Over your body the clouds go
High, high and icily
And a little flat, as if they
Unlike swans,
Having no reflections;
Unlike you,
With no strings attached.
All cool, all blue. Unlike you —-
You, there on your back,
Eyes to the sky.
The spider-men have caught you, (‘Gulliver’ by Sylvia Plath)
There is a prevailing myth that Sylvia Plath is a poet of confession. Far from it. She is a poet of evasion and effacement. One of her persisting images is that of clouds which appears in her maternal poem, ‘Morning Song’, and in ‘Poppies in July’ where her speaker declares that ‘even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts' — an image of blooming, burgeoning, expansive feeling— and then again here in her poem ‘Gulliver’, where clouds are an image of anonymity and vacuity, of blankness.
Plath is fond of images of detachment and invisibility, the image that offers no reflection, the self that cannot be fully seen or known. Hence the ‘you’ ‘that lies on his back to the sky, all cool, all blue, that is somehow part of the sky, or ‘skiey’ as Percy Bysshe Shelley famously put it. That is, a self that cannot be fully read or seen but nonetheless has a body, as Plath’s subjects tend to. She is a visceral writer, an aesthetic she learnt from her ‘master’ D.H. Lawrence, who, a vitalist like herself, felt the world was filled with ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’ as Dylan Thomas put it, a life force shared by all organic life.
It is often hard to know which way round the world is facing in a Plath poem, and here, in her poem, ‘Gulliver, we are asked to see a body lying on the ground facing the sky, facing the clouds, clouds that move over the body on the ground, the clouds themselves flat like the body that lies ‘back’. ‘Flat’ and ‘back’ create a near-rhyme that push them together into a close relationship with ‘you’, the pronoun that rings and echoes all across the poem. Plath often relies upon the accusative voice to deliver propulsion, momentum, a force field of sound, and ‘you’ is an easy word to rhyme; it rhymes with ‘blue’ and ‘true’ and ‘new’ and ‘shoe’ and shoo, words that appear in nursery rhymes. One two buckle my shoe. Words that appear in her poem ‘Daddy'. But here, in the opening part of this poem — what will later turn into another maternal poem — the ‘you’ has no reflection; it remains unidentified. And yet as reader we want a relationship between images. We go looking for a poetic logic— and there is one of sorts — because the ‘you’ and the sky meet in the image of swans and the adverb ‘icily’ and the adverbial phrase ‘a little flat.’ At the same time the speaker reminds us that the clouds are ‘unlike you’, the ‘you’ who remains separate and - at this point in the poem - still undeclared. Anonymous. This ‘you’ is then mysteriously caught by ‘the spider men,’ an image which presumably relates to the image of strings if we think of webs as forms of almost invisible strings that descend from on high. And yet, the speaker tells us that this ‘you’ has ‘no strings attached’; there is no relationship between them. Plath likes to build strange and uncanny associations only to disassociate them; and so, the ‘you’ on the ground with his body remains quite ‘unlike’ anything that might materialise in the sky — swans, spiders, string, blue clouds.
Which reminds me that she is not a confessional poet if by confession we mean an outpouring of self-identity. She is not interested in identity and in fact often effaces her subjects. No doubt Plath would not be keen on the current rage towards identity politics. Her speakers tend to obscure and self-efface and as poet she likes to keep distance between the accused or the addressed and the body of images descending from her metaphorical skies.
And I realise now, reading Plath again this morning, how much of what we call confession or ‘telling the truth’, or ‘being honest’ is in fact a form of curated dishonesty; a disguising of our true selves, whatever that might be (it sounds painful, so hide it) because we have so many screens to which to attach filtered and edited versions of ourselves: laptops, P.C’s, iPhones, mobiles; and so many online platforms, each offering more vivid and lurid ways of showing parts of ourselves - often quite literally - a grotesque form of body part-scenery.
Which brings me to my character Edith in my current narrative, ‘Pond Life’, who is now performing a ritual of truth telling by telephone. Edith is performing a ritualised confession to an inspector, or so she thinks. In actual fact, she is redacting and re-enacting scenes from a very ordinary life but choosing symbols and motifs that suit her version of the real and making them hyperreal, exaggerated, incredible. Mr. Jarvis’s white gloved hands on the counter. Mr. Jarvis in his white coat, Mr. Jarvis with his discreet manner paying her attention. In the process she loses the actual Mr. Jarvis and replaces him with a fantasy, a phantasm, a cloudy idea of a person, an onscreen ghost.