The Blood Jet Is Poetry

ARIEL by Sylvia Plath. 85 pages. Harper & Row. $4.95.

On a dank day in February 1963, a pretty young mother of two children was found in a London flat with her head in the oven and the gas jets wide open. The dead woman was Sylvia Plath, 30, an American poet whose marriage to Ted Hughes, a British poet, had gone on the rocks not long before. Her published verses, appearing occasionally in American magazines and gathered in a single volume, The Colossus, had displayed accents of refinement, but had not yet achieved authority of tone.

But within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. Daddy was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hatred of her father; its style was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, Daddy was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bale across the literary landscape.

Published last year in Britain, the last poems of Sylvia Plath sold 15,000 copies in ten months, almost as many as a bestselling novel, and inspired a vigorous new group of confessional poets. Published last week in the U.S., Ariel adds a powerful voice to the rising chorus of American bards (Robert Lowell, Ann Sexton, Frederick Seidel) who practice poetry as abreaction.

Worms like Sticky Pearls. Outwardly, Sylvia's psychosis has standard Freudian trimmings. Her father, born in the Polish town of Grabow in East Prussia, became a professor of entomology at Boston University and is presented in her poetry as an intellectual tyrant with "a love of the rack and the screw." The mother of the heroine in The Bell Jar, an autobiographical novel published in England just before Sylvia's death, is described as a metallic New England schoolmarm. Little Sylvia tried to be Daddy's darling. At three she knew the Latin names of hundreds of insects--whenever a bumblebee bumbled by, the pretty little poppet would squeak: "Bombus bimaculatus!"

But when she was ten, Daddy died. It was the trauma of her life, or so she came to think in later years. At any rate, she became a compulsive talker, a compulsive learner, a compulsive writer. All through her teens she scribbled stories, plays, poems--many of them sufficiently professional to be published in Seventeen and Mademoiselle. She won a scholarship to Smith, where she made straight A's. But her feelings took their revenge. At 19, after an unhappy month in New York City, she ran home to Wellesley, Mass., crawled under the front porch, hid behind a stack of kindling, and swallowed 50 sleeping pills. Three days later she was found, alive but in ghastly condition. "They had to call and call," she wrote later, "and pick the worms off me like sticky pearls."

Words like Missiles. A series of shock treatments put her back on her feet, but she needed "to be bolstered by someone," and a few years later she found that someone in Poet Hughes, whom she met during her Fulbright year at Cambridge. As a poet, Sylvia matured rapidly during her marriage; after the birth of her daughter Frieda, she found in the woman's world the subject she could call her own.

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.

AII night your moth-breath

Flickers among the flat pink roses.

I wake to listen: A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

In my Victorian nightgown.

Your mouth opens clean as a cat's.

But life was more difficult than poetry. In the fall of 1962, just after the birth of her son Nicholas, she and Hughes separated permanently. Alone with the children in Devon, Sylvia hurled herself into a heroic but foolhardy attempt to probe her deepest problems with the point of a pen.

All day she kept house and cared for the children. Most of the night she wrote "like a woman on fire"--two, three, six complete poems night after night. Her fire was black and its name was hatred. Her words were hard and small like missiles, and they were flung with flat force.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.

A wind of such violence

Will tolerate no by standing: I must shriek.

But beneath the hatred she found fear.

I am terrified by this dark thing

That sleeps in me;

All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity . . .

What is this, this face

So murderous in its strangle of branches?

And beneath the fear, she found a sinister love of death. She longed to feel the knife not carve, but enter

Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,

And the universe slide from my side.

Death like a Poem. In her most ferocious poems, Daddy and Lady Lazarus, fear, hate, love, death and the poet's own identity become fused at black heat with the figure of her father, and through him, with the guilt of the German exterminators and the suffering of their Jewish victims. They are poems, as Robert Lowell says in his preface to Ariel, that "play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder."

For six months, first in Devon and later in London, Sylvia wrote without letup. By the end of January 1963, her nerves were a shirt of nettles. On Feb. 4 she arrived at a friend's house, lugging the children. "She was in an inferno," the friend remembers. "Depression is not the word." For six days she let herself be looked after, but on Feb. 10 she went back to her flat to spend the night. The next morning, in an Auschwitz all her own, she executed what one critic calls her "last unwritten poem." The epithet is appropriate. In the last week of her life she laid bare the heart of her art in a clouting couplet:

The blood jet is poetry; There is no stopping it.

DADDY

You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white. Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time--Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one grey toe Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene

An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat moustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I'm finally through. The black telephone's off at the root, The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

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