I’ve been reading quite a lot of Plath recently: a sentence everybody should be capable of saying with honesty all the time. Specifically, the earlyish Journals (slowly and with much unfolding pleasure) and Ariel. I’ve read most of Ariel before but not for some time, and there are plenty of poems of which I find I hadn’t carried much from then to here and now — to this current embarkation. But forgetting is a welcome slippage if it allows us to discover as if anew.1
My current favourite is ‘Tulips’. It’s a relatively long poem that does you the favour of being clear and even straightforward at first blush and then flatters you by giving out so much more at every return. It is as inexhaustible as it is sodden with utter exhaustion. I’m not going to attempt any kind of comprehensive reading (not that I've ever managed to do that of anything) because it would take forever; all I’ll do here really is appreciate it: for poetry isn’t going to appreciate itself.
Partly what excuses me from being thorough is that others have come before me: ‘Tulips’ is probably better known than ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’, another of Plath’s poems which I wrote about fairly recently. There is a blog whose title is taken directly from this poem, and whose author has done an excellent overview already. An excerpt:
The white that seeps through the poem, the narrator seeming almost ‘snowed-in’ not only in the hospital (physically unable to leave due to her illness and the weather) but also in her own dreamlike perception of reality, suggests that the narrator is trying to escape from herself. She seems to want to rid herself of identity (‘I am nobody’) and leave behind the burden of family life.
This is very good: long-leashed but nicely poised, never breaking away from the poem and careful to keep referring back to it, unafraid of profundity and yet cautious of overstating it. That this was written by an A-Level student (in 2014, I think) is damn impressive, although that shouldn’t distract from the quality per se.
‘Tulips’ has an ambiguity halfway across its first line, just before its first caesura: viz., ‘excitable’. Ordinarily, it would mean something like ‘capable of, or liable to, being excited’ — but, in Plath’s usage, it seems to also mean ‘capable of causing excitement’. The speaker resents the tulips for making her excited, and for being themselves excited. Very subtly, then, the presumably vivid-in-colour tulips are introduced with an image that gives them a gaudy-giddy vitality, already a threat to the speaker’s desire for (or commitment to) whiteness, placidity, even death. They are out of place and out of season, an unwanted, unwarranted burst of spring in this ‘winter’ both worldly and personal. I use too many adjectives.
The speaker’s ‘learning peacefulness’ presages the pun in ‘Stupid pupil’, a delicate oxymoron that equates stupidity with inveterate attentiveness while chastising the speaker for being almost too good a student of peacefulness. She is, paradoxically, such a good ‘[s]tupid pupil’ that she ‘has to take everything in’ when learning, even everything about peacefulness: she thereby contravenes her own goal of fading away and shutting out the world. If we assume, reasonably, a likeness (however rough) between Plath and her speaker, it seems also that the speaker compromises herself by being too good a poet, unable not to notice and assess the details of her surroundings. In considering its subject matter and expressed desires, the poem’s very existence is paradoxical, since, simply, it is not nothing. You cannot write nothing; you also cannot, as much as you might want to, ‘write upon nothing’.2 A pen does not work on the air.
There is far too much in the poem to keep going on like this. I will, however, take a look at the phrase that is also now the title of the blog mentioned above: ‘I didn’t want any flowers’. It begins both the fifth stanza and the twenty-fifth line overall — is thus practically the dead centre of this forty-nine-line seven-stanza poem. Clearly, the speaker did not wish to play the patient’s part in the hospital custom of sending in flowers and arranging them by the bed, as though to domesticate and prettify the space under occupation by the sick. What’s not clear, however, is how and to whom the sentiment is addressed. It could be a purely internal thought, an angry, exasperated sigh over the presence of the flowers. Or it could be something she has said to the nurses or to the people responsible for the flowers: the implication being that she was clear she didn’t want flowers before the flowers arrived, or else that she wished she had made it clear (it is, possibly, but not necessarily, ‘[I said] I didn’t want any flowers’). To marry both possibilities, the phrase could still be an internal thought, one which she has wanted to direct to the nurses but which, for any number of reasons, she has been unable or afraid to say aloud.
Beyond their intrusive life and colour, the tulips are remindful of the outside world — where time still moves, even at the rate of the growth of flowers — and therefore of a piece with the admonitory smiles in the ‘family photo’ in lines 20–21, figured here as ‘little smiling hooks’ that would fish her out of the waters within which she wants to stay submerged, fling her on the quayside, and leave her gaping, gasping.
It's quite a poem.
1 The idea of forgetting having read something always puts me in mind of Red Dwarf: Holly, the ship's onboard computer, bemoans that he (I think this was Norman Lovett's portrayal, not that the actor's face's gender means anything for the computer) has read everything in existence, and requests that any knowledge of Agatha Christie be removed from his memory so that he can read the stories again without knowing the outcome. I also think of Peep Show: Mark: 'Jez, are you reading Mr Nice again?' Jez: 'Yes, it's a great book. Plus I'm usually incredibly high when I read it, which makes it better, but also I've forgotten most of it, so it's like I'm reading it for the first time.' That's not the exact quote.
I sometimes wish I could forget ever having Peep Show the last dozen times, just so I can watch it for the first time again. The same with the The Simpsons: I would give up everything if it meant I could see The Simpsons for the first time again.
2 Italicisation sic. Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub, in A Tale of a Tub and Other Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 1–103, p. 102. This quotation from Swift is used by David Markson as the epigraph for his lovely book This Is Not a Novel, one of a series of not-novels built almost entirely out of anecdotes about culture, literature, history, and the arts. Interestingly, the quotation is formatted by Markson as though it were taken from a poem — and with identical line-breakings in more than one edition, suggesting to me that this isn’t to do with the spacing of the page — but A Tale of a Tub is prose. I don’t really have a conclusion to draw from this.
When I re-read The Rainbow I had thought I might discover, like a flower pressed between the pages, the dried remains of my younger self preserved within it. In the most literal sense I was there, the underlinings and annotations, made when we did the book at Oxford (i.e. when we read a load of dreary critical studies about it), were still there but in any kind of metaphorical sense — no, there was nothing, no traces of my earlier self, no memories released by the act of re-reading the same page that I had read years before one particular afternoon wherever and whenever that was.
——Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage 1
The word I want to lift out of this over-quoted chunk of Geoff Dyer (ah, over-quoting, stalwart friend of undergraduates in thrall to their word-counts) is a little (and, in this form, palindromic) verb: did. This is for inconsequent personal reasons having only to do with an affection for a miniscule quirk of usage — in this case, the seemingly universal usage of do among students and academics when mentioning material currently under consideration. ‘For our seminar on contemporary literature, we did Bath and Bellow and Burgess and Borges.’ ‘Are we doing Woolf or Wilde next week?’ ‘Haven’t we already done Jane Eyre?’ ‘What Shakespeare did you do at school?’ And so on. In this context, do and did are somewhat synecdochical, in that they stand in for a number of different activities, or at least a combination of some of them: reading, highlighting, annotating, thinking about, being lectured about, discussing, quoting, writing about. Although in Dyer’s experience the verb was almost euphemistic, an obfuscation of what university-level study actually involves, it really is just a breezy shorthand. My own area of interest is in English departments, but I’m sure it’s used in much the same way by any cohort burdened with a reading list.
Anyway. When I cast an eye back over my own education (excessive, but not really impressive), I sometimes think about the authors and texts I did on more than one occasion: the poems and novels I read for two different classes, within two distinct academic contexts. There aren’t very many, and most are the hyper-canonical things that crop up everywhere, but a few stick out. I did Our Mutual Friend when I was an exchange student in the States, and then did it again a couple of years later back in the UK. I did Mrs Dalloway twice. Sort of. I did Othello for my GCSEs and my A-Levels. I did Plath’s poem ‘Daddy’ at least twice. I did Charlotte Perkins-Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper'and Plath’s poem ‘The Applicant’ at least thrice, and all before I even got to university. (Academic summer camp, academic summer camp a year later, A-Levels.) I never did The Kenosha Kid.
These details don’t stir any special insights in me. I’ve always believed firmly that, ‘curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it’, and also that rereading generally makes the good books better and the bad ones worse. But it’s never quite so simple as good and bad, especially when reading a particular text out of obligation. I have no exceptional fondness for any of the above — I like Mrs Dalloway a whole lot, but it doesn’t really mean anything to me — except perhaps for Our Mutual Friend, which is a wonderful book. You might then expect that my second reading was richer than the first. But it wasn’t. I barely read a third of it the second time around, but that’s because I wasn’t really paying attention. The second reading took place at a difficult time: I was in a stressful living situation, and it felt like I was cresting the absolute limit of such intellectual or literary talents as I could have been said to have had.
Nowadays, the sheer length of Friend seems to dispel any notion of having another go anytime soon; but what is also discouraging is, as with Geoff Dyer’s mature returning to The Rainbow, an anxiety over what parts of my younger self, if any, still lie pressed between the pages. Dyer’s disappointment is in finding nothing of his own, but I feel that my own anxiety would be in finding too much. I’m not sure. Memories of reading — mine, anyway — contain a lot of loneliness. The past is equal parts remorse for what you did and melancholy for what you didn't get to do. The pain of peering back, rere regardant, seems to me expressed most perfectly by Philip Roth, of all people. In Sabbath’s Theater, the protagonist is an aging licentious puppeteer who missed out on the big time, something of which his wife ‘delighted in reminding him back when she was still drinking herself to death for two unchallengeable reasons: because of all that had not happened and because of all that had.’ The inescapable circularity, the irreproachable adjective unchallengeable, which is almost admiring of the watertight logic: it’s both wickedly funny and quite devastating.
Again: anyway. The poem I want to write about here is one of Sylvia Plath’s. As I said above, I read bits of Plath for school but, for no particular reason, I never did her at university. By the time I’d arrived, my experiences with Plath had been variegated enough to the point that I liked her a lot but never thought of her as a favourite. I would have been happy to see her on a reading list. But, as things turned out, the only Plath I encountered head-on was during my first ever exam, a selection of hitherto unseen poems and excerpts from which we were to choose and about which we were to write — anything. The poem I chose was ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’. What an incidental delight, the chance to enjoy a new poem for the first fifteen minutes of an exam, before picking up your pen. Ahem:
On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident
To set the sight on fire
In my eye, not seek
Any more in the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
Without ceremony, or portent.
Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Leap incandescent
Out of the kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then —
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent
By bestowing largesse, honor,
One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical,
Yet politic; ignorant
Of whatever angel may choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant
A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content
Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel.
For that rare, random descent.
There’s a recording of Plath reading this poem in her extraordinary, chasmic, consonant-clamping voice. Plath is one of my favourite readers of verse on record, and I love how deftly she handles her own line-slipping syntax.
It’s possible I still have the script from my exam lying around somewhere, I’m disinclined to hunt for it, but what I remember is that I took the poem as offering a conceit of poetic or artistic inspiration — more specifically, the frustration of waiting and watching for it during a somewhat dry period. Reading the poem some years later, it’s moderately gratifying to see that there’s a lot in the text to support such an angle, whether or not it wholly works as an overarching interpretation. I’ve never been too keen on creating that kind of plain-English interpretation, as if it were really possible to paraphrase a poem without losing almost everything — I’ve tended to prefer instead to focus on details, and on points of form and aesthetic (imagery, ambiguity, syntax, phonetics, punctuation), in the hope of thereby teasing out wider concerns. This poem, however, is actually quite intelligible: its setting is clear, its argument stated with hardly any obfuscation, its imagery stark and invitingly visual. There are all sorts of subtleties, but what it describes or narrates could be fairly trimmed down (to get started). The speaker notices a black rook shuffling on a twig. She (let’s say) knows not to expect this natural image to suddenly enflame an epiphany or inspiration, and she also knows not to project patterns onto random weather. The poem is, in part, a sort of melancholy reckoning of the pathetic fallacy. Although she does sometimes wish to find ready-made meanings in nature, she knows that this is rather a vain hope, and is able to console herself with the occasional flash of unexpected brilliance and beauty, as random as they might be. So still she walks about, keeping her eyes open, simultaneously aware that she cannot wilfully bring about these ‘[m]iracles’ and confident that they do happen. The speaker is both a poet on the prowl for material and a person hoping for meaning, in a broad sense. The rook, despite being heralded by the title, is brief in its appearances: Plath does not focus on it, in fact avoids looking at it too closely or for too long — or, perhaps, she has stood waiting for it to become more than a simple thing to see and flare into numinosity. If one of nature’s faults is to be frugal and capricious with its miracles, then one of poetry’s is its need for form and compression: it’s not easy to decide, in this instance, how soon the qualification ‘I do not expect a miracle / Or an accident […]’ actually follows on from the opening image. Is it instantaneous, almost a self-reproach for having singled the rook out at all? Or is it a sigh released after a while spent standing and staring? Despite what anti-writing Wordsworthian cultists would have you believe, good poetry is almost never written on the move, and very rarely in the moment. Either way, the rook offers nothing and so the poem continues in spite of it. It is not quite a poem about not knowing what to write, or about staring out the window latching on the first thing you see; but it speaks to creativity and inspiration as being, to some degree, wilful, or willable. If nature's not forthcoming, a poet does not wait for sights to be set on fire (even if she says that’s what she’s doing). She can make poems out of what could be conceived of setting on fire: if it ‘can so shine’, it shine, for all intents and purposes. Paradoxically, however, the rook on the stiff twig, despite its position as mere potential, despite the speaker’s avowed disappointment, is already symbolically complex. Its initial description suggests the poet herself, a single poem, the poetic process, and a person bent under the ravages of mental weather. It ‘hunches’ (a lovely verb, lovelier still, somehow, for coming after the subject and not before, and for initiating the trochaic line), drawn into itself with only itself for shelter, not making use of its wings, perhaps momentarily unable to use them because of the rain by which it is compelled to engage in a ceaseless task of ‘arranging and rearranging’, a phrasing which evokes the poet’s shuffling about the parts of a poem in order to make them fit better, as well as the nervous fidgeting of somebody experiencing anxiety — constant motion with no directional movement, excessive self-attention without self-care or -love. It’s as if Plath couldn’t but poeticise the bird even when merely pointing it out, or as if the bird was poetical all unto itself — or as if the word rook constitutes a whole piece of poetry. What if Plath had done nothing more than name the bird?
Rook.
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident […]
Now that wouldn’t have done, of course. But wonder, first, how minor alterations can affect tone (‘Rook?’; ‘Rook!’; ‘Rook:’) and, second, what names per se can offer. Take the following, from the introductory section of David Foster Wallace's The Pale King: ‘shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat […]’. . .
That was somewhat disingenuous of me. The Wallace above is not a neutral display of common names, but a list that draws its luxurious, sensuous effect from reeling off unusual (and, in several cases, kind of folksy) plant-names as if one could never exhaustively account for every separate species threading the Illinois landscape; and these names pretty much all contain or display more elements than rook. But the points I’m toeing towards have to do with what actually counts as ‘meaning’. On some level, a rook does not mean but be: the rook will go on with its rooky life whether it’s far from eyes in wordless flight or still and visible on the stiff twig up there. But it might mean something to a person, and it might mean something more to somebody interested in such things as birds, and it might mean something more still to the kind of poet who might think to put it in poem. Within such a poem, the name rook means something in itself, and suggests things that could be associated with it; ‘a wet black rook’ means more — and so on, up to a point.
I realise I might be parroting or parodying Nabokov — ‘reality is an infinite succession of steps’, ‘a lily is more real to a naturalist than it is to an ordinary person’, blah2 — but, whereas his emphasis is on the impossibility of accessing some kind of total meaning (‘You can know more and more about one thing but you can never know everything about one thing’), mine is on the possibility that the kind of ‘natural object[s]’ on Nabokov’s mind might actually offer the appropriate amount of meaning to different kinds of people. I mean: everybody invests different amounts in everything; the superabundance of individuable natural objects, like the superabundance of poems, necessitates that we take more of some than of others, and sometimes that we leave those others wholly out.
All my talk of ‘meaning’ is, I’m sadly aware, rather vague. But then so is the poem. This is not a criticism. What would it mean to have such a ‘sight’ as a rook ‘set […] on fire / In my eye’? What kind of pattern or ‘design’ could one augur from weather, or the scattered fall of ‘spotted leaves’? What would the sky say if it were not ‘mute’ and were capable of ‘backtalk’? Plath’s speaker slyly admits that looking for ‘design’ was something she used to do and has since learned to resist (‘not seek anymore’): so she never found it, and is now sceptical that it can be uncovered. But what if she had? Would she have concluded anything more monumental than that nature was, apparently, not indifferent to her herself? And what would that have meant? We are pattern-seeking animals, and by Jove we will find a pattern, but we are also notoriously bad at drawing conclusions. I’m deliberately, perhaps obstinately, avoiding the question of God, largely because I’m not really interested in it. This poem is far more interesting than a wail for God. Nevertheless, I’m not sure Plath’s speaker knows what she would want. She is hesitant in her clauses (‘Although, I admit, I desire, / Occasionally’: count the commas, including the one I haven’t quoted), and she can’t quite, although ‘one might[,] say love’.
Perhaps as a way of compensating for ‘the unformed form of life’, the loose-bagginess of nature, Plath takes to the relative rigidity and artificiality of poetic form. ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’, however, is somewhat coy about its own form, specifically its end-rhymes, as if it were ashamed of the contrivances necessary for it to have been built. But still, there is an unbroken pattern: the final syllable of every line in the first stanza chimes with the corresponding line in every successive stanza. There are scattered rhymes and half-rhymes, more consonance than assonance:
there […] fire […] desire […] chair […] honor […] flare […] fear […] occur
rook […] seek […] backtalk […] took […] walk […] rook [...] luck […] spasmodic
And so on. There is something so lovable about near-rhymes, as anybody who has enjoyed Wilfred Owen will know, and I suspect that Plath was taking a young poet’s pleasure in them here. The pattern is further obscured by the enjambment, which prevents the chiming words from being natural points for pause. As I love the half-rhymes, so do I love poems that rigidly rhyme without its being obvious when hearing them read aloud. Larkin’s ‘Mr Bleaney’, for instance, which sticks out for me in this regard, or, to reach for a nearby book, Lowell’s poem ‘Beyond the Alps’, which opens his collection Life Studies. It seems to me one of the incidental triumphs of modern poetry — and perhaps even of nature — that it can hide its patterns so elegantly, in such plain sight.
This poem’s not all about making poems, and you needn’t be any stripe of artist to feel it fully. It is also about depression, quite plainly, about ‘[t]rekking stubborn through this season / Of fatigue’ — a phrase, nicely trochaic, which characterises depression as a mire of prolonged tiredness that is to be endured with a determination that it will pass and a willingness to appreciate moments of joy and light. Plath focuses especially on those unexpected concentrations of light, figuring them as betokening a kind of celestial lightning bolt or angelic condescension, a ‘rare, random descent’. The light may not lift us out, but it will afford us ‘brief respite’.
It does nevertheless help to be a poet: to have recourse to a space where you can gather all these ‘spasmodic / Tricks of radiance’ and therefrom ‘[p]atch together a content // of sorts’. The word content was, on my initial rereadings, the part of the poem that I struggled with most, in the sense that it just didn’t sound right to my ear. I wasn’t sure whether its usage is meant to evoke the ambiguity of its definitions, i.e., the adjectival form describing satisfaction or contentment along with the noun describing a subject to be expressed by art — it would be quite clumsy if so. Now, however, I’m either sure it’s my own silly linguistical brain at fault or sure it doesn’t matter. Content could easily be substituted by poem, and it was prudent to go for the more inclusive term. A ‘content’, despite the demurring, deprecating tone of 'patch' and 'of sorts', which imply a slapdash though effortful (re-)arranging, is a greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts whole cohesive thing, a perfectly appointed tableau or a dense rich stew, one mixed steadily of light cupped in hands and thrown into the pot.
1 (London: Abacus, 2008), p. 161. 2Strong Opinions (London: Penguin, 2011), p. 9.
