The Wrong Man
Professor Mary Ellen Chase, one of Sylvia's teachers
and mentors at Smith
Spring 1957
I believe she has made a mistake,
married off her brain
to a brute.
Blessed with scholarship,
Sylvia doesn't need a man.
Still I recommend her to teach at Smith.
Perhaps distance from Britain
will help Sylvia
see Ted more clearly.
His crumpled shirt,
his sly smirk,
how he weights her down.
In January 1957 Mary Ellen Chase happened to be in Cambridge and met with Sylvia for coffee. Mary Ellen wrote a letter that basically secured Sylvia a teaching position at Smith. Chase did not meet Ted at this time but learned of his negative character traits from his former instructors. Both Paul Alexander's Rough Magic and Edward Butscher's Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness detail Mary Ellen Chase's reaction to Sylvia's marriage.
Boat to America
Imagining Sylvia Plath
In the style of “Mayflower”
June 1957
She boards the ship with no more than the clothes
In her trunk, his manuscripts, her bread pan.
She sucks in sea brine, brushes off Britain
Like dust on her sandals. She points her nose
Toward America, toward teaching. The woes
Of bitter cold, of student life be gone.
She is ocean. She'll provide. She will man
The home boat. He'll write. She'll keep them afloat.
Like pilgrims they travel into the new.
She sees herself happy. She'll slow her pace.
She'll be with her mother, her Ruth, her roots.
Her husband beside her, she'll find her place.
They'll have enough money, not just make do.
A bright shining future, a smiling face.
The poem “Mayflower” can be found in The Collected Poems. The sonnet is about the choice of the pilgrims to go to America and asserts that beauty is the best when, like a branch, it is hardy.
Professor Plath
Rosalie Horn, one of Sylvia's students at Smith
1957-1958
Hubbub buzzes about Sylvia,
bees draw around her honeycomb,
suckle from the star student
turned teacher, the royal sporting British attire.
Many of the girls in freshman English
took her course for the celebrity.
But Professor Plath shocks, outdoes
and she radiates. I have never had a teacher
in such a love affair with literature,
her brain an encyclopedia. She never fails
Even with a bad bout of flu I drag
my red nose to class. She talks typewriter
fast. I struggle to write it all down,
I have been in the presence of genius.
I cry the last day of the semester.
I doubt I will ever again have a teacher
like Sylvia Plath.
Sylvia taught three freshman English classes, five days a week. She taught at Smith only one year. The college would have liked her to stay on, but teaching was too consuming and Sylvia was not able to both write and teach.
Sylvia and her Smith College roommate, Marcia Brown, 1951.
Sylvia and Joan Cantor on the beach in Cape Cod, 1952.
Sylvia at a Smith College dance, 1954.
Sylvia and Ted in Boston, 1958. She was teaching at Smith College.
Massachusetts General Hospital
Myron “Mike” Lotz, an old boyfriend Sylvia reconnected with while back in the United States Fall 1958
I rub my eyes.
Behind a small table role-playing
as a desk, I imagine I see Sylvia,
a few years older, her blond hair
dulled into wheat.
Long resident hours wear heavy
as iron—this is not the first ghost
of my past I envisioned
traipsing down the hall.
I need some serious sleep.
Sylvia hollers, “Mike.”
She tells me she's a secretary
in the psychiatric department, that she
finished her graduate work at Cambridge
and returned to the States, taught at Smith.
She tells me that she's married.
At her apartment I fill my wineglass
a few too many times. Her husband
is kind. A lovely English armoire, he seems
inanimate. I can't imagine him dancing
jigs around the room.
He is both rugged and elevated.
Ted hints to me that Sylvia is a handful
of nails, that he prefers a simple woman
like my escort tonight. I don't know
how to respond. I finish off my cabernet,
chatter on about nothing.
Ted was generally welcomed by all of Sylvia's friends, and upon initial meeting most found him charming and full of good humor, though to some he seemed condescending and aloof. Olive Higgins Prouty fell immediately under Ted's spell and wanted to put him on television. Marcia Brown Plummer at first thought Ted somewhat cold and distant, but came to feel that he was just shy. She eventually warmed to his charisma and skills as a raconteur. Later, her opinion of him altered as she witnessed Ted scold and humiliate Sylvia.
Robert Lowell's Poetry Class
Anne Sexton, poet, student of Lowell's, friend to Sylvia
Fall 1958-spring 1959
Sylvia stretches her skin
to fit someone else's bones—
her poems not yet her own.
George Starbuck, Syl, and I,
trinity of the master poet's class,
drink martinis, chow potato chips
at the Ritz, until slightly blitzed.
Drinks making us more real,
we talk suicide until laughter
tears from our eyes.
Then we bunch into my car
for the Waldorf Cafeteria's
seventy-cent dinner,
none of us having a better
or demanding home life to return to.
I implore Sylvia to push herself,
pluck the drum of her heart
until it bleeds. Sometimes I think
Lowell praises Sylvia too much,
or maybe he just sees something
in her language that I cannot.
Robert Lowell taught a seminar at Boston University that Sylvia attended along with fellow poets Anne Sexton and George Starbuck. Lowell introduced Sylvia to confessionalism, a kind of poetry defined by placing the literal Self at the center of the poem.
Robert Lowell (March 1, 1917-September 12, 1977), sometimes considered the father of confessional poetry, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1947 and 1974, and the National Book Award for poetry in 1960. He was hospitalized approximately twenty times for acute mania, which was treated with electroshock therapy.
Anne Sexton was an avowed confessional poet and helped to develop its precepts; critical acclaim for To Bedlam and Part Way Back, her first book, established her as a poet who wrote from experience. Sexton suffered from depression and had mental breakdowns and suicidal bouts. In the late fifties she began writing poetry as therapy and was soon “discovered” by the literary world for her unapologetically autobiographical poems. The recipient of many awards and grants, she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for Live or Die. In 1974 she committed suicide by asphyxiation.
Anne Sexton said in her memoirs about her experience with Sylvia during the time of Lowell's class that she had “… heard since that Sylvia was determined from childhood to be great, a great writer at the least of it. I tell you, at the time I did not notice this in her. Something told me to bet on her but I never asked it why. I was too determined to bet on myself to actually notice where she was headed in he
r work. Lowell said, at the time, that he liked her work and that he felt her poems got right to the point. I didn't agree … I told Lowell that I felt she dodged the point and did so perhaps because of her preoccupation with form. Form was important for Sylvia … [but she] hadn't then found a form that belonged to her. Those early poems were all in a cage (and not even her own cage at that).”
Afraid
Dr. Beuscher, Sylvia's psychiatrist
1959
I see Sylvia every week,
my price adjusted to fit her budget.
She's not a little girl, never was.
She's a married woman afraid
of being a wife, afraid of sterility,
afraid to disappoint Ted, afraid
that she's lost her talent to domesticity,
afraid to admit that she did wish
her father dead, and afraid to tell
her mother she suffocates Sylvia
like a bee encased in glass,
no breathing holes. Oh, Sylvia buzzes
and flutters the jar, never ceasing.
She bangs her antennae
against thick glass until she falls, stunned.
Now she flees, afraid
to do the hard work of America.
Politics in her pocket, excuses
long as the dictionary, she runs
back to Britain. And I am afraid for her.
I love her like my own.
I cross lines and tell her this.
She eyes me, determined, says,
“Don't worry, Dr. Ruth. I will be fine.”
In a 1998 interview with Karen Maroda, Dr. Beuscher said that she was not ambivalent about seeing Sylvia in 1959, that she “enjoyed seeing her,” and she reluctantly admitted to Maroda that she loved Sylvia. Ruth did not encourage Sylvia to talk about Sylvia's feelings toward her (in standard psychoanalytic treatment the patient forms an attachment with the analyst and transfers feelings onto her); instead, she focused on Sylvia's feelings about her mother, Ted, and other important people in her life.
Maroda's interview with Ruth appeared as part of an article on www.salon.com on November 29, 2004.
Her Father's Grave
Imagining Sylvia Plath
In the style of “The Colossus”
1959
She dreams she delivered
The head, severed,
Blood-spattered between her legs.
Stillborn, skull eyes shocked
Into recognition.
She finds herself
Twenty years too late, unwell,
In a yard of the dead sleeping
Head to head. She teeters on Azalea Path,
Dusts off the black stone of Otto Plath.
She searches for the shovel,
Wants to dig Daddy up, cradle
Her father's skull, but the March ground
Remains hard. She thinks if she can look
Into his eyes, she might lose the dust from her own.
She dreams nightly now
Of unborn babies and unborn poems.
Stunted fetal fragments
That she loses like blood
Between her legs.
She thinks birth
Will save her.
Dr. Beuscher warns,
“After babies
The depression will be worse.”
“The Colossus” is the title poem from Sylvia's first collection of poetry, The Colossus and Other Poems. “The Colossus” is a myth-making poem about her father in which Sylvia sees him as a titanic but lifeless statue, a powerful force and relationship in her life that she does not understand.
Her Poetry
Ted Hughes
Summer 1959
We drive this country,
camp and swim and breathe
the Midwest in,
drive sunrise to sunset
until thick in Bear Country
and redwoods we stop.
Sylvia can find no poetry
in this land, only superstitions
and tales of unhappy marriages.
I find lines in ringed trunks,
fallen pine needles,
low clouded sky.
She swells now with our first child,
no doctor's confirmation required,
we know the baby thrives.
Maybe it feeds on her words, her lyricism,
absorbs nutrients of language,
leaves little for the mother.
I tell Syl to relax,
soak in this birth, let her poems
gestate. They will be born.
Sylvia should write
her woman's rag stories
and lie content in the cool noon sun.
We stay at Yaddo, the writers' colony,
this fall. She will be released there,
I predict it. What this baby will do
to her writing, I can't predict.
Will the newborn's cries offer her melody,
or will they cause her to go deaf?
Chronicled in Sylvia's short story “The Fifty-ninth Bear,” Bear Country refers to Devil's Cauldron in Yellowstone National Park.
Ted initially did not want to have any children. He did not want the burden of having to financially support children or to lose his freedom to explore the world. But Sylvia had her heart set on having a baby, and Ted wanted to make her happy. During this cross-country trip Ted was finishing up Lupercal, his second book of poetry, which was scheduled to be released by Faber and Faber the following spring.
Autumn
Aurelia Plath
Autumn 1959
My baby and unborn grandbaby
will sail away.
Sylvia cannot live in America's
summer. She must leave,
follow the cold. In the fall,
in the earth's dying, she finds creation.
I knead the dough of my bread,
knuckles deep in flour, and wish
that birth was her mantra. But Sivvy
has been a child of the graveyard,
haunted by ghosts, since the day
Otto died. I can't reach far enough
into the ground to pull her back
and hold her here.
Ted had wanted to return to England since the beginning of 1959. Sylvia finally agreed in May 1959 that they would move back that fall. She did not like living in Boston and was struggling to have any of her work published. Sylvia requested, as part of the deal, that Ted buy her an icebox and that they find a good dentist.
Sister-in-Law
Olwyn Hughes, Ted's sister
December 1959
They return,
Ted's weary, his face
softened by American soaps
and all the trinkets designed
so one never dirties one's hands.
The mind freezes overseas,
harsher than our British
blustering gales, their
manufactured comfort.
I miss my brother, try to sneak
time to speak with him alone,
but Sylvia creeps around every corner,
must add words to our sentences,
her dull Pollyanna enough
to make one vomit sugarcane.
How he chose such a wife,
I'll never comprehend.
A pretty face, a belly swollen
with child.
Ted deserves better, deserves
royalty. I will never lower myself
for a man any less grand than my brother.
Why did he choose someone so beneath me?
Olwyn's correspondence with Sylvia and the interviews she has given for biographies of Sylvia record her view of her sister-in-law. Olwyn worked in Paris, at various times, as a secretary for both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and a theatrical agency. She never married.
Homemaker
Marcia Brown Plummer,
Sylvia's best
friend in America
February 1960
A flat on Chalcot Square
where she scrubs and retiles
and paints and styles
to furnish and polish
while builders demolish
the apartments surrounding her—
it's astounding that Sylvia
can call such a place home.
Birth heavy and in-lawed-out,
Sylvia builds her nest to assuage her doubts.
No extra bedroom for the baby,
Freud and Spock would call her crazy
to raise a family in such close quarters.
But this was all they could afford.
And she loves her little “house,”
remains enchanted with her spouse.
I miss her like gloves
on a frostbite day. I send her
my love from an ocean away.
Sylvia and Marcia corresponded throughout Sylvia's life.
Poetry First
Ted Hughes
March 1960
Baby about to come,
my book Lupercal praised,
I'm pushed into the posh lounge
of esteemed British poets—
Eliot, Spender, and the like.
My wife also will see her
first book born in print.
Britain adores us,
gathers us under smoky wings
so poetry comes
before labor pains.
We are artists first,
our children will be
second works.
Ted Hughes's book Lupercal received excellent reviews and transformed Ted into a major figure in British poetry. It allowed Ted and Sylvia introduction into London's literary set.
The Birth of Frieda Rebecca
Sister Mardi, Sylvia's first midwife
April 1, 1960
I leap to my bicycle,
cross myself that Mrs. Hughes
has only begun pre-labor,
but she pains severe,
her forehead crinkles,
her hands clenching
her husband's wrist like a vise.
Mrs. Hughes pleads through