On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)
NEXT BOOK: Seamus Heaney’s Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001
Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes were great friends. Heaney also knew Plath, casually, through his association with Hughes. His essay on Plath comes from a slight remove, which is actually a relief, since so much of the writing about Plath is over-heated, biased, or has a “J’accuse” feeling to it, highlighting her victimhood as though her suicide is the most interesting thing about her. If you love Plath, as I do, and my relationship with her work has gone on for really the majority of my life (I discovered her when I was 15) … then good strong criticism of her actual work is a breath of fresh air. Similar to Elvis Presley, to River Phoenix, to Kurt Cobain … any major artist who “checks out” early ends up making a comment on their work, on their life, through that early death. This happens whether we like it or not. And so everything starts to have portent, because it flows into that early death like an inevitable force. I dislike this approach, although I understand why it happens. What ends up happening is that the work ends up being analyzed ONLY in conjunction with that early death. This gives us the “What if” form of criticism, a level or two above fanfic, and so then more energy is spent being sad about what DIDN’T happen as opposed to joy at what DID happen. I’ve written about this before, mainly in terms of Elvis, but it’s true with a lot of other figures. Sylvia Plath is an interesting case. It IS hard to talk about Plath. How do you get all of that other stuff out of the way? All I can really do is remember my first encounter with her poetry, and how it seared through me with its power, its frightening voice, the unforgettable parade of images (the black yew tree, the buzzing bees in the orchard, the blood-red poppies, the moon rising, eyeless mannequins) … It was one of those moments that happens rarely: where an artist becomes a part of you almost instantly. I read the Ariel poems for the first time and was a fanatic for life. I was in. I would read everything she ever wrote, and I have continued to do so, over and over and over again. It has been a shifting relationship. The adolescent Sheila does not respond to what the adult Sheila responds to. The suicidal Sheila does not respond to what the well Sheila responds to. These poems shift, and morph, and change … depending on where YOU are at.
There are some things I thrilled to at 16 that did not “make the cut” once I grew up a little more. But Plath lasted.
Now about those poems that she wrote in the last months of her life. The poems that would be published posthumously in the Ariel volume. The poems that are taught in classrooms today. It is true that she wrote them at a manic speed, sometimes up to 4 poems a day. Her friends were worried. Yes, the poems were extraordinary, but they scared the shit out of people. The general reaction was: “Wow, these are amazing poems. But … uhm … are you okay?” It was not just the poems that frightened – it was the pace that also frightened. She was headed for a crash. The productivity would end. And then what? But in that time … say, September 1962 to her death in February 1963, she was on fire. The details of her life are well-known so I won’t go into it too much. The thing about these poems, the fall 1962 poems especially, is that they are highly intricate. The “bee poems”. I mean …
And I think the myth is that she tossed these off, her “madness” almost helping to create her “genius,” and blah blah blah. No. The evidence suggests the contrary. Each poem went through multiple rigorous drafts. She kept her drafts, dating them. The first draft may have been “tossed off,” but after that came the painstaking editing process – entire verses slashed, words replaced, re-writing done – all at a condensed and fiery speed. The editing process is belabored. And for Plath it was too. But she was working at warp-speed. What might have taken a month, took a 24-hour period.
There is an entire book written about the “revising” process of the Ariel poems.
Heaney’s essay on Plath is insightful and heartening to any Plath fans who get sick of the “victim narrative” that colors critical assessment of her work. I am going to excerpt from just one section of the essay, where he discusses the poem “Elm,” including its various drafts. The drafts are illuminating because it shows Plath’s mindset as well as her creativity unleashed, her filtering process, her decision-making process. You can feel her whittling away at the images until she reaches the right one. That takes a couple of drafts.
Ted Hughes felt that “Elm,” along with a couple of other key poems, represented the real breakthrough in her work. She had had semi-breakthroughs before, moments that predict the 1962 “voice”. But honestly, her 1950s work, her 1960 work … it’s still labored, careful, precocious. Effective, mind you, with a couple of flashes of what was to come (“The Moon and the Yew Tree,” “Full Fathom Five,” many others) … but Hughes gave us the image of Plath composing poems with a Thesaurus balanced on her knee, and that’s how they read.
Not so the poems that began to explode in the summer/fall of 1962, with the breakup of her marriage. “Elm” is a major poem, and represents a breaking-away from the past for Plath.
It’s fucking scary (just in case you’ve never read it before, and have to prepare yourself.) When I was in high school I had a nightmare about the fourth-to-last stanza. So, you know. Consider yourself warned.
Elm
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?
Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.
All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.
Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.
Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.
The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.
I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?——
Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.
The arch Sylvia, the scholarship-girl, the straight-A student, the overachiever, the Mummy-pleaser … these identities were so strong for Plath, so engrained, that they had to be killed outright. There had to be that strong a break. The psychosis of the 1950s expectation for women … I mean, that was a huge part of it. She had internalized that stuff. Until finally it exploded in her face. From that carnage came the unforgettable voice heard in “Elm.”
Heaney is interested in the poem “Elm,” in Hughes’ observations about it (he included one of the drafts for “Elm” in the Collected Poems of Plath that he edited after her death), and also in Plath’s various drafts. I appreciate his insights because it has to do with language, primarily. Not just psychology or autobiography. But picking “the right words at the right time,” and how Plath worked at that.
Here’s an excerpt.
Excerpt from Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001
Ted Hughes has written about Sylvia Plath’s breakthrough into her deeper self and her poetic fate: he locates the critical moment in her writing at the composition of the poem called “Stones” … In this middle stretch of her journey, she practices the kind of poem adumbrated by Pound – in Canto I, for example – in which a first voice amplifies the scope of its utterance by invoking classical or legendary parallels. These poems are serenely of their age, in that the conventions of modernism and the insight of psychology are relayed in an idiom intensely personal, yet completely available. When we read, for example, the opening lines of ‘Elm,’ the owls in our own dream branches begin to halloo in recognition:
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
In his edition of the Collected Poems, Ted Hughes provides a note to ‘Elm,’ and an earlier draft from which this deeply swayed final version emerged. There are still twenty-one worksheets to go, so the following represents only what Hughes calls ‘a premature crystallization’. (The wych-elm which occasioned the poems grows on the shoulder of a moated prehistoric mound outside the house where Plath and Hughes lived.)
She is not easy, she is not peaceful;
She pulses like a heart on my hill.
The moon snags in her intricate nervous system.
I am excited seeing it there
It is like something she has caught for me.The night is a blue pool; she is very still.
At the centre she is still, very still with wisdom.
The moon is let go, like a dead thing.
Now she herself is darkening
Into a dark world I cannot see at all.
The contrast between this unkindled, external voice and the final voice of “I know the bottom, she says” is astonishing. The draft is analytical and unaroused, a case of ego glancing around on the surface of language. In fact, what Plath is doing here is packaging insights she had arrived at in another definitive tree poem called “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” a subject set by Ted Hughes, who writes in his “Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems”:
Early one morning, in the dark, I saw the full moon setting on to a large yew that grows in the churchyard, and I suggested she make a poem of it. By midday, she had written it. It depressed me greatly. It’s my suspicion that no poem can be a poem that is not a statement from the powers in control of our life, the ultimate suffering and decision in us.
“Elm” clearly comes from a similar place, from the ultimate suffering and decision in Sylvia Plath, but access to that place could not occur until the right rhythm began to turn under her tongue and the sentence-sounds started to roll like flywheels of the poetic voice. The ineffectual wing-beats of “The night is a blue pool; she is very still. / At the centre she is still, very still with wisdom” are like the bird of poetry at the glass pane of intelligence, seeing where it needs to go but unable to gain entry. But the window glass is miraculously withdrawn, and deep free swoops into the blue pool and into the centre are effected with effortless penetration once the new lines begin to run:
Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.
Here too is dramatic evidence of another mark of high achievement, the interweaving of imaginative constants from different parts of the oeuvre. These hooves are related to the hooves of the runaway Ariel, just as they are also pre-echoes of the phantom hoof-taps of “Words.”
The elm utters an elmy consciousness; it communicates in tree-speak: “This is the rain now, this big hush.” But the elm speaks poet-consciousness also. What is exciting to observe in this poem is the mutation of voice; from being a relatively cool literary performance, aware of its behavior as a stand-in for a tree, it gradually turns inward and intensifies. Somewhere in the middle, between a stanza like:
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires
— between this immensely pleasurable mimesis and the far more disturbing expressionism of
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity
— between these two stanzas the poem has carried itself – and the poet, and the reader – from the realm of tactful, estimable writing to the headier, less prescribed realm of the inestimable. It is therefore no surprise to read in Ted Hughes’s notes of 1970 that he perceives “Elm” as the poem which initiates the final phase, that phase whose poems I attempted to characterize earlier as seeming to have sprung into being at the behest of some unforeseen but completely irresistible command.
