JOIN USShe gambled with death, but lives on
The poems my generation was taught in school were of the staid, genteel kind. Lyric poetry where nature is praised in the most benign terms and everything is floral and light. There was very little modern poetry on the syllabus — a Seamus Heaney poem made a sudden, brief appearance and it was beautiful and moving and about the death of a child. But, if we wanted to read more, to explore what possibilities poetry could offer up in capturing human emotions and the mind, we had to look elsewhere.
It was through hunting around the school library’s poetry shelf that I first came across Sylvia Plath. And the first poem of hers that dug into my consciousness (really, there’s no other way of describing the impact of Plath’s poetry — it digs in and storms through your mental landscape) was Daddy. The poem, about her domineering father, a German immigrant to the United States who died when Plath was a child, is excoriating. There is no attempt here to create a lyric tribute poem.
It bared its teeth and snarled at the wrongs committed by the late parent. The imagery — of concentration camps and Nazi crimes — is a wringer to get through. For me, as a teenage girl, being exposed to Plath in this way was both shocking and exhilarating. Poetry didn’t need to be pastoral blah-ness about flowers dancing in the wind. It could be confessional, it could be anger crystallised to the bare minimum of words. This was poetry you spoke through clenched teeth.
Quicksilver mind
It would be some more time before I discovered Plath’s full biography and output as a writer. She is, of course, the most famous of literary suicides, one half of a now almost mythical marriage of titans. The depression that plagued her and led to her death also provides the electric urgency of her posthumous collection of poems, Ariel (published in 1965). Daddy appears in Ariel, which was edited for publication after her death by Plath’s husband, the British poet Ted Hughes. Reading the poems with the foreknowledge of her suicide, it’s impossible to ignore the shadow of mortality and death, which looms over each except for two that are about her children. In those two poems, love and light do shine through even as Plath wrestles with complex emotions about motherhood and what it entails. Poems inspired by her everyday tasks and activities — from beekeeping to decorating and keeping the house to cooking even, throw up one vivid image after another in such a rapid, blink-of-an-eye pace that you’re left breathless trying to catch up with Plath’s quicksilver mind.
And that’s what Ariel ultimately does: Plath seems to be never more alive than here, in these poems that break upon you wave after wave. She might have gambled with death and lost — the writer and critic A Alvarez had said she clearly didn’t care if she won or lost — but she continues to live and breathe through her work.
The author is a Bengaluru-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.
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