26 Nov A Soul Drowned by Her Muse: Sylvia Plath
We are all a combination of darkness and light. The incantations of Sylvia Plath state the conundrum of the soul that comes—and comes again and again— into this world of shining forms. For what? To learn and experience what?
There are those that seem to ride the stormy waves of time effortlessly. These are few. There are others who choose to not ride the waves at all and lay on the shore like beached whales.These are many. There are a handful of others—the courageous artists— who find themselves far out in the ocean at some point in their lives. They see things others don’t see. Hear things others don’t hear. They wade and wait, sing and weep, knowing that being lost at sea is preferable to being near or on the shore of life.
Plath was an unlikely mermaid without fin and gill who slowly drowned in the deep waters. But as she slowly passed across the groundless scape with only sea below her and sky above, she sang of things, monstrous shapes of dark and light that most run to the movies to see while they try not to spill their coke and popcorn. In this sense, Sylvia Plath had tremendous courage. Who of us knows who really won in the end?
Even Sylvia Plath’s poet-lover-husband —Ted Hughes—could not save Sylvia from the darkest parts of herself. He was of the strong poet’s ilk of ancient days: the poet as shaman and channeler of words that are as powerful as bombs with their ability to create and destroy worlds.
Plath once wrote that death was the state where one could finally “forget time”, “forgive life”, and “be at peace.”
I wonder . . . I just wonder that if our souls could see life— not death—as the place where we learn the art of forgetting time, forgiving life, and embodying the energy of peace in action and stillness, that we would have finally solved the riddle of how to to transcend for good all worry and sorrow.
Quotes from Sylvia Plath
“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
– Sylvia Plath
“Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that – I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much – so very much to learn.”
– Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath
“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”
– Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“How we need another soul to cling to.”
– Sylvia Plath
“I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited.”
– Sylvia Plath
“I have none of the selfless love of my mother. I have none of the plodding, practical love.”
– Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I felt my lungs inflate with the onrush of scenery—air, mountains, trees, people. I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy.'”
– Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I’ll ever have.
– Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I’m here.”
– Sylvia Plath
“I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad. Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between.”
– Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I must get my soul back from you; I am killing my flesh without it.”
– Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
– Sylvia Plath
“I talk to God but the sky is empty.”
– Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I’m neurotic as hell. I’ll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.”
– Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“Kiss me and you’ll know how important I am.”
– Sylvia Plath
“Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.”
– Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.”
– Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.”
– Sylvia Plath
“That’s one of the reasons I never wanted to get married. The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”
– Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.”
– Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
– Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
“What did my arms do before they held you?”
– Sylvia Plath
Wikipedia: Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and they lived together first in the United States and then England, having two children together: Frieda and Nicholas. Following a long struggle with depression and a marital separation, Plath committed suicide in 1963. Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy.
Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two collections published: The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel. In 1982, she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for The Collected Poems. She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.
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