Every morning, when my sleeping pill wears off, I am up about five, in my study with coffee, writing like mad\u2014have managed a poem a day before breakfast. All book poems. Terrific stuff, as though domesticity had choked me.<\/p>\n
\u2014Sylvia Plath, letter to her mother, October 12, 1962<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
They were \u201cdawn poems in blood,\u201d those lines stormed onto paper while the children slept; several of them were written through fevers, and the heat seared onto the pages, those old memorandum sheets marked Smith College<\/em>, or the back of a manuscript marked The Calm<\/em>. That had been a radio play, drafted by Ted Hughes in their flat in London early the previous year; now Sylvia Plath was in the Devon farmhouse they\u2019d bought soon afterward, and Hughes was back in London, banished, their marriage over. It was late 1962, and in the space of eight weeks, it brought Plath forty of what would become her Ariel<\/em> poems. They were, she wrote to the poet Ruth Fainlight, \u201cfree stuff I had locked in me for years,\u201d and now they were out. And they were astonishing. Only pain could have released them, only fury and outrage and jealousy and panic of the sort into which Plath\u2019s daily universe had plunged. \u201cI kept telling myself I was the sort that could only write when peaceful at heart,\u201d she told Fainright, \u201cbut that is not so, the muse has come to live here, now Ted is gone.\u201d<\/p>\nAll of these poems would be in the black binder found in Plath\u2019s London flat following her suicide just three months later, on February 11. They were poems so extreme they would be turned down by several magazines (only to become suddenly suitable for publication after the sensation of her death). Look how they came, one after the other, during that ferocious fall. September 26: \u201cFor a Fatherless Son.\u201d September 30: \u201cA Birthday Present.\u201d October 1: \u201cThe Detective.\u201d October 2: \u201cThe Courage of Shutting Up.\u201d From October 3 to 10, Plath wrote her five bee poems, including \u201cStings\u201d and \u201cThe Arrival of the Bee Box.\u201d On October 10, \u201cA Secret.\u201d October 11 brought \u201cThe Applicant\u201d (\u201cIt can sew, it can cook, \/ It can talk, talk, talk\u201d). And fifty years ago today, on October 12, Plath sat down at the writing desk Hughes and her brother had made for her from a plank of elm, and she wrote her most famous poem. She wrote her father, and she wrote her festered grief, and she wrote her maddened Electra, and she wrote the unforgiving child who still ran riot in her veins; she finally got it down, so much of what had been propelling her from the moment she wrote her very first poem. \u201cYou do not do, you do not do\u201d\u2014what a line. What a spiel. What a fit of incantation. Whatever you think of \u201cDaddy\u201d\u2014wherever you stand on the question of whether its tirades are transgressions, whether its swoop into Holocaust imagery is a mere looting and parading of angers not the poet\u2019s own\u2014there is no denying its extraordinary power. It stops the breath; it bothers the heart. What must it have been like, that morning, beneath the quaint thatch of that Devon farmhouse, for Plath to find herself writing this fireball of a poem?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
It is a superstitious business\u2014childish, really\u2014the marking, or even the noticing, of anniversaries like these. Such fastening pretends that one day can be like another, pretends that every day is not, ultimately, only its own day, the only version of itself that will ever come. But \u201cDaddy\u201d is itself a poem built on a bedrock of anniversaries. The speaker is nearing thirty. She was ten when she buried her father. She was twenty when she herself tried to die. A vampire has drunk her blood for seven years. And so the mounting of milestones becomes the pathway to a liberation which saw Plath change her father\u2019s ending from the quieter fate meted out by an earlier draft\u2014\u201cdaddy, daddy, lie easy now\u201d\u2014to the uncompromising burial of the final version:<\/p>\n
Daddy, you can lie back now
\nThere\u2019s a stake in your fat black heart
\nAnd the villagers never liked you.
\nThey are dancing and stamping on you.
\nThey always knew it was you.
\nDaddy, daddy, you bastard, I\u2019m through.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Plath wrote to her mother later. She wrote to her mother often, usually telling less\u2014or rather, more\u2014than the whole truth. Aurelia Plath functioned for her daughter as a stand-in for an adoring public, and so letters home to Massachusetts constituted a busy honing of the Sylvia myth: brimming with energy, bustling with pride and affirmation and ambition. But these past months had been too much of an ordeal for Plath to muster very much in the way of cheery facade\u2014the breakup with Hughes, a black depression closing in\u2014and a bleak honesty had pushed its way into her correspondence with her mother. In September, she had written to tell Aurelia that, in light of \u201cthe horror of what you saw and what I saw you see last summer,\u201d on a visit to Devon, she could not see her mother again until she [Sylvia] had made for herself \u201ca new life.\u201d On October 9, meanwhile, she had written of her decision to seek a divorce from Hughes and had outlined the maintenance payments he had agreed to make (a thousand pounds a year). She would not, she said, return to live in the U.S., no matter how much easier her mother believed it might make life; \u201cif I start running now,\u201d she wrote, \u201cI will never stop.\u201d Given, then, that Plath had begun to tell her mother the difficult truth of her life, it is not unlikely that she truly believed what she said when she wrote to Aurelia that day, the ink still wet on her drafts of \u201cDaddy,\u201d and declared to her that a breakthrough had been made, that things were now sure to change. \u201cIt is over,\u201d she wrote. \u201cMy life can begin.\u201d Her son Nick, at seven months old, had two teeth now, she went on; he could stand up now; he was \u201can angel.\u201d His sister, Frieda, two years old, had recently had her hair cut short by her father (who was still visiting the children in Devon). \u201cIt looks marvellous,\u201d Plath wrote, \u201cno mess, no straggle. She has two kittens \u2026 Tiger-Pieker and Skunky-Bunks.\u201d Plath had just had a poem (\u201cBlackberrying\u201d) in The New Yorker<\/em>, and had been mentioned in that week\u2019s Listener<\/em> \u201cas one of the half-dozen women who will last\u2014including Marianne Moore and the Brontes!\u201d<\/p>\nIt was rhetoric far removed from\u201c Ach, du,<\/em>\u201d from \u201cwars, wars, wars\u201d, from \u201cThe tongue stuck in my jaw\u201d, from \u201cThe boot in the face, the brute \/ Brute heart\u201d of a few hours previously. But it was an optimism\u2014manic though it might have been\u2014to which the fury of that poem seemed to have delivered her. She had plans for the winter ahead, a dream of how to get through its darkness: she would take the children to Ireland, where for months now she had longed to be, having created for herself a myth of that country\u2014\u201cthe place, a dream; the sea, a blessing.\u201d In this, surely, Plath\u2019s optimism was off-kilter; a trip to Connemara the previous month had been a disaster, not least because she had traveled there with the husband from whom she was already separated and had horrified her host, the poet Richard Murphy, by giving him the impression that she wanted to start an affair. The notion of a cottage for the winter in Connemara, then, was no longer feasible, but two nights in Dublin with the poet Thomas Kinsella and his wife Eleanor seemed to have made a much more positive impression, since it was to that city\u2014or rather, to its coastal suburb, Glasthule\u2014that Plath now proposed a return. She and the children\u2014along with their Aunt Hilda, who would serve as the now-essential nanny, allowing Plath to write\u2014would go there in early December, she told Aurelia. They would drink \u201cthe milk of TT-tested cows\u201d (Plath hoped to learn to milk them herself, she said), eat \u201chomemade bread,\u201d and live by the sea. She\u2019d found Ireland \u201cjust in time,\u201d Plath told her mother in that letter of October 12. The plan was to be there until the end of February, 1963.<\/p>\nBelinda McKeon\u2019s<\/a> novel <\/em>Solace is published by Scribner. She lives in Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every morning, when my sleeping pill wears off, I am up about five, in my study with coffee, writing like mad\u2014have managed a poem a day before breakfast. All book poems. Terrific stuff, as though domesticity had choked me. \u2014Sylvia Plath, letter to her mother, October 12, 1962 They were \u201cdawn poems in blood,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":357,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2157],"tags":[8908,8909,8907,7221,2704,7179],"class_list":["post-39910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-poetry","tag-ariel","tag-belinda-mckeon","tag-daddy","tag-poems","tag-sylvia-plath","tag-ted-hughes"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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