Green alleys where we reveled have become
The infernal haunt of demon dangers;

.....

Backward we traveled to reclaim the day
Before we fell. . .

All we find are altars in decay....
Sylvia Plath, "Doom of Exiles," 1954

In Ted Hughes's "Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath's Poems," included in The Art of Sylvia Plath, he refers to several written in 1956-57, calling their vision of "the deathly paradise" a "chilling" one. The comment is haunting, also puzzling: how can "paradise" be "deathly"? Sylvia Plath was, Hughes adds, evolving her own pantheon of deities at the time, her special cosmic vision. Although she was inspired by the works of "primitive painters" from Henri Rousseau to Leonard Baskin, he explains, the vision was an internally felt experience and very much her own.

Paradise is, by definition, not deathly. A concept common to many myths and religions, it is invariably defined as the starting point for humanity, also as the time when human beings possessed the ideal life, including intimate contact with God or gods. In pagan or pre-Christian faiths or stories, the original state of innocence and bliss can be recaptured only by a return: this was often meant literally and forms the cyclical pattern of Oriental religions or pagan philosophies. With the coming of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, paradise, our first home, takes on an eschatological meaning as well. Its idyllic condition waits in some uncertain future time, a going-forward to a place or state won through God's redemptive power and grace. The word "paradise," of Persian origin, means simply "walled garden," and this aspect is retained with its traditional imagery and lavish beauty in many Plath poems as it is in paintings by Rousseau.

A deathly paradise is, however, of darkling, sinister import, presided over by presences divine but daemonic—mythic figures or power, impersonalized archetypes without concern for what they create. Within the walls of such death-gardens ravaging figures sometimes prowl and destroy, like the tigers of Rousseau's mysterious canvases, or the archetypal sow who swills down the very cosmos itself as she wallows in the "walled garden" of her legendary sty in the Plath poem, "Sow." Although they contain by implication humanity's beginnings and endings, death, not life, is the ruling principle of these anti-Edens. Moreover, their inhabitants have no freedom of choice in the old Miltonic sense of having been made "Sufficient to have stood though free to fall." They are human but hapless, at the mercy of deity or deities. The deathly paradise, then, is deathly not only because it affirms death instead of life but also because it swallows up purpose and individuality. Its ultimate affirmation is a negation: the search for an identity means the search for non-identity. The discovery of purpose discloses that there is no purpose.

On this paradox Sylvia Plath's vision is based. Having told us in "The Death of Myth-Making" (1959, uncollected) what our world would be like—dull and mechanized—ruled only by the ugly, limiting vision of Reason and Common Sense, she demonstrates in her poetry how the mythic, in its immemorial pre-Christian, even pre-Graeco-Roman dress of birth and death, seasonal and vegetative changes, moon and sea phases, and archaic concept of beginnings and endings, is the only way to express the cosmos, is, in fact, the only way the cosmos can express itself.

Early uncollected poems, scattered through Aurelia Plath's edition of her daughter's Letters Home, help us trace the poet's developing vision. A fragment about an archaic garden-figure of a boy, significantly described as "eyeless," tells us that his function is to make us forget our own mortality because his frozen, impersonal youth is eternal. "Doom of Exiles" is a "Paradise Lost" in miniscule, an apprehension of "fallen man" in a world without hope of salvation. In "the ramshackle meadow" of "Temper of Time," the snake lurks as a shadow while "apples go/Bad to the core." In the south of France, sketching the walled garden of a nunnery from the outside, Sylvia bursts into tears. "I knew it was so lovely inside," she writes her mother (italics mine). A Rousseaupainting poem, "Pursuit," is animated by "the terrible beauty of death." The panther who symbolizes male sexuality as well as the death-lust has an easy time of it, ravaging the land "Condemned by our ancestral fault"—the lost paradise again. But this poem goes farther. No wall, it says, can keep death out of a paradise already spoiled, penetrated by a power at once fatal and erotically attractive.

These early poems prefigure the twenty-eight or thirty "garden" poems in The Colossus. Among them "Snakecharmer" deserves attention, partly because it is one of the poems Ted Hughes found especially "chilling," and partly because it is a more complete realization of the anti-Edenic vision than is found in earlier works. Inspired by Rousseau's "La Charmeuse de Serpents," "Snakecharmer" reaches back into an archaic world. Turning the painting's female snakecharmer into a male demigod, perhaps a principle of ageless, archetypal function, the poet creates a cultic figure possessing the secrets of life and death, creation and destruction. What this snakecharmer pipes, has forever piped, and will eternally pipe, is a private Eden, expressive of his personal, whimsical vision. He is uninterested in plan or purpose, in gods or men. he pipes a lush, green, watery world into existence, then, as the mood takes him, out of existence again. By his piping he not only creates this world but peoples it—with snakes. It seems at first as if his garden and its occupants exist only so long as he wills them to be.

When the snakecharmer tires, however, his creatures become part of "the simple fabric,/ Of snake-warp, snakeweft"—in other words, there is an idea of snakes, almost in a Platonic sense, a "cloth" without whose prior existence no particular snakes could be given form. Soon, as the piper pipes, his snakes undergo change: they become "Leaf, become eyelid; snake-bodies, bough, breast/Of tree and human." The piper as creater-destroyer is actually piping the human race. This is a pre-Genesis as well as an anti-Genesis concept of paradise and human origins: humanity is not driven forth into the human condition by a stern yet just and compassionate God who is also prepared to redeem His children. Humanity, in this "paradise," is a ripple on a green, watery surface, a flick of a serpent-tongue, an inhalation of a piper's breath. "Eden" is a painted backdrop, cool, silky, witty, amoral, perhaps a cosmic joke. Yet because of that "simple fabric," that pre-existent "idea" of snake-humanity, the vision is no literal "pipe-dream," and its "reality" is what gives the piece its "chilling" quality.

Like "Snakecharmer," the other garden poems of The Colossus present a garden that is off-center, strange, anti-Edenic. It may be a death-garden ("The Manor Garden"), or a garden combining death and the erotic ("The Beekeeper's Daughter"), or a garden without any potential for redemption ("The Burnt-out Spa"), or a garden in which the snake still burns like a jewel and has the last laugh, even though he has been slain by the yardman—a further symbolizing of humankind as incapable of overcoming the "snake," of keeping death out of paradise ("Medallion"). Perhaps it is a garden closed into a superegg, attainable only through peering in—the great Alicein-Wonderland daughter on her knees at the tiny window behind which lives and looks sadly back at her the eye of the dead father ("The Beekeeper's Daughter"). It may be made along the lines of a mechanical model ("The Stones"), or created by or for an "Absolutely alien/Order" ("Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor"). But in each case it is a frightening garden, one which traps without sheltering, rejects even when it entices.

Moreover, whoever controls the garden, however it is described, holds the secrets of origins and ends, of life and death. The presence, the persona, god or demi-god, human or partly human, differs markedly from one poem to the next, but the control is always absolute, and the meaning (or meaninglessness) of each garden is at this power's descretion. As divorced from control of their own destiny as the snake-descended humanity of "Snakecharmer," the "controlled" are set apart in every poem. Sometimes they are voiceless appendages, sometimes helpless pleaders, occasionally welcomers crying out in greeting. But they are always placed in irreconcilable polar opposition to the "controller," or power.

"The Surgeon at 2 A.M." (CW) [For the reader's convenience, and where the source is not otherwise clear from the context, editions of Sylvia Plath's works will be designated in parentheses in the text by symbols as follows: (A) Ariel; (C), The Colossus (American edition); (CW) Crossing the Water; (WT) Winter Trees.] is a rather different poem in this tradition. Again the central metaphor is the garden and its creator-lord. This time the garden is biological, within the body of a particular patient undergoing emergency surgery late at night, afterwards in a ward where many patients lie recovering. The surgeon, the poem's power and persona, first presents a garden in his patient on the table: it is internal, beneath the skin, containing the "bell-bloom" that is the heart, the "tubers and fruits/Oozing their jammy substances," the "lung-tree." Snake-imagery is present, too, but is equated by the surgeon with "orchids" and beauty. "I am so small," says the surgeon, "In comparison with these organs!" But the surgeon is not small in relation to his job: he is playing God. He does not pretend to create human beings: he does re-create them. His skill at rearranging internal parts brings life out of death and saves the bodies in which the souls, invisible, are anchored. Next, orderlies are "wheeling off the patient and putting him to bed in the ward. The surgeon, tagging along yet remote and detached, continues to muse, admiring the results of his craft and seeing himself as divinely inspired "gardener." In a world where all is blue—light, linen, angelic atmosphere—he contemplates, not without considerable satisfaction, the drugged faces that "follow [him] like flowers." The garden-concept has expanded from a particular patient to a ward filled with patients, saved, reborn, turning in concert to the doctor-as-God.

The poem, however, is more complex. Death imagery is introduced at the end. The sleepers are described as lying in "gauze sarcophagi." Blue, hue of heaven, gives way to red, symbol of anguish, wounds, death, vividness, power. "I am the sun," the self-admiring surgeon comments. It is an Eden, this hospital, but an Eden man-made. The very purity (i.e., innocence) is artificial ("The white light . . . hygienic as heaven"). The presiding deity is a physician who saves bodies, not souls. Rebirth is physical, into a world of new teeth, a gall bladder extracted, a limb of flesh replaced by "clean, pink plastic." The soul, that reality which the surgeon posits while admitting he had never "seen" it, is not medicine's province. (Tonight, from the patient who has just undergone surgery, it has temporarily receded, like a ship's light, and stands watch.)

If it was the poet's intention to portray a compassionate figure in her surgeon, she did not succeed. He is detached, cool, admiring the body as "a Roman thing," a superb piece of engineering, and himself as its perfecter. A telling aspect of the poem is that neither on the operating table nor in the ward do patients have "faces" for the surgeon; on the ward, "Grey faces, shuttered by drugs," make an expressionless expanse of uniformity. In its own way, the garden-vision of this poem is fully as chilling as that of "Snakecharmer," its Eden as eerie and as limited. In this garden of the faceless, no seeds of* redemption have been planted. The surgeon is pleased to accept responsibility for the total "garden," but not for the individual blooms. He is also attracted, actually, by human suffering, something he can control and manipulate at will without himself becoming a part of it—an attitude found in several Plath poems. The "Adams" and "Eves" of his "Eden" are described in such terms as "A lump of Chinese white/With seven holes thumbed in" (a head), or "a pathological salami" (tissues awaiting analysis). There is a hint of medical-school student humor here: there is depersonalization, too. And there is an implied irony: why go through surgery only to wake to a world of tubes and plastic, or artificial replacements? Is this our destiny—even our physical destiny? Moreover, the surgeon who equates the "snakes" in his patients with "orchids" and splendor ignores the "snake" in his own soul. A surgeon is not meant to be a father-confessor, but this surgeon's pride is the real serpent in his hospital-garden. His is not the Eden of the caring God, but the Eden of a man who plays at being God, not humble before his powers but floating in exalted detachment ("I am the sun").

There is purpose and order in the surgeon's garden of life and death, but his control over it is startlingly akin to that of the snake-charmer. The surgeon is happy as he "worms" and "hacks"—he revels in lovely red blood. Perhaps he is the moral evocation of the snakecharmer; but for a mere hair which the centuries have drawn he might turn and "hack" his "flowers" to purposeless shreds. He does not, of course (although the theme still appears in "mad doctor" movies): the amorphous shimmer of the snakecharmer's world has been replaced by a clean, decent, ordered vision. But it is a paradise no less deathly in a nonphysical sense, because it is both man-made and man-redeemed. In a way, snakecharmer and surgeon inhabit the same mythic world. The snakecharmer belongs to the primal life before individual consciousness came into being—or became important: the surgeon is part of the Romantic or post-Renaissance world in which human individuality receives an emphasis little known in antiquity (although born with the birth of Christianity). But both personas are controlling figures alienated from their worlds—creators parted from their creatures. Both "garden poems" romanticize the alienated superfigure at the expense of faceless sufferers.

If we take the sequential publication of Sylvia Plath's poetry as a roughly accurate guide to the development of her thought and vision—we know, for instance, that the poems of The Colossus were completed by 1959, that the poems of Crossing the Water follow along in sequence more or less, and that the poems in Winter Trees are contemporaneous with those in Ariel and probably written during the last nine months or so of the poet's life—we note that garden imagery and metaphor grow less frequent. As "the garden" drops away, "the journey" takes it place—anything to get on board that train (ultimately the death-train), to find the "terminus" for which the "suitcases" are packed, to ride that horse, churn with those churning pistons. Such garden poems as do appear are more decadent. For instance, in "Leaving Early" (CW) the garden has moved indoors into a cold, artificial atmosphere charged with crackling hatred. A mysterious "lady" appears, "creator" of a cluttered, degenerate, messy apartment, and later is seen (an aspect quite possibly never intended by the poet) as pathetic victim of the poem's persona in a cosmos of lacerating tensions whose "Eden" is not only deathly but "lousy." The poem, first printed in August 1961, belongs to the same period as "I Am Vertical" (CW), an attempt to cancel the alienating barriers between self and nature, creature and creator. This poem's speaker longs for the death which will make her one with the garden, in this case the totality of Nature: it is restful, pleasant, but impersonal, and purity has no part in it. In "Among the Narcissi" (WT) we sense at once that the recuperating old man has not long to live as he hobbles among his "children," the white-paper flowers. But the garden's true response is not to the man but to an overpowering sense of cosmos or godhead—neutral, alien, fearsome. To it the flowers do obeisance; of it, frail old Percy remains innocently unaware.

It is not until the poem "Tulips" (A) that the metaphors of garden/Eden and purity/innocence cross one another for the first (and almost the last) time. This garden is an "excitable" mass of huge, intense, scarlet flowers, brought to the suffering speaker's hospital room where they oppress and disturb her. She does not simply want to die—that would be easy enough. She now feels that she is ready, worthy, by a process of preparation—"I am a nun now, I have never been so pure." But someone has brought her a red garden, forcing vivid life upon the peaceful death-whiteness of purified readiness. "Tulips" does not only set up a confrontation between life and death but between the faceless and the face-endowed as well, i.e., between the impersonal, nonindividuated, primal, and mythic, and the personal, individual, cared-for and caring, here-and-now. The speaker wishes to be effaced: the tulips will not let her. They not only force existence on the speaker but pain and self-awareness as well.

From this point on, the poems of Ariel pick up speed, merging into the imagery of the gallop, the piston, the mad journey, the agony. One last garden of death ("The Moon and the Yew Tree") presents a quiet graveyard of rest after despair, but is left behind like a way-station receding into distance while the themes of purity and redemption move harder and faster with the striking hooves, the turning wheels, the churn of pistons. "Ariel," "Getting There," "Fever 103°," "Totem," "Years," "Words"—all tell of cosmic trips without destination or even a clear point of origin, divorced from the human and the individualized. All the while the lusted-for goal (for which the self has been packed into its cosmic suitcase) is death—death in the form of sweeping-away of identity, melding into the primal/impersonal.

There are no more gardens (perhaps a touch or two of garden imagery). There are no creator-figures, either, only machines on the move, and one pitiable old queenbee with "wings like torn shawls" who ascends, red and terrible, into the cosmos, taking the poet's self along with her, a lost and defeated identity in a world found more and more alien and alienating. In "Strings," there is a final hint, in the tradition of "Snakecharmer" or "The Surgeon," of a presiding, commanding, alien power who skips in from the mythic and skips out again, leaving a few tangible clues in the form of shed garments, symbolizing the concrete dropping away from the abstract and the continuing possibility of an eternal forming power in the cosmos. In "Edge," almost the last poem Sylvia Plath ever wrote, the themes of purity and the garden cross once again with a power and effect not found in "Tulips" as, in a series of marbleized images, "the woman," now "perfected" by death, folds her children back into herself and makes of her act a self-created garden, the "deathly paradise" come true.

Two things seem clear as we trace through the poetry of Sylvia Plath: she rejects both the primal and the eschatological paradise and seeks redemption elsewhere and in a different form; Edenic imagery and metaphor for the search for purity find different voices. The quest for the garden and the quest for the lost innocence are almost never the same quest. Sometimes her simpler nature poems hold out a kind of hope, resolution, promise, for example, "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" (CW). Certain mother-child poems hint at a similar transforming power: in "Child" (WT) the speaker comes closer to God in the clear beauty of her baby's eye than in any "paradise" (the glimpse is almost at once negated as she also sees in that same pure eye the reflection of the cosmos as "dark/Ceiling without a star"). A deeply mythic distrust of gardens as sources of purity is voiced in "Three Women" (WT): the wife, safely delivered of a healthy son and concerned with how to shield him from the world's pain, asks "How long can I be a wall around my green property?" "Not very long," is the implied reply, and it brings us face to face with the metaphysical basis of Sylvia Plath's distrust of Eden, of the paradise of life.

Her trouble lies, not necessarily in the garden per se, but in the wall around it. Mythic or real, stylized like Pope's or roving into nature like Wordsworth's, gardens are designed to protect, to keep certain things in and other things out. Even though her poetry depicts a world of alienations—man from man, man from nature, man from God (perhaps mother and child form the one abiding exception)—alienation is what Sylvia Plath cries out against most in her poetry. If we live in a garden, or seek one as a perfect spot, we are always closed in with something or from something. If evil has got in, like the tiger in Rousseau's paintings, we are trapped with it: if we are barred from the garden, on the outside, there is no way back in, no way to find the lost innocence. Paradise, ultimately, is deathly for Sylvia Plath, not because it is a source of death but because it promises or threatens to prevent death. Like that mysterious "birthday present" always "waiting," it will not "let down the veil," it keeps its wall up. As under the "bell jar" where one breathes only one's own self-poisoning air, one is trapped in and by a garden, or barred from it, unable to cope with one's sins. This is why many Plath poems express a world without help, refuge, salvation, redemption. For many, paradise is bliss with its confining order: for Sylvia Plath it was not. In one sense a daughter of Eve, the poet in a deeper sense is closer to Persephone who, as Milton wrote in effect, while gathering flowers became herself the flower gathered. Ravishment by Dis was the price Persephone paid for her aimless, primal flowerpicking in which, as John Armstrong writes in The Paradise Myth, the girl surrenders to "the imperative need to counteract the oppressiveness of the idyllic confine. . . ."

A price has to be paid for the refusal of the garden's walls. In Sylvia Plath's poems we see the same price being paid over and over as her poetic voices seek yearned-for purity outside the "idyllic confine." Her personas continually express the cosmology of aliens in the world who are at the same time muffled and inaccessible behind the garden wall. Her poems perpetually ask Alan Watts's questions: How far out can I get? How lost without being utterly lost? No sure answer is given, but there is a rejection of all experiences which may be likened to what the poet called a "shut box." The garden as firstand-final home is shunned. So is the body, another form of trap. In "Getting There" (A), the poet writes, "And I, stepping from this skin/Of old bandages . . . old faces. . . ." In "Apprehensions" (WT) it is the mind that is the prison, and in "Event" (WT) marriage is seen as a crippling confinement, turning into torment the bed once experienced as "paradise." "Last Words" (CW) envisions a "box" as a happy world, pretty sarcophagus with "a face on it," and one is tempted to see this as a clinging to the individual personality, to walls that protect selfhood—until one remembers that in the archaic, nonindividuated world, a magical use was made of objects but not of the body or the personality.

It is an unendurable paradox: Sylvia Plath, who could not tolerate the wall, the constriction, the garden, also felt lost and alien in the expansion of the unconfined universe. Does this mean that death was to her the ultimate expansion, therefore the ultimate restriction—the last, walled, confining garden? One begins to suspect that, despite the frantic need for freedom, motion, and wildness, this was so. The poet always sought purification, redemption in the dynamic, the active; and yet the purifying act, in her poems as in her life, took place in enclosures: the love of the dead father in the sugar-egg; the fruition of motherhood in the dark, closed, blooming womb; death in the cellar-ledge of her mother's basement; death, finally, in the "shut box" of the gas oven, as if her myths of origins and ends were finally translated into realities.

The origin of humanity's sense of being lost and alienated has been well defined by Alan Watts in his Beyond Theology: The Art of Godsmanship:

[Man] is kicked out of Paradise, because Paradise is having a connection—roots in the garden, stem from the branch, current to the light. To be unaware of the connection is to have one's heart in the wrong place—far out in the fruit instead of within, in the tree. It is to feel that one's basic self is isolated within the body's envelope of skin, forgetting that the self is the whole circulating current from which embodiments come and go . . . endless variations upon one theme.

But Sylvia Plath's poems tell us that life in alienation, in perpetual polar tension with "other," is not worth it, and that wall-less life cosmically, mythically blended with the universe is simply not possible. The poet longs to creep back, not into the conventional womb, but into the archaic world of feeling, governed not by morality or stern justice and duty but by an indifferent, amorphous, mysteriously attractive, destructive/life-giving, goddesslike power which reveals no secrets as to our origins and makes no promises as to our ends. But surrender to this deathly paradise even as an act of the imagination gives small comfort. The death-garden may not judge, neither does it save. It may promise rebirth, but not of the individual consciousness. And it appears to be totally without love.

When the garden poems with their controlling figures have faded from her work, one realizes that, because of the sheer number and variety of their personas—sacred or secular, human or daemonic, male or female—no one accepted figure, power, or control exists. Even the moon, possibly the greatest single deity-figure, only occasionally fulfills the controlling function, and her presence, too, is always charged with ambiguity since, like those dark mother-goddesses of primal times, she presents a fearsome combination of the destructive and the maternal. It begins to appear as if setting in motion a world and its inhabitants and ordering its meaning and their end is a game at which any number may play. It comes as no surprise when Sylvia Plath, no longer speaking through some persona but in a voice all too patently and painfully her own, decides to undertake the task herself.

Therefore in "Edge," written a day or so before her death, she creates her own, new myth. In the only other poem except "Tulips" in which images of purity cross those of the garden, the persona folds in upon herself and into herself (taking her children with her) and completes rites of purification which paradoxically convert self and children into a sealed garden, where neither hope, life, nor redress bloom and flourish, yet where a strange "perfection" waits. "Edge" states that the only real "journey" is a moveless, static in-folding; the only garden the last, not the lost one. The marbleized Greek necessity of the poem's vision refuses to affirm the infinite value of human life or the existence of the divine and the transforming in the universe. "Edge" does away with the alien power of "other," but at a terrible cost. The primal and/or eschatological meaning of "garden" is denied, and the poetic persona becomes the garden, self-created. Self is the wall, the idol and monument, the creator, end, and aim of this garden. In its concept of the ultimate "home," "Edge" offers us the most "chilling" definition of "the deathly paradise," with the self as controlling deity, not from hubris but from the pathos of utter despair, in a world which can offer no place "to get to."