Pictured: A double-decker bus in downtown London, December 1956
Scholar Nancy D. Hargrove dates Plath’s “Resolve” to be written in November or December of 1956. On December 19, 1956, a thick fog was the BBC News headline, causing death on the roads, railway, ship, air and postal delays (“unserviceable”) (CP, 52). The dirty fog (smog) was comprised of a sulfurous grit from burning coal and chimneys, trains and industry. This explains Plath’s first line: “Day of mist: day of tarnish” as well as the dying hedges, the film upon the bottles’ glass, and the line, “and the coal fire burns.”  A previous smog four years earlier killed 12,000 people in England within four days and an estimated further 8,000 died from respiratory issues in the months after. To experience a pollution event like this again in 1956 prompted a hasty resolution for the Clean Air Act. The Act became law in the summer, but would take time to see results. Local authorities (“examiners”) were given the power to create smokeless zones and worked to switch residents and industry over to more environmentally-friendly fuels. Plath was in support of this and would not “disenchant” them, nor would she participate in a losing fight with air pollution, “the wind’s sneer.” “Resolve” is another poem that has no rhyme, but plenty of reason.
1956, AIR POLLUTION, CLEAN AIR ACT, EARLY POEM, ENGLAND, FOG, LONDON, NANCY D. HARGROVE, PLATH POEM, RESOLVE, SMOG, SYLVIA PLATH

Pictured: Israel’s Coat of Arms 
Plath’s “Southern Sunrise,” is widely believed to be about Benidorm’s Bay in Spain.[1]  However, the Benidorm region has no bay associated with an angel name. The poem “Southern Sunrise” is a better fit to “Angels’ Bay,” the “Baie des Anges” in the French Riviera. In January of 1956, Plath sent a postcard from Monaco to her mother, picturing this beautiful blue bay, as she had spent three winter weeks in France with Richard Sassoon.[2] By late October of that year, things had changed in this region: Israel’s coat of arms, with its “green crescent of palms,” had united with France and Britain, bombing Egypt “Inch by bright inch” and “out of the blue drench” of the Suez Canal (CP, 26). The “Suez business,” as Hughes called it in a letter to Plath, had also been holding up a trip to Spain that Hughes had planned to take by boat with his uncle through the Mediterranean.
The poem “Southern Sunrise” appears to address even more than the Suez, however. Scholar Nancy D. Hargrove believes that “Southern Sunrise” was actually written in February or March of 1959.  Casting it against the events of that date, Egypt was in control of the Suez Canal, and Britain, who had controlled Egypt for the entire twentieth century, still smarted from its loss. Britain had positioned troops to intervene in Jordan in 1958, to stop rioting that threatened the rule of British ally King Hussein.
As the political drama in this area continued over the years, this poem lends itself to either date. Most interestingly, on February 27, 1959, the wreckage of the WWII US Air Force aircraft, Lady Be Good, was found. The plane and its nine crew members were assumed to have crashed in April 1943 and listed as Missing In Action. Returning from their first combat mission bombing Naples, Italy, the plane overflew its base in Libya, another explanation for the desert setting in Plath’s poem. The plane was “tilting with the winds” and did not see the flares that were fired to attract its attention (“Sends up its forked / Firework of fronds”). It crashed in the Calanshio Sand Sea of the Libyan desert, sand being Plath’s clear quartz, and deserts being bright. Looking east over Angels’ Bay is Italy. Farther east still was Japan, whose “round red” flag rose, having executed American airmen in the Doolittle Raid, an event that I believe Plath addressed in her later 1962 poem, “Ariel.”[3]
[1] The then-sleepy little seaside town of Benidorm, in Alicante, Spain, is where Plath and Hughes took their honeymoon in the summer of 1956.
[2] This postcard is available in the 1956 correspondence in the Sylvia Plath archives at the Lilly Library, Indiana University-Bloomington.
[3] For more on the Doolittle Raid in “Ariel,” please see my book, Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, volume one (2014, Stephen F. Austin State University Press).
AIRCRAFT, ALICANTE SPAIN, ANGELS' BAY, BAIE DES ANGES, BENIDORM BAY, BENIDORM SPAIN, BRITAIN, CALANSHIO SAND SEA, DOOLITTLE RAID, EARLY POEM, EGYPT, FRANCE, FRANCE AND BRITAIN, FRENCH RIVIERA, ISRAEL, ITALY, JAPAN, KING HUSSEIN, LADY BE GOOD, LIBYA, LIBYAN DESERT, MISSING IN ACTION, MONACO, NANCY D. HARGROVE, NAPLES, PLATH POEM, RICHARD SASSOON, SOUTHERN SUNRISE, SUEZ CANAL, SYLVIA PLATH, US AIR FORCE, WWII

Given her interest in world events, Plath’s “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” appears to be her jab at Communism. This time, the military action was in Poland. In June of 1956, the Poznań Revolt had taken place in Plath’s father’s hometown.
Scholar Nancy D. Hargrove dates “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” as having been written on November 18, 1956. It was on that day that the Soviet’s Nikita Khrushchev told Poland’s leader, “We will bury you.”  Khrushchev was an extreme example of solipsism; to him, his party’s existence was the only thing that mattered. That year there were several massive uprisings of the Polish people against the People’s Republic of Poland, with its puppet leadership installed by the Soviets. The Russian buildings’ Byzantine onion domes belong to the moon in Plath’s first stanza (CP, 37); the moon was the astronomical satellite that the United States raced the Soviets to reach. In 1956, it was the Soviets who were winning the space race.
The “puppet-people” of Plath’s second stanza references the leaders placed in Poland by the Soviets. The Soviet winter and Khrushchev’s “absolute power” are evident in the third stanza. The last stanza of “Soliloquy of the Solipsist” casts Khrushchev as the dictatorial god Zeus, denying the fact that his daughter Athena sprang from his head. Similarly, the Polish government, technically a Communist state sprung from its Russian overlords, did not adopt the broken, apathetic spirit of their Russian neighbors.
Extensive news coverage had gone on for months about the riots at Poznań and in Warsaw against Soviet exploitation. Living and working conditions divided the people into pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet Communists. The government denied the Polish people the emotional support and regard for their humanity that is reflected in Plath’s words: “Love fiery enough to prove flesh real.” A few months after Plath wrote her poem, in the January 1957 Atlantic, an issue in which Plath herself had a poem published, The Atlantic described the situation this way: “The Kremlin was also forced to take into account the paralysis of will and initiative, of mind and spirit, induced by the dead hand of Stalinism.”[1]
[1] From The Atlantic Monthly, January 1957. “Eyewitness in Warsaw” by Edward Crankshaw. Page 36.
ANTI-SOVIET COMMUNISTS, COMMUNISM, EARLY POEM, NANCY D. HARGROVE, NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV, PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF POLAND, PLATH POEMS, POLAND, POZNAN, PRO-SOVIET COMMUNISTS, SOLILOQUY OF THE SOLIPSIST, SOVIET UNION, STALINISM, SYLVIA PLATH, THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, THE KREMLIN, WARSAW, ZEUS

According to her pocket calendar, Sylvia Plath wrote “Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper” on June 19, 1956, in the sun by the River Seine in Paris, France. This was three days after she and Ted Hughes were married.
Just before their wedding day, Hughes had suggested that Plath should “read not novels or poems only, but books on folklore, fiddler crabs, and meteorites” (LH, 342).  Plath wrote of looking up spiders, crabs and owls in the college library; of wanting books on wild flowers, birds, and animals of North America; and of reading Man & the Vertebrates, The Personality of Animals, and The Sea Around Us.  Plath said, “The animal world to me seems more & more intriguing” (UJ, 398).  As she became more accomplished, every bit of information, every detail she learned became a potential metaphor, simile or image to be transformed in some way into her deceptively personal words and phrases. Every line sculpted in Plath’s poetry would eventually carry the weight of these and many other mirroring references.
In the world of science, a new aquatic insect had just been discovered, the Hydrometra aemula, Drake 1956.[1]  It seems that Plath likened the delicate, slow-moving insect to an elderly woman in her poem, “Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper” (CP, 41). With its spindly legs, “The new woman in the ward / Wears purple, steps carefully.” The water under its feet comes “Adazzle with bright shards / Of broken glass.”  The Drake is wary of any who might seek “To devour and drag her down.” This poem, as well as Plath’s “Resolve,” are unique for Plath’s work in the way that they have no rhyme at all. As areas by the River Seine have beaches and cobblestone where one can get right to the water’s edge, it is quite possible that Plath watched a French cousin of the water insect while having recently learned of “Miss Drake.”
[1] Integrated Taxonomic Information System: “Hydrometra aemula, Drake 1956”  Web. http://www.itis.gov/servlet/SingleRpt/SingleRpt?search_topic=TSN&search_value=103948 Last accessed 31 March 2014.
EARLY POEM, FRANCE, HYDROMETRA AEMULA DRAKE 1956, INSECT, MISS DRAKE PROCEEDS TO SUPPER, PARIS, PLATH POEM, RIVER SEINE, SYLVIA PLATH, TED HUGHES, WATER STRIKER

“Vanity Fair” appears to have been written on October 28, 1956, judging from Plath’s pocket diary. “Vanity Fair” is Plath’s poke at the television sitcoms and soap operas such as The Grove Family in the UK, and As the World Turns in the United States, which were both becoming popular at the time. In 1956, the BBC also launched a six-part dramatic television series called “Vanity Fair,” after the classic William Makepeace Thackeray novel of the same name.
Plath’s poem makes it fairly clear that she was not a fan of the newest form of entertainment, television. In Plath’s “Vanity Fair,” the first stanza appears to be the television itself with its crooked finger antennae beckoning the black and white signal in its “frost-thick weather” (CP, 31). Plath sees television as a “hazardous medium,” with witchy connotations. She felt it was designed to create envy and those seeking to copy the television models, and to steal the “sky’s color” by turning attention to itself. The television promotes gossip (“bruit”) and its stars become “holy ones.”
In the third stanza, the “furred air” is the staticky picture of the black-and-white television sets of Plath’s time. A “midden” is an arcane word for a dung heap, and TV inserts this dung into the skull with “no knife.” Plath sees simple church-going girls waylaid by the glamour they see upon its programs.
In the fourth stanza, she shows the young wives in the kitchen, cooking and watching straying lovers and gold-digging women. The wives squander their night-times (“owl-hours”) with tales of dirty beds and unconfessed (“unshriven”) deeds. The poem continues addressing the power and irrationality of television over the mind, casting its spell on lovesick girls to believe in an artificial world and to place their own vanity first. Plath has personified television as both “sorceress” and at the end, “Satan’s wife.” Like the moral of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, “those million brides” in their houses shriek out over what is essentially a sinful attachment to worldly things.
Finally, it seems that Plath’s disdain for television started young, as she published a poem in The 1952 commencement issue of The Campus Cat called “Virus TV: (We Don’t Have a Set Either”). For more on this, see https://sylviaplathinfo.blogspot.com/2021/10/two-unattributed-published-sylvia-plath.html
AS THE WORLD TURNS, EARLY POEMS, PLATH POEM, SOAP OPERAS, SYLVIA PLATH, TELEVISION, THACKERAY, THE CAMPUS CAT, THE GROVE FAMILY, TV, VANITY FAIR, WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

“Prospect” is an interesting short poem that seems to address the fraudster and suspected serial killer, Doctor John Bodkin Adams.  Adams lived in Eastbourne, Sussex, a town of “orange-tile rooftops / and chimney pots” on the coastal area known as Beachy Head, where “the fen fog slips” (CP, 28).  Dreadnought clay roof tiles, dreadnought meaning either a British battleship or a heavy overcoat for stormy weather (Oxford), dot the English countryside, and their pink and orange roof colors have defined England since Roman times, especially in England’s eastern and southeastern counties, where Adams lived. A chimney pot is British slang for a men’s silk dress hat, worn by the upper-crust of society.
Adams was a doctor to the aristocracy, and lived grandly himself as the wealthiest General Practitioner in England at the time. He was arrested on December 19, 1956 and charged with murder. In “Prospect,” Plath gets the most mileage out of the word “rooks,” playing upon its meanings of con artists, of castles, and the black bird of death. Adams’ trial established the legal doctrine of “double effect,” explaining the two black rooks. From 1946 to 1956, Adams had found 132 wealthy patients near death and got them to leave generous endowments to him (“cocked on the lone, late, / passer-by”).
DOCTOR DEATH, DOCTOR JOHN BODKIN ADAMS, EARLY POEM, FRAUD, FRAUDSTER, GENERAL PRACTITIONER, MURDERER, PLATH POEM, PROSPECT, SERIAL KILLER, SYLVIA PLATH

Hughes placed Plath’s poem, “Landowners,” in the year 1956 in the Collected Poems. Plath referenced in her journals writing a poem on the subject of landowners two years later, on July 4, 1958, (UJ, 399). It is of course possible that she had another poem on the same subject.

If we agree with Ted Hughes’ placement and read “Landowners” and “Departure” both as 1956 poems, South African Apartheid had been in place for a little over a year, beginning with the forced removal of Blacks from Sophiatown to Soweto. Sophiatown was once the Black epicenter of jazz, blues, and politics. Plath’s most beloved professor, Dr. Dorothea Krook, was from South Africa, as well as some of her closer friends at Cambridge. Plath’s journals reveal that she felt an obligation to give to a scholarship to Black students at Cambridge coming from an apartheid government. And Plath, like her father, was a pacifist.

Plath’s “Landowners” poem is loaded with hints of South Africa, most especially with its word “Indigenous” (CP, 53).  The removal was part of the government’s plan to turn the country’s urban and residential areas white. Blacks were moved to ghettos or townships, and the town was flattened over the next eight years and removed from the maps of Johannesburg. “Landowners” suggests that those white as ghosts were “envious,” and had to “define / Death as striking root on one land-tract.”

Meanwhile, at the northern end of Africa, the Suez Canal had been seized and claimed for Egypt in 1956. Britain, France, and Israel were at war against Egypt. In an unusual alliance, the United States, Soviet Union, and United Nations attempted to persuade them to withdraw. This was a different kind of departure from the forced removal of Blacks. Plath’s poem, “Departure,” ultimately illustrates evacuations at both ends of Africa (CP, 51). The first two stanzas are full of the North African figs and grapes, brick-red porch tiles (Britain’s architectural mark upon the area), brassy sun, and lack of money. Plath’s third stanza serves to reflect upon these two moments in history occurring simultaneously. She casts the sun and the moon as the north and the south, both weighted with “The leaden slag of the world.” Slag has a number of definitions, from the least to greatest in vulgarities, especially in Britain.  To match it with the word “expose” in Plath’s next line suggests the definition of a whore, to be used and not paid for her riches. It is also left over waste metal from mining or smelting operations, yet another connection to South Africa, famous for its mines of diamond, gold, and other valuable metals.

Judging from the words in “Departure,” Sylvia Plath believed it was important to “always expose” the truth. The last two stanzas perfectly describe the rocky cliffs of the South African coast, with its many blue bays. It was time for Britain to lick the salt in their wounds, as Plath’s last line of “Departure” suggests. The withdrawal upset Europe greatly, even breaking apart close friendships back at Cambridge due to cultural and familial alliances (Sophian).
“Landowners” is also a term for Britain’s landed gentry, the aristocracy born into owning large deeds of land and thus not having to work. Landowners took over a great deal of Northern Ireland, and all of the orange in Plath’s poem is a nod to England’s William of Orange who reigned over England, Scotland and Ireland until his death in 1702.  Because of a mass emigration due to famine, this land was “Flimsily peopled.”

If “Landowners” and “Departure” are read as 1958 poems, the imperialist theme of accumulating territory in these poems remains: Apartheid continued on in South Africa, and by that year the Egyptians were fully in control of the Suez. Yet there was a new twist: In America, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was getting ready to sign the Alaska Statehood Act into United States law, another great claim on property. “Flimsily peopled,” Alaska was another kind of whiteness with its “ghost’s / Eyeful” with its snowy mountains and their “vaporous wayfarings.” Whether “Landowners” is a 1956 or a 1958 poem, the struggle for land and power is always relevant.
​
AFRICA, AFRICANS, ALASKA, ALASKA STATEHOOD, APARTHEID, BLACK SOUTH AFRICANS, BLACKS, BRITAIN, BRITISH IMPERIALISM, DEPARTURE, EGYPT, FRANCE, ISRAEL, JOHANNESBURG, LANDOWNERS, PLATH POEMS, POEMS, SOPHIATOWN, SOUTH AFRICA, SOUTH AFRICAN BLACKS, SOWETO, SUEZ, SUEZ CANAL, SYLVIA PLATH, TED HUGHES, WHITENESS

Plath wrote in her journals that “Strumpet Song” was written shortly after meeting Hughes (UJ, 410). It is a literary treatment of time in the metaphor of a whore (CP, 33). Plath’s first encounter with Hughes, when he kissed her “bang smash on the mouth” at a party and she bit his cheek (UJ, 212), seems a good match for “that mouth / Made to do violence on.” Hughes’ “seamed face” and Plath’s casting him as incomparable with another man well fits this poem. Hughes was with a different girl that night he met Plath. 
But Plath’s work was beyond mere autobiography by now: “Strumpet Song” is also Plath’s judgment on the wildly popular French actress, Brigitte Bardot. At the time Plath wrote this poem, Bardot had recently popularized the bikini and got worldwide attention with the 1956 boundary-pushing film movie, …And God Created Woman,  released in Europe in November 1956.
…And God Created Woman is about an immoral teenager (“that foul slut”) seducing the men (“Until every man” […] “Veers to her slouch”) in a respectable, small town. Bardot is known for her swollen, pouty lips (“that mouth/ Made to do violence on”) and the coal-black, heavy eyeliner (“black tarn”). Toward the end of the film, Bardot’s husband slaps her face four times, and she smiles at him.
At the time of writing “Strumpet Song,” Plath was either consciously or unconsciously trying to seduce Hughes to remain with her in Britain instead of leaving for Australia with his uncle, as he had planned. She may have compared herself a little bit with Bardot, whom she disliked. Bardot was always cast as the ingénue or siren, usually in a state of undress, and was one of the few French actresses to be wildly adored internationally. Plath might have seen a little of her pre-Hughes seductress-self in Bardot, and her own faults are projected onto the actress (“That seamed face / Askew with blotch, dint, scar”). Nevertheless, Plath closes her poem with the hope that Hughes can look up into her “most chaste own eyes.” Plath’s February 1962 journals also show disdain for the actress, when a neighborhood girl expressed how much she idolized Bardot (UJ, 635).
AND GOD CREATED WOMAN, BRIGITTE BARDOT, EARLY POEMS, PLATH POEM, STRUMPET SONG, SYLVIA PLATH, TED HUGHES

Pictured: Gold Coast’s Independence from Britain to become Ghana
Plath’s poem “Rhyme” may be one of her least-analyzed works, and most readers interpret it as simply a commentary on the creative process. There is a good chance that Plath wrote her poem “Rhyme” around mid-May, when the BBC had announced that Britain’s colony, the Gold Coast, would be granted independence to become the nation of Ghana. In March of that year, Plath’s journals talk about poet Stephen Spender discussing the depressing misfortune of India’s beggars, another formerly British territory (UJ, 216). Plath’s poem likens Britain to a greedy goose collecting gold but not making its own. The goose-queen simply “begs / Pardon” for all her takeovers in a feeble attempt to appear peaceful (CP, 50). The poem ends with a ghastly image of a slit throat, the blood gushing out like rubies. Historically, rubies are widely found in India and fit Plath’s “ruby dregs.”
BRITISH COLONIZATION, BRITISH COLONY, BRITISH IMPERIALISM, EARLY POEM, GHANA, GOLD COAST, GOLD COAST'S INDEPENDENCE, GREAT BRITAIN, INDIA, PLATH POEM, RHYME, SYLVIA PLATH

A victim of Minamata Disease. Origin of photo unknown.
On the first of May 1956, “Mayday,” Plath’s beloved Grammy died, leaving her husband, “Grampy” Frank Schober, a widower. That day, BBC News announced that Japan was in the throes of an unknown epidemic creating ataxia, convulsions, paralysis, and more. This condition was identified as Minamata Disease, a condition attacking the nervous system due to mercury poisoning.
“Bucolics” was written on May 5, 1956, and reflects this first day of May, as well as both her grandparents and this disease, first observed in pastoral cows and other animals, as “Bucolics” first stanza reflects (CP, 23). The idea of the barbed wire, the pitchfork, thorn, and stinging nettles all reflect the disease’s itching, burning, and pain. With Minamata Disease, skin peels (“They pitched their coats”), and the contamination was primarily found in water (“where water stood”). Plath hints at Japan with the word “Aslant” for the shape of the Asian eye. She and others seemed to initially suspect that this might be some leftover from the atomic bombs dropped during World War II (“Above: leaf-wraithed white air, white cloud”). Plath called “Bucolics,” a “derivative” poem in her calendar, probably due to its traditional structure and cadence.

1956 POEMS, BBC, BUCOLICS, JAPAN, MERCURY POISONING, MINAMATA DISEASE, PASTORAL, PLATH POEM, PLATH'S EARLY POEMS, SYLVIA PLATH