylvia expected to be a good 1950s wife? Ted Hughes insists (and he has also written extensively about it) that he did not expect that at all. When he first met Sylvia at a party – they both were drunk – and they basically found themselves in an empty room – making out ferociously. Sylvia bit his cheek so hard she drew blood. They were married 4 months later. THIS was their beginning. There was no nice good-girl 1950s courtship. They didn’t go out for sodas and a drive-in. No. They were bohemians, for God’s sake. They were poets. People like that don’t live by society’s rules, nor should they. (Especially if the rules are stupid.) But Ted, in some of his later poems, has described how baffled and hurt he was – after their marriage – when Sylvia suddenly got writer’s block. She had writer’s block for an agonizing year, year and a half – directly after their wedding. Hmmmm, coincidence? I think not. It seems apparent that Sylvia was so terrified of doing BETTER than her husband that … everything shut down. She then tried to be the perfect housewife – and … Ted, again, was hurt and confused by this. Where is that wild poetess? Where is my crazy American girl who shouts out lines of Chaucer to the cows? Why is she in the kitchen, tears running down her face, trying to bake pies? I mean … what has happened??

Then I look at the picture of her with her two kids (taken a month or so before she committed suicide) –

Actually, I believe her mother took that photograph during her fateful visit to her daughter. Sylvia was living in England – and her husband Ted Hughes had just left her for another woman. Comparing that photograph to the blonde bikini one – it;s hard to believe it’s the same person. Perhaps there’s something similar in the smile – there’s something phony in both smiles, to my eye. Anyway, I find it fascinating – perusing the photos of Sylvia Plath.

Not nearly as fascinating as her poems themselves which have never lost their power – no matter how times I have read them.

I have gone through a bunch of Plath phases – and I am sure I will go through more. I continue to re-visit her work, every couple of years … and re-read all those 1960-1963 poems again – sometimes in order – sometimes muddling it up – and every single time, even though I always have different responses, and sometimes one poem suddenly seems THE BEST when a couple years before it was another poem that was obviously HER BEST – but anyway, every single time I read those poems from her last 3 years, they take my breath away. They’re no picnic – they are bleak, unforgiving, relentless- especially if you read them chronologically. If you read them chronologically – you can feel herself get manic – in October of 62 – and she starts cranking out 2, 3, sometimes 4 poems a day. These were not pot-boilers, folks. These poems are now taught in colleges courses. These are the poems that would make her name. “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus”, “Fever 103”, the beekeeping poems – these are great American poems. She wasn’t just scribbling out insane manic fantasies – these are highly intricate, passionate poems with detailed complicated structures. Obviously manic – when you see how many she was putting out a day … and then there is a brief falling away for a month – December … she was still writing, but obviously it was the calm before the storm.

Then January and February 1963 came along – and I believe it was the coldest winter London had ever had – and her pipes froze – and she had no help, and two young babies – and things started getting worse and worse in her mind. And her art kicked in yet again – with ferocity and power. She would write these poems at 4 in the morning – her only time to herself. So you can feel the wheels start cranking again – in January, February – she wrote some of her best poems then. They are more frightening, however, than the October poems. She is staring at death, she is beginning to embrace the idea of death … Death is always a factor in Plath’s poems, but it takes on a new form in those last couple of poems. It is no longer just a fantasy, death is no longer a dream-lover in the night … she is now making plans. The rage of October (which gave us such poems as Daddy, and Poppies in October, and the entire bee-keeping sequence) is now gone. And you can feel a chilling resolve creep into her work. She is getting ready to go.

I have interspersed the photos of Plath I found with some of my favorite of her poems.

In honor of her birthday, here’s one that she actually wrote about her upcoming birthday – in 1962. She wrote this poem, now one of her most well-known, on Sept. 30 1962 … right before the blast of creativity and rage that would fuel her through that painful next month. Sylvia always had a fatalistic thing with birthdays:

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.

That’s a picture of Sylvia from 1953 – right before her first suicide attempt. She was living with her mother – and her mother made her take shorthand classes and typing classes (again: there is something evil about that. That very same attitude is why Barbra Streisand has always had such long nails. People laugh at those nails, or make fun of Babs for them … but I see them, and I love them. Because to her – those nails meant freedom. Her mother was pretty much totally negative about Barbra’s actual goals – she wanted to have a normal daughter – so she signed her up for typing classes. In rebellion, Babs grew her nails to extraordinary length so that even if she wanted to learn how to type – she couldn’t. The nails got in the way. So when I see those nails now – on a 60 something year old woman – I smile. It’s a reminder.) There is a story here – of the mother who truly DOESN’T love her daughter. She doesn’t. Otherwise – she would love her for who she actually IS, not who she wants her to be. Aurelia Plath never got that. Sylvia, at the end of her life, was starting to come to terms with that. She writes, quite blatantly, in her journal, “I can never live near my mother again.” And her mother comes to visit in Oct. 1962 – right after Ted has moved out – to be with Assia Wevill – the woman he was having an affair with – and Sylvia was absolutely tormented by having her mother see her in such a weak moment. To her, it was unforgivable. She wrote her poem “Medusa” about that experience – which is, you know, shocking in its hatred, and anger. But again: poets who live by society’s rules and play well with others are usually not poets to be reckoned with. Sylvia coming to terms with her rage was part of her finding her voice.

“The Moon and the Yew Tree” was written in 1961 – and is considered a breakthrough – by those who have studied Plath’s work. In it – she finds some of that cold clear eerie imagery – that she will write about until the very end. She looks out her window and sees a moon, a church, and a black yew tree. It is a beautiful image – and yet … in the poem … it becomes a harbinger. Of death, doom.

And personally – I think the first line of this poem is one of her best lines ever.

The moon and the yew tree

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky —-
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness —-
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness — blackness and silence

Little Fugue

The yew’s black fingers wag:
Cold clouds go over.
So the deaf and dumb
Signal the blind, and are ignored.

I like black statements.
The featurelessness of that cloud, now!
White as an eye all over!
The eye of the blind pianist

At my table on the ship.
He felt for his food.
His fingers had the noses of weasels.
I couldn’t stop looking.

He could hear Beethoven:
Black yew, white cloud,
The horrific complications.
Finger-traps–a tumult of keys.

Empty and silly as plates,
So the blind smile.
I envy big noises,
The yew hedge of the Grosse Fuge.
Deafness is something else.
Such a dark funnel, my father!
I see your voice
Black and leafy, as in my childhood.

A yew hedge of orders,
Gothic and barbarous, pure German.
Dead men cry from it.
I am guilty of nothing.

The yew my Christ, then.
Is it not as tortured?
And you, during the Great War
In the California delicatessen

Lopping off the sausages!
They colour my sleep,
Red, mottled, like cut necks.
There was a silence!

Great silence of another order.
I was seven, I knew nothing.
The world occurred.
You had one leg, and a Prussian mind.

Now similar clouds
Are spreading their vacuous sheets.
Do you say nothing?
I am lame in the memory.

I remember a blue eye,
A briefcase of tangerines.
This was a man, then!
Death opened, like a black tree, blackly.

I survive the while,
Arranging my morning.
These are my fingers, this my baby.
The clouds are a marriage of dress, of that pallor.

The Bee Meeting (this is one of the poems in her famous “bee sequence” – which she cranked out at 1 or 2 a day, during October of 1962.)

Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the villagers —
The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.
In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection,
And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me?
They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient hats.

I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?
Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock,
Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees.
Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice.
They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.

Which is the rector now, is it that man in black?
Which is the midwife, is that her blue coat?
Everybody is nodding a square black head, they are knights in visors,
Breastplates of cheesecloth knotted under the armpits.

Their smiles and their voces are changing. I am led through a beanfield.

Strips of tinfoil winking like people,
Feather dusters fanning their hands in a sea of bean flowers,
Creamy bean flowers with black eyes and leaves like bored hearts.
Is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging up that string?
No, no, it is scarlet flowers that will one day be edible.

Now they are giving me a fashionable white straw Italian hat
And a black veil that molds to my face, they are making me one of them.
They are leading me to the shorn grove, the circle of hives.
Is it the hawthorn that smells so sick?
The barren body of hawthon, etherizing its children.

Is it some operation that is taking place?
It is the surgeon my neighbors are waiting for,
This apparition in a green helmet,
Shining gloves and white suit.
Is it the butcher, the grocer, the postman, someone I know?

I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me
With its yellow purses, its spiky armory.
I could not run without having to run forever.
The white hive is snug as a virgin,
Sealing off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming.

Smoke rolls and scarves in the grove.
The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything.
Here they come, the outriders, on their hysterical elastics.
If I stand very still, they will think I am cow-parsley,
A gullible head untouched by their animosity,

Not even nodding, a personage in a hedgerow.
The villagers open the chambers, they are hunting the queen.
Is she hiding, is she eating honey? She is very clever.
She is old, old, old, she must live another year, and she knows it.
While in their fingerjoint cells the new virgins

Dream of a duel they will win inevitably,
A curtain of wax dividing them from the bride flight,
The upflight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her.
The villagers are moving the virgins, there will be no killing.
The old queen does not show herself, is she so ungrateful?

I am exhausted, I am exhausted —
Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.
I am the magician’s girl who does not flinch.
The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands.
Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold.

Fever 103 (another Oct. 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.

The Couriers (written in Nov. 1962)

The word of a snail on the plate of a leaf?
It is not mine. Do not accept it.

Acetic acid in a sealed tin?
Do not accept it. It is not genuine.

A ring of gold with the sun in it?
Lies. Lies and a grief.

Frost on a leaf, the immaculate
Cauldron, talking and crackling

All to itself on the top of each
Of nine black Alps.

A disturbance in mirrors,
The sea shattering its grey one –

Love, love, my season.

I think the following poem is the saddest she ever wrote. Now who can ever say what is in the mind of another – and it is always a dangerous thing to read too much into these poems (at least in a biographical way). They are, after all, art. But I believe that one of the reasons she killed herself is to spare her children a mother whose face was “a ceiling without a star”. Not that that excuses her actions. But she wrote this poem in January of 1963, 2 weeks before she put her head in the oven. I find this poem nearly unreadable in its sadness. Yet – wonderful writing as well.

Child

Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new

Whose names you meditate —
April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little

Stalk without wrinkle,
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical

Not this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes – newlyweds. Happier days. What a gorgeous couple they were.

And this is the last poem that Sylvia Plath completed. It’s chilling, yes, but standing alone – as a poem – I think there’s a lot to talk about here, a lot of stuff – not just biographical.

And I’m sorry – but the line “her blacks crackle and drag” is … I mean, it’s just fantastic genius-level imagery with major staying power, that’s all. “Her blacks crackle and drag.” (And yes … let me just throw a shout-out to Paul Westerberg – who has also recognized the genius imagery in that line.) It’s scary. “Crackle”? “Drag?” All kinds of very frightening images come to mind in those two simple words … and the internal rhyme of “blacks” and “crackle” make it seem even more eerie. I’m not a literary critic but I will NEVER be done reading this last poem. She completed it on February 4, 1963. She killed herself on February 11.

Edge

The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion 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 odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.

Let us not do a disservice to this great artist and see her only in terms of her self-inflicted end. Let us look at her art, please. Let us focus on that. If we can remove the context of her life from the poems; what is left? What do we see? What about those words, huh? What about her WORK?

Other posts I have written about Plath:

Being a Plath fan

On The Bell Jar

On the re-issuing of “Ariel”

The Plath/Hughes exhibit

On Assia Wevill

The letters of Ted Hughes