Finders Keepers by Seamus Heaney

Author:Seamus Heaney
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2015-04-27T22:53:30.627000+00:00

from The Indefatigable Hoof-Taps: Sylvia Plath

The great appeal of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel and its constellated lyrics is the feeling of irresistible given-ness. There inheres in this poetry a sense of surprised arrival, of astonished being. The poems were written quickly and they transmit to the reader something of the unexpectedness of their own becoming. There is the pressure of absolute fiat behind them; a set of images springs into presence and into motion as at a whimsical but unignorable command. They represent the extreme extension of the imagist mode, which Pound characterized as expressing an emotional and intellectual complex in a moment of time. Their metamorphic speed and metaphoric eagerness are boosted by the logic of their own associative power, and they rush towards whatever conclusions are inherent in their elements. These poems are the vehicles of their own impulses, and it was entirely right that the title which gathered them together should recall not only Shakespeare’s pure spirit but also the headlong gallop of a runaway horse. They are full of exhilaration in themselves, the exhilaration of a mind that creates in some sort of mocking spirit, outstripping the person who has suffered. They move without hesitation and assume the right to be heard; they, the poems, are what we attend to, not the poet. They are, in Lowell’s words, events rather than the records of events, and as such represent the triumph of Sylvia Plath’s romantic ambition to bring expressive power and fully achieved selfhood into congruence. The tongue proceeds headily into its role as governor; it has located the source where the fixed stars are reflected and from which they transmit their spontaneous and weirdly trustworthy signals.

But before all this could occur, Plath’s tongue was itself governed by the disciplines of metre, rhyme, etymology, assonance, enjambment. Even if her husband had not given us an image of her as the obedient neophyte, we could have deduced it from the procedures of her early verse. ‘She wrote her early poems very slowly,’ Ted Hughes tells us, ‘thesaurus open on her knee, in her large, strange handwriting, like a mosaic, where every letter stands separate within the work, a hieroglyph to itself … Every poem grew complete from its own root, in that laborious inching way, as if she were working out a mathematical problem, chewing her lips, putting a thick dark ring of ink around each word that stirred her on the page of the thesaurus.’ That would have been in the late 1950s, when Sylvia Plath was preparing the volume which would be published in 1960 in England as The Colossus, in the course of which she gradually focused her poetic attention inward and found a characteristic method of self-exploration.

This was sometimes based on the allegorization of personal experience into an emblem or icon, sometimes on the confounding of the autobiographical and the mythological. ‘Full Fathom Five’ and ‘Lorelei’, two poems based on her reading of Jacques Cousteau, are typical examples of this latter procedure. The autobiographical

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