Bodied Forth in Words: Sylvia Plaths Ecopoetics

Scott Knickerbocker
College Literature, 36.3, Summer 2009, pp. 1-27 (Article)
Published by West Chester University DOI: 10.1353/lit.0.0071

For additional information about this article

Access Provided by Beaconhouse National University at 05/11/11 6:11AM GMT

Bodied Forth in Words: Sylvia Plaths Ecopoetics

espite the New Criticisms warning against the intentional fallacy, poststructuralisms assertion that the author is dead, and New Historicisms emphasis on ideology and historical context, much of the literary criticism devoted to Sylvia Plath has relied heavily on her biography.This is partly due to Plaths unfortunate categorization as part of the confessional school of poets, whose work, in reaction against the impersonality and irony of the high modernists, instead seems to draw directly on the poets real life, particularly his or her inner, emotionally tormented life. Such a view of Plath is still ubiquitous despite her own dismissive description of confessional poetry: As if poetry were some kind of therapeutic public purge or excretion (2000, 355). As both cause and consequence of Plaths categorization as a confessional poet, the dramatic and famously tragic events of her life have also contributed to the abundance of biographically driven criticism: Before one

Scott Knickerbocker is assistant professor of English and Environmental Studies at The College of Idaho in Caldwell, Idaho. His articles have appeared in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment and in The Kenyon Review.

College Literature 36.3 [Summer 2009]

has read much of her work, one has tumbled into the gossip, into the tabloid flattening of her artistic accomplishment, and the poems have begun to line up as lurid illustrations, vivid diary entries, exhibits for the defense or the prosecution if she or her former husband, her mother and father, or anyone else, happens to be on trial (Young 1998, 18). Her troubled marriage to and separation from Ted Hughes and her suicide in 1963 at the age of 30 have given rise to wildly different readings of her work, which are simultaneously and perhaps mainly readings (and misreadings) of her life: As a result of the poets troubled and well-publicized personal life, as well as the extremely emotional and personal subject matter of the Ariel poems, these later poems have received far more attention for what they are saying than for how they are saying it (Hannah 2003, 232-33). That is, Plath sympathizers and detractors alike have frequently read her poems merely thematically, largely overlooking formal concerns, and also as keys into her psychology. In the worst examples, critics read Plaths poems as proof that she was selfobsessed, hysterical, and driven toward death from early on.1 The disappearance and destruction (by Hughes) of Plaths last journals, written during her difficult final year, only exacerbate critics obsession with her death and relationship to Hughes. Into this mysterious textual gap in Plaths work have poured, in the most extreme cases, both misogynistic and feminist perspectives of critics whose political agendas clearly predate and supersede Plath and her work. Like Emily Dickinson, Plath has become a cultural icon onto which we project our own concerns; we use her life to justify and dramatize our own beliefs (literally dramatize, in the case of the 2003 film,Sylvia). Marsha Bryant describes the particularly American habit of consuming cultural figures: Sylvia Plath is not only one of Americas major poets, but also literary cultures ultimate commodity (2002, 17). Despite the perhaps necessary function of cultural icons, the unfortunate result of Plaths persona is a lack of attention toward the craft and technique of her poems themselves. Although there are at least 500 articles and 85 fulllength published books on Plath, only a tiny minority of articles and chapters deals specifically with the formal aspects of her poems.2 Another significant result of emphasizing Plaths interiority and confessional mode is that many critics overlook and even flatly deny her connection to the outside world, including the nonhuman. For example, although Helen Vendler sensibly dismisses the fashion of applying psychiatric terms to Plaths poetry, in her review of Crossing the Water,Vendler charges Plath with solipsism: Plath refuses nature any honorable estate of its own and binds nature into a compass much smaller than it deserves (1980, 273, 274). Instead of Plaths responsibly granting otherness to nature,all of nature exists only as a vehicle for her sensibility (274). Many critics share this view, and

Scott Knickerbocker

even admiring critics of Plath continue to level the charge of solipsism, as in Adam Kirschs recent book: Plaths poetry never transcribes events in the real world, or even reacts directly to them. Instead, she creates a world in her own image, with only the most tenuous and contingent relationship to reality (261). Kirsch describes Plaths late poems as representing the intoxicating power of the completely unrestrained imagination (2005, 265). When ecocritic Terry Gifford argues that Plath uses nature imagery to [externalize] her inner life (1995, 150), he doesnt make a uniquely ecocritical claim but rather expresses the common opinion that Plaths use of natural imagery is merely instrumental to her personal psychology. For most critics, the only sense in which Plaths poems do relate to the real world is that they serve as direct psychological transcriptions of her actual feelings as an oppressed woman angry with her husband, parents, and female rivals.Tracy Brain points out the critical limitations (not to mention the unkindness) of considering Plath merely as a victim or angry woman:To treat Plaths writing in this way is to belittle her work, for the implication of such an exercise is that Sylvia Plath was too unimaginative to make anything up, or too self-obsessed to consider anything of larger historical or cultural importance (2001, 15). Brain has written a full-length study of Plaths connection to the outside world, The Other Sylvia Plath, including a chapter on Plaths Environmentalism. Brain positions herself against the fallacious notion in the main current of Plath criticism that Plath and her fictional personae are interchangeable (2001, 14), usefully pointing out (as does Janet Malcolm) the degree of perspectivism and lack of pure impartiality even in the most straightforward biographies of Plath. Despite the ironic distance Brain grants between Plath and her poetic speakers, Brain argues that Plaths poems and fiction not only make our world more vivid, but . . . they are deeply, politically engaged with that world:
Above all, Sylvia Plaths writing is saneand I mean sane in at least two senses, neither of which in the least concerns Plaths own mental state. First, Plaths writing is sane in its argument and subject matter. Insistently, the writing concerns itself with real political and material issues, with definite situations. . . . Second, the writing is sane in so far as it is controlled, methodical, and carefully wroughta circumstance to which Plaths manuscripts in the archives testify. Both of these senses of sanity are the very opposite of the myth of Sylvia Plath as mad, depressed and pouring out her distress in an ink of blood. (Brain 2001, 37)

As the sole critic who has considered Plath ecocritically, Brain makes a strong case for the influence of Rachel Carsons Silent Spring, widely deemed the scientific and literary catalyst for the modern environmental movement, on Plaths toxic consciousness (awareness of the negative consequences of

College Literature 36.3 [Summer 2009]

toxic mobility throughout ecosystems), showing that Plaths images of contagion and illness are not merely symbolic, but referential as well. Brain reconsiders Plath as responding emphatically, in Plaths own words, to the things of this world (a phrase Richard Wilbur also uses) as opposed to Robert Lowells now ubiquitously held opinion that Everything in [Plaths] poems is personal, confessional, felt . . . (1965, ix). Brain traces the influence on Plaths poetry of Carsons 1962 expos of the negative effects of pesticides on the environment. According to Brain, Plaths treatment of nature goes beyond mere Romantic adulation to deal soberly with the vulnerability of the body to toxic pollution, as well as the danger of real or imagined isolation. Rather than being obsessed with death (a common view of her), Plath expresses the ecological idea that death is often linked to alienation from ones environment and fellow creatures, whereas life requires interaction with ones environment and other beings. Plath was indeed aware and concerned about the after-effects of nuclear fallout on humans and the environment, but there are also other, less foreboding reasons to consider Plath an ecological poet. First is her obvious love for the outdoors dating from her childhood. In her early journal entries, when Plath was still a student, she expressed the conventional (and typical for a busy student) view of nature as something on the other side of school and its attendant books:Now I know how people can live without books, without college.When one is tired at the end of the day one must sleep, and the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth. At times like this Id call myself a fool to ask for more (2000, 8). Along the same lines, she often expressed a desire for Thoreauvian direct contact with nature, again set in opposition in her early journals to the intellect and language:Outside it is warm and blue and April.And I have to digest Darwin, Marx, and Wagner. Id like to rip out my brain and set it to assimilating the printed hieroglyphics in this book, and send my body down to the tennis courts in animal imbecility to jerk muscles in proper coordination and feel only the bestial and sensuous delight of sun on skin (58). Though her desire for sensuous embodiment and direct experience in nature was continuous throughout her life, Plaths poems and journal entries also show the development of a more sophisticated stance than the traditional opposition between mind and body, art and nature. Plath expresses, that is, the wildness and vitality she craved in nature through language itself. As a later journal entry shows, she wanted her poems to be very physical in the sense that the worlds are bodied forth in my words, not stated in abstractions, or denotative wit. . . . Small descriptions where the words have an aura of mystic power: of Naming the name of a quality: spindly, prickling, sleek,

Scott Knickerbocker

splayed, wan, luminous, bellied. Say them aloud always. Make them irrefutable (285). Besides her simple love of nature, another obvious reason to categorize Plath as an ecological poet is her concern about industrialization and the destructive consequences of modern, technologized life, which she expressed periodically in her journals: I dislike apartments, suburbs. I want to walk directly out my front door into earth and into air free from exhaust (2000, 346). She also concisely expresses this troubled attitude toward motorized modernity in the third stanza of Private Ground:
Eleven weeks, and I know your estate so well I need hardly go out at all. A superhighway seals me off. Trading their poisons, the north and south bound cars Flatten the doped snakes to ribbon.(Plath 1992, 130)3

The one-dimensional (because flat and linear) image of the highway violently forces nature into its own image, as the snakes are flattened. Not only does modern technology, in the form of cars and the superhighway,poison the environment (including the drivers themselves), it also seals the speaker off from the woods and natural beauty of her friends property. Plaths sense of irony and linguistic awareness, however, puts her in a different category from that of a mere nature lover. Her love of nature was, even early on, often interwoven with her self-reflexive concern for aesthetics. Still, Plaths modernist sense of irony and linguistic self-reflexivity did not expel completely romantic tendencies, such as her desire for transcendence in and through nature. Indeed, her combining and negotiating of modern and romantic impulses, often in the same poem, is one of the things that make her a distinctive nature poet. Her 1956 poem Black Rook in Rainy Weather is an early instance of romantic modernism. The most striking thing about the poem is the way it rhetorically achieves the radiance the speaker experiences without ever falling into sentimentality or over-earnestness (1992, 57). Indeed, the radiance the poem describes and expresses is, by the end, convincing partly because of its juxtaposition with the rhetoric of qualification and understatement in the rest of the poem. The poems tone and formal devices, that is, are key to understanding the significance of the speakers encounter with the rook. Unlike other poems by Plath, such as Blackberrying and Finisterre, Black Rook in Rainy Weather offers only a vague, undetailed landscape. The poem does not concern itself with scene the way Plaths bee sequence does. Neither does it fulfill the promise of its title: it is not about, finally, the rook, and it is even less about the rainy weather. How can we call this a

College Literature 36.3 [Summer 2009]

nature poem, much less an ecological poem, if it does not focus on either landscape or animal? The poem deals primarily with attitude, with the possibility of feeling awestruck by nature despite existing in a (high) modernist atmosphere of irony, aesthetic distance, and the threat of meaninglessness. Although the trope of revelation in nature, from Emersons transparent eyeball experience to Annie Dillards observation of the tree with the lights in it in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, has become a clich in contemporary nature writing,4 Plaths poem avoids being formulaic or sentimental through its many careful qualifications, understatements, and rhetorical shifts. It is not that her experience of transcendence is itself careful or qualified, but that the tone and rhetoric, by augmenting the speakers initial claim that she will most likely not witness a miracle / Or an accident / To set the sight on fire, or any design in nature, serve to authenticate and intensify by contrast what comes across as surprising and genuine, if ephemeral, radiance in nature (1992, 56-57). In the second stanza, the speaker claims that she lives in a postDarwinian universe devoid of intelligent design, operating instead through entirely physical processes: let spotted leaves fall as they fall, / Without ceremony, or portent (Plath 1992, 57).Yet already, in the next stanza, the speaker belies these seemingly calm concessions to modern naturalism in the choppy syntax and comma-riddled confession that she still craves communion with nature:Although, I admit, I desire, / Occasionally, some backtalk / From the mute sky, I cant honestly complain (57). The speakers awkward stammering expresses an agitation not felt in platitudes such as I cant honestly complain, which have begun to ring hollow. The speaker seems to settle for a certain minor light, which may still illuminate the most obtuse objects with a celestial burning, thus hallowing an interval / Otherwise inconsequent / By bestowing largesse, honor, / One might say love (Plath 1992, 57). Perhaps the clich to be avoided above all others in poetry, the word love quietly blooms at the center of the poem (and the center of its line), fenced in by qualifications:Love.That fatal word has been smuggled into the poem loaded with diminishments (Alexander 1998, 13). Love is packed in with qualifiers such as certain, minor,still,obtuse, and inconsequent.One might say it is love, further distancing the speaker from the earnest expressiveness associated with love. The speakers aversion toeven distaste fortoo easily experienced love, radiance, or design in the landscape makes her moment of revelation more powerful and convincing:I only know that a rook / Ordering its black feathers can so shine / As to seize my senses, haul / My eyelids up, and grant / A brief respite from fear / Of total neutrality (Plath 1992, 57). Again, the speakers casual wordiness in I only know accentuates by contrast the

Scott Knickerbocker

intensity of the observation. Like the rook, which is simultaneously revelatory (so shine) and organized (ordering its black feathers), the stanza describing this scene both enacts the speakers rapture in the heavily enjambed lines and conforms to the poems unusual rhyming pattern. Line one of each stanza rhymes, line two of each stanza rhymes, and so on: ABCDE, ABCDE. Such a subdued rhyme scheme, not immediately noticeable (especially as set against the enjambments) gives the poem a quiet restraint, a muted formalism through which the drama of the speakers thought process is expressed.This balance, at a formal level, between restraint and rushing forward thus enacts the qualified radiance toward which the speakers thinking moves.The poem does not try to undermine the modernist mentality of irony and aesthetic distance through its careful achievement of revelationspasmodic tricks of radiance (57). Rather, it is through its careful qualifications that such revelation comes: Perhaps miracles require such moves in the second half of the twentieth century (Alexander 1998, 14). Plath exhibits her typically modern sense of acute attention to the operations of language in her journal entries, literary texts in themselves that she diligently produced in tandem with her poems and fiction. Indeed, she used her journal not just as a place to record her observations and thoughts, but as a literary practice palate, on which she experimented with language, mixing words as if they were colors and then standing back to look. In one short entry, she offers landscape description: The wind has blown a warm yellow moon up over the sea; a bulbous moon, which sprouts in the soiled sky, and spills bright winking petals of light on the quivering black water (2000, 87). Immediately following this passage, Plath steps back and reflects on her own language, minutely analyzing her own word choice:
I am my best in illogical, sensuous description.Witness the above.The wind could not possibly blow a moon up over the sea. Unconsciously, without words, the moon has been identified in my mind with a balloon, yellow, light, and bobbing about on the wind . . . the moon is bulbous, which is an adjective meaning fat, but suggesting bulb, since the visual image is a complex thing. The verb sprouts intensifies the first hint of a vegetable quality about the moon.A tension, capable of infinite variations with every combination of words, is created by the phrase soiled indigo sky. Instead of saying blatantly in the soil of the night sky, the adjective soiled has a double focus: as a description of the smudged dark blue sky and again as a phantom noun soil, which intensifies the metaphor of the moon being a bulb planted in the earth of the sky. Every word can be analyzed minutelyfrom the point of view of vowel and consonant shades, values, coolnesses, warmths, assonances and dissonances. Technically, I suppose the visual appearance and sound of words, taken alone, may be much like the mechanics of music . . . or the color and texture in a painting. (Plath 2000, 87-88)

College Literature 36.3 [Summer 2009]

It is clear that already (as a student) Plath was intensely attuned to the materiality of language and did not treat it as a simple transparency through which nature shone. Language, like nature, has a texture and vitality for Plath. Ironically, Plath uses death to depict the animate nature of language in Stillborn.The main argument of the poem is that, by giving birth to her poems, the poet sees her poems as not only independent of her (usually a good thing) but disturbingly autonomous in their death, the result of the poets failure to make them animate despite her formal diligence: They are proper in shape and number and every part (1992, 142). A reading in line with the mostly psychological and biographical criticism of Plath would emphasize the preoccupation with death (not only are the poems dead;their mother is near dead with distraction [142]) in Stillborn and what it reveals about Plaths harsh and sometimes debilitating self-criticism. But such a reading overlooks an important and more interesting aspect of the poem. Not only does the poem associate language with animate organismseven in their death the poems smile and smile and smile and smile at meit also makes a subtle evolutionary claim (142). The poems are not pigs, they are not even fish, / Though they have a piggy and a fishy air (142).At one level these lines suggest Plaths experience when she toured a medical room full of jarred fetuses: she recognized the biological similarity and shared evolutionary ancestry between humans and other organisms. At another level, more in line with the metaphorical logic of the poem, these lines throw language into the evolutionary mix; instead of separating us from the rest of nature, language, with its animate, autonomous nature, reminds the speaker of her own place as a creature within evolutionary history. Thus not only human babies but language itself, what is so often described as what distinguishes the human species, here has a piggy and a fishy air; language is an animal attribute. As well as her sense of biological kinship with nonhuman nature, Plath also felt intensely drawn toward particular organisms. She expresses extreme empathy toward various animals in her journals and poems, such as Blue Moles,Pheasant, and The Rabbit Catcher. Plath even granted empathic imagination to the plant and fungal world. In Mushrooms, for example, she not only personifies the mushrooms but speaks from their point of view:We are shelves, we are / Tables, we are meek, / We are edible, // Nudgers and shovers / In spite of ourselves. / Our kind multiplies: // We shall by morning / Inherit the earth. / Our foots in the door (1992, 139-40).The effect of such personification is not the projection of human emotion onto natureindeed, the mushrooms display no motivation in their combination of humility and insistencebut rather an astute portrayal of the way, to human perception, mushrooms appear at an individual level to be innocuous,

Scott Knickerbocker

despite their communal ability to take hold on the loam and shoulder through holes (139). Even botanically speaking, it takes a large collection of mushrooms (a mushroom ring), connected underground, to comprise an organism; no mushroom stands alone.Thus Plaths use of first person plural is not merely a poetic flight of fancy; it expresses an ecological verity. Many different attitudes, themes, and behaviors enable us to see Plath ecocritically, but her greatest importance as an ecological poet lies beyond her thoughts about nature: in her formal craft, her use of poetic devices as a response to her environmental concerns and sympathies. Brain provides a historical context to trace environmental themes (mainly toxic consciousness) in Plaths work, but we also need a substantive discussion of the relationship between Plaths poetic technique, especially the function of sound in her poems, and ecological awareness. As a place to start, Plaths ars poetica and philosophy toward language in general provide a useful background against which to examine her specific poetic technique as it relates to ecological matters. Significantly, Plaths autobiographical short story Ocean 1212-W illustrates both her early and lifelong fascination with seaside environmentsshe called the ocean her poetic heritage (1975, 345)and the beginning of her linguistic self-reflexivity. The story reaches, that is, both outward toward the landscape and inward toward language as it recounts the origin of Plaths identity composed both by the ocean and poetry. Plath spent much of her early, impressionable years near the ocean at her grandparents Cape Cod home:
My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the landthe cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own. I pick it up, exile that I am, like the purple lucky stones I used to collect with a white ring all the way round, or the shell of a blue mussel with its rainbowy angels fingernail interior; and in one wash of memory the colors deepen and gleam, the early world draws breath. (Plath 1977, 123)

As someone who felt, after marrying Hughes and moving back and forth across the Atlantic, an inbetween nationality between England and the U.S. (her American friends thought she sounded English, and her English friends thought she had a southern drawl), Plath felt herself to be, like the ocean, fluid and unfixed. Paradoxically, however, Plath concretizes her memory of this literally fluid landscape; although both the ocean and memory itself are anything but objects, her ocean memories are like stones and shells, the clearest thing I own. It is as if later in life, even away from the ocean, Plaths ocean memories continue to constitute palpable possessions. As a young child, Plath immediately fell in love with the beach and saltwater and approached the waves with gusto:When I was learning to creep, my moth-

10

College Literature 36.3 [Summer 2009]

er set me down on the beach to see what I thought of it. I crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels (1977, 123). This is obviously a story of origins. Not only are oceans often mythologically and biologically described as places of origin, the imagery of Plaths mother pulling her baby out of the waves suggests that Aurelia Plath is virtually delivering the baby from her other mother, the ocean. Indeed, Plath makes reference to the motherly pulse of the sea and describes the ocean as a deep woman. Emphasizing the theme of origination, Plath shifts from the pulse of the seas motherly womb to initial breath associated with birth: Breath, that is the first thing. Something is breathing. My own breath? The breath of my mother? No, something else, something larger, farther, more serious, more weary (123). This mysterious larger something, this breath, signals not only the birth of the self but also the possibility of speech and poetic language, another originating force. For following closely after her description of the ocean as a site of origination preceding human creation (indeed, creating humans), Plath recounts what she portrays as her first important experience with poetic language:
And I recall my mother, a sea-girl herself, reading to me and my brother who came laterfrom Matthew Arnolds Forsaken Merman. . . . I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. A spark flew off Arnold and shook me, like a chill. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy. (Plath 1977, 124)

Just as submerging herself in the sea waves would do, Plaths first memory of poetry has a physical effect on her. It is clear, given this powerfully literary experience, that Plaths previously recounted memories of the actual ocean are partly shaped by and refracted through her experience of a literary ocean. Of course, her response to Arnolds poem would not be as intense without her prior experience of the ocean; ocean and ocean poetry shape each other. The imagery of salt and gills encapsulates the simultaneous nature of the real and the literary: I often wonder what would have happened if I had managed to pierce that looking-glass.Would my infant gills have taken over, the salt in my blood? For a time I believed not in God nor Santa Claus, but in mermaids (1977, 123). Following her sense of the oceans association with origination, Plath suggests that her ocean experience would put her in touch with her evolutionary past, not just individual past (gills pointing both to the fish-like experience of a floating fetus and the evolutionary predecessors to mammals and reptiles). This biological metaphor, however, quickly slides into a mythological reference to mermaids, a highly artificial yet shaping influence on the young Plaths experience of oceans. In other words, Plaths

Scott Knickerbocker

11

description of the ocean as an originary, shaping force in her life is also framed by mythology and poetry.The very idea of origins, that is, both shapes and is shaped. Language, while not superseding reality, is as palpable and formative as the ocean. The young Plaths attention to language precipitates her feeling of existential separation from nature when her brother is born. After his birth, As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin. I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over (1977, 126). But despite this sense of rupture, Plath experiences a new kind of connection to nature through, not in spite of, her fall into language, as Steven Gould Axelrod argues: Words themselves fragmented the two-year-olds beautiful fusion with the world, precipitating her awful birthday of otherness.Yet words, which caused this split, could also repair it (1990, 6).The symbolic order in which Plath found herself functions like an ocean, preceding and giving rise to ones own creative acts. If Plath had fallen into language, it was also, importantly, a new way of being happy (1977, 124). Her early literary and mythological exposure enables Plath to imagine the ocean as containing and producing Mermaids on rocks, chests of jewels, the fantastical as well as to interpret what the sea churns up as a sign of election and specialness. A sign I was not forever to be cast out (127). The monkey of wood that Plath finds is both a literal product of the ocean tide and a product of her literary imagination, a kind of merman that Arnolds poem enables her to see:Out of the pulp of kelp, still shining, with a wet, fresh smell, reached a small, brown hand.What would it be? What did I want it to be? A mermaid, a Spanish infanta? What it was, was a monkey. Not a real monkey, but a monkey of wood. Heavy with the water it had swallowed and scarred with tar, it crouched on its pedestal, remote and holy, long-muzzled and oddly foreign (127). Thus both poetry and the ocean itself, in its offering of the Sacred Baboon as a signthe sea, perceiving my need, had conferred a blessing (127)foster Plaths emerging sense of her identity as a poet, her election and specialness.Again using the language of Genesis, Plath suggests that her fall from direct experience of nature was never a thorough expulsion; she sees that she is not cast out from nature through the sign she interprets. Despite its necessary degree of separation from the rest of nature, language reconnects Plath to nature as it is part of nature itself. Still, Plath seems at times to describe language not only in opposition to nature but as a tool with which to order and control nature:Feel oddly barren. My sickness is when words draw in their horns and the physical world refuses to be ordered, recreated, arranged and selected. I am a victim of it then, not a master (2000, 516). Even in this brief quotation, however, Plath

12

College Literature 36.3 [Summer 2009]

both makes an argument concerning language as constituting her opposition from the physical world and complicates that argument through the use of metaphor. By describing her words as snails (with retractable horns for sensory intake), she presents words as physical themselves, even if not always sensitive enough to order and arrange nature appropriately. For Plath, poetry has its own irreducible naturalness, even wildness, coextensive though not identical with the natural world. On the other hand, poetry and nature in a certain sense require each other; they exist dialogically rather than in opposition. One way Plath dramatizes this simultaneous distinction and inseparability of poetry and nature is through her complex use of the poetic speaker, such as in Elm, based on an actual tree outside Plaths and Hughess house, which Hughes describes in the endnote to this poem:The house in Devon was overshadowed by a giant wych-elm, flanked by two others in a single mass, growing on the shoulder of a moated prehistoric mound (1992, 292). In Elm, Plath anticipates and problematizes both the claims of the ecocritics who would accuse her of extreme pathetic fallacy (ostensibly a symptom of anthropocentrism) and the biographically oriented critics who quickly conflate the personified elm and the real Plath, brushing the unusual choice of speaker aside as a mere distraction and eagerly diagnosing all sorts of writerly agony behind it (Young 1998, 19). Of course, the poem is highly imaginative on Plaths partshe is not presuming to express the elmness of the elm in a simple referential waybut to ignore the presence of elm as speaker is, as Young bluntly puts it,reductive and boring, and it blurs a useful distinction between nature and art. Let the tree talk, and be sure you try to listen (19). Indeed, the poem puts into stark relief the problems inherent in talking and listening, both in terms of poetic speakers and their interlocutors and in terms of humans in relationship to nonhumans.The poem presents human figuration of naturein this case, personificationas inevitable, yet what the tree speaks is largely its difference from humans and its resistance to control rather than any colonizing ventriloquism on the part of its human interlocutor.Through figurative restraint, the use of figure paradoxically to express natures resistance to figure, the poem accentuates both the elms constructedness and its autonomy. The first line of Elm includes two vital wordsshe saysthat reveal the poems preoccupation with figure itself (rather than just the agony behind it):I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: / It is what you fear. / I do not fear it: I have been there (Plath 2004, 27). There is no immediate reason why the poem requires this reference to the elm in third person; without she says, the poem would cohere in a consistently first-person perspective. But the inclusion of she says requires us to

Scott Knickerbocker

13

consider the entire rest of the poem in quotations and to read the elms speech as part of a dialogue, not as a monologue. More to the point, these words act as a subtle yet powerful marker of a human interlocutorsa second speakerspresence.The poem reveals very little about this overspeaker, not even her or his gender, but the inclusion of that human voice makes us hear the elms words second hand, thus foregrounding figure at the outset of the poem.We are not to forget, that is, that the elm is being personified. This does not mean, however, that the elm merely gives a transparent look at the inner life of the human; rather, in a reverse apostrophe, the elm addresses its human interlocutor and emphasizes the difference between them.This apostrophizing, as well as the attention drawn to the human overspeaker, emphasizes the act of communication itself, as Jonathan Culler makes clear: Apostrophe . . . makes its point by troping not on the meaning of a word but on the circuit or situation of communication itself . . . (2002, 139). But what is the difference the elm communicates? A tree of knowledge, she speaks with confidence in declarative sentences. She claims to know the bottom, which she does not fear as does the human because the elm has been there. Instead of traditional apostrophe, in which an aspect of nature or some inert object passively takes on the attributes the human speaker projects upon it, the elm seems to taunt the human by tossing out various interpretations it might be given: Is it the sea you hear in me, / Its dissatisfactions? / Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? (Plath 2004, 27). The tree may speak, but only to point out the human tendency to hear its own madness in the wind through the leaves, which sounds like the hiss of sea spray, evoked by the alliteration of Its dissatisfactions.This sound effect, combined with the failure implied by dissatisfactions, serves to taunt the human with her incessant but always limited figuring of nature.The elm may have a voice, but what it gives voice to is partly the sensuous aspects of language itself, coextensive with the meaningless, physical play of natures sounds, which resist being interpretively pinned down. Continuing to thematize sound, the poem alludes to another of Plaths wild figures, the horse: Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse. // All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously . . . (2004, 27).The elms imperative Listen emphasizes what increasingly becomes the most powerful technical aspect of Plaths poetry: the function of sound. At a figurative level, the elm refuses to be confined, and it manifests its autonomy by offering choice after choice of sounds: the sound of the sea or the voice of nothing, the sound of hooves or the sound of poisons, and the rain now, this big hush contrasted with a more rough sound: Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs (27). Unlike the Aeolian harp, the elm is not animated by a west wind of inspiration, but a hostile wind of such vio-

14

College Literature 36.3 [Summer 2009]

lence that Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek (27).The shriek suggests sound in its most raw state, stripped of reference. Biographically deterministic readings that ignore the gap between elm and human accentuated by she says would claim that the tree is merely a vehicle for the poets inner turmoil and psychological troubles. But what the poem instead expresses is a tension between natural forces and the possibility of nature operating as a vehicle for human emotion. Just as the elm apostrophizes its human interlocutor, it also engages in reverse personification when it naturalizes the human, who has died:All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously, / Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf, / Echoing, echoing (Plath 2004, 27). Death is portrayed as central to realizing that we are part of nature. But in Elm, this process is not presented as the human calmly being absorbed into the soil; rather, the elm experiences human contamination in both literal and figurative terms. Despite the elms strong tone and aggressive posturing, that is,she also admits to being victimized both by natural elementsthe atrocity of sunsets, the violent wind, the merciless moon that scathes meand a vaguely artificial poison in the rain, the humanly introduced fruit of which is tin-white, like arsenic (Plath 2004, 27). But the most insidious thing the elm decries is the owl-like presence that has infected and possessed it.The last five stanzas deal with this dark thing / That sleeps in me (28), but the poem leaves ambiguous whether it is a real owl the elm is endowing with evil characteristics or part of what the human speaker has projected onto the elm, as the last line before these five stanzas suggests: How your bad dreams possess and endow me (28).This line signals the crisis about personification at the heart of the poem. The elm feels most victimized by the human speaker she has been attempting to confound, and thus the last five stanzas present a different kind of personification from that in the first nine stanzas. No longer aggressively independent, the elm now feels the fear it claims only the human feels at the outset of the poem: I am terrified by this dark thing / That sleeps in me; / All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity (Plath 2004, 28). This change in tone seems to result from the elms realization of the natural processes of death, decay, and renewal as it literally incorporates the human body, a process that ultimately unites them in a physical sense. But the elm also feels contaminated by the humannot only through the acid rain but through personification. The tree still asks questions, but not, as she did before, to demonstrate her imperviousness to singular interpretation; now she questions, in earnest, her own interpretive abilities and relationship to its environment: Clouds pass and disperse. / Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? / Is it for such I agitate my heart? // I am incapable of more knowledge. / What is this, this face / So

Scott Knickerbocker

15

murderous in its strangle of branches? (28).The poem dramatizes, by means of personification itself, both the possibilities and limitations of personification through the crucial shift the elm experiences from being the possessor to being possessed. That is, in the first nine stanzas the elm seems to be in charge of its own figuration, as well as endowing the human with natural characteristics in the stone and little turf line, whereas the last four stanzas show the elm possessed by the owl-like dark thing, which originated in the bad dreams of the human. In these stanzas the elm does not question whether or not she is inhabited; figurative singularity has replaced figurative multiplicity. The elmwho confidently began the poem with I knowexpresses its resulting disempowerment in a key line: I am incapable of more knowledge (28). The overall intensity of Elm, its urgent tone, dark imagery, and apparently despairing conclusion make it tempting to read the poem confessionally, as Plath quickly and furiously transposing her inner torment to the page. But such a reaction merely testifies to the technical effectiveness of the poem, which underwent major effort and revision, as Hughes tells us: This poem grew (21 sheets of working drafts) from a slightly earlier fragment . . . a premature crystallization out of four densely crowded pages of manuscript. In her next attempt, some days later, she took them up and developed out of them the final poem Elm (Plath 1992, 292). One major revision Plath made was to give the elm a first-person perspective. In the earlier fragment the speaker merely describes the tree in third person: She is not easy, she is not peaceful; / She pulses like a heart on my hill. / The moon snags in her intricate nervous system. / I am excited, seeing it there. / It is like something she has caught for me (292). By shifting the perspective, Plath foregrounds personification itself (especially with the early she says). Again, the elm is a self-conscious figure; she knows she is being endowed with certain traits and emotions. Also, Plaths initial choice of simile in the fragmentShe pulses like a heart on my hilldraws together the human (or her heart) and the tree in a way the final poem does not. The (revised) elm speaks almost entirely in similes and metaphors, but never explicitly to compare herself to the human. Especially in the first nine stanzas, the tree repeatedly makes competing claims, as in the two perspectives she offers on her relationship with the moon:The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me / Cruelly, being barren. / Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her. // I let her go. I let her go / Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery (28). Such figurative revision results from the increasingly confused relationship between the overspeaker and the personified elm.The last four stanzas show the impossibility of keeping the two voices apart, and such entanglement poisons the

16

College Literature 36.3 [Summer 2009]

elm; the malignity she feels suggests both evil possession (supported by the medieval idea of owls as satanic) and a cancerous tumor.We need to be wary, Elm seems to communicate, of any human perception of nature and emotional identification with it, which always risks a dangerous possession in both senses of the word. The idea that only by distinguishing ourselves from the rest of nature can we truly hear what it speaks is a central but largely overlooked point of Plaths sequence of Bee poems.5 Written in less than a week in October 1962, the five Bee poemsThe Bee Meeting, The Arrival of the Bee Box, Stings, The Swarm, and Winteringmap the trajectory of a speaker who moves from self-delusion to self-awareness. The speakers relationship to both language (especially figure) and nature are requisite in this process, which can also be described in terms of moving between two different kinds of possession, to echo the vocabulary of Elm. At the beginning of the Bee sequence, that is, the speaker acts possessed, in thrall to her own wild misperceptions of reality linked to the spell-like play of language she casts around herself. Part of the speakers confusion involves her inability to make necessary distinctions between the real and the figurative and between herself and the bees. By the end of the sequence, the speakers selfinduced possession has given way to self-possession in the positive sense of getting a hold of herself : she has ventured into the cellar of her own psyche, taken stock of what is there, and gained mental tranquility. Such peaceful self-awareness hinges on her ability to see herself as distinct yet inseparable from the bees she keeps, or possesses:Possession. / It is they who own me. / Neither cruel nor indifferent, // Only ignorant (Plath 2004, 89). Through their own activity, the bees determine the actions of the beekeeper, yet the beekeeper simultaneously sustains the bees, offering them Tate and Lyle to make up for the honey Ive taken, in yet another sense of possession (89). This mutual possession-as-reciprocity between the beekeeper speaker and the bees serves as Plaths most powerful metaphor for the relationship between humans and nature.The beehives are, for her, a simultaneously domestic and wild setting in which to work out the speakers proper relationship to herself, language, and external reality. Like many of her other poems, as well as her early perception of the sea in Ocean 1212W, Plaths Bee sequence blends actual experience with mythology, fairy tales, and world history. As a girl Plath observed her entomologist fathers beekeeping practice and read his book Bumblebees and Their Ways (Plath expresses her ambivalent feelings toward the symbolic power she perceives her father to have wielded as a beekeeper in The Beekeepers Daughter, which she wrote three years before the Bee sequence). Later, when she lived in a cottage in Devon, Plath kept her own hive of bees and

Scott Knickerbocker

17

attended meetings of the local beekeepers association. This activity was, as well as a way to connect to the Devon community, part of Plaths effort to learn about life, as she wrote in her journal, to learn how the leaves grown on the trees. Open your eyes. . . . Open your nostrils. Smell snow. Let life happen (2000, 438). She frequently expresses a longing for more intimate knowledge of natures processes: I should study botany, birds and trees: get little booklets and learn them, walk out in the world. Open my eyes (523). Still, beekeeping entailed more than mere passive observation; it demanded that Plath not only open her eyes but literally reach into natures processes and risk being stung in an effort to manage the hives. During the summer prior to Plaths rapid composition of the Bee sequence, her marriage with Hughes began to break up. Facing an uncertain future in rural England (far from the London literary establishment) of single motherhood and another harsh winter, Plaths beekeeping must have served partly as an ordering activity, a provisional structure in her day amid the chaos in her personal life. Beekeeping was also thus analogous to writing poetry, another meeting ground of craft and structure with unpredictability and inspiration. Of course, beekeeping as it is represented in Plaths five poems also metaphorically expresses a female speakers struggles against patriarchy, as many critics agree (although they disagree over whether or not this struggle is successful). For instance, Carole Ferrier argues that the Bee sequence represents female endurance and strength in opposition to a controlling father figure, and she reads Wintering as an empowering shift away from the centrality of the father or indeed any male figure . . . and toward an assertion of the personas own separate identity independent of any other (1979, 215). Plath weaves classical mythology (specifically the Daphne myth), the Cinderella fairy tale, and Napoleonic history into her description of beekeeping to dramatize the speakers gendered struggles, very much informed by Plaths own marital troubles and lifelong effort to achieve poetically a powerful, autonomous voice in a male-dominated world. For these reasons, most critics understandably treat the bees and the speakers beekeeping merely figuratively and lose sight of the fact that the poems bees also refer to actual bees; Plaths consideration of physical nature attends her other concerns. Many readers therefore not only too easily confuse the sequences speaker with Plath herself; they also commit the same error as the speaker, who is initially unable to distinguish between figurative and realistic ways of perceiving the bees. Of course, the sequence is about gender and even, to a certain extent, Plaths biography. But it is not only about these things. By focusing only on what Plath communicates concerning gender, we lose the quite powerful role nature plays in the poems. Indeed, the problems (and provisional solutions) the speaker experiences over

18

College Literature 36.3 [Summer 2009]

gender are themselves linked to how the speaker relates to the natural world. For these reasons it is important to read the bees and their hives not merely metaphorically and symbolically, but as synecdoches as well. They stand in for the rest of nature, particularly as it is experienced in a semidomestic way by humans. The speakers experience of the bees in the sequence does not make an absolute shift from metaphor to synecdochein some senses they are still slightly metaphorical at the endbut they obviously function quite differently for the speaker in the last poem Wintering from the way they do at the opening of the sequence in The Bee Meeting. This has everything to do, of course, with the speakers perception of them and not any substantive change in the bees themselves. Notably, not only does the speaker curb her manic metaphor-making (Van Dyne 1982, 168) by the end of the sequenceinstead she practices ecocentric figurative restraintshe also lessens her use of sound effects meant to enact natural phenomena. For this speaker, learning to distinguish herself from the rest of nature involves a new way of speaking. The first poem of the sequence, The Bee Meeting, focuses more on the speakers hysterical and paranoid self-absorption than on the bees themselves; formally, this translates into long, turbulent lines, abrupt changes in focus, and a series of urgent questions, mostly about the community members. Some of the questions are followed by a reasonable answer, creating a schizophrenic effect:Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the villagers / The rectors, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees (Plath 2004, 81). It is as if the speaker is talking to herself in two different voices, and the calm clarity of the answer, not to mention the actual harmlessness of the community members, only heightens the sense of the speakers irrational fear and feeling of vulnerability:I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me? (81). Her feeling of alienation from the human community is linked to a confusing relationship with nature. It is unclear, for example, to what extent her vulnerability is the consequence of her feelings toward the bees or toward the human figures. Sometimes the speaker experiences her fellow humans as offering protection: Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock, / Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees (81). Other times sinister imagery makes it clear that the speakers fear is directed primarily at the villagers, whom she imagines as corrupting (molding) her and drawing her into sinister rituals: Now they are giving me . . . a black veil that molds to my face, they are making me one of them. / They are leading me to the shorn grove, the circle of hives (81). She passively (indeed, she even speaks in passive voice) misreads the villagers efforts to include her and protect her with the proper bee-

Scott Knickerbocker

19

keeping gear, which in her imagination becomes partly a death mask. The shorn grove with its pagan circular imagery, the circle of hives, suggests a meeting place for witches; the speaker even alludes to Nathaniel HawthornIs it the hawthorn that smells so sick? / The barren body of hawthorn, etherizing its children (81)whoseYoung Goodman Brown, like Plaths speaker, is a dubious judge of the intentions of the villagers (Ford 1997, 142). The speaker seems to act out the fear that she imagines the bees feel as they are smoked out of their hives: The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything. / Here they come, the outriders, on their hysterical elastics (Plath 2004, 82). While the bees may act perturbed, the hysteria the speaker seems to witness is largely a projection of her unstable state of mind. The speakers particularly excessive use of figure is central to her confusion; every element of the scene is personified in monstrous terms, thus ironically dehumanizing the entire landscape. An instance of what Perloff calls simultaneous animism and angst, the speakers landscape comes to life, in this case in a grotesque way, just as she masks the particular humanness of the villagers behind her extravagant metaphors: Everybody is nodding a square black head, they are knights in visors, / Breastplates of cheesecloth knotted under the armpits (81). Again, the speaker undermines any real sense of threat in the image of black knights with the innocuously domestic breastplates of cheesecloth. She feels fearful, that is, but we are meant to recognize her fear as unfounded. In any case, the landscape the speaker personifies is doubly estranged since the persons in the poem are themselves grotesquely depicted. The strips of tinfoil winking like people thus refer to no ordinary people in the speakers eyes. Her personifications also escalate in their morbid selfprojection of fear, from the harmless Feather dusters fanning their hands to the bean flowers with black eyes and leaves like bored hearts and the flowers that are like blood clots (81). Once the speaker makes a particular figure, it sets off a chain reaction of more figures, each instance of which removes her farther from reality. Thus she confuses her own mind with the mind of the hive; while the bees may act alarmed, they cannot have a dramatic sense of an impending end of everything, which the speaker herself feels. In her confusion, not only does the speaker personify the landscape and bees; she also naturalizes herself. Like Daphne, who became a laurel tree to escape Apollos sexual advances, the speaker wishes she could metamorphosize into a plant to elude the threat she imagines in the bees and less directly in the villagers. Once she is outfitted in her white shop smock, she feels that she is milkweed silk, the bees will not notice (Plath 2004, 81). Later, she hopes the bees will think she is cow-parsley, / A gullible head

20

College Literature 36.3 [Summer 2009]

untouched by their animosity, // Not even nodding, a personage in a hedgerow (82). Such figurative criss-crossing, in which nature is personified and the human is naturalized, would seem to betoken a drawing together of the human and nonhuman, a blurring of the boundary between these categories that would excite contemporary posthumanists. But in the case of Plaths Bee sequence, this blurring is only symptomatic of the speakers inability really to experience nature on its own terms. The human/nonhuman boundary is more porous than we conventionally think, as we see in many of Plaths poems, but here Plath also dramatizes the pitfalls of taking such boundary dissolution too far. By the end of the sequence the speaker has learned that she need not be Daphne; she need not let her humanness be subsumed by nature, which was never possible anyway. In fact, her imaginative excesses in the opening poem suggest that the opposite occurs. This is clearly expressed in the middle of The Bee Meeting, in which the speaker again scales back her figurative excess in another juxtaposition of manic questioning and sober answering: Is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging up that string? / No, no, it is scarlet flowers that will one day be edible (Plath 2004, 81).The speakers personifications have escalated in their goriness, from the black eyes of the bean flowers to the leaves like bored hearts. Whereas these figures are stated in assertions, giving the impression that the speaker is at least somewhat aware of her own figure-making (especially in the simile), the culminating question about blood clots makes it seem as though the speaker has begun to put too much faith in her own figures; she seems actually to see blood.Although the poem later falls back into self-delusion, the next line is the steadiest of the poem. Here the speaker assures herself that she is only seeing red flowers; she insists on a distinction between reality and imagination in order to calm herself down. Even the repetition of no, no expresses a reasonable, calming tone, as a parent would say now, now or there, there to a child afraid of the dark (as opposed to other uses of repetition in the poem, such as my fear, my fear, my fear [81], that express the speakers morbid obsession). Furthermore, this lines imagery foreshadows the conclusion of the sequence, in which the speaker wonders in Wintering if the gladiolas (red like the scarlet flowers) will Succeed in banking their fires / to enter another year (90).The hopeful assertion that the scarlet flowers will one day be edible points forward to the positive conclusion of Wintering when the bees unconditionally taste the spring (90). In a sense, the lines in The Bee Meeting containing blood clots and scarlet flowers summarize the difference between the beginning and end of the entire sequence.The scarlet flowers replace the blood clots, and the speaker evolves from morbidity and confusion to self-possession and hope.As

Scott Knickerbocker

21

these lines and the opening and concluding poems for which they are synecdoches show, the speakers perception of nature is key to this self-evolution. By the fifth and final poem of the sequence, Wintering, the speakers frenzied tone, cacophonous sound effects, and manic metaphor-making of the previous poems have receded. She has also stopped resorting to the Daphne myth as a form of escapism in reaction to the apparent threat of the bees. Daphnes laurel tree has been replaced by a cradle of Spanish walnut (Plath 2004, 90)one of the poems several images of hope and future possibilitypossibly holding a human baby. Encased in wood, the baby indirectly recalls Daphne, but the cradle is, like the bee box,only temporary (85). There is a common tendency among critics to read this poem negatively, or at least as falsely hopeful. For instance, Janet McCann argues that the concluding taste of spring contradicts the rest of the poem (1978, 34), and she hears a negative tone in the poem at odds with its promising words. But readings like these too often confuse the speaker of the Bee sequence with the real Plath. Ironically, these critics tend to commit the error Hughes, who changed the order of Ariel and concluded it with the suicidal sounding Edge, would have encouraged: they read the inevitability of Plaths suicide into her late poems instead of noticing the degree to which poems such as Wintering, in their hopefulness, push against the grim circumstances of Plaths final year.They either ignore or dismiss, moreover, Plaths remark that her own sequencing of Ariel began with the word Love and ended with the word Spring (1992, 14-15). True, Plaths Edge and Words, which seem to coincide thematically with her despair and impending suicide, postdate her composition of the Bee sequence, but the Bee sequence stands as the culmination of her artistry, the full measure of her poetic achievement (Ford 1997, 165). For this reason many critics fail to see (or turn a blind eye to) the hope and calm acceptance of Wintering, for such a reading would render inconsistent the myth of Plath as mad, depressed and pouring out her distress in an ink of blood (Brain 2001, 37). Still, the speaker of Wintering does enter into a dark space in the first half of the poem. She must venture within her own psyche and take stock of what is there before looking outward at the bees from a balanced perspective. Indeed, her healthy view of the bees requires that she first face up to and distinguish herself from the darkness that has affected her prior outlook. The speaker experiences winter as an introspective season; she goes inside not only the house but also the wine cellar, the heart of the house, a metaphor for her own subconscious mind (Plath 2004, 89). She admits that she has been previously unaware of what goes on there, that introspection is a new process for her: This is the room I have never been in. / This is the room I could never breathe in (89). Her jars of honey quickly become goth-

22

College Literature 36.3 [Summer 2009]

icSix cats eyes in the wine cellar (89)like the other images there:The black bunched in there like a bat, / No light / But the torch and its faint // Chinese yellow on appalling objects / Black asininity. Decay (89). Facing the cellars and her psyches contents directly and giving a name to them, the speaker is able to separate herself from them. Her memories and previously unconscious modes of perception are appalling and asinine.They are no longer fully present, but are outmoded, as the word decay and the antiquated gothic imagery suggest. The poem, and the sequence as a whole, pivots on the one word of the fourth stanzas middle line:
Chinese yellow on appalling objects Black asininity. Decay. Possession. It is they who own me. Neither cruel nor indifferent. . . . (Plath 2004, 89)

One of the few one-word lines in the entire sequence, Possession carries multiple meanings and is central (as it is literally central in the stanza) to understanding both the speakers psychological developmenther relationship to herselfand her relationship to the bees. Given what words come before it, Possession at first seems to suggest that the speakers appalling objects, or dark memories, possess her. Such sinister possession fits with the gothic tone of the black cellar and points to the speakers wild perception of the earlier poems of the sequence when she often acted possessed by demons of paranoia and irrational fear. Yet the next line and sentence after this pivotal word, It is they who own me, transforms the meaning of Possession in crucial ways. By syntactically emphasizing the pronoun they (instead of just stating that they own me), the speaker argues that instead of the appalling objects of the cellar, it is the bees that possess her, though not in any negative way: Neither cruel nor indifferent, // Only ignorant (Plath 2004, 89). Furthermore, by emphasizing they, the speaker subverts the usual sense of beekeeping, so that the bees possess her rather than vice versa. The bees are not possessive tyrants, however, the way the speaker might have experienced them earlier in the sequence; they are so slow I hardly know them (89). In fact, it is clear that the possession of beekeeping is reciprocal.The bees may own the speaker, in that they shape her activities as a beekeeper, but the bees also rely on her, especially in the winter: they file like soldiers / To the syrup tin // To make up for the honey Ive taken. / Tate and Lyle keeps them going, / The refined snow. / It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.They take it.The cold sets in (89-90).The bees calmly accept the artificial food, just as

Scott Knickerbocker

23

the speaker calmly accepts herself and her role as beekeeper. She has finally, fully learned that she is a beekeeper not a bee (Ford 1997, 143), and this perspective enables her to observe the bees empathically. The significatory richness of the sibilant Possession, which hovers (bee-like, indeed, its first syllable rhymes with buzz) alone in the middle of its stanza and thus points different directions at once, mirrors the speaker herself, who, like the word, is capable of change and is not limited to static meaning. The ing verb title, Wintering, also emphasizes dynamism like the transformations of the speakers persona and the shifting meanings of Possession. The title refers to the processes that occur during winterthe easy time for the beekeeper, the time of hanging on for the bees (Plath 2004, 89). But more importantly, the title also suggests the fact that winter, like any other season, is more properly considered a process than an exact period of time. Just as day bleeds into night and night into day, the seasons overlap, cyclically and gradually shifting from one to the next. Wintering is something all creatures do during winter, and winter is itself a process of wintering that always enfolds aspects of the future season, spring and its processes. The speaker concludes the poem with this fundamental natural fact, stating that the bees taste the spring even though it is still winter. In other words, winter here is not the conclusion of a year (or figuratively, a life) so much as it is prologue to spring and rebirth. The idea that winter contains both literal and figurative seeds of renewal counters both the poetic clich of winter as a metaphor for death and critics insistence that Wintering coincides with the inevitable, impeding death of the speaker and (or as) Plath. On the contrary, especially after the pivotal word Possession, Wintering concerns itself very much with life and continuity rather than death and finality. The bees express this by forming a community so tightknit the speaker again compares them to a single mind: Now they ball in a mass, / Black / Mind against all that white (Plath 2004, 90). But whereas the speaker of The Bee Meeting projects her own apocalyptic imagination onto the beesThe mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everythingthe speaker in Wintering merely observes the way bees cling together so closely, especially in winter, that they appear to behave like one organism. And whereas the bees fend off death through community cohesion, the speaker is now solitary.Yet, in a sequence of associations, she moves from the bees, who are all women, to an image of a human woman: The woman, still at her knitting, / At the cradle of Spanish walnut, / Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think (90).The woman is at once solitary and watching over a cradle, an image that suggests the continuity of life even in moments of emotional isolation.The woman herself may be like a bulb, possibly pregnant but in any case storing her energies in the winter like the

24

College Literature 36.3 [Summer 2009]

ball of bees, but the cradle is also bulb-like in its hard, brown shape and in its promise of future growth. Even the word stillthe woman is still at her knittingcarries two connotations: inaction and continuity. The womans dumbness refers to the silence of stillness (and possibly postnatal exhaustion), not stupidity. Just as Plath practices figurative restraint (relative to the early poems of the Bee sequence) as a way to distinguish mind and its environment, the woman expresses verbal restraint, partly as another way to indicate her storing up of energy during winter. The bees, likewise, have massed together, Black / Mind against all that white. The stark black and white contrast helps to emphasize that this winter setting is, for the speaker, a time in which she is able to make helpful distinctions, between herself and the bees and between herself and her past habits of mind (the psychic cellars contents). At a more immediate level, the bees as synecdoches for nature are themselves set in contrast to snowy reality. Still, the snow is personifiedThe smile of the snow is white (Plath 2004, 90) suggesting that these distinctions are not absolute or final (as we have seen in seasonal categories) despite relative, minor distinctions between humans and nature and inside nature itself. These nuanced, subtle observations indicate that the speaker has steadied herself and no longer projects with abandon her own state of mind onto nature while at the same time she doesnt presume total objectivity. She can simultaneously observe the natural fact that the bees now are all female, while also humorously making them critical of the males:They have got rid of the men, // The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors. / Winter is for women (Plath 2004, 90).The playful internal rhymes and consonance of the middle line, which evokes the word bumblebee, belie critics insistence that the speaker (and/or Plath) expresses hatred here for men. In any case, the speakers natural observation is emotionally hopeful; the female, albeit communitarian, bees inspire the image of the self-sufficient woman with the baby. Plant imagery also helps the speaker feel hope and the continuity of life. In a strikingly beautiful image, she literalizes the bulb, previously a metaphor for the womans body, to ask (in different metaphorical language), will the gladiolas / Succeed in banking their fires / To enter another year? (Plath 2004, 90). By asking questions, the speaker recalls her similar tendency in the The Bee Meeting, but her later questioning now emphasizes how far the speaker has come; instead of the initial poems frantic, irrational questions, which hurriedly gush out in long lines, the speaker of Wintering asks only a few questions, and the longest, middle question about the gladiolas is broken up over three lines, thus creating a slower pace and calmer tone.The gladiolas (containing the word glad) are not extinguished, even temporarily, in the winter; banking their fires suggests that they are still, in a

Scott Knickerbocker

25

sense, aglow, even if only internally. Furthermore, the action of banking a fire suggests a level of self-control and thoughtfulness that the speaker has achieved; her passions still burn, but not in a destructive or delusional way anymore. Christmas roses, in its allusion to the Christ birth (and proximity to the cradled baby), is yet another image of starting anew (90).The poem concludes with the optimistic idea that wintering, despite being a time of gathering in (banking) ones being, includes bees flying (another -ing verb accentuating process) and anticipating the spring in the taste of the Christmas roses. Lest one consider this an overly rosy reading of the ending of the Bee sequence, we should recognize that it does not conclude with complete revelation or joyful certitude despite the direct declaration of the final sentence: They taste the spring (Plath 2004, 90).The last stanzas series of questions gives a tentative feel to the poem, which does not actually conclude with blooming gladiolas or spring in any fully bloomed sense.The bees get just a taste of spring. Still, even if the poem concludes more with anticipation and hope than with what is anticipated, its conclusion is remarkably positive given how the sequence begins. This juxtaposition recalls the carefully wrought revelation of Black Rook in Rainy Weather, in which the speakers experience of natures spasmodic tricks of radiance is achieved not in spite of, but partly because of her initial skepticism and claims to live in a materialistic universe. In the Bee sequence, the speakers tentative gestures toward hope and renewal at the end of Wintering come across as radical precisely because her quiet tone and careful observations of the bees contrast so sharply with the panicky phobias of the opening poems of the sequence. The speakers perception of nature, whether cause or consequence of her state of mind, is central to her transformation over the sequence. In The Bee Meeting she relies on her misinterpretations of the bees and villagers to portray herself inaccurately as a victim of dire circumstances. She also confuses herself with the bees and fails clearly to distinguish between figure and reality. In Wintering, however, she has learned to make such distinctions.This does not mean, however, that she abandons figure, which in Wintering naturalizes life and continuity.The Bee sequence shows that nature can be used (and misused) to illustrate varying and conflicting arguments. Does this mean any and all arguments that use nature for justification are equally valid? In the context of the Bee sequence, the speakers use of natural imagery in Wintering comes across as more accurate than the morbid imaginings of The Bee Meeting. But in a larger context, Plaths oeuvre shows that ecological truth is situational and provisional. While there is no one right way to represent nature in poetry, Plaths poems derive their power from the generative friction between speakers and a nonhuman world that resists fig-

26

College Literature 36.3 [Summer 2009]

urative appropriation. For Plath, this resistance is itself to be figured forth, creating the formal reverberations with which her poems still startle us.
Notes See Howe (1977) and Schwartz and Bollas (1979) as examples of these kinds of biographical treatments of Plath, as well as rebuttals by Perloff (1986) and Axelrod (1990). 2 See the work of Karen Jackson Ford (1997), Sarah Hannah (2003), and John Frederick Nims (1970) as representatives of this minority. 3 See Dana Philips (2003) for a critique of this clichd trope. 4 My analysis is indebted to the work of Karen Jackson Ford, who argues that by the end of Plaths Bee sequence, the speaker achieves a measure of self-control accompanied by an easing of stylistic excess.This process depends upon the speakers ability to retreat from the pressures of the external world, especially the world of gender conflicts, to the inner rhythms of her own exigencies. As the influence of the exterior world diminishes, the stylistic agitation seems to abate as well (1997, 135). My treatment of the Daphne myth in Plaths sequence also relies on Ford, who argues that the speakers continual desire to become a treepart of her figurative excessbetokens not a real connection with nature but her simultaneous paranoid fear (of the bees and villagers) and inability to distinguish herself from the bees. Works Cited Alexander, Pamela. 1998.Tricks of Radiance. Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 59 (Fall): 12-15. Axelrod, Steven Gould. 1990. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Brain,Tracy. 2001. The Other Sylvia Plath. Harlow, England: Pearson Education. Bryant, Marsha. 2002. Plath, Domesticity, and the Art of Advertising. College Literature 29.3 (Summer): 17-34. Culler, Jonathan. 2002. The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Ferrier, Carole. 1979. The Beekeepers Apprentice. Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry. Ed. Gary Lane. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ford, Karen Jackson. 1997. Gender and the Poetics of Excess: Moments of Brocade. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi. Gifford, Terry. 1995. Green Voices: Understanding Contemporary Nature Poetry. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hannah, Sarah. 2003.Something Else Hauls Me Through Air: Sound and Structure in Four Late Poems by Sylvia Plath. Literary Imagination: The Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics 5.2 (Spring): 232-66. Howe, Irving. 1977. The Plath Celebration: A Partial Dissent. In Sylvia Plath:The Woman and the Work, ed. Edward Butscher. New York: Dodd, Mead. Kirsch, Adam. 2005. The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets. New York:W.W. Norton.
1

Scott Knickerbocker Lowell, Robert. 1965.Foreward. In Ariel, by Sylvia Plath. London: Faber and Faber. Malcolm, Janet. 1994. The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. McCann, Janet. 1978. Sylvia Plaths Bee Poems. South and West: An International Literary Magazine 14. 4: 28-36. Nims, John Frederick. 1970. The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. A Technical Analysis. In The Art of Sylvia Plath. A Symposium, ed. Charles Newman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Peel, Robin. 2002. Writing Back: Sylvia Plath and Cold War Politics. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Perloff, Marjorie. 1970.Angst and Animism in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Journal of Modern Literature 1: 57-74. . 1986.The Two Ariels:The (Re)Making of the Sylvia Plath Canon. Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections, ed. Neil Fraistat. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Phillips, Dana. 2003. The Truth of Ecology: Nature, Culture, and Literature in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Plath, Sylvia. 1975. Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, Selected and Edited with Commentary by Aurelia Schober Plath. New York: Harper & Row. . 1977. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose Writings. London: Faber and Faber. . 1992. The Collected Poems. New York: Harper Perennial. . 2000. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, ed. Karen V. Kukil. New York: Anchor Books. . 2004. Ariel:The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plaths Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement. New York: HarperCollins. Schwartz, Murray M., and Christopher Bollas. 1979. The Absence of the Center: Sylvia Plath and Suicide. Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry, ed. Gary Lane. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Van Dyne, Susan R. 1982. Sylvia Plath, Stings, Original Drafts of the Poem in Facsimile, Reproduced from the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith College. Northampton, Mass.: Smith College Library Rare Book Room. Vendler, Helen. 1980. Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wagner-Martin, Linda. 1987. Sylvia Plath: A Biography. New York: Simon and Schuster. . 1999. Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life. New York: St. Martins. Young, David. 1998. Tree With an Attitude: Reading Plath Irreverently. Field: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 59 (Fall): 18-23.

27