Annihilation in the Poems of Sylvia Plath (contd.)
Mrs. Copp gives a very interesting account of her being involved with herself, what she calls physical restlessness: “I remember two mannerisms, usually carried out in concert. One foot… was always kept swinging impatiently and the fingers themselves interweaving, locking and unlocking, the two thumbs rather hostility opposing each other stabbing each other with their nails.” 15 This curious physical mannerism speaks a great deal about her perpetual psychic war between two paradoxical forces self- destruction and self enjoyment; the fear of being not accepted and the joy of being celebrated.
Inspite of all her courage and confidence to take up all the challenges of life, she surrenders to her innermost misgivings and shadowy doubts. But she was not going to cry out her agonies to anybody to attract pity, while inwardly; all the time she was crying herself hoarse for help, assistance and understanding, “I need a father. I need a mother. I need some order, wiser being to cry to, I talk to God, but the sky is empty.” 16 In the poem ‘Maenad’ the speaker assumes the character of a maenadic woman, frenzied and raging throughout the seven poems sequence.
This desperate reaching out for help and crumbling down in the face of total renunciation was the main cause of her break down. She believed in ultimate and absolute love i.e., the pure innocent love of a child for her father. She has said repeatedly in her reminiscences that she was never perfectly happy after her father’s death. Her mother’s love could not fulfill her hunger for a powerful assurance which the death of Otto Plath had created. She had idolized her father out of proportion, beyond any earthly standard, and that is why she could not find his match ever. This explains her bitter exasperation of the out blown image of Otto Plath whom she wanted to get rid of, once and for all, in that famous poem ‘Daddy.’ The father fixation had eclipsed her love also to a considerable extent. In search of the unattainable, she began to reject one suitor after another. For example, one of her admirers Richard Sassoon’s weak constitution became the dominating factor in rejecting him, whom she knew long back in the States. She felt safe with strong and powerful men only. Once again we are reminded of the fact that her father was a strong man. She ran in vain, in search of an able companion, she became painfully aware again and again of the gaping chasm of insecurity, which she knew she must fight, since there was no one who could help her and fulfill her inner tormented needs. And in this dark dreary helplessness and insecurity, her faith was the only redeeming feature, “that absurd faith which keeps me chaste, so chaste.” 17
It is true, as T.S. Eliot wrote in The Dry Salvages, that the moments of agony are permanent, “with such permanence as time has,” and that the torment of others remains an experience “unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.” Sylvia was “undone”, to use her coinage, not because of her lack of faith resulted in despair but due to her overall faith and uncompromising insistence for absolute perfect purity. Perfection was her motto in life as in act. Being just a brilliant student and an aspirant poet was not enough for her. Woman as she was, she must be the perfect wife and mother to fulfill the inborn urge of womanhood. Being lonely and brooding away was not her forte, so she wrote to her mother, “I do hope someday I meet a stimulating intelligent man with whom I can create a good life, because I am definitely not meant for a single life.” 18 The voice of the ‘Spinster’ is resonant with her own inner most thoughts. She finds a lover, “her latest suitor,” but her life remains tormented as the man does not seem to fit in the cherished framework of a supportive, powerful life partner:
Now this particular girl
During a ceremonious April walk
With her latest suitor
Found herself, of a sudden, intolerably struck
By the birds’ irregular babel
And the leaves litter.
By this tumult afflicted, she
-----------
The whole season, sloven. SP, 12.
She wanted her mate to be more mature than her, of firm intellectual understanding, imaginative and powerful at the same time, to whom she would look up in awe and admiration. She was actually searching for a surrogate father, while looking for a perfect mate. Writing was a religious ritual to which she had committed herself completely. It was as necessary to her as confession and absolution are, to a catholic. This rigorous breath-taking exercise of writing was simply breath-giving rejuvenation to her. She met Ted Hughes who seemed to fulfill her quest as “Hughes was large and alarmingly powerful, both physically and in psychological presence.” 19 Meeting Ted was unusual experience of which not only she but her friends were also aware. “For the first time since I had known her she seemed truly happy,” says Copp, her friend. “Their relationship seemed calm, quiet and sure… and over that very short while Sylvia became a different person… at a stoke she became private, serious and seemingly centered.” 20
She and Ted had so many things in common, so much to share and commune. Like her, he too had no money, and had come to Cambridge only by winning a contest at open exhibition. And more important, both of them were extremely fond of poetry; poetry that was passionately original by nature. They got married on June 16, in London, at the church of St. George the Martyr, a private service attended by Mrs. Aurelia Plath. Formerly, on April 29, she had lost her grandmother whom she was greatly fond of, and with whom were attached many of her tender childhood memories. Though her marriage helped her a lot to settle down her turbulent feelings of uncertainty and disintegration, happiness was not the glittering firefly for her anymore. It was the blazing hot sun whose scorching rays and tremendous heat, also, she was ready to take in her stride. Her marital life was full of charming social activities, a perfect intercommunion of two poetic souls and it was a small wonder that people judged this brilliant couple as ‘the 20th century Brownings.’ She got rid of that awful fear that visited upon her lonely hours in Cambridge, about which she had specifically confessed in her Cambridge Notes. Busy as she was, planning her life, visiting doctor for having a child, her inner contemplation ran a parallel track indulging in depression, paranoia and dark unintelligible terrors. Her poetry is nothing but the organized form of those blurred feelings of misgiving that she experienced in her real life. Torn between the pull of life with its immense possibilities and death with its enormous mysteries, her happiness came only when she could translate her torments into poetry to every organized detail of a sustained form. Surprisingly enough, she always tried to convince herself that she was a determined survivor despite the living will-o-wasp of death:
I survive the while,
Arranging my morning
These are my fingers, this baby
The clouds are a marriage dress,
of that pallor. SP, 47.
The next year, 1960 was fruitful to the couple in many a ways. Ted Hughes’ Lupercal was published in the spring of that year. Sylvia gave birth to her daughter, Frieda on April 1st. In November the same year, her book The Colossus was published by Heinemann. The best examples of her poetic personality maturing along the way are the title poem of “The Colossus” and “Daddy”, a famous poem of Ariel. We find her Missing on her dead father in both the poems. The year 1961 saw her coming through a miscarriage in February and an appendix removed in March. The critic, Butscher points here towards two disasters- the miscarriage and appendectomy hampered her creative flow to a great extent. The miscarriage brought back the gloom and doubts again. The gloom was less for the child unarrived, more at her in ability to bear and sustain. The same gloom haunts her poetic sensibility also visa-a –vis the frustration at inability to articulation. And, as always, she transferred the doubtful darkness of her soul to the more variegated and expansive cosmic gloom that gluttonously destroys and deforms human art of will. Like the big broken Colossus statue, the little Alice lost in Wonderland, of whom she was very fond, makes her appearance time and again into her poetry in various transformed symbolic forms such as stones, coffins, babies in ‘ picking fluid,’ ‘cut paper people’ etc.
Coleridge’s attitude towards nature gets reinforced as the poet came to realize that joy came from within and not from external nature. This view he voiced in “Dejection, an Ode”:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
In the poem ‘Parliament Hill Fields,’ her voice is neither self pitying nor self- propagating while depicting the feelings of a mother who has just lost her child in a miscarriage. She tells us how she comes to term with herself while searching for a prop inside as well as outside in the nature, which she depicts here. The poem begins with a sense of loss that the poet feels for her lost child and also for her vital sense of being. Another point to note is that since the same incident of miscarriage had happened to her, one has a feeling that it is she who is speaking out and not an anonymous speaker. This is how the fusion of autobiography in her creation lends more intensity and deeper sense of involvement. In a moment, one can feel her tension for creativity, failure of which leading to self consolation which finds a logical conclusion in grasping on a fragile identity- in the form of her second child. And the redemption comes through the catharsis of the tormented soul along its agonized journey of self- exploration:
I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and
Be utterly empty. SP, 33.
Once again she was in command, full of confidence and quite satisfied with herself, her work, her family. Alvarez noticed this while he visited the Hughes’s at their Devon House, “No longer quiet and withheld … she seemed made solid and complete, her own woman again … since it seemed a strong close marriage, I suppose he was unconcerned that the balance of power had shifted for the time being to Sylvia. I understood why as I was leaving, I am writing again,” she said,” Really writing, I’d like you to see some of new poems.”21: The happiness could not last longer as she came to know about her husband’s capriciousness. Her tremendous self respect would not allow her any whimpering indulgence in self- pity. Hence, the Ariel poems, which are the outbursts of a broken heart:
Now I am lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully. “Mirror”, CP, 174.
Neither self- pity nor depression but an omnivorous anger at everything ruled her psyche. The anger was more prevalent because she couldn’t help loving him still. Elizabeth Sigmund writes that Plath claimed, “Ted lies to me, he lies all the time, he has become a ‘little’ man.” 22 She realized:
Love is a shadow
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off
Like a horse. SP, 51.
Anyhow her intense flair for life with all its atrocities as well as loneliness urged her not to give up that easily; and she began planning for her new life in London with her kids. Now most important for her was to hold the reins of inner most self and control firmly than ever. She had to face the internal storm herself in the company of her poetry. She took to horse riding to fill up whatever gap there was in her daily busy schedule. Arielwas her horse, the moving ride, whose back gave her new challenges to face, new vistas to be touched. She took meticulous care to bring up babies properly. She reflected her intense self through her poems written on her children. These poems reveald the rarest aspect of her personality at that stage when she was writing. The Ariel poems reflected her tenderness and apprehensive mother love.
The poems written for her children tell the most heart rending tales of a helpless mother who knew that she had to abandon her babies before long. She wrote four poems addressed to her daughter Freida in her transitional period i.e.“Magi,” “You’re,” “Morning Song,” and “Candles,” while her last period includes, “Brasilia,” “The Night Dances,” “ Nick and the Candlestick,” “ For a Fatherless Son,” “Balloons” and “ Thalidomide.” The poem “Morning Song,” lays bare her inner thoughts:
I am no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to
Reflects its own show
Effacement at the wind’s hand. SP, 31.
She wanted to be in perfect union with nature in the Roethkean poem “I am vertical.” This poem is an echo of her earlier infatuation with the poem “Renaissance” by Edna St. Vincent Millay where the poet said that how she laid on earth gradually sinking into it till:
God, I can push the grass a part
And lay my finger on thy heart. (“Renaissance”)
She has a similar aspiration of being one with the nature when she lies horizontal in her grave:
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally;
Then the trees may touch me for once, and
The flowers have time for me.
Neither love nor hate but complete freedom is her chosen goal now. To achieve this, she aims for a greater philosophical death and spiritual sanctity that is almost Coleridgean in its overture. Plath came a long way during those three years of her life, from 1960 to 1963. Changing interminably from one identity to the other, trying on masks of different sorts, she moved on with terrible speed. The leitmotif of her poetry, that is herself in different guises, becomes more obsessive in her later poems. Here is how her life becomes one with her poetic sensibility in the poem “Purdah:”
Little nets,
My visibilities hide
I gleam like a mirror . WT, 17.
In “Purdah”, “Lady Lazarus,” and “Fever 103,” the self is realized in a variety of experiences. In the first poem she achieves freedom from male oppression; in the second, it is no longer bound up by the traditional constraints of good and evil; and in the third, the purified self appears to suffer obliteration.
I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern-
… …. …
I think I am going up,
I think I may rise-
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I
Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses. CP, 232.
This purification can occur only in the broadest sense if each individual confronts himself or herself at the most personal level of his or her consciousness. Annette Lavers, one of Plath’s earliest critics, saw in Ariel a final “Orgiastic ecstasy” in which the horse’s gallop stands as a double symbol for the “Pulsating rhythm of life, and for the dispersion of the individual” into blank eternity.” 23 Later Judith Kroll interpreted the experience of the poem to be one of “ecstatic union” in which the individual undergoes “a final letting go of self which yields an ultimate reconciliation.”24 However, all other poems of this period concern themselves with the preservation and recreation of the self. To interpret the central experience of Ariel as a complete loss of self for whatever reason, be it a desire for orgiastic finality or ecstatic union, it is to ignore the implication of both Plath’s immediate emotional situation at the time of its composition and the previous poems to which it bears similarity. Two days before the composition of the poem, on Oct-25(1962) Plath wrote to her mother:
… I believe in going through and facing the worst, not hiding from it. That is why I am going to London this week partly to face and tell them happily and squarely I am divorcing… so they won’t picture me as a poor country wife. I am not going to steer clear of these professional acquaintances just because they know… Now don’t feel helpless anymore. I am helped very much by letters…. (Letters Home, p.477)
The realistic tone of letter with its balanced focus on practical details does not reflect the desire for self- obliteration which critics so often perceive in the poem. Rather here is a woman voicing firm resolve in the face of altered personal circumstances and expressing a determination to arrive as a professional and as an artist.
In order to take a last plunge in herself, she required a unique freedom from the bondages of the earthly life, shackles of social mores, chains of hurtful emotions and most of all, from the prison of her double self. And her search for liberation from her own tortuous self and from other hostile forces prevalent in nature or in mankind. “In Plastic” and “Facelift” are two such poems in which she expresses her urge to get rid of the ugly tortures of the altered ego or the façade of restraints and to come out transformed and independent. She dared to throw stones at artificial (world) glasshouse of false existence, ripping open the bare facts as in “Facelift:”
Exhibiting the light white
Mummy clothes, smiling. I am all right. SP, 29.
She had other dimension to take on and probe also. She had seen and made others see the ugly realities of psyche; she had encountered the senseless superficialities of society and the rotten strings of relationships. But it is the other hated self, the put on role, the dirty “white saint” or “In Plaster,” that she perpetually wants to get rid of:
Now she’s done for, the dewlapped lady
I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror-
Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.
They’ve trapped her in some laboratory jar. CP, “Face Lift,”156.
When we compare these lines with the following lines in “In Plaster:”
Now I see it must be one of the other of us,
She may be a saint; I may be ugly and hairy,
But she’ll find out that doesn’t matter a bit
I’m collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her.
These are the two poems which Ted Hughes has marked as milestones, “the first sign of what was on its way,” and which George Stade rightly described as “a monologue by the imminent volcano on the subject of its relation to the prickly defense- relations that have become close, explicit and murderous.” 25
She moved into deeper strata of experiences, throwing open new vistas of cycle of birth and death, success and failure endlessly:
Meaning leaks from the molecules
The chimneys of the city breathe, the window seats
The children leap in their cots.
The sun blooms, it is a geranium
The heart has not stopped
The reference to geranium is a vivid example of her urge to relive the happy childhood, the geranium bed of her grandmother’s garden, memory of which has consoled her many a time in her distresses moments. The poem is very important as it was written on 1 Feb, 1963, considering that she had died on 11 Feb of the same year. In remaining ten days of her life, before the heart finally did stop, she yielded such an astonishingly genuine and thought provoking poetry in perfect poetic order which has yet to find its equivalent in American poetry.
In her last days, she grew fonder of her two babies and her baby poems are the only source of comfort and love in the desolate sea of existence. An apprehensive tenderness of voice haloes all her annihilative perception as she floats in the milk of filial kindness:
This is the fluid, in which we meet each other,
This haloed radiance that seems to breathe. (SP, 68)
As both elude her outstretched hands, she planned to get them back by a unique device. By physically taking away her life, she wanted to bounce back spiritually and aesthetically in the regime of perpetual bliss. After along strenuous battle with the tortuous self, she seemed to come to terms with herself at last in these poems:
I am in control
Here is my honey- machine. “Stings,”214.
Honey is the natural analogy of her creative procreation, which signifies the triumph of art in the long run:
I have whirled the midwife’s extractor,
I have my honey,
Six jars of it. “Wintering,”217.
Incidentally, her important creations are also six in number. Her last poem, “Words,” is a broad hint towards her poetic achievement in its calm acceptance of fate or destiny, but at the same time it makes one aware of the fact that even when words failed her, she continued her sojourn:
Words dry and riderless
The indefatigable hoof taps. SP, 84
The overwhelming speed, the relentless drive and the awe inspiring technical and thematic acrobatics are resolved finally, as she perceives the triumph of fate over human aspirations and endeavours:
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life. SP, 84.
An occupied mind can never penetrate into its own depths. It is emptiness of life that gives space to escape from life. This emptiness is the attainment of ultimate bliss, when one becomes free from the shackles of bondage shedding all the petty wants and urges, fills up the being with peace. Out of this loneliness of life there is a wish for extinction of self, leading to death. A threat of disintegration of self resulting from despair, frustration and protest is an attempt to put together the broken pieces in the form of confessional poems. The release of trauma often results in the confessional poets’ interest in death and suicide. It is a way of demonstrating that the perils and pains of life are too much for one to understand. In such a predicament death or suicide only makes sense. Suicide is more attractive because it seems to stir the essential spiritual psyche and deep sensibility.
The concept of suicide and its attitudes have come a long way. In classical Greece, suicide was predicted on reason and was acceptable. Motives were noble and sanctioned by the culture. In matters of patriotism, avoidance of dishonor and unbearable grief, suicide was an appropriate exit from life. The Romans, too, held to rationality. Suicide could be considered a crime if the reasons were economic. Then legal penalties were imposed on families. The Quran proclaimed it worse than murder. In the Hindu religion, “sati,” requires a bereaved wife to die on the funeral pyre of her husband. The Shintoists’ act of ‘Hara- Kiri’ expressed honour and ritual. The church in the west has always regarded it a as sin, both moral and religious and has frequently relegated it to the occult and the diabolical. The logic of suicide is different and is unanswerable, like the science fiction fantasy of being projected suddenly into another dimension: everything makes sense and follows its own rules. Sylvia’s mental pain made her insensible to her body pain
Mrs. Copp gives a very interesting account of her being involved with herself, what she calls physical restlessness: “I remember two mannerisms, usually carried out in concert. One foot… was always kept swinging impatiently and the fingers themselves interweaving, locking and unlocking, the two thumbs rather hostility opposing each other stabbing each other with their nails.” 15 This curious physical mannerism speaks a great deal about her perpetual psychic war between two paradoxical forces self- destruction and self enjoyment; the fear of being not accepted and the joy of being celebrated.
Inspite of all her courage and confidence to take up all the challenges of life, she surrenders to her innermost misgivings and shadowy doubts. But she was not going to cry out her agonies to anybody to attract pity, while inwardly; all the time she was crying herself hoarse for help, assistance and understanding, “I need a father. I need a mother. I need some order, wiser being to cry to, I talk to God, but the sky is empty.” 16 In the poem ‘Maenad’ the speaker assumes the character of a maenadic woman, frenzied and raging throughout the seven poems sequence.
This desperate reaching out for help and crumbling down in the face of total renunciation was the main cause of her break down. She believed in ultimate and absolute love i.e., the pure innocent love of a child for her father. She has said repeatedly in her reminiscences that she was never perfectly happy after her father’s death. Her mother’s love could not fulfill her hunger for a powerful assurance which the death of Otto Plath had created. She had idolized her father out of proportion, beyond any earthly standard, and that is why she could not find his match ever. This explains her bitter exasperation of the out blown image of Otto Plath whom she wanted to get rid of, once and for all, in that famous poem ‘Daddy.’ The father fixation had eclipsed her love also to a considerable extent. In search of the unattainable, she began to reject one suitor after another. For example, one of her admirers Richard Sassoon’s weak constitution became the dominating factor in rejecting him, whom she knew long back in the States. She felt safe with strong and powerful men only. Once again we are reminded of the fact that her father was a strong man. She ran in vain, in search of an able companion, she became painfully aware again and again of the gaping chasm of insecurity, which she knew she must fight, since there was no one who could help her and fulfill her inner tormented needs. And in this dark dreary helplessness and insecurity, her faith was the only redeeming feature, “that absurd faith which keeps me chaste, so chaste.” 17
It is true, as T.S. Eliot wrote in The Dry Salvages, that the moments of agony are permanent, “with such permanence as time has,” and that the torment of others remains an experience “unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.” Sylvia was “undone”, to use her coinage, not because of her lack of faith resulted in despair but due to her overall faith and uncompromising insistence for absolute perfect purity. Perfection was her motto in life as in act. Being just a brilliant student and an aspirant poet was not enough for her. Woman as she was, she must be the perfect wife and mother to fulfill the inborn urge of womanhood. Being lonely and brooding away was not her forte, so she wrote to her mother, “I do hope someday I meet a stimulating intelligent man with whom I can create a good life, because I am definitely not meant for a single life.” 18 The voice of the ‘Spinster’ is resonant with her own inner most thoughts. She finds a lover, “her latest suitor,” but her life remains tormented as the man does not seem to fit in the cherished framework of a supportive, powerful life partner:
Now this particular girl
During a ceremonious April walk
With her latest suitor
Found herself, of a sudden, intolerably struck
By the birds’ irregular babel
And the leaves litter.
By this tumult afflicted, she
-----------
The whole season, sloven. SP, 12.
She wanted her mate to be more mature than her, of firm intellectual understanding, imaginative and powerful at the same time, to whom she would look up in awe and admiration. She was actually searching for a surrogate father, while looking for a perfect mate. Writing was a religious ritual to which she had committed herself completely. It was as necessary to her as confession and absolution are, to a catholic. This rigorous breath-taking exercise of writing was simply breath-giving rejuvenation to her. She met Ted Hughes who seemed to fulfill her quest as “Hughes was large and alarmingly powerful, both physically and in psychological presence.” 19 Meeting Ted was unusual experience of which not only she but her friends were also aware. “For the first time since I had known her she seemed truly happy,” says Copp, her friend. “Their relationship seemed calm, quiet and sure… and over that very short while Sylvia became a different person… at a stoke she became private, serious and seemingly centered.” 20
She and Ted had so many things in common, so much to share and commune. Like her, he too had no money, and had come to Cambridge only by winning a contest at open exhibition. And more important, both of them were extremely fond of poetry; poetry that was passionately original by nature. They got married on June 16, in London, at the church of St. George the Martyr, a private service attended by Mrs. Aurelia Plath. Formerly, on April 29, she had lost her grandmother whom she was greatly fond of, and with whom were attached many of her tender childhood memories. Though her marriage helped her a lot to settle down her turbulent feelings of uncertainty and disintegration, happiness was not the glittering firefly for her anymore. It was the blazing hot sun whose scorching rays and tremendous heat, also, she was ready to take in her stride. Her marital life was full of charming social activities, a perfect intercommunion of two poetic souls and it was a small wonder that people judged this brilliant couple as ‘the 20th century Brownings.’ She got rid of that awful fear that visited upon her lonely hours in Cambridge, about which she had specifically confessed in her Cambridge Notes. Busy as she was, planning her life, visiting doctor for having a child, her inner contemplation ran a parallel track indulging in depression, paranoia and dark unintelligible terrors. Her poetry is nothing but the organized form of those blurred feelings of misgiving that she experienced in her real life. Torn between the pull of life with its immense possibilities and death with its enormous mysteries, her happiness came only when she could translate her torments into poetry to every organized detail of a sustained form. Surprisingly enough, she always tried to convince herself that she was a determined survivor despite the living will-o-wasp of death:
I survive the while,
Arranging my morning
These are my fingers, this baby
The clouds are a marriage dress,
of that pallor. SP, 47.
The next year, 1960 was fruitful to the couple in many a ways. Ted Hughes’ Lupercal was published in the spring of that year. Sylvia gave birth to her daughter, Frieda on April 1st. In November the same year, her book The Colossus was published by Heinemann. The best examples of her poetic personality maturing along the way are the title poem of “The Colossus” and “Daddy”, a famous poem of Ariel. We find her Missing on her dead father in both the poems. The year 1961 saw her coming through a miscarriage in February and an appendix removed in March. The critic, Butscher points here towards two disasters- the miscarriage and appendectomy hampered her creative flow to a great extent. The miscarriage brought back the gloom and doubts again. The gloom was less for the child unarrived, more at her in ability to bear and sustain. The same gloom haunts her poetic sensibility also visa-a –vis the frustration at inability to articulation. And, as always, she transferred the doubtful darkness of her soul to the more variegated and expansive cosmic gloom that gluttonously destroys and deforms human art of will. Like the big broken Colossus statue, the little Alice lost in Wonderland, of whom she was very fond, makes her appearance time and again into her poetry in various transformed symbolic forms such as stones, coffins, babies in ‘ picking fluid,’ ‘cut paper people’ etc.
Coleridge’s attitude towards nature gets reinforced as the poet came to realize that joy came from within and not from external nature. This view he voiced in “Dejection, an Ode”:
I may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
In the poem ‘Parliament Hill Fields,’ her voice is neither self pitying nor self- propagating while depicting the feelings of a mother who has just lost her child in a miscarriage. She tells us how she comes to term with herself while searching for a prop inside as well as outside in the nature, which she depicts here. The poem begins with a sense of loss that the poet feels for her lost child and also for her vital sense of being. Another point to note is that since the same incident of miscarriage had happened to her, one has a feeling that it is she who is speaking out and not an anonymous speaker. This is how the fusion of autobiography in her creation lends more intensity and deeper sense of involvement. In a moment, one can feel her tension for creativity, failure of which leading to self consolation which finds a logical conclusion in grasping on a fragile identity- in the form of her second child. And the redemption comes through the catharsis of the tormented soul along its agonized journey of self- exploration:
I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and
Be utterly empty. SP, 33.
Once again she was in command, full of confidence and quite satisfied with herself, her work, her family. Alvarez noticed this while he visited the Hughes’s at their Devon House, “No longer quiet and withheld … she seemed made solid and complete, her own woman again … since it seemed a strong close marriage, I suppose he was unconcerned that the balance of power had shifted for the time being to Sylvia. I understood why as I was leaving, I am writing again,” she said,” Really writing, I’d like you to see some of new poems.”21: The happiness could not last longer as she came to know about her husband’s capriciousness. Her tremendous self respect would not allow her any whimpering indulgence in self- pity. Hence, the Ariel poems, which are the outbursts of a broken heart:
Now I am lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully. “Mirror”, CP, 174.
Neither self- pity nor depression but an omnivorous anger at everything ruled her psyche. The anger was more prevalent because she couldn’t help loving him still. Elizabeth Sigmund writes that Plath claimed, “Ted lies to me, he lies all the time, he has become a ‘little’ man.” 22 She realized:
Love is a shadow
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off
Like a horse. SP, 51.
Anyhow her intense flair for life with all its atrocities as well as loneliness urged her not to give up that easily; and she began planning for her new life in London with her kids. Now most important for her was to hold the reins of inner most self and control firmly than ever. She had to face the internal storm herself in the company of her poetry. She took to horse riding to fill up whatever gap there was in her daily busy schedule. Arielwas her horse, the moving ride, whose back gave her new challenges to face, new vistas to be touched. She took meticulous care to bring up babies properly. She reflected her intense self through her poems written on her children. These poems reveald the rarest aspect of her personality at that stage when she was writing. The Ariel poems reflected her tenderness and apprehensive mother love.
The poems written for her children tell the most heart rending tales of a helpless mother who knew that she had to abandon her babies before long. She wrote four poems addressed to her daughter Freida in her transitional period i.e.“Magi,” “You’re,” “Morning Song,” and “Candles,” while her last period includes, “Brasilia,” “The Night Dances,” “ Nick and the Candlestick,” “ For a Fatherless Son,” “Balloons” and “ Thalidomide.” The poem “Morning Song,” lays bare her inner thoughts:
I am no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to
Reflects its own show
Effacement at the wind’s hand. SP, 31.
She wanted to be in perfect union with nature in the Roethkean poem “I am vertical.” This poem is an echo of her earlier infatuation with the poem “Renaissance” by Edna St. Vincent Millay where the poet said that how she laid on earth gradually sinking into it till:
God, I can push the grass a part
And lay my finger on thy heart. (“Renaissance”)
She has a similar aspiration of being one with the nature when she lies horizontal in her grave:
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally;
Then the trees may touch me for once, and
The flowers have time for me.
Neither love nor hate but complete freedom is her chosen goal now. To achieve this, she aims for a greater philosophical death and spiritual sanctity that is almost Coleridgean in its overture. Plath came a long way during those three years of her life, from 1960 to 1963. Changing interminably from one identity to the other, trying on masks of different sorts, she moved on with terrible speed. The leitmotif of her poetry, that is herself in different guises, becomes more obsessive in her later poems. Here is how her life becomes one with her poetic sensibility in the poem “Purdah:”
Little nets,
My visibilities hide
I gleam like a mirror . WT, 17.
In “Purdah”, “Lady Lazarus,” and “Fever 103,” the self is realized in a variety of experiences. In the first poem she achieves freedom from male oppression; in the second, it is no longer bound up by the traditional constraints of good and evil; and in the third, the purified self appears to suffer obliteration.
I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern-
… …. …
I think I am going up,
I think I may rise-
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I
Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses. CP, 232.
This purification can occur only in the broadest sense if each individual confronts himself or herself at the most personal level of his or her consciousness. Annette Lavers, one of Plath’s earliest critics, saw in Ariel a final “Orgiastic ecstasy” in which the horse’s gallop stands as a double symbol for the “Pulsating rhythm of life, and for the dispersion of the individual” into blank eternity.” 23 Later Judith Kroll interpreted the experience of the poem to be one of “ecstatic union” in which the individual undergoes “a final letting go of self which yields an ultimate reconciliation.”24 However, all other poems of this period concern themselves with the preservation and recreation of the self. To interpret the central experience of Ariel as a complete loss of self for whatever reason, be it a desire for orgiastic finality or ecstatic union, it is to ignore the implication of both Plath’s immediate emotional situation at the time of its composition and the previous poems to which it bears similarity. Two days before the composition of the poem, on Oct-25(1962) Plath wrote to her mother:
… I believe in going through and facing the worst, not hiding from it. That is why I am going to London this week partly to face and tell them happily and squarely I am divorcing… so they won’t picture me as a poor country wife. I am not going to steer clear of these professional acquaintances just because they know… Now don’t feel helpless anymore. I am helped very much by letters…. (Letters Home, p.477)
The realistic tone of letter with its balanced focus on practical details does not reflect the desire for self- obliteration which critics so often perceive in the poem. Rather here is a woman voicing firm resolve in the face of altered personal circumstances and expressing a determination to arrive as a professional and as an artist.
In order to take a last plunge in herself, she required a unique freedom from the bondages of the earthly life, shackles of social mores, chains of hurtful emotions and most of all, from the prison of her double self. And her search for liberation from her own tortuous self and from other hostile forces prevalent in nature or in mankind. “In Plastic” and “Facelift” are two such poems in which she expresses her urge to get rid of the ugly tortures of the altered ego or the façade of restraints and to come out transformed and independent. She dared to throw stones at artificial (world) glasshouse of false existence, ripping open the bare facts as in “Facelift:”
Exhibiting the light white
Mummy clothes, smiling. I am all right. SP, 29.
She had other dimension to take on and probe also. She had seen and made others see the ugly realities of psyche; she had encountered the senseless superficialities of society and the rotten strings of relationships. But it is the other hated self, the put on role, the dirty “white saint” or “In Plaster,” that she perpetually wants to get rid of:
Now she’s done for, the dewlapped lady
I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror-
Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.
They’ve trapped her in some laboratory jar. CP, “Face Lift,”156.
When we compare these lines with the following lines in “In Plaster:”
Now I see it must be one of the other of us,
She may be a saint; I may be ugly and hairy,
But she’ll find out that doesn’t matter a bit
I’m collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her.
These are the two poems which Ted Hughes has marked as milestones, “the first sign of what was on its way,” and which George Stade rightly described as “a monologue by the imminent volcano on the subject of its relation to the prickly defense- relations that have become close, explicit and murderous.” 25
She moved into deeper strata of experiences, throwing open new vistas of cycle of birth and death, success and failure endlessly:
Meaning leaks from the molecules
The chimneys of the city breathe, the window seats
The children leap in their cots.
The sun blooms, it is a geranium
The heart has not stopped
The reference to geranium is a vivid example of her urge to relive the happy childhood, the geranium bed of her grandmother’s garden, memory of which has consoled her many a time in her distresses moments. The poem is very important as it was written on 1 Feb, 1963, considering that she had died on 11 Feb of the same year. In remaining ten days of her life, before the heart finally did stop, she yielded such an astonishingly genuine and thought provoking poetry in perfect poetic order which has yet to find its equivalent in American poetry.
In her last days, she grew fonder of her two babies and her baby poems are the only source of comfort and love in the desolate sea of existence. An apprehensive tenderness of voice haloes all her annihilative perception as she floats in the milk of filial kindness:
This is the fluid, in which we meet each other,
This haloed radiance that seems to breathe. (SP, 68)
As both elude her outstretched hands, she planned to get them back by a unique device. By physically taking away her life, she wanted to bounce back spiritually and aesthetically in the regime of perpetual bliss. After along strenuous battle with the tortuous self, she seemed to come to terms with herself at last in these poems:
I am in control
Here is my honey- machine. “Stings,”214.
Honey is the natural analogy of her creative procreation, which signifies the triumph of art in the long run:
I have whirled the midwife’s extractor,
I have my honey,
Six jars of it. “Wintering,”217.
Incidentally, her important creations are also six in number. Her last poem, “Words,” is a broad hint towards her poetic achievement in its calm acceptance of fate or destiny, but at the same time it makes one aware of the fact that even when words failed her, she continued her sojourn:
Words dry and riderless
The indefatigable hoof taps. SP, 84
The overwhelming speed, the relentless drive and the awe inspiring technical and thematic acrobatics are resolved finally, as she perceives the triumph of fate over human aspirations and endeavours:
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life. SP, 84.
An occupied mind can never penetrate into its own depths. It is emptiness of life that gives space to escape from life. This emptiness is the attainment of ultimate bliss, when one becomes free from the shackles of bondage shedding all the petty wants and urges, fills up the being with peace. Out of this loneliness of life there is a wish for extinction of self, leading to death. A threat of disintegration of self resulting from despair, frustration and protest is an attempt to put together the broken pieces in the form of confessional poems. The release of trauma often results in the confessional poets’ interest in death and suicide. It is a way of demonstrating that the perils and pains of life are too much for one to understand. In such a predicament death or suicide only makes sense. Suicide is more attractive because it seems to stir the essential spiritual psyche and deep sensibility.
The concept of suicide and its attitudes have come a long way. In classical Greece, suicide was predicted on reason and was acceptable. Motives were noble and sanctioned by the culture. In matters of patriotism, avoidance of dishonor and unbearable grief, suicide was an appropriate exit from life. The Romans, too, held to rationality. Suicide could be considered a crime if the reasons were economic. Then legal penalties were imposed on families. The Quran proclaimed it worse than murder. In the Hindu religion, “sati,” requires a bereaved wife to die on the funeral pyre of her husband. The Shintoists’ act of ‘Hara- Kiri’ expressed honour and ritual. The church in the west has always regarded it a as sin, both moral and religious and has frequently relegated it to the occult and the diabolical. The logic of suicide is different and is unanswerable, like the science fiction fantasy of being projected suddenly into another dimension: everything makes sense and follows its own rules. Sylvia’s mental pain made her insensible to her body pain
