… and a few posts ago she began to look at Sylvia Plath’s Berck Plage, which places the poet on that broad strand beside “the sea… this great abeyance.”
Already, in this first line, you see and hear her genius, the way great and abeyance share the long A, and the way the word abeyance has bay in it… And as for its meaning: The poem will mourn and rage at the way we manage our hideous human fate by living always in abeyance, indeed by being drawn in particular to places like beaches because there our effort to put a damper on thoughts of our barely pulled together lives moving toward disintegration is eased. We go to the beach because at the tranquilizing seaside world we find a living objective correlative of our efforts to pacify ourselves, to infantilize ourselves out of fear of debility and death. It’s as if nature itself, beside the ocean, wants us to calm down and easefully lie to ourselves about our harsh fate.
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 voices
Waving 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?
What Philip Larkin, in an uncharacteristically upbeat poem, calls the miniature gaiety of seasides, is in Plath a sinister “hiding,” a mere front. What’s being hidden behind the soft small setting of the shore? The wearing of sunglasses there only underlines the hidden sinister aspect of a location where we’re lulled into lying about the suffering misshapen existence in which we’re actually stuck.
Yet at Berck Plage all we have to do is look up at the vast hospital complex fronting the strand to know our precise status:
On the balconies of the hotel, things are glittering.
Things, things—-
Tubular steel wheelchairs, aluminum crutches.
Such salt-sweetness. Why should I walk
Beyond the breakwater, spotty with barnacles?
I am not a nurse, white and attendant,
I am not a smile.
She’s looking not at hotels but at the hospitals of Berck, many of which specialize in traumatic physical injury. Jean-Dominique Bauby found himself in one of those buildings among “broken-winged birds, voiceless parrots, ravens of doom, who have made our nest in a dead-end corridor of the neurology department.” So at Berck Plath found her perfect coincidence: the ultimate sunlit palliative for our condition, and an immediately adjacent anguish.
**********************
To be continued.
Am about to go out to dinner with our crowd.
June 9th, 2014 at 12:50PM
Of course “Idea of Order at Key West” — one of my relatively early Stevens favorites — is likely a beach poem in some sense. But, to my amateur eye and ear, the sea is more part of the atmospherics, a bit player next to the theme of poet as a the predominate maker of the reality of her world.
I’m trying to remember Notes off the top: all I can think of is my sense that the Blue Woman is near the sea. Then they’re the “pines above and along and besides the sea” in Auroras, but not necessarily a beach.
June 9th, 2014 at 1:13PM
Greg: Yes – my sense also of the Key West poem is that the sea is a bit player, and that the whole feel of the poem is celebratory — madly so if you compare it with Plath’s grim verse. Short version – the sea is a random mess; we’re (lovely) order-makers…
June 10th, 2014 at 9:50AM
Thanks.
Soon I will listen again, with your thoughts in mind, to WS reciting Idea of Order.
I have never read Plath. Now I will read some.