We have finally got around to watching some of the BBC poetry season we have on tape starting with a ten-year old program about Ted Hughes (with of course the usual concentration on his relationship with SP). There was a reading of one of Hughes' Birthday Letters poems with the rostrum camera image of pages from Plath's journals which had me again wondering about the last, supposedly-destroyed volumes of the journals and the salacious idea that somewhere in the various piles of papers sent to different universities around the world, that last volume still exists waiting to be released to us baying culturenistas. What would be the point? What further light would it shed on the situation and would it be worth the upset it would cause to surviving relatives? Dichotomy here - desire to read the details and also to be restrained and to do the right thing. All moot of course, unless that volume does in fact turn up.
The note in the book for this sounds like the title of a Dali painting - The possibility of the continued existence of Sylvia Plath's final journal. It is followed by these fragments of poetry - The tip-tap claw, the panther's maw across the mouth ... which begs completion but is so obviously a rip-off of an early poem by Plath to Hughes - Pursuit. Rereading it shows it to be a very personal poem but not a very good one - simply something to get a bit of her own lust out of the way I suspect. However, all the way through it, despite being stuffed with forest imagery, I see the whole thing overlaid with genteel views of Cambridge, the theatrical backdrops of academia cloaking the real world of pairing-off, of animal instincts and the struggle between the chemical depths of consciousness and the rational electrics of higher functions. But then again isn't that most poetry - the tabloid view of dusty offices, with bespectacled poets scratching away - all Hello Clouds, Hello Sky? In reality it is all rather sexy, punctuated with steamy thoughts and backstabbing.
All this has me looking forward to the Keats movie - Bright Star. This title comes from this sonnet which we end with today.
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art-
-Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors-
-No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.
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