"Wintering" is Sylvia Plath's triumphant declaration of victory and joy. Victory at having found the world of honesty and truth that she sought her entire life, first as a scientist following in her father's footsteps, then as a poet, searching beyond the gates of self-identity and death for the reality she intuited might exist beneath the world's often superficial surface.

Joy is what she found under that surface.

The poem is part of her "Bee Sequence" and I suggest you read the whole set of poems sometime. For now, we'll concentrate on just "Wintering," (click picture above) which is the final poem of the sequence. The poem starts with the line: 

This is the easy time, there is nothing doing.

What? I thought this was a Plath poem? How could the writer of "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" start a poem this way? Didn't she kill herself? What's going on here?

The truth is, Plath found immense joy, creative peace, and unstoppable inspiration in her experiences with the  loss of personal identity. It is similar, but not exactly the same as, what reportedly happens to some people who take psychedelic drugs. Plath didn't use psychedelics, but the breakdown of her "ego" and her ties to the world of "mendacity" even for a short period, through her encounters with poetry and nature, revealed an illumination that not only made her poetic name, but changed the entire world, and is still growing.

In "Wintering" she enters the cellar of an unnamed aristocrat in a spare house she has rented. This is a symbol of the abyss, the "blackness and silence" of the Yew tree, the All Being of nature. Only now Plath has no fear of the void, she has made a home for herself there. But it is not based on materialistic things or titles such as "Sir So-and So's gin."

Instead it is based on an abiding -- perhaps eternal -- connection with the rhythms of nature. She has become Queen of the Bees, just as her father, Otto, was known as King of the Bees, but as Queen she doesn't want to control nature, she simply wants to perpetuate it. She has learned from her encounters with nature to see life, not death, as the impetus of being. She has regained a personal identity, but it is a greater, much wiser and more enduring self-identity than she had as "Ted Hughes's wife." 
​
This is how we should remember Plath, because this is the poet she truly was... Her tragic suicide was the result of her inability to stay in this moment of illumination, but she touched it and she left a record to inspire countless generations to come. So in a sense, she did stay rooted in it.

This concludes my first blog-post series on Sylvia Plath, but it won't be my last! If you enjoyed the posts, please consider making a small donation to my PayPal, or use the Buy Me A Coffee button to make a donation through my MusicGuru page.

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I'm going to throw you a curve-ball here. Plath's poem, "Lady Lazarus," is a joke. I mean that literally. It's a humorous poem.

The reason that few people read it this way is due to the tragedy of Plath's experiences with mental illness and her suicide.

But the fact remains that "Lady Lazarus" can't be fully understood unless its humor is taken seriously.... So that's where we're going to start with our exploration of this very important Plath poem. This will be the penultimate poem I tackle in this blog-post series on Plath, which will end next Monday with a final post.

For now, the important thing is to read over the poem (click the pic above) and see if there's anything in it that makes you laugh straight off the top. Then read it again and consider if there are things you might like to laugh at, but don't think you should.

Finally, read it over and see if there are things you wish you could laugh at. Pretty much you should laugh at every line.

The poem represents the culmination of the loss of identity theme we've previously discussed. Plath is emerging from the "blackness and silence" of the abyss -- and in this rebirth she brings power, creativity, and joy. But most of all, there is a rejection and mockery of the banal "totems" of life.  We think of doctors, gods, and death as the highest forms of power imaginable. But mainly death because doctors and gods are supposed to have some influence over death, like lawyers that plead with death on our behalf.

But what if there is no death?

What if at the most elemental level of existence there is only being? Limitless being...  This is the "self" beyond the façade and beyond the mendacity of social constructs. That being finds the constructs quite laughable. And it "eats men like air" not because of feminist castration fury, but because the abyss, the Ever Being, eats everyone​ like air. But not because they die, but because they cast off their egos and social totems, along with their cruelties, lies, and perversions  -- not according to a moral judgement of God, but just according to existence. Being is so big, no fool no matter how rich or titled can even dent it with a shadow. Not even Herr Lucifer. Or Elon Musk.

So that's it in a nutshell. Plath had moments of poetic realization where she went beyond personal identity and found Being Without End. This is not so unusual in history, and was found by other mystics, including the Melissae I keep mentioning.

What's interesting is that Plath did it with the American idiom because no-one really did it here previously, not even the Transcendentalists who were more or less chasing a philosophy rather than a visceral experience. They talked about it over tea, Plath actually did it. Without psychedelics, which would have a first heyday only a few years after she died.

What this poem means beyond that -- and more importantly -- what comes after this kind of realization, is what we'll talk about next time as we close out the series by finishing up "Lady Lazarus" and taking a very quick peek at Plath's masterpiece "Wintering."

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Poem tally as of today: 8-21-23:
Poems Written: 355
Poetry Submissions: 51
Rejections:  26 (15 tiered)  
Acceptances: 0
Poem written today: "Water Colors"