Edge - "The illusion of a Greek necessity"

Edge

The woman is perfected
Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.

Slack Road Heptonstall Yorkshire

Hardcastle Crags (1957)

Although this is called Hardcastle Crags its more like Sylvia Plath walking out of
Heptonstall along Slack Road

"Flintlike, her feet struck
Such a racket of echoes from the steely street,
Tacking in moon-blued crooks from the black
Stone-built town, that she heard the quick air ignite
Its tinder and shake

A firework of echoes from wall
To wall of the dark, dwarfed cottages.
But the echoes died at her back as the walls
Gave way to fields and the incessant seethe of grasses
Riding in the full

Of the moon, manes to the wind,
Tireless, tied, as a moon-bound sea
Moves on its root.
Though a mist-wraith wound
Up from the fissured valley and hung shoulder-high

Ahead, it fattened
To no family-featured ghost,
Nor did any word body with a name
The blank mood she walked in.

Once past
The dream-peopled village, her eyes entertained no dream,
And the sandman's dust
Lost lustre under her footsoles.
The long wind, paring her person down

To a pinch of flame, blew its burdened whistle
In the whorl of her ear,
and like a scooped-out pumpkin crown
Her head cupped the babel.
All the night gave her, in return

For the paltry gift of her bulk and the beat
Of her heart, was the humped indifferent iron
Of its hills, and its pastures bordered by black stone set
On black stone. Barns
Guarded broods and litters

Behind shut doors; the dairy herds
Knelt in the meadow mute as boulders;
Sheep drowsed stoneward in their tussocks of wool, and birds,
Twig-sleeping, wore
Granite ruffs, their shadows

The guise of leaves.
The whole landscape
Loomed absolute as the antique world was
Once, in its earliest sway of lymph and sap,
Unaltered by eyes,

Enough to snuff the quick
Of her small heat out, but before the weight
Of stones and hills of stones could break
Her down to mere quartz grit in that stony light
She turned back"

Sculptor (1958) by Sylvia Plath

Sculptor (1958)

"To his house the bodiless
Come to barter endlessly
Vision, wisdom, for bodies
Palpable as his, and weighty.
Hands moving move priestlier
Than priest's hands, invoke no vain
Images of light and air
But sure stations in bronze, wood, stone.
Obdurate, in dense-grained wood,
A bald angel blocks and shapes
The flimsy light; arms folded
Watches his cumbrous world eclipse
Inane worlds of wind and cloud.
Bronze dead dominate the floor,
Resistive, ruddy-bodied,
Dwarfing us. Our bodies flicker
Toward extinction in those eyes
Which, without him, were beggared
Of place, time, and their bodies.
Emulous spirits make discord,
Try entry, enter nightmares
Until his chisel bequeaths
Them life livelier than ours,
A solider repose than death's."

Mirror

Mirror

"I am silver and exact.
I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful--- The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles.
I have looked at it so long I think it is a part of my heart.
But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake.
A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars,
the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her.
She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl,
and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day,
like a terrible fish."

"Southward Over Kentish Town"

"Parliament Hill Fields

On this bald hill the new year hones its edge.
Faceless and pale as china
The round sky goes on minding its business.
Your absence is inconspicuous;
Nobody can tell what I lack.
Gulls have threaded the river's mud bed back
To this crest of grass.

Inland, they argue,
Settling and stirring like blown paper
Or the hands of an invalid.
The wan Sun manages to strike such tin glints
From the linked ponds that my eyes wince And brim;
the city melts like sugar.
A crocodile of small girls
Knotting and stopping, ill-assorted, in blue uniforms,
Opens to swallow me.
I'm a stone, a stick,
One child drops a barrette of pink plastic;
None of them seem to notice.
Their shrill, gravelly gossip's funneled off.

Now silence after silence offers itself.
The wind stops my breath like a bandage.
Southward, over Kentish Town,
an ashen smudge Swaddles roof and tree.
It could be a snowfield or a cloudbank.
I suppose it's pointless to think of you at all.
Already your doll grip lets go.
The tumulus, even at noon,
guards its black shadow:
You know me less constant,
Ghost of a leaf, ghost of a bird.

I circle the writhen trees.
I am too happy.
These faithful dark-boughed cypresses
Brood, rooted in their heaped losses.
Your cry fades like the cry of a gnat.
I lose sight of you on your blind journey,
While the heath grass glitters and the spindling rivulets
Unspool and spend themselves.
My mind runs with them,
Pooling in heel-prints,
fumbling pebble and stem.
The day empties its images Like a cup or a room.
The moon's crook whitens,
Thin as the skin seaming a scar.

Now, on the nursery wall,
The blue night plants,
the little pale blue hill
In your sister's birthday picture start to glow.
The orange pompons,
the Egyptian papyrus Light up.
Each rabbit-eared Blue shrub behind the glass
Exhales an indigo nimbus,
A sort of cellophane balloon.
The old dregs, the old difficulties take me to wife.
Gulls stiffen to their chill vigil in the drafty half-light;
I enter the lit house. "

"on the morning of February 11, 1963"

"on the morning of February 11, 1963"

Sequoia - The Ever Living

"Here I was born, and there I died. It was only a moment for you; you took no notice."

Madeleine says this in Vertigo.

Vertigo based on a novel The Living and the Dead (also published as Vertigo) by Pierre Boileau and Pierre Ayraud (Thomas Narcejac)

"The story concerns a former detective who suffers from "Acrophobia" who is hired to follow the wife of a friend who suspects her of infidelity. The detective becomes obsessed with the woman, eventually falling in love with her but unable to explain her strange trances and her belief in a previous life. When she falls to her death from a tower, he is unable to save her due to his fear of heights and experiences a psychotic break. After his partial recovery he encounters a woman who is nearly the image of his dead love, and the obsession begins all over again..."

Chalcot Square, Primrose Hill

PLATH, Sylvia (1932-1963), Poet lived here 1960-1961. 3 Chalcot Square, Primrose Hill, NW1 Camden 2000

Sylvia Plath - Bercke Plage

What TH wrote about her visit to this resort in Pas d Calais.
The town and it's people may know little or nothing about SP

"In June, 1961, we had visited Berck-Plage, a long beach and resort on the coast of France north of Rouen. Some sort of hospital or convalescent home for the disabled fronts the beach. It was one of her nightmares stepped into the real world. A year later - almost to the day - our next door neighbour, an old man Percy Key died after a short grim illness during which time his wife repeatedly needed our help. In this poem that visit to the beach and the death and funeralral of our neighbour are combined."

The Full text of Berge-Plage

Berck-Plage

"(1)This is the sea, then, this great abeyance.How the sun's poultice draws on my inflammation.Electrifyingly-colored sherbets, scooped from the freezeBy pale girls, travel the air in scorched hands.Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding?I have two legs, and I move smilingly..A sandy damper kills the vibrations;It stretches for miles, the shrunk voicesWaving and crutchless, half their old size.The lines of the eye, scalded by these bald surfaces,Boomerang like anchored elastics, hurting the owner.Is it any wonder he puts on dark glasses?Is it any wonder he affects a black cassock?Here he comes now, among the mackerel gatherersWho wall up their backs against him.They are handling the black and green lozenges like the parts of a body.The sea, that crystallized these,Creeps away, many-snaked, with a long hiss of distress.(2)This black boot has no mercy for anybody.Why should it, it is the hearse of a dad foot,The high, dead, toeless foot of this priestWho plumbs the well of his book,The bent print bulging before him like scenery.Obscene bikinis hid in the dunes,Breasts and hips a confectioner's sugarOf little crystals, titillating the light,While a green pool opens its eye,Sick with what it has swallowed----Limbs, images, shrieks. Behind the concrete bunkersTwo lovers unstick themselves.O white sea-crockery,What cupped sighs, what salt in the throat....And the onlooker, trembling,Drawn like a long materialThrough a still virulence,And a weed, hairy as privates.(3)On the balconies of the hotel, things are glittering.Things, things----Tubular steel wheelchairs, aluminum crutches.Such salt-sweetness. Why should I walkBeyond the breakwater, spotty with barnacles?I am not a nurse, white and attendant,I am not a smile.These children are after something, with hooks and cries,And my heart too small to bandage their terrible faults.This is the side of a man: his red ribs,The nerves bursting like trees, and this is the surgeon:One mirrory eye----A facet of knowledge.On a striped mattress in one roomAn old man is vanishing.There is no help in his weeping wife.Where are the eye-stones, yellow and valuable,And the tongue, sapphire of ash.(4)A wedding-cake face in a paper frill.How superior he is now.It is like possessing a saint.The nurses in their wing-caps are no longer so beautiful;They are browning, like touched gardenias.The bed is rolled from the wall.This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible.Is he wearing pajamas or an evening suitUnder the glued sheet from which his powdery beakRises so whitely unbuffeted?They propped his jaw with a book until it stiffenedAnd folded his hands, that were shaking: goodbye, goodbye.Now the washed sheets fly in the sun,The pillow cases are sweetening.It is a blessing, it is a blessing:The long coffin of soap-colored oak,The curious bearers and the raw dateEngraving itself in silver with marvelous calm.(5)The gray sky lowers, the hills like a green seaRun fold upon fold far off, concealing their hollows,The hollows in which rock the thoughts of the wife----Blunt, practical boatsFull of dresses and hats and china and married daughters.In the parlor of the stone houseOne curtain is flickering from the open window,Flickering and pouring, a pitiful candle.This is the tongue of the dead man: remember, remember.How far he is now, his actionsAround him like living room furniture, like a décor.As the pallors gather----The pallors of hands and neighborly faces,The elate pallors of flying iris.They are flying off into nothing: remember us.The empty benches of memory look over stones,Marble facades with blue veins, and jelly-glassfuls of daffodils.It is so beautiful up here: it is a stopping place.(6)The natural fatness of these lime leaves!----Pollarded green balls, the trees march to church.The voice of the priest, in thin air,Meets the corpse at the gate,Addressing it, while the hills roll the notes of the dead bell;A glittler of wheat and crude earth.What is the name of that color?----Old blood of caked walls the sun heals,Old blood of limb stumps, burnt hearts.The widow with her black pocketbook and three daughters,Necessary among the flowers,Enfolds her lace like fine linen,Not to be spread again.While a sky, wormy with put-by smiles,Passes cloud after cloud.And the bride flowers expend a freshness,And the soul is a brideIn a still place, and the groom is red and forgetful, he is featureless.(7)Behind the glass of this carThe world purrs, shut-off and gentle.And I am dark-suited and still, a member of the party,Gliding up in low gear behind the cart.And the priest is a vessel,A tarred fabric, sorry and dull,Following the coffin on its flowery cart like a beautiful woman,A crest of breasts, eyelids and lipsStorming the hilltop.Then, from the barred yard, the childrenSmell the melt of shoe-blacking,Their faces turning, wordless and slow,Their eyes openingOn a wonderful thing----Six round black hats in the grass and a lozenge of wood,And a naked mouth, red and awkward.For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma.There is no hope, it is given up."

Gabriel Woods: "I visited BP on the weekend of c11th February 2003. Its like it was in June, 1961. Greeted by a surgical window display from then unchanged. All the stations of the poem are there: The dunes, breakwater, wedding cake hotel. There is a villa with the words Sylvia and Rome as cartouches on the wall. I walked to Stella Beach and Le Torquet - Paris Beach passing bunkers and a hospital set in dunes."

Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study

Prof Tim Kendall
Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study. Faber, 2001.

Jack Folsom's Bercke Plage Pamphlet "the miracles of science, she calls them sarcastically"

Jack Folsom's Bercke Plage Pamphlet

Jack Folsom
Montana State University

Death and Rebirth in Sylvia Plath's "Berck-Plage"

Extracts

"The death of the senses, in particular the death of the visionary imagination, is what Sylvia Plath feared most. For her, a rebirth, the making of a new life, is a psychic necessity."

"Plath's motivation in writing such ugly and terrifying pictures of death is certainly not its glorification. Far more likely a motive, given Sylvia Plath's abundantly demonstrated lust for the rich textures of life, is her concern for physical and psychic survival in the face of suffering and death."

Primrose Hill

Primrose Hill

Primrose Hill park is supposed to be formed from rubble from London Underground. Strange because flanking houses seem older. The park is un-naturally steep, though. It may be a glacial outlier of Hampstead Heath with spoil on one shoulder, so to speak. SP often took brief, swift walks here. The Blue Plaque is in Chalcotte Sqare. William Butler Yeats’s is not far off in Fitzroy Avenue. Looking south counting cranes from here may indicate economic activity in London. Count how many buildings have appeared in this view in your lifetime. Many of them are skyscapers.

Cambridge

Cambridge

From the bridge at The Mill Pond overlooking Laundress Green and Scudamore's Punting Company Ltd Granta Place Mill Lane Cambridge CB2 1RS UK at end of term is perhaps the best time to see Cambridge. Students converge there to picnic and drink by the riverside in twilight nocturnal outdoor parties. Commoners Friesian cows graze among them. Skinny youths lark about in the waterfall. A Spitfire may fly over from Duxford. Students climb buildings. Cambridge in the Fens, being delimited, its deliniation, the flanking colleges to the River, the clarity and simplicity of
how the river flows through Granchester Meadows make Cambridge abstract and implausible: Almost as if it were planned not on earth but by god. Its un-nerving
to leave from the city to landscape quickly without transition: From the unconcealed
obvious format of the city. On the seaward side the river flows towards Ely passing
empty white tents where students have celebrated end of term.
The city is ‘town and gown’. It is certainly ‘sniffy’, and it takes longer to get served in a PH than anywhere else in England. Everywhere residencies are tight, the city itself unable and forbidden to expand. More artistic people studied here than anywhere else. The view from the river to King’s college is the single best view anywhere. The most interesting encounter for me was with a boxer Richard Burton look-alike on a re-union visit. Hamlet performed outdoors at Girton College. Some colleges are out-of town slightly. Visit Newnam College Sylvia Plath’s college by twilight in summer. You may see a blonde American student leaving via the college portal.

BBC & British Library Tapes

Thye Talking Bookshop used to have tapes now for sale online.
Sylvia Plath recited and recorded her own Poems in BBC Portland Place.
Sculptor (1958) the last verse on the second side, a light aircraft can be heard
flying past during the recording.

http://www.audiobooks.co.uk/sylvia-plath-1.html

Heptonstall Churchyard Inscription "Even amidst fierce flames the Golden Lotus can be planted"

"Even amidst fierce flames the Golden Lotus can be planted"