In his introduction to Ariel,
Robert Lowell describes the book thus: “In these poems, written in
the last months of her life, and often rushed out at the rate of two
or three a day, Sylvia Plath becomes herself, becomes something
imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly created.” To “become oneself”
and simultaneously to be “imagined”, to imagine ourselves alive,
one could say, must be the highest (and least-often attained) aim of
the poet.
Plath's poems are
messages sent through the hazes of hell to those of us fortunate
enough to read them, exquisite sculptures carved by a prisoner's
fingernail and tempered like Ahab's steel in blood. Even the motions
of nature are torture, the poisons of cruelty and submission too
deeply-dyed to be filtered out in the cycles that are meant to clean
our bodies, to clean the earth. For Plath, natural processes are not
sources of relief and re-achieving equilibrium so much as the
dominion of the predator, the disease, the fester.
That night the
moon
Dragged its blood
bag, sick
Animal
Up over the harbor
lights.
Plath's language
is spare but dense, like wide curves of smooth ivory. At other turns
it is coldly tactile, a grizzled matrix of lines and edges, like the
guts of an agate, or the pulp sacs of a blood orange. Out of context,
her stanzas seem somehow more beautiful, and masterful.
O vase of acid,
It is love you are
full of.
…
A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking
…
How you jump—
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.
…
Where are the
eye-stones, yellow and valuable,
And the tongue,
sapphire of ash.
…
Greasing the
bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash
and eating in.
The sin. The sin.
Only a poet of
Plath's nearly unbelievable linguistic talents could pull off these
poems, which in many ways can be fairly described as
“confessional”—only a poet of devastating power and vision and,
sadly, deep experience of horror can make this fevered pain into
art. Very few poets since (Carolyn Forche and Lyn Hejinian being two
stunning examples, both female poets of explosive voice and vision,
and both owing much, as do all English-language poets since, to
Plath) have successfully made the travails of their daily lives into
vital, coruscating effusions of poetry.
The tragedy of
Plath's end cannot help but assign mythic depth to her living words.
But perhaps rather than attempt to see through those mists, it is
more valuable creatively speaking to recognize what her poems
achieved: that out of the depths of nonexistence their qualities of
levitation propelled the agonies and hallucinations of a human denied
her humanity, a being denied her being, up into the air to be
breathed by the living. They are a testament to human power (as in
“power to,” not “over”), and to the power to be, and to say.
(The first two quotations are from the poem “Lesbos”; the third from “Nick
and the Candlestick”; the fourth from “Cut”; the fifth from
“Berck-Plage”; and the sixth from the incredible “Fever 103”.
All are from the book Ariel, in the meaty part just before the
middle.)
