Water in the millrace, through a sluice of stone,
plunges headlong into that black pond
where, absurd and out-of-season, a single swan
floats chaste as snow, taunting the clouded mind
which hungers to haul the white reflection down.
The austere sun descends above the fen, an orange cyclops-eye, scorning to look longer on this landscape of chagrin; feathered dark in thought, I stalk like a rook, brooding as the winter night comes on.
Last summer’s reeds are all engraved in ice as is your image in my eye; dry frost glazes the window of my hurt; what solace can be struck from rock to make heart’s waste grow green again? Who’d walk in this bleak place?
On this bald hill the new year hones its edge. Faceless and pale as china The round sky goes on minding its business. Your absence is inconspicuous; Nobody can tell what I lack.
Gulls have threaded the river’s mud bed back To this crest of grass. Inland, they argue, Settling and stirring like blown paper Or the hands of an invalid. The wan Sun manages to strike such tin glints
From the linked ponds that my eyes wince And brim; the city melts like sugar. A crocodile of small girls Knotting and stopping, ill-assorted, in blue uniforms, Opens to swallow me. I’m a stone, a stick,
One child drops a barrette of pink plastic; None of them seem to notice. Their shrill, gravelly gossip’s funneled off. Now silence after silence offers itself. The wind stops my breath like a bandage.
Southward, over Kentish Town, an ashen smudge Swaddles roof and tree. It could be a snowfield or a cloudbank. I suppose it’s pointless to think of you at all. Already your doll grip lets go.
The tumulus, even at noon, guards its black shadow: You know me less constant, Ghost of a leaf, ghost of a bird. I circle the writhen trees. I am too happy. These faithful dark-boughed cypresses
Brood, rooted in their heaped losses. Your cry fades like the cry of a gnat. I lose sight of you on your blind journey, While the heath grass glitters and the spindling rivulets Unspool and spend themselves. My mind runs with them,
Pooling in heel-prints, fumbling pebble and stem. The day empties its images Like a cup or a room. The moon’s crook whitens, Thin as the skin seaming a scar. Now, on the nursery wall,
The blue night plants, the little pale blue hill In your sister’s birthday picture start to glow. The orange pompons, the Egyptian papyrus Light up. Each rabbit-eared Blue shrub behind the glass
Exhales an indigo nimbus, A sort of cellophane balloon. The old dregs, the old difficulties take me to wife. Gulls stiffen to their chill vigil in the drafty half-light; I enter the lit house.
Here is (part of) the poet’s own introduction to this intensely moving poem, which was written shortly after Sylvia Plath suffered a miscarriage in 1961:
I imagine the landscape of Parliament Hill Fields in London seen by a person overwhelmed by an emotion so powerful as to colour and distort the scenery. The speaker here is caught between the old and the new year, between the grief caused by the loss of a child, and the joy aroused by the knowledge of an only child safe at home. Gradually the first images of blankness and absence give way to images of convalescence and healing as the woman turns, a bit stiffly and with difficulty, from her sense of bereavement to the vital and demanding part of her world which still survives.
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans Atop the broken universal clock: The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.
Our painted stages fall apart by scenes While all the actors halt in mortal shock: The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.
Streets crack through in havoc-split ravines As the doomstruck city crumbles block by block: The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.
Fractured glass flies down in smithereens; Our lucky relics have been put in hock: The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.
The monkey’s wrench has blasted all machines; We never thought to hear the holy cock: The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.
Too late to ask if end was worth the means, Too late to calculate the toppling stock: The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans, The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.
All of a sudden it’s November and the arrival of the new month has found me in the mood for a bit of Sylvia Plath. This is November Graveyard, read by the poet herself in that uniquely unsettling voice of hers. Sylvia Plath was born in America but eventually moved to England after she married the poet Ted Hughes. Her accent sounds to me neither American nor British. Her diction, as polished as cut glass but also as brittle, is that of a person striving to re-invent herself. And failing. Her voice sounds to me redolent with alienation, and its coldness gives this reading of this bleak poem an even harder edge than the text alone. Plath took her own life in 1963 and was subsequently buried in the same graveyard referred to in the poem, in Heptonstall, Yorkshire.
The text, as read, differs from some published versions:
The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees Hoard last leaves, won’t mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn To elegiac dryads, and dour grass Guards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassiness However the grandiloquent mind may scorn Such poverty. So no dead men’s cries
Flower forget-me-nots between the stone Paving this grave ground. Here’s honest rot To unpick the elaborate heart, pare bone Free of the fictive vein. When one stark skeleton Bulks real, all saints’ tongues fall quiet: Flies watch no resurrections in the sun.
At the essential landscape stare, stare Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind: Whatever lost ghosts flare, Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor Rave on the leash of the starving mind Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.
They enter as animals from the outer
Space of holly where spikes
Are not thoughts I turn on, like a Yogi,
But greenness, darkness so pure
They freeze and are.
O God, I am not like you
In your vacuous black,
Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti.
Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.
What I love is
The piston in motion —-
My soul dies before it.
And the hooves of the horses,
Their merciless churn.
And you, great Stasis —-
What is so great in that!
Is it a tiger this year, this roar at the door?
It is a Christus,
The awful
God-bit in him
Dying to fly and be done with it?
The blood berries are themselves, they are very still.
The hooves will not have it,
In blue distance the pistons hiss.
The night is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole — A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things. Under the eyes of the stars and the moon’s rictus He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.
Over and over the old, granular movie Exposes embarrassments–the mizzling days Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams, Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful, A garden of buggy rose that made him cry. His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks. Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.
He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue — How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening! Those sugary planets whose influence won for him A life baptized in no-life for a while, And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby. Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods. Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.
His head is a little interior of grey mirrors. Each gesture flees immediately down an alley Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance Drains like water out the hole at the far end. He lives without privacy in a lidless room, The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.
Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments. Already he can feel daylight, his white disease, Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions. The city is a map of cheerful twitters now, And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank, Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.
The other day I decided to visit a few bookshops in Cardiff in order to spend the money I won in the TLS Crossword competition. It seemed only right to use it that way. These days I seem to buying poetry books more often than anything else. I’m not sure what that means.
I treated myself to the collected poems of Derek Walcott, whose work I have never really looked at before. He hails from St Lucia in the West Indies, and won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1992. His poems are truly wonderful, full of allusions to classical history and mythology, but with a distinctive Caribbean flavour all his own. Definitely money well spent.
One of the other books I bought was a collection of peoms by Sylvia Plath, called The Colossus. This is one of those smart editions from Faber & Faber that are just the right size to fit into your pocket for a long journey on train or plane. I have had Ariel for some time, and have been meaning to read more of her verse for a long time but somehow never got around to it.
The only two things that most people are likely to know about Sylvia Plath are (1) that she was married to another poet, Ted Hughes , and (2) that she killed herself in 1963 by putting her head in a gas oven. The manner of her death endowed her with a cult status, which was further amplified when the collection called Ariel was eventually published after her death. In fact The Colossus was the only collection of her poems that was published during her life.
Although it’s a very banal way to put it, Sylvia Plath led a troubled life. She had a history of mental illness and nervous breakdown. Her poems are mostly of a confessional nature, unsurprisingly bleak, but often searingly intense and shot through with vivid imagery. It’s not exactly easy reading, but if it’s catharsis you’re looking for, go no further. She’s even good for a quote or two about astronomy. How’s this, for example, from the poem Years (which didn’t make it into the collection of poems I blogged about a while ago):
O God, I am not like you In your vacuous black, Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti. Eternity bores me, I never wanted it.
One of the things that spurred me on to read a bit more of Sylvia Plath was the news that her son, Nicholas Hughes, had committed suicide at the age of 46; as a young boy he was asleep in bed when his mother had ended her own life. There was also a very moving story in yesterday’s Guardian by writer Jeremy Gavron, whose mother Hannah Gavron also took her own life, in circumstances very similar to Sylvia Plath, in 1965.
Of course there’s been a lot of rather morbid stuff written about whether Sylvia Plath was somehow responsible for the eventual death of her son, whether the propensity to suicide may be inherited, whether it was all Ted Hughes’ fault, and so on. I think all this tells us is that one person can never really understand another’s pain and the greater the pain, the greater the incomprehension also.
A few years ago when I was external examiner, I was on a train from Nottingham to Cambridge going to an examiners meeting at the University of Cambridge. I had a window seat near the front of the carriage on the right hand side. Just outside Peterborough, the train was on a curved stretch of track so I could see the line in front of us. There was a level crossing with the barriers down and cars waiting either side. I could see quite clearly a female figure standing in the middle of the crossing but as the train got closer to her she vanished from view, obscured by the train. I heard the train’s warning signal and, seconds later, the driver shouted out “Oh No..”.
There was a horrible thump and the train lurched as it travelled over something that had gone underneath. The gruesome sound of a human body being sliced apart by metal wheels is something I’ll never forget. The train came to a halt, and the driver opened the door to his compartment. Icould see that blood had sprayed over the driver’s window. The poor driver looked like a ghost. He said that when he sounded the alarm the lady had turned and walked along the track towards the train. She looked directly into his eyes as the train hit her.
Eventually, perhaps an hour later, transport police and an ambulance arrived at the scene and a replacement driver was brought to us; train drivers can never carry on after such an event. Some even have to quit the job. A police chaplain came too. The police and ambulance people collected the remains, made measurements, interviewed various people who had seen what happened and declared it a suicide. We moved to the next station, March, and got off onto the platform, the front of the train quickly hidden from us by a large piece of white canvas.
There had been time for the transport policemen to talk to the passengers who were all, like me, rattled by the experience. They (the police) had been through this all before, they said. That particular level crossing was a place people came to specifically for that reason. Nobody could say why there and not somewhere else. Apparently it’s the same on the London Underground. Some stations have many suicides of people jumping in front of trains, others virtually none. Who can say why.
Suicides are not as rare as you might think. In the United Kingdom each year about one person in ten thousand takes their own life; we’re actually quite a long way down the league table for suicide rates. Men are about three times as likely to do it as women. My cousin Gary did it about five years ago. There are several per week just at railway stations or on railway lines across the United Kingdom.
When I was told these facts I was completely shocked. It has never crossed my mind to take my own life, especially not in a way that seems designed to cause other people suffering too. The time comes all too soon anyway.
This intriguing video features Sylvia Plath reading probably her most famous poem Lady Lazarus.
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In the Dark 