The Sylvia Plath post

That is some fine writing. Believe it or not, my first encounter with her poetry.

Most of her poetry is wonderful, drom....
I haven't been reading it, but since you brought it up, now, I think you should give us MORE...

I never heard of her , however, if you could supply some info about her bio. It would help define her work.

Edgar: I agree. That was your first time you've read her? I'm glad that I decided to post!

Hey, TOL : which poems of hers did you particularly like? I will post some more right now-- I'm just getting down the Collected Poems from the bookshelf (a purchase that I've not regretted.)

I found this poem really interesting:

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.

And this one's one of my favourites:

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly ----

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky

Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

The hills step off into whiteness.
People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

The train leaves a line of breath.
O slow
Horse the colour of rust,

Hooves, dolorous bells ----
All morning the
Morning has been blackening,

A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.

They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

I found this while I was searching for poems from Ariel:

Excerpt from 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 grey 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 Nausset.
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 Dacau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy 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, you gobbledygoo.
And your neat moustache
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 this 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.

Her life and death seem both so tragic--
such as this loss of her Dad at an early age.
Sometimes grief brings out the talent, tho.... sure did in her life.

I must not know good poetry when I see it-I don't really like her work.

I love her.

I think it is difficult, though, to separate out her work from the myth - particularly the radical feminist seizure of her as a martyr, and the vilification of Hughes.

Who can know the truth of another's marriage, and reality?

I love Hughes too. His last book of poetry is so moving.

When the dust clears, a more reasonable appraisal can be made.

Meanwhile - they are both wonderful poets in my view.

Dys-- I love 'Sheep In Fog;' I was thinking of that last night. She always seems to get the right combination between description and emotion, which is enviable.

Tol-- you're right. She had the ability to express such torrents of grief without alienating the reader, in a beautiful way. I wonder whether her poems would be as timeless as the majority of the things that she wrote if she were not so troubled?

Individual-- out of interest, what poets do you like?

Deb-- I agree with you. The assumption that one can only appreciate either Hughes or Sylvia is hugely short-sighted. I prefer Plath's work to Hughes', but I think that Hughes was a great poet too. We never will know the truth about their marriage: it's impossible, because there's no such thing as one truth that covers years. When younger, I was thoroughly against what I saw as Hughes' making cash out of Plath, but I see it as much more, now:

He loved her and she loved him
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future, or tried to.

Plath was probably better when she didn't constrain herself to such things as vilanelles, but I like 'Mad Girl's Love Song...'

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

There are a lot of poets who I like a little bit, but I can safely say that I love Walt Whitman's work.

I love his work too; what's your favoured Whitman poem?

*Deleting double-posted poem!*

This one's to her then unborn child, Frieda.

You're[/b]

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,
Gilled like a fish. A common-sense
Thumbs-down on the dodo's mode.
Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,
Trawling your dark as owls do.
Mute as a turnip from the Fourth
Of July to All Fool's Day,
O high-riser, my little loaf.

Vague as fog and looked for like mail.
Farther off than Australia.
Bent-backed Atlas, our travelled prawn.
Snug as a bud and at home
Like a sprat in a pickle jug.
A creel of eels, all ripples.
Jumpy as a Mexican bean.
Right, like a well-done sum.
A clean slate, with your own face on.

Here's an early poem of hers, called 'Love Letter.'

Not easy to state the change you made.
If I'm alive now, then I was dead,
Though, like a stone, unbothered by it,
Staying put according to habit.
You didn't just tow me an inch, no-
Nor leave me to set my small bald eye
Skyward again, without hope, of course,
Of apprehending blueness, or stars.

That wasn't it. I slept, say: a snake
Masked among black rocks as a black rock
In the white hiatus of winter-
Like my neighbors, taking no pleasure
In the million perfectly-chiseled
Cheeks alighting each moment to melt
My cheeks of basalt. They turned to tears,
Angels weeping over dull natures,

But didn't convince me. Those tears froze.
Each dead head had a visor of ice.
And I slept on like a bent finger.
The first thing I was was sheer air
And the locked drops rising in dew
Limpid as spirits. Many stones lay
Dense and expressionless round about.
I didn't know what to make of it.
I shone, mice-scaled, and unfolded
To pour myself out like a fluid
Among bird feet and the stems of plants.

I wasn't fooled. I knew you at once.
Tree and stone glittered, without shadows.
My finger-length grew lucent as glass.
I started to bud like a March twig:
An arm and a leg, and arm, a leg.
From stone to cloud, so I ascended.
Now I resemble a sort of god
Floating through the air in my soul-shift
Pure as a pane of ice. It's a gift.

PBS ran a program on Plath this past weekend. Like most women my age (I'll be 57 shortly!), I read her autobiographical novel, "The Bell Jar," when I was in high school and was also a devotee of Vogue magazine. My daughter, who graduated from Smith, never read Plath. Although I seldom read poetry at this point in my life, the program whetted my appetitite for Plath. AM thinking of re-reading The Bell Jar and diving into the poems.

There is some new material on Ted Hughes that softens his image and humanizes him. You might want to look into that. I do.

I have, POM; I have read and cherished 'Birthday Letters' and have scrutinized their relationship, through his letters and her diaries.. it's sad, somewhat, that this question should overshadow the fact that they were two brilliant poets.

I love the Bell Jar; as for Plath's poems, my favourite book is 'Crossing the water,' written before her suicide and after her hyperformality in the Collosus. To me, it's the more fulfilling book: it combines the power of description and feeling of Ariel with the empathy and structure (although 'Crossing's structure's less noticeable) of the Colossus... so Many people think that some of Plath's greatest poems from CTW are actually Ariel poems.. like Face Lift and Mirror.

Here's one of the more neglected pieces from Crossing the water, called 'In Plaster.' This is one of my favourites, along with Child:

I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now:
This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one,
And the white person is certainly the superior one.
She doesn't need food, she is one of the real saints.
At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality --
She lay in bed with me like a dead body
And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was

Only much whiter and unbreakable and with no complaints.
I couldn't sleep for a week, she was so cold.
I blamed her for everything, but she didn't answer.
I couldn't understand her stupid behavior!
When I hit her she held still, like a true pacifist.
Then I realized what she wanted was for me to love her:
She began to warm up, and I saw her advantages.

Without me, she wouldn't exist, so of course she was grateful.
I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose
Blooms out of a vase of not very valuable porcelain,
And it was I who attracted everybody's attention,
Not her whiteness and beauty, as I had at first supposed.
I patronized her a little, and she lapped it up --
You could tell almost at once she had a slave mentality.

I didn't mind her waiting on me, and she adored it.
In the morning she woke me early, reflecting the sun
From her amazingly white torso, and I couldn't help but notice
Her tidiness and her calmness and her patience:
She humored my weakness like the best of nurses,
Holding my bones in place so they would mend properly.
In time our relationship grew more intense.

She stopped fitting me so closely and seemed offish.
I felt her criticizing me in spite of herself,
As if my habits offended her in some way.
She let in the drafts and became more and more absent-minded.
And my skin itched and flaked away in soft pieces
Simply because she looked after me so badly.
Then I saw what the trouble was: she thought she was immortal.

She wanted to leave me, she thought she was superior,
And I'd been keeping her in the dark, and she was resentful --
Wasting her days waiting on a half-corpse!
And secretly she began to hope I'd die.
Then she could cover my mouth and eyes, cover me entirely,
And wear my painted face the way a mummy-case
Wears the face of a pharaoh, though it's made of mud and water.

I wasn't in any position to get rid of her.
She'd supported me for so long I was quite limp --
I had forgotten how to walk or sit,
So I was careful not to upset her in any way
Or brag ahead of time how I'd avenge myself.
Living with her was like living with my own coffin:
Yet I still depended on her, though I did it regretfully.

I used to think we might make a go of it together --
After all, it was a kind of marriage, being so close.
Now I see it must be one or the other of us.
She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy,
But she'll soon find out that that doesn't matter a bit.
I'm collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her,
And she'll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me.

I think that Sylvia spend too much time in dark rooms with electric lights, she needed to get outside more often for longer walks in the woods.

You're right, Dys; but, if one looks at this selfishly, this would probably mean that she'd be stuck seeming like a bad impersonator of her husband.. in Colossus mode; her ambition would lie unfulfilled..

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 name 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.

Since Ariel was a horse on which Plath learned to ride, until she moved with her kids to London -- and if the apt they lived in was the one in the documentary, it was depressing -- she did spend time out of doors.

I wonder whether she would have lived longer, had she not left the countryside.

I Am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimallight of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.