During the month of October, Plath wrote almost a poem a day—one of the most extraordinary literary outpourings of the twentieth century. In four weeks she would produce nearly as many poems as she had written in 1960 and 1961.2 These were the poems that would, as she predicted, make her name. Plath lifted the veil to reveal ugly realities about her own life, and her society. She filled these poems with images of torture, murder, genocide, war, suicide, illness, revenge, and fury—but also spring, rebirth, and triumph. Her language would shock and startle, but her path was well trodden. For Plath, as for Yeats and Dante, the fires of hell were purifying.3 Hughes understood. He called The Bell Jar “the map / Of your Commedia,” and the Ariel poems “the total song: / Inferno, Purgatory & Paradiso.”4
The risk she had taken when she married Ted now revealed itself. She had lost her husband to a thrice-married woman with a history of abortions—all slightly scandalous to Sylvia, who was still her mother’s daughter. The poetry she wrote in October cannot be cleaved from this reality. The loss of Ted meant emotional turmoil and domestic chaos, but also freedom. In her work she reinvented Classical heroines like Clytemnestra, Antigone, and Medea. She flouted deeper taboos than Lowell and Sexton, killing off fathers, mothers, children, and the self in poems of annihilation, flight, and transcendence. These furious, urgent, and sometimes reckless poems defied formal meter, yet their stanzas were symmetrical and rhythmic. This poetry was veering off in a new direction, just as Plath was in her life. She would define them for the BBC: “These new poems of mine have one thing in common. They were all written at about four in the morning—that still, blue, almost eternal hour before cockcrow, before the baby’s cry, before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles. If they have anything else in common, perhaps it is that they are written for the ear, not the eye: they are poems written out loud.”5 Suddenly unmoored from the certainties of her life, she left behind certainty in her art. There was no need to hold tight anymore. She was in free fall.
Both Alvarez and Hughes felt at the time that Plath was facing personal demons she had repressed for years. Hughes realized that Plath was answering back to him in intimate code. He thought that as she wrote Ariel she was influenced by several of his poems that she had kept with her after he left Court Green, including “Out,” “The Green Wolf,” “New Moon in January,” “Heptonstall,” “Full Moon & Little Frieda,” and “The Road to Easington.”6 And, indeed, many of Plath’s Ariel poems engage with Hughes’s work in a game of one-upsmanship. But neither Hughes nor Alvarez recognized how much farther Plath had actually gone, how much wider her context. For these poems engaged not only with personal horrors, but cultural ones. Just as First World War poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon blew apart notions of honor and chivalry with irony and black humor, Plath dealt a similar blow to postwar gentility. Like Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” like Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” hers are poems of personal grief transmuted into public protest.
The deluge began on October 1 with “The Detective.” An abandoned wife and her children have disappeared, and a detective speaker tries to reconstruct events. The poem is clearly aimed at Hughes:
This is the smell of years burning, here in the kitchen,
These are the deceits, tacked up like family photographs,
And this is a man, look at his smile,
The death weapon? No one is dead.
“There is no body in the house at all,” Plath wrote. “It is a case of vaporization.” Allegations of abuse, murder, and dismemberment hang in the air. The trail has gone cold: “There is only the moon, embalmed in phosphorous. / There is only a crow in a tree. Make notes.” Metaphor, history, and autobiography merge surrealistically.
“The Courage of Shutting-Up,” which reads like a companion piece to “The Detective,” came the next day. There are more surreal images about a truth that must be silenced; there is talk of death and torture. “Must it be cut out?” she writes of the tongue. “It has nine tails, it is dangerous. / And the noise it flays from the air, once it gets going!” Eyes and tongues witness everyday atrocities they are forbidden to express. Silenced, they become “a country no longer heard of, / An obstinate independency / Insolvent among the mountains.” The poem is about the marginalization of the powerless by the powerful, embodied by the aristocratic British library with its exotic colonial prints and male totems. The wagging tongue appears “Hung up in the library with the engravings of Rangoon / And the fox heads, the otter heads, the heads of dead rabbits.” Plath was remembering the Rangoon prints Murphy had showed her in Ireland, while the foxes, otters, and rabbits allude obviously to Hughes. Both men had hurt her, and both embodied different types of male violence (colonialism; the hunt). Neither decorum nor femininity permit the tongue to reveal, the eyes to suggest: “Their death rays folded like flags.” But Plath’s tongue refuses to be governed. Just a few days after seeing Alvarez, she wrote in this poem of “tits / On Mermaids.” “Tits” was the coarsest word she had ever used in a poem.
Around this time, Plath received a letter from Howard Moss at The New Yorker accepting “Elm” but rejecting “Burning the Letters,” “Poppies in July,” “Words heard, by accident, over the phone,” “The Other,” and “Berck-Plage” (“none of them seemed to us quite as splendid as ELM,” he wrote).7 Moss’s rejection of her angry, personal poems—and praise for the more symbolic “Elm”—may have pushed Plath in the latter aesthetic direction. She gave up, for the moment, the rebellious, proto-feminist voice of “The Detective” and “The Courage of Shutting-Up” for more surreal poems inspired by the nature in her backyard. She called these poems, written mainly between October 3 and 9, “the Bee sequence” in letters to editors that fall: “The Bee Meeting,” “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” “Stings” (begun on August 2), “The Swarm,” and “Wintering.” All were based on her experience of beekeeping in Devon that summer. But they also resurrect the ghost of the Bienen-König, Otto Plath. She wrote in her journal that she hoped the spirit of her dead father would protect her from her stinging bees.
Indeed, Otto’s Bumblebees and Their Ways is an important, frequently overlooked, influence on Plath’s Ariel poems. Consider the following by Otto:
The way in which the Psithyrus queen proceeds in order to ensure the success of her atrocious work has all the appearance of a cunning plan, cleverly conceived and carried out by one who not only is a mistress of the crime of murder, but also knows how to commit it at the most advantageous time for herself and her future children, compelling the poor orphans she creates to become her willing slaves.
Describing a moment when the queen bee attacks other bees around her, he writes that she
now went on the warpath herself. She quickly seized one worker after another, whether attacked by them or not, rolled them below her abdomen and stung them to death. This done, she seemed to feel quite at home in the jar, and began to lap up the honey which was oozing from the bodies of her victims.8
The personification of the queen bee as a calculating murderess left its mark on Plath’s October 1962 poems.
Introducing “the Bee sequence” for the BBC, Plath wrote, “Recently I took to keeping bees. I was intrigued from the start by this ancient art of stealing sweetness, and by the heraldic regalia—the bee hats, the screen visors, the cheese-cloth breastplates and gauntlets.”9 Plath’s BBC comment about “The Bee Meeting” belies its sinister tones: “In this poem a novice is being initiated by the village beekeepers and a visiting expert.”10 Scenes of torture haunt “The Bee Meeting,” with its Gothic assemblage. Plath welds memories of her shock treatment with medieval sacrificial rite, and hints that the speaker has been “damned” by the villagers, and must be punished. In “The Bee Meeting,” T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” meets Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”:
I am exhausted, I am exhausted—
Pillar of white in a bla
ckout of knives.
I am the magician’s girl who does not flinch.
The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands.
Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold.
Hughes’s work was another important influence. He later suggested that his poem “The Road to Easington,” with its similar rhythms and questioning lines, had “brought on the first of the Bee poems,” “The Bee Meeting.” To him, its message was clear, as he wrote William Scammell in 1998. “She deliberately adopted the manner of pieces of mine that she interpreted as evidence of my perfidy, then reversed them onto me as replies in the same code (i.e. that I could not fail to recognize and read).”11 The first line of “The Road to Easington” reads, “Is there anything along this road, are there answers at the road’s end?” Plath adopted the same long, questioning lines in “The Bee Meeting”:
Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the villagers—
The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.
In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection,
And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me?
Plath knew this was fruitful territory. “The Arrival of the Bee Box” followed on October 4. For the BBC she wrote, “It is literal and descriptive: I have just received my bee colony. It is written for anyone who has ever tried to keep a genie in a too-small bottle.”12 Plath’s speaker becomes the captor, bending an ear to the “furious Latin” of the angry hive. The speaker muses on her power: “They can be sent back. / They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.” But she is “not a Caesar.” She vows to set them free. “The box is only temporary.”
Plath knew that bees often functioned in English literature as a traditional symbol of the well-run state. But in “The Swarm” she upends this association, linking them with the territorial conquests of Napoleon and the bloody wartime history of “Russia, Poland and Germany!” The observer-speaker exults in the swarm’s threat of destruction as it morphs through the air, “A flying hedgehog, all prickles.” She is almost saddened when a villager breaks up the swarm with a shot, for she is on the side of the bees, flying for their freedom.
“Stings,” too, traffics in power. The speaker ponders the hive’s queens as she handles the honeycombs—“winged, unmiraculous women, / Honey-drudgers.” Then the poem takes a more personal turn.
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.
The speaker rejects effacement, and the poem ends with some of Plath’s most famous lines:
…I
Have a self to recover, a queen.
Is she dead, is she sleeping?
Where has she been,
With her lion-red body, her wings of glass?
Now she is flying
More terrible than she ever was, red
Scar in the sky, red comet
Over the engine that killed her—
The mausoleum, the wax house.
On Tuesday, October 9—two days before Hughes left Court Green for good—Plath finished “Wintering,” a personal meditation on her struggle.13 It begins in darkness as the speaker imagines her jars of honey lined up in Court Green’s cellar. Plath’s BBC notes offer no hint of the poem’s connection to her life: “This year the bee season was poor, I started my colony late, and to make up for the six jars or so of honey I extracted, I had to feed my bees sugar syrup till they slowed into their annual coma.”14 But this is dangerous terrain for Plath, whose first suicide attempt occurred in the dark cellar of her Wellesley home. (She would write her first draft of “Edge” on the back of this page.) “This is the room I have never been in,” Plath writes. “This is the room I could never breathe in.” The dark cellar becomes a metaphor for the speaker’s troubled state of mind.
The black bunched in there like a bat,
No light
But the torch and its faint
Chinese yellow on appalling objects—
Black asinity. Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me.
Suddenly the speaker refocuses her attention on the bees outside, “all women,” keeping their “long royal lady” warm and alive. “They have got rid of the men,” Plath writes. This female emblem of resilience distracts the speaker from death and darkness. Her questions and hopes about the hive’s survival apply also to Plath herself:
Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.
Plath ended Ariel with “Wintering,” making the last word “spring”—the symbol of rebirth and regeneration that had been an aesthetic leitmotif and touchstone since childhood.
* * *
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If Plath’s poetic vision was triumphant, her reality was bleak. She wrote to Dr. Beuscher on October 9—the day she finished “Wintering”—that Ted “has nothing but shattering things to say to me, seems to want to kill me…I long for the divorce, for my independence, like clear water.” Ted had told her he had been “a hypocrite for at least the last 3 years of our marriage, I have been eating not real bread, but a delusion of love.” The past six years had been “sentimentality.”15 He seemed so different to her now—he had always been a “steady driver” but was now driving at “suicidal” speeds through the narrow Devon lanes, chain-smoking, and lying.16 She told Beuscher he had left the hotel where he spent his first night with Assia without paying, after breaking a sink and burning curtains. “Our marriage had to go, okay. But she makes the going foul.” Still, Sylvia knew that she had to play a certain part. “I have to be nice, can’t afford the luxury of a fury even. Be good little doggy & you shall have a penny. It is the last degradation. Right now I hate men. I am stunned, bitter.” She dreamed of moving to London to start her own life. “I have the consolation of being no doubt the only woman who will know the early years of a charming genius. On my skin. Like a Belsen label.”17
She told Aurelia, too, of Ted’s preparations to leave her life. “Ted is in love, humming, packing, leaving this week. He’ll live with the woman, I think marry her, though he won’t admit it.” She worried he would change his mind about the £1,000 yearly allowance. “He is very pleased with himself and whenever he wants to be very very pleased sort of hums & says, ‘I think £1,000 is too much. You can economize, eat less roasts,’ etc., etc.’ ” She feared that his family would turn him against her, though Edith, upset and bewildered by her son’s behavior, wrote to Aurelia expressing sympathy for Sylvia.
Sylvia longed intermittently for the “culture & libraries” of city life and the rural peace of Connemara. “I am dying to get to Ireland. I need three months away to recover. Everybody leering and peering,” she told Aurelia. “In spring I’ll have strength to cope with the rest, the return, holding my head up. I can’t sleep without pills & my health has been bad.” She looked to Warren now that she had “no man.” Her own husband “laughs at me, insults me, says my luck is over, etc. He goes tomorrow.” She went on:
Everything is breaking—my dinner set cracking in half, the health inspector says the cottage should be demolished, there is no hope for it, so I shall have to do over the long room instead. Even my beloved bees set upon me today when I numbly knocked aside their sugar feeder & I am all over stings. Ted just gloats.18
Now that Ted’s marriage was ending, Assia had doubts about ending hers. She and David were traveling to Germany together in early October, and she didn’t wa
nt to leave him until their financial prospects improved. She told Nathaniel Tarn on October 10 that Sylvia had named her “as correspondent in a divorce suit” and was “setting detectives onto her.” If true, this was rather more than Assia had bargained for. Things with Ted were moving too fast, while David was finally fighting for her. “D. [David] is countering the danger in a ‘magnificent way,’ doing all the things he should do to save the marriage,” Assia told Nathaniel. He was skeptical they would stay together, though he noted on October 26 that the Wevills seemed close on the way to a Peter Redgrove reading. “D. [David] is in a pathetic state doing some kind of marking act: opening car doors for A., lighting her cigarettes etc. She keeps on looking dramatically at him, as if he were going to break. They are very lovey-dovey, arm in arm all the time.”19 David later said that during this time, “We didn’t want our marriage to end, and I didn’t feel it was ending.” Assia told her husband she “regretted” her affair with Ted, which continued to appall Nathaniel.20 “For me, this is like watching a Greek play,” he wrote in his diary on October 1.21
On the same day Assia expressed her doubts about Ted to Nathaniel, Sylvia wrote “A Secret,” another surrealistic nightmare poem. She then wrote a pleasant letter to Howard Moss, delighted that The New Yorker had taken “Elm.” “I am happier about your taking this than about any of the other poems of mine you’ve taken—I was afraid it might be a bit too wild and bloody, but I’m glad it’s not.”22 She approved of the new title he’d suggested, “The Elm Speaks,” and sent him a new batch of poems on October 12: “A Birthday Present,” “The Detective,” “The Courage of Quietness” (retitled “The Courage of Shutting-Up”), “For a Fatherless Son,” “The Applicant,” “Daddy,” and her five bee poems. Moss would reject them all.
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