Just Monday night, I was reporting multiple complaints to Bug about a book I was reading that I have seen suggested as this next generation’s Sylvia Plath. To my mind, that fine work, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, would be best used for kindling – and Sylvia is gonna haunt somebody for such insane talk. 😉
(If you’ve read it and loved it – as many people have – let’s just all agree it’s no Plath. 😂)
That said, yesterday morning, I was reading some bookish news and saw that it was Sylvia’s birthday – so she is absolutely telling us this nonsense is unacceptable. 😉
Since she’s forever one of my favorites, having started reading her some 35 years ago, I want to remember her birthday.
Considering the above quote, while I understand everyone feels limited to an extent, Sylvia was, in many ways, more blessed than most with an extraordinary writing gift and an IQ that categorized her as a genius.
(She tested at 160 when she was twelve years old.)
In considering her writing, there is her only book, The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel, based on Sylvia’s experiences as a summer intern for a magazine in New York when she was nineteen, as well as the mental health challenges and hospitalizations she faced – including ECT treatments in a time when they could be brutal – as she returned home.
Sylvia is probably most widely known as a poet, though many of the awards and accolades she received came for the works that were published posthumously so she sadly did not see how beloved her work was and is.
Of her many poems, a couple of my favorites:
The Moon and the Yew Tree
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs at my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy spiritous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky –
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.
The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness –
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness –
blackness and silence.
———————————————————————
And there is also:
Poppies in October
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly —
A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky
Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.
O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.
—————————————————————-
And finally, an absolutely lovely poem that’s rarely shared (and difficult to believe she wrote at age fourteen):
I Thought That I Could Not Be Hurt
I thought that I could not be hurt;
I thought that I must surely be
impervious to suffering-
immune to pain
or agony.
My world was warm with April sun
my thoughts were spangled green and gold;
my soul filled up with joy, yet
felt the sharp, sweet pain that only joy
can hold.
My spirit soared above the gulls
that, swooping breathlessly so high
o’erhead, now seem to to brush their whir-
ring wings against the blue roof of
the sky.
(How frail the human heart must be-
a throbbing pulse, a trembling thing-
a fragile, shining instrument
of crystal, which can either weep,
or sing.)
Then, suddenly my world turned gray,
and darkness wiped aside my joy.
A dull and aching void was left
where careless hands had reached out to
destroy
my silver web of happiness.
The hands then stopped in wonderment,
for, loving me, they wept to see
the tattered ruins of my firma-
ment
(How frail the human heart must be-
a mirrored pool of thought. So deep
and tremulous an instrument
of glass that it can either sing,
or weep).
Sylvia’s poetry collection totals 532, truly remarkable considering she died at age 30.
It’s hard to imagine the work she might have done.
Bless.
(Before we go, I wanted to share a much lighter aside: As I was searching for some information for this post and scrolling down a Google answer feed, I stopped to laugh really hard at the – serious – article entitled “Sylvia Plath for Kids.” That idea seems *almost* as bad calling My Year of Rest and Relaxation the new Plath. Almost. 😅 )
Happy Birthday, Sylvia. Thank you for the stunning collection you left us. I’m so sorry you couldn’t stay longer.
Be well, everybody. Take care of yourselves and each other,
Grace and Blessings.
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