Plath – The Poems

‘Because I could not stop for Death –/He kindly stopped for me,’ wrote Emily Dickinson. Well, Plath stopped for him. And as an artist, at a most particular moment – one of secret fulfilment. Even in an early Plath poem, ‘Mushrooms’, one can hear an underground note of advancement – determined, almost military, as the usually benign mushroom warns us, ‘Our foot’s in the door.’ Plath’s feeling for syllable
and rhythm, which Eliot marked as one of the key components in the auditory imagination, is already apparent.

‘The Colossus’ is her father, writ large. ‘Thirty years now I have labored/To dredge the silt from your throat./I am none the wiser.’ It’s an old story. ‘The Colossus’ was the title poem of her first collection,
which itself went through endless permutations, including, as Hughes points out, the telling Full Fathom Five, also, and just as compelling and provocative, The Bull of Bendylaw. Philip Larkin wrote of the opening lines of ‘Two Views of a Cadaver Room’, ‘the shock is sudden’. He’d read the poems chronologically and, though impressed, this is the poem of which he said, ‘The possibility that she is simply trying on another style is dispelled’ and, he continues, ‘she has found her subject matter’. It is a line that tolls like a bell. The painting referred to in the poem is Pieter Bruegel’s Triumph of Death and there are echoes also, I believe, of the poet Gottfried Benn’s Morgue.

Plath died young and virtually unknown. So I quote her where possible on her own work. Of the speaker in ‘The Applicant’, she said, He ‘is an executive . . . [who] wants to be sure the applicant for his marvelous product . . . will treat it right.’ The question, ‘Will you marry it, marry it, marry it’ strikes a sinister, Pinteresque note. She was much criticised for her almost obsessive use of repetition, as Tim Kendall points out in Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study. However, in her inner ear that is how Plath heard the beat. Like Lear’s ‘never’, repeated five times, to sound his despair at Cordelia’s death, the human voice releases the power of repetition from the page. Of ‘Death & Co.’ she said, it ‘is about the double or schizophrenic nature of death – the marmoreal coldness of Blake’s death mask, say, hand in glove with the fearful softness of worms . . . I imagine these two aspects of death as two men . . . who have come to call.’ There is nothing to add.

The wild rhythms and the terrifying energy of ‘Daddy’, are controlled, just, by the artist. She herself said of it, ‘Here is a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God.’ Camille Paglia described it as ‘garish, sarcastic and profane and one of the strongest poems ever written by a woman’. It would take a strong woman to disagree.

At a BBC reading (and few writers loved the BBC more than Plath), she introduced the dramatic monologue of ‘Lady Lazarus’ thus: ‘The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first.’ The lines ‘I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air’ are terrifying. In ‘Edge’, ‘The woman is perfected’.

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