Inhabited by a Cry: The Last Poetry of Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath has been lhe subject of more attention than any other young American poet in recent years. Her posthumous book, ARIEL, is here considered by Peter Davison, whose new collection of poems, THE CITY AND THE ISLAND, will be published by Atheneum this autumn.
By Peter Davison
AUGUST 1966 ISSUE
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by PETER DAVISON
ONLY rarely, and almost never when still alive, does a poet become the object of a cult. Sylvia Plath, age thirty, died in London in 1963, leaving behind her a sheaf of terrifying poems. Since then, and especially in the past year, poem after poem has been written to her memory by people who never knew her work while she was alive. The fable of “her abrupt, defiant death,” as Robert Lowell puts it, sees her as immolated on the altar of a cruel society, her poems the outraged byproduct of her last agony. But to oversimplify her life, making her into the James Dean of modern poetry, would also be to oversimplify and vulgarize the development of her work.
Sylvia Plath was a greatly but unevenly gifted woman who took the trouble, and had the intellectual resources, to train herself for a decade as a poet. The Atlantic and other periodicals published a fair amount of her early work, written in her twenties, and it showed an unusual sense of rhythm, a vocabulary that had a long, accurate reach, and a protean talent kept under severe control.
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The early poems, many of them published in a collection called The Colossus (published first in London; then in a shortened version by Knopf, 1962, $4.00), seemed to have no absolute necessity for being: they read like advanced exercises. She wrote a lot of prose as well, including a novel, but none that I have read seemed to me much out of the ordinary. Sylvia Plath’s talent, though intensely cultivated, did not bloom into genius until the last months of her life, when, if we may take the internal evidence of the poems in Ariel (also published first in London; Harper & Row, $4.95) as our guide, she stood at the edge of the abyss of existence and looked, steadily, courageously, with holy curiosity, to the very bottom. It is not a matter for personal praise or personal blame that she did so; but the resultant poetry has a bone-chilling authority that could not have been achieved except by steady staring. No artifice alone could have conjured up such effects; yet such is the paradox of art, these poems would never have come into being without the long, deliberate, technical training that had preceded them. We can only perform with true spontaneity what we have first learned to do by habit.
Every artist, and almost everyone else, at one time or another fetches up against the stark facts of life and death. No one can avert his gaze at such a time without some degree of self-betrayal, even though he may be turned to stone if he continues looking. The greatest writers have been able to record these terrible moments against the larger canvas of ordinary life, adjusting the threatened catastrophes of death and destruction among related and contrasting themes of life and hope and renewal. It has become fashionable — or if not fashionable, at least common — for poets to set down their autobiographical crises, first person and second person and all, as a qualifying confession to admit them to the fraternity — a kind of professional good-conduct pass. All the difference in the world, however, lies between such antics, performed always with an audience in mind, whether explicitly in the poem or implicitly in its tone, and, on the other hand, such terrifying lines as these, from several of the poems in Ariel. No matter to whom these may be addressed, they are written for nobody’s ears except the writer’s. They have a ritual ring, the inevitable preface to doom.
From “Lady Lazarus”
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call . . .
Herr God, Herr Lucifer,
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
From “Lesbos” (one mother speaks to another)
You say you can’t stand her,
The bastard’s a girl.
You who have blown your tubes tike a bad radio
Clear of voices and history, the staticky
Noise of the new.
You say I should drown the kittens. Their smell!
You say I should drown my girl.
She’ll cut her throat at ten if she’s mad at two.
The baby smiles, fat snail,
From the polished lozenges of orange linoleum.
You could eat him. He’s a boy.
You say your husband is just no good to you.
From “Death & Co.”
I do not stir.
The frost makes a flower
The dew makes a star,
The dead bell,
The dead bell.
Somebody’s done for.
From “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 . . .
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
From “ The Applicant”
First, are you our sort of person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch.
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,
Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then
How can we give yon a thing? . . .
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.
It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it’s a poultice.
You have an eye, it’s an image.
My boy, it’s your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
To be given over to poems like these is to stand at the poet’s side frozen, but powerless to reach a hand out as she falls. Though the poems have humor in them (“I guess you could say I’ve a call”), it is gallows humor. They carry little of the playfulness that is contained in most poetry. Their hectic, breathless rhythms give plenty of evidence that they were written in dead earnest, as stays against confusion that were at best only momentary. What else is there to do when you are “inhabited by a cry”? Nothing but to set down what you see, what strikes you, without compunction or consideration. That is what these poems have done. It is all poetry can do in the situation.
The poems in Ariel are poems of defeat except in one sense: that they exist at all. It would be preposterous to suggest that the experience embodied here is unique; but it would be a lie to suggest that experience alone could have written these poems, that they could have been written by anyone but a true poet. They are a triumph for poetry, in fact, at the moment that they are a defeat for their author.
To have prepared, with all the devices and techniques of an art, for the awful catastrophe which you alone were fitted to face is to have sacrificed for art more victims than life can dispense with. One even infers, from the grim joy of some of these poems, that at the moment of writing, Sylvia Plath’s life was eagerly consuming all its careful preparations. The candle is burnt out, and we have nothing left but the flame.
Peter Davison was The Atlantic's poetry editor from 1974 to 2004.
