“One Art” is a poem that documents the journey of loss through dark irony and humor. It is written in the form of villanelle, a verse poem with a particular rhyme scheme that repeats certain end words, assigning it complex musicality. Its power is restraint. The rhyme sequence allows for its song-like quality and its surface fun. It racks up its losses from the more superficial, such as keys and watches, to houses, and to rivers and to cities, to the more profound loss of losing a loved one. The ironic last lines, “even losing you isn’t hard to master,” suggests our ability to overcome even the most monumental of losses, for each passing day, the poem reminds us is a loss in itself. Of Bishop’s poetry, the novelist Colm Tóibín has said, “For her, the most difficult thing to do was to make a statement; around these statements in her poems she created a hard-won aura, strange sad acceptance that this statement was all that could be said. Or maybe there was something more, but it had escaped her. This space between what there was and what could be made certain or held fast often made her tone playful, in the way as a feather applied gently to the inner nostril makes you sneeze in a way that is amused as much as pained.”
SUICIDE
TULIPS
Sylvia Plath
WAKING IN THE BLUE
Robert Lowell
Losing a loved one is devastating, but suicide, the act of taking one’s own life, is irreconcilable. I don’t understand it or know what to do with it. I’m angry. Not at my sister, but at all I don’t understand of the human psyche and the forces that unwillingly impinge upon a life. I don’t know what to do with this knot of fury. As I go about my day, it often feels like I’m stepping over land mines and not knowing when one will erupt. I read to try to understand. It’s more than depression that causes someone to take her life. Otherwise, everyone suffering from severe depression would end her life. It is a state of mind that gets locked in, I think. Only the poets seem to provide insight into the mystery of this form of suffering. Sylvia Plath’s poems take on more meaning and depth. I mine them for similarities and answers. It seems to me that for some people the desire to come apart will be as strong, if not stronger, than the desire to stay whole. Every day, I ask myself how I will get through this brutal loss. Poetry, work, love, friendship, the sight of the waves crashing in the ocean, the piney scent of the October air offer occasional refuge. Eventually I find comfort in the idea that there are no clear answers. Poetry offers consolation and knowledge but it cannot reverse fate and bring my sister back.
TULIPS
Sylvia Plath
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.
They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.
My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage— —
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.
I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free— —
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.
The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.
The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.
* * *
“Tulips” depicts this state where one is powerless to the terrible tide of darkness. Depression is a disease that doctors and nurses must attend to gently, “like water” rushing over a pebble. The poem is about a stay in the hospital after a suicide attempt and bears witness to the interior mind of an individual so overcome with melancholy it is as if she exists in a different country from healthy people. The speaker in the poem looks at the photograph of her husband and child by her bedside and their “smiles catch onto her skin, little smiling hooks.” She is aware, in her depressive state, of the intense divide between them, and the shame she bears for her failing. Her face is “flat, ridiculous,” she wants to “efface” herself. With its dark and gorgeous lyricism, the poem moves lethargically, quietly down the page, echoing the state of mind of its speaker.
Plath’s poetry is characterized by potent imagery, a brilliant imagination, and a heightened and intense awareness of the evolving self. Plath wrote about painful subjects: suicide, self-hatred, unstable relationships, Nazis. Her controlled use of image and keen sense of dramatic tension and structure draw the reader into the place of suffering. Conflating poet and speaker, expression and gravity, genuine confessions and dark irony, Plath’s poems document versions of the unreachable and unknowable self. “Tulips” navigates this shadowy, alienating netherworld of mental pain and the fine line between survival and death.
WAKING IN THE BLUE
Robert Lowell (1917–1977)
The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare’s-nest of his drowsy head
propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My heart grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the “mentally ill.”)
What use is my sense of humor?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard all-American fullback,
(if such were possible!)
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he soaks, a ramrod
with the muscle of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile in a crimson gold-cap,
worn all day, all night,
he thinks only of his figure,
of slimming on sherbert and ginger ale—
more cut off from words than a seal.
This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean’s;
the hooded night lights bring out “Bobbie,”
Porcelain ’29,
a replica of Louis XVI
without the wig—
redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,
as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit
and horses at chairs.
These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.
In between the limits of day,
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic attendants.
(There are no Mayflower
screwballs in the Catholic Church.)
After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor’s jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.
* * *
“Waking in the Blue” opens with a night attendant, a sophomore in college, on the ward of a psychiatric hospital, asleep, propped on a textbook called The Meaning of Meaning, a text used in many fields of language, philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science. The text, a mere prop in the poem, is inadequate in the ward. It belies the paradoxical world of mental agony, where abstract meaning, contextualized in many sciences, vanishes into the ether of illness.
Though Lowell suffered from manic depression, after many hospitalizations during his adult life, he died of natural causes. “Waking in the Blue,” from his influential work Life Studies, is an example of the emerging confessional poetry of his era. In excruciating and horrific detail it depicts the speaker’s candid awareness of how his mental illness afflicts him and how even those we may least suspect—the “Harvard all-American fullback,” for instance—are susceptible to its cruel powers. Everyone on the ward holds “a locked razor.”
Robert Lowell did not invent the term Confessional Verse. M. L. Rosenthal in a review of Lowell’s poetry in the Nation used it to describe his verse in 1959 and a new genre was born. Michael Schmidt, in Lives of the Poets, calls his work “a poetry of symptoms”—“illness, false health, false hope, failure—and love.”
Although Lowell’s manic depression was a great burden for him and his family, the exploration of mental illness in his verse led to some of his most important poetry, particularly as it manifested itself in Life Studies. When he was fifty, Lowell began taking lithium to treat his mental illness. Saskia Hamilton, the editor of Lowell’s Letters, said, “Lithium treatment relieved him from suffering the idea that he was morally and emotionally responsible for the fact that he relapsed. However, it did not entirely prevent relapses. And he was troubled and anxious about the impact of his relapses on his family and friends until the end of his life.”
The poet John Berryman, a contemporary and friend of Robert Lowell’s, also suffered from intense bouts of depression. When he was twelve his father took his own life, an event that haunted his poetry. In his poem “Freshman Blues,” he articulates how the legacy of our parents shapes us, even after death:
Thought I much then on perforated daddy,
daddy boxed in & let down with strong straps,
when I my friends’ homes, visited, with fathers
universal & intact . . .
Shocking, darkly funny, tragic, my eye travels to the phrase “universal & intact” as the prevailing experience a child covets. In this era of poetic change, Plath, Berryman, Lowell, and Anne Sexton all suffered from corrosive mental pain. Of the four poets, Lowell was the only one who did not take his own life.
In a letter to John Berryman, Lowell writes: “I have been thinking about you all summer and how we have gone through the same troubles, visiting the bottom of the world . . . the dark moment comes, it goes.”
MOTHERHOOD
THE POMEGRANATE
Eavan Boland
ON MY FIRST SON
Ben Jonson
FUNERAL BLUES
W. H. Auden
NICK AND THE CANDLESTICK
Sylvia Plath
My first child is a daughter. I remember exactly the day we conceived. It was in the early hours of New Year’s Day after returning home from a long, snow-filled walk from lower Manhattan (impossible to get a cab on New Year’s Eve) where we celebrated the New Year eating bowls of pasta and sharing a bottle of Chianti at a local Italian restaurant. I know I am pregnant almost instantly. I’ve wanted to be a mother for as long as I can remember, hoping to create for my child the stable childhood that was stolen from me when my own father died. For months before she is born, I imagine her. We have our own secret language. When we are alone, lying on the couch or taking a walk in the park I feel her move to the rhythm of my breath. She hiccups when I do. I feel her blood churning in mine, changing the chemistry of my breathing, my digestion, the way I talk and feel. My stomach looks like I’m hiding a bowling ball underneath my sweater. It’s hard and full and when I walk I sometimes cup my hand underneath my panty-line to make sure she doesn’t drop. I walk through the park and watch the young children playing in the playground or skating at the ice rink. Do all mothers imagine their daughters to be mini-versions of themselves? I hope she won’t have the traits I dislike about myself. I want her to be bright and confident. I am already giving her advice in my own head. I play music for her. I have a library of books all picked out. I walk past baby stores and stare at the mannequins, the little girls dressed in polka dot dresses and Mary Janes. When I give birth prematurely at thirty-two weeks, I know before I see her exactly what she will look like, and I’m right. She has my round face and wide forehead. There are complications and I’m rushed to the operating room for an emergency C-section. Her lungs collapse ten minutes after she is born. Against all we are prepared for, our baby does not survive. The idyllic image I have held of her and our lives together, our family, is shattered. For weeks I can’t take it in. It is surely a combination of pregnancy hormones still ruling my body, producing milk in my breasts, making my uterus contract, and my desire to not quite let her go. I refuse to talk to anyone, rapt as I am in my private universe with my daughter, unable to fully accept that she is gone.
THE POMEGRANATE
Eavan Boland (1944)
The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names
.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
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