Old Obscure Versifier Contemplates Two Great Young Dead Poets

 

Dylan Thomas in a characteristic pose before a bookstore reading.

Some years ago, I noticed that Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath shared a birthday, October 27—1914 in Wales for him, 1932 in Boston for her.  They had little in common except that they wrote poetry—although poetry very different in form, theme, style, and substance—and died young each in a kind of pitiful squalor.  Each had crossed the ocean and passed in the other’s country, a nice cosmic balance.

That year—2011—their common birthday also coincided with a new moon and where I was, at least, a howling storm of darkness.  

Sylvia Plath in a similar venue battling her invisible demons.

You know me.  I am a sucker for cosmic coincidence.  So, I scribbled a poem for the occasion.

Writing poetry about poets, both infinitely more gifted than I, is an act of terminal hubris for which I shall be justly punished.  But here it is anyway.

How Black the Night

 October 26, 2011—New Moon, Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath

 Even the New Moon hides behind the howling clouds. 

Happy Birthday Dylan—

Why did you not

            rage, rage against the dying of the light

            in that pool of your own black vomit

            at the Chelsea?

 

Happy Birthday Sylvia—

The same year, you dewy goddess,

            you emptied the medicine vials

            and crawled under your mother’s porch.

 

Not ships passing in the night,

                    but traversing the same black ocean

                    away from home

                    to something else.

 

Did you find what you were looking for

                    in worship and whiskey,

                    in broken love and madness?

 

As Dylan moldered under Laugharne,

                    Lady Lazarus, you wrote.

                   Dying

   Is an art, like everything else.

   I do it exceptionally well.

 

But laying your head in an oven

             is no art

             and posthumous poems

             no resurrection.

 

How black the night, dead poets,

                    how black the night?

 

          —Patrick Murfin

The Applicant By Sylvia Plath—National Poetry Month 2024

Sylvia Plath looking happier than tortured iconography that flourished after her death.

Sylvia Plath was beautiful, brilliant, and deeply troubled.  The daughter of a Unitarian minister and teenage wunderkind, her poetry and novel The Bell Jar became touchstones and inspirations for second wave feminists and emo girls.  Chronically depressed and perhaps schizophrenia it was difficult to distinguish autobiography from paranoid delusions.  After many failed or feigned attempts she ended her life with her head in a gas oven in London at just 30 years old.

Today, we share a piece that is among her most clear-eyed and lucid.

An early paperback edition of of Plath's Collected Poems edited by her British poet husband, Ted Hughes.  Although he spent much of the rest of his life honoring and preserving her legacy, he was demonized by many feminists as a sexist brute and cause of Sylvia's suicide.

The Applicant

First, are you our sort of a person?  

Do you wear

A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,

A brace or a hook,

Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

 

Stitches to show something’s missing?  No, no? Then

How can we give you a thing?

Stop crying.

Open your hand.

Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

 

To fill it and willing

To bring teacups and roll away headaches

And do whatever you tell it.

Will you marry it?

It is guaranteed

 

To thumb shut your eyes at the end

And dissolve of sorrow.

We make new stock from the salt.

I notice you are stark naked.

How about this suit——

 

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.

Will you marry it?

It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof

Against fire and bombs through the roof.

Believe me, they’ll bury you in it.

 

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.

I have the ticket for that.

Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.

Well, what do you think of that?

Naked as paper to start

 

But in twenty-five years she’ll be silver,

In fifty, gold.

A living doll, everywhere you look.

It can sew, it can cook,

It can talk, talk, talk.

 

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.

You have a hole, it’s a poultice.

You have an eye, it’s an image.

My boy, it’s your last resort.

Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

 

—Sylvia Plath

 

From The Collected Poems. Copyright © 2008 by Sylvia Plath.

 

Two Great Young Dead Poets Contemplated by an Old Obscure One

Dylan Thomas in a characteristic pose before a bookstore reading.

A few years ago, I noticed that Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath shared a birthday, October 27—1914 in Wales for him, 1932 in Boston for her.  They had little in common except that they wrote poetry—although poetry very different in form, theme, style, and substance—and died young each in a kind of pitiful squalor.  Each had crossed the ocean and died in the other’s country, a nice cosmic balance.

That year—2012—their common birthday also coincided with a new moon and where I was, at least, a howling storm of darkness. 

Sylvia Plath in a similar venue battling her invisible demons.

You know me.  I am a sucker for cosmic coincidence.  So, I scribbled a poem for the occasion.

Writing poetry about poets, both infinitely more gifted than I, is an act of terminal hubris for which I shall be justly punished.  But here it is anyway.

 

 

How Black the Night

October 26, 2011—New Moon, Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath

 

Even the New Moon hides behind the howling clouds.

 

Happy Birthday Dylan—

Why did you not

            rage, rage against the dying of the light

            in that pool of your own black vomit

            at the Chelsea?

 

Happy Birthday Sylvia—

The same year, you dewy goddess,

            you emptied the medicine vials

            and crawled under your mother’s porch.

 

Not ships passing in the night,

                    but traversing the same black ocean

                    away from home

                    to something else.

 

Did you find what you were looking for

                    in worship and whiskey,

                    in broken love and madness?

 

As Dylan moldered under Laugharne,

                    Lady Lazarus, you wrote.

                   Dying

   Is an art, like everything else.

   I do it exceptionally well.

 

But laying your head in an oven

             is no art

             and posthumous poems

             no resurrection.

 

How black the night, dead poets,

                    how black the night?

 

—Patrick Murfin