Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (Prosers & Poets)
Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932 in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, near Boston, to a biology professor at Boston University and a schoolteacher. Unfortunately, her father passed away just two weeks after Sylvia’s eighth birthday. She published her first poem at eight-year-old in the children’s section of the Boston Herald.
Electra on Azalea Path
The day you died I went into the dirt,
Into the lightless hibernaculum
Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard
Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.
It was good for twenty years, that wintering -
As if you never existed, as if I came
God-fathered into the world from my mother's belly:
Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity.
I had nothing to do with guilt or anything
When I wormed back under my mother's heart.
Small as a doll in my dress of innocence
I lay dreaming your epic, image by image.
Nobody died or withered on that stage.
Everything took place in a durable whiteness.
The day I woke, I woke on Churchyard Hill.
I found your name, I found your bones and all
Enlisted in a cramped stone askew by an iron fence.
In this charity ward, this poorhouse, where the dead
Crowd foot to foot, head to head, no flower
Breaks the soil. This is Azalea path.
A field of burdock opens to the south.
Six feet of yellow gravel cover you.
The artificial red sage does not stir
In the basket of plastic evergreens they put
At the headstone next to yours, nor does it rot,
Although the rains dissolve a bloody dye:
The ersatz petals drip, and they drip red.
Another kind of redness bothers me:
The day your slack sail drank my sister's breath
The flat sea purpled like that evil cloth
My mother unrolled at your last homecoming.
I borrow the silts of an old tragedy.
The truth is, one late October, at my birth-cry
A scorpion stung its head, an ill-starred thing;
My mother dreamed you face down in the sea.
The stony actors poise and pause for breath.
I brought my love to bear, and then you died.
It was the gangrene ate you to the bone
My mother said: you died like any man.
How shall I age into that state of mind?
I am the ghost of an infamous suicide,
My own blue razor rusting at my throat.
O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at
Your gate, father - your hound-bitch, daughter, friend.
It was my love that did us both to death.
Sylvia attended Smith College in Northampton, MA. In the summer after her junior year at Smith, Sylvia was awarded a coveted position as guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine in New York City. Unfortunately the experience is not what she had hoped for and it lead to a depression, ultimately leading to her first suicide attempt, which is detailed her semi-autobiographical book, the Bell Jar. After a brief stay at a psychiatric institution she was able to complete her undergraduate degree at Smith in 1955 with honors. Once graduated from Smith she obtained a Fulbright scholarship to a college of Cambridge University where she continued her writing, this is where she also met English poet Ted Hughes, who she married on June 16, 1956.
Maudlin
Mud-mattressed under the sign of the hag
In a clench of blood, the sleep-talking virgin
Gibbets with her curse the moon's man,
Faggot-bearing Jack in his crackless egg :
Hatched with a claret hogshead to swig
He kings it, navel-knit to no groan,
But at the price of a pin-stitched skin
Fish-tailed girls purchase each white leg.
Sylvia and her husband spent the following two years in the US, where she taught at her alma mater and spent some time in Boston auditing poetry seminars. But once discovering she was pregnant, the couple moved back to the United Kingdom. In 1960 Sylvia published her first collection of poetry, The Colossus. Then in February 1961 she suffered a miscarriage, inspiring a number of poems. By late 1962 their marriage was falling apart and they separated, Sylvia returned to London with her children and moved into the home where she would end her life.
For a Fatherless Son
You will be aware of an absence, presently,
Growing beside you, like a tree,
A death tree, color gone, an Australian gum tree ---
Balding, gelded by lightning--an illusion,
And a sky like a pig's backside, an utter lack of attention.
But right now you are dumb.
And I love your stupidity,
The blind mirror of it. I look in
And find no face but my own, and you think that's funny.
It is good for me
To have you grab my nose, a ladder rung.
One day you may touch what's wrong ---
The small skulls, the smashed blue hills, the godawful hush.
Till then your smiles are found money.
Sylvia Plath took her own life in 1963. There continues to be controversy as to whether or not she sincerely meant to succeed in her suicide attempt, and indeed there is fair evidence supporting both perspectives. What is not contestable is the role Sylvia Plath has played in modern American poetry and specifically for many female poets.
Edge
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.
Sylvia Plath's biography is abridged from the original Wikipedia article. Poetry selections were all authored by Plath and located from the following website.
Tags: poetry, poets, american poets, smith college, sylvia plath