Hours Blue and Eternal: Two late poems of Sylvia Plath

'Lady Lazarus' and 'Edge': A Brief Reflection

WRITING in 'Lady Lazarus' (1962), Sylvia Plath reflects that -

"Dying

Is an art, like everything else,

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I've a call."

Plath sees all of life as a creative medium, dying no less significant a component of that “existential performance”. Death, like life, must not solely be experienced, but crafted (‘…an art…’). Death is not a moment but a process – mortality is something of Plath’s volition (‘I do it…’) rather than a circumstance beyond her control. She dictates its horrors (‘I do it…feels like hell’), yet even amid that prescribed barbarism, her objective is excellence (‘…exceptionally well’). Here, Plath aligns herself with death, opportunistically penning her own eulogy, in which she openly confronts that fate, rather than pathotically submitting to it. Her talk of ‘artistry’ sees her creatively taming rather than bowing down to death, authoring a poetic testimony in which the prospect of her mortality is intimated through expressive resolve rather than appeals for sympathy.

For Plath, death, ever the muse, never the nemesis, constitutes the thematic energy that will sustain her Being, her poetic legacy. If death is a ‘call’, sacrifice her vocation, then the role of her poetry must be to convey her story through that autobiographical application, not merely confirm her literary vitality. Such a view is at work in 'Edge', written six days before the poet lost her battle with depression –

"The woman is perfected.

Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment…"

Whereas the wholly dispassionate respondent to these opening lines would view Plath as immersed in a hopelessly misguided communion with Dante’s Lion, the dreaded emblem of Pride, the triumphalist Plath retorts with a qualitative treatment of death – the body of the ‘perfected woman’ sees her located in a subliminal meritocracy, the fact of her mortality apparently peripheral to the glee of achievement.

Within the breathtaking power of these stanzas, death is but a companion piece to Plath’s broader ideal of excellence pervading not merely life but mortality itself – whatever torment she may ultimately feel, it is incorrigibly bound up with her insatiable pursuit of creative distinction. Her life – her experiences, output and death – are uniformly devoted to her Being, her posthumous inventive heritage, to a liberating exhibition of suffering (the ‘art of dying’), its anguish offset by the belief that even fate can feed her striving for brilliance. Mortality is a necessary yet cathartic evil on the path to unifying tragedy and genius. For Plath, the struggle of existence was seemingly consoled by the drama of her literary life, the magnetic and curiously enticing horror of death empirically, and, here, poetically, bound up with Being, the magnificent and abiding curtain call in her theatre of suicide.

Following Plath’s final ‘blue hour’, Ted Hughes wrote to a college friend of Sylvia’s, dolefully remarking

"That’s the end of my life. The rest is posthumous"

Scarcely could such an epitaph have been more apt. What he would now struggle with was that for which Plath had yearned, but which she could only realise in death – the fragility of her existence sequeled by the attention, the following, the Being, that would enamour the story of her life with a new and inexorable meaning.

"You are crucified by your own limitations"

observed a youthful Plath in her Journal. Lamenting the abject schism between her capacities and her ambitions, little could she have known that her ‘crucifixion’, the harsh reality of her creative boundaries, would itself be the foundation upon which posterity would build her discipleship.