[A. E. Stallings]

I agree, Kate, that she is a poet of supreme control--and not so much the raving confessional poet she gets portrayed as. Even poems like "Lady Lazarus", etc., are removed from the autobiographical by the use of persona.

Also an excellent point about her syllabics. Syllabics tend to get short shrift around here (from me as well), but can produce interesting effects. And Plath's never sacrifice a sense of rhythm for bean-counting. This is one of the more anthologized ones. A metaphor in Greek is something that carries, that bears (a moving van in Modern Greek has "Metaphores" blazoned on it), so I think there is a bit of a pun even in the title. (My only criticism of this piece is the "cow in calf", which feels too close to the riddle to me...)

Metaphors

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

[A. E. Stallings]

I just realized that today (Feb. 11th), is the anniversary of Plath's untimely death--and I thought I ought to post something. Have been reading a lot of Plath lately, partly because a friend is teaching a class on her, and I volunteered to babysit the class for a few sessions while she is away at a conference. Anyway, I wanted to post something not TOO morbid. This is one I like a lot. It is in syllabics (5 syllable lines), with occasional rimes and slant rimes and lots of inner assonance, etc. I think the syllabics really suit the subject matter here, because they can feel (as they do in Richard Wilbur's haiku stanzas) very organic, and also very quiet, sneaky. As they get bolder, trochaic dimeter start to muscle in. This is one that needs to be read (softly) aloud:


Mushrooms

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.

[Esther Cameron]

Fascinating thread. I love "Mushrooms" -- it is one I had overlooked among the early work.

Personally, I was deeply affected by the "Ariel" poems. Perhaps not altogether for the good. For me they have an authority the earlier poems don't, despite their accomplishments. I don't think one can put it down to mental illness altogether; I think that Plath's best poems go beyond personal self-destructiveness to a realization that, even while keeping up appearances, being accomplished and competent and comme il faut, we are ALL destroying ourselves. I'm not saying this excuses anything

My own favorite among her poems is "The Night Dances." To me it tells, in an almost muted way, just how open she was to the universe.

THE NIGHT DANCES

A smile fell in the grass.
Irretrievable!

And how will your night dances
Love themselves. In mathematics?

Such pure leaps and spirals --
Surely they travel

The world forever, I shall not entirely
Sit emptied of beauties, the gift

Of your small breath, the drenched grass
Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies.

Their flesh bears no relation.
Cold folds of ego, the calla,

And the tiger, embellishing itself --
Spots, and a spread of hot petals.

The comets
Have such a space to cross,

Such coldness, forgetfulness.
So your gestures flake off --

Warm and human, then their pink light
Bleeding and peeling

Through the black amnesias of heaven.
Why am I given

These lamps, these planets
Falling like blessings, like flakes

Six-sided, white
On my lips, my hair

Touching and melting.
Nowhere.

[Anthony Lombardy]

I've enjoyed this thread on Plath, and I appreciate this reference to "The Night Dances," a poem I really didn't remember. Though I'm coming late to the party, I did want to make a few comments on this poem, which nicely showcases some of Plath's strengths: the arresting images, the abrupt transitions, the level of abstraction which Plath is able to carry a reader to:

I like:

And how will your night dances
Love themselves. In mathematics?

Since we know that the subject, in ordinary discourse, wouldn't "span" the predicate, Plath makes her little joke and then takes our bemusement as license to extend the trope.

Such pure leaps and spirals --
Surely they travel

The Plathian "purity" topos does leave me cold, since it always seems to me that in Plath purity means "me, alone in my room."

The world forever, I shall not entirely
Sit emptied of beauties, the gift

The litotes of "I shall not entirely" seems like an unconsciousness echo of Horace's poem to Vergil, but with the characteristic Plathian inversion: it's about the "I" not the "you."

Of your small breath, the drenched grass
Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies.

Their flesh bears no relation.
Cold folds of ego, the calla,

And the tiger, embellishing itself --
Spots, and a spread of hot petals.

These images seem wonderful to me, especially that "spread of hot petals," until I look a little while at the isolation and narcissism they acknowledge. It's scary how Plath's genius flares most brilliantly when she is multiplying analogues for the beautiful, inviolate isolation she felt she needed.

The comets
Have such a space to cross,

Such coldness, forgetfulness.
So your gestures flake off --

Warm and human, then their pink light
Bleeding and peeling

The romantic fallacy gets respect when it is immediately recruited for simile work in a second person love poem, but, of course, the instability of the "you" in Plath, doesn't let us go very far in this direction.

Through the black amnesias of heaven.
Why am I given

Ahh!! The object of ultimate interest, the poet and her gift,or are we really talking about snowflakes?

These lamps, these planets
Falling like blessings, like flakes

What I really admire is how Plath inverts the expected simile, so, instead of saying "flakes like lamps and planets", she says it the other way around, in the context of the black amnesias of heaven, and so clenches the more interesting and difficult idea that the planets are falling like blessings. This is brilliant, and I think it would be a good idea to play around with,reversing one's similes and seeing what happens.

Six-sided, white
On my lips, my hair

Touching and melting.
Nowhere.


The rhetoric is more carefully modulated here than in some of Plath's more famous poems. The "surely" of line 6, the many modifiers trailing their nouns, and the rhetorical questions which do seem to move the argument along lend the poem an air of deliberation and discovery. But then she hits us with the auxetic "nowhere" at the end, isolated by the preceding period, as if a reader might as well distribute the negation it implies however he likes throughout the poem.

I remember Stephen Spender saying that the problem with Plath was that the overwhelming impression her poems left him with was "what a terrible thing it was to be Sylvia Plath." If this was her intention, she accomplished it, but it was certainly not an intention worthy of such a talent.

It's been nice to see a discussion of Plath which, without romanticing her illness, shows due appreciation for her accomplishment.

[Esther Cameron]

Anthony,

Interesting comments. Even though I think the poem is about more than isolation and narcissism. Remember that any mystic has to be isolated in meditation, the seismograph has to be isolated in order to pick up the imperceptible vibrations of the distant earthquake.

Esther

[A. E. Stallings]

For what it is worth, Hughes has this little note about "The Night Dances": A revolving dance which her baby son performed at night in his crib.

[Anthony Lombardy]

Alicia, Hughes's footnote is interesting and really sad. It's amazing how the baby was swallowed by the poem!

Esther, it seems to me that Plath's isolation is often alienation, while the mystic's isolation results in a kind of communion with others and the world. Maybe this is a commonplace in the criticism of Plath, but I think she had what Jacques and Raissa Maritain and some literary critics have called an "angelic" imagination, which involves an independence of will and intellect from love and morality in a quest for the absolute or for knowledge and experience that is beyond what is human. Several critics have said this of Poe. At any rate, I am certain that your exploration of what was positive, human, and genuine in Plath is far more interesting than a one-sided analysis like mine. Thanks again for pointing us toward this poem.

[Gloria Mitchell]

What an interesting discussion -- I'm glad to see some appreciation for Plath's earlier work, which I think deserves it. And I'm glad to see some resistance to the idea that anyone is supposed to read Sylvia Plath to learn about Sylvia Plath. I have nothing against literary biography, but I do think it should be put aside when approaching a poem; it seems to me that we read a poem (even a "confessional" poem) not to learn about the author, but to learn about ourselves. Or, to paraphrase Richard Wilbur, all poems begin in autobiography -- where else should they begin? -- but they must end by being about everybody, or they're no good.

Maybe some readers and critics (like Stephen Spender, or Harold Bloom) have a hard time with Plath because not everybody does have experiences that are as extreme as the ones she describes. Still, I would guess that most of us have moments of Plath-like (or Poe-like) terror, rage or despair.

If I were to cast a vote for my own favorite Plath poem, it might be "The Eye-Mote" (below).

Gloria


THE EYE-MOTE

Blameless as daylight I stood looking
At a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown,
Tails streaming against the green
Backdrop of sycamores. Sun was striking
White chapel pinnacles over the roofs,
Holding the horses, the clouds, the leaves

Steadily rooted though they were all flowing
Away to the left like reeds in a sea
When the splinter flew in and stuck my eye,
Needling it dark. Then I was seeing
A melding of shapes in a hot rain:
Horses warped on the altering green,

Outlandish as double-humped camels or unicorns,
Grazing at the margins of a bad monochrome,
Beasts of oasis, a better time.
Abrading my lid, the small grain burns:
Red cinder around which I myself,
Horses, planets and spires revolve.

Neither tears nor the easing flush
Of eyebaths can unseat the speck:
It sticks, and it has stuck a week.
I wear the present itch for flesh,
Blind to what will be and what was.
I dream that I am Oedipus.

What I want back is what I was
Before the bed, before the knife,
Before the brooch-pin and the salve
Fixed me in this parenthesis;
Horses fluent in the wind,
A place, a time gone out of mind.