Extremes in
Plath’s Poetry
Sylvia Plath: 'Love, Love, My Season'
Arthur Oberg
In this essay Oberg examines Plath’s use of extremes in her poetry.
Ariel, Sylvia Plath's major
posthumously published book of poems, begins and ends in extremis. Morning Song,
the opening poem, begins with the word "love."Words, the concluding poem, ends
on the word "life." The title of the last poem Words, and the pun in
the title of the opening poem Morning Song suggest the two other prominent centers here, art and death. Love and death, life and art
-- these are the extremities out of which the Ariel poems proceed. And Plath
insisted upon them and returned to them for alignments of the most dangerous
kind.
The Ariel poems reveal and often
pursue a direction more nearly final than that found in Plath's earlier poetry
or in her nonpoetic work. What surfaces in Ariel
proves to be a love of extremity. It expresses itself in obsessive rhythm, in a
momentum and an inventiveness of image, and in a defining vocabulary
recognizable by what it is attracted to and by what it seeks: totality,
finality, obduracy. In Plath's most central books of poetry, The Colossus and
Ariel, the adjectives expose this range of thought and feeling. The attraction
involves what is "sheer", "mere", "pure",
"absolute", "necessary." Movement
in the poems is toward what cannot be stopped or reversed, things
"intractable" and "tireless." It is toward what lies beyond
loving, human feeling, things "vast" and "immense." And
toward what is unrepeatable, things "unique" and "perfect."
Plath's recurrent use of the prefixes "in-", "un-" and
"ir-" relates to this defining poetics. And
her attempt at using words like "terrible","awful,"
and "horrible" in their root sense further characterizes her poetry
and its preferences. The vocabulary which she evolved in her poetry is never
far from the limits her opening and concluding poems announced and made final
as the proper centers among which her poems move. (p.
128)
The terms under which Plath chose to
write her poems are unmistakably given, over and over. She sought to embrace
nothing less than "everything." A procedure on this scale was bound
to assume personal and historical, aesthetic and sexual dimensions. (pp.
128-29)
If ideally nothing escaped Plath,
her tone when confronting what she called "atrocity" or
"enormity" shifted between the mocking and the serious, the playful
and the deadly. She could play child, adolescent, and adult, alternately, and
at the same time. As a consequence, it sometimes is difficult to separate boast
from threat or fear from wish in her readiness for the enormity of
everything.... Predictably, the question of knowledge returned the poet to the
smaller, but still large questions of love and death, life and art.
What can love manage.
What is death's domain. What are the just concerns of
life and of art. These involved Plath in the issue not
only of poetic content but of poetic form as well.
At once inclusive and exclusive, the
content of Sylvia Plath's poetry appropriated all provinces of knowledge. She
not only accepted the extremity and enormity of history and personality but
sought out the most outrageous facts and facta of
life and art. Repeatedly, the impression she conveyed was that of a woman and
poet to whom nothing was alien. In moving prose written after her death, Ted
Hughes ... attempted to detail this sense in her:
The world of her poetry is one of
emblematic visionary events, mathematical symmetries, clairvoyance,
metamorphoses, and something resembling total biological and racial recall. Hughes's
last clause defines what readers coming to Plath's work even for the first time
inevitably feel. (pp. 129-30)
What Sylvia Plath sought to manage
as content, she also had to handle in and as form. The poetry she admitted
admiring and the methods of composition attributed to her by people who knew
her involved poems written "all-of-a-piece." Such poems are in
evidence in the post-Romantic, organic verse she frequently succeeded in
writing....
If the word "organic"
commonly has been turned into an almost meaningless term expressive of a
quasi-mystical ideality which is present in a
particular poem, for Plath's poetry it can be a critical term of the most
descriptive and telling kind. The best poems in her first book, The Colossus, are
organic in conception, in their management of matters as basic as stanza and
line length and image. In the poem, Man in Black, taken from the first book,
Plath achieved a poem unmistakably "all-of-a-piece."
... (p. 131)
What Plath accomplishes in Man in
Black is nothing less than the achievement, wished for, willed, and executed,
of the kind of organic, post-Romantic poem which she delighted in and which she
aspired to write....
The last line in Man in Black --
"All of it, together" -- succeeds impressively in underlining the
impression that the poem has been or at least given the illusion of being
"born all-of-a-piece."Man in Black
concludes by becoming something like a completed
miniature "Kubla Khan." The poem is there
on the page, "all of it, together." In part, Man in Black is one more
attempt at writing the final, Romantic poem in the English language. (p. 133)
The early poems, when seen in
connection with the poems from the posthumous volumes, reveal a search on the
part of the poet for objects or images adequate to whatever love or hate she
wished to attach to them. In many of the late poems, she directed her
relentless precision toward casting poems in the form of extended correlatives.
In the first line of each poem, an interior state commonly is recorded toward
which the rest of the movement of the poem is painstakingly devoted.... Each
poem exposes a search for adequate image. Each exposes the wish to find
whatever is in the vase or in the tree or behind the veil. In the course of
each poem the poet steadily attempts [in Ted Hughes's words] "to locate
just what it was that hurt." (p. 139)
Separately and as a group, [Tulips,The Swarm, and A Birthday
Present] deal with problems of language, or, more specifically, with the
adequacy of any image in the face of an extreme situation. They address the
confrontation, immediate or potential, of something desired, yet also feared.
And they address the problem of finding words able to express that
confrontation. In each of these poems, the poet attempts to locate, by means of
a run of images, what "it" is: in Tulips , what "it" is
that is in the vase and to what "it corresponds," a correspondence
which signals sickness or health, life or death; in The Swarm, what "it"
is that is in the tree and, in the mind, so intriguing and threatening at the
same time; in A Birthday Present, what "it" is that can lie behind
the veil and be the source of such comforting and horrible enormity. (pp.
142-43)
The need to locate what
"it" is proves equally central to the movement and meanings of other
poems of Plath's. In part, the mad and associational intensity of poems like
Lady Lazarus,Daddy, and The
Applicant becomes understandable in view of what the poet, there, is bent on
relentlessly seeking out.... (p. 143)
The Applicant,Daddy, and Lady Lazarus reveal Plath centrally
concerned with the universal habit of image-making, [but] this is not all. More
important, in these poems she exhibits the extremes, personal and historical,
to which image-making has been taken.
Daddy and Lady Lazarus extend and
provide variations on the concerns of The Applicant. In particular, they seek
to locate what it was that hurt. These two poems radically confront Lear-like
questions of man and his image, of what constitutes for him need and excess.
"Is man no more than this? Consider him well," Lear mused. Both Lady
Lazarus and Daddy raise issues as basic as image and as man. They seek to find
images which will sufficiently body forth that man.
Lady Lazarus and Daddy are poems
which seem written at the edge of sensibility and of imagistic technique. They
both utilize an imagery of severe disintegration and dislocation. The public
horrors of the Nazi concentration camps and the personal horrors of fragmented
identities become interchangeable. Men are reduced to parts of bodies and to
piles of things. The movement in each poem is at once historical and private;
the confusion in these two spheres suggests the extent to which this century
has often made it impossible to separate them. (p. 146)
The barkerlike
tone of Lady Lazarus is not accidental. As in Daddy, the persona strips herself
before the reader ... all the time utilizing a cool or slang idiom in order to
disguise feeling. Sylvia Plath borrowed from a sideshow or vaudeville world the
respect for virtuosity which the performer must acquire, for which the audience
pays and never stops paying. Elsewhere in her work, she admired the virtuosity
of the magician's unflinching girl or of the unshaking
tattoo artist. Here, in Lady Lazarus, it is the barker and the striptease
artist who consume her attention. What the poet pursues in image and in rhyme
(for example, the rhyming of "Jew" and "gobbledygoo")
becomes part of the same process I observed in so many of her other poems, that attempt, brilliant and desperate, to locate what
it was that hurt. (p. 147)
Sylvia Plath never stopped recording
in her poetry the wish and need to clear a space for love. Yet she joined this
to an inclination to see love as unreal, to accompanying fears of being unable
to give and receive love, and to the eventual distortion and displacement of
love in the verse. Loving completely or "wholly" she considered to be
dangerous, from her earliest verse on.
Love was so much a part of her world
that it often stood in her poetry for that world itself. When the world seemed
unreal, so did love. In the early poetry, this sometimes approximated a secondhand, Romantic poetics. But the early poems also give
evidence of some more profound sense of a loving unreality which the later
poems turned into a more desperate, pathetic tableau of
"valentine-faces" and candy or enamel-painted hearts.
Plath often wrote with humor and irony when she considered love. She could be the
satirist alert to the sentiments of a Victorian or Edwardian age. She could be
a shrewd psychologist of love's ambiguities. She could be sane and clairvoyant,
joining writers as major as Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky in probing the darkness
of the heart. But in what she wrote just before and at the time of Ariel, she
began to establish a stance which I find problematic and dangerous. A
progression is evident in her handling of love and the love poem that calls
into question the loving of intentions which some of the first lines of poems
announce, but which the tone of whole poems or the endings of poems commonly
belie. (pp. 152-53)
In the important Ariel bee poems,
her uncertainty issues in the fear of being hurt or fatally "stung"
by love. It is the kind of bad joke or bad pun which comes to typify her late
art. It expresses a situation so extreme and intolerable to her that only by
such devices could she ever have hoped to manage her world. Lowell and Berryman
use similar devices, but very often out of real strength. In Plath, however,
the strategy commonly reduces to sheer helplessness.
The Ariel poems reveal a woman both
too exposed and too unopen. The sexuality is
relentless and overwhelming. The puns not only proliferate -- "head","queen","screw","cherry"
-- but succeed in words like "mail" (letter and "male") and
"box" (sexual organ and coffin) in making explicit the meanings which
are central to her work. (p. 154)
If Plath wished her poems to stand
as love letters to the world, the perspective from which they proceed may, in
the end, have made that wish impossible. Her metaphor for the world may very
well have been a response to a loveless world. But it is here that the logic of
the argument breaks down. For the poetry shows the controlling metaphor
threatening to become the informing vision itself. By the time she wrote her
last poems, there was less and less room for and patience with love. If the
poems were once meant to create love, they came to stand for a world which had
forgone or gone beyond some loving, human circumference.
The problem of artistic control
which so many critics have addressed in Sylvia Plath I find less central and settleable than that of the controlling metaphor in her
verse. Her best poems are incredibly controlled. But the issue of controlling
metaphor lingers on long after a reader has decided whether the poems show
control or "the look of control" or "controlled uncontrolledness."
The controlling metaphor affects
much that happens in Plath's poetry. In the process of finding what to
"do" with her love, she often concluded by inverting it. Poem by
poem, not just in Ariel, she radically confused love and death, self and other.
Images of love give way to images of incest (Daddy, and the bee poems) and
masturbation (Suicide Off Egg Rock, Ariel,Death
& Co.,The Jailor,Childless
Woman ). Loveless images of madness, suicide, and solipsism -- from the "I
am, I am, I am" of Suicide Off Egg Rock to the
"ich, ich, ich, ich" of Daddy -- take
on the force of leitmotifs for her work. And art, if capable of leading us back
to loving, human contexts, here gives the impression of being one more
inversion of love. It can be one more deception in this life.
In the late poems, something happens
to language and to love and to the possibility of defining a self through love.
Repeatedly, the health or breakdown of one is a reflection of the other. (pp.
156-57)
As a representative,
twentieth-century writer, Plath lends to language as language a central place
in her work. But in the implications and concluding achievement of this, she is
entirely herself. In five very late poems, Words, Kindness, Edge, Contusion,
and The Fearful, she has no rival, perhaps fortunately so.
These poems, unlike
The five poems share, aside from
having been written during the last week of Plath 's life,
an assessment of a situation where love seems either absent or unreal,
deceptive or unimportant. In all of them, there is a
rightness in choice of phrase and word and a brilliance in the run of
images in individual stanzas and in entire poems. (p. 158)
These poems all take an
associational, imagistic technique to a point of deadly confusion and delusion
where the poet can fold her poem-children back into her body simply by writing
out the wish ( Edge) or where she is so
uncomprehending of human, loving kindness that she cannot distinguish between
children and roses ( Kindness).
What I am suggesting is that these
late poems are not the mystically calm, orderly pieces which some critics have
seen them to be. Instead, they are the terrible, terrifying creations of a
woman who, near the end of a life, still could not do without love, even if she
never learned what to do with it, As a result, the tone of the poems is
something less than the matter-of-factness of the saint. (p. 160)
If love was never completely
renounced by her, neither was it constant in her work. And the poems keep
recording a journey and a movement as inevitable as death. Now that the poems
which were written just before or at the same time as the Ariel poems have been
collected and published in Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, we are afforded
an even better means of charting and confirming larger movements and stages in
her work. When Ted Hughes and other critics first wrote of an inevitable,
conscious development in her poetry and when the titles of the posthumous books
Crossing the Water and Winter Trees were first announced, I wondered how willful was the creation of that
legendary development and reputation. But a consideration of the poems
themselves and of her title, The Colossus, for her first book, helped to dispel
such fears. In the same way, interpretations of her art after the fact of her
suicide now strike me as less arbitrary and fallacious than they once did. That
she eventually took her own life is important. It might be dangerous not to consider
that fact seriously.
Plath 's development from The Colossus to
the poems of the later volumes is technical as much as it is psychic and
spiritual. More particularly, that development concerns her use of image in
connection with the possibilities for language and love. How that development
implies and makes explicit a journey, her gathered work actualizes and
clarifies.
By the title of her first volume,
The Colossus, Plath signified what she would spend a lifetime trying to create.
Sometimes she exchanged the colossus image for the image of an ark or a garden.
But the intentions were always the same, to write words that would bear love
and that would have life. The difficulty, however, was that, from the very
beginning, her landscape risked turning into (to use images from her own poems)
some nightmarish bestiary or wintering ship or burnt-out spa. The problem of
what would be her controlling metaphor, then, was full upon her from her
earliest work.
The poems she wrote after those
included in The Colossus show her still involved in trying to put together
saving, loving words. But the colossus which she feared would never get
"put together entirely" and which she feared would be a ruin becomes
more than a distant, playful fear. The opening and closing poems of The
Colossus -- The Manor Garden and The Stones -- depend upon and establish the
essential, ominous ambiguity that mark later poems
like Tulip. (pp. 161-62)
Now that Crossing the Water and
Winter Trees have been published, there is the
opportunity to observe the poet at every stage taking stock of her situation
and development. The Colossus and Ariel, even before the other volumes appeared
recently, showed her charting a course, or "getting there," as she
put it; she assigned it as a title to one of her poems. If the exact nature of
the journey or voyage or ride, all prominent metaphor in her verse, was often
in doubt, its connection with love was not.
There are two major movements which
the entire body of Plath's poetry suggests -- toward the creation of love and
toward some state beyond love. These movements are not strictly chronological
any more than they are exclusive of one another. In part, they exist in and
through the very last poems she wrote. But, as poems written in time, by a
woman aware of time, they tend to build toward that point where the second
movement, a state beyond human love, can be claimed, or at least volitionally
prophesied.... Sometimes Plath depended upon the fierce repetitions of
"would" or "shall" or "let us" in order to move
toward and create that state beyond love. The syntax of poems like A Birthday
Present and Lady Lazarus depend greatly upon such a volitional strategy. (pp.
162-63)
Mystic contains within it a
countermovement toward a belief in earthly love.
The contradictory impression which
Mystic succeeds in conveying not only is central to the meaning of that poem,
but it also connects with a defining center in much
of Plath's late verse. On the one hand, there is the woman
who becomes a contemporary doubting Thomas, except that what she disbelieves
are not Christ's wounds and resurrected presence but his love:
How I would like to believe in
tenderness.
(The Moon and the Yew Tree ...)
This moment is as desperate as any
in modern poetry. It is as pathetic as Prufrock's
musing on the mermaids, "I do not think that they will sing to me."
(p. 165)
Marriage imagery is resplendent in
Sylvia Plath's poetry. "Do" is recurrent and hypnotic as a word and
as an action. At times the persona saying, "I do, I do," is a
mechanical doll or a prisoner confessing to a crime. These senses of the word
and phrase Plath commonly linked with the recital of the marriage vow.
"Do" also is punned upon, especially in her poem, "Daddy."
The German, familiar "du" or you ("do","du","you"
-- they even rhyme) of intimate address and love songs is recalled, almost as a
reminder of the historical and personal perversions to which love and action can
be subjected. (pp. 165-66)
The Colossus already revealed the
poet's predilection for decadent unions between love and death, and art and
life. If her browned gardenia and ghastly orchid recall finde
sicle botanical catalogues, it is in her taste in
sounds, colors, jewels, music, painting, and
literature that she shows herself to be a contemporary decadent.... In the
poems that came after The Colossus, however, we are able to see how this
incipient decadence is turned from something faintly literary into something
closer to the poet's very self: "Pom! Pom! They would have killed me!" (pp. 166-67)
That Sylvia Plath wrote two
last-words poems, one called just that (Last Words) and another, Words, I find
significant. The major problem which I address in this chapter -- to whom and
to what do her poems finally belong - the two poems engage, although in the
body of her poetry they are not unique in that concern. (p. 168)
Last Words is a very different kind
of poem, closer in style to poems of intense desire like Tulips, A Birthday Present , or The Arrival of the Bee Box. The poet in Last
Words [in Crossing the Water] wants and volitionally
unlooses herself from domestic things in order to achieve a state of utter
mystic peace:
It will be dark,
And the shine of
these small things sweeter than the face of Ishtar.
Ishtar, Babylonian and Assyrian
goddess of love and fertility, is invoked. But it is
the artful, statuary face of Ishtar which has importance for her in this poem.
The state yearned for is death, not love. The word "sweeter" in this
quotation goes back to a line earlier in the same poem, "I should sugar
and preserve my days like fruit!" Sweetness commonly threatened loving
deception for Plath . Here it carries equally dark
connotations of preservation, but always at the unnatural expense of life.
Sweetness proves costly, proves to be death.
As Last Words earns
its authority, there emerges that tone, or "decor" -- an important
word for ... Plath -- which related to the matter of control and to whatever
triumph or failure these final poems contain.
Last Words manages to indicate how
the poet willed to move herself and her poetry toward love as much as it
indicates how she could not handle the artful business she went about. "I
can't stop it," she wrote in this poem. Here "It" meant not love
or blood-hurt but the escape of spirit-breath or the release of images. (pp.
168-69)
Last Words, like any of the major
poems from Ariel or Crossing the Water or Winter Trees, does not dispose of the
nagging sense that, in love as it may be with "a soldier repose than
death's" (a phrase from an early poem, The Sculptor), in the end, it
belongs to an art of elegy, less by choice than by some desperate, pathetic
necessity. (p. 170)
If the late poems belong to anyone,
they belong not to her father or husband or children or even to poetry (the
sense of the poem as unloving love-child she never forgot). But
to Death, Death the lover, Death the double.... (pp. 170-71)
What I have been tracing - the
attempts of the poems to establish lyric and love and the countermovement
toward elegy and to a deadly journey which could not be stopped -- gain
authority and intensity from the more recently released volumes. They never
contradict but extend what the Ariel poems were about. The old faults prove to
be the same; "love cannot come here," we again find.
The moving center
of both books, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, is that of a woman of
sorrows. Recurrently, Plath imagined herself as Mary and Christ. Ease, love,
correspondence, and relationship all were yearned for and did not emerge. (p.
172)
If some important part of Sylvia
Plath in her late poetry refused to accept a world of gigolos as the final
version of the world, she never abandoned the doubt that she could recognize or
accept love even were she able to manage it in her life and art. As a result,
tone figures more and more prominently in the interpretation of the poems she
left behind. Tone, its readiness and surety, dominates.
The posthumous poems expose
discrepancies and failures of the most serious kind. The phoenix figure,
prominent in various guises in her work, deserted her outside her poems. And
the children-poems she imagined in the late poem, Edge, folded back into her
and taken out of this life, became painfully distinct from her in death -- the
two children fathered by Ted Hughes and left behind; the poems which were
posthumous. And the Medea figure, once little more
than a literary trapping in her early poem, "Aftermath," proved in
the late poem, Edge, only a pathetic wish denied to her outside of mythology. When she died, so did her long sought-after and invoked gods.
The confusions and delusions of art
and life, wish fulfillment and reality, became
exposed at her death. And they record a sad fact. But, beyond that and more
important, they reach back to some sense of lovelessness
or lack implicit in a major part of her poetry. The Ariel poems, looked at
together with the poems from Crossing the Water and Winter Trees, now strike me
as less in love's behalf than she would have liked them to be. Poems like Daddy
and Lady Lazarus in the end may not be the triumphs which their momentum and
inventiveness at times celebrate. Instead, and this is my sense of them, they
belong more to elegy and to death, to the woman whose "loving
associations" abandoned her as she sought to create images for them. (pp.
172-73)
Source:
Arthur Oberg, "Sylvia Plath: 'Love, Love, My Season'," in his Modern
American Lyric: