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Essay
"I write as if an eye were upon me": Sylvia Plath as Muse
"I write as if an eye were upon me." When Sylvia Plath recorded this assessment of herself in 1959, she was bemoaning the cramping self-consciousness that continued to render her short fiction stiff and her early poetry ornate and mannered, not yet truly her own. But writing with an eye upon herself, turning her self-consciousness into a scalpel, was also her genius. "Eyes pulled up like roots" is how poet Anne Carson managed to capture Sylvia Plath in a single, dead-on line.
I write as if an eye were upon me. This very statement led me to spend my last three years, unexpectedly, rooting around in the head of and trying to see through the eyes of Sylvia Plath. An apple orchard, a hive of bees, a house near a zoo, and the sound of a woman crying, haunted by the scent of apples rotting in an orchard -- these were the seemingly random, inconsequential details that my mind snagged upon when I took a leave from my job in 1999 to get serious about my first novel, a biographical project I'd been researching for an embarrassingly long time. But between September and November of my leave, I'd written exactly one awkward page; by Thanksgiving merely sitting at my desk made me break into a sweat. It was then that I remembered, vaguely, a quote about writer's block that I'd read years before in The Journals of Sylvia Plath. To console and distract myself I went looking for my old paperback copy of the journals in my bookshelves, found it, and weirdly the book opened right to the line I'd remembered: page 315, "I write as if an eye were upon me." Suddenly I knew whose eye was upon me: it was Sylvia Plath's.
I had never had any interest or intention of writing at length about Plath. Given the breadth of critical coverage about her work and her own voluminous and prescient assessments of herself, fictional and not, I had assumed there was nothing more to be written. But Plath -- the poet, not the pop icon -- remained a private, admired voice in my literary sanctum, a relationship begun when I was pregnant with my first child and discovered her profoundly acute poems about motherhood: I took her Pulitzer-prize winning Collected Poems and Linda Wagner-Martin's biography with me to the hospital when I gave birth. Reading Plath's poetry while nursing my infant son is one of my indelible memories of early motherhood. Over the years -- that first baby of mine is now fourteen -- I suppose I read a lot of Plath, and as much or more Plath criticism and biography. What I gained as a reader wasn't something I could quantify, and I didn't think I needed to. My relationship to Plath was avocational and interior, akin to the scribbled baseball statistics I find season after season in my husband's bedside table.
But for some reason rereading the "eye" quote made me realize that the detailed historical research I'd been conducting on this other, ill-fated book project was some sort of subconscious cover for something -- I didn't know what -- about Sylvia Plath. All of my subterranean knowledge of Plath, everything I'd ever read of her, or about her, came bubbling up from the depths and splashed at the surface. It was her apple orchard, her hive of bees, her house near the zoo. Her voice, crying. I was sure that she could smell the apples rotting in her orchard from the window in her study -- an idea that was confirmed a year and a half later, when I found her brother Warren's1961 hand-drawn map of Court Green, the Devonshire manor house Plath and Ted Hughes purchased that year, in the Plath archives at Indiana University's Lilly Library.
In November 1999, I wasn't particularly familiar with the Ariel poems as a discrete collection; I'd only read them within the chronology of the Collected Poems, which I went back to as if compelled. I reread Hughes' introduction, in which he mentions Plath's original order for Ariel and Other Poems -- to this day, never published as she intended -- and I realized I couldn't sleep until I had read the poems in the order she'd wanted them read. I spent a couple of hours Xeroxing pages; I put the forty-one poems in a binder in their proper Plathian order. When I read her version of Ariel, the story it told was as vivid to me as if I'd made it up myself. I sat back down at my desk, and within forty-eight hours (domestic chaos reigning, unchecked, all around me), I had a detailed outline for forty-one chapters, one chapter per poem, and knew that the whole was called Wintering, after the final poem in Plath's collection. It was the story of her Ariel. It unfurled in one piece, like a bolt of cloth.
The Sylvia Plath who set her eye upon me at that time was also the Plath who immediately began crashing my dream life, that very first week appearing, her back to me so I only knew her by her long glossy hair and her poise in her camel's hair skirt, to lead me through a shadowy stone building, over pitching slabs of concrete, and out onto a grassy hilltop, jangling keys in her elegant hand, heading for a car that seemed to perch at the edge of the world, wooded valleys sloping away below. Where was she taking me and the little girl (her child self? Mine? One of our two daughters?) whose hand I held? I didn't know, but I wanted to find out.
Now, I want to take a step back to consider the word "muse" and the idea it shelters. "Muse" has its origins in Greek, meaning "to remember" or "the one who remembers." It is our source for the words "museum" and "musical" -- the places for evocation of the nine goddesses of the arts, the sciences, and the humanities, and the means by which these arts could create inspiration, culture and harmony in human life: being "musical" in the fullest sense. Culture was, of course, translated during ancient times largely by storytelling and poetry, often with musical accompaniment. Before poets or storytellers would recite their work, it was customary for them to invoke the inspiration and protection of the muses. Memory, back then, was a sacred faculty, the portal through which we could re-collect experience and human reality. Given this understanding, it is no surprise that the Greek word for truth means, literally, "not forgetting."
Sacred to the nine Muses themselves were the archetypes of mountains, groves, and waters, places revered by humans, in turn, for the presence of divine inspiration. Pegasus, the winged horse, belonged to the Muses, a gift of Athena, and the swan was their holy bird. The Academus, one of their sacred groves, was where Plato held his seminars, which had the dual purpose of education and worship of the beneficent Muses.
In her new book The Lives of the Muses, the critic and novelist Francine Prose looks at nine examples of a more modern interpretation of the muse concept -- that being women who embodied inspiration to the artists who loved them -- but in doing so Prose recalls the words of Robert Graves from his book The White Goddess, which was, as we know, hugely influential to Plath and Ted Hughes in their development as artists.
"Just the thought of the muse," Prose tells us, "can trigger a related compulsion -- the urgent need to explain why a woman can never hope to graduate from muse to artist: 'She is either Muse or she is nothing,' wrote Graves. 'This is not to say that a woman should refrain from writing poems; only, that she should write as a woman, not as an honorary man . . . It is the imitation of male poetry that causes the false ring in the work of almost all women poets. A woman who concerns herself with poetry shoud, I believe, either be a silent Muse and inspire the poets by her womanly presence . . . or the Muse in the complete sense . . . impartial, loving, severe, wise.'" Despite her earlier habits of looking for external poetic direction -- from her literary idols and most significantly from her husband -- by 1962, Sylvia Plath was ready not just for enormity, but for audacity: she would be her own muse.
Perhaps the obvious comparisons are merely coincidental, but Plath was certainly aware of the attributes of the nine Muses. Was she flying on Pegasus when she recognized on her birthday forty years ago that she was "at one with the drive" as she wrote the poem "Ariel" as her children slept? Did she think of the Muses and their love of water and harmony when she wrote "Ocean 1212W," her evocation of the end of her seaside childhood, which had been "a beautiful fusion with the things of this world"? She wrote, too, in "Ocean 1212W," that the pride of mountains terrified her, that the stillness of hills she found stifling. Is it purely coincidence that most of the places that gave dramatic shape to her personal life -- Smith College, her home in Devonshire, her last neighborhood in London, even Heptonstall in Yorkshire, where she is buried, are all situated either at the crest of hills or at their foot, from which she could see the world unfolding beneath her, or feel herself humbled below?
It was during her time in the groves of academe at Smith that Plath first nearly lost her grip on life; but it was in the elbow of an apple tree in her Wellesley back yard where the young Sylvia Plath first developed her love of the act of writing, of invoking the muse within herself. And later, when she shrugged off the "dead hands, dead stringencies" of exterior muses in the autumn of 1962, she found her inspiration in recognizing that the eye upon her was her own, watching herself as she experienced the terror and loneliness and elation and defiance she was left with. "This is my property" she proclaimed of her personal sacred grove of 72 apple trees at Court Green, where her bees, like herself -- resourceful, industrious, womanly, having "got rid of the men" -- were preparing for the winter ahead.
There is another hill that figures in Sylvia Plath's life in the fall of 1962, and that is Cawsand Hill, which looms 2000 feet over the tiny village of Belstone at the northern edge of Dartmoor, less than three miles from Court Green and a short ride over sheep tracks from Corsecombe, where Plath took weekly riding lessons from a Miss Redwood for three months, from late August until December 1, 1962. Cawsand Hill is the local destination for riders in northern Dartmoor, and though it is highly unlikely that Plath ever rode there alone, she would have known from her neighbors and other riders that from its summit could be seen the Devon landscape pouring all below, and that on a nearby hill could be seen a locally famous Bronze Age stone circle known as the "Nine Muses" or "Nine Maidens" -- turned to stone, legend has it, for singing and dancing when they should have been inspiring others through their womanly presence at church. It is probable that Plath used Cawsand Hill as the setting for "Sheep in Fog," begun at Court Green, like all but six of the forty-one poems she chose for inclusion in her Ariel manuscript.
"Sheep in Fog" raises the question, did she really make it to the top of Cawsand Hill, to the place called "The Beacon" on ordnance maps but known locally as "The Graveyard," a triple stone row that marks a lonely, collapsed granite gravesite? Or is the only Beacon she knew the one that Hughes' parents called home, just out of sight of the cemetery in Heptonstall's churchyard? Plath revised the drafted ending of "Sheep in Fog" just two weeks before her death in London, where she lived at the base of Primrose Hill; her earlier faith in the mild faces of Dartmoor sheep vanishes then, replaced by the eery, mournful image of the fields she could see below threatening "To let me through to a heaven/Starless and fatherless, a dark water" -- a dramatically different tone than the one she maintained at the end of the Ariel manuscript, when at "Wintering"'s close Plath's speaker makes a declaration that carries the urgent faith of a prayer, a hard-won declaration of determined survival: "The bees are flying. They taste the spring." Ted Hughes himself admitted that Plath's original plan for Ariel determined that it start with the word "love" and end with the word "spring"; even so, citing a variety of reasons, after her suicide he radically changed not just the order but the selection of poems, inserting the final handful of bleak, chilling poems that Plath had held back as products of a different kind of creative vision, but that, placed within the context of Ariel, succeeded in galvanizing the myth of her inevitable self destruction. It is Hughes' vision of Ariel that we all know: a story of blistering, satisfied self immolation. Plath's own vision, the story of a woman's courageous trajectory toward a personal renaissance, a willed triumph against heartbreak and despair, has remained as dormant and silent as the wintering hive and gladioli bulbs and rosebushes of her poem.
It was eighteen months after I first felt Sylvia Plath's eye upon me -- six months after returning from a research trip to London, Devon, and Yorkshire, all places I'd never been before -- that I made sense of my first, early dream of travelling with Plath. To paraphrase Keats, like Adam's dream, I awoke and found it truth: for the first time I realized that the stone building the dream-Plath had led me through was the 19th century Church of St. Thomas the Apostle in Heptonstall, where her funeral had taken place in February 1963. In the dream, we entered through the right transept porch, through the door where caskets are carried to the altar, followed by mourners. We crossed the transept, through guttering candlelight, and exited the left porch, passing over the heaving old gravestones of Yorkshire granite, abutted end to end by regional custom, and into the newer, unmowed cemetery where Plath is buried at the summit of the hilltop village. It was spring in my dream, I realized finally, not snowy and cold as it had been at the time of her death, and the hillside was lushly green with grass, the sky blue and open to the surrounding bruisy moors we could see beyond the car. In the dream, the implacable stone boundaries of the cemetery were erased, as were all the graves. Still I didn't know where the dream-Sylvia was taking me, but it finally made sense: the keys in her hand, her determined stride toward her car waiting at the crest of the hill. Sylvia Plath was driving, and I was along for the ride.
The little girl, I think, who held my hand, was neither Sylvia herself, nor me, nor either of our two daughters. She was, instead, the embodiment of a trust, the "child" of our mutual creation, a product of artistic inspiration that couldn't exist without the two of us working in harmony. Forty years down the road, the truth of Plath's impulse for her Ariel needed a "one who remembers" -- a muse. She was steering us beyond that cemetery, that spring-bright hillside, but it was my job to tell the story.
--Kate Moses
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Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath
About Wintering
