the savage god
breathe or Achoo. . . "). One of the finest features of her later style — the use of multiple metaphors — is here seen at its most effective. At first the poet is a foot, poor and white, trapped in the black shoe of her feelings for her father. But there is no time to assimilate this image of pained submission before a new aspect is presented: the poet does not dare to breathe or sneeze; therefore she must be hiding in the shell of her grievance, fearing punishment. Immediately we discover that it is not she who must be punished, but the dead father whom she has had to kill for a second time. Her phantom father is re-created, not as a black shoe, but " marble-heavy, a bag full of God." Again there is no opportunity to absorb the meaning of these images before the father's next appearance as a "ghastly statue." As the similes cohere we see something that resembles the Commendatore of Don Giovanni, killed once, but now God-like, simultaneously ghost and statue. When the poet addresses the statue with the two poignant lines that end the third stanza, it has already assumed the form of a Colossus, which seems to cast its shadow beneath the
surface of a 'freakish ' sea. This extraordinary sequence of images does not blunt the final impact: on the contrary, the language is so precise that each word adds a further subtlety of evocation.
Later in the same poem Sylvia Plath seems to identify her own grievance against her German father with that of the Jews against the German race, and at first sight this seems like another piece of grotesque self-aggrandisement, an attempt to validate a subjective resentment by borrowing the credentials of objective suffering. But again the language is too careful to let slip any lies about the poet's feelings; their obsessive quality is merely emphasised: "With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck/And my Taric pack and my Taroc pack/I may be a bit of a Jew." It is almost as though the poet were playing a part, but playing it so well that her mood has become self-sufficient and acceptable.
This remarkable quality is characteristic of all Sylvia Plath's later writing, and Winter Trees contains many fine examples of it. Although the book consists mainly of poems taken from the same batch as Ariel, it is by no means a collection of leftovers; the extraordinary accomplishment of Sylvia Plath's later style is manifest in every line. The book finishes with a radio play — 'Three Women' — which belongs to the same transitional period as the poems now collected in Crossing The Water. Although these poems show a departure towards the freer use of speechrhythm and a more adventurous juxtaposition of images, they are still written in the careful manner of the early works, with their reminiscences of Eliot and their ruminative style. Crossing The Water contains many passages of beautiful verse, and 'Three Women,' which is remarkable for its relatively selfless attempt to evoke the moods of three separate personalities, is written in an interesting synthesis of
the earlier and later styles.
There are a number of passages approaching closer to the poet's familiar realms of feeling, adopt the imagery and rhythms of the later work:
I have had my chances. I have tried and tried. I have stitched life into me like a rare organ, And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare.
But the verse here, with its measured vowel sounds, is still that of a craftsman. One has the sense of a deliberate striving for effect, a mannered and slightly rhetorical afflatus which is very far from the laconic directness of the poems in Ariel and in the rest of Winter Trees.
It is difficult to describe the peculiar quality of Sylvia Plath's last poems. Their originality is not simply an originality of mood. Nor does it lie in the brilliance and precision of her language, although in a certain sense Sylvia Plath's descriptive talent was greater than any other she had. Perhaps what is most surprising is the complete avoidance of hysteria. For Sylvia Plath's poetry is never reflective; it contains no sympathy for attitudes that were not her own. Her intelligence sought expression not in judgement but in the lightning clarity of revelation. The poems present a sudden glimpse of things, and, caught in that glimpse, a moment of intense emotion. Her great achievement was to evolve a style that would fit this precarious mode of lyrical expression: the multiple metaphors, the quick rhythms, the mastery of colloquial speech, the extraordinary language, and the direct, unhesitant manner.
In the later poetry we find no attempt to say anything. Images enter these later poems as particulars only, without symbolic significance, and however much the poet may borrow the emotional charge from distant and surprising sources (from the imaginary life in ocean depths, from the real and imaginary calamities of modern history) it is never with any hint of an intellectual aim. It is tempting to restore to these poems some vestiges of generality, by interpreting them as Freudian parables, or as complex symbols. But although the poems of Ariel and Winter Trees invite such an interpretation, they also show how valueless it is. It is not through their coincidence with unconscious wishes that these poems affect us, nor do they have any symbolic force comparable to their overwhelming immediacy of impact. Everything in them is objective, concrete, conscious; we can feel moved by Sylvia Plath's obsessions without feeling any need to share in them.
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