Sylvia Plath Reconsidered

Despite her enduring popularity, it is easy for some to dismiss her. Her airing of her own personal afflictions seems self-indulgent, and at times -- as in "Daddy" -- bombastic and overblown. Her voice is perennially immature, her work a phase for artistically-temperamented teenage girls to go through and then outgrow. How dare she, middle class white girl with a fine education and a Fulbright Scholarship, compare her own trite domestic suffering to that of the Jews in World War II? Self-indulgent and overblown it is, but "Daddy" is also a viscerally powerful poem; despite the anger, self-righteousness, and general emotional drag of it, there is also a thrill to its awful daring. There is no denying the impact of her words, the blunt force of this poem: the language is startling, even after repeated readings. I wonder sometimes about daddy's side of things, what he himself might have said, but ultimately his perspective is irrelevant: Sylvia Plath's poems are all about the speaker's perspective, what goes on in her mind, and the interior of that mind is inevitably a dark but fascinating place.

"The Moon and the Yew Tree" is, to me, the most compelling vision of the interior of that mind. The poem begins:

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

A light that is distant and devoid of warmth is a light that is drained of all the good that we commonly associate with "light" when we encounter the word in a work of literature; this is the light by which the speaker sees. What kind of mindset must you suffer such that the very grass itself is a "prickling" burden? How despressed do you even have to be for the grass to possess "griefs" to be unloaded? One cannot but help to think of Whitman here, how he loved the grass, the freedom and democracy of it, and how different an attitude we are treating here. The "Fumy, spiritous mists" and the "row of headstones" in this stanza (picture the set from "Night of the Living Dead," a washed palette, cheaply rendered) are none too cheery, but what really chills, what strikes the note of despair, is the speaker's assertion in the final line of this stanza that she cannot see any way out of this walking nightmare. At this point, we believe her. We are willing already to acknowledge that this despair is bred of more than mere self-indulgence. It resonates from the core of the speaker's consciousness.

The second stanza of the poem displays Plath's trademark shifts in imagery:

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky——
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

These abrupt transitions are disorienting by design, startling. We go from a "door" to a "face" to a "knuckle" and then -- "terribly upset" -- presumably back to the face, the expression on it. The door is noted by its absence -- again, no way out. The moon is a fist instead, revealed in the next line to be committing a crime: a satellite body has killed the sea and is dragging off the corpse. The face comes back, expression intact: its "O-gape of complete despair." In context, "complete despair" is startling for its nakedly abstract emotional content. The assertion again, no way out: "I live here." Here is where nature itself is a murderous thug. Whither now, Walt Whitman?

The middle of the second stanza introduces a set of contrasts between the moon as goddess and the Virgin Mary: this doomed, dismal paganism and a Christianity that promises but fails to provide any kind of redemption or resurrection. Here, the moon is also sinister: without any explicit reference to Shakespeare, the speaker aligns herself with Edmund the Bastard. This moon-vs.-virgin motif continues in the following stanzas:

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness——
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.

The key line, perhaps, is the speaker's weary, hopeless claim: "How I would like to believe in tenderness." She would like to embrace Mary, mild and gentle, but she cannot. The concluding words of the poem -- "blackness—blackness and silence" -- indicate a stunned resignation, a sense of finality: no hope of any change.

The core mechanism of this poem is the speaker's sense of sight, her faculty of seeing, and everything the speaker sees is distorted, drained of its usual color. The moon is perhaps less the cause of the speaker's despair than it is the object of her own despairing vision: "The moon sees nothing of this." If the moon does have a hand in shaping the darkness of the speaker's vision, it is not deliberate but rather elemental, like the speaker's depression -- like everything else in the universe a by-product, ultimately, of gravity and electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. Nothing is on purpose here. The moon itself is necessarily evocative of perspective: we see it from earth, it tells us where we are by telling us where we are not. Those of us not beset by the burden of despair look at it and wonder. The ancients were right to believe that it has a power on us, a power that Plath evokes in the structure of this poem: four stanzas of seven lines each, representing the lunar cycle: four weeks of seven days each, the bare essence of a month and also roughly equivalent to the cycle of a woman who menstruates. The antonym of Plath's speaker here is the speaker of Wallace Stevens' "Tea at the Palaz of Hoon": both poems are about the power of the mind, the power of the imagination, but in Stevens' poem the mind (through its positive ability to see more than what the eye neutrally sees) frees the self to find itself "more truly and more strange." In Plath's poem, the mind (through its negative ability to color darkly what the eye neutrally sees) sets limits on the self, confines it. "I simply cannot see where there is to get to."

Not all of Plath's poetry is so dim, though, as the dimmest of it. My favorite Plath poem is "Morning Song"; the tone of it is both like and unlike the tones we see at work in other poems. There is a temptation to read into "Morning Song" the voice of that same despair that we find elsewhere, but to limit the poem to that one tone is to sell it short. The prevailing tone is not so much one of despair as it is one of distance, detachment, and bewilderment -- a bafflement that at times borders on wonder, but far away wonder. The speaker sees her child as a distant object; when it cries "a far sea moves in my ear." With the child's first breaths, its "bald cry / Took its place among the elements." "Love" is identified as the ultimate cause of this child's being, but it merely "sets [the child] going like a fat gold watch": mechanical, impersonal, not something embodied, not as though the speaker were intimately involved in the process.

As anyone who has ever lived with a newborn knows, the experience is exhausting and disorienting. You don't sleep much; you stagger through inspired by the knowledge that the child depends on you for survival. In the case of this speaker, she rises from bed in the middle of the night, "cow-heavy and floral / In my Victorian nightgown." Here we find the modern scholar turned into an animal, a dairy cow, and thrown straight back into the century preceding her, one in which the obligation of dutiful motherhood was in most cases the primary obligation -- the confining obligation -- of her life.

The most startling stanza of "Morning Song" is its third:

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

The image here is that of a wisp of breath condensing on the surface of a mirror, then disappearing completely, as though it had never been. Or perhaps the image is of a sky-cloud dissolving in some metaphorical mirror. Either way, it's a jarring claim of the distance between mother and child, a denial of a relationship that we take as a given. It's not an angry statement nor a mean-spirited one, nor is it full of despair. It is, rather, simply matter-of-fact. It's the statement of a mother who feels that she has no influence, no binding tie to her child. "Love" set the child going, and now we watch it tick. The child is its own thing, and that's not necessarily bad.

Still, this vision of motherhood is a far cry from that espoused by today's culture writ large. A posthumous diagnosis of post-partum despression seems to be in order, but at the same time that diagnosis sells short the poetic vision of this poem. Are we not allowed to question the conventional wisdom of the mother-child relationship?

The title and the last line of the poem bear potential for both ironic and sincere readings. The song of the title is that of the child crying, hardly a joy to hear at two o'clock in the morning, especially when you've barely slept for days, but at the same time that cry is the animating principle of the child, the sign that it is alive and that air is filling its lungs, that it is viable outside of the womb. This is the child's only form of self-expression, as valid in its way as the poet's is. The "clear vowels [that] rise like balloons" in the last line present an image that can only be described as bittersweet: the celebratory nature of balloons, the fact that they are rising, escaping, out of hand for good.

Some of Plath's poetry is indeed sweet and touching, in moments at least. In "Nick and the Candlestick," in the midst of some otherwise characteristically gloomy cave-darkness imagery, we encounter the line "O love, how did you get here?" The fact is that there is love as well as despair in Plath's vision, and sometimes that love offers the possibility of holding the despair in check. In a script for a BBC broadcast, Plath noted of "Nick and the Candlestick": "a mother nurses her baby son by candlelight and finds in him a beauty which, while it may not ward off the world's ill, does redeem her share of it." Another poem, "Black Rook in Rainy Weather," notes the presence of the odd miracle now and then: "Miracles occur, / If you care to call those spasmodic / Tricks of radiance miracles." It's a highly qualified hopefulness she posits here, but it counts for something. Too bad the odd miracle could not save the poet herself.

In all, the darkness that typified Plath's vision is well-matched by the power of her lexicon. Had it not been so, her poetry would not be worth reading. As it is, there is an undeniable force to her words, and she presents compelling insights into the life of a kind of mind that none of us would desire to call our own, a mind that breathed poetry in and out but could not in the end be sustained by it.

A final issue that any reader of Plath's poetry must contend with is that of poet versus persona. The temptation abides, especially in supposed "confessional" poetry, to conflate the two. But to do so in the work of any poet is to place unduly strict confines on interpretation. To say that Plath herself is the speaker of one of her poems limits the meaning of the poem to the details of Plath's biography, and there is then no legitimate way to argue that the poem might mean anything out of the context of that life. Under this rubric of interpretation, there is no room for interpretation; to every question, there is a right answer -- one related to the poet's life -- that the reader needs to discover. A poem becomes an equation with a tightly defined solution -- not that there is anything wrong with an equation, but poetry is not mathematics.

Such an approach cannot do justice to a poem. Poets write with ambiguity in mind. The language of metaphor is not a language of right answers; it's a language of fuzziness and deliberate imprecision, one that states forthrightly that things are what they are not. The animating principle of a poem is to render an idea so that it produces an aura of potential meaning, a vague outline that is, paradoxically, created by sharply-defined detail. All this is not to say that a poet's biography is irrelevant, but we have to consider interpretations beyond the biographical in reading any poem. Even when Walt Whitman identifies himself as the speaker of Song of Myself, he becomes himself a metaphor. The speaker of Song of Myself, large and multitude-containing as he is, goes way beyond what any mortal being can literally be or do. The same is true with Plath's poetry. Clearly, she was inspired by her own thoughts and feelings, but to assume that the poems give a complete autobiographical account of the life is to mistake the purpose and power of poetry. As any good poet would, Plath knew this herself. Consider: "a mother nurses her baby son by candlelight." Here and elsewhere in the BBC scripts, Plath clearly delineates the speaker of the poem as potentially someone other than herself.

Of course, these poems are the product of the life she lived. But we can be thankful that the poems themselves have a life beyond that of the poet.