“Faun”: Hoo Are You?

Pictured: The flag of the People’s Republic of China, adopted 1949
Plath’s poem “Faun” was first called “Metamorphosis,” and is found under this title in Letters Home (LH, 234). Her pocket calendar entry dated April 18, 1956 reads, “wrote poem re: Ted = Pan.”  In her journals, Plath also referenced this same poem as “Faunus” (UJ, 410), the Italian version of the Ancient Greeks’ Pan. The Faunus was the mythological grandson to Saturn, and half-goat and half-man, like a satyr. First worshiped as a god of fertility, he ended as a woodland deity, a lustful rural god, and came to represent the Devil himself. Pan, of course, was the spirit Plath and Hughes believed to communicate with via the Ouija board, and Pan is featured in Plath’s “Dialogue Over a Ouija Board” (CP, 276-286). Plath wrote her mother that “Faun” was written about a night that she and Ted went out into the moonlight to find owls.
Plath’s journal entry documents that she had written her poem “Faun” roughly two months after meeting Hughes, on or before April 19, 1956. Four days earlier, she had been traveling through Rome with her former boyfriend, Gordon Lameyer, and they had not been getting along. Still, she had a wild night of lovemaking with Gordon before he left, wishing that he was Ted.[1]
“Faun” may be another example of Plath’s poetic premonition, however, as it accurately mirrors the news events in China toward the end of that year (CP, 35):  In late 1956, The People’s Republic of China’s Chairman, Mao Tse Tung, instituted the Hundred Flowers Campaign. During this campaign, Mao encouraged Chinese citizens to speak up (“On the call this man made”) about things they did not like with the communist regime. Then, the chairman abruptly did an about-face (“the changing shape he cut”) and anyone who had dared to speak was publicly criticized and sent to labor camps.
The mythological faun is tricky and devilish, and the chairman hardened and showed his true self: sprouting goat horns, as seen in Plath’s third stanza. The phrase, “he hooed,” asks “who?” and also sounds like a Chinese name. Mao asked his citizens to turn in anyone who held opinions outside of the Party. On the Chinese flag’s emblem during the Mao era, a “rank” of stars hangs “water-sunk” and like “double star-eyes.” Plath’s “yellow eyes” is yet another hint to China. Plath’s images so accurately describe an event that would take place six months later. This is another prophetic poem.
[1] From Sylvia Plath’s pocket calendar entries for April 13 & 14, 1956. This calendar may be found in the Sylvia Plath archives at the Lilly Library, Indiana University-Bloomington.
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