You’re Sylvia Plath Clownlike, happiest on your hands,
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled, Gilled like a fish. A
common-sense Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode. Wrapped up in
yourself like a spool, Trawling your dark as owls do. Mute as a
turnip from the Fourth Of July to All Fools’ Day, O high-riser, my
little loaf. Vague as fog and looked for like mail. Farther
off than Australia. Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn. Snug as
a bud and at home Like a sprat in a pickle jug. A creel of eels,
all ripples. Jumpy as a Mexican bean. Right, like a well-done sum.
A clean slate, with your own face on.
Sylvia Plath is
among the most written-about poets of the twentieth century. Since her
death in 1963, more than 100 books and countless articles have appeared
about Plath and her work. Plath’s story is well known. She was
born in Massachusetts in 1932. Her father, a college professor, died
when she was eight years old. She published her first poem even before
she began studying at Smith College! Plath’s struggles with mental
illness began when she was a student, including a suicide attempt, all
of which is vividly described in her novel The Bell Jar. After
graduation from Smith, she earned a Fulbright and studied at Cambridge
University, where she met English poet Ted Hughes. They married and had
two children. The marriage came apart at the end of 1961. Plath took her
own life on February 11, 1963, when she was just 30 years old. Her
second collection of poems, Ariel, appeared posthumously and was
immediately famous. It includes such poems as “Daddy” and “Lady
Lazarus,” poems which were immediately hailed as masterpieces of
confessional poetry and feminist icons. Plath’s poems,
especially those in Ariel, are often written about as though they were
inseparable from the way she died, and her suicide is spoken of as
though it was inevitable. One reader has described her work as:
“Thrashing, hyperactive, perpetually accelerated… throwing off images
and phrases with the energy of a runaway horse or a machine with its
throttle stuck wide open. All the violence in her work returns to that
violence of imagination, a frenzied brilliance and conviction.” (Robert
Pinsky) But there is more to Plath than her suicide, and more to
Ariel than darkness (though the darkness is certainly there). Plath was
a loving mother to her two children with Ted Hughes, Frieda and
Nicholas, and several of the poems in Ariel are about pregnancy and
motherhood. As Plath said of one of these poems, the mother “finds in
[her child] a beauty which, while it may not ward off the world’s ill,
does redeem her share of it.” That redeeming beauty of the child is at
the foundation of this poem as well. “You’re” is a delightfully
clever poem addressed to Plath’s unborn child. In typical Plath style,
it piles images on images, borrowing comparisons from everywhere—animals
and vegetables, earth, air, and water. Also typical of Plath, it feels
spontaneous but is carefully structured. Each of the two stanzas has
nine lines, reflecting the nine months of pregnancy. The poem
starts with the word “clownlike,” and there is a playfulness throughout
the poem. The first stanza speaks of the early stages of the fetus as it
grows—“feet to the stars,” “moon-skulled,” ‘gilled like a fish.” The
lines speak of the early stages of the embryo: there is an otherness
about it—it’s “gilled like a fish”—but it’s also somehow cosmic; Plath
references both moon and stars. The fetus is “wrapped up in yourself
like a spool,” living in the dark, like an owl, and “mute as a turnip”
from the Fourth of July to All Fools’ Day. (The Fourth of July to
All Fools’ Day is, of course, almost exactly nine months—and Plath’s
daughter Frieda was born on April 1!) Strange and silent though the
fetus is at this point, there’s a definite affection in how the poet
addresses it: “my little loaf.” In the second stanza, the unborn
child becomes increasingly active: “our traveled prawn… like a sprat in
a pickle jug… A creel of eels, all ripples / Jumpy as a Mexican
bean”—all images of movement. This baby is constantly moving, even
bouncing. As the poem ends, we sense that we are also coming to the end
of the pregnancy: the baby is “Right, like a well-done sum. / A clean
slate, with your own face on.” A “clean slate” is a blank page, a fresh
start: a new life that is just beginning. But, Plath says, the child has
“your own face on.” Like several of Plath’s poems about her children,
the poem emphasizes the uniqueness, the mystery of the child. She does
not see her unborn child as merely an extension of herself and her body,
but as a being in its own right. In a sense, the poem ends where it
began: “You’re.” You are: the title acknowledges the unique being that
grows in the mother’s womb. As we mark Respect Life Month this
October, I thought this lesser-known poem from Sylvia Plath’s Ariel
would be a good one to help us reflect on the uniqueness and mystery of
every life—in the womb, and out of it.
|