© 2012
KATHERINE A. BENGSTON
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
THE BLOOD JET:
THE COMMON HISTORY & NARRATIVE SIMILARITIES OF PLATH & BASKIN
A Thesis
Presented to
The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
Katherine A. Bengston
May, 2012 THE BLOOD JET:
THE COMMON HISTORY & NARRATIVE SIMILARITIES OF PLATH & BASKIN
Katherine A. Bengston
Thesis
Approved: Accepted:
______Advisor Dean of the College Dr. Michael Schuldiner Dr. Chand Midha
______Faculty Reader Dean of the Graduate School Dr. Hillary Nunn Dr. George R. Newkome
______Faculty Reader Date Dr. Jon Miller
______Department Chair Dr. Michael Schuldiner
ii TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
CHAPTER
I. INTRODUCTION……………...…………….………………………………...……….1
II. EMOTIONAL CHAOS…………………...... 8
III. SHADOWS OF MORTALITY……………….……..……………………………....31
IV. DEATH.………..………………………..…………………………………………...51
V. CONCLUSION……………………………………………………….………………75
LITERATURE CITED………………………………………………………………...... 77
APPENDICES …………………………………………………………………..………80
APPENDIX A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF SYLVIA PLATH………...…..81
APPENDIX B BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF LEONARD BASKIN……...... 86
iii
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it. -“Kindness”
“Want today to write about our Sunday night with Leonard & Esther Baskin whom, suddenly and well, we met,” Sylvia Plath briskly wrote in her journal on May 6,
1958 (379). On May 4, 1958, Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, had visited Leonard
Baskin at his studio and also met his wife, Esther (Feinstein 83). “How I love the
Baskins,” Plath continued in her journal on May 20. “The only people I feel are a miracle of humanity and integrity, with no swarm” (485). A few days later, on May 24, Plath sent a copy of her poems “Sow,” “The Earthenware Head,” “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” and “November Graveyard, Haworth” to Esther and Leonard (Crowther & Steinberg
131). The original letter, which now resides in the Baskin-Hughes papers in the British
Library, exhibits Plath’s “own black inked handwriting” etched “in the top left” corner of the first page of “Sow” (131). The inscription reads: “For Esther and Leonard/May 24
1958/Sylvia Plath” (131). These poems were not inspired by Plath’s visit with the
Baskins, but later in 1958 Plath composed “Sculptor,” a poem directly connected with her first interaction with them.
1 In the notes for “Sculptor” in The Collected Poems Hughes clarifies Plath’s inspiration for the poem, revealing, “bronze dead men lay in numbers around the house and studio of the sculptor Leonard Baskin” (287). In his essay “Notes on the
Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems,” which is included in The Art of Sylvia
Plath, Hughes further comments that “Leonard Baskin’s work struck [Plath] very hard, as well it might, since some of the gods he was carving at the time were also part of her pantheon—namely, the huge bald angels, the mutilated dead men, the person with the owl growing out of his shoulder” (189). “Sculptor” is the second to last poem in Plath’s first published book of poetry, The Colossus, and is dedicated to Baskin.
In “Leonard and Ted (And Me),” Richard Michelson writes that Plath and
Hughes’s first interaction with “the already celebrated brash young Baskin” had only two directions to go: very well or very badly (1). Baskin and Hughes, Michelson states, “were destined to clash, or to bond, and, fortunately, it was the latter, each recognizing the others’ seriousness of purpose” (1). Elaine Feinstein agrees with this view in her biography Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet, stating: “Leonard Baskin was eight years older than Ted and…already formidably assured and often searingly abrasive in his judgments,” but he “took an instant liking to Ted” (83). Michelson does not mention the presence of Plath in his essay, and Feinstein only alludes to the fact that Plath was there.
Even Plath herself did not expand on her impressions of Baskin and his wife that first day in her journal. Yet this encounter, strangely overdue given Plath and Baskin’s consistent proximity to one another at Smith College, formed the basis of a friendship that lasted until Plath’s death in 1963. After her suicide, Baskin and Hughes continued “to collaborate with illustrated books for Baskin’s Gehenna Press” (83).
2 In 1973, some ten years after Plath’s death, Baskin illustrated a rare edition of her poetry. The project, which was commissioned by Hughes, is titled Pursuit. Only 100 copies were made. Given the plethora of Plath material that has been published without illustration over the last few decades, any sort of adornment, outside of the family photos of Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, or the family photographs used most commonly in the many Plath biographies, is particularly noteworthy. Ted Hughes generally only commissioned illustrations for limited editions of Plath’s poetry, however, it is not uncommon for Plath’s own artwork to be included with her prose. Her drawings appear in several editions of The Bell Jar and have been reproduced (largely in the appendixes) in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Charles Newman’s The Art of
Sylvia Plath includes several pen and ink drawings of Plath’s, but there is no critique on the drawings, nor do the various reviews and essays in the book comment on the influence art had on Plath’s writing. Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley’s 2007 essay collection, Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual, is the first extensive, printed look at Plath’s artwork. The book includes sketches, paintings and drawings created throughout Plath’s life in her various diaries, journals, sketchbooks, notebooks and letters.
Specific illustrations are uncommon because they accent (and therefore interpret)
Plath’s poetry. The drawings included in The Bell Jar may or may not have been drawn by Plath for specific use in the novel and were pulled from several sketchbooks from different times in Plath’s life. Baskin’s prints for Pursuit were solely created for presentation with Plath’s poetry. Hughes’s many collaborations and friendship with
Baskin make him a logical choice as an illustrator for Plath’s work, but that renders
3 Hughes’s decision too simplistic. Baskin’s proximity to Plath herself and her appreciation and admiration for Baskin’s artistry make him a fascinating choice as the illustrator of
Pursuit—especially given the narrative commonalities that highlight their work in their respective art forms. Shortly after Pursuit’s publication, Baskin also contributed a drawing to the Rainbow Press edition of Plath’s Dialogue Over a Ouija Board, which was published in 1974.
In “Living Color: The Interactive Arts of Sylvia Plath,” Kathleen Connors observes that “what is not commonly known about Plath is her serious devotion to the visual arts from a very early age” (4). From the time she was a freshman until the start of her junior year, Plath took many classes in art, at first intending to focus on both art and writing (4). Ultimately, after being “judged to be merely ‘good’ and even worse by teachers and critics” Plath decided to focus her energy solely on cultivating her writing
(4). She continued, however, to fill her journals and notebooks with sketches and detailed drawings. In November 2011, the Mayor Gallery in London, England, presented an exhibition of Plath’s drawings and several limited editions of her poetry printed by the
Rainbow Press. The exhibition included the display of the books Pursuit and Dialogue
Over a Ouija Board. One of the artworks included in the show was a “drawing of a pair of discarded ladies shoes, also titled The Bell Jar,” but whether or not Plath truly intended for the drawing to be used in The Bell Jar, or even if she titled the sketch herself, is unclear (Battersby 1).
Leonard Baskin was employed at Smith College from 1953-1974. Despite Plath’s interest in art, there is currently no record or reference stating that she came into contact with him during her undergraduate career. It was not until she returned to Smith College
4 to teach during the 1957-1958 academic year that Plath and Hughes’s May 1958 meeting with Baskin occurred. However, Plath had been thinking of Baskin for months before their 1958 introduction, if only in passing. Her journals contain three specific references to either Leonard Baskin or his work in the months leading up to May. On January 21,
1958, Plath noted in her journal that one of Hughes’s colleagues acted “mean, spiteful, bitten & pompous about Leonard Baskin” (Plath 317). A little later, on February 3, Plath wrote in her journal that she “dreamed also I met & somehow loved the unmet & hence unloved Leonard Baskin in some strange house…” (Plath 379). This reference and the fact that Plath found the opinion of Hughes’s colleague bothersome, even before she befriended the Baskins, is made less strange by her interest in Baskin’s work. In March,
Plath noted that she saw “…a Baskin wood-cut: huge, mammothed in the hall: a bulbous streaked head, stained, scarred, owl-eyed – ‘tormented man,’ and a great, feathered, clawed, fierce-eyed owl sitting in an intolerable eternal niche of air above the head” at a colleague’s house (Plath 347). Though Plath had not engaged in a conversation or established a friendship with Baskin yet, she was clearly familiar and impressed enough with his work to be capable of identifying it on sight.
The thesis identifies three narrative commonalities in Sylvia Plath and Leonard
Baskin’s work, analyzing each in a separate chapter. Within each chapter, two of Plath’s poems and one or two of Baskin’s prints are explicated and their respective narratives compared. I assert that Sylvia Plath and Leonard Baskin have overlapping ideas within their work despite their different mediums. These similarities are most easily seen in their overarching narrative themes of emotional chaos, the shadows of mortality and death.
5 The first chapter establishes the influence of art on Plath’s writing and focuses on emotional chaos. The interactive quality of Plath’s poetry is explored through readings of
1956’s “Pursuit” and 1963’s “Paralytic.” The substantial time gap between the writing of these two poems is important in tracking Plath’s evolution as a poet. Around 1961, Plath stopped trying to restrict and camouflage the emotional intensity of her poems with rigid poetic techniques. Instead, she started breaking form and creating some of the most unique poems of the 20th century. “Pursuit” is one of the first early poems to show and utilize the emotional turmoil boiling beneath the surface of Plath’s poetry. Although the poem is restrained, its restraint does not quite mask the intensity of the speaker’s emotional state. Baskin’s 1956 print The Tormented One / The Tormented Man echoes the chaos of “Pursuit,” using the figure of a man stalked by feathered menaces to create a narrative parallel to that of “Pursuit.” “Paralytic,” one of the last poems Plath composed, obliterates the rigid form of “Pursuit,” favoring shorter lines and a concise, blunt narrative. Rather than mask his precarious emotional state, the speaker revels in it.
Baskin’s The Leper, For Flaubert’s St. Julien The Hospitaller (1956) serves as narrative equal to “Paralytic,” depicting a man standing frozen in place, his gaze proud yet bleak.
The second chapter focuses on the shadows of mortality in Plath and Baskin’s work. Two poems are explicated in this chapter: 1961’s “The Rabbit Catcher” and 1962’s
“A Birthday Present.” In these poems, Plath invites her readers to extrapolate complex and higher meanings by projecting emotional experiences on seemingly unrelated, common objects and creatures: the “birthday present” in “A Birthday Present” and snares
“The Rabbit Catcher.” Baskin also uses layered narratives in the 1955 print Sorrowing and Terrified Man. In the print, the face of a man is obscured by a hand, trees and
6 animals spurting from his mouth and eyes. He is one thing, yet also another, as is the
“The Rabbit Catcher” and “A Birthday Present.”
The third and final chapter analyzes Plath and Baskin’s common theme of death.
Plath’s 1962 poem “Lady Lazarus” is deconstructed first, followed by Baskin’s 1959 print Angel of Death. In “Lady Lazarus,” the speaker uses death as a rite of passage.
Death is both sought after and imposed against the speaker’s will, although she acknowledges that only in death can she be reborn. Angel of Death echoes this idea in its portrayal of a terrifying angel who seems to be struggling to stay in flight, as though he is being pulled down to Earth unwillingly or before his time. “Edge,” the last poem analyzed, is followed by Baskin’s 1970 print Let Not Your Sorrow. The print’s title echoes the lines of Aaron from William Shakespeare’s play Titus Andronicus: “Let not your sorrow die though I am dead.” Both “Edge” and Let Not Your Sorrow suggest a physical manifestation of death, a lingering on of the physical. The bodies shown in these works have meanings superimposed on them—they have no voices of their own. In
“Edge,” the moon observes the dead woman; in Let Not Your Sorrow the body has meaning only for the person it has been left out for. Finally, the thesis concludes with a short summary of the points established.
Several appendixes are also included in the thesis. Appendix A is a biographical sketch of Sylvia Plath’s life. Appendix B contains a biographical sketch of Leonard
Baskin’s life.
7
CHAPTER II
EMOTIONAL CHAOS
One of the most prominent themes of Sylvia Plath’s poetry and Leonard Baskin’s artwork is emotional chaos. In this chapter, two of Plath’s poems, “Pursuit” and
“Paralytic,” deal with internal turmoil and indecision. A panther, the physical manifestation of the speaker’s desires and fears, chases down the speaker of the first poem, “Pursuit.” In contrast, the speaker of “Paralytic” is held in place by artificial means. He attempts to use his mind to free himself from his surroundings, but he ultimately finds himself embracing a life of numbness. The narratives of two Baskin prints, 1956’s The Tormented One / The Tormented Man and The Leper, For Flaubert’s
St. Julien The Hospitaller, serve as counterparts to the poems. The Tormented One / The
Tormented Man shares several plot devices with “Pursuit” such as the fact that the print’s subject is stalked by animals. The birds in the print are representative of a part of his subconscious. The Leper, For Flaubert’s St. Julien The Hospitaller depicts a man slowly falling apart. Yet he stands upright, as though his mind can overcome his physical limitations. In this chapter, Plath and Baskin use the external to represent their subjects’ internal battles.
8 When interviewed by The Paris Review in 1995, Ted Hughes commented on
Plath’s unique way of constructing her poetry:
Our methods were not the same. Hers was to collect a heap of vivid objects and good words and make a pattern; the pattern would be projected from somewhere deep inside, from her very distinctly evolved myth. It appears distinctly evolved to a reader now—despite having been totally unconscious to her then…Her method was more painterly. (77)
Connors and Bayley see this sort of artistic structuring as evident in the “abundance of material [Plath] left behind” (4). They note that the masses of drawings, poem drafts and sketches in the Plath archives
[allow] us to follow her handprints as she tracks her entire journey as an artist and student, from the world of fairies, myths, and magic flights found in children’s books, to the reaches of her own psyche and scrutiny of mid-century culture that informed her late poetry and prose. (3)
Furthermore, and most importantly, Connors and Bayley hit upon an observation Plath made of herself, commenting that Plath’s perception of her “kaleidoscopic writing, with its layered colors, patterns, and meanings, is at times seen to blur lines between author and audience” (4).
Plath’s poems are interactive. Regardless of autobiographical readings, each of the poems contains a unique, overarching and all-encompassing theme. As Connors and
Bayley attest:
there is a tendency to interpret her body of work in terms of her ‘family romance’, her pathology and suicide, and the controversial voice exhibited in many mature poems. While the allure or relevance of these elements is undeniable, we feel her works deserve broader contexts. (3)
The aforementioned determination to “…interpret [Plath’s] body of work…” through her personal history obscures the complexity of her poetry. As Hughes stated, Plath’s poems are constructed in a way that can be described as “painterly” (77). The lure of Plath’s
9 poetry lies in its emotion. As when viewing art, Plath’s poems show what the eye feels during experiences, not what the eye sees. This ability to capture emotional chaos and reveal how it feels to be trapped within it is evident in two very different poems: 1956’s
“Pursuit” and 1963’s “Paralytic.”
On March 9, 1956, Plath wrote to her mother, Aurelia, and enclosed a copy of one of her latest poems: “Pursuit.” In the letter, which is included in Letters Home, Plath wrote that the poem “is more in my old style, but larger, influenced a bit by Blake, I think
(tiger, tiger), and more powerful than any of my other ‘metaphysical’ poems…” (222).
Plath said that the “simple, seductive beauty of the words” would “come across… if you read [“Pursuit”] slowly and deliberately aloud” (223). Beneath the title, Plath included the Racine quote “Dans le fond des forets votre image me suit.” According to Diane
Middlebrook in Her Husband, the Racine quotation translates: “Into the depth of the forests your image pursues me” (22). As published in the 1956 section of The Collected
Poems, the full poem reads:
There is a panther stalks me down: One day I’ll have my death of him; His greed has set the woods aflame, He prowls more lordly than the sun. Most soft, most suavely glides that step, Advancing always at my back; From gaunt hemlock, rooks croak havoc: The hunt is on, and sprung the trap. Flayed by thorns I trek the rocks, Haggard through the hot white noon. Along red network of his veins What fires run, what craving wakes?
Insatiate, he ransacks the land Condemned by our ancestral fault, Crying: blood, let blood be split; Meat must glut his mouth’s raw wound.
10 Keen the rending teeth and sweet The singeing fury of his fur; His kisses parch, each paw’s a briar, Doom consummates that appetite. In the wake of this fierce cat, Kindled like torches for his joy, Charred and ravened women lie, Become his starving body’s bait.
Now hills hatch menace, spawning shade; Midnight clocks the sultry grove; The black marauder, hauled by love On fluent haunches, keeps my speed. Behind snarled thickness of my eyes Lurks the lithe one; in dreams’ ambush Bright those claws that mar the flesh And hungry, hungry those taut thighs. His ardor snares me, lights the trees, And I run flaring in my skin; What lull, what cool can lap me in When burns and brands that yellow gaze?
I hurl my heart to halt his pace, To quench his thirst I squander blood; He eats, and still his need seeks food, Compels a total sacrifice. His voice waylays me, spells a trance, The gutted forest falls to ash; Appalled by secret want, I rush From such assault of radiance. Entering the tower of my fears, I shut my doors on that dark guilt, I bolt the door, each door I bolt. Blood quickens, gonging in my ears:
The panther’s tread is on the stairs, Coming up and up the stairs. (22-3)
“Pursuit” is fascinating poem both in its restraint and masochism. There are multiple readings of the poem, but the two themes focused on here are the identification of the emotional turmoil that comes with life as death and the association of all- consuming love and lust with death. Emotions follow several different paths throughout
11 “Pursuit.” The first reading of “Pursuit” comes from the remarkably detailed letter about the poem that Plath wrote to her mother. According to Plath’s letter, “Pursuit” is “a symbol of the terrible beauty of death, and the paradox that the more intensely one lives, the more one burns and consumes oneself; death, here, includes the concept of love, which is part of it” (222). This short explication is perhaps the best description of this specific theme of “Pursuit,” but it ties up the complexity of the poem too neatly and sidesteps one its best qualities: the speaker’s awareness that she is hurtling towards death.
Perhaps this was done intentionally, given the recipient of the letter.
“Pursuit” deals with the “terrible beauty” of death: “There is a panther stalks me down: / One day I’ll have my death of him” (222). Yet the poem is actually about the speaker’s desire for and awareness of this constant, elaborate dance towards her inevitable demise, which she identifies with love and the lust that comes with it:
In the wake of this fierce cat, Kindled like torches for his joy, Charred and ravened women lie, Become his starving body’s bait.
Rather than wanting to be snuffed out quickly, Plath wrote to her mother that the speaker
“burns and consumes,” in present tense, implying that the speaker is basking in her future annihilation and needs the inevitability of death to be present in order to live fully (222).
To the speaker of “Pursuit,” death is just not the end of life. In her letter, Plath stated that
“Pursuit” is complicated by “the paradox that the more intensely one lives, the more one burns and consumes oneself” (222). This push-and-pull relationship is what reels the speaker of the poem in, and she spends the poem running from an invisible menace that she is also drawn to:
12 His ardor snares me, lights the trees, And I run flaring in my skin; What lull, what cool can lap me in When burns and brands that yellow gaze?
The speaker cannot live harmoniously with this “panther,” nor does she wish to. She has to fight him, and these lines also highlight the commonalities in their characters: “His ardor” makes her “run flaring in my skin;” and she wonders “What lull, what cool” will sedate her “when burns and brands that yellow gaze.” The word “brands” has connotations of its own; the speaker will be marked, not necessarily devoured. This will be a slow death, if death comes at all this time around.
Despite the speaker’s combative attitude, she never displays any active fear of the
“panther” until the end of the poem when she is completely trapped. (Though it is important to note that “Pursuit” ends with the panther ascending the stairs, but not yet reaching her.) Instead, the speaker freely offers him parts of herself: “I hurl my heart to halt his pace, / To quench his thirst I squander blood.” These lines suggest that the panther is as powerless as the speaker, as tied to her as she is to him, and he needs pieces of her to survive. The terminology used in these lines also complicates the speaker’s views on the panther. She “hurls” her heart, suggesting desperation, yet the panther is meant to melodically “halt,” as though this offering is what he wants. She then writes that she must “squander blood,” which connotes a certain futility or waste on her part, but her blood is meant to “quench his thirst,” again implying that he is as desperate for her as she is for him, and, as aforementioned, he needs her for sustenance.
The second reading of “Pursuit,” which Plath did not write about to her mother but did intimate to her journal, is one of barely-concealed lust and her identification of
13 this sort of crushing love with an eventual complete annihilation of self. On Monday,
February 27, 1956, Plath wrote in her journal that she “wrote a full-page poem about the dark forces of lust: ‘Pursuit’. It is not bad. It is dedicated to Ted Hughes” (214). In Sylvia
Plath, Elisabeth Bronfen asserts that “Pursuit” is about Plath “[abandoning] the role of the waiting lover for the more active one of whore, going to meet her desired mate, she casts him the role of the dark nocturnal marauder” (45). Plath did often imply in her journal that she considered her behavior questionable, but her friends did not appear to share her views. Just after meeting Ted Hughes, Plath confided to a friend that she felt like a slut and recorded his response to this confession in her journal: “he just said I wasn’t a whore or a slut like I said but only a very silly girl” (214). Bronfen’s assessment of “Pursuit” as purely autobiographical and reflective of Plath’s allegedly immoral behavior seems harsh and simplistic, and her judgmental nature takes away from the poem itself. With that said, Bronfen does make an interesting point in observing that the speaker is not “the waiting lover” but instead something of an active participant in this elaborate game, though her excitement is somewhat camouflaged by her constant desire to run (45).
“Pursuit” is indeed about lust, but also what the presence of that lust means to the speaker. If the speaker wanted a brief fling, the conflicts present in the poem would be unnecessary. Furthermore, the conflicts in the poem suggest more than sexual tension; they analyze what the existence of that tension means: “His kisses parch, each paw’s a briar, / Doom consummates that appetite.” The line “His kisses parch” alone complicates interpretations of “Pursuit” as being solely about sex. “Parch” implies that an unquenched thirst exists, as though this panther is trying to drink down something more than the
14 speaker’s physicality. The emotional undertone of “Pursuit” serves as the poem’s spine and gives the lines their cadence. As mentioned before, Middlebrook writes that the
Racine quote at the top of “Pursuit” translates: “Into the depth of the forests your image pursues me,” a translation certainly supported by the poem’s title (22). Though she may not have taken the quote from it, Plath did own Théâtre complet de Racine: suivi d’un choix de ses épigrammes concernant son théâtre avec une preface, des notice by Jean
Baptiste Racine and edited by Maurice Rat. The volume was published in 1953 and
Plath’s copy of the book, from her personal library, is held at Smith College.
“Pursuit” is a very mobile poem. The speaker is always physically running, yet at the same time she is emotionally and mentally drawn back with curiosity. She cannot seem to sort out her own emotions, and she is unsure if she craves escape or being caught, or if she has already been caught:
Flayed by thorns I trek the rocks, Haggard through the hot white noon. Along red network of his veins What fires run, what craving wakes?
Here, the speaker continues to run from the panther despite being “flayed by thorns” and
“haggard.” She is enduring a great deal of physical punishment to escape; yet the pain does not make her question her need to run. Instead, as she goes she wonders about her stalker: “What fires run, what craving wakes?” The language is harsh, but not necessarily violent in an abusive sense. Instead, the words are electrifying and their placement renders them ambiguous. In this, “Pursuit” embodies much of what Plath’s poetry was to become. “Pursuit” is one of the first Plath poems to harness corresponding ideas and conflicting desires in its narrative. This duality is also a hallmark of Leonard Baskin’s
15 artwork, where conflicting narratives are often juxtaposed against one another as two halves of one asymmetrical whole.
As “Pursuit” progresses, the speaker becomes more and more divided. There is the half of her that runs, desperately trying to outdistance this menace that is “Advancing always at my back.” Then there is the other part of the speaker, the side of her that loves this chase, which eventually becomes more of a race:
The black marauder, hauled by love On fluent haunches, keeps my speed. Behind snarled thickness of my eyes Lurks the lithe one; in dreams’ ambush
These lines twine the speaker and the panther together. The “panther” becomes “the black marauder,” and he is no longer chasing the speaker down for any reason but being
“hauled by love.” His pace is now parallel with the speaker (“On fluent haunches, keeps my speed”), and the next two lines imply that this “panther” is a panther of the speaker’s own making, or perhaps exists only in her mind: “Behind snarled thickness of my eyes /
Lurks the lithe one; in dreams’ ambush.” This line ties back in with the Racine quote, in which the “image” of a pursuer is chasing down the speaker, a figment of her mind.
“Pursuit” is not one of Plath’s more commonly explicated poems. The critical attention that has been paid to the poem has come mostly in conjunction with its connection to Ted Hughes. Middlebrook comments that the poem “had little to do with
[Hughes], much to do with [Plath’s] own appetites, and everything to do with the glorious pursuit of a metaphor” (279). This is a concise and effective interpretation of one reading of “Pursuit.” Whatever its personal history and inspiration, “Pursuit” captures far more in its 50 lines than simple lust. Instead, the poem is an intricate snapshot of the
16 complexities of the speaker’s emotional self combating and attempting to understand what she desires.
Composed in 1956, Leonard Baskin’s The Tormented One / The Tormented Man mirrors the narrative elements of Plath’s “Pursuit” as well as imparting to the viewer a similar sense of anxiety. The viewer is confronted with several figural relationships.
Ultimately, it is discovered that the man is dealing with all of these figures and elements at once. It is a dramatic piece, both physically and emotionally trying. A paper and ink print, The Tormented One / The Tormented Man measures 44.5 x 48.3 cm. The print shows the “tormented” subject of narrative composition in the bottom right corner. To his left, a brilliant red bird stands perched on one leg. Behind him, a large black rectangle drops down and another bird, this one white, erupts out of the center. In the top right corner is a small, red dot accented by wings—a tiny third bird flying in the distance. One of his wings is crooked. There are two horizon lines, one black and one red. The black line crosses the forehead of the man. The red line penetrates his shoulders.
The Tormented One / The Tormented Man is not a symmetrical print. The aforementioned solid and black rectangular box fills the top half of the work and the bottom is stark white, broken only by the thick red line traveling through or behind the man’s shoulders. The dominant colors in the piece are black and white and red. Black overpowers the top of the print, and the white negative space the bottom. The aforementioned red and black horizon lines break these sections in equally in half. The figures in the piece are diagonal to one another. The white bird flying against the black is diagonal to the man, whereas the red birds are diagonal to one another. These diagonals balance out the print and add an additional layer to the narrative and complexity to the
17 composition. Without the red birds, the print would be a simplistic rendering of the darkness of the man’s torture. Without the man and white bird, the print would simply juxtapose two red birds, one small enough to be dismissed as an inkblot.
The way in which lines are used in the composition is very much like the relationship between the speaker of “Pursuit” and her pursuer. Throughout the poem, the speak is either chased by the panther: “Most soft, most suavely glides that step, /
Advancing always at my back” or running next to him, avoiding being caught but still matched in pace: “The black marauder, hauled by love / On fluent haunches, keeps my speed.” The diagonal juxtaposition of the lines does not only establish the relationship and immediacy of the subject’s danger and also the danger the speaker of “Pursuit” is in during the narrative. It also emphasizes the psychological similarities between the two works. While the speaker of “Pursuit” may not be as familiar with the panther as the subject of The Tormented One / The Tormented Man is with his demons, they both recognize the true nature and intentions of the animals chasing them.
Lines vary throughout the print. The man’s face is a network of both smooth and jagged lines. His eyes are sunken and almost completely shadowed; a small glimmer of white can be seen in his right eye. His neck is also a network of sharp, relatively thick lines and his torso is black, contrasting him from the background. The red bird to his right is detailed but also asymmetrical. The geometric shapes in its body are reminiscent of stained glass. None match each other. The bird’s feathers fan out as though in a breeze, and these lines are somewhat softer. The bird behind the man is the largest object in the print outside of the man himself. The lines of this bird curve in a clockwise direction, and are very fine. The feathers in his body overlap, and his outstretched claw is darker and
18 more defined than the soft lines of his retracted leg. The last bird, the small, roundish red one in the top right corner, looks like a blob of ink. Its feathers are thick, sometimes curving or straight. In the composition, it is too far away to make out much detail. This is a purposeful technique on the part of the artist—less detail implies that it is not on the same plane as the other figures.
The narrative of The Tormented One / The Tormented Man echoes “Pursuit” in that its subject is being stalked. However, this print is slightly different from the poem in that these stalkers are causes of various forms of torment. They are not curiosities. The subject is not drawn to them because they are all a part of him. However, like the speaker of “Pursuit” he knows their faces and why they are there. He cannot escape from them because they also exist inside of him. The lines in his face are long, dark and thick, traveling down his neck, suggesting that this sort of pursuit has gone on for a long time.
The dangling claw of the white bird, ready for attack, supports this.
Baskin has deliberately rendered three birds in the composition. The first is the bright red bird to the left of the speaker. This bird looks far more gentle and controllable than the bird swooping in over the subject’s head. He has settled on the ground, with no anticipation of flight. This bird is small, but sturdy, the lines that hold him together are solid. In the narrative of the piece, this bird represents logic. He stands just behind the man, a buffer between the man and the larger, chaotic white bird hovering in the darkness.
The white bird is the subject’s torment. The lines that hold this bird together are thin, wildly overlapping and streaming out over the blackness. This bird has one clawed foot in the white of the subject’s brighter world, but he is keeping his distance. The
19 tormented bird is large. Even in the distance, his size dwarfs the logical bird and is comparable to the man himself. In the composition, the white bird is the equivalent of the panther of “Pursuit.” This bird is the main focus, the representation of a horror and obstacle is it impossible to escape. The bird’s body is substantial, but it is his wings that are most frightening. They seem to have no beginning and no end, fanning out into the dark, curling in some strong, unfelt wind just above the man’s head. Despite the forces buffeting the bird, his torso is straight and on course, just as the panther of “Pursuit” continues after the speaker, regardless of her decision to “…hurl my heart to halt his pace, / To quench his thirst I squander blood.” The space between the subject and the bird will not hold for very long, regardless of the obstacles tossed in its path.
The smallest bird is aligned with the logical red bird. It floats off in the distance, its size impossible to guess, barely keeping up. This bird could be many things, a good memory or some forgotten logic. However, it is most likely that this bird is the man’s sanity, struggling to keep up. This bird is the most tormenting. It always flies just out of reach. Yet even the knowledge of its presence is not comforting—like the bird of logic, it keeps the man from sinking fully into his torment. The man knows the nature of the bird swooping up from behind him. The other birds bring issues and cares of their own.
The tormented man himself is the most complex of all the subjects. These birds are just a part of his psyche, constantly chasing him down. Like the speaker of “Pursuit,” the man manages to temporarily outdistance his menaces. He has finally managed to outpace them. The horizon lines cross behind him, suggesting an amount of space. There is a small smile breaking into the lines on his face, a glimmer of light breaking through the shadows in his right eye. Like the speaker of “Pursuit,” he knows his pursuers. But
20 also like the speaker of “Pursuit,” he anxiously suspects his pursuers will catch up with him in time.
Sylvia Plath’s 1963 poem “Paralytic” also focuses on conflicts within the self, but in a far different way than in “Pursuit.” Rather than actively engage with the object of desire, the speaker of “Paralytic” slips farther and farther away from reality. Of all of
Plath’s poems, “Paralytic” is one of the strongest challengers to the perception of Plath as a purely confessional poet loosely fictionalizing her own experiences. This challenge is predominantly supported by the fact that the speaker of the poem is male (Brain 119).
“Paralytic” is a complicated poem because of its alert depictions of forced inertness. In
“Paralytic,” the speaker is only able to fight his fate mentally. His physical body is restrained and there is a simultaneous energy and exhaustion in his words. Like the speaker of “Pursuit,” the speaker of “Paralytic” attempts to run towards life while simultaneously running away from it—or perhaps in the case of “Paralytic” drifting away from it. In “Paralytic” the more the speaker runs, the more he slips into forgetfulness, ultimately choosing forgetfulness over reality. Unlike the tense ending of “Pursuit,” this poem features an unavoidable conclusion. “Paralytic,” as printed in The Collected Poems, reads:
It happens. Will it go on? — My mind a rock, No fingers to grip, no tongue, My god the iron lung
That loves me, pumps My two Dust bags in and out, Will not
Let me relapse
21 While the day outside glides by like ticker tape. The night brings violets, Tapestries of eyes,
Lights, The soft anonymous Talkers: ‘You all right?’ The starched inaccessible breast.
Dead egg, I lie Whole On a whole world I cannot touch, At the white, tight
Drum of my sleeping couch Photographs visit me — My wife, dead and flat, in 1920 furs, Mouth full of pearls,
Two girls As flat as she, who whisper ‘We’re your daughters.’ The still waters Wrap my lips,
Eyes, nose and ears, A clear Cellophane I cannot crack. On my bare back
I smile, a buddha, all Wants, desire Falling from me like rings Hugging their lights.
The claw Of the magnolia, Drunk on its own scents, Asks nothing of life. (266-7)
Each line of “Paralytic” features a short burst of energy that grows weaker and weaker as the poem progresses and the speaker slowly loses himself. The lines are best described as erupting in a series of clipped staccatos. The first lines set the stage for the
22 progression of the following stanzas—a desperate, darkly self-aware poem about mental awareness and physical helplessness. As Tracy Brain concisely observes in The Other
Sylvia Plath, “the poem’s male speaker lies in a hospital bed paralysed, describing his hospital room and physical situation” (119). Unlike “Pursuit,” in which the speaker runs across the metaphorical battlefield of her emotional landscape, the speaker of “Paralytic” is very much confined to the real world, hazy as it may be to him. The opaque clarity of the speaker’s observations gives the poem a sharp bit of dark humor:
Lights, The soft anonymous Talkers: ‘You all right?’ The starched, inaccessible breast.
Clearly, lying prone on a hospital bed, in an iron lung (later humorously referred to as a
“sleeping couch”), the speaker is not “all right.”
“Paralytic” makes use of many technological inventions: the iron lung, photographs, artificial light, “ticker tape.” There is also a reference to the sleek rigidity of hospital sheets with the “drum of my sleeping couch.” This line has a double meaning, as the iron lung is constructed in a drum shape where only the head of the patient is exposed. Nearly all of the objects have a direct connection to nature — the iron lung simulates the human lung, the photographs are two-dimensional representations of the three-dimensional world, and the light is meant to compensate for a lack of natural light.
“Paralytic” begins with the speaker horizontal, being kept in a half-awake state by artificial means. The speaker’s breath is forced in and out of him:
My god the iron lung
That loves me, pumps My two
23 Dust bags in and out, Will not
Let me relapse While the day outside glides by like ticker tape.
Here, it is established that the speaker is living a half-life. He is alive and somewhat aware but simultaneously frozen; he lies in this state “While the day outside glides by like ticker tape.” There is also the implication that the speaker is being held in this state by the “iron lung,” which will not “Let me relapse.” Whether or not a relapse would be beneficial to the speaker is unclear—as it is, he is moving neither forward nor backward.
Instead, he is stagnant, and the speaker does not expand on what a relapse would mean.
The speaker is cognizant enough to appear frustrated at his situation:
Dead egg, I lie Whole On a whole world I cannot touch,
To himself, the speaker appears intact. His main desire seems to be to know his own mind once more. This is where the most intriguing piece of the poem begins to surface: the double self.
As in “Pursuit,” the speaker is pulled in opposing directions. On the one hand, he loves the glorious calm he is in:
I smile, a buddha, all Wants, desire Falling from me like rings Hugging their lights.
On the other hand, because of the allure of this perfect numbness the speaker is drowning:
The still waters Wrap my lips,
24
Eyes, nose and ears, A clear Cellophane I cannot crack.
These lines imply that the speaker is trying to push through the invisible shroud smothering him. In The Other Sylvia Plath, Brain comments on the “…characteristically
Plathian doubleness” of “Paralytic” (121). Although she is mostly centering this observation on the end of the poem, “Paralytic” in its entirety is about doubles. The split in this poem is clear-cut between the physical self and the mental self: “My mind a rock, /
No fingers to grip, no tongue.”
In her analysis of “Paralytic” in Chapters in a Mythology, Judith Kroll writes that
Plath’s “Paralytic” is a poem which
reflect[s] a crisis involving the ‘natural’ and the ‘spiritual’ lives, acknowledging the limitation of the ‘natural’ life and doubting whether a free and powerful true self could be recovered in these terms simply by asserting that self. (177)
Kroll takes the title of “Paralytic” literally, writing that “[the poem] presents the experience of a totally paralyzed man” who must “come to terms with his reality” (192-
3). This is certainly supported by the speaker’s reference to the iron lung. However, while
Kroll’s analysis breaks much ground in the consideration of the speaker as a split self,
Kroll relies heavily on the idea that the speaker’s physical inaction is due to paralysis.
She does not consider that the title may in fact be metaphorical rather than literal. This reading is also complicated by the speaker’s mention of the iron lung preventing a relapse. If the speaker is paralyzed, what is he to relapse to? Therefore, it seems more likely that the speaker is using the objects around him to construct a narrative about his
25 mental and physical state, and that the “iron lung” is the hospital itself, keeping him from physical destruction.
As it is, the speaker’s physical self is hardly mentioned in “Paralytic” except as a contrast to the mind. The speaker’s physical abilities appear to simply be numb. He has an awareness of them, but cannot reach them in his confinement. Rather than concentrate on the loss of feeling in his limbs, the speaker’s mind appears to be fading away:
Photographs visit me — My wife, dead and flat, in 1920s furs, Mouth full of pearls,
Two girls As flat as she, who whisper ‘We’re your daughters.’
Whether or not the speaker’s wife is actually dead is unclear. Being “dead and flat” could be an observation about the photograph paper itself. Notably, the girls, his “daughters,” must remind their father that they are his children. Even after this reminder, the speaker does not focus on them. Directly after the “two girls” catch his attention and “whisper,” the speaker begins to drown:
The still waters Wrap my lips,
Eyes, nose and ears, A clear Cellophane I cannot crack.
Ultimately, the speaker slips under these “still waters.”
As “Paralytic” draws to a close, the speaker detaches from his surroundings, and his “Wants, desire” commence “Falling from me like rings / Hugging their lights.” These lines in particular are a clever play on the speaker’s surroundings. He is lying down, “On my bare back” looking upward. After he has stared at the ceiling light for a time, rings of
26 light begin to emanate from the bulb, an ocular phenomenon. This is also a neat metaphor for his “wants” falling away — everything that he was and is has begun to radiate from him, dissipating as he gives up. “Paralytic” ends with:
The claw Of the magnolia Drunk on its own scents, Asks nothing of life.
Brain writes that the magnolia represents “…an image of nature that is androgynous…a flower that is masculine and feminine, self-propagating and self-sufficient in its pleasure”
(122). This is an intriguing take on final dissolution of the speaker’s self — he has renounced reality and its complications for this quiet dreamworld of his own choosing.
However, the line “The claw” suggests a faint reservation about his slide into a world that
“Asks nothing of life.” Again, his choice in the matter is slim. Something ominous has dug into him and the speaker simply has no energy to combat the inevitable any longer.
“Paralytic” has many commonalities with Leonard Baskin’s print The Leper, For
Flaubert’s St. Julien The Hospitaller, composed in 1956. The print is 23 x 9 cm, ink on paper. This print is inspired by Gustave Flaubert’s Three Tales, specifically the story “St.
Julian.” In the French tale, a man, Julian, is cursed to murder his parents, which he later accidentally does. While wandering the country in disgrace, Julian is approached by a leper who wishes to cross a river. Despite the difficulty of the task, Julian assists the leper. After Julian meets the leper’s demands the leper reveals himself as an angel and admits Julian to Heaven.
The Leper is printed on acid-free, white printmaking paper. There is a single figure, a man, with one hand hidden. His chest and legs are bare; he has only a cloth to
27 cover his groin. The print is composed of a vertical axis and smooth lines, relatively thick throughout the legs, and thinner, more vein-like, throughout the torso and arms. The figure stands with his legs apart and head tilted slightly back. The figure is not symmetrical; his entire form is shifted to the right similar to classical contra postal pose.
His body appears pulled to his right and the left is dragging downward. His torso is far more shadowed than the rest of his form, and the darkness highlighting his ribcage pulls the figure out and away from the page. Lines on the face and torso are the most distinctive, diverging from one another and then converging at the center of the chest into a solid mass of darkness.
The man seems to be straining to straighten his back despite the constraints his lower body forces anatomically. This struggle is reminiscent of the speaker’s attempts to combat his physical numbness when trapped in his figurative “iron lung” in “Paralytic.”
The body simply will not respond as the leper wants it to. The speaker of “Paralytic” is similarly trapped: “My mind a rock, / No fingers to grip, no tongue.” Although the left side of the leper’s body is more defined and the right side slopes, his carriage and lines of his shoulders keep him upright. His left shin slopes backward abruptly, almost unnaturally, but his body does not bow to compensate for this. The body is proportionally portrayed naturally, well defined but not overly so. His stance suggests stillness, watchfulness and a sense of dignity. His head is tilted slightly back, his eyes down, across the plane of his cheeks—a view usually interpreted as condescending (looking down one’s nose at someone), but in this image the artist implies a brusque bravado. He projects placid resignation approaching but falling just short of self-confidence.
28 Parallel to the speaker of “Paralytic,” the leper is clearly limited in his movement.
He stands stiffly, his weight resting on his leg. Although his right side is not quite as straight as his left, the man attempts to compensate for this in his stance. The lines are the only symmetrical part the composition. The lines in various parts of his body mirror one another even if the shape of parts of the body do not. The lines are thin in each of the arms and legs, but thick in the torso. The man’s torso retreats into shadow, and these shadows bring the print up off of the page. The shadows on his chest accentuate the shape of his lungs. It is as though they are rising up out of his body. If The Leper is used as a commentary on “Paralytic,” the emphasis on the lungs plays an interesting figurative role.
The speaker of the poem’s paralysis is likened to lying or actually existing inside of an iron lung. He writes that the iron lung pumps “My two / Dust bags in and out.” The artificial is impersonating the natural, driving home the consequences of artificiality more pointedly than the poem itself. The leper’s lungs appear to strain against his skin, suggesting that same sort of wrongness. An outside force has taken over a natural function.
Despite the leper’s tilted chin, his face has a blankness that belies his posture. His face is not clean-shaven and his eyes are barely open. They could be shutting from exhaustion or the brightness of the light. His nose is undefined. In fact, it is more of a gaping, black hole. Thin lines, much like the veins on his arms, have appeared on his face and travel down to his neck, which is swathed in thin and thick lines. Like the patient in the iron lung, only his head seems to have escaped what is happening to the rest of his body, but even his head is now being poisoned. The figure’s posture becomes a false stance. He is combating something he will eventually have to give into. His left leg, like
29 the mind of the speaker of “Paralytic,” is supporting his all of his weight. Soon, it will fracture under the weight of all he carries.
Like the speaker of “Paralytic,” the leper’s strength derives mostly from his mind.
He desires to maintain his integrity in a disintegrating body. This physical show of strength does not hide his body’s dysfunction. His chest is blackening. Thick lines of black are crawling up his neck, even as he tilts his head back. The fingers of his visible hand are relaxed, but curling inward slightly. He does not touch his body with any part of his anatomy. His arms stick out from his sides; his legs are apart. Even his shoulders slope sharply downward. The Leper is a show of tenseness even in his determined relaxation. Mentally, he reasons, but his physical ailments are slowly taking him over.
Like the speaker of “Paralytic,” he will have little choice but to eventually succumb, regardless of the strength of his mind.
30
CHAPTER III
SHADOWS OF MORTALITY
Much of Sylvia Plath’s poetry has a hyper-awareness of human frailty. In this chapter, Plath and Leonard Baskin’s preoccupation with human mortality is discussed.
Rather than outright identify human weaknesses as the subject of her poems, Plath creates narratives about seemingly unrelated subjects. She does this in “The Rabbit Catcher,” which begins as a poem about the snaring of rabbits. The rabbits and snares then become a metaphor for the speaker. In “A Birthday Present,” the speaker’s birthday and the giving of a gift are used to disguise the speaker’s repressed desire to die. Leonard Baskin also plays with this theme in his 1955 print Sorrowing and Terrified Man. The entire print is encompassed by what appears to be the face of a man. His features are made of hands, trees and animals. As with “The Rabbit Catcher” and “A Birthday Present,” the man is one thing but also another.
In her critique of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel poems, Barbara Drake notes that “…for all their sardonic humor, their catalogues of injury and failings, their pleas for anaesthesia, these are not poems of nihilism” (42). Drake goes on to state that Plath’s poem “A
Birthday Present” is a perfect example of this absence of nihilism, writing: “If the speaker of these poems sometimes extracts herself from the fabric of the work, it is, more often than not, to take a cool, ironic look at her own failings” (42). The speaker is well
31 aware of these failings, and uses everyday domestic life to cast a wall between two calls; the siren of death and the call of life. Like “Pursuit,” “A Birthday Present” focuses on seeking a metaphorical death. However, this particular poem does not view life as a kind of death. Her “birthday present” is a gift-wrapped box of the secrets she wishes to know but probably should not. They are hidden behind the “veils,” untouchable and whispering to her. “A Birthday Present” reads:
What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful? It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?
I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is just what I want. When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking
'Is this the one I am to appear for, Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?
Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus, Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.
Is this the one for the annunciation? My god, what a laugh!'
But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me. I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button.
I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year. After all I am alive only by accident.
I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way. Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains,
The diaphanous satins of a January window White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory!
It must be a tusk there, a ghost-column. Can you not see I do not mind what it is.
Can you not give it to me? Do not be ashamed — I do not mind if it is small.
32 Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity. Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam,
The glaze, the mirrory variety of it. Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate.
I know why you will not give it to me, You are terrified
The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it, Bossed, brazen, an antique shield,
A marvel to your great-grandchildren. Do not be afraid, it is not so.
I will only take it and go aside quietly. You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle,
No falling ribbons, no scream at the end. I do not think you credit me with this discretion.
If you only knew how the veils were killing my days. To you they are only transparencies, clear air.
But my god, the clouds are like cotton. Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.
Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in, Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million
Probable motes that tick the years off my life. You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine—
Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole? Must you stamp each piece in purple,
Must you kill what you can? There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.
It stands at my window, big as the sky. It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center
33 Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history. Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.
Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty By the time the whole of it was delivered, and to numb to use it.
Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil. If it were death
I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes. I would know you were serious.
There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday. And the knife not carve, but enter
Pure and clean as the cry of a baby, And the universe slide from my side.
“A Birthday Present” is complex and operates on several levels. First, there is the metaphoric—the use of a “birthday present” to disguise the secrets the speaker wishes to know. This “birthday present” has another purpose—whatever is contained within the box is a double-edged sword. Once opened, “the knife” would “not carve, but enter.”
There is no implication that the gift will result in certain and sudden death, merely that there is potential in its lethal capacity. As in “Pursuit,” the poem ends before a resolution.
“A Birthday Present” is a suggestion of how life could play out if the speaker was given what she most desires.
The poem begins with the speaker establishing her surroundings. The feeling of being trapped “behind this veil” hiding the truth from her is also articulated. She cannot quite identify what she is looking at; she only knows it is there: “What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?” Her tone is somewhat sarcastic; she is presenting a tough show to cover her vulnerability. Whatever is behind that veil, there is no certainty she will survive what she may discover. Nevertheless, she pursues it: “I am sure it is unique. I
34 am sure it is just what I want.” The speaker mocks herself through the supposed thoughts of her present, writing:
When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking
'Is this the one I am too appear for, Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?
Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus, Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.
Is this the one for the annunciation? My god, what a laugh!'
Here the speaker projects her own perceived “failings” as Dannas pointed out. “A
Birthday Present” shows both the speaker’s desire for truth and reveals that the speaker’s supposed toughness is nothing but a facade. These lines are also interesting in their critique of domesticity, the speaker (through the gift) mocks her “Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus.” Rather than critique the speaker’s appearance, the “present” just establishes her identity: “Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?” and then has “a laugh” at her “adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.”
Regardless of the gift’s views on the speaker, it remains. It is implied that the gift is observing her—conducting some sort of circumspect surveillance: “But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.” As the poem reaches these lines, it becomes clear that the “present” is one the speaker has opened before:
I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year. After all I am alive only by accident. I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way. Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains,
The diaphanous satins of a January window
35 These stanzas complicate the veils. Previously, the veils were hiding the speaker’s gift, hiding some kind of knowledge she seeks. Rather than appear mysterious, they appeared taunting. Now, these veils appear familiar and protective, as though they are a distant part of the speaker herself. The veils are protecting her from a future “present” that could do her in: “I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way. / Now there are the veils, shimmering like curtains.” Clearly, the speaker is aware of why those veils exist.
She is compelled to part them.
As the stanzas go on, the speaker begins to reason with the veils, attempting to convince them to let her have her “present.” Her imagery becomes more associated with death, comparing the veils to ivory, playfully deciding “It must be a tusk there, a ghost- column.” Then she turns to cajoling: “Can you not see I do not mind what it is.” The line is particularly interesting because she frames her words as a rhetorical question. There is a note of exhaustion lying behind her words.
Having failed at convincing the veils to part, the speaker begins to address the person who has hidden her “birthday present,” the person who chose the gift. She attempts to explain why she wants a potentially destructive gift regardless of size. Her main concern is content, and the content is explosive regardless of size: “Do not be ashamed — I do not mind if it is small.” As in “Pursuit” the one thing that has the ability to destroy her fascinates the speaker: “Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam.” As is not the case in “Pursuit,” she seems aware that this gift will have one- sided effect. She will combust, but the gift-giver will remain intact. She is perhaps too bent on discovering truth to fully comprehend the nature of the contents of what she is about to open. The speaker does comment on the possibility of death, but here her own
36 mortality is an afterthought—she has played death’s game before, and somehow she survived. “A Birthday Present” does not play with death, but instead entertains the idea of death. Never once does the speaker wish for death or seem to actively go after death.
Instead, she comments on its presence, often with a jagged touch of humor. The “present” is her main focus.
The lack of care for death is what eventually reveals the speaker’s true desires.
The veils will not part and the gift-giver will not relent and actually give her the
“present.” And so the speaker’s elaborate humor, her togetherness, begins to dissipate:
I know why you will not give it to me, You are terrified
The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it, Bossed, brazen, an antique shield,
A marvel to your great-grandchildren. Do not be afraid, it is not so.
In previous stanzas, the speaker attempted to play ignorant regarding the effects of opening her “birthday present.” Now she admits that she is aware of how things look from the outside looking in. The gift-giver believes she is too fragile to handle such a gift, or perhaps he is worried about what she may do with the gift. However, she keeps his worry at a distance, using her ability to perceive his concern as evidence of her own sanity: “I know why you will not give it to me.” “Do not be afraid,” she whispers. “It is not so.” She insists that: “I will only take it and go aside quietly. / You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle.” It will be as though she is not there. But again, the speaker changes her tone, a resentment bubbling beneath her words: “I do not think you credit me with this discretion.”
37 Perhaps the gift-giver is right to hold back because the speaker becomes more pleading. Behind the surety of her words erupts vulnerability, a leaning toward destruction she may not even be fully aware of:
If you only knew how the veils were killing my days. To you they are only transparencies, clear air.
But my god, the clouds are like cotton. Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.
The speaker clearly admits that she is aware of the reason for these veils. Her suggestion that the gift-giver cannot understand them adds another layer to the poem, as does her admittance that even the veils are smothering her. The gift-giver’s sole concern for withholding is implied to be selfishness: “You are terrified / The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it.” Yet her admittance that these “clouds are like cotton /
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide” undermines her view of the present-giver’s motivations for withholding the gift. He cannot see the veils but knows of their existence, and his refusal to give the speaker something destructive complicates his character.
Although the speaker cannot identify to herself the reason she wants this gift, perhaps the gift-giver knows it, and so refuses to give the present up:
Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in, Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million
Probable motes that tick the years off my life. You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine—
Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole? Must you stamp each piece in purple,
Must you kill what you can? There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.
38 Slowly, the veils are killing her: “Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million /
Probable motes that tick the years off my life.” But death is not coming quickly enough.
She needs assistance in tearing the veils down, and the gift-giver is “silver-suited for the occasion.” These lines imply a knowledge of the death she is inviting, but again she retreats back, handing over responsibility: “Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?” Her fractured self is somehow the result of the gift-giver’s actions, and his “present” will heal her or destroy her. “Must you stamp each piece in purple,” she goes on. “Must you kill what you can?” These lines again hand responsibility over to the speaker. The “stamp” is a price tag. He owns everything she is worth. The last line suggests that this “kill” is incomplete, or not the goal of the speaker’s search: “There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.”
The last few stanzas become more opaque and contradictory. The speaker asserts that this gift “stands at my window, big as the sky,” hinting that she already knows what this “present” is; she is simply waiting for some kind of confirmation of it. It may be as
“big as the sky.” In actual fact she suspects the gift may not be what she is expecting. She feels surrounded by the gift’s physical and metaphysical presence: “It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center / Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history.” She also admits that she has received hints of what the present may be:
Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.
Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty By the time the whole of it was delivered, and too numb to use it.
She already promised that she would not use the gift to maim the gift-giver, but she still does not clarify what she wants to utilize it for. These lines also suggest that the “present”
39 is more ominous than a traditional birthday present, as pieces of it can “come by mail” or
“word of mouth,” filtering in past the veils.
In the final stanzas, the speaker abandons any attempts to coax the gift-giver into handing over her present:
Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil. If it were death
I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes. I would know you were serious.
There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday. And the knife not carve, but enter
Pure and clean as the cry of a baby, And the universe slide from my side.
The speaker’s reticence to acknowledge the death waiting inside of her “birthday present” comes through here. “If it were death” she says, “I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.” Despite her avoidance of admitting that death lies behind the veil, she does respect the “deep gravity of it.” These stanzas also alter the meaning of the poem thus far. Before, the speaker was seeking the gift for what was inside. Here, she wants the present as a confirmation of information about the person of the gift-giver. What lies inside the box is grave because of the weight of that information: “There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.”
The last lines are perhaps the most intriguing part of “A Birthday Present.” There are a variety of tells that erupt throughout the poem. The speaker clearly cannot handle such a “present,” however much she begs. Yet her very rationales for being given the gift reveal how fragile her psyche is, how she is looking to the present to give her an excuse or ready mechanism to slip away — or at the very least to attempt to slip away. As with
40 “Pursuit,” the poem ends with no real resolution. Taking the gift is a mere ploy; she needs the pain concealed in the box to tear the veils surrounding her. One can assume that behind those veils lies death, but the concept of death is vague to the speaker. She has disguised death in a pursuit of truth. Even the pain that comes with truth may not kill her.
The last lines do not necessarily connote death, though the speaker does admit death may be inside. Instead the final lines talk of a knife:
And the knife not carve, but enter
Pure and clean as the cry of a baby, And the universe slide from my side.
The admittance that the knife will “not carve but enter” suggests an enduring hurt, one the “present” will not eradicate but instead inflame. “A Birthday Present” also begins in the kitchen, and kitchen knives are meant for carving. The speaker also mentions that
“nobility” comes with the presence, “nobility” in the gift having been given and accepted.
Yet the speaker believes some sort of numbness or moving on will come from this: “And the universe slide from my side.” This “universe” could be whatever pain ties her to the gift-giver, or the knife itself sliding back out.
“A Birthday Present” uses a gift to obscure the speaker’s desires. Beneath her rhetoric is a proclivity for self-harm. Although the speaker does occasionally acknowledge the consequences of opening her gift, she stops short of fully acknowledging what receiving such a present would mean. Here, death is a possibility that cannot be identified because of how much the speaker desires to have it. Although she seems aware of her own mortality, her awareness of the consequences of the removal of the veils around her is unclear.
41 Using a metaphor to disguise or obscure meaning is also utilized in “The Rabbit
Catcher,” though to a somewhat different effect. In the poem, composed in early 1962, the speaker sets the catching of rabbits in snares as a parallel narrative to a commentary on a troubled relationship. The poem echoes “A Birthday Present” in its refusal to acknowledge the possibility of a relationship having fatal consequence until the very end.
This ‘death’ affects both the speaker and her companion equally, although their ways of coping diverge. In his essay “Sylvia Plath: The Drama of Initiation,” Jon Rosenblatt observes that
Parallel symbolic settings are…a constant element in the process enacted by the poetry. Whether the poems take place inside a house or in the countryside, the identical metaphorical relationships are established between a vulnerable speaker and a destructive environment…in “The Rabbit Catcher” it is a country path by the sea. (24)
Rosenblatt’s observation that the speaker is “vulnerable” is astute. Regardless of whether or not the speaker is connected to her companion in the poem, the speaker grows weaker when trapped in the snare while her companion continues on his way, setting more traps.
“The Rabbit Catcher” reads in full:
It was a place of force— The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair, Tearing off my voice, and the sea
Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead Unreeling in it, spreading like oil.
I tasted the malignity of the gorse, Its black spikes, The extreme unction of its yellow candle-flowers. They had an efficiency, a great beauty, And were extravagant, like torture.
There was only one place to get to. Simmering, perfumed,
42 The paths narrowed into the hollow. And the snares almost effaced themselves— Zeros, shutting on nothing,
Set close, like birth pangs. The absence of shrieks Made a hole in the hot day, a vacancy. The glassy light was a clear wall, The thickets quiet.
I felt a still busyness, an intent. I felt hands round a tea mug, dull, blunt, Ringing the white china. How they awaited him, those little deaths! They waited like sweethearts. They excited him.
And we, too, had a relationship— Tight wires between us, Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring Sliding shut on some quick thing, The constriction killing me also.
The first thing the speaker of “The Rabbit Catcher” does is to establish a violent setting. She is in “a place of force—” with “The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair.” She has effectively been silenced, this rough wind is “Tearing off my voice.” By the end of the first stanza she is deprived of not one but two of her senses. The ocean is “Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead / Unreeling in it, spreading like oil.” The speaker also establishes two narratives. The wind has made it impossible to speak, but only because her own hair has blown back into her mouth. She has been blinded by the lights on the ocean, but she is the one who sees the dead “unreeling in it” rather than any sort of beauty. Throughout “The Rabbit Catcher,” the speaker only sees beauty in potentially deadly objects. Most of these objects are natural to the landscape, which is directly associated with her nameless companion, a man we do not see—we
43 only see the result of his labor, the empty snares lying in the hollow, the reactions of the speaker to her perceived “constriction.”
The speaker is standing on a path by the ocean, surrounded by nature and the vast array of nature’s minutiae. As mentioned before, these natural things are identified by her as being deadly. The deadliness is very real to her despite her awareness of the danger and the possibility of avoiding it:
I tasted the malignity of the gorse, Its black spikes, The extreme unction of its yellow candle-flowers.
The gorse is a thorn-covered shrub predominantly found in Western Europe. Gorse thorns, more commonly known as black thorns, are a cause of blood poisoning. These thorns are not deadly unless the speaker deliberately pricks and poisons herself with them. Metaphorically, she seems to wish to do just this, converting them into an ill- advised ointment: “The extreme unction of its yellow candle-flowers.” The bush adds to the speaker’s view of the landscape as a threat, yet she cannot stop looking at them. She writes that despite their deadliness:
They had an efficiency, a great beauty, And were extravagant, like torture.
Something about the gorse excites her; she finds “beauty” in it being “like torture.”
Torture is not associated with pain, it is “extravagant,” a thing to be indulged in.
The path the speaker stands on is a one-way street: “There was only one place to get to.” This place may or may not be dangerous, but its danger is disguised in its sweet scent. The speaker writes that it is:
Simmering, perfumed, The paths narrowed into the hollow.
44 And the snares almost effaced themselves— Zeros, shutting in on nothing,
Set close, like birth pangs.
These snares are so inconspicuous they melt into the scene, invisible to the unsuspecting rabbits. They are so expertly made that there is no warning when they snap up the rabbits:
“The absence of shrieks / Made a hole in the hot day, a vacancy.” The speaker appears to find that the absence of pain is unnatural, that the silence hiding the deaths takes something away from the setting. Everything is too still, too slow, as when death erupts out of hiding. These “snares” are a metaphor for the trap the speaker is beginning to believe she herself has walked into. She walked in unknowingly, lured in by the beauty.
The pain was so sharp and quick she did not notice it.
As the speaker waits, she begins to associate the snares even more with herself and her relationship with the unknown companion:
I felt a still busyness, an intent. I felt hands round a tea mug, dull, blunt, Ringing the white china. How they awaited him, those little deaths! They waited like sweethearts. They excited him.
This “ringing” is like the snapping of the snare. Her hands are echoing the gesture. She is caught, holding the “white china,” most commonly associated with bone china. Here, she seems to have a flash of intuition, or a warning of the future, associating the “ringing” and snapping shut of the snare with the sexual relationship of her companion with another: “How they awaited him, those little deaths! / They waited like sweethearts. They excited him.” The line is a play on the French phrase “la petite morts,” or “Little Death,” a metaphor for orgasm. The double narrative is most apparent here—the speaker is
45 associating both the rabbits and possible future unsuspecting women—of which she was one—together. “They excited him” implies that their vulnerability lures him in, a thing to be taken advantage of. The speaker also makes an assumption that she is the only one left behind. The “ringing the white china” implies her solitariness and lack of action. She has been caught, devoured, discarded.
In the last stanza, the narratives collide. The speaker comes clean, mentioning her dying relationship, but also complicating it by asserting that she herself has suffered from the “constriction” she identifies:
And we, too, had a relationship— Tight wires between us, Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring Sliding shut on some quick thing, The constriction killing me also.
Unlike the concealed snares on the pathway, this snare is permanent. The snare is not a catch-and-release mechanism. They are both caught, pulling at each other to break free.
There are “Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring.” They have been caught together so long that their minds are no longer separate, but one. Her companion’s struggles drain the energy of the speaker: “The constriction killing me also.” These lines have a note of false pride, as though the speaker did not at first view this “constriction” as a problem. Now that the other ‘rabbits’ are being caught, she sees her peril. She is stuck fast and unlikely to break free.
Sorrowing and Terrified Man is a 1955 ink on paper print measuring 91.4 cm in diameter. The print’s image perimeter is an imperfect circle, though the face of the man in the center makes the circle appear far more stretched than it is. The print is structured in a series of lines and ovals. The eyes are ovals with a thick line joining them. The
46 mouth is also a thick line, but with a hand stretching out of it. The background is black, with the face erupting out of the center. There does not appear to be any distance in between the face and background, it appears to emerge out of the darkness.
The colors are black and white, highly contrasted. The lines of the oval and the outside of the face are gently curved. The lines composing the general features, such as the eyes and the mouth, are also gently curved, but the images superimposed on them are not. An animal appears as a furrow between the face’s brow lines, fully shadowed and more sharply lined. Its shape seems feline, active and prowling. The hand emerging from the mouth or being bitten by the mouth is well defined in that the artist purposely emphasized the articulated rendering of the fingers. Above it, the nose becomes an empty stump-shaped figure. Lines bleed from his nose. All of the lines in the face come together in some way. Eye lines travel down to the hand, a thin line travels through the center of the nose to the brow line. The face itself is asymmetrical, there is no repetition in shape other than the aforementioned interior ovals.
The flatness of the image is challenged by the hand’s placement inside or on top of the mouth. This gives the print depth. The man’s face could be erupting from the blackness to collide with the hand, or the hand and animal are clawing their way up from behind him. The placement of the hand and shape of the mouth suggests a riverbed, with the animal perched on a tree branch. If the man is submerged and looking up through the water, the hand and animal are reflected on his face. However, from the interconnecting lines it appears that these objects are coming from inside of him. The visage appears to be a landscape or moon of despair. The figure is quite decidedly trapped within the tight
47 sphere that is his only surrounding universe, just as the speaker of “A Birthday Present” is surrounded by the veils limiting her world.
Sorrowing and Terrified Man is similar to Plath’s poems “A Birthday Present” and “The Rabbit Catcher” not only because of the title, which refers back to the speaker of the poem’s grief and terror at being trapped in “The Rabbit Catcher,” but also because of the parallel narratives in the print. There are two layers to the print. The first layer is the face, ringed by black. The face has hooded eyes, deep-set and close to the temples.
The nose is more of a suggestion, a brief line accented by flaring nostrils. The white of the face is heavily contrasted with the black orb surrounding it. Lines, sharp and thick, create the mouth. The second layer is composed of a nature scene, with animals standing in for the eyes and a hand erupting out of the mouth. Sorrowing and Terrified Man is a tricky print in that it is difficult, if not impossible, to decide which layer is dominant. The relationship between the two layers is symbiotic. Each layer blends into the other. As with The Tormented One / The Tormented Man, the composition relies on layering to generate interest and make its point, and its strength lies in its layering. The blending of the layers reveals more about the poem “A Birthday Present” and complicates its parallel narrative. The speaker of “A Birthday Present” is determined to disguise why she wants her gift. She separates out the layers of her narrative, using rhetoric to establish her supposed ability to handle such a present or her ignorance of what is contained inside of the box. However, in Sorrowing and Terrified Man it is easy to see that the layers are inextricably intertwined.
The face of Sorrowing and Terrified Man seems intricate until compared with the figures overlaying it. The brow line becomes a branch with an animal perched between
48 the eyes. A tree stump comes up to the base of the nose, and the mouth evokes a riverbed or some sort of water. The shape of a bird is falling on the right side of the face, frozen upside down. A hand, Baskin’s most well-defined and detailed part of the print, dangles from the mouth. The fingers of the hand are splayed, limp but not touching one another.
Nature and humanity collide in this print. The animals set atop the face are both living and dead. The bird below the eyes is falling, presumably to its demise. The animal above the eyes, invisible, lives. Not only animals are victims of the face. The hand is disconnected from its body, held loosely in the mouth not by teeth but by the lips, as though the face is sure it does not need a strong hold. There is no differentiation between nature and the face, instead, the two comment on one another. “A Rabbit Catcher” does the same thing within its narrative—the poem begins with the speaker and her companion in “a place of force” out in nature, then weaves their fate into the fate of the rabbits they try to snare. However, the print shows the animals and hand seemingly surfacing from underneath. The more closely the print is observed, the more nature takes over. At the end of “A Rabbit Catcher” the speaker states:
And we, too, had a relationship— Tight wires between us, Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring Sliding shut on some quick thing, The constriction killing me also.
These lines are meant to be a revelation, but when viewed in conjunction with Sorrowing and Terrified Man the stanza becomes a bit more complex. Just as nature has always made up the composition of the man’s face, the snare has always been an integral part of the speaker’s relationship.
49 The narratives within the print mesh together, holding each other frozen in place.
The face and the animals depend on one another in some way. The face is a home for these animals; his features mirror their features. On the other hand, perhaps the face has jeopardized their fragile ecosystem. The speaker of “The Rabbit Catcher” believes her companion has upset her world, just as the speaker of “A Birthday Present” reluctantly acknowledges the turmoil the gift may cause. Yet in the end, these two worlds, two narratives, are intertwined. They cannot be separated without losing a part of themselves, just as the speakers of “The Rabbit Catcher” and “A Birthday Present” cannot extricate themselves from their surroundings and personal natures.
50
CHAPTER IV
DEATH
Death is dealt with in two ways in most of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. It can appear as inevitable or as triumphant. In “Lady Lazarus,” death is both of these things. The speaker is aware that she will soon die, whether by her own hand or someone else’s, but she is determined to use her death to her advantage. She decides that she will be reborn and rise up again, perhaps not as a human but in whatever form is available to her. In this poem, death is manipulated, as seen in Leonard Baskin’s Angel of Death print. The angel takes up all of the space in the print. His wings are bent at different angles and a hand reaches up through his chest, as though he is being wrenched down to claim someone against his will. Plath’s poem “Edge” is very different. The speaker of “Edge” is not the dead woman. Instead, the moon is looking down at the dead woman and commenting on what she sees. “Edge” sees death as the end to a long road, and the body is there not as a statement to the person the woman was, but as a reminder to those she has left behind.
This is echoed in Baskin’s 1970 print Let Not Your Sorrow Die, where a corpse is left out for viewing. The corpse is anonymous to everyone but the person it is meant for. In this chapter, Plath and Baskin see death as both an avenue for triumph and as a state with irreversible finality.
51 One of the most well known of Sylvia Plath’s poems, “Lady Lazarus,” was written between October 23 and 29, 1962. The poem has been the recipient of both lavish praise and harsh critique for its use of Holocaust imagery. In “Dying is an Art,” George
Steiner writes of both “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” that
Sylvia Plath is only one of a number of young contemporary poets, novelists, and playwrights, themselves in no way implicated in the actual holocaust, who have done the most to counter the general inclination to forget the death camps. Perhaps it is only those who had no part in the events who can focus on them rationally and imaginatively; to those who experienced the thing, it has lost the hard edges of possibility, it has stepped outside the real. (117)
Steiner does not deny that Plath’s poetry is masterful, but he later asks:
Are these final poems entirely legitimate? In what sense does anyone, himself uninvolved and long after the event, commit a subtle larceny when he invokes the echoes and trappings of Auschwitz and appropriates an enormity of ready emotion to his own private design? ... These poems take great risks, extending Sylvia Plath’s essentially austere manner to the very limit. They are a bitter triumph, proof of the capacity of poetry to give to reality the greater permanence of the imagined. (218)
The aforementioned question is one that has divided critics and readers for decades, one to which there is no easy answer. It is difficult to condemn a generation’s need to document and understand a previous generation’s victimization and destruction.
Arguably, a short line about using the skin of human victims for lampshades evokes some feeling of moral responsibility and encourages remembrance. “Lady Lazarus” relates these historical facts quickly, if controversially.
Plath herself did not view her writing as autobiographical, nor did she view the use of the Holocaust as an “appropriation” (218). During an interview with Peter Orr of the BBC in October 1962 she said of confessional writing:
I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured; this sort of experience. One should
52 be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind. I think that personal experience is very important, but certainly it shouldn’t be a kind of shut box, and sort of mirror-looking narcissistic experience.
Later, when Plath briefly introduced several of her poems for the BBC’s “New Poems by
Sylvia Plath” broadcast in December 1962, she did not mention the Holocaust aspects of
“Lady Lazarus” at all, stating:
This poem is called ‘Lady Lazarus’. The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman. (Plath 196)
In her introduction to Ariel: The Restored Edition, Frieda Hughes comments that her mother’s
introductions made me smile; they have to be the most understated commentaries imaginable for poems that are pared down to their sharpest points of imagery and delivered with tremendous skill. When I read them I imagine my mother, reluctant to undermine with explanation the concentrated energy she’d poured into her verse, in order to preserve its ability to shock and surprise. (xv)
Regardless of the skill present in the poem, as mentioned before, Plath’s “ability to shock and surprise” has largely polarized the audience of “Lady Lazarus.” It is likely that Plath realized the poem needed little summarization, and her explanation of the poem was therefore restrained.
Readings of “Lady Lazarus” that separate the poem from Plath’s biography are rare. Tracy Brain explains the problematic nature of biographical readings in The Other
Sylvia Plath:
The problem here is not just the unfairness (and dubiousness) of making assumptions about Plath’s personal views and lived existence because of a poem. The problem is also that this view has coloured the expectations, and then opinions, of numerous readers. Worse still, this view of Plath and the one poem expands to cover everything that Plath ever wrote. (119)
53 Brain neglects to mention the effect biographical readings have on critics and biographers as well. When considered independently of Plath’s biography, “Lady Lazarus” becomes infinitely more complex, moving away from simplistic readings about the speaker’s suicidal urges being equal to the suffering endured by victims of the Holocaust. Instead,
“Lady Lazarus” becomes a complicated poem about the voyeurism of those surrounding the speaker and death’s inability to annihilate life entirely, but also comments on the symbiotic relationship between the onlookers spurring the speaker on and the speaker’s actions. As in “Pursuit,” in “Lady Lazarus” death is associated with life, but instead of burning out, the speaker of “Lady Lazarus” burns on.
“Lady Lazarus” has the distinction of being one of the poems Plath more aggressively edited during 1962. Brain notes that Plath would often recite lines or stanzas of poems in broadcast that she had decided to exclude from her final draft just a few days before. “Lady Lazarus” features two major edits. In her BBC recording of “Lady
Lazarus,” Plath included an extra stanza “after the line ‘Do I terrify?—’” and also
“lengthens the line ‘I may be skin and bone’ to ‘I may be skin and bone, I may be
Japanese’” (27). Brain also comments that these lines are present in “the early drafts of the poem” and “remained part of ‘Lady Lazarus’ until an advanced stage of its composition…when Plath crossed them out” but then “reinstated them, then omitted them once more” (27). Although Plath used the extra stanza and line in her BBC broadcast, she did not reinsert them back into the final draft of “Lady Lazarus.” The poem, as published in 1981 in The Collected Poems, reads:
I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it—
54
A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot
A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin O my enemy. Do I terrify?—
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? The sour breath Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me
And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three. What a trash To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments. The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot— The big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands My knees. I may be skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. The first time it happened I was ten. It was an accident.
55 The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut
As a seashell. They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I’ve a call.
It’s easy enough to do it in a cell. It’s easy enough to do it and stay put. It’s the theatrical
Comeback in broad day To the same place, the same face, the same brute Amused shout:
‘A miracle!’ That knocks me out. There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart— It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus, I am your valuable, The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
56 I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash— You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—
A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware.
Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. (244-7)
“Lady Lazarus” is about rushing headlong into death, but only in the most corporeal sense. For the speaker, the destruction of the physical body does not condemn the spiritual. The speaker does not regard her love of death as a suicide, but a necessary rite of passage for rebirth. She writes:
I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it—
Here, death and rebirth are identified as tools she is attempting to master. In the past, she has experimented with death, producing “A sort of walking miracle, my skin.” The first stanzas of “Lady Lazarus” read like taunts, establishing a deceptive devil-may-care attitude that is subverted as the poem progresses. The speaker is carefully planning and imagining her final exit. She allows the powers that be—here aligned with the Nazis—to believe that they have control, but her death will be a failure for them and a triumph for her. However, the triumph is complicated by the fact that their presence instigates this
57 third go at dying. “Bright as a Nazi lampshade” references the Nazi practice of using human skin to make lampshades. The line also suggests the appropriation of the speaker’s physical self. Rather than actively engage in life, the speaker’s actions are now empty, as though she is acting out anticipated emotional reactions rather than truly living.
The speaker of the “Lady Lazarus” engages in a dialogue with an unseen
“enemy,” taunting him in a series of dares. “Peel off the napkin / O my enemy” she says.
“Do I terrify?—” she questions. These lines suggest the power of death, which the speaker does not fear but the “enemy” does, having not considered the consequences of the speaker’s annihilation. To the speaker, death will only destroy her body:
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? The sour breath Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me
And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die.
Repetition is key. The speaker is careless with her physical life, indifferent to its coming end. Her body can pass on and disintegrate; there are other lives to come. These stanzas also introduce an interesting numerical aspect of “Lady Lazarus.” Each stanza has three lines. The speaker tries for death three times, she is thirty, and the “cat” she references has “nine times to die”—three times three is nine. Here, the third time is clearly the charm; as the speaker announces: “This is Number Three.”
The statement “This is Number Three” introduces one of the most abstract portions of “Lady Lazarus.” The speaker suggests that the ritual “To annihilate each
58 decade” has been successful in the past—it is a chance for the “peanut-crunching crowd” to witness her great rebirth. However, she subverts this when she informs the crowd:
“Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman” suggesting that these past, little deaths were really failures and she is actually mocking the onlookers for their voyeurism. She was not reborn, but instead remained herself, and their inability to recognize her as unchanged shows their true disinterest. These failures haunt her, especially how close she has come to death:
The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut
As a seashell. They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
The “not come back at all” suggests that the speaker was attempting to destroy both her physical and spiritual self. “And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls” shows that the speaker was far gone enough to invite decomposition. However, yet again, this reading is undermined by the speaker’s next admission:
Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I’ve a call.
These lines make “dying” a talent, not a pursuit. Interestingly, the speaker emphasizes
“Dying” as “an art,” not death, as though the act of dying is what she is after, not the finality of actual death. In the next stanza the speaker asserts: “I do it so it feels real.” She
59 does not specify who death is meant to feel real to— “the peanut crunching crowd” or the speaker herself? She states that she has “a call,” or a talent for death, reinforcing the idea that the realness of death may in fact be an elaborate charade.
As the speaker reveals more about her dances with death, her feelings about her suicidal urges become more complex. “It’s easy enough to do it in a cell. / It’s easy enough to do it and stay put” she states. These are not her concerns. She is turning dying into an “art,” with no intention of letting herself “stay put.” Instead, she clarifies what she loathes about her past failures:
It’s the theatrical
Comeback in broad day To the same place, the same face, the same brute Amused shout:
‘A miracle!’ That knocks me out.
In effect, the dying itself does not bother her. It is the return to life, intact, surrounded by the “peanut-crunching crowd” watching that astonishes her—“knocks” her “out.” She is looking to come back, but not as she was. As Plath herself said in her introduction to the poem: “The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first” (196). Dying is a rite of passage on the way to rebirth.
The real trouble seems to be the onlookers pulling her back to life before she is ready, or pulling her down with their voyeuristic stares.
The next stanzas turn the poem from an address to death (or those in control of the speaker’s death) to an address to the onlookers. “There is a charge” the speaker warns,
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart—
60 It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
If they are going to stare or destroy her before her time, she is going to receive some sort of compensation. These stanzas also complicate the meaning of “Lady Lazarus,” as they could just as easily point to the speaker’s decision to air her emotional laundry in public: her “scars.” The lines serve as a warning to those waiting to take over her death, her words, and her experience. For that, “there is a charge.” The charge may not be monetary, but instead something the speaker takes in spirit, something she has earned. After all, she points out:
I am your opus, I am your valuable, The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
They need her more than she needs them: “I turn and burn. / Do not think I underestimate your great concern.” As she burns, the crowd rushes in to see her, but her physical body is gone:
Ash, ash— You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—
A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling.
61 Her disappearance is short-lived. “Lady Lazarus” comes up from the ashes, still ready to
“turn and burn”:
Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware.
Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.
Here, the speaker cleverly condemns the onlookers as well as herself. The speaker herself is not rising from the ashes—she is the fire, hence “I rise with my red hair.” She is burning, but to continue to burn she must “eat men like air” since fire needs air to thrive.
These lines complicate the roles of the speaker and onlookers. Fire goes out if nothing feeds it, and the speaker is feeding on those around her, the ones who have encouraged this fate or driven her to it. Her threat to “turn and burn” evokes the old saying of ‘turning over in one’s grave,’ implying that the actions of the living will be seen by the speaker after her death.
The final stanza also reinterprets the motives of the speaker in regard to her
“enemy.” Is the symbolic, repetitious dying as much for the “enemy” as it is for the speaker? So long as they are willing to pay “for the eyeing of my scars,” she will “turn and burn” for them. As Bayley and Brain point out:
Lady Lazarus’s final and absolute declaration, ‘And I eat men like air’, is not simply a defiant statement of her dangerousness and power. It also suggests dependence. To eat anything ‘like air’ is to require it for sustenance, for survival. Without air, or men, the speaker could not breathe, and therefore could not live. The syntax of this final line means that the speaker does not just liken men to air, but also likens herself to it. (1-2)
62 “Dependence” goes both ways here. After all, the speaker is their “opus,” their
“valuable,” “The pure gold baby.”
Leonard Baskin’s Angel of Death is a 156.2 x 78 cm 1959 ink on paper woodcut print. The print is dominated by the figure of an armless, winged man. Only the bases of his eyes are visible at the top of the piece and the rendering of the figure ends just below his genitals. The print is symmetrical, with a vertical divide. The lines are thin and jagged at the wings, then thicker and more fluid through the torso and legs. The wings are stretched out, suggesting movement, and the right leg positioned slightly behind the right.
The palette is black and white, high contrast. The lower abdominal area of the figure dissipates into blackness, although the edges of the shape and its relationship to the rest of the figure’s contour visually saves the area from being seen as a complete void.
The most distinctive features of the print are the wings and face of the figure. As the eye travels down the body, the genitals become more prominent. The absence of a complete rendering of the figure’s arms and most of the wings adds to the feeling of flight, or descent or ascent.
The figure is larger than the black background and obscures the top and bottom of the print, overtaking the space. The massive volume of the figure actively presses at the confines of all four of the composition’s sides. The artist’s intent to convey a massive, powerful figural presence is also evident in his scaling decisions. (The print is over five feet in height.) This is an unusual print. It is very large and ambitious, especially for the time of its creation. The black shadow creeping over the abdomen of the figure evokes either the form of a hand or claw or both. The jagged asymmetry of this shape also offsets the extremely balanced, four black negative spaces at each corner of the print.
63 Here, death is portrayed as a man. This man is huge and immensely powerful. He is constantly in flight. The eye is immediately drawn to the center of the piece, which is clearly very narrow and vertical. The eye travels down, seeing the genitals and establishing the gender of the angel, and then up to the face. Despite the symmetry of the piece, there are distinctions made in the expression of the face. The right eye is more visible than the left, and the cheek is far more shadowed on the right than the left. The mouth pulls to the left. There are also differences in the shape and movement of the wings. The wings on the left hand side have longer feathers and the wing’s feathers are touching the legs of the man. The feathers of the right hand wing are short, curved and less obtrusive, not touching the body much at all. The right wing also stretches higher, suggesting an adjustment in direction or more mobility on that side.
In terms of “Lady Lazarus,” Angel of Death is an intriguing counterpart. The print is not a beautiful picture of death, but rather a frightening one. Death is not to be trifled with here. There is no smile on his face, only a grim sense of duty. His body is well defined; there is no extraneous fat. He carries himself with a sense of purpose, and his cares are not human cares. His wings make him something other than human, and his unembarrassed display of his genitals suggests a lack of care for worldly conventions.
The shadows on his abdomen resemble a handprint or claw. At close study, the print looks more like a claw. Something, or someone, is pulling death in. Regardless of whether or not the speaker of “Lady Lazarus” is being murdered or killing herself, she is clearly dying before her time. The angel’s struggle to stay in flight highlights the speaker’s strength, which is seen through her words but not fully understood. She literally pulls death out of the sky to take her. It is a terrific show of force. The stance of the
64 angel’s legs, his hips tilted to the right but his right wing higher than the left, suggests that he is being pulled down from above unexpectedly, or someone is attempting, like the speaker of “Lady Lazarus” to rise up with him and he is unprepared for the weight.
Again, the idea of being reeled in is interesting to consider in terms of the poem. Death is clearly shown as a man, and the speaker of “Lady Lazarus” has made it her goal to “eat men like air.” This angel is flying through the air; she has plucked him out and attached herself to death.
The thickest lines of Angel of Death come from the hand. Lines from the fingers seem to be shooting up the torso of the figure. This is evident in the cone-shape of lines on the chest. The hand is like thick, black smoke, polluting the angel and stunning him.
These lines travel up his neck and course into his mouth. His expression is horrific, yet the slackness of the lines in his mouth and the black shadows ringing his lips just below his nostrils make his expression surprised. This is unexpected. “Beware beware” indeed.
As with “Lady Lazarus,” the speaker of “Edge” plays with the idea of death as a triumph. Originally titled “The Edge,” “Edge” is an uncompromising poem about death and its finality (Blosser 148). This title change is important. “The Edge” is slightly more specific than “Edge.” An edge is something sharp, a precipice to teeter on. “The Edge” connotes a certain amount of uncertainty. There is time to turn around and retreat. “Edge” does none of those things. The woman of the poem has stepped off the edge of her metaphorical cliff; she has used the edge of a knife to cut away everything tying her to life. This sharpness is evident in the poem itself. Every extraneous detail has been sliced away. In this, the poem is vastly different from “Lady Lazarus,” “Pursuit,” and “A
Birthday Present.” Rather than move slowly towards death, hooked in by inevitability,
65 the woman of “Edge” achieves death. When the poem begins, the woman is already gone.
Unlike the speaker of “Lady Lazarus,” the woman seeks solace in the silence she has made for herself:
The woman is perfected. Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga, Her bare
Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty. She has folded
Them back into her body as petals Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag.
“Edge” is not written in the first person, rather the subject is characterized by an aloof, emotionally flat and somewhat resigned perspective. An earlier draft of the first line, “Down there the woman is perfected,” specifies that the speaker is the moon (Annas
123). Here, the moon is the silent observer: “The moon has nothing to be sad about, /
Staring from her hood of bone.” In “Edge” the subject of the poem is not dying. The
66 woman is dead. There is no afterlife, no rebirth, nor the pursuit of such things. As Judith
Kroll writes in Chapters in a Mythology: “Nothing hints that, like Lady Lazarus, this woman will suddenly be resurrected. ‘Edge’ presents a different kind of transcendence”
(145). The speaker of the poem does not seek rebirth or attempt to establish an identity for the dead woman. She is utterly anonymous, her identity has been eclipsed by her demise: “The woman is perfected.” However, while Kroll believes that “Edge” has many commonalities with the story of Cleopatra’s suicide, “Edge” has more commonalities with the Greek myth of Medea in its various incarnations.
Several essays on Plath’s poetry state that “Edge” “invokes Medea, who revenged herself on the man who deserted her…by killing their children” (Brennan 95). Yet these essays do not analyze the poem against the myth or push further. In Greek mythology,
Medea is the daughter of King Aeetes, the man from whom Jason hopes to win the
Golden Fleece. She is referred to as both a “priestess” and a “sorceress” in various versions of the myth and follows the goddess Hecate, who is most commonly associated with the moon (Schwab 106, 210). In basic versions of the myth, when Jason arrives at her father’s court Medea is shot by Cupid’s arrow. She falls in love with Jason. In Edith
Hamilton’s Mythology, Hera and Aphrodite have Cupid “make the daughter of the
Colochian King fall in love with Jason” (128). Their motive has more to do with Medea’s magical skills than any sort of matchmaking: “The maiden…knew how to work very powerful magic” that could be used to assist Jason in his quest (128). The plan works, but
Medea’s betrayal of her family results in the murder of her brother and exile. Jason, having fallen in love with Medea, takes her home with him to Greece. On the way,
Medea and Jason stop to retrieve the Golden Fleece. The fleece is guarded by a serpent
67 (or a dragon in other versions): “The guardian serpent was very terrible, but Medea approached it fearlessly and singing a sweet magical song she charmed it to sleep”
(Hamilton 131).
After arriving in Greece with the fleece, Medea and Jason live in peace for some time. They have several sons (the exact number fluctuates in the myths), but then Jason falls “deeply in love with a beautiful young girl, Glauce, the daughter of Creon, king of
Corinth” (Schwab 138). Jason dissolves his marriage to Medea. In retaliation for his betrayal, Medea murders Glauce by sending her poison-soaked robes. Medea then kills the sons she bore Jason before riding away in “a chariot drawn by dragons,” leaving
Jason in despair (Hamilton 135). The Medea myth was also the basis of Euripides’s famous tragedy Medea. The play follows the lives of Jason and Medea just as Jason has left Medea for Glauce. Medea is far more streamlined than the myths, with a single narrative and plot, ending with Medea “holding the bodies of her murdered children” over Jason’s head and “foretelling his miserable end” (Morford and Lenardon 486).
However, the play closely follows the events detailed in the myth.
“Edge” is not the first Plath poem to reference Medea’s story. In “Aftermath,” a poem included in The Colossus, the speaker writes:
Compelled by calamity's magnet They loiter and stare as if the house Burnt-out were theirs, or as if they thought Some scandal might any minute ooze From a smoke-choked closet into light; No deaths, no prodigious injuries Glut these hunters after an old meat, Blood-spoor of the austere tragedies.
Mother Medea in a green smock Moves humbly as any housewife through
68 Her ruined apartments, taking stock Of charred shoes, the sodden upholstery: Cheated of the pyre and the rack, The crowd sucks her last tear and turns away.
Like “Edge,” this is nonjudgmental look at Medea. As in “Lady Lazarus,” the curious crowd suffers judgment. However, “Aftermath” does not follow or directly reference the events of the myth. Instead, it assumes enough prior knowledge of Medea’s story to place her in some kind of context, and the subject of the poem is actually the onlookers’ voyeurism. “Edge” contains many of the basic elements of the Medea story, though the poem plays off of the Medea myth rather than explicitly following it. Medea lives in the myth. In “Edge,” her imitator dies.
In “Edge,” “The woman is perfected” in death, not by seeking revenge, though death itself could be some sort of coup d’etat. Nothing of her life is known, only her death. “Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment,” insinuating that she has conquered something great to come to this end. Jonathan Ellis notes in “On Sylvia Plath’s
Letters” that “In ‘Edge’, another speaker ‘wears the smile of accomplishment’, though this accomplishment is only possible in death. Plath consistently imagines the smile as a sign of attack rather than welcome” (25). This smile suggests happiness, however bitter.
Her other “accomplishment” could be the murder of “each dead child,” a Medea-like attack on their father. However, whether or not the children are actually dead is questionable. The speaker writes that “The illusion of a Greek necessity / Flows in the scrolls of her toga,” which can be interpreted as the woman believing that this “Greek necessity,” this tragic end for her children, was unnecessary, and the deaths are a mere poetic device. The idea of “accomplishment” is also tied to “The illusion of a Greek
69 necessity” by a comma, suggesting that the “accomplishment” in question is not death, but some sort of achievement in life that the woman now views as an “illusion.”
However, because the moon is the speaker, it may be that the moon believes that the woman’s choice was influenced by an “illusion.” The speaker also states that the woman wears no shoes, she has walked far enough for them to fall from her feet:
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over.
Death is at the end of a long road.
The events of Medea’s myth are echoed in the treatment of the children. “Each dead child coiled” is compared to “a white serpent,” like the serpent Medea charmed to sleep. Their whiteness could come from their being pale as death, or to symbolize purity—serpents are generally associated with temptation, and Medea struggles with her decision to kill her sons. These children are innocent tempters. The imagery of “Edge” grows more complex in these stanzas:
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
Metaphorically, “…each little / Pitcher of milk, now empty” could refer to the woman’s milk drying up, or her children growing too old for it. Their deaths have brought them back to her. They are “coiled” against her. There is a hint of naturalism in these lines—as
Annas points out, “the language is so beautiful that the reader is seduced toward accepting the poem’s conclusion” (122). Annas believes that “the dead woman and her
70 children are described as Greek statue,” but her observation is complicated by the naturalism inserted in the lines (123). As the poem goes:
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
Great sculpture does often employ posing devices to imply movements that support a narrative. However, far more sophisticated actions are evoked here. The speaker is comparing death to the close of flowers at night, a retreat into nature and the natural order of life. The way the “odors bleed” is reminiscent of potent, rotting funeral flowers.
As “Edge” closes, the emphasis is moved from the woman to the moon. The moon has been watching the proceedings closely but without interference. In some versions of the Medea myth, Medea appealed to Hecate, for whom she was a priestess, to condone her decision to kill her children. Hecate refused, but Medea murdered her sons regardless. Here, “The moon has nothing to be sad about” because “She is used to this sort of thing.” Another night, another tragedy. The moon is aloof and emotionally unaffected by human tragedy. She watches in silence.
Leonard Baskin’s 1970 ink on paper print Let Not Your Sorrow shows a corpse seated with its back against a wall. A line bisects the forehead. Above the line is white, below the line is solid black. In black lettering at the top of the print reads “LET NOT
YOUR SORROW DIE THOUGH I AM DEAD” in stark, black block letters. The title quotes Aaron of William Shakespeare’s play Titus Andronicus in Act 5, Scene 1:
71 Oft have I digg’d up dead men from their graves, And set them upright at their dear friends’ doors, Even when their sorrow almost were forgot; And on their skins, as on the bark of trees, Have with my knife carved in Roman letters, ‘Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.’
The print’s composition is asymmetrical. A rigid grid of vertical and horizontal lines unite the composition. Each of these lines is thin and solid. The lines of the body are sketchy and continuous, whereas the lines of the doorframe are straight and linear. The print is composed in a series of Ls. The print has two lines, on the left and the bottom, holding the composition together and entertaining the viewer’s eye. The right side dissipates into white. The body is also an L, and the arm is held rigidly to the corpse’s side. It is also bent to evoke the shape of an L. Oddly, the right hand of the corpse is not resting inertly on the ground. Rather, it appears to be poised against the outside of the thigh. Baskin would possibly argue that he is showing rigor mortis in defense of his rendering.
The print is starkly black and white with some mid-tones. As a subject, the print is about prolonged commemorations of death—a morbid physical lingering. This suggests a sort of endless wake, a need to analyze under what circumstances this sort of prolonged mourning is appropriate. Over the course of his career Baskin created many bookplates, and he may have initially intended for this print to be one of them.
The corpse is naked, its bones beginning to show through the face, the eyes are black holes, the teeth outlined through the skin. The body is white against the black background, though the black is seeping into the torso. The body is also stiff and
72 unnaturally straight-backed. The arm is resting against the side of the leg, not the base of the print, and shadows stretch from its fingertips out onto the thigh.
Tonally, the print is haunting. The body is used as a crude reminder that little survives physical demise, yet in one way a person does live on, if only in the memory of others. The title suggests a forced remembrance, as though those left behind would prefer to forget but cannot. Let Not Your Sorrow Die highlights the fact that the woman’s body in “Edge” is prominently displayed as well. Here, Baskin is addressing memory and commemoration. There is no indication of any spiritual presence or defining features on the corpse. It is sparse and empty, with the corpse refusing to physically settle into the blackness.
Overlaying this naturalism and strict adherence to death, Baskin has commented on the emotional ties the dead hold to the living. This anonymous corpse is empty, a body of a person someone held very dear. The inscription, “LET NOT YOUR SORROW DIE
THOUGH I AM DEAD,” is small but powerful. It is composed entirely of block capitals.
This suggests a haunting, but this haunting has little to do with the corpse. That body is empty. It is some kind of action, whether an action of the body’s when still alive or an action of the person that the body has been left for, that remains. The inscription complicates this with the idea that someone else has dug up this body and left it out for viewing. Someone else feels that the ‘owner’ of this dead thing ought to remember it, to view it once more. There is judgment here, but whether this judgment is meant to teach a lesson or inspire guilt or remembrance is left to the viewer’s discretion.
Of all of Baskin’s artwork, Let Not Your Sorrow is perhaps the best example of the narrative commonalities between his work and Plath’s. This print echoes Plath’s
73 poem “Edge” in many ways and also illuminates a previously hidden meaning of the poem. The corpse is anonymous, stiff as a statue. Although the skin is slowly falling away from the face, there is nothing else to suggest how much time has passed. In
“Edge,” “the woman is perfected” in death, as though she is likewise frozen. The body is not posed in any tortured way, but almost unnaturally relaxed, perfectly postured. The corpse sits in the dark, far beneath the light. There is also a stark finality to this print.
There is no suggestion of hope, no unnaturally preserved rendering of the corpse. This is a factual print. “Edge” is easily read as a tragic poem, which in many ways it is.
However, the formality and lack of visible grief in Let Not Your Sorrow illuminates the possibility that the woman’s death in “Edge” is not tragic at all, but truly an
“accomplishment” and natural part of life. Let Not Your Sorrow shows mourning after death, but there is no implication that the person is painful to recall. Instead, it is the presence of the body, possibly placed there by outsiders, that brings pain, not the person himself. Therefore, “Edge” may be a comment on the pain the woman’s death will bring those she has left behind rather than a critique of her supposed motivations.
74
CHAPTER V
CONCLUSION
To his house the bodiless Come to barter endlessly Vision, wisdom, for bodies Palpable as his, and weighty. -“Sculptor”
Sylvia Plath and Leonard Baskin focus on the darker aspects of life in their work: emotional chaos, the shadows of mortality and death. Yet they do not bask in emotional nihilism. Instead, both of these artists illuminate the emotional landscape of the darkness they walk through, harnessing the ever-present brutality in life and molding it into art.
Baskin does this with his 1956 print The Tormented One / Tormented Man, placing the harassed subject of the print just out of reach of his pursuers. The subject’s face is ravaged, yet a small smile is on his lips. In the background, tiny but still visible, flies a bird representing his sanity, frantically attempting to catch up. As in Plath’s poem
“Pursuit,” those pursuing the subject of The Tormented One / Tormented Man are a part of the subject, missing pieces of the puzzle of his self.
One of the most technically subtle similarities between Plath and Baskin’s work is their use of nature to create parallel narratives. In her 1961 poem “The Rabbit Catcher,”
Plath uses nature to intertwine two stories: that of snaring rabbits, and that of being in a relationship. She slowly reveals the state of the speaker’s relationship by comparing it to 75 being trapped in a snare. The layering and doubling of “The Rabbit Catcher” is echoed by
Baskin in his 1955 print Sorrowing and Terrified Man. The large, grieving face of a man is interrupted by the eruption of hands, trees and animals across his features. Are these natural images the true narrative of the piece, or would the man be featureless without them?
Finally, Plath and Baskin’s narratives collide in their most powerful common subject: death. The way these two artists use death is unique in their uncompromising understand of its finality. Plath’s poem “Edge” observes the body of a dead, anonymous woman. There is no sentiment or glorifying the woman’s demise, she now only has meaning for those who knew her. Likewise, Baskin’s 1970 print Let Not Your Sorrow displays a nameless corpse lying out, somehow partially preserved. The corpse has no discerning features, but the body holds meaning for someone regardless of its lifelessness.
Although their forums may be different, both Sylvia Plath and Leonard Baskin pare down human experience to its essentials. They take what appears to be terrifying and ugly and transform it into something strangely beautiful and nuanced. Plath’s poetry and
Baskin’s art shows that although art forms may be different, their perceptions of emotional chaos, the shadows of mortality and death can correspond regardless of medium.
76
LITERATURE CITED
Alexander, Paul. Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath. New York, New York: Da Capo Press, 1999. Print.
Annas, Pamela J. A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York, New York: Greenwood Press, 1988. Print.
Baskin, Leonard. The Complete Prints of Leonard Baskin. Ed. Alan Fern and Judith O’Sullivan. Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1984. Print.
Battersby, Matilda. “Unseen Sylvia Plath drawings go on show.” The Independent, 1 Nov. 2011. Web. 17 Jan. 2012.
Brain, Tracy. The Other Sylvia Plath. Essex, England: Pearson Education Limited, 2001. Print.
Brennan, Claire. The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Print.
Bronfen, Elisbeth. Sylvia Plath. Plymouth, United Kingdom: Northcote House Publishers, Ltd., 1998. Print.
Campbell, Wendy. “Remembering Sylvia.” The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium. Ed. Charles Newman. Indiana University Press, 1970. 182-186. Print.
Connors, Kathleen. “Living Color: The Interactive Arts of Sylvia Plath.” Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual. Ed. Kathleen Connors and Susan Bayley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. 4-144. Print.
Connors, Kathleen, and Bayley, Susan. Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Print.
Cornell, Robert. Leonard Baskin: The Northampton Years. Springfield, MA: Cornell Galleries, 1977. Print.
Crowther, Gail, and Steinberg, Peter K. “These Ghostly Archives, Redux.” Plath Profiles 3 (2010): 119-138. Print.
77 Davison, Peter. The Fading Smile: Poets in Boston, 1955-1960, from Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath. New York, New York: Alfred A. Knof, 1994. Print.
Drake, Barbara. “Perfection Is Terrible, it Cannot Have Children….” Rev. of Ariel, by Sylvia Plath. The Northwest Review 9 (Summer 1967) 101-103. Print.
Ellis, Jonathan. “ ‘Mailed into space’: On Sylvia Plath’s Letters.” Representing Sylvia Plath. Ed. Susan Bayley and Tracy Brain. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2011. 13-31. Print.
Feinstein, Elaine. Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet. New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2001. Print.
Fern, Alan. Foreward. The Complete Prints of Leonard Baskin. Ed. Alan Fern and Judith O’Sullivan. Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1984. Print.
Hamilton, Edith. Mythology. New York, New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1999. Print.
Hughes, Frieda. Foreward. Ariel: The Restored Edition. Ed. Frieda Hughes. New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004. xi-xxi. Print.
Hughes, Ted. “The Art of Poetry LXXI.” The Paris Review 134 (1995): 54-94. Print.
Hughes, Ted. “Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems.” The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium. Ed. Charles Newman. Indiana University Press, 1970. 187-195. Print.
Kroll, Judith. Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York, New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1976. Print.
MacLeish, Archibald. Preface. Figures of Dead Men. University of Massachusetts Press, 1968. Print.
Michaelson, Richard. “Leonard and Ted (And Me).” South Carolina Review 40.2 (2008): 3-8. Print.
Middlebrook, Diane. Her Husband: Hughes and Plath—A Marriage. New York, New York: Viking, 2003. Print.
Morford, Mark P.O., and Lenardon, Robert J. Classical Mythology. White Plains, New York: Longman, 1995. Print.
Orr, Peter. Interview with Sylvia Plath. BBC (1962).
78 Plath, Sylvia. Ariel: The Restored Edition. Ed. Frieda Hughes. New York, New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004. Print.
Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1981. Print.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York, New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971. Print.
Plath, Sylvia. Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963. Ed. Aurelia Plath. New York, New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1975. Print.
Plath, Sylvia. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Karen Kukil. New York, New York: Random House, 2000. Print.
Rosenblatt, Jon. Sylvia Plath: The Drama of Initiation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979. Print.
Schwab, Gustav. Gods and Heroes: Myth and Epics of Ancient Greece. New York, New York: Pantheon, 1974. Print.
Shakespeare, William. “Titus Andronicus.” The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2005, Print.
Steiner, George. “Dying is an Art.” The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium. Ed. Charles Newman. Indiana University Press, 1970. 211-218. Print.
Drake, Barbara. “Perfection Is Terrible, it Cannot Have Children….” Rev. of Ariel, by Sylvia Plath. The Northwest Review 9 (Summer 1967) 101-103. Print.
79
APPENDICES
80
APPENDIX A
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF SYLVIA PLATH
Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932 to Aurelia Schober Plath and Otto
Plath (Alexander 20). She spent the early part of her childhood in Winthrop,
Massachusetts, later moving to Wellesley, Massachusetts after her father died when she was eight. An intelligent and ambitious young person, she graduated from high school
“first in her class” and “one of only twenty-three members of the National Honors
Society” (62). Plath attended Smith College on an “$850 scholarship that was funded by
Olive Higgins Prouty” from 1950-1955 (Feinstein 52). Plath graduated a year late because of a nervous breakdown and subsequent suicide attempt in the summer of 1953.
While at Smith, Plath “was elected to Alpha Phi Kappa Psi, an Honours Society for the
Arts, and was appointed to the editorial board of the Smith Review” amongst her other academic achievements (53). Upon graduating from Smith College in 1955, Plath moved to England to “study in Cambridge” on a Fulbright scholarship (55).
While in England Plath met and fell in love with the poet Ted Hughes. They married on June 16, 1956, at first keeping their marriage concealed so as to not jeopardize Plath’s scholarship (Alexander 190). Following her final year at Cambridge, where she earned “a respectable, if not dazzling, 2.1” Plath accepted a teaching position at her American alma mater, Smith College, for the 1957-1958 academic year (Feinstein
81 74). Plath and Hughes’s time in Northampton resulted in one important friendship. On
May 4, 1958, Plath and Hughes met the sculptor Leonard Baskin and his wife, Esther
(Feinstein 83). Their relationship with the Baskins lasted through each of their lifetimes—Plath died in 1963, Hughes in 1998. After Plath’s death, Hughes collaborated on several books with Baskin including Crow and Howls & Whispers.
Neither Plath nor Hughes enjoyed the academic life at Smith. Plath in particular felt a kinship with Leonard Baskin’s “avowed scorn of offices-in-the-art-building, department meetings, and such” (385). This was an aversion Hughes shared as well. Even after their friendship with the Baskins was established, Plath and Hughes did not stay in
Northampton for long. Both were dissatisfied with teaching. In her commentary in Letters
Home: Correspondence 1950-1963 Aurelia Plath, Sylvia Plath’s mother, writes that
“Sylvia, frustrated because teaching left her no time for writing, feared that her talent would become hopelessly rusty” (321). After the 1957 winter holidays, Plath “notified the Smith English Department on January 5, 1958 that she would not return” for another academic year (Davison 165). She and Hughes “[vowed] to live as independent writers” and rented “a two-room apartment on Beacon Hill in Boston, planning to devote the remainder of 1958 and 1959 to writing” after the 1957-1958 academic year finished
(Davison 164, Plath 322). In August of 1958, just before the September move to Boston,
Plath’s poem “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor” was published in The New Yorker
(Alexander 221).
In Boston, Plath restarted the therapy sessions she had largely discontinued after returning to Smith in the Spring of 1954 after her Summer 1953 suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization (Middlebrook 124). She also audited Robert Lowell’s writing
82 seminar along with Anne Sexton and George Starbuck (Sexton 174). Plath later “landed the position of part-time secretary at Massachusetts General Hospital’s adult psychiatric clinic” and worked there for several months as well (Alexander 223). The job served as an inspiration for Plath’s short story “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams” (223). Plath and Hughes continued writing throughout 1959 and traveled across the United States during the summer before arriving for an “eleven-week residence” at Yaddo, the artist’s colony, in September (234). While at Yaddo Plath wrote, amongst other poems, “The
Colossus,” which she later chose as the title of her first published volume of poetry (238).
In December, having discovered that Plath was pregnant, Plath and Hughes moved back to England.
Upon their arrival in England Plath and Hughes resided in London. In April 1960,
Plath gave birth to a daughter, Frieda Rebecca Hughes. Plath’s former professor Wendy
Campbell recalls in her memoir “Remembering Sylvia” that Plath and Hughes visited her in “Cambridge for a day and a night, bringing Frieda and a friend of theirs who had been staying with them” (185). She also recalls: “this friend (of whom they were very fond)” was “an American sculptor who had been with them for six weeks” (185). Although
Campbell does not name this sculptor; it is unlikely that he is anyone other than Leonard
Baskin. In October 1960, The Colossus was published in England (Feinstein 104).
Plath began writing her only completed novel, The Bell Jar, sometime in early
1961. The novel was largely autobiographical and drew on Plath’s breakdown in the
Summer of 1953 for material. In Rough Magic, Paul Alexander states that Plath wrote the novel through the Spring and Summer of 1961, finishing in August just before Plath and
Hughes moved to Court Green in Devon, England (260, 267-8). In Her Husband, Plath
83 scholar Diane Middlebrook contests this claim and asserts that “Plath rapidly wrote The
Bell Jar” and that “it took only six weeks” beginning in March (127). Regardless of this inconsistency, Plath had The Bell Jar completed by Fall 1961, as she was chosen to receive a $2,000 grant from the Eugene F. Saxton Foundation to write a novel—which she informed her mother she had already written (Alexander 267). Specifically, Plath told her mother that she “had already completed ‘a batch of stuff’ that was ‘tied up in four parcels’ and ready to be mailed” to the foundation as needed to fulfill the requirements of the grant (267). Heinemann had also accepted the novel for publication, though Plath chose to publish The Bell Jar under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas due to its subject matter (267-8).
In late August 1961, Plath, Hughes and Frieda moved to Court Green, where Plath gave birth to her son, Nicholas, in January 1962 (Feinstein 115). In May, The Colossus was published in the United States. That October, Plath and Hughes separated.
Throughout the Fall of 1962 Plath wrote, amongst other poems, “Daddy,” “The Jailor,”
“Lyonnesse,” “Ariel,” and “Lady Lazarus.” On October 16, 1962, in a letter to her mother included in Letters Home, Plath wrote: “I am a genius of a writer; I have it in me.
I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name” (468). In December
Plath and her two children moved to London, where she composed the final thirteen poems in what is widely regarded as the Ariel sequence (Hughes xi, xiv). On February
11, 1963, Plath died.
In 1965, two years after Plath died in London, her last book of poetry, Ariel, was published in the United Kingdom, followed by publication in the United States in 1966
(Hughes xi). Ariel achieved what Plath predicted to her mother—the volume established
84 her as one of the 20th century’s greatest poets. The 1965 Ariel was based upon a manuscript Plath left on her desk at the time of her death titled Ariel and Other Poems.
When published, the 1965 Ariel “was a somewhat different collection from the manuscript [Sylvia Plath] left behind” (xii). Given Plath’s tendency to glean subject matter from real life, to appease publishers and prevent hurting friends of Plath and Ted
Hughes, Hughes “left out some of the more lacerating poems” Plath had initially chosen for inclusion in her original Ariel. In 1981, The Collected Poems was published and won the first posthumously awarded Pulitzer Prize. Hughes “included in the Notes the contents list of [Plath’s] Ariel manuscript” (xvii). This caused an unforeseen backlash, as few had been aware of Hughes’s rearrangement of Ariel prior to its publication. In 2004,
Ariel: The Restored Edition was released. Frieda Hughes contributed an extensive introduction explaining, in defense of her father’s editing, why the alterations were made to the original manuscript.
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APPENDIX B
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF LEONARD BASKIN
Leonard Baskin, sculptor, printmaker and poet, was born on August 15, 1922 in
New Brunswick, New Jersey and died on June 3, 2000. From 1937 to 1939 he studied under Maurice Glickman at the Educational Alliance in New York before attending the
New York University of Architecture and Allied Arts from 1939 to 1941 (Fern 7). After marrying Esther Tane in 1946, Baskin received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation
Fellowship for Sculpture and earned his B.A. at the New School for Social Research shortly thereafter (Cornell 1). In the early 1950s he studied in Paris, France at Academie de la Grande Chaumiere before receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1953 (Cornell 1).
From 1953 to 1974 Baskin taught at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he met Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. (Fern 8).
In his introduction to Leonard Baskin: The Northampton Years, Robert Cornell observes that Baskin “has received some of the highest critical acclaim bestowed upon any artist” (3). According to Alan Fern, “Baskin first came to public notice…as a printmaker” in 1952 (7). He achieved considerable attention for his 1950s “series of figures of dead men made to lie on a floor or on the ground” (MacLeish 1). Throughout the 1960s Baskin continued to teach at Smith College and garnered many awards, including Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts’ Widener Medal (Cornell 2). After the
86 death of his first wife, Baskin married Lisa Unger in 1967. Two years later he received the Gold Medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in New York (Cornell 2).
In 1974, Baskin resigned his post at Smith College and moved to England, where he lived until 1983.
During his time in England, Baskin collaborated on several books with Ted
Hughes, including the critically acclaimed Crow and Capriccio (Feinstein 226). Baskin also illustrated the limited editions of Sylvia Plath’s Pursuit and Dialogue Over a Ouija
Board after her death. After his return to the United States in 1983, Baskin continued to sculpt and published extensively. He also illustrated a limited edition supplement to
Hughes’s final book of poetry, Birthday Letters, titled Howls & Whispers, just before
Hughes’s death in 1998. Both books were written about Hughes’s relationship with
Sylvia Plath (Feinstein 232). In June of 2000, Baskin died.
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