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The Voice of Sylvia Plath In Five Meditations
by
Paul Oliver
Contact: oliverp@wolfgangbooks.com
Books Referenced
Poetry Speaks. Poetry Anthology. Sourcebooks MediaFuzion. 2001. Edited by Elise Paschen & Rebekah Presson Mosby. Narrated by Charles Osgood. $49.95 hardcover with 3 CD’s.
Ariel by Sylvia Plath. Poetry. Harper Perennial. 1999. Introduction by Robert Lowell. ISBN: 0060931728. $12.00 hardcover.
The Colossus and Other Poems by Sylvia Plath. Poetry. Vintage Books. 1998. ISBN: 0375704469. Trade Paper. $12.00
Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath by Kate Moses. Fiction. St. Martins Press. 2003. Trade Paper. ISBN: 1400035007. $14.00.
I.
This is about misogynism.
II.
I have a memory of a girl in my sophomore (or junior) year English class in high school. She sat across from me in all black, with a short skirt, black Doc Martins, unnaturally black hair and fishnet stockings. She wore a studded collar and sometimes a spiked bracelet. Her lipstick and eyeliner was either dark red or black. Her skin was pale, with two ivory arms extending out of a tight Misfits or Bad Religion t-shirt. She seemed to have only those two t-shirts to wear. To everyone, regardless of sex, she alternated between flirty and belligerent, possibly because of some unknown (to me at least) scheme of ethics. I felt special in regards to her because she used to punch me more often than others. The memory I have of her involves her reading a poem by Sylvia Plath in class, which one I forget. I just remember this attractive girl (I thought she was cute) reading Sylvia Plath and talking about it with sincerity, something she rarely did at school. I wondered what it all meant, this connection between the girl reading and the odd words of the poetess. For every unassigned reading that year I had picked Jack London or Ernest Hemingway from the list on the green paper (the list of “unassigned” titles). I spoke up in class when we were discussing Hawthorne, Poe and the others writers we were reading, but I was mostly engaged in pondering the reasons why I felt an affinity for the villainous Wolf Larsen, London’s tyrannical but philosophical Captain in The Sea Wolf. I liked books, but football was still by far my “thing.” I was on a different tip than Sylvia Plath, as well as the girl in black sitting across from me. The reality is that I did not know what Sylvia Plath’s tip was.
The connection that I believed I could see between the suicide poetess and the Gothic punk rocker was obviously esthetic. I let it stay at that. I did not investigate it further. At the time if someone had asked me when or where Sylvia Plath was when she was alive I would have offered up something idiotic, probably influenced by television and movies. I probably would have placed her in the early 1980s, New York, surrounded by aggressive punk rockers. Picture the villains in Dirty Harry or Death Wish III. You know, the fake punk rockers, the ones that never really existed but whom cultureless conservatives across America feared would come bounding into their homes at any second to pillage and plunder. If I had stopped to ponder deeper, I may have come up with a more historical Sylvia Plath, placing her in a Victorian gown, brooding, a dark cross between Ophelia and Emily Dickinson. I doubt that I would have been able to make that comparison. Actually I know I couldn’t have done so. Whatever the case, all I heard and saw of Sylvia Plath that first time was the black clothing and aggression associated with the girl in my class. I did not understand anything else. I was a sixteen or seventeen year old boy who played football. The Social Darwinism of Wolf Larsen was enough of a dilemma for me.
I still cannot remember which poem she read that day, just the way it was read.
One thing I do remember is the first time I heard Sylvia Plath’s voice; that is her actual voice and not her literary one. The first poem of hers that I heard was recorded on the third of three disks contained in the anthology titled Poetry Speaks. The anthology takes almost all the major English-speaking poets that recorded their poetry and packages the CDs within a large book. The book’s contents consist of short biographies and critical essays written by current poets as well as an expanded selection of the selected poet’s offerings. It is amazing to think about, but the collection actually contains the recording made by Thomas Edison on wax cylinder of Alfred, Lord Tennyson reading The Charge of The Light Brigade, as well as his recordings of Robert Browning, and even Walt Whitman giving grainy, but decipherable readings of their poetry. These are recordings made in the 1880s, a footnote that I find mind-boggling. The great W.B. Yeats is heard reading, as well as T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, Anne Sexton, Carl Sandburg and many more. Many give great performances, but possibly there are more poems recorded that would be better left to the eye than the ear. Yeats himself, blasphemy as it might be to say so, does not give a stellar reading of Coole Lake and Ballylee. It is methodically profound and scholarly in content and diction; it is the poetry of W.B. Yeats.
Sylvia Plath, however, reads Daddy with an insane spark. Plath’s reading is one that demands that you leaf through the pages of the written offering too. Something in her voice calls out to be deciphered, not to crave attention, but to serve as a Rosetta Stone waiting to be translated. The language is her life, a language where the significations are made with pain, pride and sadness instead of allusion and metaphor. That is not to say that the poetry of Sylvia Plath is without those guiles, but rather that the emotion in her voice parallels them. To read and understand an allusion or to glean meaning from the emotion in someone’s voice is to bring to light something previously obscure. It is the supreme slight of hand for a poet. Once you hear the way Sylvia invokes her poetry you read it too as though she were speaking still, somehow alive in your mind. It is no gaudy performance piece either. Plath does not perform her poetry so much as she commands it, or breaths it. She breathes it not like a dragon does fire but like a fire does oxygen. Something in her voice tells you that she is feeding herself as well as you.
It is haughty, this voice, sexy too, and there is something Freudian in the way she seems to impose herself with a matriarchal authority and yet also a girly, sensual playfulness. I think it has to do with alliteration. “Daddy,” she announces her poem in a posh voice, “You do not do, you do not do.” It’s someone who is condescending and hurt. Her words, when voiced, conjure an image of someone as vulnerable as Eurydice and as powerful as Athena. The poetry of Sylvia Plath is the poetry of Medea—beautiful, betrayed and baleful. In a word: unmanning.
I envisioned a cold and beautiful woman, but one who was also capable of violence and outward contempt. She was alone, this Sylvia Plath I heard, and she was prone to making a scene. I identified her with the girl in my class, the outward show of power and plea, the studded bracelets and two t-shirts. It was the sound of someone who was impressive but didn’t necessarily know it. It was someone who had to be morbid, suicidal in order to catch attention, or at least they thought they did.
The next thing I thought was that anyone who tells you they’re going to kill themselves probably won’t. I am speaking now of the second offering on the CD, Lady Lazarus. She promises to kill herself and yet is speaking as though she is daring you in some way to watch. Suicide is rarely a spectacle for the living. This is when I felt confident enough to add a final adjective to the poetry of Sylvia Plath: melodramatic.
She did kill herself. This was no longer melodrama. I knew nothing about her and with poetry of her rare order the poet is also the poem. They freeze themselves and step away to look at the rendered moment in horror. I did not appreciate this at the time. Initially, way back in high school and later on when listening to her on CD, I misinterpreted her voice. I was guilty of looking for what I wanted in that voice.
III.
Sylvia Plath tried to kill herself once, and on a second time she succeeded. It’s almost an archetypical concept in literature that Sylvia Plath dies the way she does. It is something as commonplace as the Byronic hero, wandering the lands, darkened with his past and trudging towards a future he desires to be better. We recycle the same romances over and over again and never seem to notice that the heroes do not arrive. Plath once romanticized about the fate she and her husband, fellow poet Ted Hughes, would share when she wrote that she would become: “The Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions).” When I first heard her read Daddy as well as Lady Lazarus I had no idea about her situation, no clue about the being that created the poem. Ted Hughes was also unknown to me. I did not ask myself about her because I felt I knew. I did not need, I told myself, to read her other poems. She was a suicidal poetess; something from the storybook, something easily recognized and codified.
Ted Hughes slept around while Sylvia raised their two children. Here now is something again that we can codify. Husbands cheat, as do wives, but do they cheat on women like Sylvia Plath? Certainly. The Greeks left us a mythic litany of such situations. Medea and Eurydice – are these the female equivalents to Byron’s brooding youths? I had decided that they were. Robert Lowell did too, and wrote in his forward to Plath’s posthumous masterpiece Ariel that, “The voice is now coolly amused, witty, now sour, now fanciful, girlish, charming, now sinking to the strident rasp of the vampire—a Dido, Phaedra, or Medea…” Undeath is an acceptable concept for the introduction to a suicide’s newly prepared and greatest collection of poems. He as well conjured forth the ghost of Medea, and he added Dido and Phaedra. Why though? Dido, love struck and abandoned, commits suicide. Phaedra is another allusion to a woman who vindictively kills herself. Then there is Medea; the sorceress married to Jason the Argonaut. Jason leaves her for another, and the same scene unfolds. Medea however, wields more power than the others mentioned by Lowell. I understood this concept of power. Wolf Larsen had power. Blind and cornered, Larsen’s fear evoking power existed even after his ship and crew were lost to him. This wasn’t a good comparison. Sylvia did not wield that kind of power. She wouldn’t cast a plague upon the lands before dying. She was not that selfish or cruel. The answer contradicts those clever allusions.
IV.
Wintering by Kate Moses is not going to be a classic. It does not stand alone as one of the great testaments of human creativity. It is however, one of the most psychologically daring novels ever written and it succeeds in this gambit. Wintering is a masterwork of intuition and parallel implication. Masterworks are not always classics.
The protagonist of Wintering is Sylvia Plath. The chapters are titled in correspondence to the order of the poems in her final testimonial, her cycle of poems known as Ariel. “The title Ariel,” writes Robert Lowell, “summons up Shakespeare’s lovely, though slightly chilling and androgenous spirit, but the truth is that this Ariel is the author’s horse.” In Chapter Fifteen of Wintering, Kate Moses deals with the fifteenth poem of Plath’s compilation, the title poem, Ariel.
Plath begins Ariel:
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour and tor and distances.
God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow
Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I catch,
Moses parallels:
She holds the reins tight, ankles pressing into the girth, the mare’s neck arched, jaw flexed, hindquarters tensed, her body compressed like a spring. Fog churns and dissolves on the moors; the world foams below. A wisp of distant gray marks the route of a westbound train; a pinpoint necklace of headlights traces the roadbed of the A30. Her heart is poised, the blood beating loud in her ears, pounding against the insistent whipping breath of the wind, the shock of dew, its spray, glazing her warm skin. Ripeness, she thinks, is all.
Plath finishes Ariel:
White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry.
Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
Moses mirrors:
Ariel rears. Sylvia lets her go, striking off in a bounding canter, a gallop, all four feet in the air at once, momentum snatching her, propelling her forward. The rush, the drive, the muscular inevitability of it, the throb of the horse’s motion under too late to stop, her body lit, sparking at every nerve, flying—her body, this heedless pounding speed. She believes in what she feels. She belongs to no one.
It might as well be history. The poetry of a poet like Sylvia Plath, when reconstructed by a person as insightful as Kate Moses, becomes a biography with more truthful detail than any second person accounting could ever produce. Moses renders Plath in relation to her final poems. That is to say that she renders Plath in relation to her final days. Ted Hughes betrays Sylvia for another woman, one not a mother, and leaves her with the bulk of rearing the children. Sylvia was a mother, I learned, I did not know she was when I heard that girl read her poem or even when I heard her own voice for the first time. She had two children and does not destroy them as Medea did. I was shocked by this fact. I thought Sylvia Plath was insane, aggressive and certainly cool but also equally not maternal. Kate Moses casts a bipolar (probably not a stretch in any sense) Plath burning with actual fever, trying to care for two children in an all too literary London. All this while she is in the midst of an almost impossible upsurge of creativity, producing her life’s work. She is a woman driven by fever, career and maternity, all impossibly strong forces. Fevered she tries to enjoy Yeats’s flat in London, something she has yearned and worked for, a kind of symbolic movement for her. Yeats, the poet King, is what adds the tinge of the girly in her voice. He is the King she wants to survey a domain beside. The rooms are cold and empty however, and Ted’s friends surround the locality outside her door. Frieda, her daughter, and Nicholas her son, are both very sick. The poems however… The poems seem to come with unnerving alacrity. It seems almost as if the duality of being that the best poets cultivate has seized Sylvia and has decided to work her to death. She is a woman driven by fever, career and maternity, all things irresistibly potent. The condescension in her voice, the biting edge, is the realization that the rooms are filled with hard work and stinging sweat.
Then there is a rural Plath, at the home she and Ted were going to make. She is going about the mundane affairs of keeping a garden. Drowning the slugs with Guinness like any old Englishwoman would do, and looking after the tubers to see how much of a yield they will have this year. She changes diapers and admires the nerve of brilliant flowers and tall trees. “Compared with me,” she wrote, “a tree is immortal/ And a flower-head not tall, but more startling…” Inside the house Ted entertains the man he is to cuckold and the women he is to engage in adultery with. Sylvia is not unaware. The anger is contained but not smothered by her duties as mother. She is trapped and like a fire she gasps for air. The brief flashing moments when she explodes forth, freedom remembered, a poem is produced. A poem like Ariel, her horse, or Daddy, her shucking off of patrimonial dependence; these are the components of a voice.
Sylvia Plath was competitive, and with more talent than those around her recognized. She became the ultimate paradox in her last poems. It is impossible you see, to be both at your wits end and to have your wits also become the end of you. The only thing impossible to human being, physically and metaphysically, is death.
V.
The lives of great poets are not always exciting. For every adventurous Lord Byron there is a studious John Keats. This is not a profound observation; in fact it could be said for just about any subject concerning famous men and women. William Faulkner did not love to watch bullfights or to hunt, fish and box. Hemingway did and he is easier to celebrate for these passions. It is in this manner that we can celebrate William Blake’s insanity, Poe’s drug addictions, Villon’s knavery and of course Plath’s suicide. All of course do not actually celebrate the poet or even the poetry, but instead revel in the romanticism of the explanation, the tale of why they were the way they were. We codify someone, especially a historical someone, in relation to what we can understand first and rarely ask about the actuality later. This is why I heard those initial things in Sylvia Plath’s poetry, things that I wanted to hear. I did not hear the mother of two, the pressurized domesticity of 1960s England or the other things I haven’t mentioned, like electroshock therapy during college and a miscarriage of her first child. I didn’t hear those things. Now I can.
The girl in my class identified with Sylvia Plath for reasons I can only guess. I now identify Sylvia Plath as a constructor and not a construction. “I shall never get you put together entirely,” she wrote to open the title poem of her first collection, The Colossus. If she is a construction it is not one wrought by Hamlet, scorned by Jason or doubted by Orpheus. She is not purely a malleable Ophelia, an enraged Medea or a betrayed Eurydice. There are elements, sure, some of them worth an epic or two and in a way Kate Moses has given us a full-blooded epic, real and without the need for fancy. To say she is a Medea, or an Ophelia, is to deny her existence. Existence is always irrational and when we look to explain people as either classical heroes or fated heroines we are only ignoring the actual essence that is before us. She was a mother, something Ophelia was not and something that Medea betrayed, slaying her children to get back at the Argonaut’s adultery. She was full blooded and I am willing to say that Ophelia never was. Convincing as the scene may be, no heart pumped the blood to that insane mind. What is left behind is all that ever was. Ophelia is the product of Shakespeare and not herself.
In the case of Sylvia Plath, we have her voices, things emanated from her existence. There is the literary voice, with its aggressive alliteration and mocking cleverness. The one I hear Freudian desires and an imbalanced genius within. Then there is the actual voice, luckily preserved on magnetic tape, housing the actuality of the poem. The essence of being, rendered upon a moment, the pain and the pleasure, breathing air like fire, feeding us as it devours the world for its marrow only to realize confidently that the marrow was the world itself and that death is the most sublime choice life can fathom. Haughty and sexy seem paltry adjectives now.
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