On the bank of the river’s
Backtracking tail. I’d come for
Free fish-bait: the blue mussels
Clumped like bulbs at the grass-root
Margin of the tidal pools.
Dawn tide stood dead low. I smelt
Mud stench, shell guts, gull’s leavings;
Heard a queer crusty scrabble
Cease, and I neared the silenced
Edge of a cratered pool-bed.
The mussels hung dull blue and
Conspicuous, yet it seemed
A sly world’s hinges had swung
Shut against me. All held still.
Though I counted scant seconds,
Enough ages lapsed to win
Confidence of safe-conduct
In the wavy otherworld
Eyeing me. Grass put forth claws;
Small mud knobs, nudged from under,
Displaced their domes as tiny
Knights might doff their casques …
This is a poem in syllables, seven syllables to the line, seven lines to the stanza; it inches itself forward as the crabs do, as Ted Hughes said her poems did in the beginning, felicity by felicity. The movement is steady, onward, purposeful, yet we are also being encouraged to hesitate in this ‘wavy otherworld’ and to appreciate the slubbed texture of lines like ‘The mussels hung dull blue and /Conspicuous, yet it seemed / A sly world’s hinges had swung / Shut against me.’ We are invited to indulge the poet ever so slightly, to allow her to raise her eye a fraction from the level of crabs to the level of casques. Casque, a word chivalric, plump and metallic, takes our eyes off the object for a millimoment. We are, of course, happy to be so richly distracted, and the poem is not so fanatically engaged with its own purposes that it has not the leisure to take us by the elbow and point us towards the riches of its own linguistic estate. Indeed, the reader’s pleasure comes from just this sense of being on a linguistic tour where the point of the outing is as much to relish the guide’s vocabulary as to see what is being talked about.
So the poem goes about its business which, like the crab’s business, isn’t ‘fiddling’; but neither is it absolutely engaged until its final stanzas.
High on the airy thatching
Of the dense grasses I found
The husk of a fiddler-crab,
Intact, strangely strayed above
His world of mud – green colour
And innards bleached and blown off
Somewhere by much sun and wind;
There was no telling if he’d
Died recluse or suicide
Or headstrong Columbus crab.
The crab-face, etched and set there,
Grimaced as skulls grimace: it
Had an Oriental look,
A samurai death mask done
On a tiger tooth, less for
Art’s sake than God’s. Far from sea –
Where red-freckled crab-backs, claws
And whole crabs, dead, their soggy
Bellies pallid and upturned,
Perform their shambling waltzes
On the waves’ dissolving turn
And return, losing themselves
Bit by bit to their friendly
Element – this relic saved
Face, to face the bald-faced sun.
Something really comes to life when we get to the husk of that voyager beyond the herd’s track, the ‘headstrong Columbus crab’ … The skull image, the death mask, are here strangely vital. What is truly malignant is that sea full of ‘claws / And whole crabs, dead, their soggy / Bellies pallid and upturned’, performing ‘their shambling waltzes’. It is not necessary to know about Sylvia Plath’s 1953 suicide attempt and her intent enterprise of self-renewal to discover in the conclusion of this poem a drama of survival, the attainment of a dry, hard-won ledge beyond the welter and slippage of Lethean temptations. And the convincing thing, poetically, is that all this is guaranteed by an energy beyond that mustered by the individual will. It seems managed ‘less for / Art’s sake than God’s’. It is as if in obeying the dictates of her imagination and fastening upon the dead crab, Plath is orienting herself towards the dry hard pitch she will attain in the end, in poems like ‘Words’. The crab husk is an art shape and a talisman, something we accept at a level deeper than the beautifully presented ‘mussels / Clumped like bulbs’. These latter were literary owl-calls made through the careful fingers, but the crab husk awakens the owl-life in us, calls up answering calls in the twilight of our psyche and brings the poem over into the second level of poetic attainment which is implicit in Wordsworth’s narrative.
When the vale fills with the actual cries of owls responding to the boy’s art, we have an image of the classically empowered poet, the one who has got beyond scale-practising, the one who, as Wordsworth says in his Preface, rejoices in the spirit of life that is in him and is delighted to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe. This represents the poetry of relation, of ripple-and-wave effect upon audience; at this point, the poet’s art has found ways by which distinctively personal subjects and emotional necessities can be made a common possession of the reader’s. This, at its most prim, is a matter of the old ‘what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’ kind of thing. At its most enriching, it operates by virtue of skeins of language coming together as a dream-web which nets psyche to psyche in order to effect what Frost called ‘a clarification’, ‘a momentary stay against confusion’ – precisely the kind of moment which occurs at the end of ‘Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbour’.
Ted Hughes has written about Sylvia Plath’s breakthrough into her deeper self and her poetic fate: he locates the critical moment in her writing at the composition of the poem called ‘Stones’ … In this middle stretch of her journey, she practises the kind of poem adumbrated by Pound – in Canto I, for example – in which a first voice amplifies the scope of its utterance by invoking classical or legendary parallels. These poems are serenely of their age, in that the conventions of modernism and the insights of psychology are relayed in an idiom intensely personal, yet completely available. When we read, for example, the opening lines of ‘Elm’, the owls in our own dream branches begin to halloo in recognition:
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
In his edition of the Collected Poems, Ted Hughes provides a note to ‘Elm’, and an earlier draft from which this deeply swayed final version emerged. There are still twenty-one work-sheets to go, so the following represents only what Hughes calls ‘a premature crystallization’. (The wych-elm which occasioned the poem grows on the shoulder of a moated prehistoric mound outside the house where Plath and Hughes lived.)
She is not easy, she is not peaceful;
She pulses like a heart on my hill.
The moon snags in her intricate nervous system.
I am excited seeing it there
It is like something she has caught for me.
The night is a blue pool; she is very still.
At the centre she is still, very still with wisdom.
The moon is let go, like a dead thing.
Now she herself is darkening
Into a dark world I cannot see at all.
The contrast between this unkindled, external voice and the final voice of ‘I know the bottom, she says’ is astonishing. The draft is analytical and unaroused, a case of ego glancing around on the surface of language. In fact, what Plath is doing here is packaging insights she had arrived at in another definitive tree poem called ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’, a subject set by Ted Hughes, who writes in his ‘Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems’:
Early one morning, in the dark, I saw the full moon setting on to a large yew that grows in the churchyard, and I suggested she make a poem of it. By midday, she had written it. It depressed me greatly. It’s my suspicio
n that no poem can be a poem that is not a statement from the power in control of our life, the ultimate suffering and decision in us.
‘Elm’ clearly comes from a similar place, from the ultimate suffering and decision in Sylvia Plath, but access to that place could not occur until the right rhythm began to turn under her tongue and the sentence-sounds started to roll like fly-wheels of the poetic voice. The ineffectual wingbeats of ‘The night is a blue pool; she is very still. / At the centre she is still, very still with wisdom’, are like the bird of poetry at the glass pane of intelligence, seeing where it needs to go but unable to gain entry. But the window glass is miraculously withdrawn and deep free swoops into the blue pool and into the centre are effected with effortless penetration once the new lines begin to run:
Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?
Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.
Here too is dramatic evidence of another mark of high achievement, the interweaving of imaginative constants from different parts of the œuvre. These hooves are related to the hooves of the runaway Ariel, just as they are also pre-echoes of the phantom hoof-taps of ‘Words’.
The elm utters an elmy consciousness, it communicates in tree-speak: ‘This is the rain now, this big hush’. But the elm speaks poet-consciousness also. What is exciting to observe in this poem is the mutation of voice; from being a relatively cool literary performance, aware of its behaviour as a stand-in for a tree, it gradually turns inward and intensifies. Somewhere in the middle, between a stanza like:
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires
– between this immensely pleasurable mimesis and the far more disturbing expressionism of
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity
– between these two stanzas the poem has carried itself – and the poet, and the reader – from the realm of tactful, estimable writing to the headier, less prescribed realm of the inestimable. It is therefore no surprise to read in Ted Hughes’s notes of 1970 that he perceives ‘Elm’ as the poem which initiates the final phase, that phase whose poems I attempted to characterize earlier as seeming to have sprung into being at the behest of some unforeseen but completely irresistible command.
I wish now to reapproach those last poems in terms of Wordsworth’s passage. The third kind of poetry I find suggested there is that in which the poem’s absolute business is an unconceding pursuit of poetic insight and poetic knowledge. We have passed the first stage where poetic making was itself an end and an anxiety; and we have come through the second stage of social relation and emotional persuasion, where the owl-cry of the poems stimulates the answering owl-dream in the audience and ‘strikes … as a remembrance’. In terms of the Wordsworth story, we have arrived at the point where the boy cannot make any noise with his hands:
… And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill:
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.
Here the boy – call him the poet – has his skill mocked; skill is no use any more; but in the baulked silence there occurs something more wonderful than owl-calls. As he stands open like an eye or an ear, he becomes imprinted with all the melodies and hieroglyphs of the world; the workings of the active universe, to use another phrase from The Prelude, are echoed far inside him. This part of the story, then, suggests that degree of imaginative access where we feel the poem as a gift arising or descending beyond the poet’s control, where direct contact is established with the image-cellar, the dream-bank, the word-hoard, the truth-cave – whatever place a poem like Yeats’s ‘Long-Legged Fly’ emerges from. What Sylvia Plath wrote in those days of somnambulist poetic certitude belong with that kind of poetry. There is an absoluteness about the tone, and a sudden in-placeness about the words and all that they stand for, as in the poem ‘Edge’. This is perhaps the last she wrote, perhaps the second last, one of two completed on 5 February 1963, six days before her suicide:
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.
Here is an objectivity, a perfected economy of line, a swift surehanded marking of the time and space which had been in waiting for this poem. ‘Boldness in face of the blank sheet’, which Pasternak declared one of the attributes of talent, was never more in evidence. The firmed-up quality of the writing, its implacably indicative mood, mimes the finality of the woman’s death. Even though consoling images of grave goods and children enfolded as petals are given due admittance, the overall temperature is that of a morgue. The bone-hooded moon and the bare feet share a chilly sort of dead-weight factuality. Never were the demands of Archibald MacLeish’s ‘Ars Poetica’ so thoroughly fulfilled:
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb …
A poem should be equal to:
Not true …
A poem should not mean
But be.
There is a mute, palpable, equal-to ‘being’ about ‘Edge’ which insists that we read it as a thing sufficient within itself, which it certainly is. But it is also problematically something else. A suicide note, to put it extremely. An act of catharsis and defence, maybe, or maybe an act of preparation. The ‘being’ of this poetry, in other words, is constantly being pressed with meanings that sprang upon it the moment Sylvia Plath died by her own hand. Even an image like the dead crab, strayed headstrongly beyond his fellows, is retrospectively canvassed to serve the plot of suicide’s progress. I would prefer to read the crab image as I believe the poem wants us to read it: as a relic that saved face, a talisman which helped the protagonist to face the bald-faced sun, an earnest of art’s positively salubrious resistance to the shambling pull of the death wish. I would also wish to contend that the most valuable part of the late Plath œuvre is that in which bitterness and the embrace of oblivion have been wrestled into some kind of submission or have been held at least in momentary equilibrium by the essentially gratifying force of the lyric impulse itself. A poem like ‘Daddy’, however brilliant a tour de force it can be acknowledged to be, and however its violence and vindictiveness can be understood or excused in light of the poet’s parental and marital relations, remains, nevertheless, so entangled in biographical circumstances and rampages so permissively in the history of other people’s sorrows that it simply overdraws its rights to our sympathy …
There is nothing poetically flawed about Plath’s work. What may finally lim
it it is its dominant theme of self-discovery and self-definition, even though this concern must be understood as a valiantly unremitting campaign against the black hole of depression and suicide. I do not suggest that the self is not the proper arena of poetry. But I believe that the greatest work occurs when a certain self-forgetfulness is attained, or at least a fullness of self-possession denied to Sylvia Plath. Her use of myth, for example, tends to confine the widest suggestions of the original to particular applications within her own life. This is obviously truer at the beginning of her career, and does not apply to such first-hand ‘mythic’ occasions as ‘Elm’. Nevertheless her clued-in literary intelligence never quite ceased to inspect the given emotional and biographical matter for its translatability into parallel terms of literature or legend. In a poem like ‘Ariel’, the rewards are patent: the original allusion both swallows and is swallowed by the autobiographical occasion, and there is no sense of one element commandeering the other. In ‘Lady Lazarus’, however, the cultural resonance of the original story is harnessed to a vehemently self-justifying purpose, so that the supra-personal dimensions of knowledge – to which myth typically gives access – are slighted in favour of the intense personal need of the poet.
But even as one searches for a way to express what one senses as a limitation, one remembers this poet’s youth and remembers also that it was precisely those ‘intense personal needs’ which gave her work its unprecedented pitch and scald. Her poems already belong to the tradition not just because they fulfil the poetic needs I outlined at the beginning – those considerations of tone, speech and dramatic enactment – but because they are also clearly acts of her being, words from which, in Buber’s terms, effective power streams. They demonstrate the truth of Wordsworth’s wonderful formulation, in his 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, of the way poetic knowledge gets expressed. Wordsworth’s account is the finest I know of the problematic relation between artistic excellence and truth, between Ariel and Prospero, between poetry as impulse and poetry as criticism of life. The following quotation includes a perhaps over-familiar sentence, and may show some syntactical strain, but it covers a lot of the essential ground:
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