Last Words:
 |
of Sylvia Plath
Last Words
by Sylvia Plath1
I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up.
I
want to be looking at them when they come
Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
I see them already--the pale, star-distance faces.
Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.
I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first
gods.
They will wonder if I was important.
I should sugar and preserve my days like fruit!
My mirror is clouding over ---
A few more breaths, and it will reflect nothing at all.
The flowers and the faces whiten to a sheet.
I do not trust the spirit. It escapes
like steam
In dreams, through mouth-hole or eye-hole. I can't stop it.
One day it won't come back. Things aren't like that.
They stay, their little particular lusters
Warmed by much handling. They almost purr.
When the soles of my feet grow cold,
The blue eye of my turquoise will comfort me.
Let me have my copper cooking pots, let my rouge pots
Bloom about me like night flowers, with a good
smell.
They
will roll me up in bandages, they will store my heart
Under my feet in a neat parcel.
I shall hardly know myself. It will be dark,
And the shine of these small things sweeter than the face of Ishtar.
In "Last Words" Plath struggles toward a vision of her consciousness at death. Imagining the death thoughts of an ancient priestess helps Plath to merge into death consciousness. She imagines her form (the sarcophagus), her interaction with other beings (the mysterious "pale, star distance faces"), and the extinguishing of her earth perceptions ("faces and flowers whitening to sheet"). Merging with the ancient dead enables Plath to unlock the secret of why Egyptians needed everyday objects to guide them through the darkness of death.
The Body of the Dead(Form)
"I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up."
Plath senses that at death she will inhabit a body of life forces. The "plain box" will give way to a dynamic will body that extends to the mystical sphere of the moon. She will maintain a focused consciousness that will perceive "up" into the hierarchical forces of creation. The tiger-sarcophagus, literally "flesh eating stone", implies a self transformation and death as a change of consciousness. Here consciousness may experience the death of a former priestesses who demanded and received this new death body.
"I want to be looking at them when they
come
Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.
I see them already--the pale, star-distance faces.
Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.
I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first
gods.
They will wonder if I was important.
I should sugar and preserve my days like fruit!"
Here Plath creates a complex web of images. On first reading, the beings of this section (the "they") seem to be living humans who come to visit her grave. But they are not yet born and inhabit the stars and will pick among the minerals and roots sometime in a distant future. Plath senses that the ancients created enduring tombs and mummification as a means to communicate with a far distant future. Plath also hints at reincarnation and this poem may be a reunification of separated strands of existence.(see section on Bee poems)
Plath also merges the idea of mummification with the idea of leaving a poetic legacy. As Egyptian funeral rites planted seeds in our current epoch, so the preservation of the poet's essential self in verse "preserves" seeds that may be fruitful in a future epoch.
Ralph
Waldo Emerson, from his essay "The Poet":
"So when the soul of the poet has come to ripeness of thought, she(Nature)
detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs, -- a fearless, sleepless,
deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary kingdom
of time: a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such was the virtue
of the soul out of which they came), which carry them fast and far, and infix
them irrecoverably into the hearts of men."
"My mirror is
clouding over ---
A few more breaths, and it will reflect nothing at all.
The flowers and the faces whiten to a sheet. "
On one level Plath describes a loss of poetic energy where she can no longer enter into her dead priestess and imagine death. But by being conscious of this energy loss she describes a moment in everyday life that anticipates death. We die when we move from a state of "relatedness" (like poetic inspiration where "reason" continually unites concepts into a unified whole) to a state of total detachment where the analytical forces of separation rule.(see "November Graveyard" where Plath also loses and regains higher consciousness). Her magic mirror, where she dialogues with her inner being, turns off. The vision of her Death dissipates and she returns to everyday consciousness. She can no longer hold the spirit and so turns to the light of material things.
"I do not trust the spirit. It escapes
like steam
In dreams, through mouth-hole or eye-hole. I can't stop it.
One day it won't come back. Things aren't like that.
They stay, their little particular lusters
Warmed by much handling. They almost purr.
When the soles of my feet grow cold,
The blue eye of my turquoise will comfort me.
Let me have my copper cooking pots, let my rouge pots
Bloom about me like night flowers, with a good
smell."
"They will roll me up in bandages, they
will store my heart
Under my feet in a neat parcel.
I shall hardly know myself. It will be dark,
And the shine of these small things sweeter than the face of Ishtar."
Even as she turns to the things of the material world Plath still learns about death. The attention of human consciousness has given her things an aura or luster."Warmth" and "purring" are signs of the life force. The poet has given spirit to her material possessions. These objects can then ray that spirit back to her after she dies. The poet mines her own consciousness to uncover the reason Egyptians were compelled to take material possessions into the tomb. These things bear the imprint of the owner's ego and shine a spiritual light which guides and comforts the deceased through the loneliness of the land of the shades and to one who "hardly knows oneself" serves as a reminder of the Earth. These artifacts give future generations a living connection with these ancient spirits and ensure the fertility (Ishtar, a Babylonian fertility Goddess)of the seeds that death plants in future generations of the living. These seeds work into future human evolution.
"All the Dead Dears"
How the Dead Permeate Life and the Possibility of Reincarnation
Paintings by Hans Baldung called Grien (1485-1545)
The point of view of "Last Words" is an inversion of the point of view of "All the Dead Dears". In "Last Words" Plath imagines her own death and burial and the reaction of the living when they confront her remains and tomb. In "All the Dead Dears" Plath is one of the "pale star-distance faces" that appears 1600 years after the death of the woman who was gnawed by the mouse and shrew:
All the Dead Dears2 by Sylvia Plath
(In
the Archæological Museum in Cambridge is a stone
coffin of the fourth century A.D. containing the skeletons of a woman, a mouse and a shrew. The ankle-bone of the woman has been slightly gnawed. ) Rigged
poker-stiff on her back These
three, unmasked now, bear How
they grip us through thin and thick, From
the mercury-backed glass All
the long gone darlings: They And
to sanctuary: usurping the armchair |
Plath begins with concepts that are characteristic of the physical remains of the death process: "stiffness", "granite", "antique museum-cased","relics", "dry witness", "grind", "grist","gimcrack" (showy but useless or worthless object) and "boney". Plath experiences the motionless sensations of death but her conceptual intuition comes to life as she imagines the cycle of eating and sees life that is but a mirror image of these dead images. She further imagines how her own life is invaded by stellar death forces that are slowly grinding her physical being into motionless substance:
Rigged
poker-stiff on her back
With a granite grin
This antique museum-cased lady
Lies, companioned by the gimcrack
Relics of a mouse and a shrew
That battened for a day on her ankle-bone.
These
three, unmasked now, bear
Dry witness
To the gross eating game
We'd wink at if we didn't hear
Stars grinding, crumb by crumb,
Our own grist down to its bony face.
Plath, in typical fashion, turns herself inside-out realizing how the cosmic forces of the macrocosm-"the stars"-work directly into her own physicality as an agent of decay and transformation!
This dead woman now
begins to enter and permeate Plath's being. The remains become identified
with the idea of death and since Plath realizes she must go through the same
processes she feels not only related to the woman but sees her own blood as
food for this death spirit. Plath sees the chain of generations reaching out
to her and pulling her into the disembodied realm. The drowned father flashes
through her mind as she perceives an image in the glassy surface:
These
barnacle dead!
This lady here's no kin
Of mine, yet kin she is: she'll suck
Blood and whistle my marrow clean
To prove it. As I think now of her head,
From
the mercury-backed glass
Mother, grandmother, greatgrandmother
Reach hag hands to haul me in,
And an image looms under the fishpond surface
Where the daft father went down
With orange duck-feet winnowing this hair ---
The "fishpond surface" recalls the "terrible fish" of death in "Mirror" and Ariel's song in Shakespeare's Tempest:
"Full fathom five
thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong,
Hark! Now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell."
Plath realizes that every aspect of a living being transforms at the time of death and remains in the world in a new form which can still unite with human thinking. We must be receptive to the subtle world changes that the dead bring.
Plath is consistently in communion with the dead, whether at formal gatherings of a sacramental nature or at home at those moments when eternity pushes through the measure of linear time. The dead may embody themselves in our sensations.
Plath's juxtaposition of her "taking root" with her fellow dead and "cradles rock" is an intuition that the dead may once again fully incarnate in the world:
All
the long gone darlings: They
Get back, though, soon,
Soon: be it by wakes, weddings,
Childbirths or a family barbecue:
Any touch, taste, tang's
Fit for those outlaws to ride home on,
And
to sanctuary: usurping the armchair
Between tick
And tack of the clock, until we go,
Each skulled-and-crossboned Gulliver
Riddled with ghosts, to lie
Deadlocked with them, taking roots as cradles rock.
"Lilith", by George MacDonald, captures a mysterious 19th century dark romantic vision of death when Mr. Vane, in the strange mirror world, visits the sexton-Raven and his wife(Adam and Eve!):
"The air as of an ice-house met me crossing the threshold. The door fell-to behind us. The sexton said something to his wife that made her turn toward us.--What a change had passed upon her! It was as if the splendour of her eyes had grown too much for them to hold, and, sinking into her countenance, made it flash with a loveliness like that of Beatrice in the white rose of the redeemed. Life itself, life eternal, immortal, streamed from it, an unbroken lightning. Even her hands shone with a white radiance, every "pearl-shell helmet" gleaming like a moonstone. Her beauty was overpowering; I was glad when she turned it from me.
But the light of the candle reached such a little way, that at first I could see nothing of the place. Presently, however, it fell on something that glimmered, a little raised from the floor. Was it a bed? Could live thing sleep in such a mortal cold? Then surely it was no wonder it should not wake of itself! Beyond that appeared a fainter shine; and then I thought I descried uncertain gleams on every side.
A few paces brought us to the
first; it was a human form under a sheet, straight and still--whether of man
or woman I could not tell, for the light seemed to avoid the face as we passed.
I soon perceived that we were walking along an aisle of couches, on almost
every one of which, with its head to the passage, lay something asleep or
dead, covered with a sheet white as snow. My soul grew silent with dread.
Through aisle after aisle we went, among couches innumerable. I could see
only a few of them at once, but they were on all sides, vanishing, as it seemed,
in the infinite.--Was it here lay my choice of a bed? Must I go to sleep among
the unwaking, with no one to rouse me? Was this the sexton's library? were
these his books? Truly it was no half-way house, this chamber of the dead!
"One of the cellars I am placed to watch!" remarked Mr. Raven--in a low voice, as if fearing to disturb his silent guests. "Much wine is set here to ripen!--But it is dark for a stranger!" he added.
"The moon is rising; she will soon be here," said his wife, and her clear voice, low and sweet, sounded of ancient sorrow long bidden adieu.
Even as she spoke the moon looked in at an opening in the wall, and a thousand gleams of white responded to her shine. But not yet could I descry beginning or end of the couches. They stretched away and away, as if for all the disparted world to sleep upon. For along the far receding narrow ways, every couch stood by itself, and on each slept a lonely sleeper. I thought at first their sleep was death, but I soon saw it was something deeper still--a something I did not know.
The moon rose higher, and shone through other openings, but I could never see enough of the place at once to know its shape or character; now it would resemble a long cathedral nave, now a huge barn made into a dwelling of tombs. She looked colder than any moon in the frostiest night of the world, and where she shone direct upon them, cast a bluish, icy gleam on the white sheets and the pallid countenances--but it might be the faces that made the moon so cold!
Of such as I could see, all were
alike in the brotherhood of death, all unlike in the character and history
recorded upon them. Here lay a man who had died--for although this was not
death, I have no other name to give it--in the prime of manly strength; his
dark beard seemed to flow like a liberated stream from the glacier of his
frozen countenance; his forehead was smooth as polished marble; a shadow of
pain lingered about his lips, but only a shadow. On the next couch lay the
form of a girl, passing lovely to behold. The sadness left on her face by
parting was not yet absorbed in perfect peace, but absolute submission possessed
the placid features, which bore no sign of wasting disease, of "killing
care or grief of heart": if pain had been there, it was long charmed
asleep, never again to wake. Many were the beautiful that there lay very still--
some of them mere children; but I did not see one infant. The most beautiful
of all was a lady whose white hair, and that alone, suggested her old when
first she fell asleep. On her stately countenance rested--not submission,
but a right noble acquiescence, an assurance, firm as the foundations of the
universe, that all was as it should be. On some faces lingered the almost
obliterated scars of strife, the marrings of hopeless loss, the fading shadows
of sorrows that had seemed inconsolable: the aurora of the great morning had
not yet quite melted them away; but those faces were few, and every one that
bore such brand of pain seemed to plead, "Pardon me: I died only yesterday!"
or, "Pardon me: I died but a century ago!" That some had been dead
for ages I knew, not merely by their unutterable repose, but by something
for which I have neither word nor symbol.
We came at last to three empty couches, immediately beyond which lay the form
of a beautiful woman, a little past the prime of life. One of her arms was
outside the sheet, and her hand lay with the palm upward, in its centre a
dark spot. Next to her was the stalwart figure of a man of middle age. His
arm too was outside the sheet, the strong hand almost closed, as if clenched
on the grip of a sword. I thought he must be a king who had died fighting
for the truth.
"Will you hold the candle nearer, wife?" whispered the sexton, bending down to examine the woman's hand.
"It heals well," he murmured to himself: "the nail found in her nothing to hurt!"
At last I ventured to speak.
"Are they not dead?" I asked softly.
"I cannot answer you," he replied in a subdued voice. "I almost forget what they mean by DEAD in the old world. If I said a person was dead, my wife would understand one thing, and you would imagine another.--This is but one of my treasure vaults," he went on, "and all my guests are not laid in vaults: out there on the moor they lie thick as the leaves of a forest after the first blast of your winter--thick, let me say rather, as if the great white rose of heaven had shed its petals over it. All night the moon reads their faces, and smiles."
2From The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. HarperPerennial Edition. Page 70.