The Smashed Patriarch: Sylvia Plath’s Realism
by Austin Allen
1.
The colossus is broken. The Father lies in ruins. The grieving daughter tries to glue him back together. After much fruitless labor, she manages to step away and “open [her] lunch.” It’s only a partial escape (she eats beneath funereal “black cypress” trees), but it proves grief hasn’t consumed her. For a moment, she’s doing something ordinary and healthy—not tending to a lifeless wreck but sustaining her own life.
*
In 1946, a teenager named Phil McCurdy stopped by Sylvia Plath’s house to use the bathroom. I mention this fact not because it’s vital to Plath’s story but because I’m amazed that we know it at all. It pops up early in Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath (2020), a literary biography that redefines the term comprehensive—and possibly redefines its genre. At 937 pages (over thirty pages per year of Plath’s life), the book offers a portrait so granular and layered that the proper term escapes me: stereoscopic? microscopic? kaleidoscopic? Clark could not have reconstructed Plath’s saga more minutely with location tracking. She’s got her subject’s number, from the boyfriends to The Bell Jar, from the cradle to that weathered grave in Heptonstall.
Several factors conspire in Clark’s achievement and will make it hard to match. First, Plath’s life was both tragically brief and operatically intense. (Few poets can say the same: even if we had a day-by-day chronicle of Housman, who would read it?) Second, there’s a sprawling record of that life, not only through Plath’s poetry and fiction but through her correspondence, her journaling, and the writings of her poet-husband, Ted Hughes. Third, Clark has secured access to several formerly inaccessible sources, including unpublished letters, journal entries, and hospital records, plus Hughes’s full archives. Fourth, Clark is as dogged as the best shoe-leather journalist: we get the scoop about McCurdy’s bathroom visit only because she tracked him down seventy years later. (He recalled “Sylvia” fondly, had dated her briefly; she once wrote to him about loving life’s “individual ephemeral quality.”)
Finally, there’s a factor I can only call charisma: the force of personality that lodged Plath in the memories of everyone who knew her. From a young age, she behaved like the future subject of a marquee biography. Her life seems at times outrageously overwritten, loaded with literary gold down to the last rift. I lost count of the coincidences and parallels I marked with exclamation points, but here’s one famous example: Plath wrote her undergraduate thesis on Dostoevsky’s motif of the double, only to live a life eerily full of doubles. There was Ted Hughes, her dark double in marriage and art; Assia Wevill, Hughes’s mistress-turned-partner, who copied Plath’s method of suicide; and Anne Sexton, Plath’s friend and fellow “confessional” poet, whose suicide was also notably Plath-like. All three figures hover—ghostly, transformed—in the mirror of Plath’s masterpiece, “Daddy.”
Clark recreates the life so vibrantly that her biography takes on a novel’s pulse. Like a Flaubertian narrator, she prefers to reserve judgment and let facts speak for themselves, but she can’t resist a little tenderness toward her heroine. She closes with a heartfelt plea on Plath’s behalf: “Let us not desert her.”
Though Clark builds from the ground up, she never shies from the macroscopic. Red Comet confronts the largest possible questions about Plath’s legacy. It dispenses with pop caricatures to give us the taboo-busting Plath, the Plath of irony and masquerade, whose lyrics seemed to “score the emerging feminist movement” she never lived to see. It complicates Plath’s “confessionalism,” noting that Plath met M. L. Rosenthal, the critic who coined that term—and agreed with him that “putting yourself right into the poem ... wasn’t worth it unless you get past the personal.”
Clark persuasively casts the poems and The Bell Jar as dissident literature, subversions of a culture that often framed female dissent as mental illness. (And the mentally ill as undesirables—to be sidelined, locked up, or tortured with crude “therapies,” as Plath was.) These ideas are not new in Plath studies, but Clark brings formidable evidence and rhetoric to bear on them. Of the Bell Jar narrator, she writes: “Esther’s sick society—warmongering, anti-Semitic, racist, classist, and homophobic—has driven her to the brink of insanity.” Plainly, she feels the same is true of Plath.
But Clark does shy, at times, from the awkward matter of Plath’s own prejudice. Novice readers of Ariel will be startled to find a racial slur right in the title poem. This slur has no artistic justification and has nixed the poem from many contemporary syllabi.[1] Yet Clark dissects “Ariel” at great length without discussing the slur at all. True, she covers some of Plath’s other inflammatory writings; she is not in the glow-up business. But a biography shouldn’t kick anything under the rug—after 937 pages, there shouldn’t even be a rug.
Clark’s discomfort joins a long critical history. As a feminist icon, Plath has acquired both a halo and a target on her back. These distractions have made her politics hard to gauge and tempting to finesse. In her public life, as Red Comet shows, she was an earnest liberal. At age seventeen, she co-wrote an anti-war editorial for the Christian Science Monitor; as an adult, she made a collage mocking Eisenhower’s militarism and once got angry at Hughes for attending a nuclear disarmament rally without her. By 1961, she was starting to mingle in London’s leftist circles.
At the same time, the politics of her poems defy easy taxonomy. Clark writes that, in Hughes’s opinion, “Plath was ‘Laurentian,’ not ‘women’s lib’—that is, a disciple of D. H. Lawrence’s sexually liberated, creative philosophy, not a campaigner for women’s rights.” No one should take this opinion at face value, but no honest reader would dismiss it outright. Plath can seem a fierce vitalist allied to no cause but that of art. Rather than visions of progress, Ariel delivers a near-apocalyptic indictment of humanity. Still, some of her poems (including “Stings,” the source of Clark’s title) contain ringing tributes to female power.
Plath’s vitality seems only to grow with the years. So does her notoriety. Hers is a life we can’t let go, a legacy in no danger of desertion. Her images still mesmerize, but what can her ideas mean to us now? Where do her politics ultimately point? Tackling these questions requires asking where her beliefs point—and, in turn, examining her disbelief.
2.
Plath was the kind of teenager who fell hard for Nietzsche. This attraction twined in complex ways with her German roots, which were both a source of family pride and (per Clark) “a secret source of shame.” During World War I, the Bureau of Investigation (the proto-FBI) had interrogated Plath’s father, Otto, about his loyalties as a German immigrant. During World War II, Plath suffered ostracism and taunting at school. Still, her love of Nietzsche was a genuine affinity that postdated the war. Her mother, Aurelia, gave her a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra in 1949, and though Nietzsche “was associated with Nazism and atheism, and would have been considered a potentially dangerous moral guide for a young middle-class woman,” Plath took his mind to heart. In her early twenties, she called him:
…my favorite philosopher (the wit and poetry and shock of his epigrams makes my soul ‘sneeze’ itself awake, to use a Nietzschean verb!).
Encountering this in Red Comet, I couldn’t help hearing the speaker of “Daddy,” who has lived in her father’s grip, “Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.” Does Nietzsche’s verb lurk behind this line? If so, Daddy hasn’t just scared the speaker into silence but stunted her soul. Maybe that casual “Achoo” is both a nod to a forebear and a sign of rebellious awakening.
In any case, what clinched the affinity wasn’t Nietzsche’s nationality or way with metaphor. It was his godlessness, which still defines him in the public imagination. His announcement of God’s demise (from Zarathustra) was also the announcement of a new human “project,” as R. Lanier Anderson recounts:
[A] common basis for collective life that was supposed to have been immutable and invulnerable has turned out to be not only less stable than we assumed, but incomprehensibly mortal—and in fact, already lost. The response called for by such a turn of events is mourning and deep disorientation. . . .
Thus, Nietzsche argues, we are faced with a difficult, long term restoration project in which the most cherished aspects of our way of life must be ruthlessly investigated, dismantled, and then reconstructed in healthier form. . . .
The mortality of the mythic Father; the “mourning,” “disorientation,” and difficult “restoration”—this is Plath all over. This is the undersong of “The Colossus,” of “Daddy,” of her whole artistic search for stability and healing.
Clark affirms that the young Sylvia “viewed religious doctrine with Nietzschean distrust.” In high school, Plath confessed her atheist leanings to a pen pal and sighed in her journal: “You God, whom I invoke without belief, only I can choose, and I am responsible. (Oh, the grimness of atheism!)” Years later, in a letter, she called herself “a pagan-Unitarian at best.” Weeks before her death, she told a priest whom she’d been corresponding with: “I am myself, ironically, an atheist. And like a certain sort of atheist, my poems are God-obsessed, priest-obsessed.”
Weighing this evidence, Luke Ferreter concludes that “Plath was a poet of the death of God.” This is surely accurate but stops a step short. In the months before her suicide, she became a poet of deicide, of the murder of God. Her atheism tipped over into anti-theism—or was it misotheism, a hatred born of heartbreak? “Daddy, I have had to kill you.”
Plath the confessionalist, the enfant terrible, the psychological “case”: in the scholarly portrait gallery, all have crowded out Plath the nonbeliever. Her poetry is rarely labeled philosophical; even some of her devotees treat her as a bundle of raw nerves, not a thinker.
Raise that critical lens and a lot snaps into focus. Consider this surprise from Red Comet: on her first day in Robert Lowell’s seminar at Boston University, she declared Wallace Stevens her favorite poet. Why? Beyond a few apprentice poems, her style hardly resembles his. Her bracing forward charge seems the opposite of his sinuous meditations. In many ways, Stevens was the great anti-confessionalist: he insisted that “Poetry is not personal,” kept his poems hygienically free of memoir, and even shunned the word “I” whenever possible.
But Plath’s claim was a true confession: she and Stevens share a bond deeper than style. All of Stevens’s work circles one overwhelming theme, which is also Nietzsche’s theme: the search for belief in the wake of religion, for “what will suffice” in the absence of God. As Stevens wrote in a 1940 letter: “The poetry that created the idea of God will either adapt it to our different intelligence, or create a substitute for it, or make it unnecessary.” That was his complex quest for over fifty years.
He described his early poem “Sunday Morning” as “an expression of paganism” and never greatly modified that stance (dodgy rumors of a deathbed conversion notwithstanding). And while no one would call him a strident foe of patriarchy, he was willing to shatter a colossus now and then. His “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” sequence includes a parable about “The great statue of the General Du Puy,” which looks “a bit absurd,” “belong[s] / Among our more vestigial states of mind,” and becomes “rubbish in the end.” It’s easy to imagine Plath reading this with relish.
“To find what will suffice” is Stevens’s assignment for modern poets. To find what will do, now that God won’t. And here another Plath joke clicks into place:
You do not do, you do not do
Any more…
She has taken up Stevens’s theme, transferred it to the Freudian family sphere, and dramatized it with great wit and daring. (Stevens became permanently estranged from his own father in early adulthood.) As the poet Diane Seuss has said, Plath is “not talking so much about her father as the Fathers.” The Heavenly one included.
“Ariel” riffs even more clearly on Stevens. In his late poem “The Planet on the Table” (1954), Stevens borrows the name of Shakespeare’s sprite as his alter ego: “Ariel was glad he had written his poems … His self and the sun were one.” The “Ariel” speaker mimics this pagan union, becoming “at one with the drive / Into the red / Eye, the cauldron of morning.”
In her own way, too, Plath embraces what Stevens called “the essential gaudiness of poetry”: a verbal extravagance that laughs off puritan plainness and death’s austerity. This impulse follows her even into the pit of depression. Her poem “Child,” which Clark likens to “the [suicide] note Plath never left,” ends by describing “this troublous / Wringing of hands, this dark / Ceiling without a star.” Troublous—the word is so glittering, it distracts from the misery.
What about famous atheist poets Plath didn’t claim as models? Did she relate to their work at all? Borrow from it?
She never commented much on Hardy’s poetry, but in her journals, she calls him, intriguingly, “a moving, highly kindred mind.” She never said much about Percy Shelley, either, but here the connections start to multiply.
First, there’s the clear kinship between Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and Plath’s “Colossus,” the two great English-language poems about cracked statues. Second, as Jahan Ramazani points out in “‘Daddy, I Have Had to Kill You’: Plath, Rage, and the Modern Elegy,” there’s the gravitation toward elegies that contemplate drowning and side with death:
[Plath’s “Full Fathom Five”] ends in a paradoxical image of both fulfillment and self-punishment: to achieve her father’s underwater bed would also be to drown herself. . . . Plath extends the anti-consolatory strain of elegy, of which the most famous example is Shelley’s suicidal counsel at the end of Adonais: “No more let Life divide what Death can join together.”
Then: more “Ariel” links. Shelley drowned after falling from a schooner called the Ariel (renamed from the Don Juan). His gravestone quotes Ariel’s song from The Tempest, a constant influence on Plath (as in “Full Fathom Five”). He even used the name as an alter ego in “To a Lady, with a Guitar”:
When you die, the silent Moon
In her interlunar swoon
Is not sadder in her cell
Than deserted Ariel.
It’s possible that Plath’s very last poem, “Edge,” talks back to these lines: “The moon has nothing to be sad about, / Staring from her hood of bone.” (If God was no final authority, why should Shelley be?)
Callow Shelley, charging around Europe, leaving a trail of wounded hearts and squalling babies—could this man have influenced modern feminist poetics? He could; Plath’s contemporary Adrienne Rich saw a great deal in him (here, in Poetry and Commitment):
For him there was no contradiction among poetry, political philosophy, and active confrontation with illegitimate authority. This was perfectly apparent to the reviewer in the High Tory Quarterly who mocked him as follows:
Mr. Shelley would abrogate our laws. . . . He would abolish the rights of property. . . . He would pull down our churches, level our Establishment, and burn our bibles. . . .
For Shelley, God was the pattern of all “illegitimate authority”: undefinable, unprovable, unaccountable. Worship, therefore, was a kind of original intellectual sin. This posture turns many of his poems—including “Queen Mab,” which Rich proceeds to quote—into something like broadsides against patriarchy (“Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower”). Rich also reminds us that:
For [Shelley], art bore an integral relationship to the “struggle between Revolution and Oppression.” His [Ode to the] West Wind was the “trumpet of a prophecy,” driving “dead thoughts ... like wither’d leaves, to quicken a new birth.”
I wonder if that ode helped quicken Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” with its closing vision of phoenix-like renewal. Here is Shelley’s poem: “Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth / Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!” And Plath’s: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” Both writers have fused old myths into a secular, dissenting “prophecy.” Both sound ready to burn things down.
If Plath drew on a tradition of atheist-poets, we should expect her to have influenced it, too—as I think she has.
Take the curious case of Philip Larkin. Ten years her senior, he was one of her early admirers, though he downplayed this fact in correspondence.[2] In 1960, he helped choose her poem “Medallion” for a prize awarded by Critical Quarterly.[3] In a 1982 review of her Collected, as James Booth observes, Larkin “praised her late work in terms of admiration which he accorded to no other contemporary poet.” I suspect that, now and then, he went to school on her.
Larkin’s letters show him fending off pressure from Kingsley Amis to dismiss both her and Hughes. “No, of course Ted’s no good at all,” he assures his friend, then adds: “I think his ex-wife, late wife, was extraordinary, though not necessarily likeable.” The italics, the un-Larkinesque wonderment, tell the tale. His appraisal of her Collected mixes wrongheadedness with gruff brilliance:
Increasingly divorced from meaningful incident, [Plath’s poems] seem to enter neurosis or insanity, and seem to exist there in a prolonged high-pitched ecstasy like nothing else in literature. ... Considering what one takes to be their subject matter, her poems, particularly the last ones, are curiously, even jauntily impersonal; it is hard to see how she was labelled confessional. As poems they are to the highest degree original and scarcely less effective. How valuable they are depends on how highly we rank the expression of experience with which we can in no sense identify, and from which we can only turn with shock and sorrow.
This ending prompts the obvious question: who’s “we”? Legions of Plathians have identified with her in nearly every sense. But Larkin also catches something crucial: the “ecstasy like nothing else,” the “jauntily impersonal” stance toward self-destruction. It’s hard not to feel that, on the page, Plath is having a hellish kind of fun. One often gets the same feeling from Larkin.
Probably he did identify with Plath’s experience in some sense. To my ear, his best-known poem contains a Plathian echo. Listen to Plath’s “Insomniac”:
Over and over the old, granular movie
Exposes embarrassment—the mizzling days
Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,
Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,
Now listen to “This Be the Verse,” Larkin’s lament about parents who “fuck you up”:[4]
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
“Insomniac” appeared in book form in 1971, the same year Larkin wrote his poem. Ten years earlier, Larkin’s friend and editor, Anthony Thwaite, had picked it as the winner of the 1961 Guinness Poetry Competition. As Clark documents, Thwaite called “Insomniac” the first poem he “recognized [as] a Sylvia Plath poem. … She had established a voice after The Colossus.” It’s plausible that Larkin, who had given Plath a prize himself, would have noticed this new prize-winning poem on first publication, or encountered it sometime in the following decade.
The more you read “Insomniac,” the more it seems to foreshadow late-period Larkin. Its dramatic scenario anticipates Larkin’s “Aubade”: the speaker lying awake at night, brooding on death, combing through old regrets. Both poems end with creeping daylight and the ominous tread of workers resuming their routines. (Plath’s commuters “rid[e] to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed”; Larkin’s “Postmen like doctors go from house to house.”)
Larkin’s style had solidified by the time Plath wrote her books, as had his atheism. But her forthright despair, her sweeping rejection of parental and divine authority, may well have bled into his own later efforts. He must have taken special note of “Daddy,” given that his own father, Sydney, was a Nazi sympathizer—though one who hardly appears in the poems. Alan Bennett suggests:
[I]t would have been difficult to accommodate Sydney in a standard Larkin poem . . . Sylvia Plath had a stab at that kind of thing with her ‘Daddy,’ though she had to pretend he was a Nazi, while Larkin’s dad was the real thing.
Privately, Larkin aped Sydney’s bigotry more and more as he aged. Publicly, he hushed up his late father’s fascism out of obvious embarrassment. I wonder if his failure to “accommodate Sydney”—to confront him as Plath had Otto—deepened the creative slump of his final years. I sense an evasion there, a blockage overcome only in fleeting references to “violence / A long way back” (“Love Again”). His poetry cocks a snook at God, the church, and middle-class mores, but never quite stares down pater or patriarchy. Still, no one who idealizes either of those things could write a poem like “This Be the Verse.”
Like many previous commentators, Clark attempts to vindicate Otto Plath’s politics. These efforts always leave me wondering. True, Otto had no Nazi Party affiliation; he lived most of his adult life in the United States, as a quiet entomologist with a specialty in bees. But he was also a strict, humorless German man born in 1885. Aurelia defended him against “Daddy” but allowed in a letter that he believed “the man should be der Herr des Hauses”—indeed, struck “an attitude of ‘rightful’ dominance” and demanded “submissive[ness]” from her. Maybe he never said anything fascistic, but how on earth can we be sure?
Plath protested in her journal that Otto “wouldn’t go to a doctor, wouldn’t believe in God and heiled Hitler in the privacy of his home.” This quote rarely surfaces in discussions of “Daddy”; it appears nowhere in Red Comet. The first two charges are substantially true, if unfair to hold against him. Should we assume Plath made up the third? Planted a lie in her diary to justify a poem she’d write four years later?
“Wouldn’t believe in God” is eye-catching in light of her own godlessness. Of course, she’s remembering a childhood resentment, not voicing her adult stance; eventually, she decided not to worship God or Otto. She came to see fascism and religion as more allied than opposed, Holy Fathers and Dear Leaders as images of the same false authority. “So, Herr Enemy,” she drawls as Lady Lazarus, “Herr God, Herr Lucifer.” Her Daddy bears a family resemblance to Blake’s Nobodaddy—the deity who is both Daddy and nobody, and “a very Cruel Being” besides.
Plath, who called dying her “art,” also knew enough of death to feel that nothing waited beyond it to look after her. Elizabeth Hardwick’s judgement here is shrewd: “Her poems have, read differently, the overcharged preoccupation with death and release found in religious poetry. … But she was not religious; instead she is violently secular in her eternities, realistic about the life that slides from her side.” One can picture Larkin nodding: Amen.
Clark’s account of the morning of Plath’s suicide is subtly Larkinesque:
Across Regent’s Park, the Beatles were getting ready to arrive at Abbey Road Studios at ten a.m., where they would record their first album, Please, Please Me. The morning of February 11, 1963 was the dawn of the 1960s.
The dawn according to whom? Many cultural historians have pointed to other milestones: the March on Washington, JFK’s death, the Beatles’s appearance on Ed Sullivan. Clark’s claim sounds most intuitive to poetry fans, because it recalls “Annus Mirabilis,” Larkin’s plaint about missing the free-love age:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me)—
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
In a different way, Clark hints, the ’60s began too late for Plath—the alleged Laurentian who saw “the end of the Chatterley ban” but not the arrival of The Feminine Mystique (published eight days after Plath’s death); the marooned voice of “The Colossus,” who stopped awaiting any rescue at “the landing,” then died just before the second wave of feminism rolled in.
3.
What liberation would Plath have sought if she had lived? What might she have built in the ruins of the colossus?
“The Colossus” itself cries out in exasperation at this problem. The Father is fallen, like Rome, and dead, like God. He no longer has a leg to stand on, much less a pedestal. His broken form litters a forsaken land. In this sense, he’s the opposite of Emma Lazarus’s “New Colossus”—the Statue of Liberty in her busy harbor, the proud “Mother” welcoming the “Exiles” of the world.
The speaker herself seems exiled from somewhere. Her “hours are married to shadow”; she has no other companionship, expects no other form of marriage. Her final words—“No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel / On the blank stones of the landing”—might imply that she no longer hopes to be rescued or that she no longer wants to be rescued. The word “blank” might evoke a dreadful emptiness—or a fresh page to be written on. (Years later, in “Amnesiac,” Plath sardonically called Hughes’s new life without her “a beautiful blank.”)
Sifting “The Colossus” for hints of a politics, I pause on the word “anarchy”:
O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.
I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered
In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
The speaker can’t construct a valid law, faith, or system from these ruins. The father’s authority is merely “historical,” obsolete as Latin; he is an “oracle” of nothing and offers no way forward.
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra warns: “Ye venerate me; but what if your veneration should some day collapse? Take heed lest a statue crush you!” Plath’s speaker isn’t crushed by the fall of her idol, but she is confounded. She roams an anarchic dreamspace, working for no one, eating lunch, and counting stars.
And yet: doesn’t this anarchy excite her a little? Isn’t her despair edged with merriment? She mocks the father’s ghostly “grunt[ing]” and her own “ant”-like deference to his image. She says cryptically, “It would take more than a lightning-stroke / To create such a ruin.” Is she subconsciously abetting this anarchy? Has her own creativity helped “create” and maintain it? Has she failed to restore the Father-God’s authority because, deep down, she doesn’t want to?
In his essay “What Is Authority?” (from God and the State), the Russian revolutionary Mikhail Bakunin offers a classic defense of political anarchism:
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the bootmaker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the bootmaker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me.
In other words, respect the authority of the bootmaker; reject that of anyone whose boot approaches your face.
Three years after “The Colossus,” Plath wrote “Daddy,” whose speaker decries female “ador[ation]” of the fascist “boot in the face.” In an interview from the same year, Plath sounds intriguingly Bakunin-like:
I much prefer doctors, midwives, lawyers, anything but writers. … [W]hat I admire most is the person who masters an area of practical experience, and can teach me something. I mean, my local midwife has taught me how to keep bees. … And I find myself liking her, may I say, more than most poets. And among my friends I find people who know all about boats or know all about certain sports, or how to cut somebody open and remove an organ. I’m fascinated by this mastery of the practical.
You could say she respects the authority of the beekeeper. (And, tellingly, ascribes it to a local woman, not her father the bee expert.)
I don’t claim that Plath was a committed anarchist or that the anarchy in “The Colossus” is wholly positive. The word can imply lawless misrule, the obverse of the tyrant’s lawful misrule. Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry” speaks of “the Scylla and Carybdis of anarchy and despotism”; his “Masque of Anarchy” personifies Anarchy as a skeleton whose brow reads “I am God, and King, and Law!”—and urges peaceful revolt against him.
But the “anarchy” in “The Colossus” seems more like entropy, the entropy that prevails in Shelley’s “Ozymandias.” (“Round the decay / Of that colossal Wreck…”) In a sense, Plath’s speaker is caught between these two kinds of anarchy. She tries to “mend” the “skull” of the Father-God, whose hollow authority still holds her in thrall; yet she perceives the futility of her task, the impossibility of “put[ting]” the sham back “together.” To abandon that task might nudge her toward something like Bakunin’s anarchism. It might propel her toward the anti-authoritarianism of “Daddy.”
Shelley’s “Masque” is a landmark text in the history of nonviolent resistance. One of the first Western treatises on the same subject is Discours de la servitude volontaire (Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, 1577), by the poet and theorist Étienne de La Boétie. If you are a populace plagued by a tyrant, La Boétie advises: “[J]ust don’t support him, and you will see him like a great colossus whose base has been stolen, of his own weight sink to the ground and shatter.”
Clark rightly calls “Daddy,” written three years after “The Colossus,” Plath’s “grand non serviam”: her refusal to serve the patriarchy. This gesture begins in a refusal to venerate her heritage—either European or American.
The father here is still a fallen colossus, but before he’s Nazified, he’s Americanized, laid out from sea to shining sea:
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic . . .
Again, Plath may be reworking “The New Colossus”—transforming Emma Lazarus’s “Mother of Exiles” into the archetypal Father, her icon of liberty into a toppled tyrant. (Shortly after finishing “Daddy,” Plath began writing “Lady Lazarus,” so she may well have had Lazarus on the brain.) If so, “The New Colossus” would be only one influence among many; “Daddy” is one of those successes with a thousand parents.
In a bravura six-page reading, Clark provides a wealth of likely sources for the poem: from Eliot’s Waste Land to Brueghel’s paintings of war and torture; from the fascist father of Plath’s friend Elizabeth Compton to Al Alvarez’s essay “Beyond the Gentility Principle,” which challenged poets to confront the atrocities of the 20th century. “Daddy” contains subtle echoes of Hughes’s poem “Out” and near-plagiaristic echoes of Anne Sexton’s “My Friend, My Friend”—a clunker Plath dug from the scrapyard, stripped for parts, and refashioned into a masterpiece.
What else? Plath wrote the poem two weeks before her 30th birthday, a fraught time in anyone’s life. She drafted it on October 12, 1962, during the early rumblings of what became, days later, the Cuban Missile Crisis. The nuclear paranoia of the era can’t be overstated; Lowell had already complained, in his poem “Fall 1961,” that “we have talked our extinction to death.” Invoking World War II atrocities makes some sense when World War III seems in the offing.
And there’s more, more even than Clark has room to weigh. Assia Wevill, who had recently begun her affair with Hughes, was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. Commentaries on “Daddy” often sidestep this fact, though it bolsters the ethical case against the poem. Was Plath playacting Holocaust victimhood in part to upstage a real-life survivor, whom she had reason to begrudge? If so, this would be appropriation as twisted fantasy or bitter reprisal. It’s a speculative reading, but Wevill’s huge presence in Plath’s life (and other poems) that year invites the speculation.
Then there was Plath’s mental state that month, which showed hints of mania. (Clark believes Plath first suffered the “manic component of her depression” at age fifteen.) Of course, the celebrated “October poems” can’t be reduced to a diagnosis. Still, it’s eye-opening to set them beside a list of manic symptoms: flight of ideas, feelings of invincibility, disinhibition. Also lack of sleep—and Plath’s pre-dawn writing sessions that fall, “before the baby’s cry, before the glassy music of the milkman,” have become the stuff of myth. Stuck in her house in rural North Tawton, England, she felt abandoned by Hughes, overwhelmed with childraising, and leery of the neighbors. Her rage and passion became excandescent.
More and more, she thought of her father. Early that month, she finished her so-called bee sequence, which wrestles with his legacy. These poems are justly famous, but it’s “A Secret” (October 10th) that blows the dam wide open. This surrealistic fugue features a superego-like “policeman” who holds up a warning hand—then loses control of the traffic. Cars surge forward; jungle animals stampede; foam explodes from a bottle. Next comes the dark-comic fury of “The Applicant” (October 11th), which skewers traditional marriage; then “Daddy” the next day, then “Medusa”; and so on through “Lady Lazarus” at month’s end. As in some awful fable, Plath attained the poet’s nirvana state at the price of domestic peace:
I am doing a poem a day, all marvelous, free, full songs. Everything I read about, hear, see, experience or have experienced is on tap, like a wonderful drink. I can use everything. I think my marriage, though it had much good, was a pretty sick one.
“Daddy” demands to be read beside “Medusa,” which might as well be titled “Mommy.” The Medusa of the poem is both the mythical, snake-headed gorgon—a petrifying, “Paralyzing” figure—and a kind of jellyfish. She is also the archetypal Mother; also God. In the cosmos of Ariel, these elements firmly align Aurelia with Otto (jellyfish, like bees, sting). So does Plath’s revulsion, which builds to the two perfectly opposite meanings of the final line: “There is nothing between us.” The mother is both suffocatingly attached and wholly estranged.
Both “Daddy” and “Medusa” mention the cutting of wires—symbolic umbilical cords. Separated from her husband in her husband’s country, Plath seems to sever all ties: with father, mother, even her homeland (what fascists might sentimentalize as her “fatherland”). The poet who had written a thesis on Dostoevsky now sounds as much in free fall as Raskolnikov: “[H]e had cut himself off, as with scissors, from everyone and everything.” The effect is bracing and sickening. From here until her death, the poems toy and toy with annihilation. It’s as if she’s telling her parents: You brought me into this world, and I can take me out of it. Or telling the world: You brought me into you, and I can take me out of you.
But she rejoices in taking the patriarch out first. By the end of “Daddy,” Clark marvels, “Plath seem[s] to have metaphorically killed off all the Fathers that had silenced and oppressed generations of women.”
Again, she doesn’t spare the oldest Father of all. The speaker caricatures Daddy as a “bag full of God,” then refutes his divinity with maximum contempt: “Not God but a swastika.” She calls him a “bastard,” heckling not only his maleness but his illegitimacy. (She had mentioned a literal “bastard” child in “A Secret” just two days before.) Zealously blasphemous, she hurls the Father-God from his throne, disinherits the patriarch from his own tradition.
I hear in her curse, too, the great line about God from Beckett’s Endgame (1957): “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!” Plath was an avid Beckett fan; in 1955, she declared Godot the “best” play she had ever seen. Jo Gill finds in Endgame a mirror of Plath’s quandary in “The Colossus”: “[She] is caught in the position of guardian and caretaker to someone to whom she owes an unknown debt. Her task is ceaseless, thankless and seemingly pointless.” In “Daddy,” the speaker buries this debt with a vengeance. Not only is the Father-God—the bastard—nonexistent, she’s bumped him off herself.
Afterward, she wavers between mourning and gloating. She can’t reach equilibrium, which is why the poem keeps spinning in perpetual motion. It remains in tension with “The Colossus,” too, as Ramazani explains:
The father of “The Colossus”… could not be totalized or internalized, so in “Daddy” the daughter tries expelling what she has been unable to ingest, pulverizing what she has been unable to put together. Earlier, she even “tried to die / And get back, back, back to you”… Now she would rather get back at him than get back to him, rather renounce him than renew.
All true and elegantly said—but revenge is not all. I can’t glide past the passage he quotes:
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
To me, “Daddy” is the great heartbreaker in the Plath canon, in part because of this defensive humor. It’s Plath’s hard, proud spirit that makes the abjectness of her grief so moving. Even while stomping on the grave of Pater Omnipotens, she can’t help missing her human father.
Hence the two primary, warring meanings of the poem’s conclusion: “I’m through.” These can be paraphrased as “I’m done” and “I’m done for.” Or, as Ramazani puts it,
“I’m finally through” is . . . a proud declaration of her independence; but the pronouncement also suggests its opposite—that in being through [Daddy’s] heart, through with him, through with her vitriolic utterance, she is herself through, finished, at the end of her poem and of her life. Once more the sadism and masochism of melancholia seem inextricable.
Clark takes a bleak view of the ending, pairing “I’m through” with Beckett’s “Nothing to be done.” But as with “The Colossus,” I think the more liberatory reading is possible. Maybe the “Laurentian” Plath had in mind D. H. Lawrence’s exultant “Song of a Man Who Has Come Through”:
Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of time.
Triumphant or despairing, the poem arrived with the euphoria of a breakthrough. According to Clark, when Plath read the poem to her friend Clarissa Roche, the two women “fell on the floor in fits of laughter.”
There’s a long critical tradition of not laughing at “Daddy”—of branding it reckless, heartless, and immoral. Even some of Plath’s admirers have accused her of arrogating Holocaust narratives in order to voice a private gripe.
George Steiner, whose family fled Austria and France ahead of Nazi occupation, questioned whether Plath’s Holocaust poems were “entirely legitimate.” He called them an act of “subtle larceny,” but also speculated—far afield from today’s appropriation debates—that “Perhaps it is only those who had no part in the events who can focus on them rationally and imaginatively.” (Indeed, Steiner also offered a much-quoted—and Clark-quoted—defense of “Daddy,” calling it “the Guernica of modern poetry.”)
Calvin Bedient, writing in the 1970s, had no such ambivalence:
Plath uses the historical and the mythical as a vanity mirror. When she writes as if she were as abused as a Nazi victim she climbs to self-importance over the bodies of the dead. She enters a moral sphere that her amoral personal imagination cannot apprehend.
Hardwick was also horrified. She protested the “shameful harshness” of “Daddy,” seconded the “larceny” charge, and leapt to Otto’s defense:
The father did not kill anyone and the “fat black heart” is really her own. How is it possible to grieve for more than twenty years for one as evil and brutal as she asserts her father to have been?
Ted Hughes—surprisingly? unsurprisingly?—defended his late wife:
Her reactions to hurts in other people and animals, and even tiny desecrations of plant-life, were extremely violent. The chemical poisoning of nature, the smiling pile-up of atomic waste, were horrors that persecuted her like an illness—as her latest poems record. Auschwitz and the rest were merely open wounds, in her idea of the great civilized crime of intelligence that like … Nero has turned on its mother.
Of course, it was in Hughes’s interests to emphasize the political Ariel over the personal. He defended his own reputation just as sternly against feminist critics, at least when he wasn’t accusing himself of having “murder[ed] a genius.”
Critics who neatly delimited Plath’s victimhood spoke too soon. Bedient called her a “symbol of woman oppressed, albeit by cultural forces rather than the physical brutality she sometimes invokes.” The evidence Clark musters wipes out this last clause. Plath wrote her therapist, for example, that Hughes “beat me up physically a couple of days before my miscarriage.” The editor of Plath’s abridged journals, Frances McCullough, recorded that Hughes confessed to her:
[H]e used to try slapping her out of her rages . . . And once she turned into his slap and got a black eye, and went to the doctor and told him Ted beat her regularly.
We know more than we once did, too, about the link between fascism and misogynist violence. Recent politics have put that link on lurid display. A disproportionate number of Capitol insurrectionists were men convicted of abusing female relatives. In modern online forums, neo-fascists routinely stalk, harass, and threaten women. “Misogyny and white supremacy are mutually reinforcing ideologies,” confirms Dr. Miranda Christou of the Centre for Analysis of the Radical Right. We can no longer read Plath in all innocence of this dynamic.
Could we ever? Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church) was Nazi shorthand for women’s “proper” sphere. That the emotional infrastructure of fascism might run through average homes, average churches—the idea remains provocative but, after the past century, should be banal. Days after writing “Daddy,” Plath insisted on the link in a letter to Aurelia:
What the person out of Belsen—physical or psychological—wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there & knows the worst, just what it is like. It is much more help for me, for example, to know that people are divorced & go through hell, than to hear about happy marriages.
As in her poems, this juxtaposition risks bad taste or bathos; for some readers, it will always overstep. But to the bruised body, a beating is a beating, under Nazism or democracy.
And there is more. Revisiting the infamous line “I think I may well be a Jew,” Clark reports:
Aurelia almost certainly told Sylvia she suspected her maternal grandmother was Jewish or part-Jewish. Plath perhaps wondered if she had other Jewish relatives on her mother’s side, for her maternal grandmother’s maiden name was Grünwald, a common Jewish surname in early-twentieth-century Austria and Hungary.
Could Plath claim the artistic right—as a woman who may have had some Jewish heritage, and who recalled her own father expressing Nazi sympathies—to voice a lyric “I” who may have Jewish heritage, and who accuses her father of Nazi sympathies? If I’m tilting the question too far in one direction, I would point out that critics have long tilted it in the other.
Whatever her exact roots, few writing teachers would recommend Plath’s approach. The casual bigotry scattered through her work doesn’t help her case. But with “Daddy,” there’s a risk of willfully ignoring her intent for the sake of reprimanding her. If we read the poem as dark, stick-it-to-Hitler type comedy—and how else to read a line like “With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo”?—the fury of its harshest accusers sounds misplaced. It raises the suspicion that Plath touched the right nerve.
As it happens, Plath herself is not the speaker of “Daddy.” Her father died when she was eight; the speaker’s died when she was “ten.” This difference may be paper-thin, but it is crucial. It affords Plath just enough room to speak in a voice larger than her own life. When she recited the poem for BBC Radio, she introduced it as a dramatic monologue:
The poem is spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. The father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other—she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it.
“The two strains marry” implies that the speaker isn’t solely a victim; the oppressor dwells within her, too. In this light, her crassness about identity—“my Polack friend,” “I began to talk like a Jew”—might have a certain dramatic logic. (Not true of every Plath speaker, as “Ariel” proves.) She can’t be an avenging angel, can’t expel all the poison of her heritage, for the universal reason: she is her parents’ child. Her tragedy is right there in the childlike title, which mocks as well as mourns—and mocks herself as well as Daddy.
To ignore this context is to impose a different standard on “Daddy” than on any other monologue in the canon. Even as transgressive comedy, the poem is an ethical nightmare—but simply scolding the transgressive daughter with Lear-like indignation turns the critic into the butt of the joke.
“Daddy” is nightmarish in other ways, too. Appalling in every sense, it seems to erupt from a place beyond decorum. It torches masculine Order, flies the dark flag of duende—and didn’t Lorca say the poet “is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word”? It has an element of wish fulfillment, as Freud said all dreams do:
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
These “villagers” are a monster-movie trope (think townsfolk with pitchforks). But in the larger scheme of Ariel, they also recall the “villagers” from the bee sequence, whom Plath based on her real-life neighbors in North Tawton. In “The Bee Meeting,” the villagers are bee-lovers like her father, superficially welcoming but deeply sinister. (Larkin compares them to Hitchcock characters.) In “Daddy,” they are allies against the father, “dancing” on his grave. Their mood is that of Plath and her friend laughing on the floor.
Their dance is the closest thing in Plath’s late poems to a communal moment. It’s not exactly a love-in (Hardwick calls the scene “biting and ungenerous”), but amid the doomsday clangor of Ariel, it sounds a rare note of political hope. The Father is not omnipotent. A Fascist can be abhorred, not adored. The monster can be known for what it is and driven out—or at least driven underground.
4.
God is dead. The colossus is broken. The patriarchy is smashed. The task, then, is not to smash it but to halt all efforts to restore it—our own and others’. To drop our glue pots and walk away. This is Plathian realism.
Easier said than done, as Plath understood. She has four major “atrocity” poems, four classics that gaze head-on at modern horrors: “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Fever 103°,” and “Cut.” The first three seem to end in conquest—in a transcendent feminism that stabs the heart of evil, “eat[s] men like air,” and spurns the patriarchy like so many suitors (“Nor him, nor him”). At first glance, their heroines resemble Nietzschean, or comic-book, Superwomen.
Look again, and shading after shading appears. “Daddy” is riven through its own heart, as we’ve already seen. The righteous pride of “Lady Lazarus” jostles with the speaker’s drive toward self-obliteration. In “Fever 103°,” the speaker’s puritanism is self-mocking: “I am too pure for you or anyone. / Your body / Hurts me as the world hurts God.” The insidious “sin” she longs to wash off—and claims her fever burns off—is not only universal human weakness but the crimes of modern empire: “Greasing the bodies of adulterers / Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.” Her feverish flight “To Paradise” is no salvation but an illusion born of illness, a condition measurable to the degree. It can’t seriously resolve the question that starts the poem: “Pure? What does it mean?”
And this is one of the pressing questions of the past century. The scholar Robert Paxton defines fascism as, in part, a cult of purity. But sustained opposition to fascism, patriarchy, and so on requires a moral discipline that can also look like purism—even if the equivalence is a false one. (Striving to rid a society of whole populations is the opposite of striving toward an ideal democracy. The “purity” of fascism is Orwellian, soaked in blood.) Then there’s the moderate’s kind of purism: staying forever above the fray. Across the spectrum, nothing “purifies” us of our common humanity: no fever of violence or righteousness, no false neutrality. Only death, as Plath’s poems repeatedly imply, offers the false perfection that comes with an end to moral relations.
That’s why “Cut,” the messiest and “dirt[iest]” poem of the four, is also, by design, the most anticlimactic. The speaker has sliced her thumb—apparently by accident, but she’s only half sarcastic in saying: “What a thrill.” Her own gushing blood cells threaten to turn against her: “Whose side are they on?” In a hallucinatory sequence, she projects onto her body the violence of the ages, from colonial wars to racial terrorism. She grows dizzy with a sense of complicity. One of her hands has done violence to the other, but even the wronged hand sports a bandage like a “Ku Klux Klan / Babushka.” No avenging heroine this time, she’s ablaze with shame and trauma. Her spilling life force is a “stain” that “tarnishe[s],” her wounded digit a “Trepanned veteran” and “Dirty girl.” Trepanning is the oldest form of violence the poem mentions—a type of crude lobotomy used in ancient exorcisms long before it became a medical procedure. But no demon is expelled here, no physical or political healing achieved. The fantasia ends with the bluntly un-transcendent words “Thumb stump.”
Some readers find Plath’s engagement with atrocity superficial; I think this is precisely the wrong word. All four of these poems dredge the psychic depths, working by the flickering light of symbol and subtext. The poet shapes the raw matter into a disturbing, visionary coherence, so that, at her best, she seems a godless oracle. But irrational prejudices prowl in those same depths.
In The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath, Jerome Ellison Murphy observes that, “In Plath’s work, race in particular works by a system of personal associative logic, so that races become a palette of ‘code words’ for interior conditions.” This code is often incoherent, including to herself. She is immensely conflicted about whiteness; she sometimes links it with death, sometimes with repression (as in “Cut,” where the white gauze becomes that “Klan” hood), sometimes with a pure and dominant self. Her attitudes toward blackness are just as garbled. Murphy points out that even her journals tend to invest Black figures with an aura of “threat and otherness.”
Plath’s prejudice rankles in part because it flatters those hierarchies which her overall project seems to flatten. When she trades on the false authority of whiteness, the spurious purity of the Western God, she breaks a kind of faith with herself and us. These moments feel really gratuitous, as when “The Arrival of the Bee Box” lapses into caricature: “It is dark, dark, / With the swarmy feeling of African hands / Minute and shrunk for export, / Black on black, angrily clambering.” A savior fantasy follows: “Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.”
Compare “Stings,” in which she handles bee-filled honeycombs and sounds every inch the modern feminist:
I am no drudge
Though for years I have eaten dust
And dried plates with my dense hair.
And seen my strangeness evaporate,
Blue dew from dangerous skin.
I think of Audre Lorde in the famous photo with the chalked slogan: “Women are powerful and dangerous.” What is “dangerous” about this exploited speaker’s “skin”—dangerous to herself and others—is not, of course, its color but its combination of sensitivity and toughness. In “Arrival,” by contrast, it was only the bees who were “dangerous.” Throughout the bee sequence, in fact, Plath identifies both with bees and beekeepers, the stingers and the potentially stung. This toggling reflects, I think, an awareness of herself as both oppressor and oppressed, but core awareness doesn’t always translate to surface candor.
“If living as a poet—living on the front lines—has ever had meaning,” Lorde wrote in her own journals, “it has meaning now. Living a self-conscious life, vulnerability as armor.” She could have been talking about Confessionalism (though she wasn’t). Plath has moved countless readers to project themselves inside her skin—her vulnerable armor—and to speak more frankly from within their own. Her descents into racism, skin-based prejudice, weaken this communion. They muddle her meaning and stoke needless tension along those “front lines.”
Whether her subject is God, gender, or death, Plath’s signature voice sounds undeceived. When she entertains the self-deceptions of whiteness, it becomes almost unreadable.
HAMLET: […] I loved you not.
OPHELIA: I was the more deceived.
Though it flouts the poet’s preferred arrangement, the chronological Ariel remains a hair-raising read. That last stretch of poems is, as Larkin says, “like nothing else in literature.” Except it is like something else, as I noticed recently. Its feverish verve reminds me of Hamlet’s “antic disposition.”[5]
Like Hamlet, the Ariel voice is macabre, misanthropic, tender, manic, suicidal, plagued by daddy-and-mommy issues, and thrillingly angry at a world out of joint. Plath draws the comparison herself in “Stopped Dead”:
Who do you think I am,
Uncle, uncle?
Sad Hamlet, with a knife?
Where do you stash your life?
It may be truer to say she plays both Ophelia and Hamlet. She’s still the “Mad Girl” of her early poems—lovelorn, obsessed with drowning—but she’s also the alienated intellectual refusing to suffer fools. In Hardwick’s phrase, her work acquires a “humid air of vengeance.” Her manner grows “theatrical,” as she admits in “Lady Lazarus”; she plays to the “peanut-crunching crowd.” Her “art” of dying, showcased on the page, remains uncanny. Hardwick claimed that Plath was “both heroine and author” of her own tragedy—that “when the curtain goes down, it is her own dead body there on stage, sacrificed to her plot.” This badly distorts the reality of suicide, but it’s a thought every Plath reader has had.
Ariel is gripping drama, one of the few page-turners in the history of poetry, and this would be true even if Plath had survived. The poems abound with sensational horrors, and also, as Larkin saw, with ecstasy. As the dates beneath each poem march toward February 11—as “The doom mark / Crawls down the wall” (“Contusion”)—you know the author can’t keep this up. But she can’t slow down, either. “O my God, what am I,” she marvels in “Poppies in October.” In the fractured, disoriented “Kindness,” she all but throws up her hands: “The blood jet is poetry, / There is no stopping it.”
Then everything stops: she goes over the edge, taking all her unwritten poems with her. Blank space rushes in. The silence is gigantic.
“Let us not desert her.” As her readers, her crowd, we’re still filling the silence, reconstructing the tragedy piece by piece. Even with Clark’s meticulous help, we’ll never get it put together entirely.
Plath’s work inhabits murky moral terrain. It’s “married to shadow.” Through the slight separation of poet and speaker, “Daddy” pulls off a near-impossible trick: it’s a self-implicating response to fascism that remains, in sum, passionately anti-fascist. There may be no other way to dramatize this subject. As an ideology, fascism allows no negative capability: there can be no “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts” about its evil. Such doubts, on a mass scale, usher in mass violence. But resistance to fascism—a monster that civilization has created and failed to bury—can never be as pure as we wish. The world is too shadowy. We’re too entangled. This is an urgent theme for art.
Why do we so often fail to overturn illegitimate authority? Why do we so often visit our disgust on our own bodies instead? That is Hamlet’s problem, and the Ariel speaker’s, and ours.
Red Comet establishes that Plath wanted to live. Days before the end, she told a neighbor so in tears. She had experienced her first institutionalization as torture. Faced with more of the same (the doctor was coming the day she died), she took her life in desperation.
She meant to close Ariel with “Wintering,” the most hopeful of the bee poems, which begins “This is the easy time” and ends “The bees are flying. They taste the spring.” The speaker exults:
The bees are all women,
Maids and the long royal lady.
They have got rid of the men,
The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.
Winter is for women . . .
But as she celebrates female sovereignty, matriarchy even, she is keenly aware of cold weather and hard choices. The poem itself hasn’t quite “got rid of” men: the memory of Otto, author of Bumblebees and Their Ways, haunts the margins. Plath still honors the authority of the beekeeper, but she’s taken it on herself.
My own authority here can only be provisional. I’m a poet and critic, a white male American, a gentile with some German roots, raised in no church. I’m childless and bristling with family anxieties. I can’t use a pen or keyboard without leaving those fingerprints. In my earliest critical essays, I aimed for a voice of insuperable Authority, a voice cribbed from the critics I first encountered. This voice was high-toned, purist, “objective,” in every way colossal. My imitation failed, and the failure became a relief. These days, it’s a pleasure to feel my voice is not colossal but choral: one of many and central to nothing. To hear the cracks threading through it, and to trust that others in the chorus will bear it up or balance it out.
The colossus remains in the sand, where Plath left him. He still has many votaries, all as frustrated as she was and few as astute. He represents something that never existed or had the right to exist. Let’s desert the bastard.
Notes:
[1] For examples of contemporary Black poets responding to “Ariel,” see Shane McCrae’s “The Brown Horse Ariel” and Tawanda Mulalu’s “Aria.”
[2] I am indebted to Mark Patrick Davidson Roberts’s citation of this correspondence (“The Guilty Influence: Philip Larkin Among the Poets,” PhD thesis, 2014).
[3] Larkin likely knew about Plath for other reasons. In 1957, The Hawk in the Rain, dedicated to her, had established Hughes as the most buzzed-about young poet in England. Plath, too, was building an enviable CV (poems in The New Yorker, etc.).
[4] The poem also contains bluff humor about suicide: “Get out [of life] as early as you can.” This is an unusual touch even for the depressive Larkin and another possible mark of Plath’s influence.
[1] Bedient gestures toward a Hamlet parallel, while hastily noting that “Plath is not Shakespeare” (“Sylvia Plath, Romantic…,” collected in Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry, 2019).
About the Author:
Austin Allen’s debut poetry collection, Pleasures of the Game (Waywiser Press), was awarded the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared in The Yale Review, The Missouri Review, 32 Poems, and other journals. He has taught creative writing at the University of Cincinnati and Johns Hopkins University.