I shut my eyes and all
the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is
born again.
(I think I made you up
inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out
in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness
gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all
the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you
bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck,
kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up
inside my head.)
God topples from the sky,
hell’s fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan’s
men:
I shut my eyes and all
the world drops dead.
I fancied you’d return
the way you said,
But I grow old and I
forget your name.
(I think I made you up
inside my head.)
I should have loved a
thunderbird instead;
At least when spring
comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all
the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up
inside my head.)
This Spring a friend of
mine asked if I’d write comments on her blog about this early poem of Plath’s,
as my friend Oriana knows I admire the musicality in most of Plath’s poems.
Instead of printing the
poem from the blog, I went to The
Collected Poems (compiled and edited by the late Plath’s husband, poet Ted
Hughes, 1981) but could find it neither in the fifty pre-1956 poems Hughes titled
“Juvenilia” (I prefer to use “early poems”) nor in the “complete list of poems
composed before 1956.” Odd.
After a little research,
I learned that after The Collected Poems
came out in England and America (Both editions were the same.), critics praised
Plath’s work but many had questions about Hughes’ construction of the
book. In particular, The New York Times Book Review called
attention to significant errors in the editing, most notably missing poems,
including “Mad Girl’s Love Song” which had been published in Mademoiselle magazine in 1953.
The mystery slightly
solved (no word why it was absent), I found a copy online and looked at the
poem.
“Mad Girl’s Love Song” is
a villanelle. A perfect villanelle. The structure is flawless but the musicality
is not as strong (though some alliteration and a modest amount of assonance are
present) as in other Plath poems.
But “Mad Girl’s Love
Song” is an intriguing poem which can be read on many levels. The themes of love, betrayal and loss (themes
which recur and plagued her in her later life and writing) are present
here. What remains a question for
interpretation is who, or what, the you is
in Plath’s poem.
Knowing the poem was
written in Plath’s college years, a reader might assume, after a first reading,
that the poem is about a young woman’s desire for a lover, one who ignites her
passion. By the end of the poem, he
abandons her. But the words of the poem
carry too much import to be simply that.
Or perhaps the you is a demon-lover: “I dreamed
that you bewitched me into bed…”
The mention of God, hell, “seraphim and Satan’s men” and the connection
of these to when she shuts her eyes and reality disappears could tie this to a
demon-lover, except that God, etc., also disappear. [I interpret the line “God topples from the
sky, hell fires fade” as the concepts of the righteous/the good being rewarded
and the bad punished also have disappeared.]
I’m not convinced about the demon-lover.
Another interpretation is
the you is Plath’s dead father (the subject of many
of her later poems). Robert Sully in his
excellent online essay, “Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and the Work of
Mourning” writes
The
death of her father when she was eight years old seems to have left her with a
deep psychic wound, a wound that manifested itself in both a profound sorrow
and a deep resentment, as if her father had abandoned and betrayed her.
Sully makes a skillful
argument for his theory about this poem.
In much of Plath’s early
and pre-Ariel poetry, she employs a
double voice, at once being straightforwardly subjective (in which her
situations may be what they seem) but at the same time inferring, while hiding,
a deeper self. For me, there are two
pieces of this deeper self which I believe can be the you of the poem.
While at college, Plath
began in earnest to define herself as a writer and to want this literary life
to be a career. During her junior year
at Smith College, she applied for a guest-editorship at Mademoiselle for the coming summer, a laborious, several-step
contest which required the writing of a criticism and overview of an issue of
the magazine before the first culling of applicants and several writing
assignments before the final cut for twenty guest-editorship slots. At the same time, several of Plath’s poems
were published in Seventeen and Harper’s purchased three poems (two of
them villanelles). At the end of April,
1953, Sylvia Plath received word that she’d won a guest-editorship at Mademoiselle to live in New York City
and work at the magazine for the month of June.
But the social
conventions of the 1950s preached repressive constraints. Young women could have either marriage and a
family or a career but not both. In a
telling passage from Plath’s The Bell Jar
(the novel, about this time in her life, which she finished writing in 1961),
her college-aged heroine explains:
I
also remember Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had
children I would feel differently, I wouldn’t want to write poems any
more. So I began to think maybe it was
true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed,
and afterwards you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian
state.
Plath, like many young
women in the ‘50s, saw marriage and family as irreconcilable with a career.
I believe this conflict
between her desire for a literary career and the rigid gender roles of the
times is a central issue of her poetry.
Also one might argue, given Plath’s self-identification as a writer and
her highly professional attitude toward magazine publication during this
period, that in “Mad Girl’s Love Song” what she dreams about, and for what she
has an intense passion, is for her literary vocation (part of her deep self)
but often during her junior year, she describes herself as “stupid” or a
failure (especially when magazines reject her work) as if her literary skills
have abandoned her or were imaginary in the first place. This desertion is so shattering that it
topples God and deadens the world around her.
That Plath saw herself as
a failure, as inadequate, leads into the second piece of her deeper, often
hidden, self: Plath as the mad girl herself.
As her junior year progressed, with its difficult course load, her
application for a guest-editorship and the submissions of her stories and poems
for possible publication, Plath descended into one of her worst depressions
yet. She wrote that she wanted to kill
herself, felt she was drowning and sensed in her head a “numb, paralyzing
cavern…a mimicking nothingness.” This is
the mad girl who says/writes that when [she] shuts [her] eyes…all the world
drops dead…” and with it her perception of herself: “I think I made you up
inside my head” where there is, according to her letters, solely a “paralyzing
cavern [and]…nothingness.”
Sylvia Plath wrote “Mad
Girl’s Love Song” sometime before her guest-editorship at Mademoiselle. It was
published in the magazine’s August issue, the same August as her breakdown and
suicide attempt in 1953.
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1 comment:
nice poem!
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