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Sylvia Plath Since her death, and more especially since the publications of her posthumous collections of poetry, Sylvia Plath has become a legendary figure and, like so many such figures, inspires other writers to write about her. The woman who learned the craft of poetry the hard way, playing with words and sentence structures, has become a muse in her own right. As more and more of her writing becomes available the poems, the journals, the stories and the letters so the response of readers from different generations changes, though the central image of the woman poet who died young remains intact. No doubt more texts will steadily be made available to readers ad future generations will continue to alter their impressions as those texts appear. At one point, Sylvia Plath apparently planned to gather her magnificent bee poems under the title heading Bees. She had envisioned a formal sequence, much like the then-unpublished, Poem For A Birthday, in which the controversial I of Plath's poetry is regressed to the primeval place of origin, dissolved and reassembled again (in The Stones), enacting the obsessive Plathian psychodrama of death and transfiguration.
Here again, in Bees, Plath sets out on a similar journey, and emerges triumphantly as a murderous queen bee. With the first poem, The Bee Meeting, this redemptive conceit (and the grand plan of a sequence) seems, however, embryonic at best in the poets mind -she gives us instead a devastating portrayal of her situation (the dissolution of her marriage, her sense of abandonment, jealousy, isolation, guilt, and sexual obsolescence) and absorbs the reader in the relentless psychological pull of her own desire for death. As the poem begins, an unknown mysterious catastrophe seems to have occurred, rendering I a veritable amnesiac who can only ask frightened, frantic questions (Who? Which? What? Why? ); stripped, not only of knowledge, but of protection nude as a chicken neck in her sleeveless summery dress. (We can surmise, from examining the poems Plath wrote immediately before this one Words heard, by accident, over the phone, Burning the Letters, For a Fatherless Son, The Detective, et cetera that this catastrophe was Asia Will. ) As in Poem for a Birthday, I finds herself at a point of origin; here, at the foot of the bridge: Spanning the primeval swamp?
The longed-for waters of the womb Tomb? The bridge stands ready for the crossing or the jumping from, One is not sure which The bridge offers transition, a direct passage from one shore to the next, and the contemplation of making the journey to that far shore is the hidden matter of the poem. I surmise that this undiscovered country falls into the same topography as Emily Dickinson's ambivalent Immortality. I will be subjected to a radical detour before her destination can be reached. Does nobody love me?
asks I, one key to the mysterious cloud of threat that hangs over the poem my fear, my fear, my fear. Many readers allude to pagan ritual, which revolved so keenly around the question of fertility. Fertility is indeed a primary issue at stake, burning in the consciousness of this poet so quick to label her own work stillborn and who is reeling in the aftermath of sexual betrayal. Abandonment, sexual competition, fertility / pollination these themes pulse throughout the poem as the amnesiac speaker finds herself curiously attuned, one woman telepathically linked to another, to the minds of the old queen bee (she must live another year, and she knows it) and her virgin rivals. From an email correspondence by Janice Green, a professional beekeeper: It has been long taught that when a new virgin queen hatches out in a hive she fights the old queen and the best queen wins.
It doesnt always happen this way, however. Often the bees will tolerate the old queen and both will lay eggs until the old queen gives out. If there are two virgins in the colony, one might kill the other. This will most likely happen shortly after the first virgin hatches.
She will search out the other cells and kill the queens before they hatch out. A happy feminist utopia of communal egg laying does not seem to be in the cards for this old queen, hunted from within (Green suspects that the beekeepers are looking for the old queen to replace her with a new queen An old queen isnt very stable and is subject to being replaced), in hiding as the virgins sharpen their knives like King Lears bloodthirsty Regan and General, dreaming of a duel they will win inevitably, their encroaching coup data. Also utmost on the minds of the new virgins is the bride flight, / the up flight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her. Plath is syntactically fuzzy here as to whose blood they anticipate on their hands that of the old queen or that of the male drones, or both? Janice Green writes: The virgin queens make one mating flight when the drones and most of the worker bees fly up into the air. The queen must mate while flying, so several drones will mate with her as she flies up into the air. (After which the mated drones die. ) Unable to root out the old queen, the beekeepers elect to extend her life by removing the new queen cells in order to prevent swarming. (Faulty beekeeper logic, says Janice Green, and indeed a few poems later we have a Swarm in full force).
The queens reaction (she does not show herself) is ambivalent is she so ungrateful? An almost disappointed air of impending obsolescence and mortality hangs over the old queens coffin-like hive (and over I herself) as the poem comes to an end. Strange, upsetting, writes Alvarez in The Savage God concerning The Bee Meeting. Like so many of Plath's greatest poems, the poem has the quality of nightmare or a painting by Magritte, in which the smallest object seems fraught with hidden significance, vaguely reminding the reader of something else. Whether consciously or not, she often laces her work with clever clues to the cipher of her poetic cryptograms. The Bee Meeting is an extraordinary case in point.
Three days before writing The Bee Meeting, Plath composed the famous A Birthday Present (providing the psychological bridge between Poem for a Birthday and the Bees sequence). In it, Plath reveals that she, like the Virgin Mary, is slated for an annunciation a mystical insemination and that the unwrapped, mysterious birthday present is, ideally, her own death. Here, in The Bee Meeting, like Mia Farrow in Roman Polanskis classic 1968 film Rosemary's Baby, the innocent I, with (her) fear, (her) fear, (her) fear, becomes an apprehensive virgin being led to the deadly conjugal bed itself. Surrounded by blood clots, those scarlet flowers, defloration is in the air. A blackout occurs, and the speaker returns to consciousness exhausted exhausted (reminiscent again of contemporary accounts of alien abduction, with their lost time phenomenon, and medieval encounters with the faeries).
Following the operation (removing the new queen cells from the hive), the villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands over a job well done. The eerie closing lines give the remarkable suggestion of I struggling to orient herself in the aftermath of a rape: Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold. The Bee Meeting closes with the white box of the hive doubling as both coffin and cradle. Is the promised child Plath's suicide (her rebirth) or the Ariel poems themselves? (Compare, Thalidomide, with its monstrous embryo). It might be argued that the Bees sequence, with its arrival of a womb-like box full of murderous bees, is not concerned with the rebirth of Sylvia Plath in any literal sense, but with the carrying to term of the collection of poems (a swarm of words, stings, axes compare Words) that would ultimately bring about the poets Immortality. In the poets own words: I am writing the poems of my life.
They will make my name. Cut is certainly a fine example of Sylvia Plath in ghoulish high spirits, gaily comparing her cut thumb to the Japanese bombings of World War II and a lynching by the Ku Klux Klan, although I am not sure how this becomes relevant or consciousness-raising on Plath's part. Complete with a John Wayne impersonation (Little pilgrim / The Indians axed your scalp), Cut seems more convincing as an exercise in camp, Plath as wounded veteran of the kitchen wars. The poem gives the reader fond glimpse of the dirty side of Scorpio Sylvia Plath, which revels in yuck a trait that reaches its apotheosis in the famous boogers entry in the Journals, in which Plath rhapsodies on the illicit sensuous delight I get from picking my nose: Or sometimes there will be blood mingled with the mucus: in dry brown scabs, or bright sudden wet red on the finger that scraped too rudely the nasal membranes.
God, what a sexual satisfaction! Plath dedicates Cut to her brand new au pair, Susan ONeill Roe, in what seems a sort of welcome to the family gesture. One can only imagine Roes reaction to this bloody love gift, and marvel at Plath's complexity. Welcoming aboard what amounts to an extra pair of hands (and perhaps an unconsciously threatening surrogate mum for the children), Plath presents her new helpmeet with her own severed thumb. Emily Dickinson had a strange habit of sending ambivalent condolences and tokens of affection out to the sleepy doorstops of Amherst, Massachusetts. Here, as a mild example, is a note Dickinson attaches to a gift of fruit: My Heart upon a little Plate Her Palate to delight A Berry or a Bun, would be, Might it an Apricot.
The matronly recipient is transformed by Dickinson's subtle black magic into a cannibal, a tribal high priestess astride a bloody altar. One might expect such a hors doeurve to be served up at a Morticia Adams dinner party. Cut falls in the midst of the wildly bitchy wave of poems describing the day-to-day particular hells of Plath's domestic life, the beginning of which I place with The Applicant on 11 October 1962 and which climaxes with the transcendent, suicidal Ariel on her birthday, 27 October. In every one of these poems, Plath symbolically cuts a cord, a tie to her domestic life (husband, parents, friends, in-laws, her sick body, et cetera), and attempts a casting off, a transcendence, an escape. Each poem ends with either an utterly final pronouncement of victory (a death sentence) or, when that fails, a viciously sarcastic dig, an anvil dropped upon enemy heads. What, then, are we to make of the barrage of name calling Plath lets loose upon her poor thumb at the end of Cut?
I connect this poem with a twin, Fever 103, in its focus on the physical life in the body, physical illness, fever, cut, blood. Fever 103 is a stunningly complex poem of metamorphosis. Comprised of its own mixture of high drama and high camp, the poem shows us an Apollonian Plath fantasizing herself ritualistically free from her Dionysian body, free from the physical aspects of life. This is the yearning for escape and transcendence into spirit that she will dramatize in Ariel. It is the blissful amnesia that Plath increasingly craves as she steadily coaxes herself toward her suicide. Written a few days after Fever, Cut is an abrupt dash of cold water.
In Cut, the poet is betrayed by her own flesh, a rude reminder that the yearned-for metamorphosis is simply a pipe dream. In the ancient Greek theatre, which was dedicated to the god Dionysus, the high seriousness of the tragedies was always followed by the bawdy, physical humour of the satyr plays. The fundamental key to comedy is the coarse, triumphant upset of rigid, hieratic Apollo by fluid, chaotic Dionysus, the great leveller. Cut, with its bloody kitchen accident and campy tone, is the comic and deadly serious reply of Dionysus to the Apollonian Fever 103. I say deadly serious because running underneath the surface of this piece of light verse, there are the inevitable dark currents. From the moment Plath personifies her thumb (O my/ Homunculus), the poem becomes subtly autobiographical.
Plath, welcoming her new nurse, feels like a cripple, a trepanned veteran. We are given a vision of the poet lost in the silent, godless land of the dead we encountered in The Moon and the Yew Tree. The death sentence, the anvil Plath chooses to drop, is directed at no other enemy than her herself, delivered in a litany of self-reproach and self-loathing: Dirty girl, Thumb stump. Tulips is a poem where the speaker attempts to relinquish identity, yet is acutely exposed and defined within responses to the symbolic visual and emotional disruption of the tulips. Sylvia Plath weaves dense metaphorical eddies in which the speaker s temporal carnality is ironically affirmed through a passive and soothing immersion in the imagery of death and release. This deathly imagery is potently juxtaposed with the contrasting pain of living.
The third and fourth stanzas are recognisable as a point of enjambment where the metaphorical tones heighten to offer the reader an increasingly vivid and expanded grasp on the speaker s position. To appreciate the depth of this shift, the poem must be examined in its entirety. The rich use of metaphor can be primarily explored through the poems pol arising representations of colour the contrast of the violent and invasive tulip-red, to the numbing sanctuary of clinical white. Plath extensively employs the further metaphorical devices of religion, water and animals. The puritan guise of religion allows sections of the poem s descriptive passages to assume distinctly sombre and ritualistic tones, alluding also to the purity of white and the elevation of the spiritual over the personal.
Equally, the rhythmic, soothing and eroding properties of ocean or water etches deeper symbolism and tension into Plath s narrative process enforcing the speaker s desire for anonymity within an all-engulfing, cleansing rise of anesthetizing water. This dense, centrifugal use of metaphor is introduced in the first stanza through the use of the imperative verb look suggesting a sense of self-consciousness on the part of the speaker. This sentiment has often led to Plath s work being labelled as confessional; this aspect of Tulips also invites further analysis, yet a clear distinction must remain between the art form and the author. The poem opens frenetically; major thematic tones are established early, and polarised in extremely emotive tones.
Initially the prominent metaphorical device is that of colour. While at first not identified as red, the excitable tulips (merely as a representation of colour) acutely define the opposing white. The tulips equate with the outside world, they embody life, vitality, spring and warmth; they introduce the rousing distraction of colour. Ironically, the vitality of the tulips descriptively inverts to intensely amplify the numbing achromatic white. The peacefulness of white opposes to the noise of colour, deflecting the intruding outside world. The speaker describes how the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
Light is not absorbed, but merely lies. It is passive white, and not striking colour that obliterates all. Plath develops this powerful notion of colour, with the introduction of animal imagery. The eye between two white lids personifies gulls with the rhythmic passage of white-capped nurses. Plath furthers the use of personification to a higher degree where the tulips acquire aural and tactile energy allowing the reader to hear the tulip s breathing, pierce through the gift paper. Their intense red talks to the speakers wound; it is a stabbing and noisy (like an awful baby) reminder of the suppressed pain of reality.
This adaptation of animal or human characteristics is incrementally drawn into a vivid depiction of the dangerous red tulips, opening like the mouth of some great African cat. A tapestry of active and violent language is juxtaposed with the sombre and surrendering tone of the speaker s self-descriptive language. The speaker s identity is heightened in the third stanza as the lumbering cargo boat is swabbed clear of loving associations. A sense of history is inscribed, through the passive relinquishment of the speaker s once precious possessions: my test, my bureaus of linen, my books femininity, order and academic attachments are collated, and then shunned. These characteristics are seen as emotional surplus, they are relinquished in favour of spirituality. The speaker remains physically inert in the almost tranquil rise of water, subject to its corrosive yet cleansing properties.
There are further allusions to holy water, baptism, and meditation within the text. This antiseptic, almost religious process furthers the erosion of worldly pain and distances the unbearable din of explosions. This imagery also acts as a prelude to a notable thematic departure (the fifth stanza) from the baggage of life and its painful associations, to a tenable spiritual link with a premise Plath had previously named the art of dying. The speaker recoils at the increasing agony of an emotionally cluttered life, yet is comforted (dazed) by the dispassionate vacuum of death. The anaesthetised peacefulness induces a sensory clarity evoking feelings of familiarity and longing at the prospect of death. Death is defined by its emptiness; there is a ritualistic simplicity in death that eschews the unbearable demands of life.
Death asks nothing, whereas the tulips command the stupid pupil s attention, and they hurt the speaker. The ritual (and perhaps the art) of death takes on religious connotations. Death is vacuous, yet it embodies spiritual sustenance through the religious guise of a Communion tablet. The speaker is aware that it is this finality that the dead close on.
The tulips maintain a white-knuckled grip upon all things considered harmful in the outside world. Their redness is a hepatic connection that corresponds to the speaker s wounds. Plath powerfully communicates the sensory excitement of physical pain in a selection of her other texts. The poem Cut follows this element, as a wound becomes a thrill; contrasting blood red plush with dead white skin. As with Tulips, the speaker in Cut is more comfortably defined through a wound rather than the dull white imagery of life. Throughout this poem, Plath heavily relies on colour related symbols to represent aspects of her own life and imparts her situation excellently.
The Thin People is an example of what both Hughes and Alvarez term the apprentice Plath, whose chaotic depths are never allowed to disturb the glass-like surface composure of her poems, yet give tantalizing hints of the daemon lurking beneath. This quality, spiced with the luxury of hindsight, makes for an extremely curious poem. The Thin People, the title of which is a euphemism for the victims of the Nazi death camps, is a poem about racism, specifically anti-Semitism; the thin people and the Jews can, I think, be seen as synonymous therein. It is clear that the origin of The Thin People lies in Plath's childhood memories of the horrific newsreels documenting the Nazi concentration camps that so shocked the world and from which her contemporaries were still attempting to recover: the emaciated survivors, the dead stacked like matchsticks. Meagre of dimension as the grey people On a movie-screen. They Are unreal, we say: It was only in a movie, it was only In a war making evil headlines when we Were small We can see in this poem a foreshadowing, a stirring of the Nazi imagery that will reach it s peak and full flower five years later in Ariel.
Plath in her younger years could not blind herself to the prolonged media coverage of war crime trials such as the one of Adolph Eichmann. This ongoing media event riveted the attentions of the entire world as the full, detailed horror of the Nazi extermination machines were revealed and dictators of genocide were brought to justice. However, whereas in Ariel, Plath will wholeheartedly identify herself with the Holocaust victims, in The Thin People, a curious thing occurs. Plath adopts a tone of annoyance. The poet resents the thin people, the mere existence of whom undermines her carefully constructed facade of plump prosperity and pastel perfection, her wallpapered Frieze of cabbage roses and cornflowers. Her diction is delicately hostile, daintily mocking: stalky limbs Wrapped in flea ridden donkey skins / Empty of complaint, forever / Drinking vinegar from tin cups so weedy a race How they prop each other up!
What sets out to be a mournful lyric becomes a weirdly comical poem in which the poet bemoans such revolting inconveniences as hunger, genocide, poverty. The poem, like all of Plath's poems, is about Plath herself, as much as she would like to hide behind a masking we. One can see in the pieces central conflict a clear parallel to the dire struggle between the vivacious, All-American Alpha girl and the frightened, suicidal, Plutonic persona lurking underneath. Use of irony in Plath s work is always an evil eye, to keep darkness at bay, a mode of psychic self-defence lying at the root of the carefully masked hostility and chilling horror just rippling the surface of these strange, arch verses. The thin people, who could not remain in dreams / Could not remain outlandish victims / In the contracted country of the head, are the very same spectres who haunt Plath's own nightmares the dreams of deformed and tortured people which Plath identifies as guilty visions connected with her fathers death (Journals, p. 301). Thus, the thin people are, in a deep sense, Plath herself, in a multiplicity of image reminiscent of the surrealistic climax of Orson Welles 1948 film classic The Lady from Shanghai Plath as the luminous Rita Hayworth, trapped in the Crazy House/Hall of Mirrors, desperately blasting a pistol to defend herself but merely shattering her own grotesque, fractured reflection.
A confessional poet, an extremist poet, a post-romantic poet, a pre-feminist poet, a suicidal poet all these terms have been used (and are still being used) in attempts to define and explain Sylvia Plath s writing. Some readers have seen her as a schizoid, carrier of a death wish that they perceive in everything she ever wrote. Others have seen her as a victim of male brutality, destroyed by a faithless husband. Having been undermined by an ambitious mother, overcompensating for her own inadequate marriage. There is no doubt that equally extravagant explanations of her writing will be theorized in the future, since, like the works of other poets who share the dubious honour of having died young, her writing does not slot easily into categories and headings. Her writings will continue to intrigue and confuse the best of critic indefinitely.
Bibliography: Selected Works by Sylvia Plath The Journals of Sylvia Plath, eds Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough (New York, The Dial Press, 1982). Ariel (London, Faber and Faber, 1965; New York, Harper and Row, 1966). The Bell Jar (London, Heinemann, 1963; Faber and Faber, 1966; New York, Harper and Row, 1971). Selected Works about Sylvia Plath Alvarez, A. , The Savage God (London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971; New York, Random House, 1972).
Poems: The Thin People They are always with us, the thin people Meagre of dimension as the grey people On a movie-screen. They Are unreal, we say: It was only in a movie, it was only In a war making evil headlines when we Were small that they famished and Grew so lean and would not round Out their stalky limbs again though peace Plumped the bellies of the mice Under the meanest table. It was during the long hunger-battle They found their talent to persevere In thinness, to come, later, Into our bad dreams, their menace Not guns, not abuses, But a thin silence. Wrapped in flea ridden donkey skins, Empty of complaint, forever Drinking vinegar from tin cups: they wore The insufferable nimbus of the lot-drawn Scapegoat.
But so thin, So weedy a race could not remain in dreams, Could not remain outlandish victims In the contracted country of the head Any more than the old woman in her mud hut could Keep from cutting fat meat Out of the side of the generous moon when it Set foot nightly in her yard Until her knife had pared The moon to a rind of little light. Now the thin people do not obliterate Themselves as the dawn Greyness blues, reddens, and the outline Of the world comes clear and fills with color. They persist in the sunlit room: the wall paper Frieze of cabbage-roses and cornflowers pales Under their thin-lipped smiles, Their withering kingship. How they prop each other up! We own no wildernesses rich and deep enough For stronghold against their stiff Battalions. See, how the tree boles flatten And lose their good browns If the thin people simply stand in the forest, Making the world go thin as a wasps nest And green; not even moving their bones.
The Bee Meeting 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 voices are changing.
I am led through a banfield. 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 hawthorn, etherizing its children. Is it some operation that is taking place? It is the surgeon my neighbours 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 armoury.
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 finger joint cells the new virgins Dream of a duel they will win inevitably, A curtain of wax dividing them from the bride flight, The up flight 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 magicians 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. Cut For Susan ONeill Roe What a thrill - My thumb instead of an onion. The top quite gone Except for a sort of a hinge Of skin, A flap like a hat, Dead white. Then that red plush.
Little pilgrim, The Indians axed your scalp. Your turkey wattle Carpet rolls Straight from the heart. I step on it, Clutching my bottle Of pink fizz. A celebration, this is. Out of a gap A million soldiers run, Redcoats, every one.
Whose side are they on? O my Homunculus, I am ill. I have taken a pill to kill The thin Papery feeling. Saboteur, Kamikaze man The stain on your Gauze Ku Klux Klan Babushka Darkens and tarnishes and when The balled Pulp of your heart Confronts its small Mill of silence How you jump- Trepanned veteran, Dirty girl, Thumb stump.
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