by Sylvia Plath
Now in the midst of all this I am working hard on arrangements for your 10 days in my fair country! I have reserved a luxurious room for us in London on Fleet Street (where all the newspapers are) which I stayed* in before going to Paris, courtesy of Emmet Larkin, Phd student and Fulbrighter from NYC: only members of the hotel can reserve this guest-room, so I got it through him. Also have you room in Cambridge hotel. Now for a matter of your choice: I have the unparalelled chance to get us tickets for a trip to Stratford-on-Avon for Friday and Saturday the 15th to 16th including seeing “Hamlet” & “Othello”. Now this would mean our cutting London to a mere one day and coming almost right up to Cambridge, so we could leave early Friday morning. Would you like to do this, or would you rather spend all Friday and Saturday in London, walking about and seeing things and plays there? I thought you might want to take advantage of the Stratford jaunt, as it’s a harder place to get to, and you’ll probably have a chance to see as much London as you want in August when you come back with Mrs. Prouty. I’ll tentatively reserve tickets to Stratford and do write quickly and let me know! For the rest of our week, I’m thinking of renting a car (after getting a British license if I can this May) and driving us to the most beautiful coast of Wales. I have a hankering for Wales, and Dylan-Thomas salt water and thought you might like a slow cruising drive there, stopped at leisure, not on a train. We’ll see. Let me know if it sounds good to you! I am looking more forward to your coming than you can imagine. Also let met know what days you’d like me to reserve for you in Paris at a hotel! When and if you have a chance, could you send over my “Joy of Cooking”? It’s the one book I really miss!
Love and joy from your Caviar-ful daughter,
sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Sunday 29 April 1956
TLS with envelope,
Indiana University
April 29th
Sunday morning
Dearest most wonderful of mothers . . .
I’m so struck full of joy and love I can scarcely stop a minute from dancing, writing poems, cooking and living. I sleep a bare eight hours a night and wake springing up merry with the sun. Outside my window now is our green garden with a pink cherry tree right under my window in full bloom, thick with thrushes caroling.
Enclosed: article in Varsity by my two friends:* I’m trying a free-lance one for the New Yorker called “B. and K. at the Claridge.” I met so many peculiar mayors and ministers that it’s chock full of anecdotes. I can still hear the rich lovely Negro wife of the commissioner of Nigeria (in red fez) chuckling and saying in perfect English: “It’s so nice to see someone excited.” I have been so active and busy that I can’t even remember if I wrote you about last weekend, or which poems I sent!
I never have eaten and no doubt never shall eat again so much black caviar, flown especially from Russia; or drink so much vodka! I’m writing enough to make the Fulbright commission go mad with joy: am assigned a brief article on Smith College to appear in Varsity,* interview with my favorite South African girl, Margaret Roberts, fashion coverage of shops* in Cambridge. Am planning to try Monitor with Paris article, and sketches, after carefully deleting any references to wine or tobacco! Have also been asked to write a newsletter next week for an Oxford paper!* I’m writing about America for the British, and vice versa for America! Am shipping poems off by the cartload: in two weeks I have written the seven best poems of my life* which make the rest look like baby-talk. I am learning and mastering new words each day, and drunker than Dylan, harder than Hopkins, younger than Yeats in my saying. Ted reads in his strong voice, is my best critic, as I am his.
My philosophy supervisor, Doctor Krook, is more than a miracle! She took me on an extra half hour last week, and I’m in medias res of Plato, marveling at the dialectic method, whetting my mind like a blue-bladed knife. Such joy.
Bodily, I’ve never been healthier: radiance and love just surge out of me like a sun: I can’t wait to set you down in its rays: think, I shall devote two whole weeks of my life to taking utter care, and very special tendering, of you. I’ve already reserved London and Cambridge rooms, have decided against Stratford as It would be too much of a rush and I want to sip slowly the green healing of my paradise with you. We’ll leave about the 22nd (I have to be out of Whitstead then) for Paris, where I’ll see you through your first two or three days and get all set up for you so you’ll know what you want there, and then I’ll take off for a month of writing in Spain, on the south coast. Being tan, doing nothing but writing, sunning and cooking. Maybe even learning to catch fish!
Ted is up here this week, and I have become a woman to make you proud. It came over me while we were listening to Beethoven, the sudden shock and knowledge that although this is the one man in the world for me, although I am using every fiber of my being to love him, even so, I am true to the essence of myself, and I know who that self is, and like her, and will live with her through sorrow and pain, singing all the way, even in anguish and grief, the triumph of life over death and sickness and war and all the flaws of my dear world. And this woman I am stretching to be is one whom no man can send crying out of life. Ted knows this, and I know this, and my next months into the summer, before he goes to Australia, will be spent making him learn with every bit of his mind and heart that my like is not to be found the world over; nor is his, and in the sight of all the stars and planets and words and food and people in the world, there are only the two of us who are whole and strong enough to be a match, one for the other. If he grows to this, the whole world will flare for joy; if not, I shall write and love life all the same.
I know this with a sure strong knowing to the tips of my toes, and having been on the other side of life like Lazarus, I know that my whole being shall be one song of affirmation and love all my life long; I shall praise the lord and the crooked* creatures he has made. My life shall be a constant finding of new ways and words in which to do this.
Ted is incredible, mother. We went to the circus the other night and loved it to the hilt; he has not changed his clothes since I met him two months ago, but wears always the same black sweater and corduroy jacket with pockets full of poems, fresh trout and horoscopes. In his horoscope book, imagine, it says people born in scorpio have “squashed-out noses”!* All the signs in the sky point to this man and me.
How I cook on one gas ring! Ted is the first man who really has a love of food, a clean, strong love: he stalked in the door yesterday with a packet of little pink shrimp and four fresh trout. I made a nectar of shrimp newberg with essence of butter, cream, sherry and cheese, had it on rice, with the trout. It took us 3 hours to peel all the little tiny shrimp, and Ted just lay groaning by the hearth after the meal with utter delight, like a huge Goliath.
His humor is the salt of the earth; I’ve never laughed so hard and long in my life; he tells me fairy stories, and stories of kings and green knights, and has made up a marvelous fable of his own about a little wizard named Snatchcraftington, who looks like a stalk of rhubarb. He tells me dreams, marvelous colored dreams, about certain red foxes and about his mad cousins. His health is phenomenal. The first man I’ve known who is brilliant, full of stories, poems (he memorizes all poems he likes, and we quote each other through all literature) and is big, healthy, humorous with the affirming humor of power and vigor. My poems sprout about him like shoots; even when he goes, I shall go on, for what I have learned in loving him is part of me, now, and not dependent on him; this is the core of my joy.
The reason why you must be at ease and not worry about my proud growing this time is because I have learned to make a life growing through toleration of conflict, sorrow, and hurt: I fear none of these things, and turn myself to whatever trial, with an utter faith that life is good, and a song of joy on my lips. I feel like Job, and will rejoice in the deadly blasts of whatever comes. I love others, the girls in the house, the boys on the newspaper, and I am flocked about by people who bask in my sun; I give and give; my whole life will be a saying
of poems and a loving of people and giving of my best fiber to them.
This faith comes from the earth and sun; it is pagan in a way; it comes from the heart of man after the fall. I know that within a year I shall publish a book of 33 poems which will hit the critics violently in some way or another; my voice is taking shape, coming strong; Ted says he never read poems by a woman like mine: they are strong and full and rich, not quailing and whining like Teasdale, or simple lyrics like Millay: they are working sweating heaving poems born out of the way words should be said.
I want to get a Saxton grant after Cambridge (I hope to send off a manuscript of poems at the end of May where the best judges I could have would decide: Richard Wilbur, Rolfe Humphries, May Sarton, Louise Bogan: all in love with words and lyrics, not loose social statements!) and if this does not win, I shall try Auden next winter with my summer’s harvest. I haven’t time to write stories now, but this summer I shall. I have a growing voice: I must get a grant for a year, to write in Spain or Italy, a second book of poems together with either a novel or a book of short stories. Oh, mother, rejoice with me and fear not. I love you, and Warren, and my dear suffering grammy and dear loving grampy with all my heart and shall spend my life making you strong and proud of me!
Enclosed, a poem or two, I don’t remember whether I sent you these.
your loving
sivvy
Strumpet Song
With white frost gone
and all green dreams not worth much,
after a lean day’s work
time comes round for that foul slut:
mere bruit of her takes our street
until every man,
be he red, pale or dark,
veers to her slouch.
Mark, I cry, that mouth
made to do violence on,
that seamed face
askew with blotch, dint, scar
struck by each dour year;
stalks there not some such wild man
as can find ruth
to patch with brand of love this rank grimace
which out from black tarn, ditch and cup
into my most chaste own eyes
looks up.
Complaint of the Crazed Queen
In ruck and quibble of courtfolk
this giant hulked, I tell you, on my scene
with hands like derricks,
looks fierce and black as rooks;
why, all the windows broke when he stalked in.
My dainty acres he ramped through
and used my gentle doves with manners rude;
I do not know
what fury urged him slay
my antelope who meant him nought but good.
No one pale queen could quell a man
drunk so dire and puissant on his prowl,
yet lest he ruin
my whole choice terrain
I voluntary ran to halt his kill.
I spoke most chiding in his ear
till he some pity took upon my crying;
of rich attire
he made my shoulders bare
and solaced me, but quit me at cock’s crowing.
A hundred heralds I sent out
to summon in my slight all doughty men
whose force might fit
shape of my sleep, my thought---
none of that greenhorn lot matched my bright crown.
So I am come to this rare pass
whereby I trek in blood through sun and squall
and sing you thus:
“How sore, alas, it is
to see my people shrunk so small, so small.”
Firesong
Born green we were
to this flawed garden,
but in speckled thickets, warted as a toad,
spitefully skulks our warden,
fixing his snare
which hauls down buck, cock, trout, till all most fair
is tricked to falter in spilt blood.
Now our whole task’s to hack
some angel-shape worth wearing
from his crabbed midden where all’s wrought so awry
that no straight inquiring
could unlock
shrewd catch silting our each bright act back
to unmade mud cloaked by sour sky.
Sweet salts warped stem
of weeds we tackle towards way’s rank ending;
scorched by red sun
we heft globed flint, racked in veins’ barbed binding;
brave love, dream
not of staunching such strict flame, but come,
lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Thursday 3 May 1956
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
May 3rd, 1956
Dearest of mothers.
No doubt this is the most difficult of times for you; know that I feel this; and that from the sorrow at one end of your scale, I want you to turn to the joy and love growing day by day at this young green end. I really must share with you the miracles of the last days.
I am coming into my own; I am becoming at one with myself, growing toward the best in me. The incredible thing is that I have passed through the husk, the mask of cruelty, ruthlessness, callousness, in Ted and come into the essence and truth of his best right being: he is the tenderest, kindest, most faithful man I have ever known in my life. I have, in a flash of clairvoyance, seen into him and into the colossal capacity he has for being strong and straight to the end of time, and he has seen into me, how best I can be for a woman, even with my past wastes and squanderings of energy. We are getting through, wrestling through, the unessential husks into the only real place in the world: that whistling desert where human beings stand naked before the sun and the earth and give in full honesty and faith of all their being: there is no question of other faces or figures turning us aside: once one passed beyond the mere look and shape of a being, into the essence of their spirit, their best powers for growing, there is only one kind of committment till the end of time, and this is what we are working to.
For the first time in my life, mother, I am at peace; never before, even with Richard, did I cease to have little opportunist lawcourts in session in my head whispering: look at this flaw, that weakness; how about a new man, a better man? For the first time I am free. I have, ironically, been exposed this term to the handsomest, most creative and intelligent men in Cambridge (writers, artists, etc.) and in the midst of this, I am at peace, able to enjoy them as people, but utterly invulnerable. Even with Richard I had my eye out for a strong healthy man. This is gone, for the first time.
I feel that all my life, all my pain and work has been for this one thing. All the blood spilt, the words written, the people loved, have been a work to fit me for loving Ted. He has a voice, a trueness, which someday will be sought the world over; yet, even as he scorns Dylan Thomas for lack of discipline, for betraying his best self foully, he turns from adulation: his writing and his woman are the sole things. I am good for him; I see the power and voice in him that will shake the world alive. Even as he sees into my poems, and will work with me to make me a woman poet like the world will gape at; even as he sees into my character and will tolerate no fallings away from my best right self.
All I know is, that with Ted, the “necessities” of the world dwindle to nothing: we want food ( and love to cook, eat, and will learn to catch our own), a roof, our books and typewriter and even these could be blown away in a high wind and we would hack out of ourselves a world like man never saw. It is not easy, but it is the most magnificent and godlike thing I have done to work to know this man, who works to know me; once we come to the point far enough on in this long lifetime work, we will say it to the whole world, and that will be the main good there is. I have no fear, only a faith; I am calm, joyous, and peaceful as I have never known peace. And, fantastically, I am keen mentally as I have never been; my supervisor is delighted, I can tell: I told
her this week, at the best supervision yet, on Plato, that I was not taking this as a “course” but as a fight to earn my humanism through the centuries of philosophy and religion in this world. It is a voyage of the mind; to true knowledge and not just opinion and belief.
She, in turn, said she had been so stimulated by my questions last week that she had revised some lecture notes. Oh, mother, on Mayday, Ted and I went up a green river in a punt and miraculously, there was not another boat on the river! I learned to punt, so I can take you the same way, and saw baby owls, cows and even a water-rat. We had tea, honey & sandwiches under the apple tree in Granchester. While Ted has written many virile deep banging poems, I have a small one I like which I shall quote to you:
And that, by Ted. He has a stright voice; here it is a lyric speech; but it is the least bit of his finger; the might of his arm is to be most wondered at. All smallness, all warping and vanity falls away with this man; he is big as I only thought a dream or a god could be; there were giants in the earth, and I think we come from another age to this world; we love the flesh of the earth and the spirit of that thin, exacting air which blows beyond the farthest planets; all is learning, discovering, and speaking in a strong voice out of the heart of sorrow and joy; oh, mother, I shall be so happy to have you come. I have never had so much love to give before. Do be strong, bear what is to be born at home, and come to me to be loved and cared for.
your own loving
sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 4 May 1956
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Friday morning, May 4
Dearest mother . . .
It was with a sense of rest and peace at last that I received your letter yesterday telling me of grammy; strangely enough, I have been living in tense wait long distance, and often every day talked with Ted about grammy and grampy and my home. He was with me when I read your letter, and we felt we sort of consecrated our Mayday to grammy. Before I got your letter yesterday, we were shopping together for mushrooms and steak and wine for dinner and had the impulse to go into a cool lovely little 15th century church in the heart of Cambridge and just sit together in peace and silence and love. I gave a prayer in my heart then for grammy, and for my own family, and for my dear Ted. We are so very happy together.