I had never read Sylvia Plath’s poetry before this week, and I was surprised, when compared to The Bell Jar, which is written in straightforward prose, by the complexity of her poetry. Like T.S. Eliot, who relies on a musicality and sound of the line, Plath writes poetry that is full of sound. Her images are quick, often formed in only a couple well-chosen words, and are rapidly arrived at in her work.
We are all familiar with Sylvia’s dramatic life (and death): the American girl with an ear and eye for poetry, her marriage to the British poet, Ted Hughes, her failure to maintain sanity, and her eventual suicide in her kitchen.
Sylvia Plath’s paints her lines with images like a surrealist (think Dali–melting clocks beside a Greco-Roman arch, a piece of meat decaying in the foreground while a kite flies overhead). She makes broad leaps from calm and gentle images—a tree—to violent ones—mottled and bloody necks—and back again. Unlike Charles Simic, for instance, who relies on the narrative power of the images, Plath uses the symbolic meaning of the image to unite her poem.
The yew’s black fingers wag;
Cold clouds go over.
So the deaf and dumb
Signal the blind, and are ignored.
I like black statements.
The featurelessness of that cloud, now!
White as an eye all over!
The eye of the blind pianist
At my table on the ship.
He felt for his food.
His fingers had the noses of weasels.
I couldn’t stop looking.
He could hear Beethoven:
Black yew, white cloud,
The horrific complications.
Finger-traps—a tumult of keys.
Empty and silly as plates,
So the blind smile.
I envy the big noises,
The yew hedge of the Gross Fugue.
Deafness is something else.
Such a dark funnel, my father!
I see your voice
Black and leafy, as in my childhood,
A yew hedge of orders,
Gothic and barbarous, pure German.
Dead men cry from it.
I am guilty of nothing.
The yew my Christ, then.
Is it not as tortured?
And you, during the Great War
In the California delicatessen
Lopping the sausages!
They color my sleep,
Red, mottled, like cut necks.
There was a silence!
Great silence of another order.
I was seven, I knew nothing.
The world occurred.
You had one leg, and a Prussian mind.
Now similar clouds
Are spreading their vacuous sheets.
I am lame in the memory.
I remember a blue eye,
A briefcase of tangerines.
This was a man, then!
Death opened, like a black tree, blackly.
I survive the while,
Arranging my morning.
These are my fingers, this my baby.
The clouds are a marriage dress, of that pallor.
Sylvia Plath opened the gateway for confessional poetry, yet she buries the personal implications of her writing deep in the text. This veiling enables her work to be overtly smart. The poem is more than just a personal confession, it is also a complex exploration into the pregnant power of symbols to convey meaning.
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