The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1

by Sylvia Plath

  I’ll be so eager to hear what you think of these: for myself, they show a rather encouraging growth: “Channel Crossing” is one of the first I’ve written in a “new line”: turning away from the small, coy love lyric (I am most scornful of the small preciousness of much of my past work) and bringing the larger, social world of other people into my poems; I have been terribly limited hitherto, and my growing strong concepts of the universe have been excluded from my poetry (coming out, I think, most interestingly in my series of Seventeen stories about social problems: jewish question, sororities, etc., which I still admire!) Now, I am making a shift. The world and the problems of an individual in this particular civilization are going to be forged into my discipline, which is still there, but, if you will read the poem out-loud (it’s meant to be) you will, I hope, not be conscious of rhymes and end-stopped lines, but of the conversational quality of the verse.

  “The Pursuit” is more in my old style, but larger, influenced a bit by Blake, I think (tiger, tiger) and more powerful than any of my other “metaphysical” poems; read aloud also. It is, of course, a symbol of the terrible beauty of death, and the paradox that the more intensely one lives, the more one burns and consumes oneself; death, here, includes the concept of love, and is larger and richer than mere love, which is part of it. The quotation is from Racine’s “Phèdre”, where passion as destiny is magnificently expressed. I am hypnotized by this poem and wonder if the simple seductive beauty of the words will come across to you if you read it slowly and deliberately aloud. Another epigraph could have been from my beloved Yeats: “Whatever flames upon the night, Man’s own resinous heart has fed.”* The painter’s brush consumes his dreams, and all that.

  Oh, mother, if only you knew how I am forging a soul! How fortunate to have these two years! I am fighting, fighting, and I am making a self, in great pain, often, as for a birth, but it is right that it should be so, and I am being refined in the fires of pain and love. You know, I have loved Richard above and beyond all thought; that boy’s soul is the most furious and saintly I have met in this world; all my conventional doubts about his health, his frail body, his lack of that “athletic” physique which I possess and admire, all pales to nothing at the voice of his soul, which speaks to me in such words as the gods would envy. I shall perhaps read you his last letter when you come; it is my entrance into the taj mahal of eternity.

  Well, overcome as he is by an intense, almost Platonic scrupulosity, he feels he must conquer the phenomenal world, serve two years in the army, find a profession and become self-supporting and then and only then found a home and all the rest. So with all these large things, he leaves me, consecrated to silence, and a kind of abstract understanding in our own particular world of devils and angels; it would be a good thing if someone from this world could overcome his image and win me, but I seriously doubt that, however I seek, I will find someone that strong. And I will settle for nothing less than a great soul; it would be sinful to compromise, when I have known this. I feel like the princess on the glass hill; what possible knight could overcome this image? This dynamic holy soul which we share?

  Well, the essence of my difficulty and torment this past term has been to realize that no matter how I wanted to escape the commitment, I cannot deny that I am captive to a powerful love which passes all the surface considerations of this world and reaches to what we can know of the eternal. I am also, now, deprived of this person (I can’t even see him this spring in Paris, he is so obsessed with this ideal of conquering the world before returning to me; he won’t compromise, which, being very practical, I would, sharing the present spring and making it lovely). With these circumstances faced, the situation, while torturing, becomes real enough to deal with:

  I have changed in my attitudes: I parcel out the love I have, the enormous desire to give (which is my problem, not “being loved” so much: I just have to “Give out” and feel smothered when* there is no being strong enough for my intensity) in homeopathic doses to those around me: the little woman in the subway lavatory whom I changed from a machine into a person for a minute, and hugged her; the crooked man selling malt bread; the little boy running his black dog which urinated over a pool of white swans: and all those around me. I am, essentially, living in two worlds: one, where my love is gone with Richard; the other, this world of books, market, and nice people. If I could meet anyone this summer, or next year, or next, I would be most happy to learn to love again: I am always open to this. But until someone can create worlds with me the way Richard can, I am essentially unavailable.

  I hope you understand that all this is very private, and I am sharing it with you as I would the deepest secrets of my soul, because I want you to understand that my battles are intricate and complex, and that I am, without despair, facing them, wrestling with angels, and learning to tolerate that inevitable conflict which is our portion as long as we are truly alive. I am growing strong by practice. All the growing visions of beauty and new worlds which I am experiencing are paid for by birth pangs. The idea of perfect happiness and adjustment was exploded in “Brave New World”; what I am fighting for is the strength to claim the “right to be unhappy” together with the joy of creative affirmation.

  More practically: please reassure me about the money which you said you sent. It was not in your letter which said it was, ambiguously “enclosed” and “coming.” Do let me know how you sent it, for it hasn’t come yet. Also, more seriously, how is grammy? I heard she was in the hospital again this week and am most concerned to hear how she is coming along. Please do let me count on your coming this June, unless she is in a critical state: in a sense, you have a debt to the young, to the living, and the future, you know. I’d love to be able to think you’d do everything possible to come; I’ve gotten to look so extremely forward to your sharing England with me!

  More immediately still: will you please write to the Eugene Saxton fellowship fund (cf. that book in our library at home on scholarships) and ask for information about applications: I want very seriously to apply for a grant for the years 1957-1958 for either writing a book of poems or a novel; I believe that my background of poetry prizes is a rather fine statement of promise: The Academy of American Poets, Lyric Young Poet’s, sharing the Irene Glascock, Smith prizes and publications; if, as I hope I can write a good deal this spring & publish, I should be the “young writer” they seem to favor; also, I feel the sproutings of a novel in me, which would have to be started in the form of short stories; but I am going to revolt from this critical world (which can dry one’s blood, if one isn’t careful: I see it in all the women around me) and want desperately to try spending a year writing, preferably in southern france, Italy or Spain, where the climate is “my air” all year round. I know I probably will have to apply sometime next fall early, and want to be prepared with documents, etc. Please, please, ask them about this in a letter, saying, perhaps that your daughter is on a Fulbright. Better still, send me their adress & a copy of their paragraph of purpose in the book, & I’ll write: that would be best. I’ve had a new vision, partly because of this brilliant analytical critical boy I’ve met from Yale whose mind has clarified certain purposes in me which see dangers in the academic continuity: he’s going back to be a professor at Yale and knows all the brilliant critics: Cleanth Brooks, E. M. Forster, David Daiches, C. S. Lewis, and so on. But the pedestrian, analytic mind, while tonic, appalls me: I fly to the saintly, religious, intuitive: the blend of both: Ivan Karamazov!

  Love from a very happy

  sivvy

  Sylvia Plath

  4 Barton Road

  Cambridge, England

  Channel Crossing

  On storm-struck deck, wind sirens caterwaul;

  With each tilt, shock and shudder, our blunt ship

  Cleaves forward into fury; dark as anger,

  Waves wallop, assaulting the stubborn hull.

  Flayed by spary, we take the challenge up,

  Grip the rail, squint ahead, and wonder how much l
onger

  Such force can last; but beyond, the neutral view

  Shows, rank on rank, the hungry seas advancing.

  Below, rocked havoc-sick, voyagers lie

  Retching in bright orange basins; a refugee

  Sprawls, hunched in black, among baggage, wincing

  Under the strict mask of his agony.

  Far from the sweet stench of that perilous air

  In which our comrades are betrayed, we freeze

  And marvel at the smashing nonchalance

  Of nature: what better way to test taut fiber

  Than against this onslaught, these casual blasts of ice

  That wrestle with us like angels; the mere chance

  Of making harbor through this racketing flux

  Taunts us to valor. Blue sailors sang that our journey

  Would be full of sun, white gulls, and waters drenched

  With radiance, peacock-colored; instead, bleak rocks

  Jutted early to mark our going, while sky

  Curded over with clouds and chalk cliffs blanched

  In sullen light of the inauspicious day.

  Now, free, by hazard’s quirk, from the common ill

  Knocking our brothers down, we strike a stance

  Most mock-heroic, to cloak our waking awe

  At this rare rumpus which no man can control:

  Meek and proud both fall; stark violence

  Lays all walls waste; private estates are torn,

  Ransacked in the public eye. We forsake

  Our lone luck now, compelled by bond, by blood,

  To keep some unsaid pact; perhaps concern

  Is helpless here, quite extra, yet we must make

  The gesture, bend and hold the prone man’s head.

  And so we sail toward cities, streets and homes

  Of other men, where statues celebrate

  Brave acts played out in peace, in war; all dangers

  End: green shores appear; we assume our names,

  Our luggage, as docks halt our brief epic; no debt

  Survives arrival; we walk the plank with strangers.

  Sylvia Plath

  Pursuit

  “Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit.”*

  Racine

  There is a panther stalks me down:

  One day I’ll have my death of him;

  His greed has set the woods aflame,

  He prowls more lordly than the sun.

  Most soft, most suavely glides that step,

  Advancing always at my back;

  From gaunt hemlock, rooks croak havoc:

  The hunt is on, and sprung the trap.

  Flayed by thorns I trek the rocks,

  Haggard through the hot white noon.

  Along red network of his veins

  What fires run, what craving wakes?

  Insatiate, he ransacks the land

  Condemned by our ancestral fault,

  Crying: blood, let blood be spilt;

  Meat must glut his mouth’s raw wound.

  Keen the rending teeth and sweet

  The singeing fury of his fur;

  His kisses parch, each paw’s a briar,

  Doom consummates that appetite.

  In the wake of this fierce cat,

  Kindled like torches for his joy,

  Charred and ravened women lie,

  Become his starving body’s bait.

  Now hills hatch menace, spawning shade;

  Midnight cloaks the sultry grove;

  The black marauder, hauled by love

  On fluent haunches, keeps my speed.

  Behind snarled thickets of my eyes

  Lurks the lithe one; in dreams’ ambush

  Bright those claws that mar the flesh

  And hungry, hungry, those taut thighs.

  His ardor snares me, lights the trees,

  And I run flaring in my skin;

  What lull, what cool can lap me in

  When burns and brands that yellow gaze?

  I hurl my heart to halt his pace,

  To quench his thirst I squander blood;

  He eats, and still his need seeks food,

  Compels a total sacrifice.

  His voice waylays me, spells a trance,

  The gutted forest falls to ash;

  Appalled by secret want, I rush

  From such assault of radiance.

  Entering the tower of my fears,

  I shut my doors on that dark guilt,

  I bolt the door, each door I bolt.

  Blood quickens, gonging in my ears:

  The panther’s tread is on the stairs,

  Coming up and up the stairs.

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Tuesday 13 March 1956

  TLS (aerogramme),

  Indiana University

  Tuesday morning

  March 13, 1956

  Dearest darling beautiful saintly mother!!!

  Hold on to your hat and brace yourself for a whistling hurricane of happiness! Spring has sprouted early this year, and all the cold doubts and dark fears of winter exploded in a mass of magnificent mail this morning:

  MY FULBRIGHT HAS BEEN RENEWED! Joy, bliss, and how wonderful it comes before my vacation! You must imagine what this does to my peace of mind: I’ve weighed myself and found wanting so often this hectic term (I’ve really slaved this term, and often felt no matter how hard I read, I still would never make the grade) that this kind of consecration from the powers that be make me feel that needed surge of strength to dare and drive through this next and last week of term; tired and discouraged as I’ve been, fighting for a stoic and creative attitude in spite of all frustrations and rejections and conflicts on every side: they are giving me a 12 month allowance to cover as much of the summer as I’m in England, so when you’re here, I hope to be your hostess from the 13th to the 22nd of June! What joy to show you my London, my lovely Cambridge! And not have that worry of money over my head! I am sure my acting and writing has something to do with it, for my academic letters surely weren’t anything more than business like: also, my statement of purpose was rather eloquent, and I luckily have the gift of an angel’s tongue when I want to be persuasive! Let me say it again in loud print: MY FULBRIGHT IS RENEWED!!!

  There! Now I can write to Smith and cancel my application for aid with thanks and joy. Oh, I must send the Fulbright office here copies of my Cambridge articles and drawing: I think my love and joy of this place shows through there. I was so elated to hear that it “shared” Cambridge with so many at home. I am planning to go around sketching Cambridge this next week, when everybody will be gone, and the Backs and flowers will be shining in the strengthening sun. I cannot draw well, or write exceptionally, but I feel now so far beyond that perfectionist streak which would be flawless or nothing: now I go on in my most happy-go-lucky way, and make my little imperfect worlds in pen and on typewriter, and share them with those I love. You have no idea how fresh courage came to me through your last letter and those who appreciated my article and drawing: I look ever upward, and am in the midst of brilliant, beautiful, talented people. My accomplishments and abilities often seem so small in comparison: I often wonder “who am I to teach!” and must be helped to look back and see what a fine career I’ve really had, and how far I’ve come: in the academic world, I’m with real scholars, and of course, feel ignorant & untutored. But compared with highschool, even college, I’m really becoming well-read!

  Other wonderful news came too: I am meeting Gordon somewhere in Germany at the beginning of April and we are renting a car and driving through Germany, Austria, Switzerland, to Italy (Venice, Rome in Spring, Capri!) Isn’t it like a fairy tale! Mrs. Lameyer wrote me a dear letter, and I am happy, because Gordon & I are so compatible (in a friendly way) that it should be a fine trip! Then he may come to England to visit, too! My vacation plans had depressed me, for I didn’t want to go to Italy alone, and now, I can be truly “alone” when I want, and Gordon, too, because of being together. (Single
girls are always having to fight off men in Europe, and it is a bother to travel alone).

  Also, I have the brilliant, attractive woman supervisor I wanted for the moralists next term, and, if she likes, next year! The one woman I admire at Cambridge! I should grow amazingly by fighting her logically through Aristotle, Plato, through the British philosophers, up to D. H. Lawrence! I always wanted to take philosophy, and here’s my chance! She is a fine woman, young and much admired by the most brilliant dons here. Also, I am probably going to be tutored in German beginning next term, through the summer here (I plan to be in Cambridge a month from July 20 to August 20 to read and write) and Gary Haupt,* my most analytical and intelligent friend from Yale has offered to do an hour of Rilke a week with me! (He studied German under the best men in the world for 3 years!) Also, we are going to hear the Vienna choir boys in King’s Chapel this Wednesday! Saw the best performance ever of “Troilus and Cressida” (Shakespeare) last night: felt delighted: most professional, compared favorably with Old Vic: such a place this is!

  Another thing I must mention: you know I am very much in love with Richard. Well, we are both this way. And, knowing this, I can live through much sorrow and pain. I have never felt so celestially holy, for the fury which I have, and the power, is, for the first time, met with an equal soul. In a way, I must tell you that our community life in Wellesley, which I love and admire like an “Our Town”, has bothered me a bit in this regard, for I feel they could well accept and admire a Gordon, who is physically beautiful & really my match outwardly, I think. But I still feel dubious about my Richard, because I see now through the boyish weakness of his frame, & the delicate health & unathletic nature, to a soul which is kingly and beautiful and strong; I see it so powerfully, that I fear to expose him to the “conventional” world of judgment which I am so much a part of; he is a solitary soul, and I have given him life & faith. Do you understand my dilemma? Gordon has the body but Richard has the soul. And I live in both worlds. It is hard; both fight now, and the perfectionist in me wants to combine them, but that seems impossible. Do write.