Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  Seeking food, yet finding none.

  These are the wan, gray shreds of the tattered day.72

  “City Streets” was utterly unlike anything Plath had written before. She dispenses with formal rhyme and writes free verse reminiscent of Eliot and Ezra Pound, and turns away from her usual landscape settings to explore, instead, an urban streetscape. She would return to urban imagery in other high school poems.

  Plath was self-conscious and self-reflective about her literary vocation in early poems like 1948’s “I Reach Out,” “Obsession” (about writing), and “Neither Moonlight Nor Starlight,” in which she defends her vocation to herself and to a society skeptical of women writers:

  Why do I stay at my inkstained desk

  From the dim gray dawn to the dusk of day?

  Why do I linger in the loneliness of this bleak place

  When I could be bathing in moonlight, stardust

  Or the spilling gold of the sun?

  (Neither moonlight nor starlight are for me.)

  You ask me why I spend my life writing?

  Do I find entertainment?

  Is it worthwhile?

  Above all, does it pay?

  If not, then, is there a reason?

  (Ah, I would like to give you an answer

  To satisfy you completely, but that is impossible.)

  Listen awhile, and believe in me,

  There is a reason for my writing, yes.

  I write only because

  There is a voice within me

  That will not be still.

  The last stanza of this poem was eventually printed on a plaque dedicated to Plath outside the Wilbury Crockett Library at Wellesley High School—a fitting tribute to the young woman remembered by her classmates not as a suicide but as an exemplar of high literary ambition.

  Other unpublished Plath poems from this period strike a modern, self-questioning note. The free verse “I put my fingers in my ears…” tells of a speaker in the throes of an existential crisis.

  In wonder

  I listen.

  This is I.

  This is my life I hear

  Beating like a muffled airplane engine,

  Pulsing loud.

  Over what barren wastes of rock

  And tattered cloud

  Is that plane winging?

  And why am I struck chill by

  Its strange high singing?

  In “Spring Again,” the speaker rejoices in the arrival of the new season but realizes that something inside her is off-kilter: “Yet minutes are dragging, / hours are long— / can it be I who am act- / ing wrong?” “Portrait” explores a bleaker moment of self-reflection:

  I start to speak:

  each word, alas,

  is but an echo,

  meaningless…

  By reflections on the water

  I am caught;

  I revolve in narrow rings

  of surface thought…

  Among the shadow throngs

  I pass,

  An idle whisper

  through the grass.

  “Portrait” rehearses now-familiar Plathian language: echoes, reflections, shadows, grass, catching, and revolving resurface in later poems. But the poem from 1947–1948 that most looks forward to Plath’s future work is the surreal “Tulips at Dawn,” which merges landscape and mindscape. It begins:

  Thin blue shadows spatter the lawn;

  The tulips are calm in the light of dawn.

  The sunlight through their sharp green leaves

  Is metallic and chill.

  Plath then takes an imaginative leap—“I plummeted downward / Into a well of gold”—as the language of Ariel tentatively emerges:

  Into the depths of austere whiteness

  I go.

  Gray shade

  And white flashes of cold

  Lance my wings.

  I am a captive

  Of white worlds.

  Snow on snow

  And steel-gray skies.

  “Tulips at Dawn” challenges the idea that Plath discovered her Ariel voice in the 1960s. “Into the depths of austere whiteness I go” looks forward to “the substanceless blue / Pour of tor and distances” that begins “Ariel”—another dawn poem—fourteen years later. As in “Ariel,” the short lines here give momentum to the speaker’s metaphorical flight, while the language of martyrdom and captivity will reemerge in the bee poems, “Lady Lazarus,” “Fever 103º,” and “Purdah.”

  Other poems from this period also suggest future work. “Bereft,” an elegiac poem about a speaker who says goodbye to a loved one at the edge of the sea, already exhibits that particular Plathian combination of anger and tenderness toward the lost that will resurface in “Daddy,” “Full Fathom Five,” and “The Colossus”:

  So glad to be rid of a part of me

  That long after you were gone

  I stood on the beach and exultantly

  Watched the rising tide come on.

  I saw the tide cover the gaunt black rocks

  And the water smooth the sand,

  And when all your footprints were washed away—

  Then I started back to land.

  “I Have Found the Perfect World” (1948), which draws on Plath’s interest in the Gothic, anticipates the murderous heroines of Ariel. In the poem, the speaker confronts a rival, and admits,

  I used to feel the primitive desire to kill you.

  I wanted to claw at your face until the blood ran down in wet red drops.

  I wanted to tear your hair out in rough handfuls.

  I wanted to beat your head against the ground until your skull was smashed to fragments.

  I wanted to do all this and more, while I laughed a mad vicious laughter.

  Poems like “Tulips at Dawn” and “I Have Found the Perfect World” make clear that the Ariel voice was always within Plath, though it would become silenced, over the years, under layers of New Critical shellac. Ted Hughes would help her recognize the superiority of this starker, less rarefied voice, so antithetical to the formal, thesaurus-heavy verse she spent her college years honing to perfection. Indeed, sections of “I Have Found the Perfect World” sound straight out of Hughes’s oeuvre.

  Yeats was another important early model for Plath. She was particularly drawn to his late poem “The Cold Heaven,” which would influence several of her own poems from this period:

  Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting heaven

  That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,

  And thereupon imagination and heart were driven

  So wild that every casual thought of that and this

  Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season

  With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;

  And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,

  Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,

  Riddled with light….73

  The metaphorical possibilities embodied in Yeats’s dueling, paradoxical visions of heat and cold, blood and ice, appealed to the young poet searching for new ways to voice competing senses of ecstasy and despair. Plath’s “Alone and Alone in the Woods Was I”—the first poem she wrote for Crockett, with its imagery of ice and heat, exultation and birdsong—is clearly indebted to “The Cold Heaven”:

  The tones poured about me where I stood

  And crashed on the crystal of the wood.

  I broke the icy bond that bound me

  And tore the frost-film from my eyes.

  In ecstasy I gazed around me

  At the early morning ski
es.

  ………………….

  And where my soul had sent its cry—

  There curved the blue dome of the sky.

  “Joy” (1948) depicts a speaker whose “very soul” “is drenched / With shining melody,” while “Summer Street,” also written that year, uses similar Yeatsian language:

  Languidly I was drawn

  Up—heavenward.

  Chill blue waves washed over me,

  and iceberg clouds

  were needled through with sharp white rays.

  Sunlight wavered in the depths,

  devoid of heat,

  while frigid water lapped against

  glittering silver fields

  of ice and snow.

  Numbed by giddy, shifting lights

  and caught amidst

  a whirl of ice, my soul became

  part of heaven’s boundless sea:

  a frosty spear

  of shining steel; and just as ice

  cracks a thin glass, the spear

  began to grow,

  shattering the fragile shell

  of numbness that

  encompassed me. I gasped for breath,

  struggled up through death-cold blue—

  and I was free!

  The biographical value of these early poems lies not in what they reveal about Sylvia Plath’s psyche, but in what they show us about her literary predilections. Though “City Streets,” “Alone and Alone,” and “Summer Street” are derivative, their Eliotic and Yeatsian models suggest Plath’s artistic direction. The imagery of fire and frost, and their corresponding color tones of blue and red, would become symbolic touchstones for Plath just as they had for Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, and Dylan Thomas. Like Yeats, Eliot, and her future husband, Ted Hughes, she, too, would fuse elements of Romanticism and modernism in her poetry to striking effect.

  6

  Summer Will Not Come Again

  Wellesley, 1948–1950

  Sylvia ended her tenth-grade year with straight A’s and set off for Martha’s Vineyard in July. At sailing camp that summer, she, Ruth, and Betsy all lived in a tent for counselors in training. She again called herself “Sherry” and was noticeably shorter with Aurelia. “Don’t expect more than a post card each day,” she wrote curtly in early July 1948.1 She did not have enough money to join the other girls, the majority of whom went on outings to Nantucket or day trips around the island, and she could barely afford to take the camp’s pottery class. But she loved biking and sailing, and felt “a thrill” at the tiller.2 Aurelia received mixed messages—Sylvia worried about feeling “left out,” but told her mother not to send more money. “I’ll manage,” she wrote despondently.3 The food was subpar this time around, and she came down with a phlegmy cough that bothered the other girls, who thought she had tuberculosis. Even her close friends began to annoy her; she called Ruth “a pain in the neck.” “At times like this I long for my very own mummy….but I’ll cheer up.”4 Aurelia’s visit on July 11 soothed her. The day she left, Sylvia wrote, “I feel like I’ve had an emotional purge—all my pent up feelings let go when I cried, and I feel so much better.”5 She kept Aurelia abreast of her “emotional thermometer,” which by July 17 was “stationed permanently at the ‘Highly Happy’ mark.”6

  Sylvia was aware that her moods were slipping perilously from her control. She seemed to improve for a few days—she wrote about the beauty of the clear night skies and a pleasant picnic on Indian Hill, the island’s highest point—but by July 20 she was again beset by unhappiness. In the first of four letters she wrote to Aurelia that day, she described her frustration:

  Honestly, this is one of those rare moments when I just could cry! Both Bets and Ruth have gone sailing in the harbor race, and I haven’t yet. I’m glad I can be alone in my tent for a few minutes so I won’t have to go through the torture of gay talk while I feel so sad inside….Well, my first wave of sadness has left me—If only I wasn’t so easily hurt and so darn sensitive!7

  By her third week at camp, Sylvia was writing to Aurelia three times a day, saying she had “to blow off steam to someone.”8 The day after she wrote Aurelia about her “sadness,” she was all exuberance: “I am so happy it bubbles over! My ‘thermometer’ is back to it’s [sic] high normal again. Nothing special has happened except that I have, in the midst of my petty jealousies, found myself. I am filled with complete serenity and love for you and your cheery little cards which have arrived so faithfully!”9 The manic component of her depression had begun its deadly onset.

  After camp ended, Sylvia spent a calming week in Falmouth, on the Cape, at her friend Ann Bowker’s summer home, and she returned to Wellesley “very brown and healthy.”10 For the rest of the summer, between 10:00 and 11:00 each morning, Aurelia taught her to type; by the end of August, Sylvia could type 80 words per minute.11 She began her junior year at “High,” as she called it, and continued to dominate her classes, especially Crockett’s. She played guard on the junior varsity basketball team and became close to two teammates, Pat O’Neil and Jeanne Woods. Athletic competition appealed to her: she found traveling to other towns exciting, and enjoyed the half-time huddles, water breaks, and orange slices between quarters. Physical exertion eased her academic and social anxiety.

  In early October 1948, she was thrilled to receive a handwritten invitation on expensive white stationery from Barbara Botsford, the secretary of the Sub-Deb sorority. Barbara asked Sylvia to join the club and attend a tea. Plath pasted the card in her scrapbook, calling it a “passport to acceptance in the social world.” During initiation week, she was assigned a “big sister” who made her embarrass herself in public and come to school with unkempt hair and no makeup. Sylvia called the week “gruelling” and said she barely “squeaked through.” But she obediently endured public humiliation for the sake of acceptance. “It’s amazing but true. After such a long time of getting ignored it’s hard to believe I’m a Sub-Deb.”12

  A few years later, in July 1952, Plath would transform this experience in her short story “Initiation,” which she sold for $200 to Seventeen. The protagonist, Millicent, decides not to join the sorority after surviving initiation week. She realizes she has nothing to gain by proving herself to a shallow, conformist group of girls and decides, heroically, to remain an outsider. It is hard not to read “Initiation” in the context of early 1950s McCarthyism. Though Millicent is initially delighted by the invitation to join the sorority, she is troubled when she learns that her best friend Tracy is blackballed for being “a bit too different.” Millicent cannot bring herself to become her big sister Bev’s “gopher”: “It was a denial of individuality. Rebellion flooded through her.” But she still participates in initiation week, kneeling at the sorority altar as her sister breaks an egg over her head, and then sitting for hours in a dark cellar and playing mute in school.

  After an inspiring encounter with a stranger, Millicent decides to take the “harder” route to “victory”—alone—rather than experience “coronation as a princess…as one of the select flock.” Plath’s larger metaphor is political: her heroine stands up not only for herself, but for those who refuse to conform. An image of heather birds in the story symbolizes her acceptance of strangeness, which she romanticizes: “Swooping carefree over the moors, they would go singing and crying out across the great spaces of air, dipping and darting, strong and proud in their freedom and their sometime loneliness.”13

  Louise Giesey White remembered that she, Pat O’Neil, and Sylvia—girls who cried when they got B’s—joined the Sub-Debs with high hopes of popularity, despite the fact that Crockett thought the sorority absurd and mocked it during class. “I was willing to go along with the others, sell my soul,” Louise said. But they all soon dropped out. The club did little more than meet every two weeks at a member’s house, where the girls’ mothers were expected to put on
an elaborate tea. “Really the mothers had to perform,” Louise recalled.14 Plath may have had misgivings about staying in the sorority for the reasons she laid out in “Initiation.” But Pat recalled that Sylvia dropped out because Aurelia “did not feel that she could have people over to the house.”

  Aurelia loved having Pat over, however. After school, Pat and Sylvia would “bomb into the Plath house…laughing our heads off…all girlish passion and enthusiasm. And Mrs. Plath enjoying it all.” Pat remembered that Sylvia decorated her bedroom with her own artwork, as well as prints of post-war German abstract expressionists. Sylvia was “impressed” with their depictions of “the break-up of order, reality,” especially the work of Max Beckmann. She admired Picasso, too: “She made her own copy of Guernica that she put up over her dresser.”15 Pat remembered that Sylvia was particularly affected by works of “social realism” they saw at a spring art festival on the Boston Common. Pat felt all of this artwork had influenced Sylvia’s own work. As did her bedroom itself: Sylvia told Pat she watched the moon through her two bedroom windows on nights when she had trouble sleeping.

  * * *

  PLATH’S SHORT STORIES FROM HIGH SCHOOL already display a left-leaning sympathy for those on the margins of society, especially women. The squalor, poverty, and loneliness that afflict her protagonists lend her late-1940s stories a subversive and at times anti-capitalist edge very likely influenced by Crockett. Populated by single, friendless, unfulfilled women living in lonely boarding houses and working menial jobs, these stories were works of both social protest and high literary experimentation—equal parts James Joyce and Charles Dickens. They were utterly unlike the short fiction that Plath would eventually publish in women’s magazines and were, predictably, turned down by Seventeen and Mademoiselle. These modernist stories almost seem to have been written by another author—one with literary aspirations and political concerns very different from the author of teen melodramas such as “And Summer Will Not Come Again,” which Plath published in Seventeen in 1950.