Sylvia Plath: Spiralling and Pulling Out

This week I have had the great joy (?) of spending a few days preparing a class presentation on Sylvia Plath and her posthumously published collection of poems Ariel. It was the last class presentation of my undergraduate degree, and frankly I was determined to make it the very best. I got completely absorbed in Plath, and not just Plath but also Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton as well. A troubled bunch of poetic geniuses who were all somehow held prisoner in each of their own heads by mental illness.

Let me first say a few things on the reception of Plath. Not everyone likes her, not everyone likes her work, and that's okay, not everyone has to like her. In fact I won't ask you to, nor will I convince you that you should like her. However, one thing that every personality in my class today agreed on was that her place amongst the great poets is fully deserved. A sunny disposition she did not own, but she was certainly a creative genius. As it happens I love Plath's work, it crafts the miserable and horrific into something beautiful. If you have read my previous blogs, you'll know this is something I find particularly interesting. I was drawn into the spiral.

Having immersed myself in Ariel and selected works by Lowell and Sexton I ended up feeling drawn and heavy. I needed to pull out of the spiral in order to work on the presentation. I knew I needed to do something to catapult my mind back into the land of the living. So I wrote this poem.

Sylvia

Is there no justice for the lonely and forsaken?
Is there no dream for the broken and breaking?
Let us plunge

Headlong into the ether

We will mine the moon for the blue in its midnight
We will plumb from its depths the crystal of its cold

I will not give it back
Not anything that you have not already had
I will give you nothing but what you have given me

Keep your ice and water

I need none of those, I will give you ice
For you have given me the freeze of the lonely

Keep your blue and moons

Keep your violent tulips
Keep the stinging bees

Your insanity steels my spine

While your haunted embryos and dead babies
Eat at the edge of the fiery cavern in my chest

Keep your baldheads and black boots

My feet are bare and my hair flies behind
Your Lazarus eats mankind

I don’t need your hospitals

I learned from your insanity I won’t know it
Keep your lecherous doctors and frames of smiles

The carbon monoxide that choked you

Should have been swallowed by the trees you wrote
Oh shallow woman, you scorned the night