A Note on Sylvia Plath’s “Morning Song” and Other Poems from Ariel

Sylvia Plath’s biographers and literary critics all but unanimously believe that Ariel‘s introductory poem, “Morning Song”, recounts the birth of Plath’s daughter, Frieda, and thus serves as, alas, another “confessional” poem. As I have argued in my previous commentaries on her poetry, Plath’s status as a confessional poet must be considered with more than a grain or two of salt. Although it is undeniable that Plath used her life as a vehicle for her unique form of poetic expression, her poems, especially those of Ariel, are composed of fictionalized biographical elements that enable her to offer broader pronouncements on femininity, culture, and literature. The same is true of “Morning Song” which, if one were to accept the traditional biographical reading, would be a very strange poem indeed.

As a preliminary observation, “Morning Song” diverges from the historical record in two respects: first, Frieda was born a year earlier, on April 1, 1960, so the poem is not a contemporaneous record as, for example, Plath’s letters and journals are; and second, both Plath and Hughes separately reported that the midwife did not have to strike baby Frieda at birth [see, e.g., Ted Hughes letter to Lucas Myers, April 22, 1960].

Aside from these anomalies, the poem’s figuration seems off-center and inept. The baby is likened to a “fat gold watch” whose “bald cry / Took its place among the elements”, a grandiose characterization that befits a god rather than a human child. The baby is also like a “new statue” in a “drafty museum”. In other words, this is not one of the adorable putti of the Italian Renaissance. Instead, the images of the “child” are idealized or mythologized projections that belong to another realm, so that one is inclined to say (as the author herself does in “Magi”): “What girl ever flourished in such company?”

The poem’s other peculiarities do not resonate like the trenchant representations that characterize Plath’s letters and journals. The infant’s “nakedness / Shadows our safety” is an almost inscrutable abstraction that drifts beyond the mind’s purchase, as if the fact of being au naturel obscures the onlooker’s own sense of safety and comfort. Witnesses to the birth are like a Greek chorus, first “magnifying your arrival”, but then “stand round blankly as walls”, somehow rendered dumb by the baby’s ineffable presence. Then there is this off-putting admission:

I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.

In this incongruous portrait of mother and child, the act of giving birth is a mechanistic distillation (albeit one of a “cloud”) with its miserable end in self-effacement. The metaphor reduces motherhood to the mere act of creation without the expansive period of childrearing and care that would follow a natural birth.

A biographical reading also has a tendency to debase what is surely remarkable poetic expression. For example, respecting the lines, “All night your moth-breath / Flickers among the flat pink roses,” the critical apparatus that tends to Plath’s legacy informs us that a piece of the wallpaper from the Plath household, bearing the very image of the roses enshrined by the poem, is now preserved at Smith College’s Lily Library.[i] If we are to credit poetic figuration in every instance of the poem, we should be allowed the luxury of maintaining that “flat pink roses” actually serves its purpose as a symbolic literary artifact and not as a fragment of the true cross.

Finally, when the baby cries, the narrator stumbles from bed with a figure still evidencing her late pregnancy, ready to nurse (“cow-heavy”). The baby’s mouth is “clean as a cat’s”, a remarkably sensual and animalistic image that is offset by the dowdy “Victorian nightgown” of its mother. At dawn, the baby’s cries assume a perfection of sorts, linguistically in “clear vowels” and musically in a “handful of notes” which delightfully “rise like balloons.”  These are charming images, but the hyperbole is all too much, effectively gilding the lily.

If one accepts at face value the narrative of “Morning Song”, with all of its disconnected emotions and unsettling imagery, the poem reads as a case study in post-partum depression which, though such an interpretation be incompetent to give larger purpose to the poem’s figurative scheme, too easily satisfies the needs of biographically bent readers.[ii]

A more interesting construction is to be found in the view that “Morning Song” is the author’s account of the creation of the poem, in this instance one that performs the traditional duties of an envoy that introduces the poet and her work. In English poetry, the prime example of this type of poem is Edmund Spenser’s “To His Book” from The Shepheardes Calender:

Go, little Book; thy self present,
As Child whose Parent is unkent,
To him that is the President
Of Nobleness and Chivalrie:
And if that Envy bark at thee,
As sure it will, for Succour flee
Under the shadow of his Wing.
And, asked who thee forth did bring,
A Shepherd’s Swain say did thee sing,
All as his straying Flock he fed:
And when his Honour hath thee read,
Crave pardon for thy Hardy-head.
But if that any ask thy Name,
Say, thou wert base begot with blame:
For thy thereof thou takest shame.
And when thou art past Jeopardy,
Come tell me what was said of me,
And I will send more after thee.

With its correlation of author-poem qua parent-child in “Morning Song”, Plath joined a tradition that goes at least as far back as Ovid (“Tristia” I.1). From this perspective, the poetic figurations in “Morning Song” are purposeful as well as amusing and clever. The love that sets the poem going is likened to a watchmaker’s meticulous care, assembling the most precious matter with precise calculation. The “midwife” is the poet’s muse. The baby’s “footsoles” refer to metrical feet, i.e., the time-keeping elements of a poem. The “watch” metaphor also introduces a temporal element in a literary work’s existence, as Plath here implicitly acknowledges that a poem may last longer than a poet’s life (Ars longa, vita brevis), but that time eventually carries away all things (Omnia fert aetas, animum quoque). “Morning Song” makes us acutely aware of the preciousness of time.

Giving full rein to the parent-child metaphor, one may construe “Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival” as the performative act of writing and reading. The “drafty museum”, with its clownish pun on “draft” (eschewing the British spelling, “draughty”), represents a forum where the new poem is first exhibited. One imagines that this “museum” is full of literary artifacts from drafts of other poems, and that the poem’s realization comes after successive efforts to nurture it to completion. The “naked” expression of the poem provides safe cover for the poet as well as it overshadows conventional pretensions to modesty (as similarly reflected in the image of Lady Godiva in “Ariel”).

In the metaphorical play of this scheme, the act of writing poetry becomes not a conflicted statement of human motherhood, but an expression of the relationship between the poet and poem, which is like a cloud that “distills a mirror” of itself only to be eventually “effaced” by winds of time. This figuration refers to the poet’s sense of her own mortality and the work that survives (albeit itself ultimately effaced), as best exemplified in Keats’ epitaph, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Plath similarly combines two complex symbols of vitality of mortal life and its ephemerality in “moth-breath” and “flat pink roses”, which are depicted in telescoping two-dimensional images in wallpaper and the poetic text. We are therefore moved to see these as surrealistic literary artifacts and to interpret them accordingly. So too, the poet listening to a “far sea” is a familiar reference to poetry (cf., Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West”) and a heritage that began with Homer.

Plath reported that she often rose before dawn to write, so the scene of the poet in her Victorian robe is one in which she apprehends the anthropomorphic embodiment of the poem (“Your mouth opens clean as a cat”), with its “cry” framed by metaphor and synesthesia (“clear vowels rise like balloons”), eliciting a portrait that suggests the strange and unexpected effect that the poem’s realization has upon her own sensibility. It is notable that the poem’s “cry” summons the poet and not the other way around, and therefore plays on the traditional sense that a poem, like a child, is a blessing bestowed by a divine power. The poet-poem relationship, like that of parent-child, is symbiotic, borne out in “Morning Song” by the ritual of the poet rising to nurture her poem with the inspired milk that has filled her overnight.[iii]

As opposed to strict biographical readings of Plath’s work, I suggest that this “literary” interpretation of “Morning Song” comes closer to accounting for the poem’s figurative elements in a way that normalizes its emotional content. The parent-child metaphor need not be so precisely aligned that an x=y correspondence exists in every respect, because the poet must be allowed the freedom to play with her work and create the enchantment and surprise that we yearn for in every poem. Moreover, in no respect am I attempting to convey an absolutist’s interpretation of these symbols, whose very nature deals in conflicting meanings, such as those implied by Plath’s use of “moth-breath” and “pink roses”. When we do acknowledge this figurative play, however, “Morning Song’ becomes more poetically engaging and less problematic than it would be if anchored to a straightforward biographical interpretation.

Plath continued to use the metaphor of author-parent and poem-child in other poems like “Barren Woman,” “Thalidomide,” “Childless Woman,” and “Child,” each exploring a different aspect of literary creativity and particularly Plath’s personal struggles with writing. The specific figures of one poem provide the connective tissue to other poems. For example, as opposed to the “clear vowels” of the new, fully realized poem in “Morning Song,” malformed or aborted creations “screech” in “Thalidomide” and “shriek” in “Childless Woman.” Similarly, we hear “I’m no more your mother / than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement at the wind’s hand” echoed in “I spin mirrors / Loyal to my image” in “Childless Woman.” In the same sense, “Thalidomide” contains a series of images of failed creation, the last of which also adopts the mirror metaphor: “The glass cracks across, / The image // Flees and aborts like dropped mercury.”

Likewise, “Ariel” is also about poetic creation. Though Ted Hughes presumed that the poem memorialized Plath’s horse riding experiences, textual historians have shown that “Ariel” was chiefly written as a response, companion, and counterpoint to “The Thought Fox,” a poem in which Hughes described his own creative process. “Ariel” rehearses Plath’s daily writing practice, which began in the wee hours of the morning and concluded with the sun rising at dawn when Plath’s daughter would need attending to. The poem enacts the touching off of the creative spark that yields the poem which, among the many metaphors of fecundity that critics have already noted in the poem,[iv] is finally realized in the image that most critics seemed to have missed, that of the sperm cell impregnating the egg[v]:

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

This brilliant finale coalesces by sandwiching metaphors that Plath had compiled in making the poem, where “dew” symbolizes fleeting inspiration in the form of the androgynous sperm cell, viz., the “arrow” that “flies suicidal” to become “one” with its egg, the “Eye” of the sun, a traditional symbol for God and the source of all creativity.[vi] It is the poet, the “Noble Rider” that Stevens described in his famous essay,[vii] riding the winged steed – at once “God’s lioness” and Jerusalem (analogues of the word, “Ariel”)– who “unpeels,” completely losing her sense of individual identity (stanzas 7 and 8: “White / Godiva . . . a glitter of seas”), even the most intimate kind as mother (The child’s cry // Melts in the wall), in order to create the poem. Certainly, the connection between “caul” and “cauldron” here is too close to be accidental. In the context of Ariel, the poem “Ariel” completes the poetic expression that began with “Morning Song”.

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Footnotes

[i] Tracy Brain, The Other Sylvia Plath (Routledge 2001), 80 [fn 75].

[ii]  Susan Van Dyne, Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems (University of North Carolina Press 1993), 159.  “[S]he seems to have composed it as an antidote to the miscarriage of her second child, almost a year later in late February 1961.”  Van Dyne also thinks this miscarriage gave rise to “In Plaster and “Tulips” : “Plath’s efforts in both poems to cast off any link between the maternal body and her own may indirectly suggest the guilt and resentment she felt because, in her miscarriage the month before, she felt she had failed Aurelia.” Ibid at 90.

[iii]  In this figuration, where the child-poem is nursed by the mother-poet, Plath may be referring to a simile used by Plato in Ion, where Socrates discusses the source of poetic inspiration and likens it to the “milk and honey” drawn by Bacchic maidens:

For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian revellers when they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind. And the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves say; for they tell us that they bring songs from honeyed fountains, culling them out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; they, like the bees, winging their way from flower to flower. 

[iv] See the University of Illinois page on “Ariel,” especially the commentary by Kathleen Margaret Lant and Christina Britzolakis.  https://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/ariel.htm.

[v] Plath used such impressionistic images frequently. Tim Kendall makes a similar discovery about “Childless Woman” where “The womb / Rattles its pod, the moon / Discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go” describes the unfertilized female egg descending through the fallopian tubes.

[vi] We see the same metaphor in “Child” with “Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing / I want to fill with color and ducks, / The zoo of the new.” So that the anxiety-ridden ending of the poem (“Pool in which images / Should be grand and classical // Not this troublous / Winging of hands, this dark / Ceiling without a star”) is explicable when viewed as a poem about the frustrations of poetic creation.

[vii] Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel (Vintage 1951).  In his essay, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” Stevens uses a quotation from Plato’s Phaedrus:

Let our figure be of a composite nature—a pair of winged horses and a charioteer. Now the winged horses and the charioteer of the gods are all of them noble, and of noble breed, while ours are mixed; and we have a charioteer who drives them in a pair, and one of them is noble and of noble origin, and the other is ignoble and of ignoble origin; and, as might be expected, there is a great deal of trouble in managing them. I will endeavor to explain to you in what way the mortal differs from the immortal creature. The soul or animate being has the care of the inanimate, and traverses the whole heaven in divers forms appearing;—when perfect and fully winged she soars upward, and is the ruler of the universe; while the imperfect soul loses her feathers, and drooping in her flight at last settles on the solid ground. (NA 3)