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Sylvia Plath

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on March 13, 2007 at 10:38:31 pm

Slyvia Plath

Presented by Dani Stoe

Though often viewed as either a feminist martyr or a tragic heroine, Sylvia Plath was in truth neither and, at the same time, a bit of both. While it is certainly true that her madness was most likely driven over the edge by her husband's general scorn for women, she was no martyr for feminism. She was also not quite the doomed lunatic, as some would describe her. Plath was the author famously known for the novel The Bell Jar, as well as poems such as "Ariel." Collections of her poetry were published after her death. They include Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, and The Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

One interesting influence on Sylvia Plath's career was her friendship with fellow poet Anne Sexton. Although contrasting stories exist regarding the genuineness of their friendship, Plath and Sexton did spend time with each other during March and April of 1959. Both attended a poetry class offered by Robert Lowell at Boston University and enjoyed discussing their deaths over martinis at the Ritz-Carlton hotel's bar after class. Poet George Starbuck, who joined them on these occasions, wrote that they "had these hilarious conversations comparing their suicides and talking about their psychiatrists" (Trinidad 4). However, as Sexton began an affair with Starbuck and they ~~(who is the "they"?)~~ had work published, Plath became jealous of her friend. Simultaneously, Plath's work was not well received by both publishers and critics, upsetting her further. Nevertheless, as Plath became more successful, she acknowledged she had been influenced by Sexton's work. Plath's "Ariel" and Sexton's "The Starry Night" both celebrate suicide, the same topic which the women discussed at the Ritz. After Plath's death, Sexton started to incorporate Plath's themes and Nazi imagery into her own work. Despite communicating only sporadically between 1959 and Plath's suicide, both women were definitively influenced by their brief friendship, showing in their respective works.

Examples of Her Poetry:

"Ariel"

Stasis in darkness.

Then the substanceless blue

Pour of 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 cannot catch,

Nigger-eye

Berries cast dark

Hooks----

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,

Shadows.

Something else

Hauls me through air----

Thighs, hair;

Flakes from my heels.

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.

"Daddy"

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time---

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one gray toe

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pours bean green over blue

In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.

My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.

So I never could tell where you

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine,

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

Are not very pure or true.

With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been sacred of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You----

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot

But no less a devil for that, no not

Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,

And they stuck me together with glue.

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I'm finally through.

The black telephone's off at the root,

The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two---

The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.