(Earlier posts here and here.)
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 glitter 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.
******************
Earlier, in her poem Berck Plage, Sylvia Plath described the ocean creep[ing] away, many-snaked, with a long hiss of distress. Now she looks up, and describes the sky, wormy with put-by smiles.
This is a world frozen in the act of becoming posthumous; on the beach we hear and see the recession of things – the sky holds faintly curved imprints of vanished smiles (the smiles of Cheshire Cat nurses who pretend to keep you alive and then vanish with a knowing smirk when you die), while the sea, oceanically insidious, is not worms but snakes, a hideous Medusa whose receding hiss hiss hiss whispers the sickening recurrence of life, suffering, and death.
The idea of futile recurrence is significantly softened in “Dover Beach,” where, standing on the coast across from Berck Plage,
you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery…
Here the sound is still tonal. It even has cadence. It’s about lyric sadness, not cold-blooded anguish. And we still own it – it hasn’t hardened into mythology yet. We share it with the ages, with Sophocles.
Matthew Arnold’s speaker looks behind him, into his hotel room, at his beloved; he turns and looks outside his window at a “fair” and “sweet” scene. Plath’s poem features not lovers but obscene exhibitionists stared at by an
onlooker, trembling,
Drawn like a long material
Through a still virulence…
The observer in Plath’s poem sees no beauty; she doesn’t even see any motion. Or if it’s motion, it’s worms moving on the bodies of the dead. It’s germs doing their slow work of undoing us – a still virulence – and all we can do is gape at the obscene semi-hidden desiccating procedure. That Cheshire cat is the grin of a skull, and the lovers, swallowed up by the sea, are becoming
white sea-crockery,
What cupped sighs, what salt in the throat….