December 1945 brought an eclipse of the moon—“a gray shadow spreading over it till only a pale ball of faint light hung in the sky,” she wrote in her diary.148 Sylvia found the December blizzards, with their “driving” winds and “howling” snow, exhilarating. The family spent their “big Christmas” at Aunt Dot’s house. (Grampy was working at the Brookline Country Club.) Sylvia faithfully recorded her gifts as usual: mittens, a nightgown, money, slippers, clothes, jewelry, a pocketbook, stamps (she now had more than 8,500), and a new diary. Writing in her diary was becoming essential to her well-being: “Dear Diary You’re one of the ‘musts’ for peace of mind.”149 All her friends were away, and her obligations were on hold, and the lull seems to have unnerved her. Unusual physical symptoms appeared; a few days after Christmas she vomited and fainted, hitting her head on a table as she fell. She stayed in bed and did not dress for three straight days. She channeled her unease into Gothic iambs:
The night is crouched in wait outside
Stealthy, catlike, dark and wide,
The night wind moans and plays a game
Of rattling every window frame—
My tiny, flick’ring lamp shines bright—
Small proof against the fearful night.
The hordes of darkness start their dance—
Retreat, advance; retreat, advance.
The night it lurks in wait outside
Hollow, hungry, dark and wide.
It waits to pounce into my room
And swallow it within the gloom.150
On New Year’s Eve, still in bed, she felt “very funny (peculiar) and lonely.”151 She had turned thirteen only two months before and seemed aware of an impending, nebulous shadow on the horizon. Like her mother, she tried to banish the bad with the good and end the year on a high note. She was “sort of optimistic” about the New Year and hoped that she would “succeed in my viola and piano and dancing and school and sports.”152 The war was over, just as she had hoped in her 1944 poem “Wish Upon A Star”: “I wish that all the wars would end; / Their homeward way the soldiers wend.”153 Her own struggles with depression were just beginning, however. In the coming years, she would fight an increasingly sinister opponent as she matured into a world that seemed to reflect the dark paranoia of her worst sleepless nights. Both Plath and the nation were moving toward a different kind of war, one in which the enemy was hidden, out of reach, but armed with an arsenal of annihilation.
4
My Thoughts to Shining Fame Aspire
Wellesley, 1946–1947
In January 1946, Sylvia received a fountain pen from her grandfather with her name inscribed in gold. She treasured the gift the way other teenage girls treasured silk dresses and pearl necklaces. When the pen was stolen five months later, she wrote that it was among the worst days of her life: “I felt ill all day and know now how much I loved it….My whole world has turned gray and black.”1 Aurelia replaced it two months later with “an exact duplicate,” which pleased Sylvia enormously.2 This unusual extravagance suggests that Aurelia understood how much her daughter had come to see the gleaming, monogrammed pen as an embodiment of her calling.
Plath put her pen to good use in 1946. Although most of her poems from this time are sentimental, they provide a glimpse of her developing thematic interests. Almost every poem Plath wrote during junior high school described a natural landscape. In “The Lake,” which dates from 16 July 1946, the water “is really / the earth’s clear eye, / Where are mirrored the moods / Of the wind and the sky.”3 Plath’s titles reflect her preoccupations: “Awake,” “Rain,” “The Spring Parade,” “March,” “The Lake,” “The Wind,” “Mornings of Mist,” “A Winter Sunset,” “Steely-Blue Crags,” “May,” “October.” These nature poems conveyed emotional truth within safe, impersonal parameters.
Plath began to explore darker images in early 1946. “A Winter Sunset,” written in her diary on January 16 and sent to her grandfather, reads:
Over the earth’s dark rim
The daylight softly fades,
The sky from orange to gold
And then to copen shades.
The moon hangs, a globe of iridescent light,
In a frosty winter sky,
While against the western glow one sees
The bare, black skeleton of the trees.
The stars come out and one by one
Survey the world with lofty stare;
But, from the last turn in the road
A cosy home beckons to me there.4
The first sound of Plath’s mature poetic voice is audible here. The middle stanza, suffused with the language of dark Romanticism, is the emotional heart of the poem. It contains several tropes that would reappear in Plath’s later work: a cold moon, liminal evening light, winter frost, and black, menacing trees. The stark vision nearly overwhelms the thirteen-year-old poet, who retreats to home and safety as if frightened of her own descriptive powers. Sylvia soon realized that the sentimental image of the “cosy home” weakened an otherwise powerful Gothic portrait; notably, she omitted the final stanza when she published the poem in the Phillipian in February 1946. This sound aesthetic decision suggests a shift away from sentimentality toward sublimity.
The same voice sounds again in other poems from 1946. Sylvia dedicated “To Miss Cox,” published in the Phillipian in November 1946, to a beloved schoolteacher who had passed away. It was Plath’s first public elegy. The somber poem considers the fleeting nature of life and hints at the consoling promise of an afterlife. The final stanza is the most powerful, though Plath again tempers her dark imagery with a cheerful ending:
The winter skies are leaden,
The flying snowflakes sting;
But behind the cold white stillness
There’s the promise of a spring.5
Leaden skies and “cold white stillness” are familiar elements of Plath’s mature poetic universe, while “the promise of a spring” would remain a resilient theme in her work. She never abandoned the idea of resurrection.
* * *
WHILE SYLVIA’S FRIENDSHIPS with Ruth Freeman, Margot Loungway, Perry Norton, Betsy Powley, Prissy Steele, and others6 flourished throughout her eighth-grade year, school was beginning to feel more like a “prison.”7 Missing school had once made Sylvia upset; now she cherished the “luxury” of lying in bed on weekends and lamented how quickly Monday came. She continued to earn straight A’s on her report cards, and was pleased when her English teacher, Mrs. Warren, told her that she was writing at near-college level and should apply for a college scholarship.8 But she counted down the days until her next vacation. That spring, her grandmother had to drive her to school because she was lugging ten pounds’ worth of books.9 She was stressed and overwhelmed, and admitted as much when she finally quit piano lessons in March.
She began to fall ill more frequently as her anxiety levels rose. Some of these illnesses may have been psychosomatic, as sickness seemed the only acceptable way to give herself a break. Days in bed gave her time to read and write for pleasure. In April 1946, for example, she was “itching” to read two books by Adele DeLeeuw but complained that she wouldn’t have time with all her schoolwork. Two days later she was conveniently home sick and “devoured” both books.10 Illness became her only respite from the pressures of schoolwork and extracurricular activities, and Aurelia was surprisingly lenient about letting her stay home. This was a pattern that would continue throughout Sylvia’s life. (It is possible that Plath’s breakdown in August 1953, which was partly brought on by the prospect of writing her senior thesis on James Joyce’s Ulysses, was an extreme version of the illness patterns that had developed in girlhood.)
Sometimes even a day off could not quell her anxiety. “I went to bed with a spinning brain,” she wrote in March 1946 after a day sick at home.11 When she returned to school,
she complained of her “eyes spinning and the black and white flashes grew worse in my study periods so that I couldn’t even read or work.”12 After resting in the nurse’s office for an hour she felt better, though the mysterious condition went undiagnosed. In May, after a hard day at school and a wet walk home in the rain, she was “angry with the world”; the following day, too, was “very raw and discouraging.”13 She began to have “gruesome” nightmares and did not sleep well.14 In a notebook dating from junior high, she described one of these nightmares in language reminiscent of Poe:
All there was overhead, below and on either hand was damp, suffocating, slimy, clinging blackness. Things padded silently, stealthily close by, but even though their presence could be sensed they were unknown things. They were made all the more terrifying by being unseen and yet there, because the imagination has the power to create monstrosities out of the vague unknown more horrible than the creations of nature itself. There was no feeling or seeing—only consciousness. Suddenly a spot of light appeared. It shaped itself deftly into a woman’s head. Beautiful and yet frightening. The skin was blue-white as marble. The nose finely modeled, the mouth vividly red, and the eyebrows were thin black arches. Her hair, black also, dissolved into the living darkness. But where her eyes should have been there were two gaping holes from which issued licking red tongues of fire. The face began to glow and, little by little, the blackness was forced back.15
Sylvia was excited by gruesome scenes elsewhere, as when she narrated a performance of “Horatius at the Bridge” in English class: “I reveled in those bloody lines.” After reading The Scarlet Pimpernel, a book about the French Revolution that she called “thrilling” and “rather bloody,” she drew a blood-stained guillotine surrounded by decapitated heads in her diary.16 She was again excited by blood—this time her own—when she scraped her knee during a basketball game that May: “To my delight it bled all over the bus and drew pitying attention and sighs.”17 When a fire struck a neighbor’s garage that spring, she wrote, “thrill, thrill” as she watched the “screaming engines” rush to put it out.18 Her Romantic mind seized on violence as it did hurricanes and winter storms—as a sublime force that brought her closer to an unveiling, an edge. When she heard Sibelius’s Finlandia in Boston’s Symphony Hall that May, she praised its stormy rhythms: “marvelous! It sounded like waves pounding on the wet beach, tossing up mists of spray with the theme of lightning and thunder rising through the powerful melody.”19 Finlandia inspired her to write a poem, “Sea Symphony,” in which she described “The boom of the breakers on sharp, black rocks, / The scream of the gulls as they dip and soar” and the “pale green light / Of stormy, blustering afternoons.”20 The Gothic romance and moorland setting of Jane Eyre—which made her “estatically happy” [sic]—moved her more than the drawing room dramas of Pride and Prejudice, which she read in June: “I enjoy it greatly. Of course the artificial speeches they made in those days are rather boring.”21
In mid-June she won the school spelling bee and a special Wellesley pennant for her academic achievement, but she longed for the final weeks of school, when the workload lightened. She was the only eighth grader to receive a fourth “letter” for academic success, and when school let out she was up in her apple tree voraciously reading Adele DeLeeuw books “about girls beginning their life work”: “she writes about many different careers in very professional language.”22 Sylvia also resumed work on her novella Stardust, based on the Nancy-Star sequence she had begun in the mid-1940s. She was pleased to see that after typing out her longhand, her second chapter took up seven pages.23
At June’s end the Powleys drove Sylvia up to Camp Helen Storrow for her second summer. She was again in the same tent with Betsy; Ruth Freeman soon joined them. (Sylvia was pleased that Ruth entered the cabin as she was washing the windows: “What a good impression that must have made.”)24 Back in Wellesley later in the summer, she studied Eleanor Gates’s play The Poor Little Rich Girl for ideas about plot and structure that she could use in her own stories.25 She also became more serious about painting. Aurelia bought her a set of oil paints and four canvasses that July, which gave her a “thrill.”26 She painted birch trees and zinnias and began typing lessons in August. She loved the speed tests and looked forward to the day when she could type her own stories quickly.27
Betsy and Ruth often came for weekends, and they enjoyed convivial family suppers with Sylvia’s grandparents, aunts, uncles, and young cousins. The three friends played cards, often with Betsy’s parents, and swam. Sylvia mastered the diving board at the Morses Pond bathing beach. “It is such fun to cut the water like a knife,” she wrote. “I am just bursting glad that I’m learning how to dive!”28 She still noted days that summer when she felt “queer” and “off,” “yawny, miserable” days when she retreated to bed.29 Yet it was in bed that she often did some of her best creative work. In late August she wrote four poems while she recuperated from a sore throat, writing, “I picked these thoughts out of the air when they came flying by on winds.”30 Lounging in bed also gave her time to catch up on current events through the radio. Sometimes the implications were disturbing: “I listened to the news—about the troubles with Palestine, Jugoslavia [sic], and Russia. Boy! If only there isn’t another war in this world! I do so want peace.”31 She wished that she “could run things for a while.”32
Sylvia spent the last two weeks of August lounging on the sun porch, where she drew “bathing beauties” in sultry poses, and read Wuthering Heights. She found the book “rather dark and morbid” but enjoyed it.33 Aurelia, meanwhile, gave her Triumph Clear, a book about a young girl crippled by polio. After the high drama of Wuthering Heights, the novel’s moral message was a letdown: “The books [sic] lesson is, I guess, that we never know how much we appreciate something until we loose [sic] it.”34 In Sylvia’s diary, Aurelia stands in the background of all this activity as a source of comfort. One night Sylvia left Betsy’s house late, and feared riding home in the dark. “As I started on the dark bike ride home, I saw a familiar figure ahead. Mother had come to meet me. Was relieved and happy.”35
Sylvia started the ninth grade, her last year of junior high, in September 1946. She added Latin, Ancient History, and Algebra to her usual roster of subjects. She was in an honors-level English class taught by Helen Lawson, who remembered that, though Plath was at the top of the class, she had “the complete respect of her fellow pupils—not that of a ‘grind.’ ”36 Sylvia began Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities the first week of September and called it “the most wonderful, magnificent book I’ve ever read!”37 She soon began David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, and declared her love for Dickens in her diary.38
She loved, too, the clear blue skies, tawny leaves, and bracing winds of autumn. It was now too cold to read in the apple tree, so she camped out in her grandmother’s room, which was sun filled and “airy,” reading The Count of Monte Cristo and letters from her Belgian pen pal Claudine Dufrane, which her grandfather helped translate from French.39 After drawing pictures of starlets in her diary that month, she wrote, “Some old nagging thing inside me prompts me to waste such nice paper….From now on I won’t let the weak side of my character hold sway.”40
She attended her first school dance with Perry Norton that October in a yellow evening dress with velvet black bows; she happily recorded that she danced with seven boys. Her fourteenth birthday soon followed (her favorite present was an avocado from her grandfather), but she did not greet it with the usual enthusiasm. She felt she was growing old, and seemed despondent about the passage of time.
She discovered Sara Teasdale’s poetry in November and copied several of Teasdale’s nature poems into her diary, writing, “What I wouldn’t give to be able to write like this!”41 The poems she copied—“Late October,” “Full Moon,” “The Fountain,” “Autumn Dusk,” “Mountain Water,” “There Will Be Stars,” and “Beautiful, Proud Sea”—are similar in tone to the kind of lyric nature
poetry she was then writing. In “Late October,” for example, Teasdale writes:
Listen, the damp leaves on the walks are blowing
With a ghost of sound;
Is it fog or is it rain dripping
From the low trees to the ground?42
Sylvia transcribed these lines in her diary and wrote, “they express my thoughts beautifully.”43 The Teasdale poem that seems to have had the most influence on her was “The Crystal Gazer,” whose first four lines she transcribed in her diary that November:
I shall gather myself into myself again,
I shall take my scattered selves and make them one
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