Ekphrasis with Sylvia Plath

This month's close read takes on Plath's poem The Disquieting Muses*. If you are interested in making art from art, as Plath does here, come to my next Paris Lit Up writing workshop on 7 April at 12h30 in the library at Shakespeare and Company. If you can't wait until then, there is a writing prompt for you to try at the end of this post.

Plath uses the idea of and rewrites the Sleeping Beauty fairytale in this poem addressed to her mother. Instead of asking why the wicked fairy was not invited to her christening she wants to know which family member was not invited and chose to send 'three ladies in her stead/with heads like darning needles'. The second stanza expands this imagery into other children's stories and fairytales with its reference to Hanzel and Gretel, to ask whether her mother's words from these sources dispelled the ladies 'nodding at night around my bed'.

The ladies represent the ultimate childhood nightmare for Plath. As she says idiomatically in the third stanza, they even broke her father's study window panes where a hurricane did not and in the fourth and fifth stanza prevented her from enjoying the delights of childhood like dancing, 'singing the glowworm song' and playing the piano. The nightmare continues into adulthood as the muses are the travelling companions she must face as they 'stand their vigil in gowns of stone/Faces as blank as the day I was born/Their shadows long in the setting sun'.

Plath continues to lay the finger of blame for her state of mind, and here we might read-in some biography and her depressive episodes, on her mother. The repetition of the words mother, mother lays emphasis on this at the opening of the poem, in the final stanza and at several places in between.

The poem ends with a puzzle that she will not betray the company of the muses. What does this mean? That they are far from nightmare and by now familiar comfort, artistic guides even, or that to oppose her mother she must alley herself with what terrifies herself most? Perhaps both. This poem is often read as the young woman wrestling older female figures who are trying to smother her**, but I think this is a simplifcation.

Of course, all of this is without even knowing that Plath had in mind a particular painting, executed during World War I by Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio di Chirico, when she wrote this. Once you see the painting (left), the description of the figures and their precise position around the crib is apparent, and somehow for me less nightmarish. Unfortunately, now you know this, you can never read the poem in isolation, as you are almost bound to want to navigate between the two to see which elements Plath used and which she ignored.

That is an added dimension to the game of ekphrasis and specifically what is crucial for the writer, I now think, is to be skilled enough to make a completely self-contained poem that does not need to be informed by knowledge of its source. Often I find it tedious to have such imposed on me as reader, as it requires work on my part to go elsewhere (and I am inherently lazy), instead of just enjoying the poem, although guilty as charged on previous occasions!

And now for the writing...Find yourself a scary painting. There are plenty to choose from (Bosch, Fuseli, Munch come readily to mind). Use its images as description for something scary from your childhood. It does not have to be a gothic nightmare, just something that frightened you (and perhaps still does). Just remember to cut it loose from its moorings and don't make the piece dependent on knowing the painting, avoid references to the actual artist, although you might want to throw the reader a clue, as Plath does, in the title or in one of the lines. Have fun. Boo!

 * The poem can be found in the Faber Collected Plath (1982) pg. 74
** See Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath (2008) pg.42 and further cites. 

Into the Light with Sylvia Plath

To shed some light on another of Sylvia Plath's poems in advance of my next Paris Lit Up Writing Workshop on 3 March in the library at Shakespeare and Company and set you a writing challenge, I'm going to take a close look at Sylvia Plath's 1962 poem By Candlelight. Ostensively a poem about waking in the night to tend to and feed a crying baby: 'Balled hedgehog./Small and cross', the poem has various points of light, to adopt a painterly term, before settling in praise of the particular candlestick as totem/guardian of the child. Let me elaborate.

Addressing the child ('small love'), the poem starts in a country night with a delightful image of it 'steeled with the sheen/Of what green stars can make it to our gate.' The stars are the first point of light and they are strange, being green. The next point of light is the mirror (a constant Plath object, as noted in my first two posts - scroll down for more), which floats mother and child 'at one candle power'. A mirror is the place where they meet each other. A candle third point) has a quasi-religious significance as a 'haloey radiance' and blows their shadows on the wall of the room making them 'violent giants'. Yet its light is barely there at all to start with as it is almost snuffed out.

The third and final stanza of the poem focuses on the candle : 'the light/ that keeps the sky at bay' and the bent man candlestick 'the little brassy Atlas' and its 'five brass cannonballs', which for the child represent protection, solidity and certainty in an insecure world :'to juggle with, my love, when the sky falls.' In this way, light banishes darkness in the poem, literally and metaphorically.

And now for the writing challenge: something wakes you in the night, what? focus on sounds in the dark inside and outside the house; then introduce one light source, then another, focus on how they effect you and what they do to the room; what happens next?; use the present tense and choose a title that doesn't have the words light or night in it. Enjoy and good luck!

The poem can be found on pg. 236 of the Faber Collected Plath (1981).

Writing Workshop - Journeys - with Sylvia Plath

My next Writing Workshop for Paris Lit Up is next Sunday, 3 February, at 12h30 in the Library at Shakespeare and Company. The theme is Journeys. Ahead of that, let's take a look at one of Sylvia Plath's poems and here's a suggestion to write something in response.

In Ariel, Plath's poem Totem, is a journey of a less literal kind. Deceptively it starts on a railway line running through countryside, but from the beginning this life metaphor is unstintingly visceral and threatening: 'The engine is eating the track' and 'the farmers like pigs....(have) blood on their minds'. Indeed the poem is soaked in the red stuff from 'the butcher's gullotine' and the aborted hare to Plato's afterbirth, Christ blood and so on: 'the world is blood-hot and personal'. She returns to the travel imagery towards the end of the poem:

'There is no terminus, only suitcases

Out of which the same self unfolds like a suit
Bald and shiny, with pockets of wishes,

Notions and tickets, short circuits and folding mirrors.'

Mirrors again - a Plath trope. It's a frighteningly uncompromising vision of life's journey and the tied nature of existence:

 '...blue children
In nets of the infinite,

Roped in at the end by the one
Death with its many sticks' 

culminating with death in its last line.

Me and the girls, Bryce Canyon, Utah, 2003.

Here's the writing challenge: think of a mode of transport (there are plenty to choose from Shank's pony to parachutes, sailing ships to skateboards, and bicycles to balloons) that represents or could represent your life journey and use its imagery and specialist vocabulary to say something(s) about either your life so far, the life you plan to have in the future, or the life you wish you'd had in the first place. Enjoy and Good Luck.

Presiding Spirit 2013: Sylvia Plath

It’s a doldrum day at the slow turning of the year. It’s pouring with rain again and I am not talking the dog out in a gale. Instead I lift a slim volume of verse from my shelves. It’s one of my most precious books: a first edition of Ariel by Sylvia Plath: red hard back, simple gold lettering, edges slightly browned, pages dark cream, forty poems dedicated to her children, Frieda and Nicholas. I bought it more than twenty years ago. It doesn’t have a dust jacket and so it’s monetary value, a knowledgeable poetry bookseller told me recently, is less than it would be if it had, but I don’t care.

Its worth is inside, in those marvelous poems she left on her desk in February 1963 and which Faber published in 1965, after some reshuffling of the order by Ted Hughes. A restored edition was published in 2007 and makes for fascinating comparison. Fifty years after her death, I am reading her again for the umpteenth time. It’s a little pilgrimage. It’s disturbing, but comfortably familiar. That’s why she’s my this year’s  Presiding Spirit.

Over the coming twelve months you will find articles, essays and readings on this page on Plath. Please check back often and leave a comment on the writings you find here. If you would like to contribute to this project, you are most welcome.

The opening poem of Ariel is Morning Song, a poem of a mother’s anxiety at night, listening to her sleeping child waiting for the sound that requires her response:

‘One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s.’

But it is much more than this as it starts and ends with the child claiming its voice: ‘The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry/Took its place among the elements.’; ‘And now you try/Your handful of notes;/The clear vowels rise like balloons.’ The skill of Plath here is to have at one and the same time an ordinary register of language, the matter of factness of the mid-wife’s action and the child’s vocalisation, coupled with the extraordinary in idea of our voices joining the elements and the strange simile of vowels rising like balloons. The image of the breast-feeding mother as ‘cow-heavy’ has stayed with me. I think it was one of the first things I’d found for myself that alerted me to the exciting possibilities of language and its physicality when I was a teenager. It’s simple, all the best ideas are.

In the tradition of reading the first and last poems in a book in order to decide whether it is any good; a habit which many people have and might be borne in mind when ordering a collection for publication, let’s look at the final poem, Words. It’s short, but full of complex imagery that begins with a startling one word line ‘Axes’ and goes on to celebrate the felling of a tree for the sound of the wood ringing and echoing ‘off from the centre like horses’, another thought-provoking simile; and for the sap that wells up like water ‘striving/To re-establish its mirror/Over the rock'. Mirrors are a frequent Plath image and I have already written about that in an earlier post - scroll down. Words then become ‘hoof-taps’ echoing the earlier horse image, but in the end ‘dry and riderless’, while the finality of the poem’s last lines is a depressing expression of pre-determinism: ‘From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars/ Govern a life.’

In between these two poems you will find some of her most famous work such as Lady Lazarus, Tulips and Daddy. To finish this first introductory piece, just a short note, again by way of welcome, to the four bee poems, as this is a current topic in certainly British poetry with a least two collections having been published on it in the last year (Carol Ann Duffy’s The Bees and Sean Borrowdale’s Bee Journal).

The Bee Meeting is a longer narrative poem on the opening of hives to locate and remove newly-hatched queens, where Plath’s existential position is as questioning outsider, at first improperly dressed: ‘I am nude as a chicken neck’ and perplexed as to what is going on: ‘Is it some operation that is taking place?’, but never comfortable, even down to the final lines: ‘Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold.’

The Arrival of the Bee Box is more than an empty super: ‘...the coffin of a midget/Or a square baby’, as it is locked, dangerous and swarming with bees. This time properly attired (she is learning) in her ‘moon suit and funeral veil’ she considers whether to open the box. A kind of modern day Pandora, she hopes they will ignore her as she is ‘no source of honey’ and resolves the dilemma of action in the poem: ‘Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free. / The box is only temporary.’ Again control over life and death is worked though in this piece as Plath describes herself as both god and Caesar.

Stings is for me a very powerful poem, set at honey harvest and involving the scraping of the frames for extraction. The stand-out sentiment is contained in these adamant lines:

‘I am no drudge
Though for years I have eaten dust
And dried plates with my dense hair.’

and the elision of the poet with the queen bee at the poem’s close: ‘...I/Have a self to recover, a queen.’

In Wintering extracted honey is perfectly described as ‘six cat’s eyes in the wine cellar’, an otherwise forbidding place of blackness and decay for Plath that echoes the danger the all female bees are in as regards their survival, living as they have to on replacement honey (sugar) ‘the refined snow’. It ends on a positive note: ‘The bees are flying. They taste the spring.’ Thus the year turns. Have a very happy 2013.

Mirror Mirror on the Wall

The object speaks in Sylvia Plath’s Mirror[1][2] 

Most readers spend a lot of time stating the obvious about this poem. Yes, it’s about a woman coming to terms with or not coming to terms with the inevitable process of ageing. But we don’t get to that until the last few lines and that wonderfully startling final image of her face rising ‘like a terrible fish’.

For now I am much more interested in who’s doing the talking[3]. The mirror not the woman is the ‘I’ of this poem and that’s interesting. In the first nine lines of this eighteen line poem i.e. half of it (the whole of the first stanza), it explains itself – silver, exact, without preconceptions, truthful – and how it exists ‘Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall’. All of this, even it metaphorically turning into a lake, is before the woman appears. And the mirror carries on talking. Why? Why give voice to an inanimate object?

I suppose much of the answer lies in the project of poetry to say things in interesting, unusual and surprising ways. It would be a dull poem if all it was about was a woman looking in a mirror and saying to herself something like “oh dear I am getting old, as in old trout” (if you’ll pardon the pun and reductio ad absurdum). Plath finds another way of doing this and makes the exchange between woman and mirror something active as the mirror has a voice and personality and knows its importance to the woman, even if it mourns its position of neglect.

Granted it is not the knowing mirror of Snow White, but it does reflect faithfully and does not predict. It is not cruel and has no prejudices. It does not produce flattering light like the lying candle and moon, but it does have a sense of grandeur and power (‘a little god’). Nor is it passive as the exchange involves the mirror actively swallowing and drowning the younger woman and being rewarded by her tears and ‘agitation of hands’.

The technique of voicing allows Plath to think about the mirror-iness of mirrors, to explore what they are in essence, how they function and what they represent in our lives; a kind of meditation if you will. It’s a way of getting below the surface of things and thinking more deeply about them; a self-reflection.

You can try this for yourself and it’s an oft-used workshop exercise. Find an object of significance, it can be anything, and ask yourself what it wants to say, what’s its story, character, attitude, interaction with you? Now give it voice and write in the first person. It sounds bonkers, but actually it’s a lot of fun and if done really well, might even rival Plath’s great poem. Good Luck.

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[1] Written 1961. Published in Crossing the Water, 1971.

[2] As the poem seems to be widely available everywhere on the internet, please search it out or better still buy a book with it in it as the poem itself is not reproduced in this article.

[3] There are lots of different critical approaches one might take with this poem from the feminist to the psycho-analytical, but they are not my focus here.