P: Sylvia Plath

Elm

Obviously it was going to be Plath, wasn’t it? (With apologies to Edgar Allan Poe and a big sorry not sorry to Ezra Pound.) I’ve been looking forward to this one since H for Hughes. I teach both poets at A Level and think I said at the time that I find Plath’s work richer and deeper – but I don’t especially mean that as an indictment of Hughes. Plath’s work is richer and deeper than almost anybody’s. For me she stands alongside Elizabeth Bishop as arguably her century’s greatest poet. I’ve been fascinated by her since I first encountered her work at the age of 17, and I’ve read the biographies, including Heather Clark’s brilliant recent Red Comet, which I think does a fantastic, almost miraculous job, of clawing her back down from myth’s pedestal and reframing her as a person and artist. I’m fascinated with her in all her genius and all her flaws. She’s highly educated, gifted, relentlessly driven and ambitious, and constantly looking to push and refine her art. I often find the popular conception of her infuriating and misogynistic - the ‘mad girl’ from her own love song, spewing out unregulated emotion onto the page, with the poetry and its intensity reducible to an expression of her mental illness. She isn’t that – she’s a master technician of language with supreme control of her subject matter.

Today’s poem is ‘Elm’, a poem about despair and one of her darkest in its conclusions. But also one, I think, that exemplifies that absolute control she has, and that her poetry about despair is not to be read as an inevitable precursor to her subsequent death, but as a supreme act of artistic generosity. I’m going to mention here that this is going to contain references to miscarriage, infertility and depression.

You can read it here: Elm | The Poetry Foundation

Elm

for Ruth Fainlight

Plath dedicated the poem to her friend Ruth Fainlight, because she had admired Fainlight’s poem “The Sapphic Moon”. Fainlight is still alive and still writing poetry. I saw her read at the age of 92 in Hebden Bridge a couple of years ago along with Plath’s biographer Heather Clark, which was probably the most memorable and fascinating reading I’ve ever been to. Given Plath’s legendary status it felt really strange, to me, hearing Fainlight talk about ‘Sylvia’ as her friend, as a real person who she went out walking with, and chatted to about childcare.

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.

Is it the sea you hear in me, 
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

I think the opening of this poem takes some unpicking, in terms of narrative perspective. Plath throws us right in with this foreboding piece of reporting speech – ‘I know the bottom’. I think what’s happening here is that the Elm is speaking to the poem’s persona – the “she” in “she says” refers to the Elm. In fact, the “she says” is the only thing that the poem’s persona says in the poem – the rest is almost in inverted commas, spoken by the tree.

The elm tree in mythology is often associated with death and the underworld, I think from the myth of Orpheus, so when the Elm says ‘I know the bottom’ perhaps this means ‘I know death?’ Plath’s poetry often touches on the idea of ‘knowing death’ – think Lady Lazarus – and in this case that knowledge is kind of outsourced into the voice of the tree. The tone is almost mocking – “I have been there”, it says, but *you* haven’t, and you fear where I have been.

But how does the tree know that the persona it’s addressing ‘fears’ death – well the only explanation is that the tree’s voice is itself a projection of the persona’s own thoughts – perhaps we’re not being asked to assume that a tree is speaking here, but to recognise the voice of the tree as a product of the persona’s own inner fantasy. So what’s happening here is almost filtering through on three levels – the Elm tree is speaking as the projected thoughts of the poem’s persona, who herself is obviously a projection of Plath the writer.

This notion of the tree’s voice coming from the speaker’s own mind is further supported by the direct acknowledgement of uncertainty in the second stanza about where the voice is coming from. The persona can hear the tree’s branches whispering in the wind, which sounds like the sea, and sounds, literally, like that lovely sibilant ‘dissatisfactions’ – but perhaps it’s also ‘the voice of nothing’. There seems to be a worry about madness in the idea of listening to the tree’s ‘voice’ and finding meaning in it that is being acknowledged, again almost mockingly, by the tree itself.

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop this, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Look at what the tree is saying here to the persona. There is nothing comforting here, is there? Dismissing love as ephemeral and intangible, making heartbreak into a slightly absurd, pathetic thing to suffer from. Plath doesn’t get enough credit as a surrealist or absurdist artist, but comparing the loss of love to the galloping away of a wild horse is a genius image, and even more so if you consider this as an extension of that earlier sibilant sound of the tree’s leaves – it was the sea, now it’s galloping horses.

At the same time, the slightly ridiculous image of the horse is still treated with seriousness – the tree is aware of the power of heartbreak, if not the realness of love, and its cruelty is that it knows its sound reminds the speaker of her loss of love and yet promises to continue this until she is dead.

So what’s happening here – why is the Elm tree so seemingly cruel? I guess the answer is a bleak one if we look at the earlier idea that the tree is really the projection of the persona. There’s a kind of self-mocking and self-contempt here, then, and it’s possibly worth conceptualising the elm as a kind of metaphorical intrusive voice? As I intimated earlier – I think it’s tempting but reductive to see this as Plath’s own self-hatred – the whole layered construction of personae, and the corralling of these feelings into art already make it much more complex than that.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons? 
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

With the rhetorical question that the tree asks itself here, we potentially also get a change away from this slightly hostile, mocking one. The unifying thing here that Plath is using is that sound of the leaves – it’s been the sea, it’s been mad whispers, it’s been galloping horses, and now it’s acid rain. Again, look at that lovely sonic underpinning of it with ‘hush’. The speaker’s tree imagines itself bringing rain, which in other hands might be cleansing or purifying, but here it’s acid rain, leaving a poisonous white residue.

Then the imagery moves to fire, and being burnt out. Lots of critics have interpreted this stanza as being a veiled reference to Plath’s experiences with electro-shock therapy, and again, there’s definitely something in that given the references to fire and electricity throughout her work. Now the tree seems to have something in common, then, with Plath’s projected persona, and in its suffering is no longer superior or mocking, but merging with the human, in that it’s now a ‘hand’. “I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets” is an incredible line, isn’t it? One of the most cliched images possible of nature’s beauty and calm, turned completely on its head and being described as ‘an atrocity’. How is sunset an atrocity? Are we supposed to think of its visual similarity to the atom bomb, perhaps? Maybe a reach, but that meeting of light and ground and the outward spreading of light before darkness is maybe common to both. Or is it more of a personal sense of atrocity – the atrocity of something so beautiful marking another day of pain and suffering completed?

By this point in the poem, almost the halfway point, what do we have? It’s a picture of turmoil – if the conceit is that the Elm tree is talking to the poetic persona, we see the tree using different interpretations of the sounds it’s making to kind of scroll through the various ways in which it is disturbed. It begins with an almost arrogant assertion of its authority in the field of suffering – I have been to ‘the bottom’, you have not. Then it seems to detect the speaker’s despair and loneliness and mocks that relentlessly, but then it seems to turn that despair on itself and focus again on its own suffering at the hands of acid and fire. It’s interesting that in the last stanza here that suffering is transmuted into violence – the sound and movement of a tree in the storm being likened to shrieking and wild wielding of clubs.

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.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

This part of the poem, honestly, has always confused me. There’s a shift here, away from the tree looking at itself and the woman and introducing this new character of the personified moon. I feel as though the dedication to Fainlight and her poem ‘Sapphic Moon’ might be particularly significant to this part – that poem was about a miscarriage, and recent letters have revealed that Plath also experienced this around this time – so the references to the moon being ‘barren’ could somehow link to this, especially because the moon is often associated with femininity and fertility in all kinds of myths.

But who is the moon here and what exactly is her relationship with the tree and the speaker? There’s definitely hostility there – the tree looks up at the moon and sees another female figure, but one who is ‘merciless’ and ‘cruel’. The syntax here makes it unclear – ‘she would drag me cruelly, being barren’. Does that adjective ‘barren’ refer to the subject (she – the moon) or the object (me – the tree). My sense is that it’s the tree, especially given the imagery in the previous stanzas of the tree being ‘a hand of wires’. So if the moon is a symbol of fertility, then the Elm’s sense of being the ‘cruel’ and ‘merciless’ moon’s victim is rooted in a fear of being judged and mocked for her lack of fertility by the ‘radiant’ figure who is its ultimate embodiment? We can also see how this may relate to the persona too, and Plath herself, if we’re going to continue with the idea that really the tree’s voice represents a working-through of their experiences.

Plath doesn’t make the ‘letting go’ part any easier to pin down, partly because again there is the ambiguity of who ‘diminished and flat’ refers to – again I think the ‘diminished and flat’ must be referring to the tree herself, if the moon is round and fertile. The tree has compared herself to the moon and found itself wanting – so much so that she has had to ‘let go’ the moon, and therefore let go of the idea of fertility – almost surgically removing this concept from itself. Plath does something genius here because she carried the idea of pregnancy through to the end of the poem and makes it something much darker. If the tree is not pregnant or fertile, then what *is* growing inside it? The speaker’s ‘bad dreams’. I absolutely love the cleverness of this move in the poem – as the tree’s attention moves away from the moon and back onto the woman, the act of looking at the moon and considering fertility remains, and is warped into an explanation for the bad feelings and inner turmoil. There’s *blame* here – the tree is accusing the woman of impregnating it with ‘bad dreams’. I’m also fascinated by that word ‘endow’ – your bad dreams ‘endow’ me – usually this is a word associated with something positive and powerful, so there’s the sense that the Elm is claiming and benefiting from a kind of malign power from the bad dreams. Richard III vibes for me here in this line – ‘since I cannot prove a lover I am determined to prove a villain’. Perhaps a reach.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

This section is probably the most iconic, memorable part of this poem – look again at how Plath is continuing the pregnancy imagery, but turning it into something terrible. This is pure Gothic. The ‘cry’ inside is a kind of parasite but also a vampire – not content with inhabiting *you*, it searches for victims in the night ‘with its hooks’. What a terrible way to conceptualise love. This is what I meant in the introduction about Plath’s artistic generosity. If Confessional poetry is ‘here is what it’s like for me’, then what an act of generosity, for Plath to face up so mercilessly to what it’s like for her, and turn it into such layered, complex art.

And the admission of a lack of control in that second part – the tree is ‘terrified’ of the thing inside it. The perfect artistic move here is to compare the tree’s despair to something ordinary that lives inside of a tree – a bird – and turn it into a kind of monstrous metaphor. I find the sensual, tactile nature of this image genuinely disgusting – inside you is this ‘dark thing’ and you can feel its ‘feathery turnings’.

I also love the clear reference to Emily Dickinson here, and I imagine Plath, with her wicked, dark sense of humour, laughing like a drain when she thought of taking Dickinson’s iconic image of Hope – ‘the thing with feathers that perches in the soul’ – and twisting it so nastily. Hope is the thing with feathers? No – despair is the thing with feathers, and it turns disgustingly inside you like a malign pregnancy. Fucking HELL, Sylvia. If you don’t admit she’s a genius by now then you and I will never truly understand one another.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

Earlier, love was a shadow. Plath continues this image with the clouds – the tree looks up into the sky, as it did earlier with the moon, and it sees ‘the faces of love’ in the clouds. Or rather, it thinks it does, and cannot be sure. Either way, the faces of love are ‘pale irretrievables’. I like how things takes us back to the beginning of the poem where the tree was noticing the persona’s loneliness and loss of love and mocking it. Now, because the tree and persona have become more blended – the person’s ‘dreams’ have possessed and endowed the tree, remember – the tree and the speaker share the same view of love as something shadowy, cloudlike, distant and ephemeral. Perhaps not even worth the effort to ‘agitate my heart’.

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? –

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.

Again, this ending is structurally brilliant because it’s taking us back to the ideas at the beginning of the poem. ‘I know the bottom’, says the tree at the start – I have reached the very limit – and now that is reiterated with ‘I am incapable of more knowledge’. But that’s subtly different, right? ‘I know the bottom’ suggests that there *is* a limit to suffering, and you can reach it. ‘I am incapable of more’ suggests that there may not be a limit to the *suffering*, only a limit to the capacity for it. It’s worse. ‘I have known the bottom’ at least implies an ability to climb back up and an inability for things to get worse. This poem ends with even that uncertainty being taken away from the tree, as it looks for its own face and identity in the ‘tangle’ of its branches and hears again the ‘snaky acids’ of its rustling.

Read the poem again here: Elm | The Poetry Foundation