In Sylvia Plath’s juvenilia, we can see that the chief danger to her style is restraint: formality encases her emotions. And yet her style was endangered equally—once she allowed emotion its freedom—by a theatricalizing melodrama. Both of these dangers always hovered over her poetry, and no one—as we can see in her journals and letters—was more aware of their perils than she. She died a suicide at thirty, but the fact of death, and death as a subject of expression, had preoccupied her from the time she was eight, when her father died in a fashion inexplicable to a child. Although Otto Plath was a professor of entomology, he convinced himself that the illness he was experiencing was cancer and refused medical attention. In fact, he had suffered adult-onset diabetes and could have been successfully treated. By the time he was hospitalized, one leg had become gangrenous, and he died of sepsis. (It seems probable, in retrospect, that it was the clinical depression that eventually doomed his daughter that caused Otto Plath to lie in bed for months before he died.) According to Plath’s account in “Lady Lazarus,” her father’s death caused her to attempt suicide at the age of ten; when she tried it again at nineteen, she almost succeeded. After her college suicide attempt, Plath was treated with painful electroshock and varied medications; she also underwent the psychotherapy of the time, which, because it encouraged a dwelling on childhood trauma, may have helped to fix Otto Plath’s death in his daughter’s mind as the ineradicable cause of her own rage, melancholy, and instability. Her death wish permeates even her Smith College juvenilia; she practiced taking the last look from the time she began to write.
Although Plath’s early fantasies of death are concealed under impersonal carapaces, they seem in hindsight transparently autobiographical. In a youthful Audenesque sonnet, “The Trial of Man,” Plath, addressing “man” in general as “you,” asserts, “You were condemned to serve the legal limit / And burn to death within your neon hell.” The poem ends with “man” grotesquely awaiting electrocution:
Now, disciplined in the strict ancestral chair,
You sit, solemn-eyed, about to vomit,The future an electrode in your skull.1
Other early fantasies are even more violent. The somewhat incoherent “Sonnet: To Eva” begins,
All right, let’s say you could take a skull and break it
The way you’d crack a clock; you’d crush the bone
Between steel palms of inclination, take it,
Observing the wreck of metal and rare stone.
The effects of death on Plath’s style were, as such an example reveals, at times disastrous. Melodrama and the depiction of violence—restrained in the poem above only by Plath’s sonnet rigidities—were two of the stylistic results of her traumatized view of existence, but they coexisted with a jeering irony, visible in Plath’s damning inventory of herself as Eva in the same sonnet. She is an unmendable mechanical Humpty Dumpty, composed of a heap of intractable and platitudinous metallic organs—
Cogs and disks, inane mechanic whims,
And idle coils of jargon yet unspoken.
Not man nor demigod could put together
The scraps of rusted reverie, the wheels
Of notched tin platitudes concerning weather,
Perfume, politics, and fixed ideals.2
How was Plath—without ruining her poems—to retain authentic features of her imagination, such as the symbols of melodrama and violence absorbed from her childhood literary matrix of legends, fairy tales, and catastrophic myths from Bluebeard to Dracula? Plath’s later interesting revisions of these theatrical dramatis personae created them as ambiguous characters, so that the melodrama is generated by a conflict in which no clear moral discrimination can be made between protagonist and antagonist. Plath herself could only rarely play the part of an innocent victim; she felt more honest, in her most conspicuously staged poems, when playing the man-eating Lady Lazarus pitting her obscene striptease against her voyeuristic audience, or the vampire-killing daughter vanquishing the vampire parent in “Daddy.”
For a long time, “death” meant to Sylvia Plath only the twinned images of her father’s malignant gangrenous toe and her own envisaged suicide. Death lived within her, estranging her not only from herself but also from other human beings, including her widowed mother, for whom she felt obliged to play the role of a happy and successful daughter. Plath’s violent death dramas do not dominate every poem she wrote, but because they recurred as insistent imaginative material, she needed to find vehicles for them that could be vehicles of art. She is candid about the exaggeration of the images that throng her mind and works hard toward the end of her life to find forms of restraint that will not betray the excruciating content of her poems and to find images of tragic being that will not wreck aesthetic shape. As we see her last looks at death, we can trace her arrival, through a deepening mastery of technique, at a poetic strength absent in her earliest work. Although I begin with a few glances at early poems, I will spend most of my time on a single sequence by Plath, “Berck-Plage,” which seems to me to illustrate both her inability to remove death from her poetry and her eventual success at integrating it stylistically with her aesthetic aims.
As an artist, Plath explicitly desired four things: honesty of perception, clarity of analysis, discipline of expression, and moral strength. These desires, raised to principles, pervade even her juvenilia. In “Notes to a Neophyte,” she issues over-alliterating commands to an apprentice self judged to be too unrestrained, too vague, too falsely social:
metamorphose the mollusk
of vague vocabulary
with structural discipline;
stiffen the ordinary
malleable mask
to the granite grin of bone.
Unhappily, such a passage sums up clarity, discipline, and strength in a linguistically embarrassing surfeit of metamorphosing mollusks and granite grins. As for acquiring honesty, that was more difficult. At first, Plath took the task of honesty to be a satiric one: to expose, with sadistic satisfaction, the clay feet of the patriarchal idols of the tribe:
our eyes glut
themselves on the clay toes and short clubfoot
which mar the idol’s sanctity.
To confine honesty to the unmasking of social fraud, however, is to follow too easy a path, since it excludes honesty directed at the self. Plath proceeds in this early poem, “Metamorphoses of the Moon,” to a question far more important for her future work: how to choose the more honest of two equally plausible views. Here she debates the choice between imaginative and scientific representations of the moon:
The choice between the mica mystery
of moonlight or the pockmarked face we see
through the scrupulous telescope
is always to be made: innocence
is a fairy-tale; intelligence
hangs itself on its own rope.
In subsequent works, Plath balances between a diction of innocence—which, under the terrors of suffering, regresses to a childlike belief in angels and ogres—and a diction of intelligence, which is scrupulous with respect to external fact. Honesty to trauma, early and late, required of her both the admission of the child’s melodramatic volatility and the representation of the adult’s discriminating scrutiny.
Some critics have thought that Plath failed to maintain an equal respect for feeling and fact. When—in an attempt to show the annihilating pain visited upon her at eight by her father’s self-willed suicide—she compared him to a Nazi and herself to a Jew, she was criticized for appropriating for her own circumstances a fact too historically large, and too exclusively the property of the murdered Jews, to be contracted out to private domestic loss. Such a metaphor seemed to some a failure of adult judgment, however accurate it might be to Plath’s inner conviction that in willing his own death, her father had killed her too; as she said at his grave in “Electra on Azalea Path,” “The day you died I went into the dirt.” Plath failed in a similar way, some believed, when, instead of inserting herself into the image of the exalted Lazarus, raised from the dead, she converted him to her own purposes, changing him into herself, a malevolent “Lady Lazarus.” I mention these criticisms of Plath’s melodramas of appropriation because they have been leveled by serious lovers of poetry. Others—myself among them—do not find a failure of morality or tact in Plath’s extreme metaphors. Her German father, she thought, had murdered her own will to live by caring too little for her to attempt to save his own life. It is undeniable that her sickening death drive (which she ascribed, perhaps mistakenly, to her father’s willed dying) never left her mind; she had recurrent violent nightmares of “destruction, annihilations— / An assembly-line of cut throats” (“Waking in Winter”). In such circumstances, with such feelings, no moderate metaphor could be accurate. When she was resurrected, at nineteen, from a near-death state (after an overdose of barbiturates), it was natural that the myth of Lazarus should come to her mind. Unlike Lazarus, however, Plath returned not to joy but to horror: confinement in a hospital, electroshock, shame, public disgrace; and she endured those events while wanting still, and always, to die. How could she have imagined herself into the fate of the real Lazarus, happily restored to his family?
The harsh critiques of Plath’s poems of violence and melodrama bear witness not only to the disturbing force with which the death drive grasped her being but also to her success in transmitting that force in aggressive language. It needs to be remembered that she was a more exigent critic of herself than any commentator has been. Her last poems reveal that she had resolved to adopt a volume other than the fortissimo of “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus.” Still young in her art, she aimed, as we shall see, at aesthetic control and moderation of expression in spite of the death-obsession within which she had to live and create.
The worst thing her early trauma did to the adult Plath was to deprive her of both past and future. She had no real past, in her view, because she had always (since coming to self-consciousness at the age of eight) been dead; and she had no real future because she foresaw only an unrelieved continuation of the “neon hell” of nightmare in which she perpetually lived. Although past and future tenses appear in Plath’s juvenilia, they become rare in her adult poems, which take place in an acute and electric present. The strongest demand placed on Plath’s style by its confinement to the present moment was that it keep that moment charged and progressive even in its temporal immobility. Since the creation in a poem of panels of time—past, present, and future—is one of the strongest ways to simulate a believable human speaker, Plath is forced, by her fixed incarceration in the present, toward other means of self-construction. The creation of an insistent and isolated “I,” surrounded by brilliant images, is her most frequent choice of means. The classic case of that present-tense “I,” mythologized as Godiva, can be seen in Plath’s suicidal coursing into the sun as her horse Ariel rises from earth to air. As she rides, she becomes stripped of all but the pure active will of the vital “I,” which dictates to the poem called “Ariel” its unrelenting high tessitura:
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.
We experience a sense of gasping relief when the prolonged and repeated high pitch of the “I” sound, sustained by its ten instances (from “White” to “I”), subsides into the lower vowels of the incinerating sun, “the cauldron of morning.” In this wonderfully managed poem of the present-tense “I,” the “I” strips itself, image by image, until it aims itself out of itself.
In “Ariel,” as in other late theatrical poems of the “I,” Plath achieves an increasing reining in of her tendency to the ostentatiously lurid. She could not do without it—the lurid cannot be easily deleted from her conception of dying—but she could manage it without restricting it within the cage of a grotesque sonnet, without the gothic stage machinery of “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus.” Plath did more than put reins on her “I”; she began to be morally capable of what she named, in the title of a poem, as “The Courage of Shutting Up.” Although there are “disks of outrage” in the mind of the surgeon-protagonist of that poem, he does not speak, and his eyes refrain from sending out their death rays:
The surgeon is quiet, he does not speak.
He has seen too much death, his hands are full of it. . . .
. . . the tongue, too, has been put by.
But how about the eyes, the eyes, the eyes?
Their death rays [are] folded like flags
Of a country no longer heard of,
An obstinate independency
Insolvent among the mountains.
In “shutting up,” refusing to wield the death rays of her dominant “I’s,” Plath acquired a new style. It appears in various short poems that have become famous, such as “Edge.” But the poem in which her impersonal style is extensively and brilliantly displayed is a June 1962 sequence called “Berck-Plage,” which preceded by a few months the vow of silence in “The Courage of Shutting Up.” Of the 126 lines of “Berck-Plage,” only seven contain “I” or “my”;3 reading the poem, one senses a sharp change from Plath’s “I” mode. “Berck-Plage” is a poem in which, though using “ultimate” words and images, Plath maintains, through descriptive objectivity, a moral equilibrium. In “Berck-Plage” Plath allows herself theatricality and violence while putting them under the sponsorship of intelligence, creating a detachment in which a last look is sanely, if despairingly, directed toward natural death. Plath could write “Berck-Plage” so well because she had turned her attention away from herself and her father, and had written about natural death, not suicide. The poem commemorates the death of her aged neighbor, Percy Key, who had been pictured in the April poem “Among the Narcissi” as an “octogenarian . . . recuperating from something on the lung.” Commenting on the stoic courage of Key’s walking on the hill where he “nurses the hardship of his stitches,” Plath perceives that “there is a dignity to this; there is a formality.” It was that dignity and formality that she carried into the composition of “Berck-Plage.”
“Berck-Plage” fuses, as Ted Hughes notes, the 1962 death and funeral of Percy Key with a 1961 visit that he and Sylvia Plath made to a beach in Normandy called Berck-Plage—the location of a hospital serving cancer patients, amputees, and victims of accidents, who took their exercise on the beach.4 Several of Plath’s obsessions are incorporated into “Berck-Plage”: her father (with his emblematic black shoe for the gangrenous foot) displaced into the person of the village priest (also, of course, called “Father,” making the implicit link); Otto Plath’s grave (earlier described in “Electra on Azalea Path”); the sea as an abyss swallowing living things, out of which once-living things, now dead, are hauled; hills as stable presences in contrast to the devouring sea; ritual; sexual infidelity; corpses and their remains; eternity; and disappearance. But “Berck-Plage” is helped toward a stance of contemplation by its leisurely construction as a sequence (it has seven equal parts, each made up of nine couplets). The terrible attraction to death is here, but Plath’s stylistic response on this occasion is to represent death in slow motion; although the poem takes last looks at several stages of death, ending in a pilgrimage to a grave, there are many nearly static scenes on its path to that “naked mouth.”
Before coming to the individual parts of “Berck-Plage,” I must give a brief sketch of its two-part plot, in which the presence of the lyric speaker as a person is minimal. In the first part, which takes place at the seashore, the speaker, partly healthy, unlike the hospital amputees (“I have two legs”), but partly ill of an “inflammation,” walks by the sea, observing the black-cassocked figure of Death the priest as well as the mackerel gatherers’ dead fish, geometrized into “black and green lozenges.” While the merciless priest (after the manner of Otto Plath the professor) obliviously reads a book, two lovers embrace behind former wartime concrete bunkers. The sea, feared by the speaker, is full of corpses that it has swallowed, and its entangling weeds seem like hairy private parts. Frightened not only by the menacing sea but also by the hotel-hospital for the sick and the maimed, the speaker recuses herself from responsibility to the diseased and dying.
The second part of “Berck-Plage,” taking place inland, occupies itself with Plath’s dead neighbor. Individual sections represent Percy Key’s embalming at the undertaker’s, then his body in the coffin, together with the coffin bearers and the engraved date on the coffin plaque. Subsequently, the widow and her daughters keep vigil in their stone house at evening; in the morning, the funeral takes place in the presence of priest, widow, daughters, and speaker. Although the soul, in a glance at Christian iconography, is transmuted to a bride, the husband is not Christ, as conventional belief would have it, but the gaping earth. Finally, the burial in the cemetery is described through the eyes of children on a neighboring hill. They see, in their distorted vision from above, hats superimposed flatly on the grass as if their wearers had magically disappeared. This remote view staves off for a moment the act of burial; but as the poem arrives at the naked mouth of the grave, the plasma of hope in the mourning speaker runs out, and death is confirmed in gaping despair.
Plath’s stylistic response to Percy Key’s death, as I have said, is to invent an impersonal style. What does a piece of that style “feel like”? Not only has it put aside those piercing “I’s” in favor of objective description, it has also put aside (for the most part) the excitable questions and exclamations that normally attend Plath’s anxiety-ridden “I.” With the courage of shutting up, the tongue of the poem has been quieted. The facts in the undertaker’s parlor are few: the dead man has been embalmed and placed in a coffin; the sick-bed nurses have lost their function; the corpse’s hands are folded; the sheets and pillow cases of the deathbed have been washed; a silver plaque with the date engraved on it has been affixed to the oak coffin. As I have summarized them, the facts are emotionless. Plath’s charge to herself, in writing the poem, is to surround death with interpretation and emotion, but to do so without permitting the continual intrusion of the personal “I.” The speaker is allowed to make remarks, but they are chiefly the remarks not of an “I” but of an “eye,” an eye that can speak of what it sees but must restrict itself to copulative verbs of constatation, without verbs of personal action. Here are the flat opening phrases of section 4 of “Berck-Plage,” representing the embalmed Percy Key:
A wedding-cake face in a paper frill.
How superior he is now.It is like possessing a saint.
The nurses in their wing-caps are no longer so beautiful.They are browning, like touched gardenias.
The bed is rolled from the wall.This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible.
After the summary outburst “It is horrible,” the pure flatness of observation cannot persist; but even as the imagination raises its queries, and the personality of the speaker intrudes itself, a macabre decorum is maintained at the wake:
Is he wearing pajamas or an evening suit
Under the glued sheet from which his powdery beak
Rises so whitely unbuffeted?They propped his jaw with a book until it stiffened
And folded his hands, that were shaking, goodbye,
goodbye.Now the washed sheets fly in the sun,
The pillow cases are sweetening.It is a blessing, it is a blessing:
The long coffin of soap-colored oak,The curious bearers and the raw date
Engraving itself in silver with marvelous calm.
Imitating the “marvelous calm” of the self-engraving date (except for the spurt of revulsion in “It is horrible”), the speaker stands in the undertaker’s parlor taking the mourner’s last look at the corpse. Sight is the only sense drawn upon (with the single exception of “The pillow cases are sweetening”). The speaker restricts herself to only two binding forces in her eighteen lines: the copulative verb “is” (“are,” “were”), which appears twelve times, and the terminal “-ing,” employed ten times. The inert copula is the sign of the impotence of the eye to change anything; the “-ing” endings agitate the lines into a progressive present in order to give the corpse-picture the illusion of motion. The only departure from the intense present moment comes in the two past-tense lines about the preparation of the body, when real actions could still occur: “They propped his jaw . . . / And folded his hands.”
Restricted to being an eye, the speaker is immobile in body; having decided on reticence, she is contained, almost tongueless. Her images must speak for her emotions, except for the few moments in which her tongue cannot be restrained from exclamation or comment: “How superior he is now”; “It is horrible”; “The pillow cases are sweetening”; “It is a blessing, it is a blessing.” The sole question of this section—“What lies under that glued sheet?”—cannot be satisfied, but the wish to know causes the poem’s flashback to aspects formerly knowable: the open jaw (before the “beautification” of embalming) and the shaking hands (when the corpse was alive). The stanza’s three-line initial query (“Is he wearing pajamas or an evening suit,” etc.) matches the second three-line segment at the close (“The long coffin,” etc.). These three-line segments stand out from the others, which occupy one or two lines. The opening one-line, one-fact noun phrase of the affixed eye (“A wedding-cake face”) matches in its nominal, verbless form the three-line, three-fact noun phrase, with the eye similarly affixed, of the close: “The long coffin . . . , // The curious bearers . . . the raw date / Engraving itself.” The calm of the self-engraving date is “marvelous” only because it repudiates a personal dirge, as the poet strives to do. The face in the frill is seen with the cold eye that in youth noticed the “pockmarked face” of the moon; evasive “mica mystery” has no place here. Plath does permit herself brief relentings into lyric farewell, “goodbye, goodbye,” and into the lulling ritual words “It is a blessing, it is a blessing.” Underneath that soothing music, however, lies a suppressed outcry: the “raw” date that signifies extinction proclaims itself flayed into being.
“What is the name of that color?” the speaker of “Berck-Plage” asks as she sees the earth into which Percy Key will be lowered. She answers herself in another succession of noun phrases, this time images of post-traumatic aftermath: “Old blood of caked walls the sun heals, / Old blood of limb stumps, burnt hearts.” If the immediate artery spurt of the blood jet is poetry (“Kindness”), then these images of old blood on healed walls, old blood of earlier amputations (such as Plath’s father’s), and calcined hearts from a fire now cold, tell us that Plath sees the possibility of a style that is not a present-tense outburst resembling a jet from a living wound but a style that is more diagnostic, more measured, speaking after the fact about the caked walls, the stitched stump, the charred heart. She maintains this style with admirable evenness throughout “Berck-Plage,” regaining it after every protest that escapes her lips. It is only at the end, as the cortège arrives at Percy Key’s grave, that the style breaks down utterly and the blood jet returns, this time as a sky pouring out the last of its life-giving plasma. All claims of “marvelous calm” unravel, as we see, through the children’s wondering eyes, first the geometrized bearers and coffin, but then the naked wound of the open grave:
Six round black hats in the grass and a lozenge of wood
And a naked mouth, red and awkward.
For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma.
There is no hope, it is given up.
The final ironic and earnest echo of “consummatum est,” breaking from the speaker’s mouth, confirms the irreversibility of the end.
Plath has, then, found in her late style two manners of taking the “last look”: the blood-jet cry of the “I” and the post-traumatic analysis by the eye. The first manner has more continuity with the poet’s earlier work; the second represents, in Tim Kendall’s words, “a new style.”5 Death envisaged as already accomplished creates the severer manner, in which, no longer imprisoned in an agonizing present tense, Plath assumes a retrospective stance. Her own comment on the new style presents itself in the poem “Words,” dated February 1, ten days before Plath’s death on February 11. In “Words,” the old wounds suffered in the past return in transfigured form in the present; the ax strokes of traumatic tree fellings in the past send off present echoes, which sound like hoofbeats:
Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the center like horses.
Suddenly Plath abandons these present-tense short-phrased echoes for a long visual narrative of past tears and their aftermath, retold in a different present tense, that of the newly felled tree:
The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock
That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
The “granite grin” of the juvenile “Notes to a Neophyte” reappears here in the rock as skull, the foundation over which tears run, as the psyche strives to reestablish in the form of water its original sap/jet, which will, as it abates its motion, become a still mirror of contemplative reflection.
With no transition, Plath returns from her feelings at the time of her felling to the echoes created by her subsequent representation of that trauma in words:
Years later I
Encounter them on the road—
Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
With the word “indefatigable,” Plath claims permanence for her poem. The poem “should” end here, with this understated but identifiable boast: normally, “eternizing” assurances end the poems in which they appear. But Plath, with another unannounced transition to tears, reveals that the sap/tears/water has indeed reestablished its pool, but not a reflective one:
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.
The striking images of this poem—axes to sap to tears to falling water to rock to skull to pool to fixed stars—have attracted the fine attention of Tim Kendall, Plath’s best critic. But I want to consider here a different aspect of this late poem, in which, though the tree/poet dies into a skull, the indefatigable hoof-taps continue into a solid future. The aspect to which I turn is Plath’s construction of sentences.
In Plath’s narrative of the tree/poet, both prelude (lines 1–5) and coda (lines 14–20) consist of two sentences, but the tale of the tears (lines 6–13) is voiced in a long single sentence coursing down the page, imitating the purposive journey of the tears, as the water acknowledges in turn both the eventual skull of its former body and even its posthumous destruction by tempus edax, the devouring “weedy greens.” In short, the opening sentences track the initial ringing echoes of words; the long middle sentence tracks the posthumous life of the sap of the felled tree; and the last two sentences track the response of a present self contemplating its own past and future. The “I” appears late in the poem’s “dry” close, in the penultimate stanza: “Years later, I / Encounter [the words] on the road.” The weeping of the sap has ceased, the water has disappeared, and even the rock skull has been devoured by nature. As the poet rereads her past work, it no longer seems a shriek of active trauma nor a slow bodily production of tears, but takes on its metrical character as “indefatigable hoof-taps.” Instead of former selves being shed like “old whore petticoats” (as in “Fever 103°”), or enduring as skulls or bones, or being consumed by the sun, they endure as words. It is the last three lines of “Words” that give pause. Water, we thought, had disappeared with the white skull and its correlative rock. But no—water reappears, no longer as striving and cursive but as a static pool, itself as immobile as the fixed stars which, normally reflected on the surface of the water, are interpreted as sunk, unchanging and unchangeable, at the bottom of the pool.6 The temporal motion of the poem—so important to Plath, as we saw in “Ariel”—is here suspended in the “while” introducing the final “sentence” (an adverbial sentence fragment). “While,” always of great use to poets, makes two things happen simultaneously. Plath would have known the power of “while,” especially from Keats’s ode “To Autumn”: “While barrèd clouds bloom the soft-dying day . . . / Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn. . . .” As Keats’s “while” enables the simultaneity of the visual and the auditory, so Plath’s enables the simultaneity of immortal sounds and mortal fate. While the fixed stars of determinism govern an individual life, the indefatigable hoofbeats of human creation simultaneously assert themselves beyond that lifetime. Even the legitimate pride Plath feels with respect to her past work, as she encounters it “years later,” cannot extinguish her conviction that her life is not her own to direct.
The present tense of “Words” is, as I have said, ingeniously distributed among Plath’s own retrospective present, her present present (in the attempt to reestablish a reflective pool), and the eternal present of the fixed stars. In the sardonic poem “Gigolo,” also from this period, the gigolo leans over a pool:
All the fall of water an eye
Over whose pool I tenderly
Lean and see me.
When in “Words” Plath represents the eye regarding the pool, it no longer views its narcissistic image, as in “Gigolo,” but rather perceives the ordaining conditions of fate. The objectivity of regard in “Words,” as in “Berck-Plage,” arises from Plath’s adoption of a view that is post-traumatic, even posthumous, but it is a point of view tenaciously maintained as long as the poet is alive. It cools the eye and slows the pace from Ariel’s rapidity to water’s slow descent; it allows dryness as well as tears; it demands above all a dispassionate diagnosis of how things stand.
On the other hand, a feverish heat within is native to Plath. Can this late dry and cool style be applied to a description of heat? Plath attempted this feat more than once, using flowers—tulips, poppies—as symbols of life heat. “Tulips” is a long exercise in the dry style, but its Lawrentian length links it to a Romantic desire for extended expressiveness that is “moist” rather than “dry.” Plath found a more successful binocular vision of death and life in the faultless poem “Poppies in October.” In it, the redness of life and the pallor of death engage from the beginning in an antiphonal shadow play, the motion of their interchange speeding up as the poem advances. The poppies—an unexpected “love-gift” to the desolate poet—set the standard for redness with their female “skirts”; their redness surpasses even that of the red dawn-clouds and the red jet of blood staining the coat of a dying woman:
POPPIES IN OCTOBER
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly—
A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a skyPalely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.27 October 1962
In the implied scenario preceding the poem, Plath, under a wintry dawn sky filled with reddening “sun-clouds,” finds herself on a street where poppies are for sale and where businessmen wearing bowler hats are walking by while an ambulance hurtles past, carrying a hemorrhaging woman. The aesthetic poppies, the rosy clouds, the commonplace businessmen, and the bleeding female body compete for Plath’s attention. It is to the ravishing beauty of the flowers that the poet responds first; she can describe the poppies adequately, she implies, only by declaring that their “skirts” surpass the sun-clouds, and—as she apparently heartlessly gathers the ambulance patient into her admiration of the shape and color of the flowers—that the poppies’ red surpasses the “bloom” of a bursting heart. The patient is solely a spectacle as her coat becomes soaked with an expanding red stain. But suddenly the ambulance seems forgotten as the senses carry Plath into gratitude for the unexpected beauty of the flowers so late in the year; they are a “gift, a love gift.” The chill of death—present in the ambulance but warded off by Plath’s willfully contemplating only the color of the woman’s blood, not its cause—is displaced as Plath transforms the red heat of poppies and lifeblood into the bleak exhaust-oxymoron of the sky, “flamily” (if also “palely”) “igniting its carbon monoxides.” Lethal in the aftermath of both its igniting sun flame and its igniting wintry clouds, the sky asks for no such gift of beauty, nor do the “halted” souls of the dull-eyed, quasi-dead bowler-wearing men.
Isolated from both sinister landscape and suffering patient by her defensive aesthetic attention, the poet wonders why she has been chosen as the recipient of this unasked-for but consolatory gift; and the poppies, enabling Plath’s poetic utterance by metamorphosing themselves into “late mouths” that “cry open,” create around themselves a paradoxical environment, composed of a forest of frost that breathes death, and a dawn of cornflowers that breathes renewal. In the earlier “Poppies in July,” dated July 20, 1962, the poet, assaulted by the red of the poppies, longed for a deathly colorlessness. The view there is purely self-enclosed: there are no ambulances, no businessmen, no clouds. Only when Plath turned to an external reality framing her emotions was she able to include death objectively, to see it as something other than a personal assault.
The rhythms of “Poppies in October” derive from the poem’s malignant dactylic rendering of the fatal sky “Palely and flamily / Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes / Dulled to a halt under bowlers.” The dactyls even initiate the poem: “Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.” These falling rhythms govern all of Plath’s local sense perceptions (skirts, heart, sky), but at the end of the poem they are conquered by their opposite, the rising rhythm of anapests, in “O my God, what am I” and “In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.” By thus “turning itself inside out” rhythmically, the poem ends on a note of gratitude. It has first alternated an alienated aesthetic perception with astonishment at “a love gift,” but that life benefit has been temporarily obscured by the hostile crematorium sky and the inert robotic eyes under bowlers. Plath finds herself able to end with renewed exaltation at the gift of beauty because she has discovered a different rhythm and a new set of words (unaltered “forest” and “flowers” in lieu of flowers transmuted into “skirts”) that can restore beauty to nature, not place it cold-heartedly in the context of human hemorrhage.
If we ask ourselves how Plath found a style with which to gather death and life into a single binocular view, we can reply that for her the task became specialized, since death was always before her eyes. She needed to discover a way to restore life to the skull, to put blood into the face of death, as George Herbert said. Her melodrama and violence were ways of waking Death up: to make a corpse stand up and do a striptease, to construct an ambulatory black boot over a dead foot. The sheer force of her animating will, as she breathes life into inert clay or tries to reassemble the disjecta membra of a father-Colossus, puts the poetry under a strain of energetic artificiality. The interface of life and death becomes a site of manipulated shock electrically galvanizing personified Death into personified Life. Plath’s poetry survives aesthetically because Death is so violently present that Life must take on a matching violence, but when their confrontation takes place in a present-tense personal moment, the result, in her mature work, is more a duel than a binocular comprehensiveness. When Plath left aside her own and her father’s suicidal drives and contemplated the natural death of Percy Key, she could, while maintaining aspects of the macabre, let her poem “engrave itself” calmly, with Percy Key’s formality and dignity as her guide. She learned to examine death with an impersonality of style that announces her eventual critique of poems exclusively personal in utterance. She could maintain her late severity and impersonality by regarding herself from the outside in poems such as “Axes” and “Edge” that succeed in containing life and death within a single steadfast gaze. She could reprove her subordination of human response to aesthetic response in “Poppies in October,” chillingly conveying in a dry style the alienated eye describing the hemorrhage, while exhibiting the resuscitation of human feeling in her confession of unworthiness before the gift of beauty. Repentance for her “sin” of aesthetic appropriation of blood lies behind the outburst of penitential gratitude: “O my God, what am I / That these late mouths should cry open.” The complex relation between the detached “appreciation” of the red heart-blood and the subsequent penitence before the living poppies makes Plath’s confrontation of life and death—in her last look before she will be suffocated by the lethal sky—one that accommodates both her native violence of imagery and her newly objective style. She was always a posthumous person, but it took her years to acquire a posthumous style.