Once one has been seized up
Without a part left over,
Not a toe, not a finger, and used,
Used utterly, in the sun’s conflagrations, the stains
That lengthen from ancient cathedrals
What is the remedy?
Plath echoes the “conflagrations” of Yeats’s “Easter 1916” where “all is changed, changed utterly” in the wake of rebellion. Here the conflagration is not political, but personal, even philosophical. (It was around this time that Plath was corresponding with Father Michael Carey, advising him to read Yeats.) The poem conjures Saint Augustine’s dark night of the soul, though here the soul emerges unscathed as the speaker watches the sun rise and the city come to life. “The children leap in their cots. / The sun blooms, it is a geranium. // The heart has not stopped.” The speaker has made it through another night.
“Kindness,” like “Totem,” also referred to Hughes’s Difficulties of a Bridegroom. In Plath’s poem, Dame Kindness, who seems modeled on Aurelia, offers to soothe the speaker with “sweet” platitudes (“Sugar can cure everything”). Jillian was certain that she herself was the inspiration for the lines “blue and red jewels of her rings” that “smoke / In the windows”—she had such rings, and said that Sylvia had “admired the stained glass” in the kitchen and study of her home in Mountfort Crescent where they often “sat and talked.”41 She wondered if the poem had been about her, for she felt that she had mothered Sylvia during the last months of her life. The poem jumps between Dame Kindness, the “rabbit” of Hughes’s radio play, and a Hughes figure who brings the speaker tea. The soothing efforts are no use: “The blood jet is poetry, / There is no stopping it. / You hand me two children, two roses.” Plath may have remembered the Mademoiselle photographer who gave her a rose to symbolize her poetic ambition. If the husband and mother figures—or, indeed, the culture at large—think they can stanch the “blood jet” of her creativity with feminine bribes of children and roses, they are mistaken. The offerings will not subdue her into silence.
In just two drafts, on February 1, Plath wrote “Words,” which grapples with the significance of the poet’s legacy. Initially her words are like “Echoes traveling / Off from the center like horses.” But slowly, over time, their significance recedes.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road—
Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.
The stars are an ill portent; her own words are unfamiliar. The horse imagery of “Ariel” reappears, but, as in “Sheep in Fog,” the energy has halted. In “Ariel,” the galloping mare was a symbol of Plath’s poetic destiny. Although the ride was risky, the poet managed to hold tight and remain in control. Now the “riderless” words and “fixed stars” suggest defeat, surrender, a dark fate. Plath comes close, here, to saying that the poetic venture has failed her; the sap left in the axe’s wake “Wells like tears.”
Plath may have looked to Hughes’s “Full Moon and Little Frieda,” which was published on January 27, 1963, in The Observer, when she wrote “Words” on February 1. The pail of milk that Frieda lifts in “Full Moon and Little Frieda” is a “mirror / To tempt a first star to a tremor,” an image Plath uses in “Words” to very different effect when she writes, “From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars / Govern a life.”42 The “echoes” of Hughes’s poem provide her with an image of fatalism and drowning. Plath’s pool image also plays with the reflection between Frieda and the moon at the end of Hughes’s poem, when “The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work / That points at him amazed.” The image of two artists engaged in an act of mutual admiration might once have existed as an ideal between Plath and Hughes, but now the image served as a bitter reminder that the marriage of true minds had disintegrated while his echoes still rang in her ears.
According to “A Dream,” which Hughes later published in Birthday Letters, the last lines in “Words” came from him: “Not dreams, I had said, but fixed stars / Govern a life.”43 Plath’s words had come full circle. Like the moon and child in “Full Moon and Little Frieda,” Hughes stares back at Plath, staring back at him.
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Sylvia showed some of these poems to Ted, whom she invited to Fitzroy Road on Sunday, February 3. He was rerecording Difficulties of a Bridegroom at the BBC that day, and because of “replays etc” he realized that he would not arrive at her flat at two p.m. as planned. Careful not to upset her, he sent a messenger to tell her he would arrive at three. He wrote in his diary at the time:
Got there about 3-10. We had meat-loaf. We had the pleasantest most friendly open time since last July. She read me her most recent poems—stronger, calmer. She seemed more whole and in better shape than at any time since she came to London. Yes, we planned. We conspired. When I played with Frieda, she wept. I held them both and she wept. She kept repeating that I would want somebody else and I kept denying it absolutely. For the last few days I have been calling everybody Sylvia. Wanting to turn back but not knowing how to stay out of the old trap. Letting her know that I wanted to take up our old life but that it had to be different. I couldn’t be a prisoner, also, the feeling that she was strengthening in her independent life, that she seemed so pleased with, and starting to write again. And the feeling that my seeing so much of her disabled this effort of hers. The feeling that her centre of gravity was coming back into me. The feeling that I wanted that and encouraged it. She promised to visit me Thursday night. Stayed till about 2 a.m.44
The following day, Monday, February 4, Plath wrote “Contusion,” a disturbing poem that begins, like “Cut,” with bodily injury. Yet the energy of “Cut” is gone. There are no thrills, merely indifference: “Color floods to the spot, dull purple.” The bruise inspires a similar series of metaphors, ending with the moment of death when “The heart shuts, / The sea slides back, / The mirrors are sheeted.”
“Contusion” suggests the depth of Sylvia’s depression, which she half admitted to Aurelia in her last letter of February 4. “I just haven’t written anybody because I have been feeling a bit grim—the upheaval over, I am seeing the finality of it all, and being catapulted from the cowlike happiness of maternity into loneliness & grim problems is no fun.” Aurelia had again suggested that Sylvia might consider moving back to America, or at least sending Frieda over to give herself a break, but she refused.
I appreciate your desire to see Frieda, but if you can imagine the emotional upset she has been through in losing her father & moving, you will see what an incredible idea it is to take her away by jet to America! I am her one security & to uproot her would be thoughtless & cruel, however sweetly you treated her at the other end….I shall simply have to fight it out on my own over here.
Sylvia’s concerns about uprooting Frieda suggest that she was keenly aware of the effect her absence would have on her daughter. That she did, finally, leave her children suggests that her depression worsened swiftly in the next week, and that she became ever more terrified of its consequences. She wrote Aurelia in that same letter, “I am going to start seeing a woman doctor free on the National Health, to whom I’ve been referred by my very good local doctor which should help me weather this difficult time.”45 She did not use the word “psychiatrist,” or “depression,” but Aurelia would have understood.
That same day, February 4, Sylvia wrote a happier letter to Marcia, though she broached her depression obliquely: “Everything has blown & bubbled & warped & split—accentuated by the light & heat suddenly going off for hours at unannounced intervals, frozen pipes, people getting drinking water in buckets & such stuff—that I am in a limbo between the old world & the very uncertain & rather grim new.” (She used the word “grim” in three letters that da
y.) She was excited about Marcia and her husband’s upcoming visit, as she had been “cut off from my dearest friends & relatives.” She voiced, again, her “shock” that her children would grow up without a father, and that if she spent summers at Court Green they would likely not see Ted for half the year. She railed against his new life, full of flings and holidays. “You have no notion how famous he is over here now.”46
Sylvia’s letter to Marcia shows her full of plans less than a week before her suicide. Marcia had offered to help rent Sylvia’s properties to Americans, and Sylvia sent her two detailed, paragraph-long advertisements describing the floor plans, rent, and location of Fitzroy Road and Court Green in crisp, efficient prose. She advised Marcia about hotels near her flat in Camden, and she ended her letter by saying, “how very much I need a spring tonic.” That day Sylvia settled practicalities with her Devon cleaning lady, Nancy Axworthy, asking her by letter to neuter the cats. “I long to see my home (in Devon) and will be back soon.”47 She also wrote to Elizabeth, telling her she was sending her “a copy of The Bell Jar under separate cover” (though she never did). She was having problems with her au pair and admitted she was “quite grim and hollow feeling about bringing up the babies without a father.” Ted came once a week. “I know quite well anything else is impossible, but it is difficult, one keeps wishing for lost Edens.” She hoped to return to Devon in June, after she had appeared in May on the BBC program The Critics—though she would be “heartbroken” to miss her daffodils. Frieda had settled well into her nursery school, and she was “girding” herself to see a specialist about Nick’s eye. “I have squeezed, and I mean squeezed out an article for Punch & one for the Home Service.” She was considering renting out Court Green until the summer; she did not wish to, but she needed the extra income. She ended the letter with sincerity and humor: “I have written some more dawn poems, in blood, and hope in a week or so to feel like taking up the novel in which you & David appear briefly as angels, only don’t let the news of my pseudonym get around or I’ll be sued by everybody in North Tawton!”48
Sylvia wrote to Father Michael Carey as well on February 4, telling him she was on the upswing after her “post-flu coma.” She felt strong enough again to “cope with sewing curtains & writing dawn poems, and minding babies.” Carey had written to her in late January about the “two schools of modern poetry”—those who “wish to be obscure, and those who knife out their thoughts in an almost surgical clarity.” He thought that Plath belonged to the latter camp.49 She replied, “I don’t think any good poet wishes to be obscure. I certainly don’t; I write, at the present, in blood, or at least with it. Any difficulty arises from compression, or the jaggedness of images thrusting up from one psychic ground root.”50 When Carey had asked her which poet would be the agreed “universal name for the lyrical,” Plath answered: Yeats.
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By now the “big thaw” had set in, and the snow and ice were starting to melt. The streets were full of dirty slush, and flooding was a problem.51 Ruth Fainlight wrote Sylvia on February 3 that she would be back in London at their old Pembridge Crescent flat by early March, and that she would spend April with her in Devon. “Everything was packed up,” Ruth remembered, “and we’d gone to an awful lot of trouble to get our maid out of Morocco, to come to England.”52 She had no idea the state Sylvia was in. Meanwhile, Sylvia received an invitation from Tony Dyson, dated February 4, to participate in the arts festival at the University College of North Wales in Bangor. On the same day, Susan Alliston wrote to her asking for a meeting. “Do ring me, if ever you feel like it,” Sue wrote casually.53 The invitation—and the naivete it assumed—probably infuriated Sylvia.
On February 4, Sylvia wrote her last letter to Dr. Beuscher—one of six she wrote that day. She had not written to Beuscher since moving to London, and began by telling her about the move and her plans for renting out Court Green. But she quickly moved on to Ted. She feared that she had suffered from what Erich Fromm, in The Art of Loving, called “Idolatrous Love”: “I lost myself in Ted instead of finding myself.” She had made him “both idol & father.” Still, her “identity” had been strong enough to make her feel “immense relief” about Ted’s departure and the divorce: “now I shall grow out of his shadow, I thought, I shall be me.” She wanted to take charge of her own life. But she missed her husband. “I had a beautiful, virile, brilliant man & he still is….He has said he is sorry for the lying, and shows concern that we get on our way.” She admired him even more now that he was “happy & whole & independent…what good friends we could be if I could manage to grow up too.” She told Beuscher about Assia (“this ad-agency girl”) and said Assia had decided to move back in with David Wevill. Perhaps this news led Sylvia to think that reconciling with Ted was not impossible. Dr. Horder said that he never heard Sylvia express resentment toward Ted during her frequent visits to him that January and February—only toward Assia. “Sylvia still loved Ted and still looked up to him.”54
Yet she told Dr. Beuscher it was not Ted’s departure that so disturbed her, but her depression. The flat tone of this letter differs from the others she had sent to Beuscher—it is the epistolary equivalent of “Edge” rather than “Ariel.” “What appals [sic] me is the return of my madness, my paralysis, my fear & vision of the worst—cowardly withdrawal, a mental hospital, lobotomies….I know Spain and lovemaking would do me no good now, not until I find myself again. I feel I need a ritual for survival from day to day until I begin to grow out of this death….I keep slipping into this pit of panic & deepfreeze [sic], with my mother’s horrible example of fearful anxiety & ‘unselfishness’ on one side & the beauties of my two little children on the other.” She was “living on sleeping pills & nerve tonic.” Her new poems were “very good but, I feel written on the edge of madness.” People had been kind to her, offering her BBC and magazine commissions, and yet, she wrote,
I am scared to death I shall just pull up the psychic shroud & give up. A poet, a writer, I am I think very narcissistic & the despair at being 30 & having let myself slide, studied nothing for years, having mastered no body of objective knowledge is on me like a cold, accusing wind. Just now it is torture to me to dress, plan meals, put one foot in front of the other. Ironically my novel about my first breakdown is getting rave reviews over here. I feel a simple act of will would make the world steady & solidify. No-one can save me but myself, but I need help & my doctor is referring me to a woman psychiatrist….I am, for the first time since my marriage, relating to people without Ted, but my own lack of center, of mature identity, is a great torment. I am aware of a cowardice in myself, a wanting to give up. If I could study, read, enjoy people on my own Ted’s leaving would be hard, but manageable. But there is this damned, self-induced freeze. I am suddenly in agony, desperate, thinking Yes, let him take over the house, the children, let me just die & be done with it. How can I get out of this ghastly defeatist cycle & grow up. I am only too aware that love and a husband are impossibles to me at this time, I am incapable of being myself & loving myself.
“Now the babies are crying, I must take them out to tea,” Plath ended. “With love, Sylvia.”55
Sylvia’s letter to Ruth Beuscher reveals her terror of sinking back into an incapacitating depression. It also shows her skill at obscuring her depression from friends: on the same day she told Dr. Beuscher about her fear of losing her mind and her desire to die, she reassured Aurelia about her mental state, discussed rental properties and travel plans with Marcia, wrote to her cleaning lady about neutering cats, told Elizabeth about her new novel, and engaged in literary criticism with a priest. “She was always good at hiding how depressed she was….I could have saved her if I’d been there,” Beuscher later claimed.56 “I permitted myself to be reassured….I spent many years regretting that.”57
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Ted and others thought that Sylvia seemed out of sorts during that first week of F
ebruary. Jillian remembered that Sylvia left the children with the new au pair during the weekend of February 2–3 and went back to Devon to “collect things.”58 Nancy Axworthy confirmed this “flying visit,” saying Sylvia had come down to collect some manuscripts that Saturday and headed home that same day.59 The car had given her trouble on the trip, and on Monday Sylvia phoned Gerry Becker to ask him if he would take it to a repair shop for her. He obliged, and Jillian, worried, invited her over. Sylvia declined, saying she “felt terrible.”60 Gerry returned the car to her on Tuesday the 5th. When the Beckers did not hear from her on Wednesday, they became concerned. Gerry planned to stop by on Thursday to check on her.
Kenneth Davies, Winifred’s son, remembered coming to Fitzroy Road for lunch in early February. He did not “register” a great difference in Sylvia “since the North Tawton days,” though things did not seem quite right. When he arrived, he accidentally chained his bicycle to a neighbor’s railing. Sylvia opened the window and told him, in a “rather sharp” voice, to move his bike—“so we did not get off to a good start.” He entered her “large living room” and noticed “a counter with a number of bar stools. In the middle of the floor was a play pen in which the two children were playing. All three were poorly with colds.” They spoke of North Tawton and his new job as a London policeman. She kept the conversation polite and formal. “I can also remember being rather hungry as I had been invited to lunch and none had appeared by four o’clock in the afternoon. Eventually pork and apple sauce arrived and very good it was too.”61 He did not notice anything seriously amiss with Sylvia, but “did pick up that she was not well and put everything down to that…she invited me to have lunch again the week after and when I turned up I was told that she had died during the week.”62
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