Ted Hughes writes of Sylvia Plath: “The world of her poetry is one of emblematic visionary events, mathematical symmetries, clairvoyance and metamorphoses. Her poetry escapes ordinary analysis in the way clairvoyance and mediumship do: her psychic gifts, at almost any time, were strong enough to make her frequently wish to be rid of them.”¹ Sylvia Plath herself testified to having had experiences that could not be given a rational, materialistic explanation. Visiting Yeats's Tower at Ballylee in Ireland in September 1962 she “had the uncanny feeling [she] had got in touch with Yeats' spirit,” she wrote.² Once in January 1956, on a visit to Vence in southern France, she had, as she noted in her journal, a “mystic vision” of dying and coming to new life through the power of love.³ She also had an intense experience of the Matisse Chapel, an event she described on a postcard sent to her mother on January 7, 1956 (LH 203-05). She had a vision of beauty, a beauty that had an aura of the sacred about it, especially since a kindly Mother Superior, in an act of particular understanding and gentleness, made the chapel accessible to Sylvia as a personal favor. Her gratefulness—“Vous êtes si gentille”—was acknowledged by the nun with a smile and the words: “C'est la miséricorde de Dieu.” “It was,” Sylvia concluded (LH 205).

Already as an adolescent Plath seems to have had intimations of insights that went beyond the rational. Shortly before entering Smith College she put down in her diary: “There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it” (J 11). She ended this entry, somewhat in the vein of an eager teen-ager: “Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I'll laugh. And then I'll know what life is” (J 12).

We have also been told about Plath's experiments at the Ouija board together with Ted Hughes. She drew on this interest in two poems: “Ouija” and “Dialogue Over a Ouija Board: A Verse Dialogue.”⁴ From a reading of these poems it is hard to know just how seriously she took such occult seances.⁵ Even before Ted Hughes brought these sessions into her life, she had toyed with ideas about phenomena such as “scientific mysticism, probability in foreknowledge in cards, hypnotism, levitation, Blake” (J 126). Hughes taught her about horoscopes (LH 242), and she pursued this line later on. In a journal entry for February 9, 1958, she states: “I must meantime, this June beginning, learn about planets and horoscopes to be in the proper starred house: I'll wish I had learned if I don't: tarot pack, too. Maybe I should stay alone, unparalyzed, and work myself into mystic and clairvoyant trances” (J 191).

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In her journals and letters, then, Plath recorded her desire to know transcendence in its many guises. In her poetry she dramatized such yearnings in the form of visionary events with various kinds of emblematic significance. As essential parts of the poems' story-lines they lead to climactic moments of beauty, triumph, and ecstasy, or the texts formulate passionate hopes and longings for such moments. As a young woman she dreamed of being carried away by an all-consuming experience of love; she had an “enormous desire” to give love, she asserted (LH 223). Violent language served to define such total abandon: “I just have to ‘give out’ and feel smothered. …” Her description of Ted Hughes, shortly after their “cataclysmic” first encounter at a party in Cambridge,⁶ is rapturous: he—and her meeting him—represent “something most miraculous and thundering and terrifying” (LH 234). But love and sexual passion as means of reaching transcendence are rare subjects in her poetry. “Pursuit” (CP 22-23), a poem written immediately after that first meeting with Ted Hughes, is one of her few poems focusing on love between man and woman. Plath said that she was herself “hypnotized” by this poem (LH 222). Here love and lover appear in the shape of a panther who “stalks” the female persona “down.” Words like “aflame,” “lordly,” and “insatiate” characterize this overpowering, devastating force. Pursuer and pursued act out a fearful game. The female persona confesses:

I hurl my heart to halt his pace,
          To quench his thirst I squander blood;
          He eats, and still his need seeks food,
Compels a total sacrifice.

The outcome is uncertain but threatening: “The panther's tread is on the stairs, / Coming up and up the stairs.” Stronger than the desire for sexual ecstasy is, in my reading, fear of completely losing one's self to the tyrannous power of sex.

In Plath's early works there are other and, so it seems, more immediate needs that have been given artistic form. There is the yearning and the waiting for a vision; this may be a vision of beauty, of inspiration, perhaps of the divine. In “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” (CP 56-57), the last poem assigned to the year 1956 in Collected Poems, we encounter an early example of her dramatizations of a “visionary event.” The speaker adopts a humble attitude in her observation of nature. We recognize one of the poet's favorite landscapes; here it is a dull, grey, ordinary scene, modestly adorned with a random black rook which performs its daily activities—“[a]rranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain”—unconcerned about the human observer. The scene is seemingly without design or any deep meaning, and the observer certainly does not “expect a miracle / Or an accident” which might add color or structure and perhaps even an inkling of purpose to the sight. She admits to herself that she “desire[s], / Occasionally, some backtalk / From the mute sky,” but she soberly refuses to complain about unresponsive nature. She has, though, a lingering, faint hope that “[a] certain minor light may still / Lean incandescent // Out of kitchen table or chair.” She is ready to interpret such light from above as the token of a willingness to “hallow” an unremarkable scene and an “inconsequent” moment in a human being's life. This might be a gift of “largesse, honor, / One might say love.” “Wary,” “skeptical,” “ignorant,” these words announce the speaker's attitude as she is waiting for such a sign, but wait she does, for she is “politic” enough to be ready for whatever “fire,” “light,” or “burning” that may “seize [her] senses, haul / [Her] eyelids up. …”

It comes as a surprise to the reader to learn, near the end of the poem, how serious the situation is for the speaker: she longs to stave off “fear / Of total neutrality.” The tone of the poem has become less ordinary and factual. A religious vocabularly was introduced early by the word “miracle,” but its possibility, perhaps even its existence, was denied. “Light,” “celestial,” “hallowing,” and “angel,” all of these words have up till the very end been partly hidden, as it were, by the surface of the ordinary and the factual. The speaker knows that a simple thing like a rook “[o]rdering its black feathers” can bring forth a certain light and grant her a “brief respite” from her fear of blankness; it has apparently happened before. At the close of the scene and its accompanying inner monologue, the speaker affirms the reality of miracles, at the same time adding a safeguarding afterthought. The final note, expressed in lines of haunting beauty, is marked by hope and confidence:

. … Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.

In this poem, then, with its patient waiting for a “miracle,” the poet gives voice to a desire for an unspecified kind of visionary event. In my reading the gift sought is an infusion of creative inspiration brought about by a “trick” of natural beauty. The religious vocabularly adds a spiritual dimension to this longing. In the poet's view, the gift is of a divine nature and significance, giving meaning to an artist's life.

Read in the context of Plath's development as a poet, this poem with its humble speaker, who makes herself ready to receive a gift of inspiration in a moment “hallowed” by a certain vision of light, suggests an awareness of the need to give up the stance of the self-reliant virtuoso and instead, with a naked face and mind, open oneself to creative influences, in this instance through the beauty and quiet drama of nature.

In two related poems also written in 1956, “On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad” (CP 65-66) and “On the Plethora of Dryads” (CP 67-68),⁷ Plath criticizes the virtuoso stance in a lighthearted manner. The former poem is a self-ironical treatment of an intellectual artist's attempt to force nature to cooperate in the creation of beauty. But nature does not obey by the laws of intellect and order. Instead of being gloriously transformed into a lovely nymph, the speaker's “damn scrupulous” tree “stays tree.” In “On the Plethora of Dryads” the artist-speaker starts out by making a similar mistake. Aiming for “a quintessential beauty” she believes that by focusing all her efforts, like an ascetic, on her object—the perfect Tree—she can attain an understanding of nature and perceive “visionary lightnings.” But only by surrendering her senses to disorderly, imperfect nature is she granted a chance to transcend the trivial and the ordinary, and thereby spot the seductive dryads. The fine frenzy of creativity is gained, not through the intellect nor through a pretentious belief in some kind of divine inspiration, but through the senses.

There were other early poems, set in an inspiring landscape, where Plath succeeded in creating a scene and a plot that convincingly celebrate a visionary event. In “The Great Carbuncle” (CP 72-73) she uses a religious vocabulary to describe a brief moment of transcendence experienced by wanderers in a moor landscape. The title's “carbuncle” alludes to a bright-red jewel, but more importantly it brings to mind the drops of blood that according to legend fell from the crucified Christ's body into the Holy Grail; other religious terms are “transfiguring,” “pilgrims,” and “angels.” The poem tells how wanderers and landscapes become bathed in an extraordinary light.⁸ To the wanderers it is as if their bodies are “transfigured”; they become weightless, and hands and faces turn “[l]ucent as porcelain.” These “pilgrims” are drawn toward the mysterious source of the light, emanating from a burning red sun in the likeness of a carbuncle. This great jewel is

          shown often,
Never given; hidden, yet
Simultaneously seen
On moor-top, at sea-bottom,
Knowable only by light
Other than noon, than moon, stars—

Although this poem draws on a religious vocabulary, with the allusion to the blood of a crucified Christ as its central symbol, the miracle it dramatizes does not seem to be of an orthodox, Christian kind. Rather it is a pagan one which through the magic of nature makes the human being part of a transcendental existence. What this moment of transcendence achieves may be a forgetting of an earthbound self, a self which is at home among earthbound tables and chairs. To the present reader “The Great Carbuncle” suggests the poet's desire for an otherworldly experience, which is not necessarily religious but rather spiritual-esthetic and which is a means to rise above the mundane and the humdrum. Read in the context of poems like “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” the miraculous light of the carbuncle signifies creative inspiration of a high order.

The idea of a transfiguring moment continued to preoccupy the poet. “On the Decline of Oracles” (CP 78) is a—somewhat lame—complaint over the triviality of today's visions, compared to those of a past, heroic age. This regret was apparently a heartfelt one on Plath's part, for, as Ted Hughes testifies in his comment on this poem, she “frequently mentioned flashes of prescience—always about something unimportant” (CP 287). Plath's antidote to triviality was the magic of art. In “Snakecharmer” (CP 78), for example, the creative artist has the power to perform miracles; they may be illusions, but they exist as long as the artist cares to call them forth from his instrument.

In some poems the moment of transcendence appears as a state of ecstasy or euphoria. In “Lorelei” (CP 94–95) this feeling is inseparable from a death wish. The speaker is tempted by the song of the Lorelei sirens, her “sisters,” to join them deep down. What they offer is a form of “drunkenness,” related to darkness and death, and their world is “more full and clear // Than can be.” The ecstasy they are willing to share is a means for the speaker to get away from an existence that is too “well-steered,” too “balanced,” too “mundane.” The poem ends by the speaker welcoming the sirens' invitation:

O river, I see drifting
Deep in your flux of silver
Those great goddesses of peace.
Stone, stone, ferry me down there.

Thus, in this poem, the transcendence is something wished for, not actually achieved, but clearly imaged as ecstasy.

In his note to “Lorelei” the editor glosses the relationship between “drunkenness” and ecstasy that the poet establishes here. She drew on facts presented by the deep-sea explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau about the euphoria felt by divers suffering from oxygen shortage. In such a “euphoric, visionary” state divers are apt to “blissfully forget all precautions and danger” (CP 287). When Plath wrote the poem (in July 1958) the idea of the death wish appealed to her as a subject for poetry (J 246). Less than a year later she dismissed the poems she had written while she was teaching at Smith College (1957–58): they were all “miserable death wishes” (J 302). She may have included “Lorelei” as well in her sweeping condemnation, for already in December 1958 she commented somewhat condescendingly on “Lorelei” and other poems as “all my romantic lyricals” (J 275).

Poems written in the years 1959 and 1960 dramatize no striking “visionary events.” In “Blackberrying” (CP 168–69), written in 1961, the scene is being prepared for such a moment, but it is not realized in the way the reader is led to expect. This is another of Plath's “psychic landscapes,” that is, scenes where the human observer interprets natural forms, colors, and sounds as messages to be received by her. By anthropomorphizing nature the personae of such poems seek to arrive at an idea of their own identity and place in the world.

Walking down a blackberry lane the persona of this poem responds ambiguously to nature's signs and gestures. She is presented as a naively self-centered person, and when the blue-red juice of the berries colors her hands, she imagines that this is a token of sisterhood, a token that is both flattering and slightly disturbing to her. “I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me,” she thinks. But under a seemingly composed outward appearance the speaker's inmost attention is directed elsewhere. She is listening for the distant sea and is vaguely aware of it “[s]omewhere at the end” of the blackberry lane. Her longing for it is masked by a put-on matter-of-factness in an effort to cope with inevitable lack and loss: “I do not think the sea will appear at all.” This Prufrockian evasion is meant to fortify the “child” against disappointment. She takes in other elements of the scene—the sounds, the movements and colors of birds, and the colors of berries and meadows. None of these bring her joy or a sense of beauty.

But then the scene changes: near the end of the lane her face is suddenly “slapped” by a gush of wind. A sheep path takes her down to the tip of a hill, where the longed-for view of the sea meets her eye. But this is not a grand vision of harmonious beauty; what she sees is “nothing, nothing but a great space” of color and sound. Earlier in the poem colors have been rich: berries are “ebon”-colored, their juices “blue-red,” and bellies of flies are “blue-green.” But colors associated with the land are tinged with putrefaction (“one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies”). The colors of the sea, however, are uncompromisingly stark—white and pewter-grey. From being unpleasant (“cacophonous”), sounds have become harsher and more insistent (“beating, beating”). But the sea has a redeeming aspect in that the vision it renders recalls that of art: lights and sounds of this enormous space resemble those of the silversmith hammering at an “intractable” material in order to shape it into art.

It seems inevitable that readings of this poem should end up in statements about “dread,” “meaninglessness,” “emptiness,” and “void or nothingness.”⁹ There are indeed lots of negations in the text, for example words like “nobody,” “nothing,” “not,” and “protesting.” And the final view of the sea calls forth no triumphant cries of “Thalassa! Thalassa!” the way the Greek legionaries greeted the sea on their return from war inland. Nevertheless I interpret the poem in a less “negative” way. In my reading the speaker does reach her goal: she is granted a vision of the sea. It is true that the vision is bleak, but it changes her frame of mind and perhaps even her personality. The language shrewdly mirrors her character: the epithets “dumb” and “fat” that she applies to the berries suggest her own, slightly contemptuous attitude to nature, as does the prosaic image of the birds which look like “[b]its of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.” Her self-centeredness is aptly reflected in the idea of berries “accommodating” themselves to her milkbottle by “flattening their sides.” At the end of the scene she forgets about herself, at least for a moment, and surrenders to a source of greatness and power totally alien to herself. The egocentric, childish person that she was is now forced to acknowledge the naked truth: what lies ahead of her is a grim reality that she will have to face. The closing image of the silversmith hints at a way for the speaker to cope with this seemingly unresponsive space: to try to come to terms with it like—and as—an artist who does not fear seeming emptiness and harshness. Her longing has not brought her to an uplifting “visionary event” or to a revelation of tranquil beauty, but to a recognition of the naked, bitter truth about the world and her own place in it. Even though this sort of revelation may not be of an unequivocally beneficial kind, to have reached the goal is what matters, to have won an insight is the gain, and it was the vision of the sea, so urgently waited for, that brought this about.

While in these pre-1962 poems we have seen the poet envisage and experience moments of creative inspiration or of ecstasy and visions of beauty or truth, her later poems embody desires which seem to be even more personal. They render situations where a woman is freed from hindrances of passivity and masochistic cooperation with whatever or whomever had victimized her. Such yearnings are often resolved in metaphors of activity—rising, flying, and so on—instead of a passive receiving of some kind of gift or favor.

The poem “Stings” (CP 214-15), written in the highly productive month of October 1962, dramatizes a different and much more “positive” vision than the one we find in “Blackberrying.” In “Stings,” one of the Bee cycle poems, the “story-line” refers to the beekeeping procedure of exchanging honey for clean combs. The dream-like quality of the scene is marked, for example, by the anonymity of the people taking part in the operation (“The man in white,” “He and I,” “These women”) and by the several questions that express uncertainty and fear (“What am I buying, wormy mahogany? / Is there any queen at all in it?” “Will they hate me … ?” “Is she dead, is she sleeping?” “Where has she been … ?”). Novice beekeeper and practiced beeseller alike are vulnerable although dressed according to beekeeping decorum (they are “[b]arehanded”); that much vulnerability is part of the dangerous game. The speaker-novice identifies more and more with the old queen. Life has been harsh to her; her wings are by now “torn shawls, her long body / Rubbed of its plush— / Poor and bare and unqueenly and even shameful.” But that is the price the elect have to pay for their status, and the speaker herself proudly rejects the inferior, unglamorous role that the honey-drudgers and their human sisters submit to. Earlier she had let herself be thus exploited; for years she had “eaten dust / And dried plates with [her] dense hair.”

The speaker may be a novice to the trade, but she obeys by the rules, and she feels that she is “in control.” Suddenly a third person appears on the scene. He is definitely an outsider who doesn't stick to the rules, and the bees accordingly punish him for that; they “found him out.” They hit him where he is most guilty: they fasten onto his lips “like lies,” for lies, so the reader assumes, is what used to flow from his lips. The presence of this third person—an appearance which, as Susan R. Van Dyne argues, is “curiously unmotivated in the narrative”¹⁰—is, thematically, doubly justified. On one level this unidentified man, who the speaker with a touch of Schadenfreude sees as “a great scapegoat,” functions as the single object of revenge; on another, equally meaningful one, his presence introduces the idea of death and through it the idea of rebirth. While the honeybees die after they sting, the speaker, who now identifies completely with the queen bee, cannot stop at death. She has “a self to recover,” a self that has been absent—dead or asleep.

The poem ends in triumph: the old queen may have been killed in accordance with the rituals of beekeeping, but, miraculously,

Now she is flying
More terrible than she ever was, red
Scar in the sky, red comet
Over the engine that killed her—
The mausoleum, the wax house.

The speaker has become the reborn queen, a survivor and a potential avenger. She has recovered a self that was all but lost, and hers is now a self stronger than ever before. Thus the poem closes in a vision of triumph; it has dramatized a transformation from drabness and powerlessness, from fear and uncertainty, to wholeness and strength, to fearlessness and self-possession.

“Wintering” (CP 217-19), the final poem of the Bee cycle, also ends on a hopeful note. This is even more explicitly an homage to survival. The speaker situates us in mid-winter. She has dutifully performed the rituals of beekeeping: she has extracted the honey from the combs; she has stored the jars of honey in the cellar; and now her job is to feed the surviving bees, who are “[s]o slow [she] hardly know[s] them.” She responds with baffled admiration to their bravery and persistence: they are “[f]iling like soldiers / To the syrup tin.” She fears the darkness in which the bees dwell; she would never be able to breathe down there, for to her such an existence represents “[b]lack asininity. Decay. / Possession.” The bees apparently are unaware of any dangers and horrors.

The final stanza opens with a series of questions, all of them expressing doubt and fear about the fate of hibernating nature:

Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?

Without answering these questions, the poet ends the poem in a tone of absolute certainty: “The bees are flying. They taste the spring.”

The speaker of “Wintering” closely identifies women with bees. The bees, doomed to darkness and a strategy for precarious survival, are all female; they are workers and a queen bee. The gradual identification is marked by the words “women” and “men” for members of the bee society. Drones are spoken of as “[t]he blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors” that the “women” have got rid of. The reference to a universalized Woman, “still at her knitting, / At the cradle of Spanish walnut, / Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think,” joins wintering bee and motherly woman in the idea of patient waiting and gestation. The final line then lifts the scene out of darkness and dumbness to a vision of regeneration: bees and women are moving toward a new spring, toward a new life.¹¹

In “Fever 103°” (CP 231–32) fire is the means of regeneration. The poem depicts a state of a person's body and mind that lends itself to delirious fantasies. A series of surrealistic images, loosely strung together, render a feverish preoccupation with various forms of fire. Hellish flames, crackling tinder, a reeking candle envelop the speaker-patient, whose horrified thoughts circle around other killers and victimizers as well. In her unruly imagination radiation and atom bombs mingle with Isadora Duncan's killing scarves, with “ghastly” orchids, and with “devilish” leopards and adulterers. In a final vision, and purified by fire, the speaker sees herself rising free of ties to a “you”—perhaps a child—and to a “him”—a husband or any man. Her destination is a Paradise of aggressive self-assertiveness where her old selves of sinful, too easily victimized woman give way to a pure virgin:

I think I am going up,
I think I may rise—
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I
Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,
By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean.
Not you, nor him
Not him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)—
To Paradise.

The vision of transcendence that this poem leads up to is of a less assured kind than the ones we have encountered in earlier poems. The “triumph” is compromised by being visualized in a state where reason and fact are missing. In her heart the speaker knows this, but, irresponsibly and egotistically, she abandons herself to these wild fancies in a kind of unabashed bravado.

“Ariel” (CP 239-40), a poem that has attracted a great deal of critical attention, has puzzled readers by the very intricate fusion of elements which have gone into the dramatization of a horseback ride.¹² Horse and rider become one; direction and goal for the ride are uncertain; and metaphors and images connected with rider, horse, and landscape melt into one highly ambiguous picture:

God's lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow
Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,(13)

Is this a journey toward death? Or does it lead to rebirth after the speaker, daringly and shamelessly like a Queen Godiva challenging her husband the King, has rid herself of both inner and outer hindrances: “dark hooks,” “shadows,” her own “dead hands,” and “dead stringencies” imposed on her? Does the allusion to sexual orgasm (“And now I / Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas”) mean just that or does it rather suggest any kind of ecstasy? While there are critics who see only or largely darkness and death in the poem,¹⁴ most commentators tend to view it as embodying at least some element of victory or gain. They speak of “new-found freedom from male surveillance,” “some sort of resurrection,” “a goal which is at once destructive and ecstatic, an end and a beginning.”¹⁵

What I as reader respond to most strongly is the very idea of ecstasy that the speaker reaches in her daredevil ride. It is first of all a physical thing resulting from the thrill of mastering the horse and the breakneck speed, and from the overcoming of hindrances in the landscape through which the ride takes the speaker. But more importantly the ecstasy is envisioned as the conclusion of a liberating process of mind and psyche. Since this process involves both pain and danger to self and others, the shedding of an old self and an old existence is deathlike. But rebirth is the goal for her arrow-like flight, not death. In the same way as other poems we have examined, “Ariel” thus ends in a vision of transcendence. Like the poem “Wintering” which closes with the word “spring,” “Ariel”'s final word is one of hope and a new beginning:

And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.

The poems written during these months of great creativity—September-October 1962—also embody strong desires for revenge, not only rebirth. This is true of “Purdah” (CP 242-44), written at the end of October. Identifying with celebrated female avengers—Charlotte Corday and Clytemnestra—the speaker envisages herself as a lioness who, after having been hidden behind the doll-mask that the purdah-existence has forced her to wear, experiences the ecstasy of both freedom and revenge. When the time comes, she will “unloose— / From the small jewelled / Doll he guards like a heart— // The lioness,” and the “shriek in the bath” and the “cloak of holes” will testify to her triumph: the tyrant will be defeated and she will be free. This is a moment of triumph still to be won, but having been shown the way by her avenging heroines, she feels assured of reaching it.

In “Lady Lazarus” (CP 244–47), the last poem Plath completed in the amazingly productive month of October, the conclusion is again a vision of terrifying, “successful” revenge on the male. The freakshow star Lady Lazarus's crowning performance is to die and be reborn, again and again. “Dying / Is an art, like everything else,” she boasts, and she does it “exceptionally well.” Her hatred of the man, the “Herr Doktor” who promotes her at his vulgar shows, establishes a fearful bond between the Master and his Slave. She pictures her liberation as the result of a final act of violence. Like the queen bee of the poem “Stings,” Lady Lazarus will rise to a new life, but she is out to take a more specific revenge than the queen bee ever was. The queen bee's glory was to recover a self, while Lady Lazarus's envisaged triumph will allow her also to kill her enemy. She gives him proper warning:

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

Coming after these visions of violence and revenge, the poem “Getting There” (CP 247–49), which was written in early November 1962, works as a coda in the present discussion. It is a more impersonal poem than the angry ones created in October. The I is presumably female (she rises from “Adam's side”), but her role as a passenger on a mysterious train is uncertain, and so is the purpose of the train ride. The text consists to a great extent of speculations and observations, and of questions without answers, with “How far is it?” as an ominous refrain. It reads like a tentative interpretation of a dream, or rather a nightmare, and surrealism characterizes the style and mood of the journey which holds the various ideas and images together. Through landscapes and scenes of war and violence this nightmare train finally takes the speaker to the destination. The carriage turns into a cradle, and she is able to shed the old, tattered and wounded self (“this skin / Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces”) and alight, “[p]ure as a baby.” This rebirth is achieved at a price, for the last means of transportation is “the black car of Lethe.” Lethe, the river in Hades, spells death and the underworld, but it also signifies oblivion. Thus the poem ends in a vision of new life, won through suffering and graced by merciful forgetfulness.

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We have thus witnessed how in Sylvia Plath's poetry visionary events and the yearning for them appear in several forms and with varying emblematic purport. We have seen how as a novice poet she gave voice to longings for an infusion of creativity in her life as an artist and how she battled with creative droughts and feelings of being caught in the humdrum and the mundane. “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” exemplifies this aspect of Plath the poet. In a poem such as “The Great Carbuncle” the dramatization of a moment of transcendence, also performed through a phenomenon in nature, is emblematic of other yearnings: a desire to experience another world, another kind of existence, or perhaps to be in communion with the sacred. In both this poem and “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” it is a certain light that is the conjuring element, and it is the observer's senses that are the medium.

Some poems conclude with a vision of euphoria or ecstasy. In “Lorelei,” for instance, we meet euphoria in the form of “drunkenness,” an experience which combines a feeling of total freedom from an inhibiting intellect, with a death wish. It is tempting to read this rendering of a death wish in the context of other poems where the poet seeks to rejoin a lost father-figure, whether deep down in the sea or in the ground (for example, “Full Fathom Five” and “The Beekeeper's Daughter”). In “Ariel” we witnessed another kind of ecstasy—joyful, powerful—which is reached through boldly bringing body and mind to the brink of death but overcoming danger and guilt and leading to a liberation of mind and psyche. The ecstasy of sexual passion that is hinted at in “Ariel” occurs also as a possibility in the early “Pursuit,” but, as I have argued, this form of ecstasy is rare in Plath's poetry.

Stronger, we found, is another form of ecstasy that is envisioned, for example, in “Purdah”: the excitement caused by an act of revenge on a victimizing male. In other poems as well with a victimizer-victimized theme, such as “Stings” and “Lady Lazarus,” the visionary event appears as this kind of triumph. Revenge here also means liberation and recovery of self. Emblematic events signifying survival and rebirth are envisioned, for example, in “Wintering.”

In the explosive poems Plath wrote in the fall of 1962, the visionary events that they present most memorably make up emblems for the power created through the uninhibited release of anger. This is an anger often tempered by humor and the appeal of reckless bravado, and it is certainly these features, harsh and provocative as they often are, that make the reader empathize with an avenging woman.

In some of the texts where the present discussion has identified visions of transcendence, the moments of ecstasy and the “triumphs” that the poems dramatize may be so brief and sudden, or so minimal, that it is difficult to spot them. My overriding purpose has been to highlight such elements in order to counterbalance a prevalent view which holds that Plath's poetry is largely haunted by death and feelings of regret and anger. There is no denying that longings and desires represented in her poems are often riddled with doubtfulness and anxiety, even anguish and despair, but as I have shown in my analysis, her poems as frequently lead to some kind of transcendence, however momentary or ambiguous.

Notes

1. “Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath's Poems,” in Charles Newman, ed., The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium (London: Faber and Faber, 1970), 187.

2. Letters Home by Sylvia Plath: Correspondence 1950-1963, ed. Aurelia Schober Plath (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 480. Hereafter referred to as LH in the text.

3. The Journals of Sylvia Plath, ed. Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough (New York: The Dial Press, 1982), 128. Hereafter referred to as J in the text.

4. Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 77-78 and 276-86, respectively. Hereafter referred to as CP in the text. For experiments at the Ouija board, see the editor's note number 62 (CP 276).

5. For discussions of Plath's use of occultism, see Timothy Materer, “Occultism as Source and Symptom in Sylvia Plath's ‘Dialogue over a Ouija Board,’” Twentieth Century Literature 37, 2 (1991): 131-47; and Helen Sword, “James Merrill, Sylvia Plath, and the Poetics of Ouija,” American Literature 66, 3 (1994): 553-72.

6. See Journals, 111-12, 153.

7. Nancy D. Hargrove places these two poems among the output for 1956, not 1957 which is the date assigned to them in Collected Poems; see The Journey Toward “Ariel”: Sylvia Plath's Poems of 1956-1959 (Lund: Lund Univ. Press, 1994), 48.

8. Ted Hughes's comment on the poem explains the nature of this light: “On an odd phenomenon sometimes observed on high moorland for half an hour or so at evening, when the hands and faces of people seem to become luminous” (CP 276).

9. See Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 236; Victor Kramer, “Life-and-Death Dialectics,” in Linda W. Wagner, ed., Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1988), 163; Jon Rosenblatt, Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1979), 93. See also Edward Butscher, who speaks of “vacuum space”; Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (New York: The Seabury Press, 1976), 283.

10. Susan R. Van Dyne, Revising Life: Sylvia Plath's “Ariel” Poems (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1993), 108. For an instructive discussion of the poet's various drafts of “Stings,” see Revising Life, esp. pp. 107-12.

11. It is interesting to note that as Plath visualized and planned her second book of poems, Ariel, she placed “Wintering” with its hopeful ending as the very last of the collection. See Ted Hughes, Introduction and Notes to Collected Poems, 14-15 and 295, respectively.

12. The editor of Collected Poems comments on the title of the poem: “The name of a horse which she rode, at a riding school on Dartmoor, in Devonshire” (CP 294).

13. The name “Ariel” in Hebrew means “God's lioness”; see, e.g., Linda W. Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath: A Biography (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988), 220.

14. E.g., Jon Rosenblatt, who interprets the metaphoric ride as “a clearly self-destroying journey”; see Sylvia Plath, 146.

15. Linda W. Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath, 220; Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame, 272; Caroline King Barnard, Sylvia Plath (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 97.