Trevor Thomas described Sylvia during this time as tearful and vulnerable one day, cold and imperious the next. Ted experienced a similar mood shift between his visit on Sunday, February 3, and Monday, February 4, when he and Sylvia spoke by phone.
On Monday lunchtime she rang. I had to promise to leave England in 2 weeks. I was ruining her life, living in London, she having to hear about me. I asked her who from? She would not say. Very agitated. All the day before just gone. I told her I couldn’t leave England. I had no money & nowhere to go. She made me promise. Finally I said I would go but I didn’t see how I could. She wanted me never to see her again. She sounded terribly excited. I had talked with Al, the one person who has lent me his opinion, and he thought I was being indulgent, going on…that I ought to get out….I promised I would go as soon as I could.63
Alvarez seems to have been Hughes’s closest friend in London at that point. He may have thought Sylvia and Ted were better off apart, but his own recent involvement with Sylvia complicated his motives.
On Tuesday, February 5, Plath wrote her two last surviving poems, “Edge” and “Balloons.” Readers have long expressed amazement that she could have written such dissimilar poems on the same day. One is a cold, expressionist portrait of a dead mother and her dead children, while the other describes Plath’s own happy children in her warm, cheerful living room. However, the poems are more connected than they appear. Both feature a mother on her own, trying to protect her children from the world’s horrors.
“Balloons” describes the “Guileless and clear” balloons that had been floating around the flat since Christmas, “Delighting / The heart like wishes.” But the idyllic tableau breaks apart when the little boy accidentally pops the balloon. His bubble, quite literally, bursts.
Then sits
Back, fat jug
Contemplating a world clear as water.
A red
Shred in his little fist.
The rhymes in the last two lines are supposed to disturb: red shreds, fists, breakage, and disappointment are the boy’s new realities. This is an initiation. Sweetness and light give way to explosion, diminishment, and violence. Plath cannot protect her children from the wounds they will suffer. The poet’s imaginary vision, too, is broken by the child’s act, as in “Ariel.”
Though surrealist in tone, no other poem in Plath’s oeuvre—perhaps in any poet’s oeuvre—has been as biographically determined as “Edge,” which gives the uncanny impression of having been written posthumously. Widely believed to be Plath’s last poem, “Edge” has been interpreted literally as a suicide note. Yet the poem is packed with literary and artistic allusions that belie its “confessional” nature. As in “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” Plath uses irony to make a devastating political point: only a dead woman is “perfected.” Not perfect, perfected—like a work of art, an experiment, something controlled, without agency. The short, unadorned couplets, soothing assonances, and stage-lit, interstellar setting of “Edge” challenged perceptions about how poetry was supposed to sound, as well as the realities it could reflect and alter. Rather than a suicide note, “Edge” is self-elegy, and self-absolution.
“Edge” was originally titled “Nuns in Snow,” and was written on the back of a draft of “Wintering.” Critics have suggested that the snow imagery in that poem carried over to “Edge,” though Plath abandoned the idea after two lines (“Here they come / Down there”).64 She changed the title to “The Edge,” and then, by the final draft, to “Edge,” though the ideas of coldness, celibacy, martyrdom, and purity envisioned in the original title lingered in the new lines.
The poem takes place in that “cold and planetary” space of a Giorgio de Chirico painting, like “The Disquieting Muses” and “The Moon and the Yew Tree.” “Down there the dead woman is perfected,” Plath wrote in an early draft of the poem, as if viewing the scene from high up, alongside the indifferent moon.65 After the ascents of “Ariel,” “Fever 103°,” and “Lady Lazarus,” “Edge”—like “Sheep in Fog” and “Words”—seems flat and resigned. Its tonal color is blue, not red. All has stilled.
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.
Mothers in Plath’s poems cannot protect their children from the world’s ravages. In “Edge,” there is an end to this anxiety. Plath describes two children “coiled,” like Cleopatra’s asp, at each empty breast. They are dead like their mother, yet Plath evokes the regeneration of the garden: “She has folded / Them back into her body as petals / Of a rose close when the garden / Stiffens.” As Helen Vendler has noted, the gesture is “protective.”66 Jillian thought these lines may have been inspired by a Louis MacNeice poem she quoted to Sylvia shortly before her death. As they sat pensively in her dining room at dusk, looking out at the back garden through the large windows, Jillian recited MacNeice’s lines: “The sunlight on the garden / Hardens and grows cold, / We cannot cage the minute / Within its nets of gold.” Sylvia told her she had “forgotten about that poem” and was “glad to be reminded of it.” She said she appreciated the “rhymes in the middle of the lines.”67 Plath may also have remembered Yaddo’s lush rose gardens and Classical statues, as well as its founder Katrina Trask and her four dead children.68 Yaddo had been a place of regeneration: it was the site of her first poetic breakthrough, her first months of pregnancy, and her first experience of artistic parity with Hughes. It was an artist’s Eden, the first and last time she could surrender herself solely to her craft. Yaddo was perpetual spring.
Plath grafted the world of de Chirico onto Yaddo’s garden. Many of de Chirico’s paintings feature women in Classical dress, with togas and bare feet, reclining horizontally on rectangular slabs amid arched stone buildings, long shadows, and distant trains. In one, the woman is called “Melancholia.” In another, she is Ariadne, the Classical heroine who led Theseus out of the labyrinth and saved him from the Minotaur—only to be abandoned by him on the island of Naxos after they eloped. Plath had seen de Chirico’s painting Ariadne at the Met in New York, which she described in her journal in March 1958: “The statue, recumbent, of Ariadne, deserted, asleep, in the center of empty, mysteriously-shadowed squares. And the long shadows cast by unseen figures—human or of stone it is impossible to tell.”69 She had shown interest in the legend years before, when she wrote “To Ariadne (deserted by Theseus)” in 1949, about her breakup with John Hodges. Aurelia said it marked “the beginning of the appeal of the tragic muse.” Plath had then written from the deserted Ariadne’s perspective:
Oh, scream in vain for vengeance now, and beat your hands
In vain against the dull impassive stone.
The cold waves break and shatter at your feet;
The sky is mean—and you bereft, alone.
The white hot rage abates, and then—futility.70
The dull stone, mean sky, and loneliness of young Plath’s Ariadne seem to foreshadow the deserted woman of “Edge.” But Plath had another deserted woman in mind. The asp imagery and the cruelly indifferent moon, “Staring from her hood of bone,” invoke Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. In the play, Cleopatra puts an asp to her breast to commit suicide; she dies nobly and identifies with the moon. (“My resolution’s plac’d, and I have nothing / Of woman in me; now from head to foot / I am marble-constant; now the fleeting moon / No planet is of mine.”)71 Robert Graves had identified Cleopatra as a manifestation of the White Goddess, which would have made her an even more potent female symbol for Plath. D. H. Lawrence’s “Prayer,” which Plath had marked up in her copy of his Complete Poems, was probably also an influence: “O let my ankles be bathed in moonlight
, that I may go / sure and moon-shod, cool and bright-footed towards my goal.”72
By the time Plath wrote “Edge,” the desertions endured by Medea, Cleopatra, and Ariadne resonated painfully. She frequently used the word “deserted” in her letters home to describe Hughes’s actions. His desertion and, later, Alvarez’s were bound up with poetry itself, of a piece with a male lyric tradition that had also “deserted” women. Plath had registered this theme in “The Colossus,” where the deserted daughter lives in exile on a remote island, tending the monument of her father. By “Edge,” the daughter has become a deserted wife and mother, alone with her children in what Judith Kroll called a “frozen and eternal tableau.”73
The famous first lines of “Edge” recall poems like “The Fearful,” “Barren Woman,” and “The Munich Mannequins,” where Plath had used the word “perfect” to describe childless women. She may have been thinking, too, about Sara Teasdale’s poem “I Shall Not Care,” a poem often linked to Teasdale’s suicide in 1933.
When I am dead and over me bright April
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair,
Tho’ you should lean above me broken-hearted,
I shall not care.
The speaker declares, “I shall be more silent and cold-hearted / Than you are now.”74
Plath does not fantasize about revenge in “Edge,” which resembles a Classical frieze. Yet it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the poem is a poisoned arrow aimed at Hughes. Plath’s speaker now performs the part of the White Goddess, only this time she has no strength left to demolish the myth. As Graves had written, “woman is not a poet: she is either a Muse or she is nothing.”75
This Goddess is the presiding spirit of “Edge” and has “folded” the speaker back into her own system just as the speaker has folded her dead children back into her body. The images of barrenness and sterility further suggest that Plath imagines her speaker joining the ranks of the Goddess, who is childless. Hughes’s abandonment of Plath for a childless woman may have embittered her even more toward the White Goddess myth, and inspired a mocking determination to give Hughes what he “wanted”—a cold, cruel, childless muse to whom he must sacrifice himself. “Edge” also incorporates elements of two Hughes poems published in The Observer on January 6, 1963, “Dark Women” (later titled “The Green Wolf”) and “New Moon in January.” Hughes found manuscript copies of both poems in Plath’s flat after her death.76
If Plath is talking back to Hughes, who embodied the living male poetic tradition in her own life, she is also talking back to Yeats, in whose shadow she stood, and in whose house she would die. “Edge” bitterly complies with Yeats’s wish for complete womanly surrender in “He wishes his Beloved were Dead,” where Yeats writes,
Were you but lying cold and dead,
And lights were paling out of the West,
You would come hither, and bend your head,
And I would lay my head on your breast;
And you would murmur tender words,
Forgiving me, because you were dead:
Nor would you rise and hasten away,
Though you have the will of wild birds,
But know your hair was bound and wound
About the stars and moon and sun:
O would, beloved, that you lay
Under the dock-leaves in the ground,
While lights were paling one by one.77
“Edge” indicts a sexist culture and literary tradition that equated perfect womanhood with passivity and compliancy. In what was probably her last poem, Plath drew on Shakespeare, Greek myth, Graves, de Chirico, Yeats, Teasdale, Lawrence, and Hughes to create art that was utterly new and strange—an alternate poetic tradition for women in the wake of her personal male “desertions” and betrayals. It was as if Plath had finally decided that maternity and poetry, womanhood and ambition, could not be reconciled. “We have come so far, it is over.” And yet the poem’s savage irony checks its despair. The message of “Edge” is not, as in “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” “blackness and silence,” but fury.
35
The Dark Ceiling
London, February 1963
On Wednesday, February 6, five days before her death, Sylvia met with the art historian John Richardson, chair of the Library and Arts Committee at the Camden Library and a close friend of Pablo Picasso’s. They discussed the 1963 Saint Pancras Arts Festival. The next day, he asked Sylvia to accompany him to a Spike Milligan reading in early March in a flirtatious letter, adding, “Thank you, by the way, for your invitation to drop round on you although I must warn you that I generally take up invitations like that.”1 The letter suggests that Sylvia was hoping to assuage her loneliness and make new professional connections.2 Leonie Cohn wrote on February 8 from the BBC Talks Department, thanking Plath for her “splendid script,” “Ocean 1212-W,” and asking, “How soon can you record it?”3
On that same Wednesday, February 6, Ted visited Sylvia again at Fitzroy Road. In his diary, he noted a worrisome new tone in her voice:
On Wednesday I heard from A.[ssia] of S.[ylvia] going the whole story of our marriage and parting to Gerry Becker, and the details of my deterioration etc. and how I had left her in Devon utterly without cash etc. I wrote her a note saying that if she had said this I wanted a reply because I intended to see a solicitor to stop Gerry Becker spreading lies about me. I took it round & confronted her with it. She begged me not to do anything, that she couldn’t help what people said. I asked if she had told him that I left her without money etc and she obviously had. That passed, we talked about Yorkshire, just getting out and away from the people. Made plans. She was terribly upset but not more than a thousand times before. She kept asking me if I had faith in her—that seemed new & odd.4
Lorna recalled Sylvia visiting her on that last Wednesday or Thursday. She had offered to watch the children while Sylvia shopped for new curtain fabric at Heal’s, a posh London store. By this time, Sylvia was already looking for a new au pair—she told Lorna the au pair had left the children alone, and “she felt she had to get rid of her absolutely straight away.”5 Lorna offered to help arrange a new au pair for her through her own German au pair. “I do think she was quite close to finding another,” Lorna recalled. Lorna’s own au pair said a “friend of hers could come see Sylvia on the Saturday, but then Sylvia wasn’t there, she was going to be away for the weekend.”6
Sylvia was out of sorts when she arrived at Lorna’s Chalcot Square flat with the children. Sylvia had said she was looking forward to the outing, but now she could not muster up the energy to leave. She slumped into a chair, wide-eyed and vacant. “She came round, and she just sat, and certainly then she did talk a lot. She said she was writing a novel, and she talked about Alvarez….He was involved in that. And she told me it was going to be under a pseudonym….She was just sort of sitting, staring. And at some point I said to her, ‘Do you want to go to Heal’s?’ and she said, ‘Well no, no.’…She was staring rather vacantly into space…looking kind of not all there.” The children both had colds and runny noses. Lorna made tea. “Clearly something was off.” But she did not recognize the severity of the situation, for Sylvia had never shared her history of depression.7 After Sylvia’s death, Catherine Frankfort told Lorna that Sylvia had told her she had struggled—and thought she was still struggling—with postpartum depression after Nicholas’s birth. Jillian, too, thought Sylvia “was going through a dire post-natal depression…which in my experience, personal and by observation, lasts very much longer in many women than popular or medical opinion allows.”8
* * *
—
When Ted met with Sylvia on Thursday, February 7, she seemed even more confused about where she stood:
Thursday morning, next morning, she rang, freshly upset, asked to see me. Came to Cleveland St.—for first time. She was back to making me promise
to leave immediately, to get right out of England. Had been asked to join the Critics on Sunday, and again kept asking me if I had faith in her to be able to do it. Could not make out if she was trying to call my bluff, with her weeping demand that I leave England immediately—or whether she did need me to go, saw everything in my flat—even that I had a new Shakespeare. We talked again about going to Yorkshire & letting some weeks or months pass. Then back to me promising I would get out of England. We parted upbeat, about 1-30, but with both still in the air—me to go abroad immediately, or both of us to go to Yorks [Yorkshire].9
In his poem “The Inscription,” Hughes later re-created this scene. Plath sees his red Oxford Shakespeare, a new version of the same edition she had once ripped apart in February 1961, and opens it “with unbelieving fingers.” She reads Assia’s inscription and closes it quietly, “Like the running animal that receives / The fatal bullet without a faltering check / In its stride…”10
In January 1975, Ted recalled this afternoon in a letter to Aurelia.
The dominant theme towards the end of this is divorce, her steely determination to get that divorce. At the time it seemed to me impenetrable. So it came as a great shock, on the Thursday before her death, to hear that she didn’t want a divorce at all—and that I was a complete idiot to have ever thought that she did. The whole crazy divorce business was a bluff. So what is to be made of that? She mismanaged those last months even worse than I did.11
Yet Hughes said nothing about Plath disavowing divorce in his 1963 notebook entry. Rather, she seemed to be telling him, in her proud way, that they needed to get back together or never see each other again. She could not remain in limbo. As long as he remained in her orbit, she felt that she would not be able to take control of her life again.
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