by Sylvia Plath
Anyhow, we are exactly the same height, when I wear flats, and I feel so relaxed and happy just being with him---perhaps he is just a stand-in for Gordon, I don’t know, but I do feel the need of orienting myself deeply to some one person in a confiding companionship where I can be articulate, and George Gebauer seems to be the most logical person around--I’ve refused two dates with a boy at Dartmouth business school, and I think I would really rather stay in and read now, than just go out with “anybody”---but when I came back I felt that the first month should be spent “getting back in Circulation” which I did with the greatest success.
Its a funny thing, but when I was out with Gerhardt last Saturday, (George’s third roommate) I kept counting the hours from 3 to 1 thinking they would never been over---in spite of the fact that Gerhardt treated me to cocktails, a lambchop dinner and a party---I could hardly wait till George came back from the chem lab and dropped in to talk with me. In contrast, on Sunday, as we just sat and read in George’s living room, the clocked seemed terribly accelerated and the hours struck one after the other with alarming rapidity . . . we listened to music, talked, went downtown for a club sandwich, and I felt just bubbling over with the mere realization that I had found a friend with whom I could share my humor, my ideas, and my delight in the surrounding world.
Really, I am very lucky to know such nice people--Marty, Claiborne, Gordon, Phil and George--all so alive and stimulating.
Mrs. Kelsey came up last night to see how I was feeling and brought a whole iced grapefruit for me to eat---it’s little things like that which make her so loved around the house.
George called up to tell me that he would call for me at 4 tomorrow afternoon, so that is a delightful prospect which has helped me get through this rather rugged week, . . . he is going to let up on his honors work in chemistry till spring vacation, when he will be up here working---he says that I am a bad influence, as he had resolved to work on weekends, but I really don’t think he is too disturbed by my coming onto the scene---
It was such fun last Sunday to have him carry my books down to the house as we walked along under the starry sky like schoolchildren, hand in hand, talking about people and ideas . . .
Got a postcard from Bob Cochran who did quit Dartmouth after all and is now at Newport Beach in California preparing to enter a sailboat race to Mexico--some people are just too unconventional for a disciplined program of study and must learn about life first hand, like a wandering hobo . . .
I am really pleased about my accepted job at the Southward Inn, especially as it doesn’t begin till June 21 which will give me a nice vacation and ample time to be at Marty’s wedding in Hanover. Also, Orleans is near Nauset, the most beautiful part of the Cape as far as I’m concerned. The sun and sea have it all over commuting in the sooty city as far as I’m concerned, and the Belmont taught me the lesson of moderation . . .
I’ll be hearing from you next week . . . meanwhile,
best love from your happy daughter . . .
sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Tuesday 16 March 1954*
TLS with envelope on Smith College
letterhead, Indiana University
Tuesday
Dear mummy . . .
Just a note to tell you that I finished my last written before spring vacation this morning, and am relaxing now under the illusion of freedom . . . just have a 20 page Russian paper to write now, which should be hard work, but quite satisfying . . . I think I will definitely write a thesis this coming year if I can get a good topic . . . . the rigid prospect of having to take 5 exams per week and attend every class doesn’t really appeal to me . . . and I am making up for lost time by the classes I’m taking this semester . . .
Mrs. Koffka’s exam today was good . . . and I really crammed for it this last week, doing six weeks of work this one week alone! I don’t know whether I was too general or not, but am sure I’ll at least get a B from her. As I passed in my exam, she looked at me intently and asked if I wasn’t in her History 11 section four years ago---I said yes and was amazed and pleased that she remembered me all this time!
Good news--I got an A- in my Russian exam, which was that hard question on money in Dostoevsky, and a straight A in my Hawthorne exam---which proves to me that I can combine artistic enjoyment with intelligent analysis, even if I am no genius! Thought you’d be pleased that I did so well while taking it so easily and having such a lovely time with my friends in the house and with George too!
Got a wonderfully understanding and appreciative letter from Gordon* today . . . he’s such a dear.
Also would love to fly to NYC Sunday IF we can afford it . . .
much love . . .
sivvy
p.s. – just received a copy of an article by a girl at a Texas U.* which included a very favorable criticism of my poem “Carnival Nocturne”!
TO Gordon Lameyer
Tuesday 16 March 1954
TLS on Smith College News Office
letterhead, Indiana University
March 16
Dearest Ulysses . . .
A March Tuesday finds me cold, dry, blue and windslashed in my sun square room . . . just finished intellectual history written this a.m. and feel deceptively free and omniscient and wise: all I have to do this coming week is a 20 page paper on the novels of Dostoevsky, who is to me in intellectual writing what Dylan is to me in emotional lyricizing. I’ll never get over the experience of reading “The Idiot” and “Brothers Karamazov” and fear that I shall walk around carrying the muchunderlined books in a small satchel and quoting voluminously from them at the slightest provocation!
Statistically, since I last talked twodimensionally with you, I’ve heard I. A. Richards hold forth on the “Dimensions of Reading Poetry” and sat on the floor at his feet during the subsequent reception listening him read poetry aloud by a leaping twinkling fire . . . also heard and delighted in a remarkably lucid lecture by Selden Bacon* from Yale on the intriguing subject: “Alcoholism: Illness, Evil or Social Pathology” . . . the following evening I went spontaneously down to Joe’s with my beautiful, brilliant blackhaired next year’s roommate, Nancy Hunter,* ostensibly because we wanted a glass of wine with our history reading. We ended up drinking a bottle of that lovely Chianti apiece and becoming inspired by our mutual eloquence and scintillating ideas in every field from sex to salvation . . . got to know each other a great deal better in the process. Symbolically, two voluptuously greenglass wickered wine bottles now flank your navy picture, which, as you may guess, is paganly enshrined on my maplewood bureau . . .
Your last manyleveled letter was declaimed partly aloud today over coffeecups and through bluelayered smoky air in Toto’s* . . . somehow I suddenly felt terribly close to you through your typewritten talking and your descriptions were so colored and conceived that I could fancy them more real than the original scenes must have been! You have many admirers of your reported journeyings, sir . . . I wonder when and where I will see you again if I will be able to look at you and say to myself: yes, this is the boy I have been writing to, confiding in, beginning to know and understand . . . or if you will be a darkeyed mysterious stranger with all the secret wisdom of the ages in your enigmatic smile and I will find that I cannot reconcile you to your name . . . identity is such a perilous quantity . . .
Last weekend, amid howling rain and sleet and treacherous puddled streets, Warren arrived from Harvard with one of his charming young roommates. I got them dates for the Amherst freshman show and dance and they stayed overnight in Chi Psi with George Gebauer, a good friend of mine whom you may have known . . . Anyhow, I had a great time Sunday over twohour’s worth of coffee catching up with Warren’s academic, social and ideological life---he’s doing wonderfully well at Harvard and is at present enamored of a Radcliffe girl poetically named Margo*--who mother claims resembles me, oddly enough. The two boys were my guests for dinner at the house and threw the whole freshm
an class into a minor state of adoration: my prestige mounted enormously because of my tall goodlooking brother!
Spring vacation begins a week from tomorrow, and I am planning to read about ten novels during it . . . plus spending five days exploring the delights and deviltries of NYC. My Estonian artist friend who I’ve probably told you about has invited me to stay with him as long as I want--his mother, too, which makes it all moral and aboveboard- and explore the town from my own section of their apartment to which they will symbolically give me the keys. I look forward to museums, central park, wine and cheese, and greenwich village . . . also, for some magnanimous reason, mother wants me to have the experience of flying in a big plane for the first time---though I really don’t see how anything could approximate the exhilaration of my one trip last year in the little two-seater over the Connecticut river and the Holyoke range . . . however, I shall probably increase my cosmopolitanity and accept her offer to wing my way wayward . . .
Other bumbling plans---mere bottles of form to be filled with the blood and wine of content---are a waitress job at the Southward Inn in Orleans on the Cape (anything to be near the sand and sea) which should begin not till June 21, giving me time to bridesmaid it at Marcia Brown’s wedding in Hanover and relax after exams at the end of May . . .
You are a most gratifying critic, by the way . . . you would be good at so many lovely things---lawyering psychologically, professoring English to young worshipping lads and free lance criticizing on the side of Mr. R. G. Davis---oh, hell, you are just damn versatile . . . we know what we are but not what we may be . . . and maybe we don’t even quite know what we are . . .
How can one become enamored of a letter? is it like loving a poem or a symbolic piece of prose because of the subconscious rememberings and desirings of living heightened by the pleasurefulpain of articulateness? . . . or is it linking the twodimensional mental work to the darkmysteriousmythicalphysicomentalempathy of bodyandmind??? God knows what I’m trying to say. And even he is having a time at it . .
Sometimes I am a susceptible hedonist, but if I don’t try to rationalize or be hypocritical about it, if I say: I am being this way because it is all I can get out of this particular situation and all I want to get and give, and it is good for it’s intrinsic value and for no long range or ideally related purpose except the immediate intense reveling joy of here and now to the height---then I can orient my refined and luxuriating hedonism to the honest reasoned integrity I hope I can revolve around all my life . . .
But when it is very dark and very mysterious and very warm one can say onename and really mean another . . . a much more fundamental and psychically significant name . . . so gordon, gordon, gordon . . . .
There is music to be heard with you and favorite parts of books to be read aloud to you . . . and apples to be eaten . . . with you . . .
lovingly . . .
sylvia
TO Ramona Maher
Tuesday 16 March 1954
TLS with envelope,
Dobkin Collection
Lawrence House
Smith College
Northampton, Massachusetts
March 16, 1954
Ramona Maher
Box 192, Texas Christian University
Fort Worth, Texas
Dear Ramona:
I was extremely pleased to receive the copy of your article “Conjectured Harbours” and enjoyed it a great deal, being especially appreciative of your favorable review of my poem “Carnival Nocturne”--indeed, if you happen to have another copy or so of the article I’d really like to have it as this is the first time I’ve seen anybody write a criticism of any of my work!
As for recent information about me---I’m taking an extra semester at Smith this year as I missed the first term--so I’ll be a senior next year. I’ve had three poems accepted by Harpers’ which should be coming out sometime this present spring---the names of the poems are “Go Get the Goodly Squab”, “To Eva Descending the Stair”, and “Doomsday”. I’ll enclose a couple of poems so you can get an idea of what I’ve been doing.
Campus activities related to writing include serving on the editorial board of the “Smith Review”, our college literary magazine, and being a reporter and correspondent for the out-of-town newspapers in the college News Office . . . I’ve also been on our college Electoral Board (which ratifies nominations for the Big Four college offices), served as Secretary for the Smith College Honor Board, been a member of Alpha, our honorary society of the arts, and been elected a Junior Phi Bete . . .
My favorite novelist (at present) is Dostoevsky, while Dylan Thomas is my favorite modern poet---Gerard Manley Hopkins, Yeats, and W. H. Auden rank highest among my other models---also I’m a devotee of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf and D. H. Lawrence.
I’d be interested to see your article when your through---congratulations again on your essay!
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Smith College
Assignment III
Harper’s*
Doomsday
A Villanelle
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans
Atop the broken universal clock:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.
The painted stages fall apart by scenes
And all the actors halt in mortal shock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.
The streets crack through in havoc-split ravines,
The doomstruck city crumbles block by block:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.
The fractured glass flies down in smithereens,
Our lucky relics have been put in hock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunk leans.
God’s monkey wrench has blasted all machines.
We never thought to hear the holy cock:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.
Too late to ask if end was worth the means,
Too late to calculate the toppling stock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans,
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.
Sylvia Plath
Smith College
Assignment III
Harper’s
To Eva Descending the Stair
A Villanelle
Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear;
The wheels revolve, the universe keeps running.
(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)
The asteroids turn traitor in the air,
The planets plot with old elliptic cunning;
Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear.
Red the unraveled rose sings in your hair:
Blood springs eternal if the heart be burning.
(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)
Cryptic stars wind up the atmosphere,
In solar schemes the tilted suns go turning;
Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear.
Loud the immortal nightingales declare:
Love flames forever if the flesh be yearning.
(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)
Circling zodiac compels the year.
Intolerant beauty never will be learning.
Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear.
(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)
Sylvia Plath
26 Elmwood Road
Wellesley, Massachusetts
Lawrence House
Smith College
Northampton, Massachusetts
Accepted by Harper’s*
Go Get the Goodly Squab
Go get the goodly squab in gold-lobed corn
And pluck the droll flecked quail where thick they lie,
Go reap the round blue pigeons from roof ridge
But let the fast-feathered eagle fly.
Let the fast-feathered eagle fly
And the sky crack through with thunder,
But hide, hide, in the deep n
est
Lest the lightning cleave you asunder.
Go snare the sleeping bear in leaf-lined den
And trap the muskrat napping in slack sun,
Go dupe the dull sow lounging snout in mud
But let the galloping antelope run.
Let the galloping antelope run
And the snow blow up behind,
But hide, hide, in the safe cave
Lest the blizzard drive you blind.
Go cull the purple snails from slothful shells
And bait the drowsing trout by the brook’s brim,
Go gather idle oysters from green shoals,
But let the quicksilver mackerel swim.
Let the quicksilver mackerel swim
Where the black wave topples down,
But hide, hide in the calm port
Lest the water drag you to drown.
Sylvia Plath
26 Elmwood Road
Wellesley 81, Mass.
Verbal Calisthentics
My love for you is more
Athletic than a verb,
Agile as a star
The tents of sun absorb.
Treading circus tightropes
Of each syllable
The brazen jackanapes
Would fracture if he fell.
Acrobat of space,
The daring adjective
Plunges for a phrase
Describing arcs of love.
Nimble as a noun
He catapults in air;
A planetary swoon
Could climax his career.
But adroit conjunction
Eloquently shall
Link to his lyric action
A periodic goal.
TO Melvin Woody
Wednesday 24 March 1954
TLS, Smith College
Memorandum sheets, with heading>
TO
you
FROM
me