Sylvia Plath's New Poems

I’ve recently bought Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems. I have had the poems themselves in other books, but I wanted this version, which collects everything from her juvenilia through the great Ariel poems. This book was edited by Ted Hughes, with a rich appendix of notations. The downside is that the Ariel poems are in Hughes’ chosen order, not Sylvia’s. Thus “they taste the spring” happens in the middle of the series, which jolted me. I very strongly prefer her order of poems.

Interestingly there were several poems or fragments which never made it into any manuscript. Ted Hughes writes:

She had made a somewhat earlier (but undated) attempt to break through to the substance of this poem. [He is referring to"Fever 103"]. After several pages of what looks like feverish exploration of the theme, her earlier controls took over and reduced the confusion to the following, which she left in manuscript, unfinalized:

Four o’clock and the fever soaks from me like honey
O ignorant heart!
All night I have heard

The meaningless cry of babies. Such a sea
Broods in the newsprint!
Fish-grease, fish-bones, refuse of atrocities

Bleached and finished, I surface
Among the blanched, boiled instruments, the virginal curtains.
Here is a white sky. Here is the beauty

Of cool mouths and hands opening as natural as roses.
My glass of water refracts the morning.
My baby is sleeping

This is fascinating because, as a writer, I love to see how things evolve. The “fish-grease, fish-bones, atrocities of refuse” became:

Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch

You can hear it in the cadence.

And “all night I have heard” became:

Darling, all night
I have been flickering off, on, off, on

The mention of “virginal” curtains and roses became:

Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses

This one was a forerunner to the beautiful “Elm” which strikes me as an incredibly dignified and noble poem. This was her first attempt at that iconic poem:

She is not easy, she is not peaceful,
She pulses like a heart on my hill.
The moon snags in her intricate nervous system.
I am excited, seeing it there.
It’s like something she has caught for me.

The night is a blue pool; she is very still.
At the center she is still, very still with wisdom.
The moon is let go, like a dead thing.
Now she herself is darkening.
Into a dark world I can not see at all.

First, that line “the night is a dark pool” sounds a lot like the early cadence of The Moon and the Yew Tree:

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.”

“A premature crystallization,” Ted Hughes calls this attempt at her early “Elm”.

As a writer, this is precious. To see the evolution of her cramped thoughts to the booming, thundering authority of the final 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.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallup thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand,a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radience scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminshed and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrevables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?–

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.

Good lord in heaven. If that doesn’t knock you back on your heels, blinking, searching for equilibrium. She got that from the polite little scrap above.

Stings is another whose ancient drafts survive. But before I explore that, I noticed something in the final version.

This is a phrase from the final version of Stings, written October 6, 1962

I am no drudge
Though for years I have eaten dust
And dried plates with my dense hair

That sounds a lot like the final lines of Lady Lazarus, written later that month, October 23-26, 1962:

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

They both mention eating. They both mention hair. And dust and ash are very similar. So it’s possible to see that she was cannibalizing ideas and imagery across all her poems. (This makes me feel less guilty for stealing a phrase from another of my books for my work in progress.) She does this numerous times. In her first version of Stings, written August 2, 1962, is the line” It has set them zinging”. Earlier, on February 19, 1961, she wrote a poem for her daughter, Morning Song. It begins:

Love set you going like a fat gold watch

The “set them” and “set you” sounds very similar and very deliberate to me.

Then there is another image borrowed from a poem written for her son on October 29, 1962; the last lines read:

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.

Compare that to this earlier fragment:

It has set them zinging
On envious strings, and you are the center.

This is the first version of Stings:

What honey summons these animalcules?
What fear? It has set them zinging
On envious strings, and you are the center.
They are assailing your brain like numerals,
They contort your hair

Beneath the flat handkerchief you wear instead of a hat.
They are making a cat’s cradle, they are suicidal.
Their death-pegs stud your gloves, it is no use running.
The black veils mold to your lips:
They are fools.

After, they swagger and weave, under no banner.
After, they crawl
Dispatched, into trenches of grass.
Ossifying like junked statues –
Gelded and wingless. Not heroes. Not heroes.

The published and final version is:

Bare-handed, I hand the combs.
The man in white smiles, bare-handed,
Our cheesecloth gauntlets neat and sweet,
The throats of our wrists brave lilies.
He and I

Have a thousand clean cells between us,
Eight combs of yellow cups,
And the hive itself a teacup,
White with pink flowers on it,
With excessive love I enameled it

Thinking ‘Sweetness, sweetness.’
Brood cells gray as the fossils of shells
Terrify me, they seem so old.
What am I buying, wormy mahogany?
Is there any queen at all in it?

If there is, she is old,
Her wings torn shawls, her long body
Rubbed of its plush —-
Poor and bare and unqueenly and even shameful.
I stand in a column

Of winged, unmiraculous women,
Honey-drudgers.
I am no drudge
Though for years I have eaten dust
And dried plates with my dense hair.

And seen my strangeness evaporate,
Blue dew from dangerous skin.
Will they hate me,
These women who only scurry,
Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover?

It is almost over.
I am in control.
Here is my honey-machine,
It will work without thinking,
Opening, in spring, like an industrious virgin

To scour the creaming crests
As the moon, for its ivory powders, scours the sea.
A third person is watching.
He has nothing to do with the bee-seller or with me.
Now he is gone

In eight great bounds, a great scapegoat.
Here is his slipper, here is another,
And here the square of white linen
He wore instead of a hat.
He was sweet,

The sweat of his efforts a rain
Tugging the world to fruit.
The bees found him out,
Molding onto his lips like lies,
Complicating his features.

They thought death was worth it, but I
Have a self to recover, a queen.
Is she dead, is she sleeping?
Where has she been,
With her lion-red body, her wings of glass?

Now she is flying
More terrible than she ever was, red
Scar in the sky, red comet
Over the engine that killed her —-
The mausoleum, the wax house.

As I find new drafts, new notations, my knowledge and love of Sylvia Plath grows ever deeper. At times I think I’m just like her.. with those awkward first drafts, the cramped phrasing… but she leaves me and everyone behind when she bursts out with those dazzling, world-changing poems. There is no-one like her, and never will be.

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