Meeting the Moon at the Door

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
-- Sylvia Plath, The Moon and the Yew Tree

They (being the collective of all who know in the Universe) say it is bad luck to look at the new moon through a window. No lore that I can find, at least not readily, makes the same assertion about the full moon. So here I sit, with my eastern exposure, being watched by the moon... full moon, harvest moon, shining through the branches and telephone wires and casting my Edward Scissorhands figure on the windowsill in shadow against the unreflecting glass.

Last week I watched Sylvia, the beautiful, grim movie about Sylvia Plath, but not really: It was really more about Sylvia and her relationship with Ted Hughes. The subject matter is grim, not worthy of romanticizing; the movie itself is beautiful, visually, and even when the director attempts to capture life as seen through the warped, telescopic lens of depression, it is still beautiful. (Gwyneth Paltrow is good as Sylvia, but not the draw for me, as I only tuned in for a glimpse at her mother, the sublime Blythe Danner, who played -- who else? -- Sylvia's mother.)

Of course Sylvia Plath was not unfamiliar to me, or so I thought. Beautiful Sylvia Plath, who wrote and went mad and got married and wrote more and had babies and lost her marriage and wrote even more and then gassed herself. The original dead girls poet. Even her name has a kind of mythic resonance, unfortunately teetering somewhere between tragic heroine and urban legend (you can't chant it in a girl's restroom seance like you can "Helen Keller" or "Bloody Mary", but it still contains a frisson of scariness all the same).

I read both The Bell Jar and Ariel when I was 15. I found the novel interesting. The poems in Ariel, I found off-putting. In fact, I almost didn't like them. More to the point, I felt as though I *should* like them, and I could see they were of substance and merit and art, but they made me uncomfortable. I didn't understand them.

Of course, I understood them, literally, but I had no way in to the place Sylvia was going -- had gone. I was like Alice, forever the wrong size for the key or the door. So I kept my Plath books and did not reread them, and as we often do when we mistakenly take our misapprehensions for closure, presumed my need for, and understanding of, her work completed. Sylvia Plath, dead poet.

Days after watching the wretched, lovely film, Sylvia was still on my mind. I started reading Wintering, a novel of her last months of life structured around that final, feverish creative cycle of poems. Still edging toward Sylvia's work, but not quite there yet. In that time, I've picked up a few of the poems, reading them again. At first, it was mostly for a point of reference for this novel's structure. But now, as I read them more than 20 years later, they have something to say to me -- or, perhaps more accurately, I'm finally ready to hear what they say. How could I have possibly done that at 15?

Soon I will be done with Wintering, and I will pull out my battered copy of Ariel and reintroduce myself. There was nothing for me to see there as a child, and no way for me to see myself reflected in what I read. Now that the door's been opened, who knows what I will find?

Posted on September 28, 2004 to horticulture

Previously: Where have you gone, Lizzie Bennett?
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