Sylvia Plath

For being my favorite writer, I had limited knowledge of the American poet whose poems not only are soaked in allusions and darkness, but whose life reflects all of it as well. Sylvia Plath, with a “uniquely intense” interest in the Holocaust, ended her life by putting her head in a gas oven. This coincidental darkness is the spine in her language. The dreadful irony of her life that shines in her work also commanded her life. The influence that extends from this is what made me decide to use her and her work for this project. As a writer, I have also been influenced in many other ways and getting this opportunity to know the life she led and those around her, leads me to admiration for the writer I have already been trying to frame my work around.
My poem that for now I am titling “Honeycomb”, for it is of course not done, is my interpretation of Plath’s work and the life she lead surrounding it. More specifically, it is a reflection on the theme of bee’s that continuously shows up in her work. Because of the research I did, I found that Plath’s father, Otto Plath, had a special interest in bees. When he died, Plath was eight years old and the sorrow and anger that consumed her was a direct catalyst to many of her issues later on in life. The torn relationship she had with her father was an undeniable influence for all of her work, therefore in my work, I decided to use the concept of bees and torn relationships.
Along with my research of Plath, her relationships, and her work, I also did a bit of research in beekeeping. I tried to convey the terms used in beekeeping and bees in the poem written. “Here, again, in your solitary apiary” (1). In her work Plath does this as well. “The white hive is snug as a virgin/sealing off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming” (34-5, The Bee Meeting). Plath does this with many of her poems, using extensive knowledge and history as a factor. “I made a model of you, /A man in black with a Meinkampf look” (64-5, Daddy). In this fashion, she uses language to coordinate the rest of the knowledge she gives the reader. In this fashion, I achieved the same.
Along with the bee and beekeeping connotations, I used the second person narrative that Plath is famous for. “I continue to suck you dry/for that warmth of honey/oozing down the stinger slit of my throat/as you play standby” (8-11). This targeted audience is the language that Plath used to target the relationships she struggled and dealt with, such as with her father and husband, Ted Hughes. “If the moon smiled, she would resemble you” (1, The Rival).
That downward spiraling relationship with Hughes is portrayed in many of Plath’s poems. “The singeing fury of his fur; /His kisses parch, each paw’s a briar” (18-9, Pursuit) and the adultery committed by Hughes also is what plagued her to write. “I think that my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have,” she is quoted to say in an interview with Peter Orr.
These experiences, the death of her father, the divorce of her husband and the miscarriages that troubled her for years all reflect the language she used in her work. To reflect her, I used these same concepts. Also, I used the literal language she used in her poems with words such as “solitary”, “beekeeper”, and “unaffected”. Such terms are used in frequently in her work and such language reflects her.
Living her life through her work and vice versa, the only way to transform the research into a creative piece of my own was to directly use her life and experiences in the same ways she used it, though I cannot say that it was the same outcome, only influenced and reflected. “Oh, satisfaction! I don't think I could live without it. It's like water or bread, or something absolutely essential to me. I find myself absolutely fulfilled when I have written a poem, when I'm writing one. Having written one, then you fall away very rapidly from having been a poet to becoming a sort of poet in rest, which isn't the same thing at all. But I think the actual experience of writing a poem is a magnificent one.”