Poets and Poems
Teachers can find all of these poems and their accompanying paintings online easily. Each is reproduced in countless print art and language arts collections, as well. I will introduce the three poets as a group, emphasizing the obvious similarities among their lives and poems. As we get to the poems I will emphasize the unique styles that distinguish them. We will use a variety of close-reading and close-viewing exercises throughout the process.
Robert Lowell and “Epilogue”
Robert Lowell described his privileged childhood self as manic, energetic, and a little obsessive. In frequent bouts of bipolar disorder he roller-coastered in cycles, affecting his relationships, his teaching, and his writing, which he “saw writing both as a way to understand his compulsions and as a compulsion in its own right, a roundabout leading out of trouble and immediately back in.” His “regular” life was driven by metaphor—his way of making sense—but in manic fits the comparisons became his reality. He might have thought himself to be a composer or a dictator. In the vacuum after his fit he could “tame” his metaphors and put them to use in his work.8 This cycle of adapting the manic literal to the more sane figurative use in verse might be the most direct connection between his mental health and his poetry. Robert Lowell’s “Epilogue,” fittingly published as the final poem in his last collection of poems weeks before his death, is about the fear that ruled his late life: he felt he was losing his creative abilities and his capacity for imagining, only able to resort to memory. One of the poem’s metaphors is that he can only take a snapshot, posed and artificial and static. Perhaps he is also questioning the abilities of poetry, not just his own. The painting to which Lowell likely refers is Johannes Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter.
The first four lines of the 23 line poem ask directly why poetry fails him when he wants to “imagine,” not “recall.” The only two italicized lines follow: “The painter’s vision is not a lens, / it trembles to caress the light.” These may be the words of the poet himself; he seems to envy the painter and gives him (I say him because of Vermeer) the passionate verbs trembles and caress. When he describes the contrast of a metaphorical snapshot, that can only refresh a posed memory, he uses a harsher diction: “lurid, rapid, garish, grouped. . .paralyzed by fact.” He questions next why accuracy is not enough. (My students count on snapshots to document and validate their lives on social media. I see a probable discussion about the more accurate immortality of other ways to document our lives.)
Lowell often uses four-beat lines although most of his poems are free verse. In “Epilogue” we will look at those that have more or fewer. For example, line three is four simple one-syllable words: “I want to make,” which, isolated, shouts a statement he wants his poem to make.
The predominant images in the poem are, in fact, images-driven: vision, lens, shapshot, eye, and photograph. He finally holds Vermeer’s painting out to us near the end of the poem for comparison? Contrast? The “accuracy / Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination” is praised, but it is also balanced with what Lowell desires, the experience of “his girl solid with yearning.” The possessive “his” of Vermeer suggests complexity in the painting, as well. The painting is more authentic than the snapshot, the kind of creation that Lowell does not want to lose. The woman in the painting is facing the window where the light illuminates her front as she reads, as if she were a saint. She is wearing blue and expecting a child, maybe suggesting Mary? Often a rich symbol a (the) map is behind her, and also lets the sun track across it through the window. In contrast to the realness of the sun, however, the map is only a web of representational signs. This “snapshot” is so heavy with affection, so un-posed—it must be what Lowell has in mind as an authentic, inspired creation, whether of art or poetry. .
The mood of the final lines leaves the reader feeling that the narrator (and in this case poet) is slipping away. Of course, the poem belies its own statement that the poet is fading in its ability; it is deeply imaginative and crafted so that we cannot tell if we should wink back at the poet or feel pity for him.
Anne Sexton and “The Starry Night”
Another New England writer of some privilege (but also probably abuse), Anne Sexton married relatively young. While her husband served in Korea she was a fashion model—an industry she shared briefly with Sylvia Plath. Still young, she suffered post-partum depression and breakdowns after having both of her children. She attempted suicide on her 27th birthday. A psychiatrist encouraged her to write between visits, and she was quickly addicted to the process, joining writing groups in Boston and meeting Plath, Lowell, and other confessional poets and mentors early on. Her poetry was truly confessional; she dared to write about topics such as abortion, menstruation, addiction, and suicide. Criticism for her content was balanced with awards and praise for her poems. Like Lowell, her last collection of poems was about dying, but it seemed to be her poetry that kept her alive for her last two decades. Her life was fraught with drama—physical abuse of her children and between Anne and her husband, infidelity, and addiction, to start. Sexton committed suicide when she was 45. I found work discussing specific cognitive disorders connected with the likelihood of suicide. She had several of these: selective abstraction and generalization, among others. These two were the most relevant as I saw examples playing out with all three poets. Both of those just listed here are manifested in the use of metaphor which “fuse(s) sensory and thought.” Certainly all poet and writers use metaphor. These particular metaphors, that are extreme and intense, and also the use of hyperbole, serve as tools Sexton and others who habitually express the extreme depth of unhappiness, such as in “The Starry Night” when “one black-haired tree slips / up like a drowned woman in to the hot sky” or “the old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.”9 The intensity of despair and manic feeling in general may account for some of the very personal and controversial topics among confessional poets, especially Sexton.
Anne Sexton’s “The Starry Night” is an obvious choice for this unit. It is one of few paintings that I can be sure they’ve seen (I have a drink-and-paint version of a Starry Night with the Tulsa skyline in my classroom). Even before closer analysis, students will suspect easy connections to mental illness and probably suicide, for example, in the refrain “I want to die” or in “sucked up by that great dragon…” Van Gogh’s life and death were also marred by mental illness and that manic energy is present in this painting, especially. We know he was thinking about death—and religion—at the time from a letter he wrote to his brother Theo: “Looking at the stars always makes me dream . . . Just as we take the train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star.” And from Van Gogh in the poem’s epigraph: “That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars,” also from a letter to Theo.
In the painting the roiling sky overpowers the calm, sleeping village below, like death waiting to call someone up. It is a dark painting save the eleven stars, maybe representing as many dead souls who have “reached a star.” Sexton says in the poem’s refrain, “This is how / I want to die.” The last four words end the first two stanzas, in prominence and repeated, confirming the interpretation that the painting is about death. The poem’s imagery, including the violent metaphors Wedding discusses, allows no room for the idea that the poem has romantic or creative interpretations.
In Sexton’s poem, the town is reduced to something that is “silent” and “does not exist / except where one black-haired tree slips / up…” She emphasizes the starry night, instead, personifying it with those terrible metaphors, and yearning for it to pull her in, to death. The last twelve words are the trickiest, less clear than her dominating use of image and metaphor. “to split / from my life with no flag, / no belly, / no cry.” She wants to go, to die, completely liberated from that which gives her immortality or meaning.
Sylvia Plath and “The Disquieting Muses”
We tend to compartmentalize Sylvia Plath’s life into several categories: her seemingly glamourous young years when she was a summer intern at Vogue Magazine, her tempestuous marriage to renowned poet Ted Hughes, and her struggles with mental illness and ultimate suicide at the age of thirty. It is this middle time, with Hughes in their early years, in which she finds herself often in museums, exploring and writing about art in a break from her standard poetry, but we do find the confessional voice in “The Disquieting Muses.” It is inspired by the painting of the same name by Italian metaphysical poet Georgio de Chirico. Sylvia Plath’s ekphrastic poems are well-known but are eclipsed by the greater interest in her more personal, confessional poems, for obvious reasons. At the age of thirty, she does, like Sexton and others take her own life.
“By writing about works of art, Plath inserts herself into an ongoing dialogue, a dialogue larger than the one in her own mind.”10 In this way, maybe art provides a focal point or cornerstone for the miasmic thoughts she has about her relationships, especially, and other issues, in the same way that the poems of Lowell and Sexton are probably influenced by their psychological distractions to some extent. Jeffrey Meyers points out that the subjects of the painting she writes about include “naked women in trees and jungles; coiled snakes and threatening lions; faceless, even headless figures in deserted shadowy squares; sea monsters and severed heads; blood and violence; alienated and tragically doomed lovers; departing souls and apocalyptic images.”11
The De Chirico painting was created in an early modern 1917, as is apparent by some cubist style and the factory in the background. In his analysis of the work James Thrall Soby says that it “illustrates the ambivalent, 'metaphysical' nature of (De Chirico’s) early art. The picture attracts and repels, beguiles and frightens, conveys a warm nostalgic aura but at the same time suggests an impending catastrophe.”12 We’ll see that Plath’s poem captures this range, from nostalgia to catastrophe, with words. The painting is dominated by distortion, by the ambiguous green –blue sky time of day and the awkward length of the piazza between foreground and background. A female statue on the right both hovers and sits on the ground. One figure has removed her head and set it on the ground. If the painting in the landscape is the landscape within Plath’s own mind, then we question who is populating the terrain and what statement she makes about both The three female figures in the painting are the three figures, or muses, in the poem. Plath said of them in an interview, “All through the poem I have in mind the enigmatic figures in this painting - three terrible faceless dressmaker's dummies in classical gowns, seated and standing in a weird, clear light that casts the long strong shadows characteristic of de Chirico's early work.”13 Students will want to speculate on the random artifacts, such as the boxes and striped stick or staff.
The use of I and the direct address to Mother indicate a personal narrative from the start. The three figures are a “visual representation of the evil she blames her mother for not protecting her from.”14 We sense this when the figures are introduced in the first stanza as these women, and the statement is sustained through all seven stanzas. The meter throughout, with approximately four beats per line, gives nursery rhyme percussion, underscoring the un-childlike, somber sentiment in the poem. The muses suggest any number of witches, fates, godmothers, or good fairies, and the mix of the allusions they represent makes their presence richer in the poem, and they make the mother, who reads, bakes, praises and controls the pretty things, more vapid and distant. The idealism and safety Mother represents become less and less accessible in Plath’s darkening mind, but she credits her mother for the idylls of her childhood—she “sent me to piano lessons / And praised my arabesques and trills.”
The first two words are “Mother, mother,” and it is the first word in the second stanza. The first two stanzas conjure up a conventional nursery with a mother who tells bedtime stories about “Mixie Blackshort the heroic bear,” but Mother has introduced or allowed in her absence “these ladies. . .with leads like darning-eggs to nod / and nod and nod” at her crib. The voiceless, nodding heads are frightening to me, much less a child, and they are creepier in contrast to the witches who were always baked into the gingerbread. They are permanently settled into her head. By the 16th line they are still there—“Mouthless, eyeless, with stitched bald head.”
By the third stanza, when she is twelve, the muses are permanently settled into her head or life. Her mother makes bright attempts at cookies and dressing up thunderstorms; still, “those ladies broke the panes.” She keeps them at an objective arm’s length through the first half of the poem by always calling them “these ladies” or “those ladies.” For a while both worlds are present—the conventional, sunny one, and the somber, shadowed one with voiceless muses, and she crosses back and forth.
In stanza four they are present through what should be an enchanting evening with friends dancing and blinking “flashlights like fireflies.” What was probably Plath’s or our narrator’s own anxiety is blamed on the “Godmothers” and the imagery of lengthening shadows begins in the poem with “And the shadow stretched, and the lights went out.” It has been unclear whether her Mother is aware that this dark side exists. Perhaps she is, when in this stanza she “cried and cried,” as she watches Sylvia, “heavy footed” unable to engage in her performance.
Through the persistence of her conventional life of piano lessons, her mother’s apparent love is eclipsed by the presence of “muses unhired by you, dear mother.” Plath or her persona has achieved the “assiduous concealment of a more fundamental condition of blankness and hopelessness.”15 We see her tortured self emerging both in her young life and in the poem.
In the penultimate stanza her mother is floating away on a blue and floral balloon “and bluebirds that never were / Never, never found anywhere.” She seems to be taking all of the life, the beauty away with her balloon, leaving Plath in her desolate, haunting landscape where all that was good has turned dark and she turned to face “her traveling companions.”
The lengthening shadows continue in the final stanza where she repeats the address to her mother from the poem’s first line. Plath is left in the “kingdom you bore me to,” and the muses continue their vigil. There seems to be no escape—until the last two lines when she stands defiant despite the company she keeps.16
Comments: