Annihilation in the Poems of Sylvia Plath (contd.)
In the middle Ages, suicide was beyond literature. It was a mortal sin, a horror, the object of such total moral revulsion. Dante had written the Divine Comedy at start of 14th century, and in less than 200 yrs, suicide had become once again a possible subject. Sir Thomas More, like Plato, allowed it as a kind of voluntary euthanasia in his utopia. Later in the 16th century death before dishonor and suicide for love became the common place of poets and playwrights. The Romantics established in the popular mind the idea that suicide was one of the many prices to be paid for being genius.
Suicide permeated Western culture like a dye that cannot be washed out. It is as though the Romantic epidemics in Germany and France created throughout Europe a general tolerance for the act: ‘Tolerance’ in both the ordinary and medical senses of the word. The public attitude became more forbearing as the suicide was no longer thought of as a criminal act, whatever the outdoor laws decreed, the cultural system acquired a tolerance for suicide, as for a drug or a poison. Suicide didn’t disappear from arts; instead it became part of its fabric. It became preoccupation of a certain kind of post- romantic writer like Dostoevsky, who was fore runner of 20th century act. The new concern of 20th century poetry was the self, and then the ultimate concern of act was, inevitably the end of self- that is death.
The seed of suicide was deeply embedded in the subconscious mind of Sylvia Plath. Her life was often pulled by the clutches of these dark forces, and she moved like a pendulum between the two extremes. Involved with bees at Devon one afternoon, she left the house by herself in their Morris station wagon. She drove of the road at high speed in an old airport. She lost consciousness but was not seriously injured. Another successful attempt was there; Ted was upset and deeply concerned about her. On Oct 12th, 1962 Plath wrote the poem that has immortalized her as in “Daddy” voiced her 6yrs of frustration. This poem represents the physical with emotional, the father with the husband in a rhythmic swirl of energized language that set form in opposition to the content for the utmost in ironic effect. She makes transfer from father to husband in the last four stanzas of the poem.
As her 30th birthday approached on October 27th, she wrote in quick succession, “Fever 103,” “Ariel,” and “Lady Lazarus.”In each of these poems a betrayed woman, sick, sexually abused, almost dead, survives to meet out vengeance. The death of “Lady Lazarus” corresponds to the poets own cries- the first just after her father died, the second in her teens when she had a nervous breakdown and the third, a car accident of 1962, and death which was shortly to come. The subject of the poem is the physical confrontation with death which purifies the self of accumulated encrustation of experience as well as the rebirth it leads to”Ariel” is the only poem of Plath which traces the process of transformation of the woman her ideal. The transforming ritual of purging and fusing leading to new birth, conceived in other poems as a ritual leading to death, is presented as a journey from stasis in darkness through a nightmarish landscape. The rider and the horse, feminine and masculine principles, separate entities, melt into one another as they move forward in “Ariel”:
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances. CP, 239.
The graph began to tip on that side of despair. Sylvia moved herself and the children to new flat in London several days before Christmas of 1962 the coldest winter measured in England since 1814. It seemed that nature sided with shattered Sylvia. The unspeakable and unbearable cold that nagged on and on, after Christmas and around the New Year was enough to depress the most heartily cheerful person. The whole season was cold and snowy, train wheels froze on rail road tracks, electric wires broke out frequently and water pipes froze. Sylvia had no telephone as yet, she felt terribly rejected. At night she was too tired for anything except “music, brandy and water.” Her mood deepened and darkened. She decided in desperation to seek psychiatric help once again although not happily, remembering her days of shock therapy. She wrote to a doctor for an appointment, waiting for his reply, her demons danced around her.
Perhaps she knew that she was fighting the last battle with death. The total mastery over death which Plath believed she had and which she tried to demonstrate in that final fatal gamble, is reflected in her God like control over the concept in her poetry. Images of war, fire, burning, bondage and death in their manifested forms focus the private as well as universal adjustment one has to go through. Again the recurrent images like moon, sun, bee, babies, sea, tree, horse and garden expound the inner struggle of poet to come out of the fire of self purification and accept all the bitter experiences that life offers.
The entire social and domestic life of London stood still, frozen, near the end of January 1963, she consulted a doctor who was unable to find a hospital bed for her. The fierce rage against the world, husband, all wrong doers was turning into a thorny bed inside taking dangerous dimensions and she was in total panic. This time she was asking for help, by seeking the doctors’ counsel, by waiting patiently for aupair, by writing indomitable poems- just to go on living, till she found peace in death.
Her creative life was greatly influenced by certain personalities including her father Otto Plath, whose shadow loomed largely in her poetry, as an ominous figure, a “Man in Black,” as a colossus, or as a creature of the world of dead inviting her to join him. Ted Hugh also had a great influence on her work. To begin this large, hulking Yorkshire poet made her aware of the sights and sounds of nature that were new to her. In her early years, she incorporated in her poetic form Dickinson’s mysticism or Auden’s wit and elegance as painstakingly as possible. Wishing to abide by the ear’s particular fascination for the special poetic form called villanelles, she started practicing that form of art too. She turned to Dylan Thomas enthusiastically for his sounds of words and voluptuous sensuality of his style. She was fascinated by Roethkean style. And then, finally, Robert Lowell became the dominant influence on her style and form. She is remembered for her own style adopted in her last days of poetic and physical being, when she decided to get rid of all the pretensions and decorative badges and ribbons of her once honoured mentors.
The different circumstances and situations in her life shaped her personality and influenced her making it essentially egocentric. Her poetry mainly focused on herself, a pre- requisite of confessional poetry – it has to hinge on the poet’s reaction to the world in which he finds himself. This confessional poet is the pivot of his own small world. The external world is prominent, but for confessional poets external events are transmuted in such manner as to lose their public value and are felt on the personal level.
Taking the whole work of Plath into consideration, different critics made different approbations to her. Very often she is called a White Goddess, an outright confessional exhibitionist, a vitriolic, vengeful feminist, a bitch Goddess, a temptress, Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson. Plath’s poetry incites strong reactions. No single critical work can give a comprehensive picture of Plath’s poetic personality. Her vision is existential and nihilistic. Plath’s use of her own life in her poetry is an effort to bring together the divergent aspects of her experiences. Confessions for her take the divergent aspects of her experiences and the form of an unifying principle that carries a personal validity.
Sylvia Plath in The Colossus casts herself as a seeker, who asserts relationship as central motivating force. She addresses herself to the task of relating the outer world of nature to the inner world of mind, the past or her childhood coalesced with her present, the phantoms of myths with the reality of dreamlike experience and the passive everyday life with the freedom of creative imagination. As these poems proceeds, they seem to overcome the personal world, which is viewed from a distance in some of the earlier poems. However, there is a significant personal voice and a descent towards a subjective centre where father- daughter relationship becomes a central concern in the poems. The significant shift from the outer to the inner, from the descriptive to the subjective becomes apparent on one of her earliest poems like “Water Colour of Granchester Meadows” that appear in The Colossus. After her marriage with Ted Hughes, they stayed near the Granchester Meadows in Cambridge. The descriptive details of the scene brood over the first two stanzas of the poem and then she comments on the unreality in the geographical set up: “It is a country on a nursery plate.”In a sharp turn, the poem reaches climax that brings jolts to the reader from a feeling of nature’s benevolence to its brutality:
Droll, Vegetarian, the water rat
Saws down a reed and swings from his limber grove
While the students stroll or sit,
Hands laced, in a moony indolence of love
Black-gowned, but unaware
How in such mild air
The owl shall stoop from his turret, the rat cry out. CP, 22-28.
The moon, turret, and the owl are “part of an English Gothic Heritage” (Steiner, 295).Here Plath employs them as a means to define the dialectics of violence that forms nature. Though ‘hand laced, in a moony indolence of love’ express a quality of romantic self, Plath rejects the absolute world of romanticism. She observes the beyond state of the calm surface of the Granchester Meadows where each moment is found as a crisis and where “the owl shall stoop from his turret, rat cry out.”The poet’s awareness of lurking death becomes by extension, an awareness of the insecurity of her own self. She finds the impersonal ruthlessness of nature an essential fact and relates it to the human world.
In her early poems Plath starts a journey into the unknown and back again; she consciously utilizes the structures of myth and fairytales to point a contrast between a childhood memory of potentiality and recognition of the constraints and limits of the world she really inhabits. One can easily discern a constant grouping and searching in and around her cosmic experience in her early poems to find out the outlet from the disturbing passions, to establish a firm foot- hold on the terrace of her own self to direct all her aspirations towards ‘Purity and Perfection’ of art and being. Her poem “Hardcastle Crags” is a microcosm of the movement out and back again. The poem is built around a recurrent and finally overwhelming image of stone. It tells how one night a woman leaves a town, walks out in the surrounding countryside, and finally retreats in fear back into the town. There is the contrast between the artificiality of the town and the naturalness of the world outside the town:
Flintlike, her feet struck
Such a racket of echoes from the steely street,
Tacking in moon-blued crooks from the black
Stone-built town, that she heard the quick air ignite
Its tinder and shake. CP, “Hardcastle Crags,” 62-63.
Here the topography is ‘steely’ and ‘mute as boulders’, the landscape eagerly awaits the annihilation of the persona. The blank mood of the woman is reinforced by a similar blank and black night around her. It proves to be too burdensome for the woman because it has compressed her head, turning it to ‘a scooped out pumpkin crown’. She finds herself more alien in the town. The highly depressing and pitch-dark night is totally apathetic towards her mental turmoil:
All the night gave her, in return
For the paltry gift of her bulk and the beat
Of her heart, was the humped indifferent iron
Of its hills, and its pastures bordered by black stone set
On black stone. CP, 63.
Whatever is living or has movement in the natural world has been turned into stone. The nature is insensitive; the living creatures too are impervious to the affliction of the persona: the village is a ‘dream peopled’ and the domestic animals are mute as boulders. So the silence prevails everywhere. The general tone of harshness is created within the atmospheric effect of this poem. But all the harshness of the nature finally fails to frighten the woman.
Such a mood of defiance also gets its perfection in her later poems like “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”. There is a difference between the self and the world that surrounds it. The self comes up against something more complete, finished, opaque, strong, and less able to be broken down into fragmented than she is. The nature as an ‘unresponsive entity’ can be seen in her other poems “Suicide off Egg Rock” (1959). At the outset the poem projects about the mechanized civilization, symbolized by gas tanks, factory stacks, and concrete flats creating together “that land/ of imperfection.” This matrix of imperfect landscape offers an objective-correlative for Plath’s personal sense of alienation and anguish, and thus, Plath’s poem is her “brave attempt at merging personal despair with social significance.” 26 Besides the imperfections of nature, there is its hostility. The ‘damnation’ of nature burdens with the life of the persona and prompts to commit suicide. The timeless chant fails, nonetheless, in stopping the persona from taking his life. Death, feels the protagonist, is that “forgetful surf”, which leaves nothing but vacancy:
The words in his book wormed off the pages
Everything glittered like blank paper. The Collected Poems, 115.
The title poem “The Colossus” is addressed to Plath’s father. She imagines the father as a huge statue that is in ruins, and she is reduced to an ant:
Scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails of Lysol
I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull-plates and clear
The bald, white tumuli of your eyes. CP,129.
The poem is considered as a prototype of “Daddy”. The absurdity lies in the light verse, the ant crawling to mourn. However, this absurdity is woven into the theme as the poet confesses:
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the slit from your throat
I am none the wiser. The Collected Poems, 129.
The poet’s own personal past lies in ruins that she is trying to put into shape. “The Colossus” is huge and sustains the remote past, very much like in “On the Decline of Oracles”, a poem written during her Cambridge period. Plath points out:”My father died, and when he died/He willed his books and shell away” (The Collected Poems, 78). Plath is unable to relate herself with her father to define one’s role in new terms. She doesn’t mourn her father’s death, but her inability to extricate herself from the psychological involvement with his death. Her tragedy lies in her relation with him and in the predestination that she can define herself only with regard to him. In the last stanza of the poem “The Colossus” she expresses:
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind,
Counting the red stars and those of plum- color
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.
My hours are married to shadow. The Collected Poems, 130.
The “hours are married to shadow,” implies a death consciousness as the shadow signifies death. But the more destructive aspect of this father-daughter relationship is the incestuous allurement, which the daughter fails to resist. The pervasive, tireless obsession with death may lead one to think that Plath’s own sense of identity was frail, and that she suffered from a characteristic sense of essential insecurity. But “Sylvia Plath, so far in her writing career, shows no signs of having come to terms with death; a nagging sense of ontological insecurity, as a result, is the very fabric of her poetry.”27
In her poems of juvenilia like “Dialogue En Route”, and “To Eva Descending the Stair,” there is almost a naïve attempt on the part of the persona at equating herself to something that would give ballast. In her other poems of this period, the existential dread comes into open because birth is threatened by death, as in “Moonrise” and “The Manor Garden”. For every image of birth and growth, there is countering image of death and decomposition. As in “Moonrise” where the natural process of ripening is simultaneously presented with rotting. A sense of finality and doom pervades in” The Manor Garden,” which is addressed to the unborn baby:
The fountains are dry and the roses over
Incense of death, your day approaches. CP, 125.
The speaker of the “Moonrise” contemplates the corpses underground and which release memories of her dead father. There is at the same time, eager expectancy involved in her future delivery of child. Thus, the cyclic and generational destruction is poised against her own fertility. Birth and Death, fertility and decay are the central focus in “The Manor Garden”. The canvas is the autumnal decay of a garden, signaling a dying year, contrasted with the pregnancy of the speaker.