lucymonster | Dabblings in poetry: Sylvia Plath

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.)

~ Mad Girl's Love Song, 1953

This verse was quoted in an unrelated book I was reading; poetry only very rarely grips me as viscerally and immediately as these few lines did. I had to look up the full text online because it wasn't even included in my collected Plath edition. (It was worth looking up. Holy fuck, I love this poem!)

But then I had the collected Plath down from the bookshelf, so I figured I might as well keep reading. Here are some excerpts from a few favourites.

I
When in good humor,
Give grass its green
Blazon sky blue, and endow the sun
With gold;
Yet, in my wintriest moods, I hold
Absolute power
To boycott color and forbid any flower
To be.

~ Soliloquy of the Solipsist, 1956

Depression can be a form of solipsism, I think. I have a vivid memory from when I was fifteen or so, unmedicated and approaching rock bottom, of looking across the school oval one lunchtime and realising I couldn't see the colours right. It was a bright, sunny day and I knew intellectually that the grass was yellow-green, the sky very blue, the school uniforms bright red and navy, but it all just looked grey and I don't mean that metaphorically. Plath's solipsist is an absurd, almost comedic figure, but also desperately unhappy. Misery and self-absorption go hand in hand. Either can be a cause of the other.

Mornings dissipate in somnolence.
The sun brightens tardily
Among the pithless reeds. Flies fail us.
The fen sickens.

~ Frog Autumn, 1958

All the imagery in this short poem is wonderful, but it was "Flies fail us" that got me. What a turn of phrase! It reminds me in a very roundabout way of the Iliad's "goat-forsaken cliffs".

(That is not how anyone sensible translates aigilips - all it actually means is "steep" - but the literal Greek word means "abandoned by goats" and that's how I will forever choose to read it.)

the slime of all my yesterdays
rots in the hollow of my skull

and if my stomach would contract
because of some explicable phenomenon
such as pregnancy or constipation

I would not remember you

~ April 18, Juvenilia

I bought this book when I was in my teens, but I mustn't have read it very thoroughly at the time and that's probably for the best. 'The slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull' is the kind of line I would have scribbled all over the covers of my notebooks and the sides of my beat-up Converse shoes if I had been familiar with it, and honestly, the My Chemical Romance lyrics I used for the same purpose were bad enough.

But yeah, this one speaks directly to my inner teenage lizard brain.

From the comic accident of birth
To the final grotesque joke of death
Your malady of sacrilegious mirth
Spread gay contagion with each clever breath.

Now you must play the straight man for a term
And tolerate the humor of the worm.

~ Dirge for a Joker, Juvenilia

Plath has this moody, miserable reputation but her humour can be very sharp where it appears. "Tolerate the humor of the worm", fucking hell. I love her.

I didn't read cover to cover, but one thing that stood out to me was how many more poems I liked from among the juvenilia than from her published volumes. That could be due to how they were collected - only 50, from a few hundred - but there's also a raw emotionality to these early efforts that connects with me more than some of her more sophisticated, "mature" work.

Also, Mad Girl's Love Song is still my favourite of them all. <3