For Sylvia Plath
In the Moon And the Yew Tree, you pointed the dying light of your heart toward the nights, slate board of gloom.
All those dark trees & wind knotted branches, clawing their way, relentlessly, upward.
Your moon, how can we forget, that terrible white parchment, stuck in those dark branches.
Confined in your own perpetual midnight church of pain, you pressed your flat porcelain palms against cold granite walls, stumbling forward, seeking the relief of escape.
It was not to be, your tortured search, published in all those posthumous reviews, your every thought & emotion analyzed, with thousands of interpretations. Autopsied after death; scapel/verb, adjective/bone-saw, toothed forceps/noun.
And all those intellectuals, fingering pages of your darker interpretations, second guessing your life & art; their searching, a counterfeit braile of sorts, feeling for the textures of your dead thoughts. Now, you sleep in the green grasses, you feared no longer unloading their grief on your swollen, porcelain blue feet.
Now the "eight great tongues" still ring, clouds flower over godless nights, your pain an open hinge in the pale of eternity; the blackness & silence is defining.
Self-Portrait in Semi-Abstract Style -- Sylvia Plath
In the Moon And the Yew Tree, you pointed the dying light of your heart toward the nights, slate board of gloom.
All those dark trees & wind knotted branches, clawing their way, relentlessly, upward.
Your moon, how can we forget, that terrible white parchment, stuck in those dark branches.
Confined in your own perpetual midnight church of pain, you pressed your flat porcelain palms against cold granite walls, stumbling forward, seeking the relief of escape.
It was not to be, your tortured search, published in all those posthumous reviews, your every thought & emotion analyzed, with thousands of interpretations. Autopsied after death; scapel/verb, adjective/bone-saw, toothed forceps/noun.
And all those intellectuals, fingering pages of your darker interpretations, second guessing your life & art; their searching, a counterfeit braile of sorts, feeling for the textures of your dead thoughts. Now, you sleep in the green grasses, you feared no longer unloading their grief on your swollen, porcelain blue feet.
Now the "eight great tongues" still ring, clouds flower over godless nights, your pain an open hinge in the pale of eternity; the blackness & silence is defining.
When Sylvia Plath enrolled at Smith College, a prestigious women’s liberal arts college in Northampton, Massachusetts, she planned to study studio art, and her poetry continued to rely heavily on her visual sense. When she was 24 she wrote, “What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black.” On a Fulbright Scholarship to Newman College, one of the 2 women-only colleges at the University of Cambridge, she met future poet laureate Ted Hughes in 1956 and married him 5 months later. After a tempestuous relationship they separated in September, 1962. A month later she began writing at least 26 of the 43 poems that appeared in “Ariel,” but, at 30, she committed suicide in February 1963 by putting her head in an over with the gas turned on. Devastated, Hughes buried her in Heptonstall in West Yorkshire, near his hometown. Although Plath had begun publishing poetry at 8, and had over 50 short stories published before she went to Smith, it was “Ariel” that established her reputation (as both a poet and a tragic, haunted figure) and garnered her a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. Her friend and mentor Robert Lowell wrote in his preface to the book that its verses played “Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder.” Hughes dropped 12 of the poems, added another dozen, and changed their arrangement. Vandals have repeatedly tried to remove “Hughes” from the name on her gravestone, blaming her husband for his misery. Shortly before his death in 1998 he published “Birthday Letters,” consisting of 88 poems about their marriage, some written in the aftermath of her death, some decades later. In Celtic lore, the yew was associated with death; here is “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” written earlier than most of the poems in “Ariel”:
ReplyDeleteThis is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky —
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.
The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness –
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness and silence.
thank you for this
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