Three Decent Poems by Sylvia Plath

The "Restored Edition" of Sylvia Plath's most famous work, Ariel, published in 2004 by HarperCollins is worth reading as in it there is a foreword by her daughter Frieda Hughes that kindly takes the view that her father was not at all that bad, but that her mother's poems in their original order and verse were somewhat better. Having not read the original Ariel, I am not one to compare, but it makes complete sense to me, and something that should have been done long ago. The idea that Ted Hughes edited and arranged the original Ariel is flabbergasting at best, especially in light of the fact that Plath quit allowing the philandering Hughes to even look at her poems while they were separated. But what can you do when you are still married to someone and accidentally kill yourself? Had she known her suicide attempt would work, that her landlord would fall asleep too, my bet is she would have left implicit instructions for her manuscript. At least Frieda felt the final placement of her work on her table implicit enough that she felt the personal need to make her mother's work right again. And I say, good for her.

I have never been a big Sylvia Plath fan. I never saw a Plath poem I could enjoy enough to read more of them. But after reading a piece about Plath written by A. Alvarez in his book The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, I was slightly hooked on this fascinating woman and therefore needed to learn more about her as a poet. I then procured an old sixty minute PBS video of Plath's life story and listened to her actual voice. What interested me the most was her need to read aloud her poems at the end of her short life rather than just let them drift along in a strsnger's consciousness if they happened to read themselves one of her latest ones. Alvarez states in his short biography written of her life that Plath was wanting to read to him all of the time, that she felt her latest work had to be heard as well as read. It is entirely true that Sylvia Plath was writing her very best poems in the last year of her life. As a whole, Ariel fails as a great book of poetry, but it does have some great poems in it. For example:

Getting There

How far is it?
How far is it now?
The gigantic gorilla interior
Of the wheels move, they appal me ---
The terrible brains
Of Krupp, black muzzles
Revolving, the sound
Punching out Absence! Like cannon.
It is Russia I have to get across, it is some was or other.
I am dragging my body
Quietly through the straw of the boxcars.
Now is the time for bribery.
What do wheels eat, these wheels
Fixed to their arcs like gods,
The silver leash of the will ----
Inexorable. And their pride!
All the gods know destinations.
I am a letter in this slot!
I fly to a name, two eyes.
Will there be fire, will there be bread?
Here there is such mud.
It is a trainstop, the nurses
Undergoing the faucet water, its veils, veils in a nunnery,
Touching their wounded,
The men the blood still pumps forward,
Legs, arms piled outside
The tent of unending cries ----
A hospital of dolls.
And the men, what is left of the men
Pumped ahead by these pistons, this blood
Into the next mile,
The next hour ----
Dynasty of broken arrows!

How far is it?
There is mud on my feet,
Thick, red and slipping. It is Adam's side,
This earth I rise from, and I in agony.
I cannot undo myself, and the train is steaming.
Steaming and breathing, its teeth
Ready to roll, like a devil's.
There is a minute at the end of it
A minute, a dewdrop.
How far is it?
It is so small
The place I am getting to, why are there these obstacles ----
The body of this woman,
Charred skirts and deathmask
Mourned by religious figures, by garlanded children.
And now detonations ----
Thunder and guns.
The fire's between us.
Is there no place
Turning and turning in the middle air,
Untouchable and untouchable.
The train is dragging itself, it is screaming ----
An animal
Insane for the destination,
The bloodspot,
The face at the end of the flare.
I shall bury the wounded like pupas,
I shall count and bury the dead.
Let their souls writhe in like dew,
Incense in my track.
The carriages rock, they are cradles.
And I, stepping from this skin
Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces

Step up to you from the black car of Lethe,
Pure as a baby.


It is quite obvious to anyone reading this poem that her power was amazingly strong, her force driving home the words she chose to inflict on us, and she, the victor in a battle that could never be won except on her terms. There were three specific poems in Ariel that struck me as something from an outer world, that spoke to me in a voice I not only understood but crave myself to have. The poem in the book following Getting There was titled Medusa and you do not have to understand it to get its meaning.


Medusa

Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs,
Eyes rolled by white sticks,
Ears cupping the sea's incoherences,
You house your unnerving head -- God-ball,
Lens of mercies,
Your stooges
Plying their wild cells in my keel's shadow,
Pushing by like hearts,
Red stigmata at the very center,
Riding the rip tide to the nearest point of
departure,

Dragging their Jesus hair.
Did I escape, I wonder?
My mind winds to you
Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,
Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous
repair.

In any case, you are always there,
Tremulous breath at the end of my line,
Curve of water upleaping
To my water rod, dazzling and grateful,
Touching and sucking.
I didn't call you.
I didn't call you at all.
Nevertheless, nevertheless
You steamed to me over the sea,
Fat and red, a placenta

Paralyzing the kicking lovers.
Cobra light
Squeezing the breath from the blood bells
Of the fuchsia. I could draw no breath,
Dead and moneyless,

Overexposed, like an X-ray.
Who do you think you are?
A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary?
I shall take no bite of your body,
Bottle in which I live,

Ghastly Vatican.
I am sick to death of hot salt.
Green as eunuchs, your wishes
Hiss at my sins.
Off, off, eely tentacle!

There is nothing between us.


Another obvious point I need to make is the difficulty Sylvia Plath would have naturally had with a tyrannical editor the likes of, for sake of argument, Gordon Lish. He would have been very hard on her as most of her poems are too soft, too easy, and he would have made her work very hard at improving most of them, and some to no avail. My bet is, Lish just would not have accepted them. But these three fine poems I have included in this criticism and praise of Sylvia Plath I am want to say he would have liked, and perhaps have offered little to no suggestion as how to improve them. They are that good. The last poem I will leave with you from this restored Ariel collection was obviously written in a state of acceptance, albeit not the way she wanted things to be. Things are what they are, however, and this poem presents the "thing" in a very powerful way and with great distinction. The reader is hard-pressed these days to find a poet the likes of Sylvia Plath. Jack Gilbert comes immediately to mind, but my advice, look only for the strong. And be wary of the popular.

The Rival

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,

And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.

The moon, too, abuses her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.

No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.