Though Plath wrote a number of important poems between "Tulips" and "The Moon and the Yew Tree," these poems still fall short of what would become her full brilliance. They describe her struggle to place the experiences she had during her hospital stay in context as she returned to the "Mad Men" day to day world of a wife and mother in America in nineteen sixty-one.

What this meant mostly was she couldn't mention her loss of personal identity experiences to anyone, or her poetic ambitions. It was time, finally, by everyone's clock for Sylvia to grow up and be a good mother. She may not be an artist, but she had the honor of being married to a  great poet, Ted Hughes, who seemed fated to someday sip wine in a castle, which is what he later did as Poet Laureate to Queen Elizabeth II.

But when he was still married to Plath, he was gracious enough to assign her "studies" from time to time to write about. Plath's brilliant poem, "The Moon and the Yew Tree" (click her picture above) is the result of one of the "instructions" that Hughes gave to her, after seeing the moon behind a yew tree outside their apartment window.

The poem that Plath wrote at his orders explodes with the mystic visions she'd discovered in "Medallion" and "Tulips."  She embraces the "nothingness" of Jung's abyss, the "blackness and silence" of the universe and purely embodies this abyss as the source of creative power. The key is that Plath's poetic self now knows that "blackness and silence" are the sources of creative energy in the universe, the unbroken Is-ness that stays true and sacred despite our often phony lives and self-identities. She's able to spin a myth out of the scene as if by sorceric will.

The poem shocked Hughes very deeply. As a poet and an enthusiastic reader of Shakespeare and myth, he recognized that Plath had become a true Seer. He also probably realized she'd been making his meals, sewing on his buttons, and typing his poems while he berated her attempts to write and slept around behind her back. He didn't want any of that to change, but the poem said change is coming. 

In typical Hughes fashion, he simply shrugged off the poem as a practice piece to Plath's face, but we now know, reading over his posthumous criticism of her poetry and his Birthday Letters poems, how much the poem wounded him and rightly so.

As powerful as "The Moon and the Yew Tree" is, Plath was just getting started.  Having discovered the creative heart of the cosmos and maybe even her place in it, Plath was ready to step fully into her poetic genius, which she does in the poem we'll look at next Monday, "Lady Lazarus."

Poem tally as of today: 8-21-23:
Poems Written: 345
Poetry Submissions: 51
Rejections:  25 (15 tiered)  
Acceptances: 0
Poem written today: "Still Houses"

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By the time Plath came to write her poem "Tulips," her marriage and personal life were hanging by a thread. Her poem "A Winter Ship" foreshadows the erotic breakup between herself and Hughes, while "Medallion" shows Plath's exile from the literary establishment and her awakening as a mystic.   

"Tulips" is where Plath's genius really begins to assert itself. I've written a long-ish, very scholarly essay on "Tulips" and I encourage you to read it, but expect to be challenged, as the depth of this poem is considerable.

What I want to say about it here is simply this. Consider how Plath uses the texture of "blackness" (and silence) in her early poems and how it begins to emerge after "Black Rook in Rainy Weather." What you'll see is: the notion of black moves from the basic notion of existential death to an idea of limitless creation, a la Jung's abyss. I'm not saying she brushed up on Jung; I'm saying, she stepped into an alchemical truth.

Plath needed authenticity. She saw the world around her, whether justly or not, as fake. The titles we give each other, our family connections, the literary establishment, the way we view sex and nature -- the way we view and treat animals. This artifice or mendacity as Tennessee Williams called it  in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof drives the world, but it doesn't drive the poet's world.

In "Tulips" -- Plath explores what it might be like to cast off everything from family to skin and just drift in the universe as being-ness without a name or particular purpose. What she finds is holiness and spiritual fire. She  finds "a peacefulness so big it dazes you" -- and though the tone of the poem is sad, or even somewhat morbid, it is truly a poem of birth.

Plath emerges from this poem and experience with a great deal of creative energy and a vision that is suitable for its consumption. Her next great poem, "The Moon and the Yew Tree," marks the point at which Plath forever moves from being a seeker to being a Sibyl -- or, as I've been quietly shouting all along -- a Melissae.  

But you don't need to know all that! Just be aware that by "dying" to the demands of her persona, Plath was "born" into the great poet we all love. That's what's important!

​Want a little help polishing or editing your poems?  Contact me: [email protected]
​OR use the links below.

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Poem tally as of today: 8-14-23:
Poems Written: 341
Poetry Submissions: 51
Rejections:  25 (15 tiered)  
Acceptances: 0
Poem written today: "Sky Slip"

The important things to take away from "Medallion" (linked thru picture) are that it shows Plath's initiation into nature as a mystical experience, and her first notable encounter with immortality. Prior to this poem, Plath's work simmered with a typical scientist's daughter's existentialism. It's quite evident in her poem "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor." Also in poems like "Dirge for a Joker" or even her very early political poem, "Bitter Strawberries." 

But in this poem, death awakens in the form of a jeweled snake. Stanzas 2-6 read:

Inert as a shoelace; dead
But pliable still, his jaw
Unhinged and his grin crooked,

Tongue a rose-colored arrow.
Over my hand I hung him.
His little vermilion eye

Ignited with a glassed flame
As I turned him in the light;
When I split a rock one time

The garnet bits burned like that.
Bust dulled his back to ocher
The way sun ruins a trout.

Yet his belly kept its fire
Going under the chainmail,
The old jewels smoldering there

The dead snake is more alive now than when it was living. In death it has been "perfected." The speaker of the poem has passed now through the "gate with star and moon" -- symbolically -- and has entered a world beyond the ordinary. The "rare, random descent" Plath cried out for in "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" has become the world.

But to see the mystical world one must leave behind the "flung brick" of the constructed world, the human world of cities, fathers, fear of death, and ignorance of nature. The speaker of the poem is now more alive, alone in the woods with a dead snake, than she was with the "yardmen" of human society.    

The poem ends as though the snake is being cast into metal -- becoming a medallion.... Plath has seen beyond death; she has experienced an ego death; she has  stepped out of her father's shadow, off the concrete path, and into the wild, witchy world of the ouroboros. 

From this point on, her poetry would retain this magic that she discovered at Yaddo while her poems and book mss. were being roundly rejected and her husband's star was rising. In between cooking his meals, sewing on his buttons, and typing his poems, Plath also managed to attain a poetic genius that those around her never even knew was possible...

This poem was and is her medal, her medallion. 

 This is where it all truly started.

Poem tally as of today: 8-7-23:
Poems Written: 333
Poetry Submissions: 51
Rejections:  24 (14 tiered)  
Acceptances: 0
Poem written today: "Gull Wings"

Want a little help polishing or editing your poems?  Contact me: [email protected]
​OR use the links below.

Support the blog through the link below (leads to my "music guru" page) or donate through PayPal to [email protected]

I deeply appreciate your help in keeping the blog alive!

* If you're feeling really ambitious, please look up the Melissae, find all the stuff about bees and seeing past the veil of death through poetry, and consider how this all relates to SP, synchronistically.