Did you know that before Sylvia Plath wrote shrieking guttural howls like Daddy and became the idol of angsty adolescents everywhere (‘Sylvia Suicide Doll’, in her daughter’s bitter words), she penned things like romantic villanelles?
Sylvia Plath
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you’d return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
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This is beautiful. Her metaphor has caught me off guard
It is interesting that I had come accross Sylvia Plath many times in my life but she had never registered for some reason.
Now, I have just made some research on her and become intrigued with her works and life. It was just recently that I have been trying to get hold of some elusive elements of life which I suspected to be an everlasting depression. Here are some excerpts from her which are very characteristic:
“To annihilate the world by annihilation of one’s self is the deluded height of desperate egoism.
The simple way out of all the little brick dead ends we scratch our nails against….
I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb.”
“outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.
I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers’ beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.”
“It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous and positive and despairing negative; whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.
I am now flooded with despair, almost hysteria, as if I were smothering.”
“God, if ever I have come close to wanting to commit suicide, it is now, with the groggy sleepless blood dragging through my veins, and the air thick and gray with rain and the damn little men across the street pounding on the roof with picks and axes and chisels, and the acrid hellish stench of tar …
My world falls apart, crumbles, ‘The centre does not hold.’ There is no integrating force, only the naked fear, the urge of self-preservation.”
Well, thank you for pointing her out.
Kassad, I appreciate the response—I hope you feel better soon.
I think some of those excerpts are taken from The Bell Jar, which I have yet to make myself read through—I keep getting bored with the tone in the first few pages, well before the good parts (I can’t put my finger on what exactly about the early narration turns me off, maybe that it’s somewhat of a bored mixture of smugness and blandness detailing this-happened-then-that-happened).
My introduction to Plath was not from her writings but to her as a concept (the famous depressed author who wrote Ariel and The Bell Jar before sticking her head in an oven, etc.) Despite having once been yet another despondent teenager inducted into a grotesque fascination with her, I don’t like her actual writings much!
Perhaps the tragedy of Plath’s legacy is that because of her iconic status it’s hard to tell where, in our ideas as readers and commentators, responses to Sylvia the Artist end and those to Sylvia the Life begin. But that’s partly her doing, because of the confessional, ‘Sylvia the Mind’ nature of her work—maybe fussing about the person behind the words is inevitable.
hey did sylvia plath write any more villanelles?
More villanelles by Plath.
I’d just like to put in my two cents on the cavalier dismissal of Plath’s later work as “shrieking guttural howls like Daddy”: while the poem “Daddy” is, I agree, an example of emotion overtaking art, most of Plath’s later work more closely resembles this poem than that one. Don’t mess.
Anonymous, I said “shrieking guttural howl” as a description, not as a dismissal—I actually like ‘Daddy‘.
The ‘before/after’ thing was just a way of phrasing, I wasn’t making any claims about the differences between her periods of writing. (The ‘suicide doll’ criticism is not of Plath’s work per se, it’s of interpreters who trivialize her work by focusing too much on her suicide.)
Ahhhh! Young love.
What theme is this? Can’t wait to start my own blog.
Annita, it’s a modified version of K2
Excellent post, I will save this in my Furl account. Have a great evening.