Sylvia Plath

The Colossus and Other Poems

The Manor Garden
The book opens with a poem about natural things and the passage of time. As with Hemmingway, suicide is mentioned in the work. Sylvia also killed herself (2-11-63). She was awarded the Pulizer Prize posthumously in 1981. I wonder if her suicide had anything to do with it.

A spider is mentioned in this first poem. In order to be a good poet, apparently, one must, at some point, say something of spiders.

Two Views of a Cadaver's Room
This poem means something to me as my life experience involves such rooms (having worked in the funeral industry for a time). I found it interesting and true but more a narrative than a poem. Kind of like Frost's old-man-come-to-die poem, but graciously short.

"In their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow." This is the one and only line I have ever remembered in connection with Plath, so I must have read this book before.

As with Emily, the works are sometimes so personal with their references as to be confusing or cryptic.

I like the way this poem seemingly contrasts the life and death of perhaps two in the room. It's so shocking and true!

Night Shift
What is this poem about? Metropolis? Industry?

Sow
A long, somewhat novel look at a pig.

The Eye-Mote
I'm taking this quite literally but also it fixes my interest in the general concept of suffering some life-altering, "accidental" thing where one is no longer what one was and self is as gone as yesterday.

At first I saw a woman writing about horses. Egads, another woman obsessed with ponies, say it isn't so. And it wasn't, thankfully, as the poem evolved.

The occurrence, the accident, the happening warps a view of everything, even the simplest shapes. The speck becomes a "Red cinder around which I myself, Horses, planets and spires revolved." It becomes the smallest thumb that can, in the simplest movement, block out the vast expanse of the sun.

This evoked a tear:
"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."

The title also reminds me of a Bible verse.

Hardcastle Crags
"The long wind...
...blew its burdened
whistle
In the whorl of her ear, and like a scooped-out
pumpkin crown
Her head cupped the babel."

This poem says a couple things:
a) There is a disconnect with her surroundings, an alienation of sorts: "The dream-peopled village" also the "indifferent iron" of the landscape. The image of the surroundings is cold and dark while she is the passion, the active flame in danger even of being snuffed out by all this. The world seems too big to argue with, the waters too vast to hope to tread. Its absolution is impenetrable. The sheer weight of it threatens to grind her into "mere quartz grit."

b) Is this a poem about suicide and not completely having the courage to go through with it?

Faun
A literal poem about Puck? Or a figurative look at a transforming man in her life?

Departure
"The money's run out," and they are leaving, which is nothing to the unaffected locale. The indifference of nature. Allen Ginsberg's dad spoke of nature as being all bosom and no heart. Like spiders, many poets speak of this.

The Colossus
About her father? About her husband? A poem about a man she has exhausted herself in trying to get near, so much so that the beginnings of apathy show.

Lorelei
Utterly haunting. An image of mermaids, the real kind who sing you to your death. I see the struggle between life and what Sylvia acknowledges is the deception of death. Ultimately she perceives it as peaceful and longs for it.

Point Shirley
A palpable, heart-breaking reminiscence of her grandmother.

The human experience element of piercing emotions which former humdrum, unappreciated monuments evoke.

Genius:
"I would get from these dry-papped stones
the milk your love instilled in them."

The Bull of Bendylaw
The surprising thing about Plath is that even when I have no idea what she is talking about, I am still interested in what she has to say as in the brilliant:

"The king's tidy acre is under the sea,
And the royal rose in the bull's belly,
And the bull on the king's highway."

No earthly, but I get this silly, concrete vision of cement statues in a garden by the sea. Picturesque, until up comes the sea, washing away the statues, the roses and the bull who came to eat them at exactly the wrong time.

All The Dead Dears
Sylvia ponders the life cycle, entertaining especially death.

Aftermath
I like this eery snapshot of a fire-ruined dwelling and an individual at the bewildered beginning of her personal crisis... and all the bystanders come to gawk. But Sylvia is honest and she shoots them with a flash exposing their craned craving for morbid entertainment in:
"The crowd sucks her last tear and turns away."

The Thin People
"Could not remain outlandish victims...
Any more than the old woman in her
mud hut could
Keep from cutting fat meat
Out of the side of the generous moon
when it
Set foot nightly in her yard
Until her knife had pared
The moon to a rind of little light."

"Into our bad dreams, their menace
Not guns, not abuses,
But a thin silence."

For Plath's Thin People the battle was weight. I don't have the same battle, but I know the disdain each day. I will write Healthy People. Until then my thin silence, a pregnant pause.

We see the red crush of pain in these lines:
"See, how the tree boles flatten
And lose their good browns

If the thin people simply stand in the forest,
Making the world go thin as a wasp's nest

And greyer; not even moving their bones."

It's not so much envy as pain.

Suicide Off Egg Rock
"...And his blood beating the old tattoo
I am, I am, I am."
I gasped, went wild at the richness of that.

This poem is another pearl in Plath's necklace of watery auto-elimination. In the world of Sylvia Plath ears are whorled, water is flux and peace is death.

Mushrooms
This poem speaks the voice of mushrooms. It's novel as in
"We
Diet on water,
on crumbs of shadow..."
Plath must have felt that way at times.

I Want, I Want
This is another fascinating poem that I am not worthy of grasping, yet it commands a second and third look with its intriguing imagery. At my best, all I could make out is a poem about God and sacrifice.

Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows
It occurred to me, while reading this poem, that I should write one myself about the anole lizard and his spotted ruby throat and threatening postures and ridiculous miniature pushups.

"...While the students stroll or sit,
Hands laced, in a moony indolence of love-
Black-gowned but unaware
How in such mild air
The owl shall stoop from his turret, the rat cry out."

So many levels here. Death hovers so far over unknowing, unseeing youth, youth in the process of graduating itself and growing old, losing the nascent cataract that obscures the view of the hovering owl that waits on wings to devour, unaffected, the "moony indolence of love."

The Ghost's Leavetaking
So real it made me laugh:

"...Five o'clock in the morning, the no-color void
Where the waking head rubbishes out the draggled
lot
Of sulfurous dreamscapes and obscure lunar conundrums
Which seemed, when dreamed, to mean so profoundly much..."

This poem is strikingly novel and wonderful as in:

"At this joint between two worlds and two entirely
Incompatible modes of time, the raw material
Of our meat-and-potato thoughts assumes the nimbus
Of ambrosial revelation. And so departs."

If this doesn't excite you, please check your pulse.

"...in those sheets
which signify our origin and end..."

In the left eye I see the funeral shroud; in the right ear (in the whorl) I hear the midwife calling for boiling water and clean sheets.

The reference to the parallel twilight world is curiously childlike:

"...the cloud-cuckoo land of colorwheels

And pristine alphabets and cows that moo
And moo as they jump over moons as new
As that crisp cusp toward which you voyage now."

There is talk of a possible child loss experience. Glimpses here? Children in a land apart?
And I like the continuity of
"...as new
As that crisp cusp..."
A new day? Or the new experience of one's immediately impending death? When I lost my parents I saw death first-finally as miraculous as birth. Not as wonderful, mind you, but as miraculous. Presto change-o, poof, they've disappeared. Here all my life one second and not the next? Honestly. But oblivion is no miracle. Death is a mere footstone, highlighting again the miracle of life.

"Hail and farewell. Hello, goodbye."
Not only the conscious unconscious of waking and dreaming but of life and death. Quite profound.

A Winter Ship
I like the feel of this image of the garrishness of industry:

"Red and orange barges list and blister
Shackled to the dock, outmoded, gaudy,
And apparently indestructible.
The sea pulses under a skin of oil."

Genius:
"All around us the water slips
and gossips in its loose vernacular,
Ferrying the smells of dead cod and tar."

Full Fathom Five
Before her dad was identified I found him in the lines, and harkened back to the "weedy acres of [his] brow." Now I know. I can relate to:

"All obscurity starts with danger:

Your dangers are many."

Also:
"The muddy rumors
of your burial move me
To half-believe: your reappearance
Proves rumors shallow..."
The way I find out if my birthfather is still alive is when the check for $200 comes at Christmas. When it stops coming, I will wonder if he is dead or if he merely came to his senses and stopped pretending to care.

She referenced her dad here as untouchable, as a king. I harken back to the Bull of Bendylaw and read references to the king anew. Is this the passage of time? The destruction of a picture of a decent childhood?

"Your shelled bed I remember."
I don't want to jump to odious conclusions.

"Father, this thick air is murderous
I would breathe water."
The thick air of their relationship or the thick air of its loss? Or the thick air of awful memories of awfuller experiences? Sylvia is dead of her own hand. What makes her person any different than me, save that and her genius? I shudder.

Blue Moles
A poem about coming upon two dead moles in the yard. It's a comparison of their mysterious, isolated lives to our own. Plath's agonized search for purpose comes into focus.

Strumpet Song
Does this speak literally of philandery? I am tarnished, ruined by some particular knowledge of her personal life.

Man in Black
Surely significant to her. Not so much to me. A man is the focal point of this poem which seems to say "a man is the focal point of this poem." Everything and not much of anything.

Snakecharmer
I can't help feeling this poem is dated. Plath's midcentury is showing. Snakecharmers and Sputnik - poem fluffery of the time, mystical as Columbus' round world. The Discovery Channel eviscerated this poem with the science of swaying.

Plath deserves the full forty and so we tango for long hours. It's only a season, but it's Sylvia all.

The Hermit at Outermost House
I don't get it. Mention of stone gods. Her dad again?

The Disquieting Muses
Some unsettling issue with her mother. I don't know the history. The snapshots of her childhood, some happy, were priceless, something to hold onto.

Medallion
Another keen observation of some dead thing in the yard. So keen in fact, it must be included here in full:

"By the gate with star and moon
Worked into the peeled orange wood
The bronze snake lay in the sun

Inert as a shoelace; dead
But pliable still, his jaw
Unhinged and his grin crooked,

Tongue a rose-colored arrow.
Over my hand I hung him.
His little vermilion eye

Ignited with a glassed flame
As I turned him in the light;
When I split a rock one time

The garnet bits burned like that.
Bust dulled his back to ocher
The way sun ruins a trout.

Yet his belly kept its fire
Going under the chainmail,
The old jewels smoldering there

In each opaque belly-scale:
Sunset looked at through milk glass.
And I saw white maggots coil

Thin as pins in the dark bruise
Where innards bulged as if
He were digesting a mouse.

Knifelike, he was chaste enough,
Pure death's-metal. The yard-man's
Flung brick perfected his laugh."

The Companionable Ills
Way over my head. My only stab is learning to love otherwise unseemly quirks.

Moonrise
So many novel comparisons here. White is the theme. It is related to life and death, death in sundry particulars. The last line: "The White stomach may ripen yet," piques my interest: Is this an actual birth? Is this an allusion to a miscarriage? Something else? What?

Spinster
"...heart's frosty discipline
Exact as a snowflake."

A poem about a terminally guarded woman that ends picture-perfect with cherries on top. Is this someone Plath knows or someone Plath would like to have been?

Frog Autumn
A cyclic poem about Autumn and a wistfulness for the fat of summer. I'm happily struck that the death queen values the light of day here, seemingly resents the dismantling promise of winter.

Mussel Hunter At Rock Harbor
Halley's comet is mentioned in this poem about creatures in a tide pool. It appears approximately every 75 years or so, 1986 being its most recent showing. I didn't bother to go outside for a look. I was a tomato-head. Halley's comet always reminds me of Mark Twain.

"Where red-freckled crab-backs, claws
And whole crabs, dead, their soggy

Bellies pallid and upturned,
Perform their shambling waltzes
On the waves' dissolving turn..."

"This relic saved
Face, to face the bald-faced sun."
Sylvia having fun for a change.

The Beekeeper's Daughter
Rich with the image and scent of natural things - mostly flowers, some fruits. A poem about these and bees... and something more?

The Times Are Tidy
Commentary on contemporary industrial life, the "life-o-matic" world. Midcentury shows again. Sputnik launching into the ether.

I wonder if the last line is sarcastic or if she is right about her disdain and wrong about her guilty conscience.

The Burnt-out Spa
Pretty much a poem about a burnt-out spa.

I like the cyclic theme carried in:
"The small dell eats what ate it once."

Sculptor
Poem in honor of Leonard Baskin, sculptor.

"...until his chisel bequeaths
Them life livelier than ours
A solider repose than death's."

Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond
Major nature poem. Nature I can most easily sink my teeth into. I can experience it without it becoming so busy as to blur into a tasteless mass of neutrality. Each element is succulant emotion that I can grasp and roll around. This is nature from ink. World and season flowing fluid from a pen.

Perhaps I should stab at a poem about Plath using some of my smarter comments about her.

Another poem about the end of the liveley warmth of summer. This has a feel that picks up where Frog Autumn leaves off.

I note with interest that Plath comments "This is not death, it is something safer." Death is not as safe as suspended animation here. Would Plath have preferred a cryogenic tank to the gas of an oven, when, were it possible, she would have emerged from her sleep her same self? Wherever you go, there you are.

Plath metions Golgotha and that is my cue; Ginsberg must be next under my own personal passionate microscope whose analysis means nothing.

The Stones
I have read the title and the first line:

"This is the city where men are mended."
My guess: a poem about a boneyard?

I know the earth is mother with a belly of mulching detritis and I know this is an unsettling comfort... but I can't help waxing Freudian on the repeat allusions to the belly and the mention of the fetus.

"This is the after-hell: I see the light."
Oh precious one!

"On Fridays the little children come."

Come to play in the boneyard after classes or something different? They "trade their hooks for hands." What else? On Thursdays the not-so-little children come. And I should know.

Mention of counted fingers and itching mendings.

"There is nothing to do. I shall be good as new," Sylvia ends.

Visit Sylvia's grave.