Plathanasius of Massachusetts
Sarah Ruden, translator of Aristophanes, Homer, Petronius, St. Augustine, etc., and the author of a study on St. Paul and a biography of Virgil, has now written an evaluation of Sylvia Plath as a poet, taking up six of her best poems for scrutiny. The selection, running from 1959 until six days before Plath’s famous suicide in 1963, consists of “Mushrooms,” “You’re,” “The Babysitters,” “The Applicant,” “Ariel,” and “Edge.” Working with the conceit that Plath conceived herself in her poetry as a classical heroine, Ruden argues for her “establishment, on purely literary merit, in the cool mainstream of literary greatness.” Plath’s poetry is concerned with immortality and myth, with myth defined as claims about “the nature of experience” which allow even people with quiet lives to participate in grandeur. First, the popular image of the tragic waif—note the resemblance to “waifu”—must be erased. Ruden writes that Plath’s legacy, guided by her widow Ted Hughes, is itself an “Ariel legend” in which her mental pathologies supposedly pushed her beyond any help, certainly his, leading both to the late and great poems and to her death. Ruden does not believe the conventional story that Plath’s misery prompted her best work, nor the larger Romantic association of madness with art. She is not the first to object thusly, as viewers of Annie Hall, let alone Plath enthusiasts, will remember: “Sylvia Plath. Interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college-girl mentality.” She fills out Alvy’s argument and reminds us that while there are millions of depressed, suicidal people, there has only ever been one Sylvia Plath.
Plath and Hughes stayed at the Yaddo artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York in the autumn of 1959. One pictures Sylvia, true to her name, rambling in the woods before lunch and finding at her feet the subjects of Ruden’s first selection, “Mushrooms.” Eating well and writing some verse that while it owed too much to Eliot and Roethke had some singular promise, she was approaching commitment to a “riveting message about the world’s collision with her unstinting mind and her female body.” Ruden gives each poem this kind of context, thinking practically about Plath’s immediate concerns while also showing the artistic path. The poem was to be both focused and fun, “bringing together outrageous opposites” in a cosmic comedy. It surfaces in Plath’s journals as a mere “exercise on mushrooms” which Hughes liked, and she thought could be “trash or genius.” The finished thing is like a nocturnal waking dream, fancifully narrated by the mute, “meek” mushrooms who will finally “Inherit the earth” from out of which they have struggled for life. But the tone is a little sinister, so these ironies may not be so beatitudinous. Ruden gives attention to the aspiration, both phonetic and professional, in the word “acquire” in the second stanza, and relates this to Plath’s interest in ancient cosmology, in which earth is the lower element. She ends this essay with the claim, implicit before, that “Plath poems, whatever their more conventional influences and subject matter, are disproportionately about writing poetry.” We can take that “disproportionately” to mean “mostly,” but the wobbly adverb set me worrying. Ruden is not able to revert to this conclusion for all of the six poems, and it transpires that when Plath is not writing poetry about poetry Ruden can’t find in her much more than platitude.
“You’re” is Plath at her most comic and willfully whimsical. She is pregnant with her daughter Frieda Rebecca, a protean fetus whom she compares in the poem to a clown, a fish, a thumb pointing down, a spool, an owl, a turnip, and so on. Among all these, the child is also the proverbial bun in the oven, for which Plath breaks into apostrophe—“O high-riser, my little loaf”—in a moment that could draw tears from a stone. Ruden tracks the analogy between gestation and poetic composition and finds “something brand new in literary history” in the way the mother of the poem speaks it and her child into existence. It seems to me just as much a series of reactions by her “unstinting mind” to what she literally feels inside: the bread swelling in the heat, the “creel of eels” slithering, and the “Mexican bean” jumping.
The next poem, “The Babysitters,” recalls a summer ten years previous when Plath was working as a nanny at a Massachusetts mansion, and went on a cheeky expedition with her friend to an island off the coast with its defunct sanitarium and empty vacation homes. The poem addresses this friend in confidence but is never cryptic and not even very ambiguous. Ruden is good on the convex shape of the stanzas and the artful repetition in the lines about Plath’s peskiest charge: “And the seven-year-old wouldn’t go out unless his jersey stripes / Matched the stripes of his socks.” Plath has made poetic parody of the boy’s insistence, of her own persistence in trying to get him ready, and of the whole situation. Elsewhere in the essay Ruden strains to find things to talk about, such as the wit in “the bathetic ‘socks’ (rhymes with cocks and bollocks).” “Socks” does not rhyme with “bollocks.” Maybe only an Anglo-American critic can do a good job on Plath. Ruden finally offers a connection to the Iliad, and a note about how life is hard and poetry is making the best of it.
I Am the Arrow recovers quickly with Ruden’s treatment of “The Applicant,” the poem with which she began her introduction so as to address Plath’s political dimension. The speaker is a job interviewer, but also the voice of psychotherapy, ads in lifestyle magazines, and what some, though Plath would not, might call the patriarchy. Readers will notice in Plath the recurring figure of the doll, which here, in the last two stanzas, working as a metaphor for a wife, appears as the “living doll,” an “It” who can sew, and cook, and “talk talk talk.” “Doll” is also 50s slang addressed by complacent guys to their complaisant gals, and Plath shows in her unsubtle way how miserable it would be for these men to get what they say they want. Ruden notes that the poem mocks the passive applicant, dumbly wishing for happiness, not just the salesman interviewer, but she doesn’t take as expansive a view of the last lines, in which, according to her, Plath is “writing more and more stingingly about herself,” and her own worries; I think they can also express in stinging, sardonic terms a man’s frustration with a wife who tries to be too wifely.
It is in the poem “Ariel” that the speaker is the arrow, hurtling “Into the red / Eye, the cauldron of morning.” Ruden sees the skiing episode in The Bell Jar as a preview of the experience on the runaway horse that inspires this poem. One is reminded of the scene in Carson McCullers’ Reflections in a Golden Eye in which Captain Penderton rides at such speed that he’s free of all his usual anxiety. Ruden’s guidance through the transformation is expert. Like the wildness of the horse, the reason for the mad rush is unknowable. It begins, after the opening “Stasis in darkness,” without a verb: “Then the substanceless blue / Pour of tor and distances.” The “tor” is the craggy hill of the sort found in Devon where Plath was living, liquified by speed into the same blue as the sky. If the idea Plath offers that horse and rider have become one is familiar, we are to be startled when watching as “I,” the speaker, “foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.” The “I” desperately asserts itself once more, seems lost in the change to the arrow, but then lives on as both phoneme and diminished grapheme in “flies,” “Suicidal,” “drive,” and lastly, in sound alone, in that “Eye, the cauldron of morning.” We can see here something like the heroes of antiquity changed into constellations, the temporary becoming a fixture; we also have that word “Suicidal,” and at the time of the poem’s composition that event is only a few months away, so Ruden must reluctantly deal with the simplest biographical reading, not by challenging it as a reading, but by mentioning that Plath’s talk with a neighbor the night before her death might have contained an instruction to save her from what was to be only a suicidal gesture. Ruden will again insist that Plath’s virtuosity was in spite of, not because of her unhappiness, but the effort at bringing into doubt the official story saps the strength of this claim.
The closer, “Edge,” seems likely the poem that most encouraged the idea behind the book. It was written six days before Plath’s death, and it pictures a dead woman with her two dead children. Here an autobiographical reading is “irresistible”: along with the contemporaneous “Balloons,” this poem considers the condition of a suicide’s children. The world of the poem is explicitly classical, as the woman is wearing a toga, and her children are imagined as white serpents coiled before pitchers of milk as if after a ritual. The allusions are to Greek tragedy but Ruden points out that the toga is a uniform for Roman men in public, and has it that the woman’s body is not a supine corpse but really an upright sculpture whose “smile of accomplishment” enjoys the subject’s immortal stature. It may be hard to imagine that Plath with her fastidious education could get mixed up and carelessly put a toga on a Greek figure, but however calm and precise the prosody might be, it certainly seems possible that her mind was disturbed enough at this point to make such a mistake. The shift from horizontal to vertical is important, so Ruden’s work here seems likely to significantly change how one reads “Edge,” particularly if one is reading it for the first time within these pages. The poem is certainly about an aftermath, if not posterity as the ancients conceived it, though it ends not on the woman but looking at the moon, “Staring from her hood of bone,” whose surrounding nighttime “blacks crackle and drag.” As Ruden concedes, the poem has ended bathetically on some ugly assonance, and her explanation is that Plath is demonstrating that the moon’s “poetic power” has been “transferred” to the dead woman. This will not satisfy all readers.
Her rejection of Romanticism aside, Ruden does believe that the best of the late work, which within Plath’s short career means the last six months, is “marginally better” than the best of everything up until then, and she concedes that the personal crisis “did contribute to new and arresting kinds of expressiveness,” along with the notorious provocations in the poem “Daddy.” (What seem like Plath’s outbursts can be fit into the Classical scheme when one notes that for the ancients, “rage, obscenity, and insult had their own proper genres with their own meters.”) Might crisis have deranged the work, after a certain stage? There is something a bit woozy and too familiar about these lines in “Edge”: “She has folded them back into her body as petals / Of a rose close when the garden / Stiffens and odors bleed / From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.” To insist that Plath, when at her desk, was always in control, you might have to ignore or work around too much. But I Am the Arrow is a very effective introduction to Plath’s poetry, taking us right to the edge before this question starts to obtrude. It works partly because one has been impressed with Ruden’s tough love routine. “The truth is that Plath sometimes craved sheer attention and could go for short-term fixes such as cinema-noir lines, like ‘I eat men like air’ at the end of ‘Lady Lazarus,’” she tells us. This readiness to be critical, besides establishing trust, also allows Ruden to discern moments of Plath’s self-criticism, in “The Applicant,” and briefly in The Bell Jar, though one wonders if she was really so self-aware, or more generously, if she was really so self-absorbed. “The Applicant” may admit of another understanding, “The Babysitters” calls out to a friend in a more conversational key, and a poem called “You’re” can hardly be a song of oneself. In any case, the poems Ruden has chosen for this book have no silly gambits or shock tactics; the best of them, let us say “Mushrooms” and “Ariel” are, as she helps us to see, rather extraordinary works of controlled intensity.
Kazuo Robinson is a writer based in New York. His reviews have been published in Cleveland Review of Books, The New Criterion, and The Oxonian Review. He maintains a Substack at kazuorobinson.substack.com where he writes all about fiction.
