A few years ago a friend sent me a photo of himself wearing a Sylvia Plath T-shirt. It was pale pink – the colour of the Smith College memorandum paper on which the poet drafted many of her poems – and printed with the iconic picture of Plath in side profile, wearing a white hairband. I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever seen.
I am one of countless poets who developed an obsession with Sylvia Plath after being introduced to her work as a teenager, and her writing became a catalyst for my own. I recited her poems out loud in my bedroom, just as I would sing along to my favourite songs. The poems’ cadences sank into me, the way Plath sank into my own personal mythology, long before any other writers did. Beyond the power of her work, what Sylvia Plath represented to me is still hard to understand. On a personal level I felt a kinship with her because we had both lost parents as children (she, her father at eight; me, my mother at seven). We had both received sharp, early lessons in the savagery of the world. Such lessons are, of course, not unusual. Most teenagers, despite their backgrounds, have a sense of this savagery. Perhaps that’s why Plath’s work so often hits home in those years, when one is beginning to reckon with life’s difficulties and work out how, if, one might harness them.
Ariel, Plath’s final, posthumously published collection of poems, shows us how. Understandably, these poems have often been interpreted in the light, or shadow, of her oncoming death. Sylvia Plath died of suicide 60 years ago today, at the age of 30. The circumstances around her death have been described, fictionalised, analysed – sometimes sensitively, more often voyeuristically – in biographies, memoirs, films and literature. Posterity loves a tragic female artist, a tendency that Plath’s daughter Frieda Hughes rightly objected to in My Mother, a furious poem written in response to the 2003 film about her parents, Ted and Sylvia. Its final lines read:
They think I should love it –
Having her back again, they think
I should give them my mother’s words
To fill the mouth of their monster,
Their Sylvia Suicide Doll,
Who will walk and talk
And die at will,
And die, and die
And forever be dying.
A death, however tragic, is only a very small part of a life. There is in fact incredible vigour and energy in Plath’s poems. Despite the anguish that powered its writing, Ariel is full of bright, glittering images, “electrifyingly-colored sherbets”, flowers of astonishing redness, and its soundtrack is hoofbeats. I read these things as symbols of the poet’s irrepressible life force, not her illness.
Plath’s most recent biographer, Heather Clark, sought to make the poet’s life, not her death, the driving force of her book. Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, a title taken from Plath’s poem Stings, captures perfectly the reasons why we should remember her. “Comet” comes from an ancient Greek word meaning “long-haired star”, an image that calls to mind the ending of Plath’s Lady Lazarus, a poem about coming back from the dead: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair’. Stings uses the metaphor of a beehive and its queen bee to describe a kind of renaissance of the self. The poet writes: “They thought death was worth it, but I / Have a self to recover, a queen.” As we memorialise Sylvia Plath on the anniversary of her death, we should honour this spirit of resurrection – and recover a queen.
