I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
The poet links the fox’s spirit to his own creativity: “Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox / It enters the dark hole of the head. /…/ The page is printed.”105 “The Thought-Fox” had become emblematic of Hughes’s poetic persona and thus an inspiring foil for Plath as she contemplated her new life, alone, on her thirtieth birthday.
Plath had experienced a major poetic breakthrough on her twenty-seventh birthday, at Yaddo. There, she had written the seven-part “Poem for a Birthday,” which recounted a troubled woman’s recovery from mental illness—partly prompted by Hughes. When Plath finished the sequence, she knew that she had hit a new note, and she confided to her journal that the poems had freed her.106 Now, three years later, Plath wrote another successful birthday poem—this time, without Hughes’s help. Such a poem, if good enough, would confirm that Ted’s abandonment had freed her to become an even better poet than she had been before.
Both Plath’s horse and Hughes’s thought-fox are vessels of creativity. Each poem begins in darkness: Hughes’s opens at “midnight moment’s” while Plath’s first line is “Stasis in darkness.”107 Although this darkness defines a natural landscape—for Hughes a forest, for Plath “tor and distances”—the poet is not actually situated in these landscapes but inside a room, where the poet-speaker is writing. Hughes makes this explicit in “The Thought-Fox,” in which the speaker describes himself “Beside the clock’s loneliness.” In “Ariel” we do not discover this detail until Plath writes of the child’s cry sounding through the wall, suggesting that the speaker has been, like Hughes’s, alone in the act of writing. These dark spaces represent, for both poets, the stasis of the imagination in the moment before creation. Like “The Thought-Fox,” which begins in a midnight forest, expands into a “widening deepening greenness,” then contracts again to a “hole of the head,” “Ariel,” too, moves from stasis to the more expansive “tor and distances” to finally contract into the “red // Eye” of the rising sun. (The word “eye” appears twice in both poems.) Each poem expands and contracts from beginning to end. Both poets break through a barrier: for Hughes the moment occurs when the fox “enters the dark hole of the head,” while Plath’s speaker aims straight into the sun. In each case, the deepest corners and furthest reaches of the imagination are penetrated.
But horses are larger, stronger, and faster than foxes; Plath’s poem is the stronger of the two, the one with the more intensely rhythmic momentum, the more resounding final crescendo. Unlike Hughes’s speaker, she will not wait passively for the poem to sneak into the mind; she will ride after it (or ride with it) as an active participant in the creative process. Hers is the more daring of the two speakers, willing to take more risks with her poetry: riding a galloping horse requires more courage than tracking a fox. Whereas Hughes’s fox displays what could crudely be called female characteristics—it is timid, quiet, moves “delicately” while setting “neat prints” on the snow—Plath’s horse, although referred to as “God’s lioness,” displays stereotypically male characteristics of strength, agility, speed, and recklessness. Plath’s poems, as Marianne Moore lamented, were not decorous; at any moment they could rise up, throw the reader off, and pursue their own course. They were, especially now, poems that could not be tamed.
The short lines, enjambment, and dashes of “Ariel” keep the poem moving at a quick clip; Plath creates a drama of speed and rebirth imagined as a metaphor for the flight of writing. The speaker shape-shifts, becomes pure motion, “a glitter of seas.” But then the fantasy, and the act of writing the poem, halts: “The child’s cry // Melts in the wall.” The cry interrupts both poet and reader, who realizes, abruptly, that we are not on the moors after all, but enclosed, indoors. The speaker, presumably a mother, ignores the cry, and resumes her flight.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
Plath here inverts Mrs. Willard’s assertion—originally spoken by Dick Norton’s mother—in The Bell Jar that “What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.”108 Mildred Norton’s comment embodied the life Plath had rebelled against. Her fear of that life had led her to flee Dick, Gordon, Wellesley, America. The final lines of “Ariel” are a referendum on the unconventional path she had chosen as she took stock of her life on her thirtieth birthday. She had always been the arrow—until suddenly, as a single mother, she wasn’t. But Plath could still take flight in her poems. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats asks the “holy fires” to purge him so that he might escape the obligations of the body and become his art.109 This—as well as Hughes’s “The Thought-Fox”—is the shadowy subtext of “Ariel.” Yet Yeats never had to stop writing to tend to an infant. Plath is flying blind as she tries to reconcile her life as an ambitious poet with her life as a mother.
The desire for dissolution at the end of “Ariel” has often been read in triumphant, transcendent terms, but the child’s interruption presents a larger problem: either the woman stops writing poetry to tend to the child, or she ignores the child for the sake of her art. For years Plath had abhorred barrenness and boasted that children would enrich her creative life. Now, alone with two toddlers in a drafty old house in a remote country village, she began to acknowledge the difficulties that came with motherhood. “Ariel” offers a brief respite from the dilemma as the mind soars in Parnassian Romantic flight over sublime landscapes. Plath could have removed the reference to the crying child and made “Ariel” a different kind of poem. In her first draft, there was no child. Instead, “Ariel” ended with an image of orgasm: “One white melt, upflung // to the lover, the plunging / Hooves I am, that over & over.”110 But in the second draft, Plath replaced the lover with a child. If the poem began as a way for her to take flight from the pain of abandonment, its final form was driven by the desire to escape the demands of mothering. And so “Ariel” became the first poem in English that confronts the risks and burdens of maternity for the woman poet. (In an ironic twist, it is the baby who nearly prevents the poet from giving birth to the poem.) “Ariel” is partly about the competing “drives” of creativity and maternity. Plath had begun to realize that the two were not so easily reconcilable, and that her creative drive was, as her friend Lorna Secker-Walker observed, as strong as her maternal one.
Other poems Plath wrote in late October and early November—“By Candlelight,” “Nick and the Candlestick,” and “The Night Dances”—display more confidence in the child as a sublime poetic subject. In these poems, the child commands the mother’s attention, while nature becomes a spectator. In “Nick and the Candlestick,” Plath writes:
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,
Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,
You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.
Her short BBC introduction to this poem illustrates the tradition she was working against: “In this poem…a mother nurses her baby son by candlelight and finds in him a beauty which, while it may not ward off the world’s ills, does redeem her share of it.”111 In “The Night Dances,” Plath writes that the calla lily cannot compare to the breath of a sleeping infant, while the comets, full of “coldness, forgetfulness,” stand in contrast to the “Warm and human” baby. In “By Candlelight,” “haloey radiance” bathes mother and child in the night nursery—though the critic Paul Giles has noted that Plath’s reference to “mercuric / Atoms that cripple” in “Nick and
the Candlestick” suggests anxiety surrounding the Cuban missile crisis, which was in its “most intense phase” when the poem was written in late October.112
These poems, writes the poet Eavan Boland, changed the nature poem forever: “This is no longer a poet being instructed by nature. This is a poet instructing nature.”113 Boland, one of Plath’s most influential poetic inheritors, argues that in these poems about Nicholas, Plath pushed back against the masculine sublime and reconfigured the poetic hierarchy. The poems gave Boland, and other women poets, the confidence to believe that “Standing in a room in the winter half-light before the wonder of a new child is aesthetics”—that transcendence could alight in the nursery as well as upon the mountaintop.114 Yet even in her tender poems about Nicholas, such as “By Candlelight,” Plath uses unsettling and even macabre imagery. The bells that tongue the hour are “dull,” the candle is a “yellow knife,” its shadows “violent giants.” The baby is “Small and cross,” a roaring prisoner behind his “bars.” In “Nick and the Candlestick” the nursery becomes a Hadean underworld, full of “Black bat airs” and “Cold homicides.” Plath is often at her best when she is writing about her children, but she is never at ease. The intimacy between mother and child, in her poems, is always shadowed by something threatening and ominous—perhaps the burden of the mother’s poetic calling itself.
* * *
—
The New Yorker would reject every poem Plath sent to it in October, November, and December 1962 except for “Amnesiac.” Rejection letters from Howard Moss—seven in all—arrived with depressing regularity that fall and winter, as he passed on some of the greatest poems of the twentieth century: “Ariel,” “Purdah,” “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Fever 103°,” “Poppies in October,” and “Sheep in Fog,” among others. The New Yorker still thought of itself as a family magazine, and these poems were too shocking for a publication that sat on living room coffee tables. Once the rejections arrived, Plath’s optimism and creative momentum became harder to sustain. She had told her mother the poems she was writing that autumn would make her name. Now she wondered if they would be published at all.
32
Castles in Air
Devon and London, October–November 1962
In early October 1962, Sylvia wrote to Al Alvarez to ask whether he would like to hear some of her new poems when she traveled up to London at the end of the month. “For heaven’s sake, yes, I’d like nothing better,” he replied. Ted had told him “rather smugly” that her new poems were even better than the last batch she had sent to him—which he thought “superb.”1 “God knows you’re the only woman poet I’ve taken seriously since Emily Dickinson,” Alvarez wrote. “And I never knew her.” The invitation was just the slightest bit suggestive. “Come over to my place. I have lots of drink.”2
Although Sylvia had professional appointments in London in late October, she had more personal reasons for the visit. After years of knocking distantly at the door of Howard Moss at The New Yorker, she had managed to forge a strong personal connection to the most important poetry critic in England. Now her poems would skip the line and get a face-to-face audition. She could hardly contain her excitement. To Mrs. Prouty, she wrote, “the top poetry critic in England and poetry editor for the Observer (the big Sunday paper here, twin to the Times) will hear me read all my new poems aloud at his home! He is a great opinion-maker & says I am the first woman poet he has taken seriously since Emily Dickinson!”3 “Needless to say, I’m delighted,” she told Warren.4
Plath wrote most of the poems that made her famous in a single month—October 1962. She claimed to correspondents that fall that Ted’s leave-taking had freed her writing, that domesticity had choked her. Yet as her summer and fall letters to Dr. Beuscher show, Ted’s departure caused Sylvia deep emotional anguish and plunged her even deeper into domestic drudgery until Susan O’Neill-Roe’s arrival. Sylvia lost so much weight that September that she worried Elizabeth and Winifred. It was not until her late-October 1962 trip to London, when she shared whiskey and poems with Al Alvarez, that she began to hope that a real rebirth was possible. After this visit, she changed course, abandoned her Ireland plans, and decided to move to London. She had just written some of the greatest poems of her life, poems of revenge and empowerment. The woman who visited Alvarez in late October, and again in early November, was ready to act. Her poems had broken through; so would she.
* * *
—
When Sylvia arrived in London on Monday, October 29, she headed to the BBC to record “Berck-Plage” for The Poet’s Voice.5 Afterward, she went straight to Al Alvarez’s studio in Hampstead. She read him her new poems out loud, and he had the feeling that she was used to “being listened to properly”—presumably by Hughes.6 Although later Alvarez could not remember when Plath read specific poems that fall, he remembered hearing, over the course of her four visits, the bee poems, “A Birthday Present,” “The Applicant,” “Getting There,” “Fever 103°,” “Ariel,” “Poppies in October,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” and “Letter in November.” The poems astonished him. “It was as though Lowell had opened a door which had previously been bolted against her.”7 Before Life Studies, Alvarez said, she had mastered “Stevenesque cadences and Empsonian ambiguities,” building poems “grudgingly, word by word, like a mosaic. Now all that was behind her.”8 They spoke of the exhilaration she felt while riding her mare, Ariel, and also of suicide. They were both a “member of the club,” Alvarez wrote: “Suicide, in short, was not a swoon into death…it was something to be felt in the nerve-ends and fought against, an initiation rite qualifying her for a life of her own.”9 Her poetry, he felt, had finally become true to “the forces that really moved her: destructive, volatile, demanding, a world apart from everything she had been trained to admire….She turned anger, implacability and her roused, needle-sharp sense of trouble into a kind of celebration.”10 He felt she was “completely off in her own direction” with these new poems. And she was “great fun, clever and amusing.”11
Alvarez was most impressed with “Ariel,” which Plath had written just two days before. He took it and “Poppies in October” for The Observer. “I told her it was the best thing she had done, and a few days later she sent me a fair copy of it, carefully written out in her heavy, rounded script, and illuminated like a medieval manuscript with flowers and ornamental squiggles.”12 Apart from her handmade cards to relatives, this copy of “Ariel” is the only illustrated, dedicated poem in Plath’s vast archive. Alvarez’s high estimation of the poem may have influenced her to call her second collection Ariel rather than the other titles she had considered: The Rabbit Catcher, A Birthday Present, The Rival, and Daddy.13 She was thrilled by the recognition. “The Observer critic thought my poems were marvelous & took two on the spot,” she wrote Mrs. Prouty on November 2. “I feel I am writing in the blitz, bombs exploding all round.”14
Alvarez’s praise gave Plath confidence to hold her head high at the PEN party on October 29. The party was to celebrate the publication of a new PEN poetry anthology that two of her poems—“Candles” and “You’re”—had appeared in.15 She felt stares and judgments, and described to Prouty the “malicious questions, the gloating nastiness” of others.16 But Edward Lucie-Smith remembered no “nastiness.” People were “concerned” about Sylvia, talking among themselves before she arrived about how best to help her and get her work. When she did arrive, late, she spoke to Lucie-Smith of her desire to live an “independent existence.” She gave the impression this had nothing to do with Assia, “that she had left because she wanted, in a sense, to become herself. She said that she couldn’t cope with the demands of her own talent and with the demands of running the household at Court Green. That was the only time I ever saw the poise a bit disturbed. She was certainly keyed up. Higher color than usual.”17 Michael Hamburger had a long conversation with Sylvia and was “struck by her hectic desperation.”18
Daniel Huws, who talked to Sylvia “an awful lot” that night, had a different memory. He was surprised that she was there, and equally surprised to find her smoking. She was the most relaxed she had ever been around him, and he felt that she had finally dropped her grudge from the Saint Botolph’s days. When she asked him how he felt about divorce, which she was considering, he answered that as a Catholic he believed marriage was until death. She responded, “Absolutely, that’s what I believe too.” Daniel knew nothing of Sylvia’s psychiatric history. “Ted was utterly loyal. He never ever talked about Sylvia’s problems…never even hinted she’d been suicidal.”19 He remembered embracing Sylvia as he helped her into a taxi, “sitting bolt upright and staring ahead as the taxi vanished down the Kings Road.” It was the last time he saw her. Like so many others, he later thought he had “let her down.”20 But Sylvia felt that she had faced “the spotlight with dignity.” She wrote Mrs. Prouty, “Being the wife of the most famous poet in England is not easy, but I felt I did best to see the lot of people at once.”21 Ted was conspicuously absent.
On this trip, Sylvia stayed with Eric Walter White and his wife Dodo—not the Macedos, who she now thought too close to Assia. Sylvia wrote to the Whites on October 26 thanking them for rescuing her from “enforced purdah in the West Country.”22 The image would resurface in “Purdah,” which she finished on October 29, possibly on the train to London. In the poem, Plath channels the shrill voice of Clytemnestra, who murdered her husband, Agamemnon. Like “Daddy,” “Purdah” is a dramatic poem of female revenge. At the poem’s end the speaker imagines “The shriek in the bath, / The cloak of holes.” During her visit, Sylvia spoke frankly to the Whites about “her troubles.”23
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