Death and Rebirth in Sylvia Plath's "Berck-Plage"
Sylvia Plath's "Berck-Plage," which
contains 126 lines of seemingly unmitigated malaise and funereal gloom, stands
in many readers' estimation as one of her heaviest and least appealing works,
even considering its autobiographical significance. The occasion for the poem
is described by Ted Hughes in a note to the poem written in 197O:
‘In June,
1961, we had visited Berck-Plage, a
In a notebook entry later published as "Rose
and Percy B" in the Johnny Panic collection, Sylvia Plath recorded her own
feelings several days after the funeral, which took place on June 29, 1962:
"I have written a long poem, 'Berck-Plage,' about it. Very moved. Several
terrible glimpses". Indeed, Plath's description of
Percy's stiffening corpse is a glimpse even more ghastly than the drowned face
looming under the fishpond surface in "All the Dead Dears". That
earlier poem (1957) offers an important clue to Plath's purposes in her later
poems about the dead and the dying: "How they grip us through thin and thick,
these barnacle dead." Faces in an endless mirror of preceding generations
-- these skeleton-kin, she says, "Reach hag hands to haul me in."
Plath's motivation in writing such ugly and
terrifying pictures of death is certainly not its glorification. Far more
likely a motive, given Sylvia Plath's abundantly demonstrated lust for the rich
textures of life, is her concern for physical and psychic survival in the face
of suffering and death. In many of her poems, what Plath perceives is a
death-figure which threatens to swallow her up unless she can reassert her
living identity by "fixing" and thus immobilizing her enemy in a
structured poetic image. The otherwise uncontrollable fear brought on by what
she perceives can thus be allayed by its transference to what she can control:
the image. For Sylvia Plath, the spectacle of the maimed French
war veterans at Berck-Plage and of Percy Key, the cancer-ridden English
Everyman next door, were to become emblems of her own struggle to confront
death and defeat its power to poison the mind. The early drafts of the poem
show that Plath had an even larger purpose in mind than the fusion of the two
incidents when she began to compose it during the week following the old man's
death (June 26-3O, 1962). According to the dates on the drafts, there
emerged by June 28 a third element of great personal importance: an ironic
parallel between the dying processes she had witnessed and the birth and growth
into life of Nicholas, her second child, who came into the world at almost the
same time that Percy Key was entering his final decline into death. Few readers
of the published version of "Berck-Plage" would suspect that Sylvia
Plath had deleted a whole section of the poem before the final typescript. The
deleted section shows in juxtaposed "buntings" a dying man and a
hungry, growing baby.
As we shall see, Plath had justifiable reasons for
deleting the section, but the knowledge of what it contains compels us to
reconsider carefully the published version of the poem. In spite of its size
and complexity, "Berck-Plage" has attracted relatively scant
attention from scholars and critics, especially in connection with rebirth and
affirmation of life. Although Judith Kroll does not discuss the poem specifically
in her book-length study, Chapters in a Mythology, her introductory comment
about the death/rebirth theme can serve as a keynote for the present study:
To
see the autobiographical details only as such is
to
regard Plath's vision of suffering and death as
morbid, but to appreciate the deeper significance of
her
poetry is to understand her fascination with
death as connected with and transformed into a
broader concern with the themes of rebirth and
transcendence.
Plath's basic method of "transforming"
death is to assume, figuratively speaking, the role of a photo-journalist at
the scene, keenly observing details with her camera and narrating interpretive
commentary in such a way as to "control" what she sees with the
transforming power of her language. Her technique resembles that of cinematic
montage, which juxtaposes and thereby fuses diverse visual images in a
meaningful way, beyond the normal parameters of space and time. In this way,
Plath's "lens" can both record and transcend the literal immediacy of
what she witnesses, thereby creating order out of chaos.
"Berck-Plage" opens with a strange
seaside scene. In a fragmentary rough draft, Plath's first image is not of the
sea, as it is in the finished version, but of the sun:
Silent and violent, the sun
Laid its bright poultices on the promenade.
The recollection also includes pretty girls selling
ice cream cones, but as the draft continues, the images shift into the realm of
the bizarre: the girls are adjusting wigs over their bald scalps, Their
identical heads glistening in the cool, little china eggs. Part of the
nightmare-come-to-life that Ted Hughes mentions is evidently Plath's
association of these heads with Giorgio de Chirico's The Disquieting Muses and
her own obsessive poem with the same title, which have been examined closely by
Judith Kroll. From the very beginning of her work on "Berck-Plage,"
Plath envisioned grotesque, surrealist transformations of what she had actually
seen, as if she herself were doing a Chiricoesque painting or a Fellini film.
The sun's poultice -- a poultice of silences, she
calls it in the first draft -- is simply a covering laid or unrolled over the
concrete promenade, but then Plath uses its medicinal qualities to assuage the
pain of seeing once again the darning-egg heads: "How the sun's poultice
draws on my inflammation." The cause of this inflammation is not yet
revealed. In her second try at opening the poem, she says that the sun, like a
poultice, draws my poison into the light.
We may call this the poison of festering memory,
which in turn poisonously distorts her vision of the scene. The sun's act or
process of drawing forth such poison can in medicinal terms heal the infection.
The poet's corresponding act is also to have healing power. A father (Otto
Plath) once died of a gangrenous infection, leaving his daughter bereft of her
belief in God: "I'll never speak to God again," the young Sylvia said
to her mother. Now, more than twenty years later, an old man (Percy Key) has
died of a cancerous poison within him, and the spectacle of his dying recalls
the scene at Berck-Plage the year before. These awful images, already fused in
Plath's mind and thereby all the more poisonous, must be drawn out by the poultice
of the poem's making, and be replaced by healthy tissue. That is Sylvia Plath's
evident purpose and challenge in writing "Berck-Plage."
The bald-headed girls must be changed, played down.
Plath shifts the emphasis to their function, the dispensing of sherbets:
Electrifyingly-colored sherbets, scooped from the freeze
By
pale girls, travel the air in scorched hands. (1.3-4)
Soothingly cold sherbet -- it too is a poultice,
against the fiery heat. But there is a sinister note in the fifth line:
"Why is it so quiet? What are they hiding?" the speaker asks. Bald
scalps under their wigs -- by implication there may be other deformities
lurking about in this scene: amputees, perhaps, like Otto Plath, the one-legged
father, the eminent entomologist. The speaker-as-daughter reassures herself,
and as always, she puts on her own disguise: "I have two legs, and I move
smilingly" (1.6).
Plath's next step is to develop the silence of the
scene. The manuscript shows considerable experimentation with the effect of
sand that dampens her breathing and deadens vibrations like a piano damper,
muting voices and the sounds of boats. The speaker expresses fear: I carry my
twangling apprehensions, she says at one point, as if anticipating the disabled
patients, their "shrunk voices/ Waving and crutchless, half their old
size" (1.8-9) becoming part of the general deadening of the sense of
hearing in the scene. Ironically, the sense of sight is at the same time being
stung sharply by what is seen:
The
lines of the eye, scalded by these bald surfaces,
Boomerang like anchored elastics, hurting the owner. (1.1O-11)
Such scalding baldness both literally and
figuratively must be filtered out, evidently because the underlying truths
brought to light by the sun's poultice are unbearable. One must put on a face,
a disguise, so as not to be "seen" as unbearable. One must put on
dark glasses, so as not to "see" the unbearable.
Given Sylvia Plath's known distaste for the
hypocrisies and blindness of men of the church (one of whom is shocked by what
is revealed in her poem, "Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest"), it is
not surprising that she now brings into view a priest:
Is
it any wonder he puts on dark glasses?
Is
it any wonder he affects a black cassock? (1.12-13)
The poem is to end with a climactic funeral
ceremony in which "the priest is a vessel,/ A tarred fabric, sorry and
dull" (7.5-6). Black is the absence of color, the absence of living
sunlight in which one can have vision. The death of the senses, in particular
the death of the visionary imagination, is what Sylvia Plath feared most. For
her, a rebirth, the making of a new life, is a psychic necessity.
The priest, like the bald-headed girls and later
the maimed veterans, represents a disturbing intrusion upon the natural
landscape. As the first section of the poem ends, we see the priest moving
among the mackerel gathers, "who wall up their backs against him"
(1.15) as they go on "handling the black and green lozenges like parts of
a body" (1.16). Plath's early draft describes the mackerel gatherers as
simple, the way we would all like to be/ And dressed in a washed, good blue,
signifying grace. She admits they would appear sinister, were it not for their
faded blue work shirts, honest potato-colored faces? And their absolutely
blank, skylike expressions. Unlike the surgeons who presumably have been
amputating body parts of the mutilated veterans, the fishermen are simply
sorting out the biggest. Yet the first section ends with the protesting sounds
of the hitherto silent and inactive sea:
The
sea that crystallized these,
Creeps away, many-snaked, with a long hiss of distress. (1.17-18)
The draft indicates that the sea's distress is over
the loss of the fish, to whom it had given birth out of its darkness. Plath's
worksheets often show her tendency to delete or alter explicit references or
reasons so that her images in final form are more subtle and ambiguous.
As the first section ends, the tone is ominous. The
first draft of the second section shows no separation as yet from the first.
Who is this priest? Has he come to bless the salt flats, she wonders? It is
full of shells, orange-pink and delicate, like lacquered fingernails, which she
is collecting for her daughter. But then the edge of the priest's cassock is
blown back, revealing a deformed, shortened leg in an orthopedic boot which
precedes the longer leg like a compass point whose faulty ovals paste their
deformities in the air like bitter mouths... such faulty ovals, engendered by a
bad compass.
This priest in dark glasses who "affects a
black cassock" might as well be the black-booted Nazi we see fantasized in
"Daddy." The finished version of section 2 opens with Dr. Death,
reading his missal at a funeral service:
This black boot has no mercy for anybody.
Why
should it, it is the hearse of a dead foot,
The
high, dead, toeless foot of this priest
Who
plumbs the well of his book,
The
bent print bulging before him like scenery.
(2.1-5)
The printed words of the funeral service are
voluptuous to the priest. They are his pornography. He does not see "the
real stuff" nearby, the sickly and ugly spectacle of raw human sex:
Obscene
bikinis hide in the dunes,
Breasts and hips a confectioner's sugar
Of
little crystals, titillating the light,
While a green pool opens its eye,
Sick with what it has swallowed --
Limbs, images, shrieks. Behind the concrete bunkers
Two
lovers unstick themselves. (2.6-12)
Beside the sea, the locus of beauty and the source
of life, we are made to watch here a deathscaped travesty of spirituality and
procreation that is reminiscent of Eliot's "The Waste Land." As yet,
there is nothing affirmative to be understood apart from the poem's opening
proposition: "How the sun's poultice draws on my inflammation."
The second section ends with the speaker's
exclamation over delicate shells ("white sea crockery") which, as one
crossed-out line in the draft says, have been crunched by the priest's blind
boot. The priest himself, an onlooker, warped & dark in the draft, is now
seen as being drawn in his wind-trembling cassock "through a still
virulence,/ And a weed, hairy as privates" (2.17-18). As we know from the
last stanza of Plath's "In Plaster" and from Buddy Willard's exposure
of his "turkey neck and gizzards" to Esther in The Bell Jar, hairy to
Plath is ugly, and "hairy privates" are even uglier. Near the end of
"Berck-Plage," the blackness of the priest's cassock and the
blackness of shoe polish are to be negative images in opposition to the colors
of earth and the funeral flowers.
In the third section of the poem, the scene shifts
from the beach to the balconies of the "hotel" and a glimpse of
glittering "things." As the speaker in Plath's draft observes, these
glittering things are not jewelry but steel wheelchairs and aluminum crutches
-- the miracles of science, she calls them sarcastically. As her eyes shift
away toward the sea's edge, her nostrils pick up its scent:
Such salt-sweetness. Why should I walk Beyond the
breakwater, spotty with barnacles? I am not a nurse, white and attendant, I am
not a smile. (3.4-7)
In this fusion of images, we see that an emotional
barrier of stone separates the speaker both from the maimed and barnacled
veterans and, in the lines next to come, from the children digging in the sand.
She is attracted to them, but as she says, "my heart is too small to bandage
their terrible faults" (3.9). These faults may be the children's emotional
wounds, prefiguring the physically wounded side of a man that is shockingly
revealed in the following lines: "his red ribs,/ The nerves bursting like
trees" (3.10-11). The draft contains far more description: empty sleeves
and trouser legs, an emaciated man no more than the suit he wears, poled on a
crutch, another man wheeled by on his back, like a family scandal, and the
children meanwhile, poking the waste sand, their terrible fault now clearly
understood as the fate they share with the speaker-as-child and the man on the
gurney cart: abandonment to the impersonal, mirrory eye of the surgeon. His
mirror, she says, is but "a facet of knowledge" (4.13), capable of
mending broken bodies, but by implication incapable of mending broken souls.
That capability or power is not to be found in
surgery, nor, as Plath has shown, in religion: the priest we have just seen
drawn through a virulence. The capability might be found in art: the poultice
of the poem is at work, but its efficacy is still under question. Now instead,
the image of the man on the gurney fuses with the image of an old man lying on
a striped mattress --old Percy Key next door, whose dying and funeral are to be
the main focus of the poem:
An
old man is vanishing.
There is no help in his weeping wife.
Where are the eye-stones, yellow and valuable,
And
the tongue, sapphire of ash (3.15-18)
The spareness of the finished version of the third
section is the result of five manuscript pages of experimentation with various
image combinations and details that were finally omitted. "The stones of
his eyes," in the line above, for example, are turned up and melt from us
like water in the draft. The stones are yellow and valuable-looking because of
the light reflected from an electric fire, which also cauterizes the blunt
stumps of the furniture. In the early evening of June 25, when Plath actually
saw the old man dying (he died at midnight), she carefully observed such
details, recording some but not all (as we see in the draft of the poem) in her
notebook entry for July 2:
The
living room was full, still, hot with some awful
translation taking place. Percy lay back on a heap of
white pillows in his striped pajamas, his face already
passed from humanity, the nose a spiraling, fleshless
beak in thin air, the chin fallen in a point from it,
like an opposite pole, and the mouth like an inverted
black heart stamped into the yellow flesh between,
a
great raucous breath coming and going there with
great effort like an awful bird, caught, but about to
depart. His eyes showed through partly open lids like
dissolved soaps or a clotted pus. I was very sick at
this.... The end, even of so marginal man, a horror.
Together with the eye-stones, the beak-like nose
preoccupied Plath as she was composing the first view of the old man in the
poem. The cognitively dissonant catechresis, "And the tongue, sapphire of
ash" (3.18), added later, underscores the shockingly ironic nature of this
transformation from jewel-valuable life to ash-reduced death -- ashes to ashes.
After the long and difficult job of making her transition from the beach scene
to the death scene, Sylvia Plath wrote the fourth section of the poem very
readily, much as we see it in the published version. Percy Key, now dead, has
been transfigured into a sort of religious icon that appears grotesquely comic:
A
wedding-cake face in a paper frill.
How
superior he is now.
It
is like possessing a saint. (4.1-3)
The wing-capped nurses, no longer so beautiful
since their "blooming days" of caring for Percy are done, "are
browning like touched gardenias" (4.5). With the death scene ended, there
remain only "things, things," as on the balconies of the hotel: the
bed, rolled from the wall, the bird-beaked effigy, now stiffening, encased in a
glued white sheet. In death, says the speaker, "This is what it is to be
complete. It is horrible" (4.7). Most poignant of all in the description
are the hands, now folded, "that were shaking: goodbye, goodbye"
(4.12).
The next stage in the aftermath is the application
of a ritual poultice, to draw out the grief and return life to the living. As
in Emily Dickinson's "The Bustle in a House," grief after death is
more quickly put behind by housecleaning:
Now
the washed sheets fly in the sun,
The pillow cases are sweetening. (4.13-14)
The speaker, having already pronounced the
completeness of death to be horrible, now mouths unconvincingly a typical
death-room platitude at the sight of the coffin and "the curious bearers:
"It is a blessing, it is a blessing"
(4.17).
Some draft pages of "Berck-Plage,"
including the first part of the next (fifth) section of the poem, are written
on the backs of pages from Ted Hughes' play, "The Waking," which is
probably not coincidental. Indeed, Susan R. Van Dyne of
Freely become the sun's bride, the latter
Grows quick with seed.
Grass-couched in her labor's pride,
She
bears a king. Turned bitter
And
sallow as any lemon,
The
other, wry virgin to the last,
Goes graveward with flesh laid waste,
Worm-husbanded, yet no woman.
Appropriately enough, section 5, which opens with a
distance shot of green Devon hills under a lowering sky, moves in on the
concealed hollows of a wife's thoughts on losing her husband: practical details
about trunks -- "Blunt, practical boats/ Full of dresses and hats and
china and married daughters" (5.4-5). Things: a curtain flickering from
the open window the speaker calls "the tongue of the dead man: remember,
remember" (5.9). Amid the "Pallors of hands and neighborly
faces" (5.13), the memory begins to fade. Color is draining, even from the
flying iris in the room, "flying off into nothing" (5.15). As the
images dissolve, we hear the plaintive cry of all who are dying: "remember
us."
At this point, the scene abruptly shifts to the
graveyard, and the speaker in the poem observes:
The
empty branches of memory look over stones
Marble facades with blue veins, and jelly-glassfuls of daffodils.
(5.16-17)
No one is there but the stones, the spirits of the
dead within them, their "flesh" reduced to blue-veined marble. The
stones are flanked, not by reverently placed vases, but by cheap jelly glasses
containing what the draft of the poem refers to as yesterday's malingering
daffodils. Memory is indeed fading, but as the fifth section of the poem
concludes, the speaker affirms the value of the site as a way station on the
road to eternity: "It is so beautiful up here: it is a stopping
place" (5.18). As in her poem with that title, "Getting There"
for Plath is an arduous journey with an unknown destination.
In the first handwritten drafts and typescript, Sylvia
Plath interrupts the description of the graveyard and funeral in order to
reflect upon the opposite end of the life cycle. The speaker hears a sound, and
as usual in this long procession of sensory observations, she must make sense
of it, put it in place within her structure of meaning:
This dovey moaning is not an old man, it is a baby.
A
baby delivered in the same January
As
the old man's tears for himself:
One
eye weeping and weeping
Through the blue of the boxing, the blue of the news.
A
wintry body felt itself thinning.
O
hungry substance, greedy for color!
The
tulips had a part of him that spring,
The
green came in late, wiping its lips.
The pallors so much emphasized in the fifth section
are now seen as the result of the voracious renewing phase of the death-to-life
cycle. As Kroll puts it, this is "an ironic version of the idea of
spring-as-rebirth (seen instead as death masquerading as renewal)." Treacherous
for the aged, then, is the boxing time, the festival week of midwinter
celebration in anticipation of spring. Treacherous too are the tulips, for a
pallid hospital patient: "The vivid tulips eat my oxygen," says the
speaker in "Tulips." The green of spring has sucked the life from
Percy Key, and now, before we see him buried, we see in retrospect his waning
life transferred to the waxing life of an infant, unmistakably that of Nicholas
Hughes, the poet's second child:
And
this is the baby --
This collocation of delicate vowels,
This singular distillation in which I admire myself.
I
too have given him valuables.
And
am rewarded with smiles,
Two
wise eyes in a worm's body,
Smells of sweet oil and cotton.
The speaker dwells upon the ironies of reversal and
trans- formation: the coos of the mourning dove become the coos of the baby;
Spring the life-destroyer just above now becomes Spring the life-creator, with
the speaker herself as its agent, as a mother re-creating herself. She admires
the product as if looking into a mirror: the gift of "valuables" is
repaid with the baby's smiling face and wise eyes, which, as Plath's draft
says, assess the value of the giver. That she admires herself through her
offspring says a great deal about the value of creativity as a counter-force to
death, and about Plath's own artistic counter-balancing in this poem, even if
she later changes her intent and deletes the baby section.
The last two lines of this sixth section in the
draft contain a sharply focused and ironic contrast between the old man and the
baby:
Old
man, what a dirty bunting!
My
baby's cries are round and blue. They fly off like pigeons.
Baby bunting is white and fresh;
"bunting" for a withered corpse is dirty: bury it -- so the argument
runs -- and behold instead the swelling of a new life, taking independent
flight from its creator. This is the most positive line in the whole poem as
originally conceived by Plath, but it is a personal reassurance for Plath
herself, not really an integral part of the death/burial narrative. As a
life-creator, Plath can make her speaker mock the old man and boast of her
creation, thereby working the medicine of the sun's poultice in the opening of
the poem: it has drawn off her inflammation, and she is restored to health,
ready to attend the funeral with a lighter heart.
If one sees the sixth draft section as a digression
for the purpose of psychic and emotional self-medication, then it is easy to
see why Plath then discarded it. Having been healed by what she thought and
wrote, she could then regain her poet's aesthetic distance and restore the
poem's unity of focus upon Percy Key's death and burial.
The sixth section in the final version of the poem,
then, "pans" from the graveyard above to the narrow lane below, along
which the funeral procession will move:
The
natural fatness of these lime leaves!--
Pollarded green balls, the trees march to church.
The
voice of the priest, in thin air,
Meets the corpse at the gate,
Addressing it, while the hills roll the notes of the dead bell;
A
glitter of wheat and crude earth.
(6.1-6)
The scene is striking for its blending of human
artifice and transformation (sculptured lime trees, marching as the actual
procession will march) with the larger landscape that echoes the death-knell
while displaying its life-face, "A glitter of wheat and crude earth."
The earth is a central image here; it is labeled as bloodily colored in the
draft, but Plath wants to say more and crosses that out to write the following:
What is the name of that color?--
Old
blood of caked walls the sun heals,
Old
blood of limb stumps, burnt hearts.
(6.7-9)
That last line evokes the memory of Otto Plath,
who, as we gather from many of her poems, is in Sylvia Plath's mind and
emotions not as yet properly "buried." The idea of
"Berck-Plage" as a symbolic burial of the father, in association with
images of renewal out of the same red earth, is considered by Olwyn Hughes to
be the central significance of the poem. Eventually, Sylvia Plath focused her
many images of red earth/blood/flower/womb in her late poem, "
With the graveyard setting thus described and
labeled, Plath is ready for the tableau of the widow and her three daughters,
all in black, final and theatrical as the draft says, and "Necessary among
the flowers" (6.11) as if they too were props on a stage. The widow
"Enfolds her face like fine linen,/ Not to be spread again" (6.12-13)
just as her dead husband's face has been shrouded. The departed facial
expressions of once-living people now reappear in the low-flying clouds of
"a sky, wormy with put-by smiles " (6.14). Thus far the speaker seems
to mock the tableau of the mourners for its staginess, but in the following
lines, Plath does some serious mythologizing:
And
the bride flowers expend a freshness,
And
the soul is a bride
In
a still place, and the groom is red and forgetful, he is featureless. (6.16-18)
Birth, marriage, death -- in this description we
recognize the mythic fusion of the three as the female soul, released from the
male body, "remarries" the red, impersonal earth enroute to fresh
procreation of life. In the draft, Plath envisions an intermediate step As the
lone soul marries itself/ To the flesh of a leaf. In this myth, then, the dead
man is physically enfolded in earth to become organic fertilizer for new life
that is already extant in the spiritual marriage of soul-bride and red-earth
groom. The groom is "red and forgetful, he is featureless." In the
chronology of the poem, the earth-groom now awaits the "bridal
party," the funeral procession that is ascending the hill to "put
by" the shrouded, soul-bereft body of Percy Key.
The seventh and final section of the poem
re-creates the actual event in which Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes participated.
The speaker first positions herself in the procession:
Behind the glass of this car
The
world purrs, shut-off and gentle.
And
I am dark-suited and still, a member of the party,
Gliding up in low gear behind the cart.
(7.1-4)
She is at the moment an insulated observer, in the
draft version Lugging my small grief up behind the cart -- a modest grief by
comparison to that of the widow, but a real one, as we know from her journal.
As usual, she is an ambivalent observer, as she was at Berck-Plage, sensitive
to the inconguities of the scene. The deformed priest on the beach now
reappears as a pale and shabby imitation of a priest -- another functionary prop
on the stage. These rites are "fatuities" compared to the
transforming death/marriage/birth rite that ends the previous section of the
poem. "And the priest is a vessel," declares the speaker in the final
version, "A tarred fabric, sorry and dull" (7.6-7). There cannot be a
"true" burial rite with such a figure in charge. The speaker will
conduct her own rite, then, and she proceeds immediately to do so, shifting
attention from the priest to the coffin and the flowers, and shifting the tone
as well within a half-line. The priest is
Following the coffin on its flowery cart like a beautiful woman,
A
crest of breasts, eyelids and lips
Storming the hilltop. (7.7-9)
Now we realize the importance of the marriage rite
previously described. A dead human being lives again as the flowers and leaves
of plants, climbing toward the sky, the red eye of morning.
The speaker's burial rite could be considered as a
triumph of beauty over death, but now its efficacy is threatened. The speaker
passes children in a schoolyard, who smell the shoe blacking of the mourners.
Anointing with shoe polish is not consecration, she implies; blackened shoes
too, like the priest, are "tarred fabric." One must see beyond the
sorry and dull appearances of
Then from the barred yard, the children
smell the melt of shoe blacking,
Their faces turning, wordless and slow,
Their eyes opening
On
a wonderful thing-- (7.10-14)
Literally speaking, the children see a funeral
procession, but Plath manages the narrative so that the images which follow
become the children's vision as well as the speaker's. Appropriately, it is an
aerial view, looking down on the gravesite:
Six
round black hats in the grass
and a lozenge of wood,
And
a naked mouth, red and awkward.
(7.15-16)
These are difficult lines to interpret. For
instance, Judith Kroll notes that death here is a mere physical extinction,
only a parody of completeness versus the transcendence in some of Plath's last
poems. On the other hand, one could argue that these lines contain an image
that is emblematic amd enduring, more than mere physical extinction. Sights and
sounds are removed from the everyday world and persist in the mind much as they
do on Keats's Grecian urn: the mourners' hats superimposed upon the green
grass, the coffin reduced in scale to a lozenge (one recalls the fish-lozenges
in section 1), and the naked mouth, red and awkward -- an earth-mother's vagina
about to take back her offspring.
The image is not entirely static, however, because
the red mouth is like a gaping wound (reminiscent of the red ribs of the
wounded veteran in section 3) that the "surgeon" must try to repair.
In the last two lines of the poem, the attempt apparently fails:
For
a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma.
There is no hope, it is given up.
(7.17-18)
The poem would appear to end in despair (most
readers take it that way), but one must not forget the image of the coffin
among flowers now transformed into a beautiful woman. The "giving up"
in the final line becomes as much an exorcism of death as it is a yielding unto
death. The hole claims its human sacrifice. For Percy Key, there is no hope of
return to mortal life; he (and perhaps Otto Plath as well) is given up so that
the life cycle can renew itself. The next stage of the grieving process is to
let him go, so that the speaker and the mourners in the black hats can go back
down the hill to the living world.
The speaker, who is here transparently Sylvia Plath
herself, has risen above the world's tumult and has seen renewal after death,
even a triumph of rebirth, as we know from these images recently discussed and
from the omitted section about the infant Nicholas. Her hope has not dissolved
into futility, as Holbrook contends, but rather she has through the act of
composing "Berck-Plage" transformed her grief over Percy Key's death,
her revulsion concerning human "deformity," and her latest ordeal of
existential despair into a life-renewing vision. One might say that this vision
in philosophical terms is rather superficial and lacking in life-sustaining
force -- a mythic vision of renewal, after all, does not help much when one is
dead -- but the essential point about Plath in writing "Berck-Plage"
is the power of her images to re-fashion her sense of self by ridding her mind
of self-destructive garbage. It is the act of image-making -- horrific as well
as beatific images -- that liberates the troubled mind of the modern artist and
enables her or him to go on living. Since Sylvia Plath could not and would not
bear the loss of creative imagination because of psychic paralysis, she was compelled
to imagine the worst (deformity, disease, death) as eclipsed by the best
(newborn children, woman-flowers, sky-plasma). The act of juxtaposing the two
was her reality, her method of making order out of chaos.
Jack Folsom