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The Chronology of Sylvia Plath's
Poems: 1956-1959
by
Nancy D. Hargrove
In his Introduction to The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes states that the "aim of the present complete edition . . . is to bring Sylvia Plath's poetry together in one volume . . . and to set everything in as true a chronological order as is possible, so that the whole progress and achievement of this unusual poet will become accessible to readers" (15; italics mine). Most reviewers and scholars have never questioned that order, assuming that it is largely or even wholly accurate. Comments such as the following are representative: "Chronologically arranged, her 224 adult poems make a kind of diary of artistic self-discovery . . ." (Pollitt 69), and "[We] are at last given a thoroughly responsible presentation of the poems in chronological order . . ." (Pritchard 72). However, while the order of the poems written from 1960 onward is reliable, thanks to Plath's own careful and consistent dating of those manuscripts, that for the poems composed from 1956 through 1959 is seriously flawed. Indeed, Hughes himself later in the Introduction clearly states that, for the poems of this period, he makes "approximations of order" only, based either on his memory or on dates of submissions to magazines. Thus, he goes on to note, "the sequence of the groups of poems through this period is fairly certain. But I am rarely sure now which poem comes before which in any particular group" (16-17; italics mine). Still, despite this caveat, the order which he established has never been challenged, although even the most casual reading of these poems in conjunction with the letters and journals or, in some instances, with simply a general knowledge of Plath's life reveals some obvious errors and raises suspicions that others might exist. In fact, they do. Since a valid assessment of Plath's development as a poet and of the worth of her work as a whole is partially dependent on an accurate chronology, it seems to me imperative to point out and correct as many of these errors as possible and to begin to establish a more nearly definitive order of composition.
This is no easy task, and embarking upon it gives one a certain amount of sympathy for the difficulties Hughes himself faced. There is simply no hard evidence at all for a number of these poems, so that placing them was and still is largely a matter of informed speculation. However, such evidence does exist for many, revealing numerous errors in Hughes's dating. The chronology of Plath's life in itself indicates some errors so blatant that they seem to be the results of mere carelessness or extremely poor memory; for example, "Southern Sunrise" appears early in the 1956 section, implying a
Further, a most unlikely and unassuming source, located in the Plath Collection at Indiana University's Lilly Library, clearly establishes the exact dates of composition for thirty-six poems in 1956, drastically altering the established chronology for that year. Two tiny datebooks, The Cambridge Pocket Diary for 1955-56 (with entries beginning on October 1, 1955) and one for 1956-57 (with entries concluding at the end of November 1956), contain Plath's handwritten records of the events of most days, typically following a set formula beginning with a (usually gloomy) characterization of the day as a whole, describing the main happenings, and noting the specific dishes eaten at meals, particularly dinner. Among the happenings, she often notes the composition of poems by title or first line. Hughes must have overlooked these datebooks as a possible source for establishing the chronology, even though they were in the Lilly Library at the time that he was preparing the volume, having been among the materials purchased from Plath's mother Aurelia Schober Plath in March 1977. The Cambridge Manuscript, a collection of forty-three poems submitted by Plath in partial fulfillment of the Cambridge Tripos in the late spring of 1957, is another aid in determining poems produced in 1956 and early 1957 (Lane and Stevens 56-57). Other sources located in the Plath Collections of the Lilly Library at Indiana University and of the Smith College Library Rare Book Room that are helpful in dating the poems composed during all four years include portions of letters and journal entries omitted from the published versions, unpublished material by Mrs. Plath and Hughes, and Plath's list of submissions for the fall of 1959. Using all the evidence currently available, both published and unpublished, I will propose a reordered chronology for each of the four years in question, indicating those dates which are now definitive (along with the specific sources) as well as those still in question.
In addition to Plath's letters and journals, the two Cambridge Pocket Diaries and the Cambridge Manuscript provide information that greatly contributes to the establishment of a more nearly accurate chronology for 1956. The Pocket Diary for 1955-56, containing entries that begin on October 1, 1955, with Plath's arrival in Cambridge and end in early October, 1956, and the Pocket Diary for 1956-57, with entries for the rest of 1956, give precise dates of composition for thirty-six poems, five of which have not
| Hughes's Chronology | Reordered Chronology | |
| "Conversation Among the Ruins" | Feb. 20 | "Winter Landscape, with Rooks" |
| "Winter Landscape, with Rooks" | "Tale of a Tub" | |
| "Pursuit" | 23 | "Channel Crossing" |
| "Bucolics" | 27 | "Pursuit" |
| "Tale of a Tub" | Winter? | "Prospect" |
| "Southern Sunrise" | Apr. 18 | "Faun" |
| "Channel Crossing" | "The Queen's Complaint" | |
| "Prospect" | 20 | "Ode for Ted" |
| "The Queen's Complaint" | "Song for a Summer's Day" | |
| "Ode for Ted" | 21 | "Firesong" |
| "Firesong" | 27 | "The Glutton" |
| "Song for a Summer's Day" | 29 | "Strumpet Song" |
| "Two Sisters of Persephone" | May 5 | "Bucolics" |
| "Vanity Fair" | 17 | "Wreath for a Bridal" |
| "Strumpet Song" | 24 | "Two Sisters of Persephone" |
| "Tinker Jack and the Tidy Wives" | Spring? | "Conversation Among the Ruins" |
| "Faun" | "Recantation" | |
| "Street Song" | June 1 | "Dream with Clam-Diggers" |
| "Letter to a Purist" | 2 | "Ella Mason" |
| "Soliloquy of the Solipsist" | 3 | "Crystal Gazer" |
| "Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest" | 7 | "Tinker Jack and the Tidy Wives" |
| "The Glutton" | 8 | "Village Idiot" |
| "Monologue at 3 a.m." | 21 | "The Spiteful Crone" |
| "Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper" | 23 | "Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper" |
| "Recantation" | July 3 | "The Shrike" |
| "The Shrike" | Aug. 4 | "Full Moon" |
| "Alicante Lullaby" | 18 | "Epitaph for Fire and Flower" |
| "Dream with Clam-Diggers" | July/Aug.? | "The Goring" |
| "Wreath for a Bridal" | "Alicante Lullaby" | |
| "Epitaph for Fire and Flower" | "Fiesta Melons" | |
| "Fiesta Melons" | "Southern Sunrise" | |
| "The Goring" | "The Other Two" | |
| "The Beggars" | Sept. 5 | "Golden Midas" |
| "Spider" | 9 | "November Graveyard" |
| "Spinster" | 16 | "Obstacle Course" |
| "Rhyme" | Oct. 3 | "Monologue at 3 a.m." |
| "Departure" | 4 | "Street Song" |
| "Maudlin" | 5 | "Touch and Go" |
| "Resolve" | 19 | "Spinster" |
| "Landowners" | 24 | "On the Plethora of Dryads" |
| "Ella Mason" | 28 | "Vanity Fair" |
| "Crystal Gazer" | Nov. 17 | "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" |
| "November Graveyard" | 18 | "Soliloquy of the Solipsist" |
| "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" | 19 | "Letter to a Purist" |
| 23 | "Natural History" | |
| Fall? | "On the Difficulty of Conjuring up a Dryad" | |
| "Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest" | ||
| "Resolve" | ||
| "Rhyme" | ||
| "Maudlin" |
The first poem to be recorded in The Cambridge Pocket Diary for 1955-56 is "Winter Landscape, with Rooks." Written on February 20, 1956, according to entries both in the Pocket Diary and in her journal, it appears to be the earliest poem of this year. As she notes in the journal, "Wrote one good poem: 'Winter Landscape with Rocks' [sic]; it moves, and is athletic: a psychic landscape" (104). Here she combines two elements of her current personal life, her immediate environment of Cambridge (J 105) and her disillusionment with Richard Sassoon (J 98-105).[1] The next two poems, however, reflect her determination at this time to shift from private to social or universal concerns (LH 248). She describes "Tale of a Tub" in the February 20 journal entry: "Began another big [poem], more abstract, written from the bathtub: take care it doesn't get too general" (105). Clearly philosophical, the poem is a meditation on the illusions created by the imagination to veil the horrors of reality. Three days later, she notes in the Pocket Diary that she finished "Channel Crossing," calling it the best she has ever written. Basing it on her actual experience of crossing the English Channel for Christmas Holidays just two months earlier, she tells her mother that it is an attempt to bring "the larger, social world of other people into my poems" (LH 248). Although there is no clue as to the date of "Prospect," I suspect that it belongs to this time period, reflecting the view from Plath's Whitstead window and focusing on a landscape suggesting the hostility of the universe. None of these poems appear in the Cambridge Manuscript.
Plath's resolve to focus on the "larger, social world" was shattered by the entrance of Hughes into her life, for the poems which she produced from two days after their first meeting through the end of May are concerned almost exclusively with love and passion. On Monday, February 27, she records both in her Pocket Diary and in her journal the composition of "Pursuit": "Wrote a full-page poem about the dark forces of lust: 'Pursuit.' It is not bad. It is dedicated to Ted Hughes" (J 115). While there seem to have been no poems written during March as she sorted out her feelings for Sassoon and Hughes, poems came quickly once the courtship with Hughes was fully underway in mid-April. On April 18, she notes in the Pocket Diary the composition of "Metamorphosis," later retitled "Faun," commenting that it is about Hughes as Pan and judging it to be good; the next day, she sent a copy of it to her mother, describing it as "a small [poem] about one night we went into the moonlight to find owls" (LH 264). In the same entry she also remarks that she has begun "Mad Queen's Song," retitled "The Complaint of the Crazed Queen" and later "The Queen's Complaint." Two days later (April 20), she indicates that she has completed "Through fen and farmland
Concerns with the disruptive nature of passion in two other poems for which no evidence has yet been found by which to determine exact times of composition suggest that they may have been written in the spring. In "Conversation among the Ruins" Hughes seems the model for the male lover whose appearance has shattered the ordered life of the female speaker. Not only does the last line ("What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?") echo a line from his poetry, but also details associated with the lover are echoed in letters and journal entries describing Hughes written between late February and late April. Further, in a note addressed to Sassoon on April 18, Plath describes what appears to be her relationship with Hughes, using not only the same words employed in letters about Hughes written to her mother on April 17 and 19 ("Something very terrifying too has happened to me, which started two months ago," J 143), but also a variation of Hughes's line which concludes the poem: "I am living now in a kind of present hell and god knows what ceremonies of life or love can patch the havoc wrought" (J 143). Finally, Hughes notes that Plath had a postcard of the de Chirico painting which inspired the poem pinned to her door (CP 275); since she had a habit of purchasing postcards on her travels and displaying them in her room, it is plausible to suppose that she had obtained it during her trip to Italy in early April. Another possibility, reinforced in that the poem does not appear in the Cambridge Manuscript, is that it was written in 1958, when the works of de Chirico and other artists became an important source of subject matter. Because the second poem, "Recantation," is included in the Manuscript, it was written prior to the late spring of 1957, with the spring of 1956 as the most likely period since its content reflects Plath's own conflicts at this time about relinquishing a promising academic career for love and thereby disappointing older authority figures such as her mother and respected teachers both at Smith and Cambridge. The speaker of the poem, originally entitled "The Dying Witch Addresses her Young Apprentice" (Plath Collection, Smith College), admits the power of physical attraction over both wealth and wisdom, bitterly ordering her young charge to go to her "greenhorn youth."
Through the first week of June, Plath continued to produce poems which she recorded in the Pocket Diary. She spent the morning of June 1 writing "Dream with Clam-Diggers." Set in the seaside town of Winthrop and reflecting an actual dream which she had on March 10 (J 133), it treats the impossibility of recapturing the innocence of childhood. Since it is a departure, both in setting and subject, from the poems that she composed throughout the spring, it is quite possible that Hughes suggested this topic to her, a regular practice from this point on designed to help Plath find sources of inspiration. Indeed, "Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats," whose composition she noted the next day, was the result of an assignment given to her by Hughes (LH 359). Another comment on the negative results of spinsterhood, it again reflects Plath's struggle with the decision to remain single, but risk loneliness and social criticism, or to marry, but risk subjugation of her pride and freedom. On June 3, she worked the entire morning, producing 24 lines of "Gerd the Gypsy Crystal Gazer," later retitled simply "Crystal Gazer." Notable only for its mediocrity, the poem uses for its framework the dramatic situation of a newly-wedded couple consulting a fortune-teller about their future to convey the typical Plathian theme that love ultimately is painful and ends in decay and death. Finishing the revisions of "Crystal Gazer" on the 5th, she wrote "Tinker Jack Traffics with the Tidy Wives" (retitled "Tinker Jack and the Tidy Wives") on the 7th. Thoroughly conventional in its theme of the transience of youth and beauty and in its ballad-like form with archaic and stilted diction, it is unusual in its use of a male speaker. The next two poems, "The Village Idiot who Watched the Weather" and "The Spiteful Crone," written on June 8 and 21 respectively, are apparently no longer in existence; she perhaps destroyed them, having labelled the second a bad poem.
She broke out of this spate of particularly weak poems with "Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper," a sensitive presentation of the experience of a mental patient suffering paranoia based on her memory of such a woman at McLean in 1953 (see BJ 157-159). Although Hughes asserts that he remembers precisely Plath's writing it "on a parapet over the Seine on 21 June, 1956" (CP 17), not only does Plath's letter of June 18 to Warren indicate that they would not arrive in Paris until June 22, but also an entry for June 23 in the Pocket Diary notes both the composition of the poem and the drawing of a pair of shoes on that day. On July 3, she wrote "The Shrike," a bizarre and violent poem about a young bride who is so jealous of her husband's glamorous dreams during the night that, like the butcherbird (the bird's common name), she viciously attacks him each morning. An unpublished section of her journals, which appears to have been written during the train trip to Spain on July 5-6, contains a fragment from "The Shrike" with several alterations, suggesting that she worked on it for the next several days (Plath Collection, Smith College).
Of the nineteen poems whose dates of composition she records in the Pocket Diary from the time that she met Hughes until the end of June, only six do not appear in the Cambridge Manuscript: "Ode For Ted," "Song for
From July 7 until August 20, Plath and Hughes vacationed in Spain; although Plath records many details in the Pocket Diary, so that their movements and activities are easy to trace, she only notes the composition of two poems ("Full Moon" and "Epitaph for Fire and Flower"). That none of the ten poems based on her experiences in Spain appears here or in the Cambridge Manuscript raises the possibility that all were composed after the spring of 1957; indeed, several journal entries indicate that, in the summer of 1958 and in the winter of 1959, she turned to her memories of this period as sources of inspiration. In an entry for July 27, 1958, she notes, "I've written two [poems] about Benidorm, which was closed to me as a poem subject till now" (253), and in one for January 28, 1959, she writes, "Sudden desire to do a series of Cambridge and Benidorm poems" (294). Despite the 1958 entry, Hughes has placed none of the "Spanish" poems in the 1958 section of The Collected Poems. Seven appear in the 1956 section ("Southern Sunrise," "Alicante Lullaby," "Fiesta Melons," "The Goring," "The Beggars," "Spider," and "Departure"), one in the 1957 section ('The Other Two"), and two in the 1959 section ("Two Views of a Cadaver Room" and "The Net-Menders").
Clearly, placing these poems is extremely difficult and involves a good deal of speculation. However, I suggest that only "Southern Sunrise," "Alicante Lullaby," "Fiesta Melons," "The Other Two," and perhaps "The Goring" can be considered as possible products of the summer or fall of 1956 (and of course all may have been written a good bit later), the first four because of the light-hearted, essentially positive tone of each, a rarity in Plath's poetry perhaps reflecting the happiness of this honeymoon period, and the last because she may have written it in conjunction with a short story on the bullfight that she and Hughes saw in Madrid between July 7 and 10; in letters of July 14 and 25, she tells her mother that she is writing a bullfight story (LH 299, 302), whose specific details, as recounted here, correspond to those in the poem. And at the bottom of a typescript of the poem in the Smith College Plath Collection the date 1956 is written in blue ink, although the handwriting cannot be definitely identified. However, it is also possible that the poem was written in the early summer of 1958, for her comment in a journal entry for July 9, 1958, that a poem she had written that day is "Hard as my little gored picador poem was hard" (248) may imply that "The Goring" had been composed recently; in addition, it is written in the strict syllabics (fifteen per line, in this instance) with which Plath was extensively experimenting during the summer of 1958.
The remaining Spanish poems seem almost certainly to have been written in the summer of 1958 or the early months of 1959. A reference to "the black spider in Spain knotting ants around its rock" (243) in a journal entry for June 26, 1958 may indicate that "Spider" was begun or at least conceived at
The only two poems definitely composed during the Spanish vacation, according to the Pocket Diary, are "Full Moon," a work written on August 4 which Plath characterized as bad and therefore apparently destroyed, and "Epitaph for Fire and Flower," begun on August 18 and completed the next day (see also LH 313-315). Against the enormous backdrop of the universe, the latter comments on the intensity and the transience of sexual passion, focusing on "two most perishable lovers."
Leaving Benidorm on August 21, the two spent a week in Paris followed by a month (August 29-October 1) in Heptonstall, West Yorkshire, with Hughes's parents. During this time, Plath only mentions four poems in her Pocket Diary. On September 5, she notes that she worked on "Firesong," which she had first written on April 21, and "Golden Midas," which has not survived. On September 9, she records the composition of "November Graveyard," which Hughes has placed next to last in the 1956 section. The first of a number of poems inspired by the scenery of West Yorkshire, it focuses on the highly unusual graveyard of Heptonstall's ruined church of St. Thomas à Becket to convey its theme of the absolute finality and nothingness of death, despite the imagination's attempts to create the illusion of an afterlife. The composition of the first draft of another poem which has not survived, "Obstacle Course," is recorded on September 16.
Returning alone to Cambridge on October 1 to begin her second year of study, Plath immediately produced two poems reflecting her anguish over the separation from Hughes, both of which are noted in the Pocket Diary: "Monologue at 3 a.m." on October 3 and "Street Song" on October 4. After recording the composition of the second, in which a protagonist suffering intense emotional pain does her shopping on a busy street, she comments that she misses Hughes greatly. On October 5, her last entry to mention a
Switching to The Cambridge Pocket Diary 1956-1957, she records the composition of seven more poems along with other daily events through November. She spent the morning of October 19 writing "Spinster." A portrayal of a woman who retreats from the emotional chaos and intensity of passion, it seems clearly to reflect the influence of Hughes's "Secretary." Although Hughes has placed "On the Plethora of Dryads" in the 1957 section, according to the Pocket Diary she began it on October 24, 1956, completing it two days later. A highly stilted poem, it presents the conflict between the abstract and the concrete, between the purity of the intellect and the corruption of the flesh, with the latter winning out. Its echoes of Stevens in both subject and style can be seen in other poems of the fall such as "November Graveyard" and "Black Rook in Rainy Weather." With its similar title and its reflections of Stevens, "On the Difficulty of Conjuring up a Dryad" may also have been composed at this time, for the date 1956 appears in ink at the end of page 2 in a typescript in the Smith College Plath Collection, and the poem appears in the Cambridge Manuscript. Further, it was published in the Winter 1956-57 issue of Chequer (Lane and Stevens 29). In an unpublished letter of April 1, 1957, Plath tells her mother that it has been bought by Poetry and describes it as a philosophical poem on the death of the imagination (Plath Collection, Lilly Library). The first draft of "Vanity Fair" is noted on October 28; using as her central character a witch who tempts innocent girls to indulge in sex, Plath portrays sexual passion as consuming, violent, and destructive.
In mid-November the Pocket Diary records the composition of four poems in six days. Turning to the more philosophical and abstract subject of the ability of the natural world to provide rare moments of inspiration or significance, she worked throughout the morning of November 17 on "Black Rook in Rainy Weather," another poem in the manner of Stevens. The next day, after revising it, she composed "Soliloquy of the Solipsist"; inspired no doubt by Hughes's "Soliloquy of a Misanthrope," it focuses on the ability of the artist/lover's imagination to create and to destroy. And the following day saw the composition of "Letter to a Purist," a stylistically awkward poem in which the female speaker denigrates the purist element in her lover. The last notation in the Pocket Diary of the composition of a poem appears on November 23 for "Monarch Mind," later retitled "Natural History." Hughes's placement of it in the 1957 section is thus in error. In a stilted and thoroughly conventional allegorical mode, it treats the defeat of the intellect by the body.
The order of composition for the poems produced in the fall of 1956, as confirmed by the Pocket Diaries, shows Plath alternating between works based on highly personal, current concerns with love, sex, and physical separation emanating from her relationship with Hughes (but always carefully distanced and objectified, in accordance with the poetic dictates of the time) and more abstract meditations on such topics as the interaction between
Finally, four poems which Hughes has placed in the 1956 section may belong to the fall of that year, although little evidence has yet been found to aid in their placement. "Dialogue between Ghost and Priest," on the theme that the pain of love extends beyond life and into death, may have been written soon after the West Yorkshire visit of September when Plath was first introduced to the region's folk tales of fantasy and the supernatural (see J 149), while the situation (a student's determination to overcome depression and fear) and the concrete details in "Resolve," which appears in the Cambridge Manuscript, suggest that it may have been written in November or December of 1956. The coal fire, the hedge leaves, and the neighbor's rose bush reflect the flat at 55 Eltisley Avenue, which Hughes occupied beginning on November 1 (LH 324). According to Stevenson, Plath joined him in mid-November, although she retained her Whitstead room until December 1 (98). Further, the references to a "Day of mist" and to the "little hedge leaves" having turned yellow evoke the season of autumn. Its publication in Granta on March 9, 1957 (Lane and Stevens 31), also suggests the late fall as a plausible time of composition. "Rhyme" is puzzling in the extreme, offering few clues to its time of composition. Its use of allegory and its apparent theme that an artistic imagination that does not produce should be destroyed, similarities to other poems produced in the fall, would indicate that time period as a possibility. However, that it is not in the Cambridge Manuscript may suggest a later time of composition, perhaps the summer of 1958 because of its theme and its experimentation with a rather elaborate syllabic pattern. "Maudlin," a highly enigmatic poem in the surrealist mode, is included in the Cambridge Manuscript with the title "Mad Maudlin"; therefore, a fall 1956 composition date is entirely plausible.[2]
The poems for 1957 are the most problematical of the four years in question, for hard evidence of times of composition exists for only five; placing the others, then, is largely a matter of speculation, and some of them may not even belong to 1957. Of the twenty-one poems that Hughes has included in the 1957 section of The Collected Poems, five definitely were composed in other years ("On the Plethora of Dryads" and "Natural History" in 1956 and "The Disquieting Muses," "On the Decline of Oracles," and "Snakecharmer" in 1958) and three may well have been ("On the Difficulty of Conjuring up a Dryad" and "The Other Two" in 1956 and "Words for a Nursery" in 1959).
In an unpublished passage of a letter of January 14, 1957, Plath tells her mother that she has just written two long poems of approximately fifty lines each and feels much better for having broken the dry spell of the previous few months, occasioned by her numerous practical problems (Plath Collection,
| Hughes's Chronology | Reordered Chronology | |
| "The Snowman on the Moor" | by Jan. 14 | "Sow" |
| "Mayflower" | "The Snowman on the Moor" | |
| "Sow" | Jan. 21 | "Mayflower" |
| "The Everlasting Monday" | by Feb. 3 | "The Lady and the Earthenware Head" |
| "Hardcastle Crags" | Apr. 7 | "All the Dead Dears" |
| "The Thin People" | Aug. ? | "Ouija" |
| "On the Difficulty of Conjuring up a Dryad" | "Words for a Nursery" | |
| "On the Plethora of Dryads" | Summer? | "Two Views of Withens" |
| "The Other Two" | "The Great Carbuncle" | |
| "The Lady and the Earthenware Head" | "Hardcastle Crags" | |
| "All the Dead Dears" | Late '57/Early '58? | "A Lesson in Vengeance" |
| "Natural History" | "The Everlasting Monday" | |
| "Two Views of Withens" | "The Thin People" | |
| "The Great Carbuncle" | "Night Shift" | |
| "Words for a Nursery" | ||
| "The Disquieting Muses" | ||
| "Night Shift" | ||
| "Ouija" | ||
| "On the Decline of Oracles" | ||
| "Snakecharmer" | ||
| "A Lesson in Vengeance" |
Plath is exaggerating only slightly when she tells her mother in a letter of August 6 that she is "writing my first poem for about six months" (LH 372), for she seems to have produced little from February through July under the various pressures of studying for her exams ("I am living at the University library from morning to night," she says in late April, LH 355), cooking and keeping house, and returning to the United States in late June. Only one poem can definitely be attributed to this period; in a letter of April 8, Plath tells her mother, "I just finished yesterday one of my best, about 56 lines, called 'All the Dead Dears'" (LH 352). Based on an exhibit that she had seen at the Archaeological Museum on Downing Street in Cambridge, the poem presents death as a sinister, hovering presence in the form of one's own dead relatives, who wait greedily and impatiently to drag the living into the grave with them. With the exception of "Mayflower," these poems from early 1957 are included in the Cambridge Manuscript.
The remaining poems cannot be placed with any certainty, although the fact that none appear in the Cambridge Manuscript suggests that they were written after May 1957; some may have been produced in the late summer before her job as instructor of English at Smith College absorbed all her attention, leaving her little time or energy for creative writing in the fall, while others may have come during the next year. The poem to which she refers in the August 6 letter, described as "a short verse dialogue . . . over a Ouija board, which is both dramatic and philosophical" (LH 372-373), must be "Dialogue over a Ouija Board," which grew to be much longer than she had originally planned. Perhaps because of its length, Hughes put it in the notes for the 1957 section of The Collected Poems (276-286) rather than in the section itself. However, he does place the short poem "Ouija" in the section proper. While the latter was perhaps written earlier in the year since Hughes and Plath had been consulting a spirit in the Ouija board since February (see LH 337), it seems more plausible that it emerged in August as an off-shoot of the longer work; indeed, a journal entry for August 9 indicates that Plath may have tired of the "long lumbering dialogue verse poem" (170) and abandoned it for this shorter version on the same subject. A highly ambiguous poem, it portrays Pan, the spirit of the Ouija board, as a worn-out, ineffective, and basically powerless god associated with death more than life, evil more than good, weakness more than strength. "Words for a Nursery," spoken by the right hand of a foetus or an infant (Aurelia Plath's notes on the poem, Plath Collection, Smith College), may also have been written in August when Plath feared she was pregnant; however, she notes that "I couldn't write a word about it" (J 171), and it seems unlikely that such a whimsical tone could have come from this "black lethal" period
"Two Views of Withens," "The Great Carbuncle," and "Hardcastle Crags," all based on the scenery of West Yorkshire, may have been inspired by the June visit to West Yorkshire before setting sail for the States and written later in the summer, but their time of composition cannot be ascertained. The first recounts the differing responses of two hikers to the ruined farmhouse which was the model for Bronte's Wuthering Heights (see CP 276); although Plath first visited the site in September of 1956 (LH 306), she may well have returned during the June visit of 1957. The second, an Eliotean meditation on a moment out of time caused by "an odd phenomenon sometimes observed on high moorland for half an hour or so at evening, when the hands and faces of people seem to become luminous" (CP 276), is perhaps based on an actual occasion in September 1956 when the horizontal light of the setting sun turned Hughes and Plath a glowing pink as they hiked on the moors (unpublished portion of letter written on September 11, 1956, Plath Collection, Lilly Library). Finally, "Hardcastle Crags," whose earlier titles include "Night Walk," "A Walk in the Night," and "Nocturne" (Plath Collection, Lilly Library), uses Heptonstall and the surrounding moorland as symbols of the harsh indifference both of humanity and nature to the lonely, frail, and vulnerable individual.
There are only a few vague, ambiguous clues to the times of composition of the four remaining poems, which seem to have been written in the fall of 1957 or the winter of 1958. "A Lesson in Vengeance," a stilted allegory, was completed by February 28, 1958, as an unpublished portion of a journal entry notes that it was sent out to an unnamed magazine on that date (Plath Collection, Smith College). Likewise, "The Everlasting Monday" was written prior to April 26, 1958, since in an unpublished journal entry for that day Plath proposes "The Everlasting Monday" as the current title for her book of poetry, explaining that it captures Yeats's concept of work and life as composed of everlasting Mondays, a symbol of new beginnings (Plath Collection, Smith College). "The Thin People," originally entitled "The Moon was a Fat Woman Once," seems to have been written between September 1957 and the late spring of 1958 when she read it during a recording session. A brilliant poem on how the knowledge of the suffering and injustice of the world, as represented by starving peoples, haunts and tortures sensitive and thus vulnerable individuals, its "wallpaper / Frieze of cabbage-roses and cornflowers" no doubt reflects the "pink-rose-walled room" (J 183) of the Northampton apartment in which Plath and Hughes lived during her tenure as an instructor at Smith. "Night Shift," which focuses on the harsh reality of the mechanized industrial world observed in a factory on Northampton's Main Street, also appears to be a product of this academic year, though not necessarily of the fall of 1957. While Hughes includes it in the 1957 section,
| Hughes's Chronology | Reordered Chronology | |
| "Virgin in a Tree" | Mar. 20 | "Virgin in a Tree" |
| "Perseus" | "Perseus" | |
| "Battle-Scene" | 21 | "Battle-Scene" |
| "Yadwigha" | "The Ghost's Leavetaking" | |
| "A Winter's Tale" | 22-27 | "The Disquieting Muses" |
| "Above the Oxbow" | "On the Decline of Oracles" | |
| "Memoirs of a Spinach-Picker" | "Snakecharmer" | |
| "The Ghost's Leavetaking" | "Yadwigha" | |
| "Sculptor" | May 22-June 11 | "Full Fathom Five" |
| "Full Fathom Five" | "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor" | |
| "Lorelei" | "Child's Park Stones" | |
| "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor" | by June 25 | "Fable of the Rhododendron Stealers" |
| "Moonrise" | "Above the Oxbow" | |
| "Frog Autumn" | June 26 | "Owl" |
| "In Midas' Country" | June/Early July? | "The Goring" |
| "Incommunicado" | July 1-3 | "Incommunicado" |
| "Child's Park Stones" | by July 3 | "Landowners" |
| "Owl" | July 4 | "Lorelei" |
| "Whiteness I Remember" | Early July? | "Green Rock, Winthrop Bay" |
| "Fable of the Rhododendron Stealers" | "Memoirs of a Spinach-Picker" | |
| "The Death of Myth-Making" | July 9/14? | "Whiteness I Remember" |
| "Green Rock, Winthrop Bay" | by July 27 | "Moonrise" |
| "The Companionable Ills" | by July 27? | "Spider" |
| "I Want, I Want" | "Departure" | |
| "Poems, Potatoes" | Late July/Aug.? | "Night Shift" |
| "The Times are Tidy" | "Sculptor" | |
| Aug.? | "In Midas' Country" | |
| "Frog Autumn" | ||
| Fall? | "The Companionable Ills" | |
| "I Want, I Want" | ||
| "Poems, Potatoes" | ||
| "The Death of Myth-Making" | ||
| "The Times are Tidy" | ||
| Late Dec. | "A Winter's Tale" |
The eight art poems composed during the week of spring holidays (March
With the exception of "The Disquieting Muses," the use of art works allows Plath to present some of her most pressing personal and artistic concerns in a distanced, objective manner: the destructive nature of chastity in "Virgin in a Tree," the triumph over anguish and suffering in "Perseus," the human desire to accomplish heroic feats in "Battle-Scene," the vitality of the dream world in contrast to the dullness of the daily world in "The Ghost's Leavetaking," the conflict between idealistic and painfully realistic concepts of life in "The Disquieting Muses," the loss of significant prophetic vision in the modern artist/poet in "On the Decline of Oracles," the creative powers of the artist/poet in "Snakecharmer," and the freedom of the artistic imagination in "Yadwigha."
Plath's hectic schedule of teaching, grading papers, and keeping house apparently left no time for her to write from late March until her classes ended on May 22. However, once free, she turned immediately to poetry, producing "Full Fathom Five," "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor," and "Child's Park Stones" by June 11. Beginning with these poems and continuing
Journal entries for May 11 and June 11 provide convincing evidence of the time of composition of "Full Fathom Five." In the former she notes that Full Fathom Five is a potential title for her book of poems and discusses its multiple meanings; she then adds that, when she is free of her job, she will set herself "magic objects to write on: sea-bearded bodies—and begin thus, digging into the reaches of my deep submerged head, 'and it's old and old it's sad and old it's sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father . . .'—so Joyce says, so the river flows to the paternal source of godhead" (223). By June 11 she had written the poem: "My book is now titled after what I consider one of my best and curiously moving poems about my father-sea-dog-muse: Full Fathom Five" (J 244). Its syllabic pattern of 7-9-5, a rhythmic and visual recreation of the motion of waves and tides, is the first of numerous experiments with this technique during the summer; indeed, most of the poems produced then exhibit syllabics, another clue to dating. "Full Fathom Five" also reflects her current interest in modern art in that one of its several sources may have been Jackson Pollock's 1947 painting of the same title (Melander 38).
In a letter of June 11 to her brother, Plath includes "a recent poem . . . I made about the fiddler crabs we found at Rock Harbor when we went to get mussels last summer for fish bait" (LH 396) as an example of her new realistic subject matter (nature) and style (syllabics), asking him to check her details for accuracy. "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor," on the inability of the human being to understand or become a part of the animal world, was accepted by June 25 for publication in The New Yorker, an accomplishment which she had long desired, and appeared in the August 9 issue.
Finally, her journal entry for June 11 indicates that "Child's Park Stones," a descriptive poem on the stability and tranquility of the enormous rocks in this park near their Northampton apartment, has just been completed: "We went at twilight to walk in the green park (I have just written a good syllabic poem, 'Child's Park Stones,' as juxtaposed to the ephemeral orange and fuchsia azaleas, and feel the park is my favorite place in America)" (236).
The same journal entry also recounts an incident in the park which provided the inspiration for "Fable of the Rhododendron Stealers." It may well have been composed soon afterward, for, in an unpublished portion of a letter of June 25, Plath tells her mother that she has written another poem about the park (Plath Collection, Lilly Library), meaning apparently another one in addition to "Child's Park Stones." In the same unpublished portion of the letter, she also reveals that she has written a poem about climbing a mountain, a reference no doubt to "Above the Oxbow." A descriptive piece on the countryside surrounding the Oxbow of the Connecticut River as viewed from the small mountain of Skinner State Park, just south
The next poem for which an exact date can be determined is "Owl," written on the morning of June 26, according to a journal entry of that date: "Wrote a brief poem this morning—'Owl over Main Street' in syllabic verse. . . . That owl we heard on our midnight walk around town, the great feathered underside of the bird's body, its wide wings spread over the telephone wires— a ghoulish skrwack" (243). In the poem, Plath uses the owl and the rat as symbols of the hidden and sinister destructiveness of the natural world. Another poem using an animal as subject and experimenting with syllabics may have been written in June or early July rather than in the summer of 1956; "The Goring," based on her memory of a bullfight seen in Madrid in July 1956, was written by July 9, for in a journal entry for that day she compares it to "Whiteness I Remember" (248).
Several other poems, all but one of which use syllabics, are products of the first days of July. The unpublished July 1 entry referred to above goes on to record their unsuccessful attempt to approach a groundhog while climbing Mt. Holyoke, an incident that was to become the subject of "Incommunicado," a poem written by July 3, as indicated in an entry of that date: "Ted has given me several poetry subjects and assignments which are highly exciting: I've already written a good short poem on the groundhog and on landowners and am eager for others" (244). Further, in an unpublished portion of a letter of July 5, Plath recounts the same event to her mother, noting that she has written a short poem about it (Plath Collection, Lilly Library). With a syllabic pattern that is a variation of the one in "Above the Oxbow" (10-10-12-10-10-10-12), "Incommunicado" uses specific details from the actual episode to convey once again the impossibility of human beings establishing communication with animals.
The reference to a poem on landowners in the July 3 entry indicates that "Landowners," which Hughes has placed in the 1956 section of The Collected Poems, actually belongs in 1958. The use of syllabics (9 per line) seems to confirm this later date. Further, Plath may well have combined her present envy of those who owned their property with a similar emotion experienced while a student at Cambridge to produce this psychological study of the speaker's envy of the stability and rootedness of landowners. This poem also heralds a new source of subject matter at this time, memories of the past, perhaps suggested to her by Hughes.
This interest in the past combined with a directive from the Ouija board on July 3 to "write on the poem subject 'Lorelei' because they are my own kin" to inspire "Lorelei," which Plath wrote "for fun" on July 4, "remembering the plaintive German song Mother used to play and sing to us. . . . The subject appealed to me doubly (or triply): the German legend of the Rhine
Plath's delving into her past as a source of subject matter is also reflected in the July 5 letter: "I am going back to the ocean as my poetic heritage and hope to revisit all the places I remember in Winthrop with Ted this summer; Johnson Avenue, a certain meadow on it, our beach and grammy's. Even rundown as it now is, the town has the exciting appeal of my childhood, and I am writing some good poems about it, I think" (LH 398). One of these was surely "Green Rock, Winthrop Bay," a comment on the destructive effects of time and the impossibility of recapturing the innocence and beauty of the past; curiously, Plath abandons syllabics, perhaps to reflect the jarring, disturbing nature of the speaker's disillusionment. It seems likely that "Memoirs of a Spinach-Picker," based on her 1950 summer job at Lookout Farm (see J 3-5; LH 35-36) and originally entitled "The Champion Spinach Picker" (Plath Collection, Smith College), was produced at this time as well, a speculation supported by its use of syllabics (11 per line); it is unusual in its theme of the freshness and idealism of youth.
From this time through mid July, Plath suffered from a bout of imaginative sterility that catapulted her into intense depression. This period of sterility, however, was followed by one of productivity: in a journal entry for July 27, she notes, "I have written four or five good poems this past ten days, after a sterile hysterical ten days of nonproduction. These poems are, I think, deeper, more sobre, somber (yet well colored) than any I've yet done" (253). Unfortunately, she does not identify those poems, and yet some clues allow a number of speculations. "Whiteness I Remember," a syllabic poem based on a memory from her Cambridge days, seems to have been her first attempt to break out of the dry spell. While an entry in The Journals ("I wrote what I consider a 'book poem' about my runaway ride in Cambridge on the horse Sam") indicates that she wrote it on or just prior to July 9 (248), in an unpublished portion of a journal entry for July 17, Plath notes that she started writing it on July 14 and must finish it that morning (Plath Collection, Smith College).
Whether she began it on the 9th or the 14th, she still felt paralyzed by sterility on the 19th: "Paralysis still with me. It is as if my mind stopped" (J 251). In describing her inability to produce, she writes, "Lines occur to me and stop dead. . . . I observe: 'The mulberry berries redden under leaves.' And stop" (J 251); one page later in the midst of castigating herself the sentence "Grub-white mulberries redden under leaves" appears abruptly and without explanation (252). Clearly, she is struggling here with the poem which becomes "Moonrise"; ironically, she overcomes her imaginative sterility by writing a highly psychological, surrealistic poem about it. In addition to
As she notes in the July 27 entry, two of the poems which she has just written are "about Benidorm, which was closed to me as a poem subject till now. I think I am opening up new subjects and have . . . a plainer, realer poetry" (253). The most likely candidates, as discussed earlier, are "Spider" and "Departure," both of which are written in challenging syllabic patterns. Concerning the former, in a journal entry for June 26, she records her memory of "the black spider in Spain knotting ants around its rock" (243), indicating her interest in it as subject matter at this time. And the publication of "Departure" on March 7, 1959, in The Nation (Lane and Stevens 19) supports this period as its time of composition.
Two incidents recorded in the July 17 entry, one published and the other unpublished, suggest that "Night Shift" and "Sculptor" may have been composed at this time. The former, a notation that "The windows shake in their sockets from some unheard detonation" (250), may record the situation which inspired "Night Shift," which currently appears in the 1957 section of The Collected Poems. The latter is a long, detailed description first of the bronze statues of dead men and then of the enormous wooden statue of a wingless angel in the house of Leonard Baskin, artist-in-residence at Smith College, whom Plath and Hughes first met on May 5, 1958; Plath then records her awe and admiration of his work (Plath Collection, Smith College). She may well have composed "Sculptor" soon after she made this entry; it was published in May 1959 in Grecourt Review (Lane and Stevens 31). Dedicated to Baskin, it is a tribute to the creative powers of the artist, the sacredness of his craft, the immortality of his works. That both poems follow similar syllabic patterns (7 per line and 7-7-7-8, respectively) is further evidence that they belong here.
"In Midas' Country" and "Frog Autumn," both of which exhibit complex syllabic patterns, seem products of August, Plath's last poems on Northampton prior to the move to Boston in September. The former had its inception in copious notes dated August 9 which describe speed boats on the Connecticut River, skiers on invisible towlines, white wakes in blue water, and bleached heads of rye; at the end is written (apparently later) "In Midas' Country" (Plath Collection, Smith College). Set in the countryside near Northampton, the poem presents the late summer as a time of abundance and richness which will soon give way to the harsher conditions of winter. While there is no hard evidence, its similar subject matter, the decay and sterility of the natural world in autumn, suggests that the latter shares this time of composition; its scenery certainly seems to reflect the frog pond in Child's Park, where Plath and Hughes often watched "two magnificent black frogs" (LH 395); it was published in January 1959 in The Nation (Lane and Stevens 22).
The next five poems, which Hughes has placed at the end of the 1958 section, may have been written in the fall in Boston, but they could also have come earlier in the year; "The Companionable Ills" and "The Times are Tidy" were published in January 1959 and "The Death of Myth-Making" and "I Want, I Want" in the fall of 1959 (Lane and Stevens). As a group, they show an abandonment of the use of nature and the (somewhat personal) past as subject matter in favor of allegory and vague abstractions. "The Companionable Ills," "I Want, I Want," and "Poems, Potatoes" continue the syllabic experimentation of the summer, while "The Death of Myth-Making" and "The Times are Tidy" do not. These poems seem remarkable only in their mediocrity, perhaps reflecting Plath's battle with the "old panic fear" (J 259) throughout the fall.
As the result of taking a job in early October in the psychiatric clinic at Massachusetts General Hospital, suffering a severe depression which sent her back to her psychiatrist Beuscher, and concentrating on short stories when she did write, Plath seems to have produced no other poems until the end of December, composing "A Winter's Tale" after she, Hughes, and Mrs. Plath had taken a walk around Beacon Hill on Christmas Eve. In this "light piece" (LH 410) with a syllabic count of 8-8-8-4, she attacks the commercialization of Christmas through a catalogue of sights observed in Boston.
As was the case with the poems of 1958, accurate composition dates can be established for many poems of 1959 as a result of numerous references in journal entries, letters, and other sources, and enough clues about others exist to allow speculation supported by some evidence. With goals of using actual people, situations, and emotions in place of the fictional ones of past works and of avoiding strict, highly formal structures which inhibit emotional intensity, Plath still wavered uncertainly over whether to write directly about herself during this year. She produced poetry in two three-month periods. In the first (January through March), she focused on locations associated with her past—Cambridge, Benidorm, and, most often, Winthrop and its environs—and only occasionally used the syllabics associated with the summer and fall of 1958. In the second (September through November), she found inspiration in Yaddo, the artists' colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, where she and Hughes resided from September 9 to November 19. While she wrote in distanced tones and relied on syllabics and triplets in the first of these poems, she then began to experiment both with more personal subject matter and with a freer style, a result largely of the influence of Lowell, Sexton, Roethke, and of course Hughes himself.
"Point Shirley," originally entitled "Point Shirley, Revisited," was composed on the weekend of January 16-17 (J 293). A tribute to her grandmother, the poem uses the details of the Schobers' house to comment on the destructiveness of nature and the isolation of the individual. On January 20, Plath began the sonnet "Goatsucker" for Esther Baskin's book on nocturnal animals[4] and a week later produced "The Bull of Bendylaw," which she herself
| Hughes's Chronology | Reordered Chronology | |
| "The Bull of Bendylaw" | Jan. 16-17 | "Point Shirley" |
| "The Eye-mote" | 20 | "Goatsucker" |
| "Point Shirley" | 27 | "The Bull of Bendylaw" |
| "Goatsucker" | Jan./Feb.? | "The Hermit at Outermost House" |
| "Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows" | Feb. 19 | "Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows" |
| "A Winter Ship" | "Suicide off Egg Rock" | |
| "Aftermath" | Feb./Mar.? | "The Eye-mote" |
| "Two Views of a Cadaver Room" | "The Net-Menders" | |
| "Suicide off Egg Rock" | "The Beggars" | |
| "The Ravaged Face" | "Two Views of a Cadaver Room" | |
| "Metaphors" | by Mar. 8 | "The Ravaged Face" |
| "Electra on Azalea Path" | by Mar. 20 | "Electra on Azalea Path" |
| "The Beekeeper's Daughter" | "Metaphors" | |
| "The Hermit at Outermost House" | mid Mar. | "Man in Black" |
| "Man in Black" | Mar.? | "A Winter Ship" |
| "Old Ladies' Home" | "Old Ladies' Home" | |
| "The Net-Menders" | "The Beekeeper's Daughter" | |
| "Magnolia Shoals" | "Aftermath" | |
| "The Sleepers" | by Sept. 21 | "Magnolia Shoals" |
| "Yaddo: The Grand Manor" | "Yaddo: The Grand Manor" | |
| "Medallion" | by Sept. 25 | "Medallion" |
| "The Manor Garden" | Oct. 5 | "Polly's Tree" |
| "Blue Moles" | early Oct.? | "Dark Wood, Dark Water" |
| "Dark Wood, Dark Water" | "The Sleepers" | |
| "Polly's Tree" | by Oct. 19 | "The Manor Garden" |
| "The Colossus" | "The Colossus" | |
| "Private Ground" | mid Oct.? | "The Beekeeper's Daughter" |
| "Poem for a Birthday" | Oct. 22-Nov. 3 | "Poem for a Birthday" |
| "The Burnt-out Spa" | by Nov. 11 | "The Burnt-out Spa" |
| "Mushrooms" | "Blue Moles" | |
| Nov. 13 | "Mushrooms" | |
| mid Nov.? | "Words for a Nursery" | |
| "Private Ground" |
On January 28 Plath records in her journal a "Sudden desire to do a series of Cambridge and Benidorm poems" (294). Although only "Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows" can be specifically dated, "The Eye-mote," "The Net-Menders," and "The Beggars" seem likely products of this desire, with "Two Views of a Cadaver Room" as a possible off-shoot. The composition of the first is noted in a journal entry for February 19: "Wrote a Grantchester poem of pure description. I must get philosophy in. Until I do I shall lag behind [Adrienne Rich]" (296). Despite this criticism, the poem does express the "philosophy" that, beneath its benign and charming appearance, nature is violent and destructive. February or March may well have seen the composition of "The Eye-mote," a meditation on the loss of innocence based on an incident that occurred in Cambridge in March 1956; of "The Net-Menders," a description of elderly women at their work in the fishing village of Benidorm, with philosophical musings on human mortality;[5] and of "The Beggars," a harsh criticism of the mendicants at Benidorm's outdoor market. While the syllabic patterns of the latter two may indicate that they belong to the summer of 1958, their consistent appearance in lists of poems sent out in the fall of 1959 (Plath Collection, Smith College) suggests that they had been produced more recently. "Two Views of a Cadaver Room" seems to have been written in February or March as well, for its subject matter is similar to that in a number of poems composed then. Since Plath had surely seen Breughel's The Triumph of Death in Madrid's Prado Museum on July 10, 1956, it may well have been evoked by memories of Spain explored in the Benidorm poems. Further, like "Suicide off Egg Rock" and "Electra on Azalea Path," it also concerns memories of her college days. That it was accepted for publication in TLS on July 6, 1959 (Plath Collection, Smith College), confirms that it was composed well before that date.
In addition to "Point Shirley," a product of mid January, a number of poems composed in February and March reflect Winthrop or its environs. According to a journal entry for February 19, Plath began "Suicide off Egg Rock" on that date: "I began a poem, 'Suicide Off Egg Rock [sic],' but set up such a strict verse form that all power was lost" (296); however, on February 25 she reports that she has revised it extensively with positive results: "Wrote a ghastly poem in strictly varying line lengths with no feeling in it though the scene was fraught with emotion. Then did it over, much better: got something of what I wanted. . . . My main thing now is to start with real things: real emotions" (298). Although using her own experiences from the summer of 1953 and the location of Lynn Beach, just north of Winthrop, Plath nevertheless distances these personal origins by using a third-person speaker
In an entry for March 9, Plath notes that on the previous day she wrote the octave of "The Ravaged Face," thus completing the sonnet whose sestet she had written a day or so earlier after a "lugubrious" session with Beuscher: "Got idea on trolley for a poem because of my ravaged face [caused by excessive crying]: called 'The Ravaged Face.' A line came, too. Wrote it down and then the five lines of a sestet. Wrote the first eight lines after coming back from a fine afternoon in Winthrop yesterday. I rather like it" (299). Excessively emotional, awkward in diction, and ambiguous in meaning, the poem is among the weakest of this year. However, that visit to Winthrop also inspired one of her very best poems of 1959, "Electra on Azalea Path." In the March 9 entry she tells of going to her father's grave in the Winthrop cemetery, perhaps a result of her sessions with Beuscher in which, among other things, she was exploring her feelings of anguish and guilt about his death. The poem, completed by March 20 (J 300), is a highly complex psychological portrait of a daughter's response to her father's death. Also finished by March 20 was "Metaphors for a Pregnant Woman," later shortened to "Metaphors." Having indicated in the March 9 entry that she intended to write "some good pregnant poems, if I know I really am" (300), she produced this poem during the next ten days when she felt certain that such was the case; ironically, on the very day that she noted its completion, she also recorded her disappointment at not being pregnant after all.
"Man in Black" is another poem inspired by the Winthrop visit and composed about March 20. In recording its acceptance by The New Yorker in an entry for April 23, she reveals that she "wrote [it] only a little over a month ago on one of my fruitful visits to Winthrop. . . . The 'dead black' . . . may be a transference from the visit to my father's grave" (301-302). In an unpublished portion of the March 9 journal entry, Plath tells of walking along the rocks by the ocean near Water Tower Hill, noting that Hughes in his black coat had gone out to the end of the sand bar, and then of continuing on to Deer Island Prison, where they talked with a guard about the animals there (Plath Collection, Smith College). The poem demonstrates how a focal figure (either father or husband) gives order and meaning to the world.
Three other poems whose precise dates of composition cannot be confirmed may have been evoked by the March visit(s) to Winthrop as well, reflecting that location in various ways. "A Winter Ship" and "Old Ladies' Home" both use actual landmarks of the town. The former, a meditation on nature's ability to destroy or outlast things human, focuses on a dilapidated wharf in Winthrop's harbor, while the latter, a sensitive and moving portrait of old age, is probably based on the General Winthrop Nursing Home only six blocks from her parents' house on Johnson Avenue. "The Beekeeper's Daughter" with its deeper exploration of the father-daughter relationship and its use of the bee metaphor may well be a follow-up to "Electra on Azalea Path," evoked by the March 8 visit to Otto Plath's grave.
Finally, "Aftermath," a philosophical sonnet on humanity's obsession with the tragic and sordid, also seems to have been written in March. In an unpublished passage of the journal entry for March 9, Plath reports that, on returning to Boston from the Winthrop visit the previous day, she and Hughes had observed the smouldering remains of a great fire in a burnt-out building, an event which apparently inspired the composition of this poem soon afterward as it was published in the Fall 1959 issue of Arts in Society (Lane and Stevens 13).
Plath apparently wrote no poetry from April to September of 1959. In April, May, and June she concentrated on short fiction, noting in a journal entry for May 31, "I have written six stories this year, and the three best of them in the last two weeks! . . . My poems are so far in the background now. It is a very healthy antidote, this prose, to the poems' intense limitations" (307, 309). In July and August, she and Hughes toured the United States, returning to Wellesley at the end of August for a brief visit. Pregnant with their first child, she seems to have begun writing poetry again just prior to or just after September 9, when the two went to the artists' colony of Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, for a period of ten weeks. Because she recorded in her journals much of what she produced there, accurate composition dates can be established for many of the poems of this time.
"Magnolia Shoals," "Yaddo: The Grand Manor," "Medallion," and "Polly's Tree" seem to be the earliest of this group, produced between early September and early October. All employ syllabics and triplets, suggesting that, after her five-month layoff, Plath began to write again in the strict forms with which she had always felt most comfortable; further, they are carefully distanced, using objects or settings as subjects. "Magnolia Shoals" may have been inspired by and written soon after a trip to the seaside town of Magnolia, just south of Gloucester, made no doubt during the visit to Wellesley, a contention supported by the poem's description of the departure of summer at a coastal setting. "Yaddo: The Grand Manor," a contrast between the richness of this setting and the artistic sterility of one of its guests, may well be the first poem composed at Yaddo; many of its details are echoed in a journal entry for September 16 in which she also complains of her inability to produce (313-314). Both poems were written prior to September 21, when, according to her list of poems sent out during the fall of 1959, Plath mailed them to The New Yorker (Plath Collection, Smith College).[6] Concerning
"Dark Wood, Dark Water" and "The Sleepers" were probably produced in early to mid October, for both were mailed along with "Polly's Tree," "The Net-Menders," and "Spinach Picker" to The New Yorker on November 3, according to her record of poem submissions for the fall (Plath Collection, Smith College). A mood piece describing the feelings both of melancholy and of pleasure evoked by the autumnal grounds of Yaddo, the former employs the triplet and a syllabic count of five. The latter, which does not use the scenery of Yaddo, the triplet, nor a consistent syllabic pattern (although most lines have six syllables), is an ambiguous work which seems to treat the changes lovers undergo as their relationship develops; its mediocrity suggests that it was written prior to the spate of stunning poems produced from mid October to early November.
Turning to freer forms and highly personal subject matter, Plath composed "The Manor Garden" and "The Colossus" in the days just prior to October 19: "I tried Ted's 'exercise': deep-breathing, concentration on stream-of-consciousness objects, these last days, and wrote two poems that pleased me. One a poem to Nicholas [the baby she was carrying], and one the old father-worship subject" (J 323). "The Manor Garden," using as its setting the famous rose gardens of Yaddo, is a striking expression of the intensely heightened anxiety felt by a mother-to-be for the emotional, mental, and physical well-being of her unborn child, while "The Colossus," employing the surrealistic "setting" of the enormous head of the ruined statue, explores yet again the complexities of the father-daughter relationship, a subject often treated in 1958 and 1959; in this case, however, the daughter ultimately rejects her obsession with him. Because its subject matter is similar to that of "The Colossus" and because it was submitted to The Kenyon Review along with "The Manor Garden," "The Colossus," and "Poem for a Birthday" on November 3 (List of poem submissions, Plath Collection, Smith College), "The Beekeeper's Daughter" may well have been produced at this time rather than earlier in the year.
On October 22, Plath began the series of seven poems comprising "Poem for a Birthday," in which she experiments both with subject matter and with style; she records in a journal entry for that date, "Ambitious seeds of a long
"The Burnt-out Spa" was written between November 8, when Plath and Hughes had walked to a ruined spa near Yaddo, and November 11, when she refers in her journal to having written it that week (330); the setting seems to function as a symbol of rebirth in nature which is not available to human beings. Also completed "to our satisfaction" by November 11 (J 331) was "Blue Moles," based on two dead moles Plath and Hughes had seen on October 22 (J 324); here Plath considers the indifference of nature to the destruction of its own creatures. Two days later, on Friday the 13th, she wrote "Mushrooms," inspired both by mushrooms observed in front of West House at Yaddo and recorded in an unpublished portion of a journal entry of October 10 (Plath Collection, Smith College) and by the topic "mushrooms, that they think they are going to take over the world" given to her by Hughes (Kroll 236). As in other poems of the period, "Mushrooms" is noteworthy in its unusual speakers, the mushrooms themselves, in its portrayal of the violence of nature, and in its technical virtuosity and its organic linking of style and content, particularly in terms of syllabics, triplets, and sound values.
Two other poems also seem to be products of November, although irrefutable evidence has not been discovered. Although Hughes has placed "Words for a Nursery" in the 1957 section of The Collected Poems, it seems much more likely that it was a product of the fall of 1959, or perhaps slightly later. Its original title "Poem for a Nursery" (Plath Collection, Smith College) links it to "Poem for a Birthday"; its subject matter, the formation of the right hand of a foetus, reflects Plath's pregnancy and her interest in related matters, as evidenced in "The Manor Garden" and "Poem for a Birthday"; its unusual speaker, the hand itself, is similar to other experiments with narrators of the time; and its strange combination of disjointed structure and bizarre, ambiguous images with five stanzas of ten lines each and five syllables per line (a technical echo of the hand) indicates her struggle at this time between freer, more open forms and the rigid ones which she had always preferred. "Private Ground" provides several internal clues suggesting a composition date of mid November or somewhat later; its references to eleven weeks, to "First frost," and to a walk in Yaddo's rose garden with its goldfish pools and statues echo details of a similar walk recorded in an unpublished portion of the journal entry of November 11, especially its description of the grass shining with melted frost (Plath Collection, Smith College). That neither of these poems appears in Plath's list of submissions to magazines during the fall of 1959 suggests that they were not composed early in the season; indeed, since both "The Burnt-out Spa" and "Mushrooms"
The chronology herein proposed is far more definitive than that established by Hughes in The Collected Poems. Whenever possible, it corrects errors of placement by presenting evidence of exact or close dates of composition, according to various sources. In those cases in which hard evidence does not exist, it suggests the most likely composition dates, based on all available material. Since an entirely accurate chronology may never be a reality, it seems imperative to move as close to that ideal as possible in order to chart the course of Plath's development with more validity. Indeed, this revised chronology allows us more effectively to follow her often frustrating search for compelling subject matter, her wide-ranging experimentation with various techniques (as, for example, with syllabics in the summer of 1958), her methods, habits, and problems of composition, her struggle between the accepted current dictates on the impersonality of the poet and her magnetic attraction to the subjective, and her creation of a very striking repertoire of metaphors, images, and symbols. Plath scholarship has begun to recognize the importance of the poems produced from 1956 to 1959 to her canon as a whole, and this chronology should prove a helpful aid in their further exploration.[8]
- Hughes, Ted, ed. Introduction. The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper, 1981.
- Kroll, Judith. Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper, 1976.
- Lane, Gary, and Maria Stevens. Sylvia Plath: A Bibliography. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1978.
- Melander, Ingrid. The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: A Study of Themes. Stockholm: Almqvist, 1972.
- Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. New York: Bantam, 1972.
- ___. The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes. New York: Harper, 1981.
- ___. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough. New York: Dial, 1982.
- ___. Letters Home. Ed. Aurelia S. Plath. New York: Bantam, 1975.
- Plath Collections, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, and Smith College Library Rare Book Room, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.
- Pollitt, Katha. "A Note of Triumph." Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath. Ed. Linda W. Wagner. Boston: Hall, 1984.
- Pritchard, William H. "An Interesting Minor Poet?" Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath. Ed. Linda W. Wagner. Boston: Hall, 1984.
- Scigaj, Leonard. "The Painterly Plath That Nobody Knows." Centennial Review 32 (Summer 1988): 220-249.
- Stevenson, Anne. Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath. Boston: Houghton, 1989.
Works Cited
Notes
In all parenthetical documentation, The Journals of Sylvia Plath will be designated by J, Letters Home by LH, The Collected Poems by CP, and The Bell Jar by BJ.
In an unpublished journal passage for May 25, 1959, Plath makes a curious reference to "Maudlin" as a prophetic work and notes her pleasure in saying a line of it to herself (Plath Collection, Smith College).
Plath was also considering works of art by Gauguin, but did not finally compose any poems on them; see LH 385-386. For an interesting discussion of Plath's poems on art, see Leonard M. Scigaj, "The Painterly Plath That Nobody Knows," Centennial Review 32 (Summer 1988): 220-249.
Esther Baskin's children's book Creatures of the Night (1962) contains a prose section on the goatsucker with an illustration by Leonard Baskin. Plath's poem, however, is not included, although a poem by Hughes entitled "Esther's Tomcat" appears in another section. Plath's numerous notes on the characteristics of and superstitions about the bird can be found in the Plath Collection, Smith College.
Plath's article "Sketchbook of a Spanish Summer," which was published in the Christian Science Monitor on November 6, 1956, contains a passage on Benidorm's netmenders that is echoed in the poem: "Later, in the cool of the day, the tanned, elderly women sit outside their doorways in wooden chairs, backs to the street, weaving nets of thick rope or fine mesh."
After The New Yorker rejected them for publication on September 28, Plath sent "Magnolia Shoals" to Harpers on September 30. When it was returned on October 8, she sent the two to the Christian Science Monitor on October 9; both were accepted on October 13 for $20. See Plath's list of submissions for the fall of 1959. Plath Collection, Smith College.
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