No poet's reputation has suffered from the enthusiasm of her fans like Sylvia Plath's, whose groundbreaking poetry is ignored by men because they associate her with strident women's studies majors who have nothing interesting or original to say. Unlike many of her fans, Sylvia Plath was both interesting and original, as I hope the following series of posts will illustrate.
The key to understanding the strength of Plath's poetry is to understand what the psychiatrist Carl Jung meant when he said in "Man and his Symbols" that “the unknown approach of death casts an adumbratio (an anticipatory shadow) over the life and dreams of the victim.” To illustrate this phenomenon, he tells the allegedly true story of a friend’s 10 year old daughter who provided her father with a curious and unnerving Christmas present: a handwritten booklet containing a series of the girl’s strange and apocalyptic dreams. The relevant motifs of the dreams are listed as follows:
1. An “evil animal,” a snakelike creature with horns devours all the animals in the world, but God comes in through the four corners of the world and gives birth to all the dead animals, making them live again.
2. The girl ascends into Heaven, where pagan dances are being performed, then descends into Hell, where she witnesses angels performing good deeds.
3. A horde of small animals frighten the girl, one of which grows to a tremendous size and devours her.
4. A small mouse is penetrated by a worm, than a snake, then a fish, then a man, and then the mouse becomes a man.
5. The girl sees a drop of water as if through a microscope, and sees that it is full of tree branches. She knows this to somehow be the origin of the world.
6. A bad boy throws dirt at passers-by; in this way, all the passers-by become bad.
7. A drunken woman falls into water, then emerges clean and sober.
8. Somewhere in America – the girl was German – people are rolling on anthills being attacked by ants. The girl panics and falls into the river.
9. The girl is on a desert in the moon. She sinks so deeply into the sand that she reaches Hell.
10. The girl is confronted with a luminous ball, which she touches. Vapors emanate from the ball, and a man comes and kills her.
11. The girl is dangerously ill. Birds come out of her skin and cover her body entirely.
12. Swarms of gnats obscure the sun, the moon, and the all of the stars except one, which falls on the dreamer.
Jung went on to discuss the archetypal themes present in the girl’s dreams. Perhaps most importantly, Jung saw the first dream as an illustration of
Apokatastasis, or divine restitution. The idea of restoration returns again in dream 7, where a drunken woman is seemingly baptized by her fall into the river and renewed. Images of apocalyptic destruction and archetypal images of creation occur separately in several other dreams. Apocalyptic destruction is most evident in dream 12, while dreams 4 and 5, portray the creation of humanity and the world, respectively. Dream 4 is particularly interesting in that the mouse’s original penetration by the worm, and then by subsequently higher life forms, seems to reflect human embryonic development, during which the individual sheds vestigial characteristics such as gills and a tail as he or she develops.
In total, Jung identified the following themes in the girl’s dreams: death, restoration, the creation of the world, the creation of man, and the relativity of values. Jung claimed that upon reading these dreams for the first time, he was overcome by “the uncanny feeling that they suggested impending disaster,” given that their symbolism was “the opposite of what one would expect to find in the consciousness of a girl of that age.” Rather, they are all themes Jung identified as particularly important to those approaching their life's end. As it so happened, at least according to Jung, the girl fell ill unexpectedly and died about a year after giving her father this unique Christmas gift. Jung posited that her dreams were visions conjured by her unconscious mind as it processed the shadow of her impending death.
Reports of presentiment are common in literature. Emily Dickinson described it as “that long shadow on the lawn/ Indicative that suns go down/ The notice to the startled grass/ That darkness is about to pass.” Interestingly, she seems to have anticipated Jung’s description of the phenomenon as a shadow cast backwards in time by an imminent and catastrophic event. Percy Shelley allegedly saw his doppelganger in the weeks leading up to his death, and John Donne is said to have seen his wife’s doppelganger on the night their daughter was stillborn. Were these mere stories dreamt up by men who, after all, lived with one foot in the world of the fantastical? Or were they perhaps visual hallucinations triggered by both men’s subconscious realization of impending catastrophe?
We should begin our consideration of Sylvia Plath's poetry with Ariel, the title poem of the book that posthumously made her name. The poem is short enough to warrant posting in its entirety.
"Ariel"
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.
God's lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees! -- The furrow
Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,
Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks ----
Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else
Hauls me through air ----
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.
White
Godiva, I unpeel ----
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry
Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies,
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
On the surface, Ariel is about a horseback ride where rider and horse merge into one heroic entity which breaks up, like a satellite entering the Earth’s atmosphere, as it gallops into the setting sun. In truth, it is an illustration of the poet's own destruction and, following her shedding of "dead hands, dead stringencies," heavenly restitution. Its incomparable conclusion is best described as death by incineration tinged with religious sentiment--for what is the sun but paradise, a light too pure for flesh to withstand? But read the final lines again, and one sees that the image is also one of conception. “The dew that flies suicidal” calls to mind semen hurling itself toward its own oblivion into the egg, here represented by the “cauldron of morning,” i.e. the feminine vessel of new life. Thus, in Ariel, death and conception are the same event, as the rider’s fiery incineration makes possible her heavenly rebirth.
In fact, the theme of Apokatastasis is present in nearly all of Plath's most famous poems, with perhaps two exceptions that will be discussed in a later post. Consider Plath's poem Fever 103°. Like the girl’s dream sequence as described by Jung, this piece contains a journey to both Heaven and Hell, apocalyptic imagery, and the themes of baptism and - once again - divine restitution. The
poem begins with the following lines:
Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple
Tongues of dull, fat Cerebus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean
The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The choice of Cerberus is not incidental, for the speaker then descends into a personal, fiery Hell where waves of fever are depicted as the radioactive fires of Hiroshima, “greasing the bodies of adulterers and eating in.” Where the young girl witnessed gnats blocking out the sun, moon and stars in her dream, Plath - who came of age in the decades after World War II and thus had a different, secular mythology to draw on - describes her state with images of atomic warfare. And yet, the poem’s overall theme is one of restitution, not punishment. In Plath’s own words about the piece during a BBC reading, “The fires that punish become the fires that purify.” This poem’s turning point occurs in the following three stanzas:
Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.
I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern ----
My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.
The speaker, after suffering for three days and nights, seems to have vomited out the last of her sins, leaving her pure as God. “Does not me heat astound you,” she goes on to ask, “and my light?” But she is not only too pure for her audience; she is too pure for this fallen world:
“I think I am going up—
I think I may rise.
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I
Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses
By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean.
Not you, nor him
Not him, nor him
(My old selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)
To paradise.”
Thus the speaker, who earlier in the poem compared her illness to an adulterer’s divine punishment, is cleansed of her transgressions and restored to a pure, virginal state—a transformation which concludes with her ascent into Heaven, attended by angels and images of romantic love.
We come now to Plath's signature poem,
Lady Lazarus. As in Ariel and Fever 103°, this poem documents the speaker's destruction and rebirth. Once again, as a part of the generation that came of age following World War II, Plath draws on the specifics of that conflict for her images, this time comparing her complete annihilation to that of the Jews in German death camps. Toward the beginning of the poem she describes her ressurected self as:
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Jews processed in the German death camps came out as lampshades and linens. Plath's description of herself as possessing skin "bright as a Nazi lampshade" and a face like a "featureless, fine/ Jew linen" inform the reader that she has undergone something similar to the Nazis' unfortunate victims. Unlike them, however, she seems to have somehow survived, and is "a sort of walking miracle." Later in the poem, Plath describes the details of her self-annihilation, much as she does in Ariel and Fever 103°:
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
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.
The Holocaust allusions are fairly obvious. The speaker has been reduced to a cake of soap, a wedding ring, and a gold filling--i.e., her body has been incinerated, the fat has been separated out from the flesh and all that remains is ash and the few parts of her that were gold and did not burn. But as in Ariel and Fever 103°, this destruction only sets the stage for the speaker's miraculous rebirth, described in the final stanzas:
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
The speaker has risen triumphantly from the ashes of her own cremation, her red hair calling to mind images of the phoenix, so powerful that she “eats men like air,” i.e. as if they were nothing. The poem’s title is itself an appeal to religious imagery, as Lazarus was the character in the Bible whom Jesus is said to have raised from the dead. And toward the poem’s conclusion, Plath calls out to both God and the Devil in warning. And yet the speaker, despite her references to a doctor earlier in the poem, seems to ressurect herself.
The details of Plath's life have led to her becoming a sort of feminist martyr. But her poetry is operating on an archetypal level - which is far deeper than that of political grievances. Thus, feminist interpretations of her work invariably sell her genius short. Plath was a sort of modern priestess whose exploration of the archetypal themes of death and restitution was paradoxically made possible by her own later suicide. The next post in this series will offer a Jungian interpretation of the men in Plath's poetry, notably in "Daddy" and "Death & Co.," and show that Plath's primary issue was not with men but with her own
animus.
