2015: The Year of Reading Women discussion
P's
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Ariel by Sylvia Plath
Thank you, Connie!From another corner: the entry on the phoenix from the Aberdeen bestiary (I am providing you with the link instead of the text because I don't want you to miss all the pretty pictures;):
http://www.abdn.ac.uk/bestiary/transl...
(We need pp. 55r - 56v)
I found the following fragment interesting, as the numbers used coincide, to some degree, with numbers used in Plath's poem:
It lives for upwards of five hundred years, and when it observes that it has grown old... it deliberately fans the flames for itself and is consumed in the fire. But on the ninth day after that, the bird rises from its own ashes.
Also, as an aside, a link to another poem based on the story of Lazarus, from a poet heavily influenced by Plath - 'Mrs. Lazarus' by Carol Ann Duffy, Britain's current poet laureate. It was published in her 1999 collection, The World's Wife:https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
(In this poem, a widow, ready to enter a new relationship after a long and painful grieving process, is 'punished' by her husband's return from the dead - this being, among others, a commentary on communities which more or less directly require widows to remain perpetually 'faithful' to their late husbands.)
Wow, the Carol Ann Duffy poem is very intense.Thanks for posting the Phoenix material, Bloodorange. That's a beautiful old manuscript.
One of the most powerful poems in Ariel and one of my favorites. That Plath used religious imagery to assimilate suicide attempts to a ritual to be performed every ten years and then mock her ressurrection "a sort of walking miracle" is a scathing provocation. The stanzas are dripping with bitter irony and could be interpreted as a cynical retaliation against Catholicism.Also, the Holocaust imagery "Herr Dokter" "Herr Enemy" "Herr God" "Herr Lucifer" "Nazi lampshade" and as "Jew linen" seems to be addressed to an impassive, amoral audience who has paid an entrance to watch a show, almost as if the exposure of Plath's mental disintegration is a product to be consumed, an idea that could also be understood as a critique to the publishing houses and the morbid vouyerism of the general public.
Dolors wrote: "That Plath used religious imagery to assimilate suicide attempts to a ritual to be performed every ten years and then mock her ressurrection "a sort of walking miracle" is a scathing provocation. The stanzas are dripping with bitter irony and could be interpreted as a cynical retaliation against Catholicism."Thank you, Dolors! I was looking for some materials considering Plath's use of the Holocaust imagery, but unfortunately I haven't found anything that looks unbiased --will make another attempt later.
A side note:
A cake of soap,- also belong to the category of gruesome death camp imagery (sorry if I'm stating the obvious).
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Just one question: Why retaliation against Catholicism? Wasn't she a Unitarian?
Meanwhile,
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
reminds me of Ariel's song from The Tempest:
Full fathom five thy father lies.
Of his bones are coral made.
Those are pearls that were his eyes.
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.
I'll try to discipline myself and see if I have anything to add.Plath blends three dimension of 'confessionalism' in this poem; private (her suicide attempts from which she has arisen like Lazarus), family (her German descent, on which more later), and public (history and news of death become a source of torment and disorientation for individuals, as in The Bell Jar, where the protagonist is jarred by the news of the electrocution of the Rosenbergs - who were a Jewish couple - which seems to amplify her own obsession with death).
It is suggested that Plath, a child of a German immigrant father and a mother of Austrian descent, was frequently 'made aware' by people she encountered of the German responsibility for the WWII genocide: http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/... (caveat lector - the article mentions "alleged horrors of Buchenwald and Auschwitz", which raised my hackles. 'Alleged' they certainly weren't.) By presenting herself as a Jew, a victim, she reverses the situation and makes the reader almost automatically sympathetic - which could be a source of subversive satisfaction - at the same time conveying the sense of terror. This imagery will return later in 'Daddy'.
The motif of display, of voyeurism reminds me of the scene in The Bell Jar, when, following her suicide attempt, Esther is visited by George Bakewell, her loose acquaintance.
How could this George Bakewell have become a doctor so suddenly? I wondered.
He didn't really know me, either. He just wanted to see what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked like.
I turned my face to the wall.
"Get out," I said. "Get the hell out and don't come back."
The narrator seems to be identifying with the Jews in the Holocaust since she is also suffering. She tells the gruesome things that the Nazis have done--using skin to make lampshades, creating scars during their experiments, pulling fillings and cutting off rings for their gold.She is rising from the dead like Lazarus. She almost drowned as a child. Then she attempted suicide as a twenty-year-old, overdosing and hiding in a dirt cellar behind a rock for three days:
"They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls."
The quote above sounds like imagery referring to the second Lazarus story, the beggar who is covered with sores.
She is predicting her next attempt at suicide:
"This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade."
She regards the people who find her on the verge of death as voyeurs to a stage show:
"The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot
The big strip tease
Gentlemen, ladies...."
Next one up:Tulips
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.
They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.
My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage——
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.
I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free——
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.
The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.
The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.
Thanks for posting "Tulips", Traveller.This poem was written after she had an appendectomy in March 1961. She had a miscarriage the month previous to this.
Bloodorange wrote: "Dolors wrote: "That Plath used religious imagery to assimilate suicide attempts to a ritual to be performed every ten years and then mock her ressurrection "a sort of walking miracle" is a scathing..."The obvious is still noteworthy when it bears relevance Bloodorange! Will be waiting for the extended report on Holocaust imagery, although my interpretation resembles the one posted by Connie. Plath assimilated the humiliation and the suffering of the Jews in concentration camps with the stigma of her own mental illness.
"Just one question: Why retaliation against Catholicism? Wasn't she a Unitarian?"
I inferred from The Bell Jar, that Plath was disappointed in religion and that she deemed it as a feigned charade that nurtured the hypocritical standards of a patriarchal society and vice versa. Here I enclose the scene of Plath's novella where she meets with the minister of the Unitarian church and Esther's smooth irony in referring to their conversation:
"He was terribly nervous the whole time, and I could tell he thought I was crazy as a loon, because I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died."
She seems to mock the idea of resurrection and has a very particular understudying of hell in life as if religion and faith were useless artifice and unable to improve her situation. The same despair and frustration can be felt in her poem, don't you think?
Dolors wrote: "Will be waiting for the extended report on Holocaust imagery, although my interpretation resembles the one posted by Connie. Plath assimilated the humiliation and the suffering of the Jews in concentration camps with the stigma of her own mental illness."The article I linked to in post 107 gave me a fresh perspective on Plath's use of Holocaust imagery, although I would recommend it with some reservations. I also found some interesting remarks in a thematic analysis of 'Lady Lazarus' by Harold Bloom in his Bloom's Major Poets: Sylvia Plath, which I think I'll hide under spoiler tags, since they're not mine and perhaps don't add that much at this point. (view spoiler)
The last sentences of the quoted extract - "Now her enemy is actually God, as well as Lucifer. God and Lucifer, in fact, may be one here" are, I think, nicely tied to your argument about religion. I see your point now: death and hell, death and resurrection all taking place in a person's lifetime.
Bloodorange, I'm glad you posted the link to the counter-currents.com article in post 107 which was partly about Holocaust imagery. I am not Jewish myself, but as I was reading "Lady Lazarus", I was wondering if Jewish Holocaust survivors and their families would feel that Plath should not be comparing her suffering to the Holocaust. A few of the Jewish reviewers had the same type of a reaction. In 1961, the Holocaust was a fairly fresh event in everyone's memory. While I'm not denying that Plath suffered, it was not the agony of a concentration camp or the evil of a genocide. However, as a poetic image, it was very effective because the Holocaust conveys a scene of horror, a hell on earth.
In "Tulips" Plath uses the colors of white and red to convey her feelings. In the beginning of the poem, she is in a white hospital, feeling numb and floating in a peaceful state under the influence of narcotics. "They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep" and later "...the water went over my head." There is the sense of flying on air currents as she describes the nurses: "They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps." She is away from the demands of real life.She receives the gift of red tulips which she describes as "too excitable" and "too red...they hurt me" and "their redness talks to my wound." The tulips destroy her peaceful feeling: "Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour/A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck". She compares the tulips to "the mouth of some great African cat".
In the last four lines, she seems to be ready to return to reality and health, using the red image of her heart:
"And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health."
Connie wrote: "She receives the gift of red tulips which she describes as "too excitable" and "too red...they hurt me" and "their redness talks to my wound." The tulips destroy her peaceful feeling: "Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour/A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck". She compares the tulips to "the mouth of some great African cat"."It seems to me that the speaker desperately wants peace; she enjoys being literally removed from her life (I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books/Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head). The flowers remind her of her attachment to life, to reality; since this is all unwanted, they're presented as predatory.
Apparently, ‘Tulips’, dated 18 March 1961, was a breakthrough in Plath's writing method. Let me quote Ted Hughes (following Sylvia Plath. An Introduction to the Poetry, 2e by Susan Basnett (p.108):
The two years between 1960 and 1962 had produced some beautiful poems, but only three that she selected for Ariel. She had heard what her real voice sounded like, and now had a new standard for herself. The poem called TULIPS was the first sign of what was on its way. She wrote this poem without her usual studies over the Thesaurus, and at top speed, as one might write an urgent letter. From then on, all her poems were written in this way.The rhythm of the poem reminds me of one of Pound's 'translations', 'The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter': http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/... - the end stopped lines create a sense of breathlessness, urgency, heaviness in 'Tulips' and passion and heavy-heartedness in the latter poem.
That's an interesting point about the rhythm of "Tulips", Bloodorange. The Pound poem is beautiful.
Thank you, Connie! Aside: Yes, Pound's Japanese poems/ translations from Cathay (1915) are exquisite, universal and haunting. Another one I love is 'Song of the Bowmen of Shu', which is about the sadness of war, any war.
http://www.infoplease.com/t/lit/catha...
Thanks for sharing Pound's poems, Bloodorange.
Bloodorange wrote: "Connie wrote: "She receives the gift of red tulips which she describes as "too excitable" and "too red...they hurt me" and "their redness talks to my wound." The tulips destroy her peaceful feeling..."Interesting! The Pound comparison is great, and I especially like your reading of the symbolism, along with Connie's notes on the use of colour. I also hear echoes of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." In addition to the themes of isolation and alienation, there's that same pessimistic mood, the sense of heightened sensitivity/ vividness/ paranoia about the workings of modern industrial society - in Plath's case, the self in relation to the mental health industrial-complex.
An excerpt from Eliot:
LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats 5
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question….
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes ...
Similar lines/themes in Plath:
"I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses/ And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons."
"The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble"
Obscureason wrote: "Bloodorange wrote: "Connie wrote: "She receives the gift of red tulips which she describes as "too excitable" and "too red...they hurt me" and "their redness talks to my wound." The tulips destroy ..."There's this sense of "atmospheric disturbance" attributed by the speaker/persona of the poem to the tulips, which simultaneously correspond to remaining will or desire or life within (in comparison to numbness, a "wound") - and reinvigorate something within - a self beyond the "nobody" that has taken over. The tulips are an agitation to her state of calm/numbness (and its "safety"), the so-called peacefulness she seems to have given herself over to ... the tulips could be understood as rousing her from that death-state, and therefore experienced as painful.
The speaker says, "I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly/ As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands./ I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions." She experiences the tulips as "too red in the first place, they hurt me ... Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds." The tulips are "upsetting" her with their "sudden tongues and their color."
and:
I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free——
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you
...
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
...
Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.
Isn't it time for another poem?Since my edition does not include 'A Secret', please let me know if you notice anything wrong re: spelling/ formatting of the poem.
A Secret
A secret! A secret!
How superior.
You are blue and huge, a traffic policeman,
Holding up one palm—-
A difference between us?
I have one eye, you have two.
The secret is stamped on you,
Faint, undulant watermark.
Will it show in the black detector?
Will it come out
Wavery, indelible, true
Through the African giraffe in its Edeny greenery,
The Moroccan hippopotamus?
They stare from a square, stiff frill.
They are for export,
One a fool, the other a fool.
A secret… An extra amber
Brandy finger
Roosting and cooing ‘You, you’
Behind two eyes in which nothing is reflected but monkeys.
A knife that can be taken out
To pare nails,
To lever the dirt.
'It won't hurt.'
An illegitimate baby—-
That big blue head—-
How it breathes in the bureau drawer!
'Is that lingerie, pet?
'It smells of salt cod, you had better
Stab a few cloves in an apple,
Make a sachet or
Do away with the bastard.
'Do away with it altogether.'
'No, no, it is happy there.'
'But it wants to get out!
Look, look! It is wanting to crawl.’
My god, there goes the stopper!
The cars in the Place de la Concorde—-
Watch out!
A stampede, a stampede!
Horns twirling and jungle gutturals!
An exploded bottle of stout,
Slack foam in the lap.
You stumble out,
Dwarf baby,
The knife in your back.
'I feel weak.'
The secret is out.
written 10 October 1962
I'm glad you posted the poem, Bloodorange, since I was reading it tonight. It seems that she has discovered a big important secret. But she doesn't know if she should tell someone:"You are blue and huge, a traffic policeman,
Holding up one palm--"
Keeping the secret is difficult. It's building up inside of her:
"'But it wants to get out!
Look, look! It is wanting to crawl.'"
Finally she lets the secret out and feels relieved:
"My god, there goes the stopper!"
I found it light and witty, a nice contrast after reading several of her sad or depressing poems in a row.
Connie wrote: "I'm glad you posted the poem, Bloodorange, since I was reading it tonight. It seems that she has discovered a big important secret. But she doesn't know if she should tell someone:"You are blue..."
LOL I agree with Connie! This poem is veritable "Cabaret" compared to some of the others.
I think it's in the title - "a secret" sounds way less serious than "the secret" - I cannot decide, for the time being, whether the poem is funny, mocking, or grotesque.
Bloodorange wrote: "I think it's in the title - "a secret" sounds way less serious than "the secret" - I cannot decide, for the time being, whether the poem is funny, mocking, or grotesque."I hear you. It is certainly very theatrical - one might say to the extreme. Perhaps it's part of what gives it that sense of distance vis-à-vis its subject matter. (EDITED > That was *not* the article link I intended to include! Looking for it now!)
Bloodorange wrote: "I think it's in the title - "a secret" sounds way less serious than "the secret" - I cannot decide, for the time being, whether the poem is funny, mocking, or grotesque."There is a strong element of mockery - a good example is her tone in relation to the "YOU" in the first stanza (whom she compares to a traffic cop). The image of a traffic cop holding out a palm in a "stop" manner against her makes a strong impression.
His gesture marks a difference/distance between them. Yet she is addressing him.
Why do you think she describes herself as having one eye?
A difference between us?
I have one eye, you have two.
Maybe because she was blind to his secret, insufficiently perceptive? When I was looking for this poem online, I came upon a website claiming it relates to Plath' s discovery of Hughes' affair with A.W., but haven't had the time to verify it yet.
Bloodorange wrote: "I think it's in the title - "a secret" sounds way less serious than "the secret" - I cannot decide, for the time being, whether the poem is funny, mocking, or grotesque."This is so insightful, Bloodorange. I don't know that we have to decide between the three. Perhaps the poem generates some unease because it vacillates in tone or captures all of those elements. The speaker's tone is a bit 'side-show circus'/freak show master (& we're not sure if we want to see or be exposed to what's about to be laid out for us!). The baby-secret (smelly?) stuffed in a drawer is definitely a grotesque trope.
In reference to your later comment, given that all of the poems are from around this era of her life, it's very likely that it's a reference to Hughes' infidelity/disloyalty.
Now that you make the connection between "one eye versus two" and his infidelity (and her blindness to it), I also see that the "two eyes" could be read as a metaphor for his duplicity as opposed to her singularity/integrity (one eye). It works in multiple ways.
There's also the one-eyed mythological monster, Cyclops. More grotesquery, this time the speaker's own "monstrous" self, perhaps - her singular jealousy and rage, which also gives her this painful clarity of vision, like something coming into focus. The tone and imagery are very effective, too - you really feel this sense of being so viscerally affected - disgusted or sickened by a situation.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2...According to this article in the Boston Globe (about the Plath biography American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath), Plath suspected an affair between Ted and Assia when she picked up the phone on July 9, 1962. So that could be the secret as Bloodorange and Obscureason discussed. Maybe the second eye is a roving eye.
"A Secret" was written on October 10, 1962.
Plath's poem "The Fearful", written on November 16, 1962 according to this article, was about Assia who did not want children since she would lose her beauty if she got fat.
The poem "The Fearful":
https://www.poeticous.com/poets/sylvi...
There are many mentions of an illegitimate baby in "The Secret". I read somewhere that Assia had multiple abortions (before her affair with Ted Hughes). Another possible interpretation is that Plath had just found out Assia's secret--the abortions. It would be human nature to love to spread some dirt about your rival.
Connie wrote: "http://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2...According to this article in the Boston Globe (about the Plath biography"
Lots of interesting material there, Connie - thanks!
The book, Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath, mentioned in the Boston Globe article, is a slim, moving volume written/published in 2002 by Plath's friend, writer Jillian Becker. Plath stayed with Becker and her husband in the final few days before her death.
Thanks for the book recommendation, Obscureason.This might be an interesting book about Assia Wevill:
http://seattletimes.com/html/books/20...
Thanks for all the recommendations! I was struck by how these poems, 'A Secret' and 'The Fearful', correspond:Hearing the fierce mask magnify
The silver limbo of each eye
Where the child can never swim,
Where there is only him and him. ('The Fearful')
A secret… An extra amber
Brandy finger
Roosting and cooing ‘You, you’
Behind two eyes in which nothing is reflected but monkeys. (A Secret)
Monkeys are symbols of impurity, stupidity and evil (again, sorry if I'm stating the obvious).
As far as limbo is concerned, I'm not sure what the Unitarian stance is on this, but in Catholicism, there's no theory regarding the place the unbaptised or aborted children go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limbo#Li...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evangeli...
Obviously, it can also refer to the emptiness, responsiveness, mirror-like quality of Assia; we could guess why she would make an attractive lover to Hughes.
On the whole, I'm still not sure what to make of this poem - but from lack of any interpretations of it in my Plath books I infer I'm in a good company:)
Bloodorange wrote: "Thanks for all the recommendations! I was struck by how these poems, 'A Secret' and 'The Fearful', correspond:Hearing the fierce mask magnify
The silver limbo of each eye
Where the child can ne..."
So many interesting biographical facts, and at the same time demonstrating that a poem stands on its own, beyond the literal and any specific outside/factual, one-to-one correlations. As you show here, factual materials can augment the understanding of a poem and its metaphoric and symbolic possibilities. But it's always a matter of expansive meaning, rather than any process of nailing down a particular line/image to match a particular fact. As an artistic artifact, the poem's internal logic and built world and imaginary persona overshadows any outside literal connections. In terms of the world of the poem, I'd be curious to hear what others make of the penultimate line in the final stanza: 'I feel weak.' I'm not sure what to think of this line. Why does the poem's speaker/persona feel 'weak' after the secret is released?
Connie wrote: "Thanks for the book recommendation, Obscureason.This might be an interesting book about Assia Wevill:
http://seattletimes.com/html/books/20..."
Oops - just saw this. Thanks, Connie! :)
Obscureason wrote: "Now that you make the connection between "one eye versus two" and his infidelity (and her blindness to it), I also see that the "two eyes" could be read as a metaphor for his duplicity as opposed to her singularity/integrity (one eye). It works in multiple ways."Yes to that. There homophone reinforces this reading.
Things I notice:
- picture-book imagery (traffic policeman, the animals – giraffe, hippopotamus, monkeys, the climax – the stampede of cars-animals: ‘A stampede, a stampede!/Horns twirling and jungle gutturals!’)
- a secret under the guise of something playful and innocent:
Will it come out- a man is afraid of the baby’s “coming out” of the bottle/ drawer, a woman defends it
Wavery, indelible, true
Through the African giraffe in its Edeny greenery,
The Moroccan hippopotamus?
- the change of the addressee – “you” from the first stanza seems to be addressed to a different person than “you” in the last stanza.
- the knife in the baby’s back, ‘I feel weak’ – initially, I had associations with voodoo dolls, indirect killing; now I’m inclined to think the speaker quotes one of baby's parents (expressing surprise? weakness?)
Moments I have *no* idea what to make of :
- “They are for export,/One a fool, the other a fool”
- the first element of the tripartite list (“An extra amber/ Brandy finger/ Roosting and cooing ‘You, you’/ Behind two eyes…” - I can only think of an extra finger of brandy).
Returning to motifs of eyes, limbo and unborn children – did you know about Assia’s pike dream? (In May 1962, the Wevills visited Plath and Hughes in Court Green. One day at breakfast Assia told her dream of a pike with human fetus in his eye. Here is Hughes’ poem from Birthday Letters in which he relates the event:
After a single night under our roofReportedly, Hughes frequently dreamt of fish, and the pike played a significant role in his poetic bestiary.)
She told her dream. A giant fish, a pike
Had a globed, golden eye, and in that eye
A throbbing human foetus -
You were astonished, maybe envious.
I refused to interpret. I saw
The dreamer in her
Had fallen in love with me and she did not know it.
That moment the dreamer in me
Fell in love with her, and I knew it.
"I feel weak" in the last stanza might be a feeling of relief that the secret is in the open, since she's had a sense of pressure when she was holding in the secret.Lots of interesting information, everyone. Some of the emotion in the poem could apply to any big secret, although Plath was writing in a very autobiographical manner at that time.
More about Assia and babies: Assia was pregnant with Ted's child at the time of Sylvia's suicide, and had an abortion six weeks later:
http://www.theguardian.com/theguardia...
Next poem: The Jailer
My night sweats grease his breakfast plate.
The same placard of blue fog is wheeled into position
With the same trees and headstones.
Is that all he can come up with,
The rattler of keys?
I have been drugged and raped.
Seven hours knocked out of my right mind
Into a black sack
Where I relax, foetus or cat,
Lever of his wet dreams.
Something is gone.
My sleeping capsule, my red and blue zeppelin
Drops me from a terrible altitude.
Carapace smashed,
I spread to the beaks of birds.
O little gimlets—
What holes this papery day is already full of!
He his been burning me with cigarettes,
Pretending I am a negress with pink paws.
I am myself. That is not enough.
The fever trickles and stiffens in my hair.
My ribs show. What have I eaten?
Lies and smiles.
Surely the sky is not that color,
Surely the grass should be rippling.
All day, gluing my church of burnt matchsticks,
I dream of someone else entirely.
And he, for this subversion,
Hurts me, he
With his armor of fakery,
His high cold masks of amnesia.
How did I get here?
Indeterminate criminal,
I die with variety—
Hung, starved, burned, hooked.
I imagine him
Impotent as distant thunder,
In whose shadow I have eaten my ghost ration.
I wish him dead or away.
That, it seems, is the impossibility.
That being free. What would the dark
Do without fevers to eat?
What would the light
Do without eyes to knife, what would he
Do, do, do without me?
========
In "The Jailer", Plath is portraying herself as a victim while her jailer is rattling the keys. She's under the influence of a sleeping pill, imagining that:"I have been drugged and raped.
Seven hours knocked out of my right mind."
Then she awakes to reality as the sleeping pill's effects wears off, feeling like Prometheus getting pecked by the eagle:
"My sleeping capsule, my red and blue zeppelin
Drops me from a terrible altitude.
Carapace smashed,
I spread to the beaks of birds."
She also imagines herself being burned, sick, and starved. She knows her husband is looking elsewhere and writes:
"I am myself. That is not enough."
She looks back to the day they were married, to happier times before her husband changed. Or maybe he was pretending to be someone else:
"All day, gluing my church of burnt matchsticks,
I dream of someone else entirely."
She lists the ways she is dying and tortured:
"Hung, starved, burned, hooked."
She imagines him as impotent and wishes him dead. But she will never get rid of her memories, and still feels trapped:
"I wish him dead or away,
That, it seems, is the impossibility."
He is the light that knifed her eyes, leaving her blind and in darkness. She knows that he has moved on, to his next victim:
"What would the light
Do without eyes to knife, what would he
Do, do, do without me?"
It's a very sad look at the demise of a marriage.
Thank you for the interpretation, Connie! At first I thought the jailor is depression ('Surely the sky is not that colour'); having read your post I can see it can also be a man ('Lies and smiles'). I'll try to add an orderly reading later during the weekend.
Bloodorange wrote: "Thank you for the interpretation, Connie! At first I thought the jailor is depression ('Surely the sky is not that colour'); having read your post I can see it can also be a man ('Lies and smiles')..."I was wondering if the "blue fog" she refers to in the second line is depression.
Bloodorange wrote: "Thank you for the interpretation, Connie! At first I thought the jailor is depression ('Surely the sky is not that colour'); having read your post I can see it can also be a man ('Lies and smiles')..."I actually like both possibilities but I'd posit that "depression" as jailer is a better interpretation in this case for its symbolic openness rather than a solving-for-meaning/literal-object approach. We're not doing the crossword here, right! ;)
One thing I find interesting is the speaker's state of mind. There's an insistence here - such a strong point of view - the speaker needs to express her state of mind - perhaps a way of fighting against the feeling of oppression. As you say, Connie, she feels "jailed." Tortured. She is certainly searching for an object to her pain, seeking something to blame (thus the title), but it's imaginative and emotive. The whole tone of the poem seems to be as much internally questioning and (as she puts it) indeterminate as declarative or externally objective. Lots of self-doubt and self-blame. I found these lines very evocative:
What have I eaten?
Lies and smiles.
Surely the sky is not that color,
Surely the grass should be rippling.
How did I get here?
Indeterminate criminal,
I die with variety—
Hung, starved, burned, hooked.
Another thing that I found interesting is the narrative progress within the poem, both a start-through-finish movement and a sort of vacillating within the poem. These lines at the end summarize that point A to point B movement very starkly:
It goes from the abstract "dark" needing its "fevers" "to eat" - the light needing eyes to knife and then, much more narrowly and concretely, the "jailer" (whether symbolic personification or person) needing her, the victim - a much more specific partnering.
What would the dark
Do without fevers to eat?
What would the light
Do without eyes to knife, what would he
Do, do, do without me?
But there's that continual dance throughout as well. Her "nights sweats greas[ing] his breakfast plate."
And then this:
All day, gluing my church of burnt matchsticks,She imagines at least that her dream of someone else - her drift away, her momentary distraction - causes him to bring her back, like a jealous lover.
I dream of someone else entirely.
And he, for this subversion,
Hurts me, he
With his armor of fakery,
Traveller wrote: "Next poem: The Jailer
My night sweats grease his breakfast plate.
The same placard of blue fog is wheeled into position..."
EDIT>> Erg. My first sentence somehow escaped: Thanks Traveller, by the way, for posting the poem.
The way she's imagining/feeling her pain is interesting too -- described as a very unequal relationship. The speaker feels a great inadequacy, overwhelmed ... To me, the intensity of emotion correlates to intense need or desperation to express her emotional state. Again, perhaps, a way of fighting it.
He his been burning me with cigarettes,
Pretending I am a negress with pink paws.
I am myself. That is not enough.
She even tries to lessen his power by imagining him "Impotent as distant thunder" or "wish[ing] him dead or away. But it's an "impossibility" - or "it seems."
Mockery/satire/grotesquery of "A Secret" -- it really is so different in tone than either the desperation "The Jailer" or the control and high irony of "Lady Lazarus."
Speaking of - Oh my gosh. Thanks for that JUICY post on "A Secret," Bloodorange! I like the "picture book" feeling you identify there ... again, this kind of colourful/carnivalesque surface/darkness under the surface tension. Now that I look at it again, I agree with you that the 'I feel weak' quote is kind of floating, non-attributed. There may be no particular parent, but it's what the one who birthed the child would say. It's almost like the speaker is watching the birth and identifying with it or even midwifing the birth? Cross between midwife and circus ring leader!
Interesting voodoo connection there, too. Perhaps it even suggests a ritualistic aspect being evoked by the speaker? I hadn't noticed these compelling motifs of eyes, limbs and unborn children.
Damn, that's a great poem by Hughes. The pike and Hughes' bestiary calls into relief the difference to Plath's animals, which in "A Secret" are all exotic. A great collision of these different registers or a crashing/breaking of the domestic scene: there's the domestic register, with lingerie drawer, baby-secret," calling someone "pet" -- and this exotic, foreign, "outside" or polluting one (the bad smell, exotic animals, perhaps the animals are images of fools because they are being readied/used for the zoo, neither domestic nor natural habitat?) and then the social/public/law register in the absurd figure of the traffic cop trying to regulate it all. It's like she's insisting instead upon a domestic/maternal regulation/rite of passage for the secret, but also putting these darker, perverse elements into it.
Telling perhaps that Hughes falls in love with this domestic dreamer (in that poem excerpt), given that overall Plath is given to such dark drama and intensities of emotion and epic mythic scale, Greek and Roman gods warring, etc. Almost as if she were incanting/invoking all of this awe-inspiring, formidable power to help her and bring vengeance upon him and almost as though his poem might suggest that he feels/felt overwhelmed by the sheer scale and epic weight and breadth of the field as invoked by Plath. It also kind of makes me realize how incredibly powerless each, in their own way, must have felt - her whirlwind of desperation, fury, despair, his frustration, anger, resignation, exhaustion.
The 'domestic' dreamer "under our roof" is also an interloper.
Traveller wrote: "Next poem: The Jailer
My night sweats grease his breakfast plate.
The same placard of blue fog is wheeled into position
With the same trees and headstones.
Is that all he can come up with,
The r..."
Sorry, one last thing: that line just kills me:
All day, gluing my church of burnt matchsticksI realize she's probably referring to some kind of silly craft she's doing in the nuthouse but it's all so poignant. Her being reduced to this. Spending all day on this tiny "make-work" craft. And then the symbolism of all of it, the building, Church/sanctuary, matchsticks, burnt matchsticks!! Argh.
Connie wrote: "In "The Jailer", Plath is portraying herself as a victim while her jailer is rattling the keys. She's under the influence of a sleeping pill, imagining that:"I have been drugged and raped.
Seven..."
Thanks for the annotated interpretation Connie. I was also interested in the use of domestic imagery in the first line:
"My night sweats grease his breakfast plate."
There's hurt pride, victimization and reproach in that line, almost as if she is imprisoned in the jail of marriage, embodied in her husband, which imposes certain domestic (and demeaning) obligations on her.
Then, I also think the penultimate verse doesn't only evoke more happier times, but also denotes a certain despondency at having failed to retaliate against the husband-jailer. The burnt matchsticks somehow relate to the cigarettes the husband tortures her with and could symbolize some sort of stratagem to alter the male dominance in the marriage. Plath seems to reiterate in the last stanza that the husband's power is fueled by the subjugating act in itself and the repetition of "Do" and accusatory tone of the question marks have a sense of urgency and desperation that equals the one of trapped victim in a house of horrors. I suppose Plath exaggerated reality to protest against the inequality of genders in and out of the familiar unit.
This poem also reminded me of the modernists' different approach to the domestic imagery or everyday life that alluded to feelings of comfort and security like William Carlos Williams or later Frank O'Hara would fill their poems with, using jesting wordplay and a complacent tone. I am trying to think of a female poet that used the domestic imagery in the same way and can't think of any off the cuff...a bit suspicious, don't you think?
Dolors, that's an interesting look at the domestic imagery.The image of gluing a church of burnt matchsticks is a vivid one since the church, representing the setting of a marriage, is weak and crumbling. That's a good tie you've made about the matchsticks to the husband torturing her with cigarettes. She feels powerless in her marriage, so she has to protest through the images in her poetry.
Would you object to my switching to lurking mode for two or three poems? It turns out I have to read two books on top of my regular schedule.
Bloodorange wrote: "Would you object to my switching to lurking mode for two or three poems? It turns out I have to read two books on top of my regular schedule."
We'll miss your wonderful comments, Bloodorange, but will be glad to have you lurking.
We have around 27-28 more poems left in "Ariel". I'm going to be having extra reading for a course I am taking, starting the third week of February, so I also might be a lurker some weeks. I was wondering if everyone wanted to finish all the poems. An alternative would be for each of us to post a couple of poems that we especially liked, or thought were important, and finish up the discussion in February. If you want to read all 30 poems, I'll continue to participate most weeks.
Any thoughts about how many more poems we should read, everyone?
Connie wrote: We have around 27-28 more poems left in "Ariel". I'm going to be having extra reading for a course I am taking, starting the third week of February, so I also might be a lurker some weeks. I was wondering if everyone wanted to finish all the poems. An alternative would be for each of us to post a couple of poems that we especially liked, or thought were important, and finish up the discussion in February. If you want to read all 30 poems, I'll continue to participate most weeks.Any thoughts about how many more poems we should read, everyone?"
To be honest, I really like the fact of reading all the poems - if not from old *and* restored edition, then at least one of the,. I really have hard time comprehending Plath's technique in Ariel, and our discussions allow me to go outside readily available, and frequently simple, interpretations. This means, to me, going a little out of my comfort zone and changing my reading/ thinking habits, and
I love that.
On the other hand, I feel that this thread has perhaps too few regular contributors to continue for the next ten or more weeks without any hiccups, especially since we really do our best to really *get* the poem, which can be time-consuming (or guilt-inducing).
I can see a few options:
1. choose, as Connie suggests, some poems (5? 10? 15?) from the remaining poems and do in-depth reading;
2. settle for making less challenging analyses (and thus allow for better and worse days, and better and weaker analyses);
3. take turns in leading the discussion. Each of regular contributors would be responsible for analysing and/or leading the discussion on one poem in three (or more... ;), and the rest of us could either add something or say 'thank you' and proceed to the next poem.
I think I like solutions 1 and 3 the most.
Bloodorange wrote: "Connie wrote: We have around 27-28 more poems left in "Ariel". I'm going to be having extra reading for a course I am taking, starting the third week of February, so I also might be a lurker some w..."Hello everybody. I'd love the discussion to continue but I don't have too much time during weekdays to take the lead, weekends tend to be better. I would lean for the first option as I think it's the most realistic given the level of activity in the thread during the last few days.
Any other suggestions?
2015: The Year of Reading Women
Books mentioned in this topic
Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (other topics)Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath (other topics)
American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath (other topics)
Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (other topics)
Sleepless Nights (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Edgar Allan Poe (other topics)Ingrid Jonker (other topics)
Ingrid Jonker (other topics)
There are two Lazarus stories in the New Testament that Plath drew from when she wrote "Lady Lazarus". I thought it would be helpful to our discussion later to post the Biblical quotes.
The first Lazarus Biblical story (John 11) involves the brother of Mary and Martha who died. Jesus raised him from the dead, and Lazarus came out of the grave covered with burial wrappings.
"And he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes; and his face was bound about with a napkin. Jesus saith unto them, 'Loose him, and let him go.'" (John 11:44, King James Bible)
The second Lazarus story is about a different man described in Luke 16. Lazarus is a poor beggar covered with sores. A rich man will not help Lazarus. Lazarus goes to heaven after he dies, but the rich man is sent to the fires of hell.
"And a poor man named Lazarus was laid at his gate, covered with sores, and longing to be fed with the crumbs which were falling from the rich man's table; besides, even the dogs were coming and licking his sores. Now the poor man died and was carried away by the angels to Abraham's bosom; and the rich man also died and was buried. In Hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torment, and saw Abraham far away and Lazarus in his bosom. And he cried out and said, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus so that he may dip the tip of his finger in water and cool off my tongue, for I am in agony in this flame.' But Abraham said, 'Child, remember that during your life you received your good things, and likewise Lazarus bad things; but now he is being comforted here, and you are in agony.'" (Luke 16:20-25)