Pictured: The New Yorker’s celebrated editor, William Shawn
Plath’s poem, “Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest” talks of the “black November” in the year of 1956 which severely escalated the Cold War. The character of “Father Shawn” may well be the editor of The New Yorker at the time, William Shawn. As an editor, Shawn seemed to be one of the few journalists with a conscience. He insisted, for example, that an entire issue of the magazine be dedicated to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Writers loved William Shawn, and J.D. Salinger even dedicated his novel, Franny and Zooey, to Shawn, who had first serialized Salinger’s work in two separate stories.[1]
In her poem, “Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest,” Plath places Shawn in the position of a holy man (“Father Shawn”) speaking to a spirit who walks the earth. Shawn asks the newspaper-man’s question: “How now” and he directs him to “simply tell.” The news of the day of course was the Cold War and the related Hungarian Revolution. Meanwhile, British and French troops had moved in on the Suez Canal (“Gnaws me through” and “this sorry pass”) with Israel, against Egypt. Nikita Khrushchev threatened to rain his rockets down on London (“The day of doom”). America’s president Eisenhower believed that British imperialism was finished, that Arab nationalism was going to be lasting, and that the Suez Canal was irretrievably lost. Eisenhower was angry at Britain for occupying the canal and not informing him.
In “Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest,” Plath saw the love of territory to be “too great love / Of flawed earth-flesh,” with governments forgetting about the nearly unseen who live there. The Hungarian Revolution had temporarily paralyzed the Kremlin, “Some damned condition,” and “shriveling in torment,” until the Russian tanks came and crushed the Hungarian student protesters. Plath’s last stanza of her “Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest” reflects the national guilt of watching and doing nothing.
Plath’s poem, “November Graveyard” began on September 9, 1956 per her calendar, with the worst of this horror yet to come. At the time of her writing the poem, anti-Communist protesting had escalated and journalists exposed the Soviet’s oppression. By late October and through mid-November, thousands of freedom fighters had been massacred and many more were forced to flee, setting the scene of Plath’s poem. Plath wrote to her mother in early November that she had been depressed and almost physically sickened by the news of both Britain bombing Egypt in the Suez Crisis, and the Hungarian Revolution. America watched in shame. Eisenhower had pledged to keep out of it, for fear of starting a full-scale war with the Soviets. 
Plath’s personal guilt about doing nothing during this conflict may lie in the un-restful “Monologue at 3 a.m.” written on October 3, 1956. The poem has been compared in mood and format to Louis Simpson’s “Summer Storm” (Peel, 147).  Outwardly, of course, it is a poem of Plath missing Hughes. But since the end of July that year, martial law had been imposed upon Poland following an anti-Communist revolt. The poem inside the poem appears to be that Plath grieves over that almanac which displays the land of Eastern Europe in its fury and drenching blood, while she does nothing but sit mute and twitch in discomfort.
Unsurprisingly then, Plath’s poem, “The Glutton,” written on April 27, 1956, is a portrait of British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden. Eden had made a remark summarizing the Western position, to which it seems Plath and the world thought he should have “Cupped quick to mouth.” Eden said: “We do not wish to move a finger” for the Hungarians. On this same date, doubts about Eden’s future as prime minister were being expressed in the papers as his personal ratings plummeted. Plath played on the nation of Hungary’s name with “hunger-stung”; Eden’s Englishness shows in the drink of “wassail” as he enjoys his “prime parts” and rich meals. Known to be quite stylish, Eden was “So fitted” in his suits. In her pocket calendar, Plath referred to “The Glutton” as a “good, small, hard, packed poem.” Also on the day Plath wrote “The Glutton,” Nikita Khrushchev departed London with Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin. It had only been months before, back in February 1956, when Khrushchev had publicly made a bitter attack on his predecessor Stalin, and the world had held hope that the Soviets might ease their pressure on Hungary.  In an April 26, 1956 letter to her mother, Plath wrote that she had attended the reception of the Soviet leaders and shook Bulganin’s hand. She had called him a “dear, white-bearded little man with clear blue eyes,” and “rubbed elbows” with Anthony Eden. In those times of American McCarthyism, jokes had been made that Plath would not be allowed back into the States for her Communist sympathies. Yet all that was changing as the Soviets showed their fiercer side.
[1] Franny and Zooey would later be a great influence on Plath’s 1961 poem, “Tulips.” See my book, Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, volume one (2014, Stephen F. Austin State University Press) for more.
ANTHONY EDEN, ANTI-COMMUNIST, ARAB NATIONALISM, BRITISH FOREIGN MINISTER, BRITISH FOREIGN MINISTER ANTHONY EDEN, BRITISH IMPERIALISM, COLD WAR, COMMUNISM, DIALOGUE BETWEEN GHOST AND PRIEST, EARLY POEM, EASTERN EUROPE, EGYPT, EISENHOWER, ENGLAND, GREAT BRITAIN, HUNGARIAN REVOLUTION, HUNGARIAN STUDENT PROTESTERS, HUNGARY, ISRAEL, KHRUSHCHEV, LOUIS SIMPSON, MCCARTHYISM, MONOLOGUE AT 3 A.M., NATIONAL GUILT, NEW YORKER EDITOR WILLIAM SHAWN, NOVEMBER 1956, NOVEMBER GRAVEYARD, PLATH POEM, REVOLT, SOVIET PREMIER NIKOLAI BULGANIN, SOVIET UNION, SOVIETS, STALIN, SUEZ CANAL, SUEZ CRISIS, SUMMER STORM, SYLVIA PLATH, TED HUGHES, THE GLUTTON, THE KREMLIN, THE NEW YORKER, UK, UNITED KINGDOM, WILLIAM SHAWN, WM SHAWN

Ted Hughes positioned “Spider” as a 1956 poem, but the evidence suggests it may have been written in 1958. In the poem, Plath references the African folklore tale of Anansi, the trickster spider. Hughes noted in The Collected Poems that by the end of the year 1956 she had become greatly interested in African folklore, and he cited in  his book Winter Pollen the “explosive transformation that author Paul Radin’s African collection worked on the poetry of Sylvia Plath” (WP, 78).  

In January 4, 1958, Plath herself wrote of reading “myths & folktales & poetry & anthropology” (UJ, 306). From this point, folklore shows up creating another level of understanding to much of her work.

While undated, the “Spider” poem’s line, “Last summer I came upon your Spanish cousin” sets the poem after Plath and Hughes’ honeymoon in Benidorm, which happened in July 1956.  Plath had not been to Spain before then. In her journal on June 26, 1958, Plath wrote about “the black spider in Spain knotting ants around its rock,” and if one believes that her diary entry inspired the poem, then she wrote this poem in late June 1958 (UJ, 398), almost two years after her honeymoon. This seems to be in conflict with a statement Plath made a month later in her journals on July 27, 1958, when she wrote about having just composed two new Benidorm poems, a subject that had been “closed” to her until then. Plath also wrote in January of 1959 of wanting to do a series of Cambridge and Benidorm poems, but this did not seem to happen (UJ, 466). She called her new poems “deeper, more sobre, sombre (yet well colored) than any” she had done before (UJ, 410).  These comments make “Spider” and her other poem, “The Goring,” likely candidates to have been written in 1958, not in 1956 where they are placed by Hughes in The Collected Poems. However, with the “Last summer” reference, it is also possible that Plath wrote “Spider” toward the end of 1956 and had simply forgotten that she wrote the poem.  

The year makes no difference. Plath’s “Spider” celebrates the great baseball player Willie Mays, who in 1956 hit 36 home runs and stole 40 bases. Whether looking at 1956, 1957, or 1958, Willie Mays remained an MVP in baseball. Mays was, in Plath-speak, a “black busybody of the folktales,” right behind Jackie Robinson. Why would Plath know or care about baseball? In 1953, she had been romantically involved with a professional ballplayer for the Detroit Tigers, Myron “Mike” Lotz. Plath’s hometown of Boston is known to take baseball very seriously, and Mays played for the neighboring New York Giants, and later, the New York Mets.[1]

Plath’s “Spider” is loaded with baseball words and metaphor: Willie Mays could field (“squint from center field”), hit “As a sledge hammer,” and run the bases (“nimble filament” and “each time round”) better than almost anyone. The summer season of baseball is named in the second stanza, and Mays had first become a star playing with the Black Barons in the Negro League (Plath’s “baron”). Plath notes the “Spanish cousin” of the prior summer, and that summer of 1955 was when Joe DiMaggio, called “Dago” by teammates, was accepted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. “Dago” is a colloquialism for an Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese-speaking person. By the time of this poem, DiMaggio had already had a short marriage to Hollywood legend, Marilyn Monroe, another celebrity Plath admired.[2]

The MacGregor baseball glove Mays used in the New York Giants was called a “spider web glove,” appropriate to the poem’s name, and Plath’s “gray spool of stone” is home base. Mays outhit, outfielded, and outran everyone to the point it was nearly “Appalling to witness” […]“His next martyr to the gross cause.”

The baseball stadium is Plath’s “altar tiered” and the ants are the small players and fans, when viewed from a distance or on television. They are “a file of comers, a file of goers.” Plath sees the team players and bases as a “small stonehenge.” As the players touch base, Plath’s “caught ants waved legs in.” Mays is a “spry black deus” (god) in the machine (“Ex machine”) of baseball. In mid-1950s American professional baseball, race began to mean nothing in the face of great talent, “Nor did they seem deterred by this.”

“Spider” may have first been inspired by a line of ants and a spider that Plath and Hughes observed in Benidorm, but once one is aware of Plath’s layering of meanings, this is an extremely limited interpretation (UJ, 255-256).
[1] Willie Howard Mays, Jr., born 1931, is a retired American professional baseball player who spent the majority of his Major League Baseball career as a center fielder with the New York and San Francisco Giants before finishing with the New York Mets. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1979, his first year of eligibility.

[2] Sylvia Plath’s letters and journals have several references to Marilyn Monroe. See Carl Rollyson’s book, American Isis: the life and art of Sylvia Plath (2013, St. Martin’s Press) for more.

​AFRICAN FOLKLORE, AFRICAN-AMERICAN, AMERICAN BASEBALL, ANANSI, BALLPLAYER, BASEBALL, BASEBALL HALL OF FAME, BENIDORM, BLACK BARONS, EARLY POEMS, JOE DIMAGGIO, MACGREGOR BASEBALL GLOVE, MARILYN MONROE, MIKE LOTZ, MYRON LOTZ, NEGRO LEAGUE, PAUL RADIN, PLATH POEMS, SPAIN, SPIDER, SPIDER WEB GLOVE, SYLVIA PLATH, TED HUGHES, TRICKSTER SPIDER, WILLIE MAYS, WINTER POLLEN

Pictured:  A scene with “Mrs. Shrike” from “Shopping for Death” by Ray Bradbury, an episode on Alfred Hitchcock Presents.
The Shrike bird might have metaphorically flown to the height of its popularity in 1956. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Air Force One was a Shrike U4-B (“The singular air”). That same year, the television program Alfred Hitchcock Presents aired a show called, “Shopping for Death,” written by Ray Bradbury. It featured two salesman trying to console an aggressive, hostile woman named Mrs. Shrike. Plath at least occasionally watched Hitchcock, as she alluded to him in some 1955 letters.
In her poem, “The Shrike,” written on July 3, 1956, Plath seems to compare herself to this aggressive predatory bird of Africa and Eurasia. There were other influences at work in the layers of meaning for this poem, however. In the news, the Imperialist British and French troops (“Such royal dreams”) had withdrawn their troops from the Suez (“her flown mate / Escaped”). Plath addresses the hunger in Africa “With her blank brown eyes starved wide” and the emaciated bodies “With taloned fingers, / Shaking in her skull’s cage” and “so hungered.”
There was also a popular play running at that time called “The Shrike,” by Joseph Kramm. It was set in a mental ward and featured a man who had unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide in the same way that Plath had attempted to when she was twenty, by swallowing a bottle of pills. His bitter and manipulative wife drove him insane with her relentless ambition for him, and Plath may have seen a connection between his attitude and the British over Northern Africa and the Suez especially. Because the fictional Mrs. Shrike had won over the doctors, the man comes to be under his wife’s control completely. Did Plath contemplate that her ambition for her husband (“Such royal dreams beckon this man”) and jealousies (“While she, envious bride”) may have been too great?
AFRICA, ALFRED HITCHCOCK, ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS, BRITISH IMPERIALISM, EARLY POEM, FRENCH IMPERIALISM, JOSEPH KRAMM, PLATH POEM, SHOPPING FOR DEATH, SUEZ, SUEZ CANAL, SUEZ CRISIS, SYLVIA PLATH, THE SHRIKE, THE SHRIKE PLAY

Pictured: Poet Emily Dickinson
Plath read a lot of Plato at Cambridge in 1956, and the country of Greece went through a great deal of political upheaval that year. The island of Cyprus had been under British rule but was seeking to reunite with Greece. King Paul of Greece had three children with his wife: two sisters and the male heir to the throne. After twenty years of right and leftist split in the Greek Civil War, the two sides of Greece elected the mayor of Corfu who would become their first female mayor. Plath’s poem “Two Sisters of Persephone” was written on May 24, 1956, per her pocket calendar,[1] the day after she had begun to read Plato’s Phaedo, and within the same month, she’d read Gorgias, Symposium, The Republic and Karl Popper’s related book, The Open Society and Its Enemies.
“Two Sisters of Persephone” represents the two sisters/daughters of King Paul, one who became Queen of Spain, the other who remained a “wry virgin to the last” (CP, 31). The ionic Grecian columns fit Plath’s “wainscoted room.”  As the country’s economy improved, Plath’s language uses accounting images for working problems, calculations, the “sum,” the “Dry ticks” and “blown gold.” In letters, Plath wrote to her mother about all of these events in Greece and Cyprus, as well as her attention on African and the Arab states.
1956 was also a year that the poet Emily Dickinson, with whom Plath would later be compared, experienced a revival. The resurrection of this great poet may also be an influence for the virginal woman in the “wainscoted room” of Plath’s “Two Sisters of Persephone.” John Crowe Ransom published an essay that year called “Emily Dickinson: A Poet Restored,” and the well-respected Sewanee Review featured a piece called “The Poetry of Emily Dickinson” by Sergio Baldi. Even the American cartoon program Looney Tunes got into the act, with their March 4, 1956 program featuring Lois Nettleton reciting the poetry of Emily Dickinson as the cartoon’s narrative. The “meager frame” of the Dickinson-like woman marks the time and meter of her work like “A mathematical machine,” while Plath seems to have felt that she herself had learned to take more liberties, “Hearing ticks blown gold.”  Plath’s “Two Sisters of Persephone” may be one of Plath’s first great poems, layering meanings of history past and present, myth, and the arts. Plath knew this too, calling it her “best poem yet” in her calendar.[2]
[1] This pocket calendar is available for viewing in the Sylvia Plath Archives at the Lilly Library, Indiana University-Bloomington.
[2] Per her pocket calendar dated May 24, 1956. This calendar may be found in the Sylvia Plath archives at the Lilly Library, Indiana University-Bloomington.
BRITISH IMPERIALISM, CORFU, CYPRUS, EMILY DICKINSON, GREECE, KARL POPPER, KING PAUL OF GREECE, PLATH POEM, PLATO, PLATO'S GORGIAS, PLATO'S PHAEDO, PLATO'S SYMPOSIUM, PLATO'S THE REPUBLIC, SYLVIA PLATH, THE OPEN SOCIETY AND ITS ENEMIES, TWO SISTERS OF PERSEPHONE, VIRGIN

Plath wrote “Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats” on June 2, 1956, per her pocket calendar. Plath spoke a bit of French, and the very near-homophone la maison translates to “the house.” This is less a poem about an animal hoarder, and more explicitly about a cat house, or a brothel. This subject was all over the news as 1956 English society wrestled with ideas of church and state, and homosexuality was still viewed as a crime. In December 1955, The British Medical Association published the well-selling Homosexuality and prostitution: a memorandum of evidence, and in May 1956, the Church of England’s Moral Welfare Council published their own study on sexual offenders and social punishment. Meanwhile, journalists like Colin MacInnes were building careers writing about the seamier side of London.[1]
Plath’s poetic “Ella Mason” lives in “a ramshackle house” in a red light district of London called Somerset Terrace. Section 33 of the Sexual Offences Act in Britain reads: It is an offence for a person to keep a brothel, or to manage, or act or assist in the management of, a brothel. In Plath’s poem, there are “queries” made about Plath’s Ella Mason, who lives with eleven felines at last count, playing “hostess to” the Tabbies and Toms of the neighborhood. In later poems such as “Watercolor at Grantchester Meadows,” Plath also uses the cat as a metaphor for a jaded, unscrupulous woman. In “Ella Mason,” she gives it away in her last two lines: “That vain jades sulk single down bridal nights, / Accurst as wild-cats.”
On the second of August, the Parliament passed the Sexual Offences Act of 1956, which did not criminalize the act of prostitution itself, but did the activities of soliciting and running a house of ill repute.
[1] English novelist and journalist Colin MacInnes (1914-1976) was openly bisexual and wrote on subjects such as urban squalor, racism, sexuality, drugs, anarchy, and decadence in 1950s London.
BRITISH MEDICAL ASSOCIATION, BROTHELS, CAT HOUSES, CRIMES IN ENGLAND, EARLY POEM, ELLA MASON AND HER ELEVEN CATS, ENGLAND, HOMOSEXUALITY AND PROSTITUTION, HOUSE OF ILL REPUTE, PARLIAMENT, PLATH POEM, PROSTITUTION, RED LIGHT DISTRICT, SEXUAL OFFENCES ACT IN BRITAIN, SEXUAL OFFENCES ACT OF 1956, SOMERSET TERRACE, SYLVIA PLATH, WATERCOLOR AT GRANTCHESTER MEADOWS

Revisions to Plath’s poem “Crystal Gazer” were discussed in Hughes’ October 1956 letters, but Plath’s calendar notes reveal that she wrote 24 lines (probably the first four stanzas) on June 3, 1956 and worked on it through the next few days. On the 6th, she noted that she had barely begun reading Aristotle when she was struck by the poem “Gerd & Bold crock” [crack?]. This seems to reference the first line of the seventh stanza of “Crystal Gazer.” And so it seems that Aristotle, the philosophical father of Government and Science, among other things, may have had some influence on this poem’s final stanza.
​
The detail of the “Crystal Gazer” poem suggests that Plath and Hughes had already been working with crystal ball gazing, also known as “scrying” or “seeing.” This said, many read this poem as autobiography. It is clear in Plath’s poem that she foresees the end of love, and the inevitability of death. If one looks deeper, however, this is another 1956 poem of the seeming blessings of the Warsaw Pact which “intertwined” eight Communist states in the Western Bloc, and resulted in “A flash like doomcrack,” for Hungary especially. The Warsaw Pact had been created to be a treaty of friendship, cooperation and mutual assistance, seen in Plath’s second and third stanzas of “Crystal Gazer.” The name “Gerd” is Old Norse/German, a prevailing language across many of those nations. Its homophone, “gird,” means to secure or encircle with a belt or band. Plath did not select this name at random.

Gerd “spins the ball” of the world, deciding the future. She is “spindle-shanked” like a globe in a stand, a rather violent description of being set in place, and also a fit for German spiked helmets in the 19th and 20th centuries that saw wide use in the occupations of the Western world. Gerd has “a lens / Fusing time’s three horizons” of the past, present, and future. She would know then that a similar pact had been in existence since 1939 when Soviet forces in alliance with Nazi Germany first occupied Central and Eastern Europe, maintaining the region after the war. She squats, looking “mummy-wise” toward Austria and Hungary. Austria had been united with Hungary until the end of World War I and was the place of origin for Plath’s mother’s side. Plath often referred to Aurelia Plath as “mummy.” Gerd’s knowledge of history, her male behavior (“hoyden”), and desire to govern more than is normally granted aligns her with the communist powers, and especially the Soviet Union. Because she sees disruption ahead, she aims at those “with power to strike” and destroys them.

Three weeks after Plath wrote this poem, in the Eastern Bloc, the Poznań 1956 protests took place. In late June 1956, factory workers in Poland held a series of massive protests against the dictatorial Soviet-placed government and were met with violent oppression. Poznań was the homeland to Otto Plath, Sylvia Plath’s father.

ARISTOTLE, AUSTRIA, CENTRAL EUROPE, COMMUNISM, COMMUNIST STATES, CRYSTAL BALL, CRYSTAL GAZER, EASTERN EUROPE, GAZING, GERD & BOLD CROCK, HUNGARY, PLATH POEM, POLAND, POZNAN, PROTESTS, SCRYING, SEEING, SOVIET UNION, SYLVIA PLATH, WARSAW PACT, WESTERN BLOC, WORLD WAR I, WORLD WAR II

[An earlier version of this essay was first published in Plath Profiles, Volume 7, 2014 with analyses of the 1956 poems by Sylvia Plath]
 “[Y]ou are being sounded and unpicked, and charted and reduced to your parts. However your new veiled Southpaw approach I should think is a match for their craft.”
–Letter to Sylvia Plath from Ted Hughes, October 6 and 8, 1956[1]
Ted Hughes knew that his wife Sylvia Plath had a few tricks in her poetry, and that her words were not always what they seemed to be. In my work in Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, volume one, (2014, Stephen F. Austin State University Press), I reveal new interpretations and multi-layered dimensions of Plath’s poetry through the use of the tarot and Qabalah. It was only natural that I should go back to explore Plath’s early work and see if she had done the same in The Collected Poems, especially those written before her mystical masterpiece of Ariel.
Critics of Ted Hughes have complained that Hughes, who edited Sylvia Plath’s The Collected Poems, considered Plath’s work before 1956, when the two came together as a couple, as “juvenilia.” Many see this as Hughes giving himself credit for mentoring Plath, and his discounting her earlier work because it did not have his stamp of influence upon it.
In his introduction to The Collected Poems, Hughes admitted, “One can see here, too, how exclusively her writing depended on a supercharged system of inner symbols and images, an enclosed cosmic circus. If that could have been projected visually, the substance and patterning of these poems would have made very curious mandalas. As poems, they are always inspired high jinks, but frequently quite a bit more.” He continued, “I worked closely with her and watched the poems being written” (CP, 16). Viewing Plath’s early work, pre-,and post-1956 through the same mystical framework from which my interpretations of Plath’s Ariel are structured, it is evident that her pre-1956 poems lack these multiple meanings and that Hughes was correct in his division of this work from her later poetry. Some poems written after Hughes’ appearance in Plath’s life still did not make the grade. This is the case for Plath’s poem “Aerialist,” written on May 30, 1956, according to her pocket calendar.[2]
It appears that Plath first began to layer meanings in her work, starting with “Conversation Among the Ruins,” a poem she wrote before her involvement with Hughes. In this poem, Plath uses a technique that she would develop to perfection in her Ariel poems of 1962 and after.
I have discussed my process of decoding Plath’s Ariel work in other Plath Profiles volumes[3] and in Fixed Stars Govern a Life,[4] so I shall not repeat it here. [Please email me at [email protected] if you are interested in getting a PDF of the now out-of-print Fixed Stars Govern a Life for just $5 USD. The Decoding Sylvia Plath books are still available on Amazon.com]. In 1956, Plath was not yet an expert in expanding meanings within her work, and this is why her early work feels good, is perfect in rhythm and meter, yet most acknowledge that these earlier poems are not her most significant. In The Collected Poems, Hughes edited and changed some poem’s order. Scholars have already identified that Hughes repositioned some of Plath’s poems outside of their credited years. Why? Because Hughes later imposed that same Ariel mystical structure upon The Collected Poems, a framework that he and Plath used in all of their work and one which would ultimately lead to Plath posthumously winning the Pulitzer Prize. Some of her best juvenilia, most notably, “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” was left out of The Collected Poems entirely because it did not fit the mystical template. Likewise, “Aerialist,” written on May 30, 1956, was also excluded in the 1956 poems for the same reason.
My interpretations are out of the sequence initially published in The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. In earlier Plath Profiles articles, I arranged my short studies of each in the chronological order of their writing. The poems are searchable by title but not in exact order on this website.
1956 was when Plath and Hughes met, married, and went on their honeymoon to Benidorm in Alicante, Spain. Plath’s poems that are believed to clearly reference Benidorm are: “Southern Sunrise,” “Alicante Lullaby,” “Dream with Clam-Diggers,” “Epitaph for Fire and Flower,” “Fiesta Melons,” “Spider,” “The Goring,” “The Beggars,” “Departure,” and “The Other Two.” Hughes placed all of these poems but “The Other Two” in the 1956 section of The Collected Poems. He did not group them together, most likely because he adhered to Plath’s mystical structure and because the themes stretch far beyond Benidorm. You will see from my short analyses on this website that calling these “Benidorm poems” is missing their creative value altogether. Sylvia Plath was a poetic genius, and this genius was built and practiced in the layering of meanings, beginning here in the 1956 collection.
Important:  Unfortunately, I am unable to share the poems in full due to copyright restrictions, so please search for the poem or crack open your copy of The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath to properly reference these analyses. A belief in the occult is not necessary to understand these interpretations of Plath’s early work. A simple guideline is to cast the time of the poem’s writing against personal, academic, and news events of Plath’s day, often recorded in her calendar, letters, and journals.
Some of these analyses show the fascinating accuracy with which Plath described a future event. I do not tell the reader what to believe, but it is a case for Plath’s self-proclaimed premonitions, which seem to have been greater than her own awareness of them. With this guide, Plath’s 1956 poems are explained here as they are models for news events, whether or not one is well-read on the subject of mysticism.
It should not be overlooked that Plath said to her mother in a letter on April 25, 1955:
“I want to write at least ten good news poems….” 
Politics of the day mattered to Plath, and we must not forget that Plath proclaimed to Peter Orr in a famous interview that she was “rather political” (Orr).
[1] From The Letters of Ted Hughes, Selected and Edited by Christopher Reid, 2007, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. Page 64. A copy of this letter may be found in the Sylvia Plath archives at the Lilly Library, Indiana University -Bloomington.
[2] Plath’s pocket calendar entry for May 30, 1956 reads: “Spent morning perversely caught in throes of nightmare poem ‘aerialist.” This calendar may be found in the Sylvia Plath archives at the Lilly Library, Indiana University-Bloomington. “Aerialist” may have been inspired by the 1956 movie “Trapeze,” starring Burt Lancaster, Tony Curtis, and Gina Lollobrigida.
[3] See my articles in Plath Profiles 2, 3, 4, and 5.
[4] Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, volume one, by Julia Gordon-Bramer. (2014, Stephen F. Austin State University Press)
In closing, I will be working on this site for a while, uploading each year of my Early Poems work as I get to it. I have been sitting on it for so long, doing little with it, and now it is time. Please forgive if it is less formal than a journal publication. Feel free to write me or leave comments on any of this work if it moves you, or if you reference it in your own work. Please also let me know if you spot any errors or if references to something are lacking and I will get right on it. It has been a fascinating experience returning to Plath’s early work and seeing it with new eyes. Plath’s skills of applying mysticism to her work had not been fully developed in 1956, although she had accomplished a great deal with layered meanings since her juvenilia. Historical events and dates are verifiable. Whether you believe that some of these are examples of Sylvia Plath’s premonitions is up to you.
-jgb
Julia Gordon-Bramer is the author of Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, volume one (2014, Stephen F. Austin State University Press). She teaches graduate-level creative writing at Lindenwood University, St. Louis, Missouri, and in 2013 the Riverfront Times voted her St. Louis’ Best Local Poet. She intends to explain Plath’s 1957 poems in the next issue of Plath Profiles.


Works Cited:
Lawrence, D.H.  The Letters of D.H. Lawrence. Volume One. Cambridge University Press. 2002.
Orr, Peter. “A 1962 Sylvia Plath interview with Peter Orr” from The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets Conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press, and Ian Scott-Kilvery. London: Routledge (1966).
Web: http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/orrinterview.htmLast accessed: 23 January, 2014.
Plath, Sylvia. Ariel, the Restored Edition. 2004. HarperCollins.
Plath, Sylvia. Letters Home, Correspondence 1950-1963. Selected and edited with commentary by Aurelia Schober Plath. First HarperPerennial Edition 1992.
Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. 2008. HarperPerennial Modern Classics.  First published in 1960 by Harper-Collins.
Plath, Sylvia. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. By Karen V. Kukil.  First Anchor Books Edition.

“The Beggars” is one of Plath’s poems seemingly set in Benidorm, Spain. If Plath had been reading the newspapers from home, which Aurelia might have sent, she would have seen that a new version of Faust opened at the Theatre on the Green in Wellesley, running July through August. In an article entitled, “The Beggar’s Opera,” the Harvard Crimson’s rave review praised stars Jack Cassidy and Shirley Jones in the leading parts. Meanwhile, the famous movie director Werner Jacobs had released his motion picture, The Beggar Student.

Beggar “tragedians” seemed to be everywhere in 1956. Also that year, Patience Macelwee published Beggar My Neighbour (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1956), a book about how in economics, policy that benefits one country may be at the expense of others, and even at the expense of a country’s own longer term security. Finally, in August of that year, the famous poet and playwright Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, a Marxist who probably had strong feelings about Macelwee’s subject and who famously revised “The Beggar’s Opera,” died on August 14, 1956. The date Plath wrote “The Beggars” is uncertain, but Hughes did place it within Plath’s 1956 poems.
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BEGGAR MY NEIGHBOR, BEGGAR MY NEIGHBOUR, BENIDORM, EARLY POEM, EUGEN BERTHOLD FRIEDRICH BRECHT, FAUST, HARVARD CRIMSON, JACK CASSIDY, PATIENCE MACELWEE, PLATH POEM, SHIRLEY JONES, SPAIN, SYLVIA PLATH, TED HUGHES, THE BEGGAR STUDENT, THE BEGGAR'S OPERA, THE BEGGARS, WERNER JACOBS

Over those first six months of marriage with Hughes, Plath told her mother that she was writing new “happy” poems glorifying her love with Ted. The poems she listed were “Two Sisters of Persephone,” “Metamorphosis,” “Wreath for a Bridal,” “Strumpet Song,” “Dream with Clam-Diggers,” and “Epitaph for Fire and Flower.” It is curious that Plath labeled these works as “happy,” as no matter how one reads them, each is loaded with ominous portents, a clear dark side, and impending doom. The dream which inspired “Dream with Clam-Diggers” occurred March 11, 1956, when she had only just had her brief fling with Ted Hughes. At that time, Plath was not sure what may become of it. Interestingly, several months later, another dream was recorded in a Benidorm journal entry of notes observing “bait diggers” (UJ, 576).
Most consider “Dream with Clam-Diggers” to be a Benidorm poem. On the most obvious, surface level, this poem portrays Plath’s sleeping subconscious, its buried memories, thoughts, and feelings (CP, 43). The poem begins with an idyllic early childhood at the beach. Next, evil, dark clam diggers rise from the muck of the bottom with the intent to kill her. “Dream with Clam-Diggers” captures some of the images in Plath’s August 13, 1956 notebook entry (UJ, 576), however, her calendar shows that she had begun at least the first line of this poem on June 1, 1956, calling it “the dream budded bright.”
Plath’s March 11, 1956 journals suggest that this poem was partly rooted in memories of a night when a drunken Ted Hughes and his friend threw clots of dirt at a window to wake her. Her dream that night was of returning to Winthrop, and in her journal she wrote:
“…But last night they came, at two in the morning, Phillipa said. Throwing mud on her window, saying my name, the two mixed: mud and my name; my name is mud. She came to look for me, but I was sleeping. Dreaming of being home in Winthrop on a lovely new spring day, walking in pajamas down the streets of melting tar to the sea, the salt freshness, and squatting in the sea in a tangle of green weeds were clam-diggers with osier baskets, rising, one after the other, to look at me in my pajamas, and I hid in spring shame in the trellised arbors of Day’s home.
“Mail came through the sewer, and I got only bills. Mail and rice came through the sewer, that bubbling green mucky sewer we played in by the sea, transmuting what corruption, what slime-gilded periwinkles, into what radiant magic. They laughed and said they trusted the mail and rice coming through the sewer.
“And all this while, those three boys in the dark were treating me like what whore, coming like the soldiers to Blanche DuBois and rolling in the gardens, drunk, and mixing her name with mud” (UJ, 235).
It is easy to see elements of Plath’s dream in “Dream with Clam-Diggers,” however this poem may also be one of the best examples of Sylvia Plath’s premonitory dreams. We must keep in mind the date that Plath started writing, if not completed “Dream with Clam-Diggers” before she and Hughes were even married, much less on their honeymoon in Benidorm, Spain. It is generally assumed that the beach in this poem is the one at Plath’s familiar Winthrop, Massachusetts.[1] Nowhere in “Dream with Clam-Diggers” is the beach specifically named. Details such as “pilgrimages” do suggest Massachusetts. Her images of “air winnowed by angels” and “sea-town” suggest ships, as does the more obvious fifth stanza “schooner” and “ship sank.” However, Plath has also perfectly described the old seaport town of Nantucket, Massachusetts.
On July 25, 1956, at 10:15 a.m. (“on that hot morning”) almost two months after Plath had begun “Dream with Clam-Diggers,” the Andrea Doria luxury cruise ship would become one of the first televised tragedies. From Italy, the Andrea Doria was known as the most beautiful and luxurious ship in the world, its pretty flag pennants strung like Plath’s “cockle-shells” (originally “slime-gilded periwinkles” in her dream). The ship, on its hundredth crossing across the Atlantic, was returning to New York City (“she was come / Back to her early sea-town”) through the waters of Nantucket. The Andrea Doria had serious trouble with listing (“wayward girl”), and it had encountered this problem near Nantucket before, also fitting Plath’s poem’s sense of returning. Meanwhile, the nearby Stockholm, fitting Plath’s neighbor image, and “squatting at sea’s border,” a sturdy Swedish workhorse ship (“She, in her shabby travel garb began”), had just left its dock in New York’s busy harbor (“eager toward water”).  A thick fog surrounded the Andrea Doria, fitting Plath’s angelic air. When the ships finally spotted each other in the waters off of Nantucket, it was too late to avoid a collision (“wrack of wave”). Plath’s last line in the poem shows the ships advancing, their front windows like squinting eyes, “fixed on murder.” The Stockholm slammed into the Andrea Doria’s side. The Andrea Doria continued looking beautiful, despite the huge hole in her side which filled with water, and took the boat down, fitting Plath’s entire third stanza. As the ship “Sloped seaward to plunge in blue,” Plath has described the “white fire” of steam and fog. Ships all around rushed to help with rescuing its more than a thousand passengers and crew, fitting Plath’s last line of that third stanza. Fifty-two people were killed. This accident remains one of the worst maritime disasters to occur in United States waters.
As Plath traveled by ocean liners to cross the ocean for “her first move of love” to the U.K., this news event, which took place while she and Hughes were on their honeymoon, certainly must have shocked her. We can’t know for sure if she followed this seemingly inescapable event on the news and in the papers, but we can know that her poem foretold the disaster in perfect detail.
[1] Sylvia Plath enjoyed childhood summers at the beaches in Winthrop, Massachusetts, and also occasionally visited Nauset Beach in Cape Cod.
ANDREA DORIA, ATLANTIC OCEAN, BENIDORM, COLLISION, CRUISE LINER, CRUISE SHIP, DREAM WITH CLAM-DIGGERS, EARLY POEM, MARITIME DISASTER, MASSACHUSETTS, NANTUCKET, NANTUCKET MASSACHUSETTS, NEW YORK CITY, PLATH POEM, PREMONITION, PREMONITORY DREAM, PROPHESY, PROPHETIC DREAM, SHIP WRECK, SPAIN, STOCKHOLM, SWEDISH SHIP, SYLVIA PLATH, TED HUGHES, WINTHROP, WINTHROP MASSACHUSETTS