“Maudlin”: The Monthly Curse

Of all the work in the 1956 section of The Collected Poems, “Maudlin” may be the one closest to Plath’s autobiography. However, this poem was probably written in 1959. After all, Plath wrote in her journals on May 25, 1959, “My Maudlin poem is a prophetic little piece. I get the pleasure of a prayer in saying it: Gibbets with her curse the moon’s man” (UJ, 485).  The question is, what is the poem’s prophesy?

Plath had always been a slave to her menstrual period, which was irregular, heavy, and caused severe cramping. On the day this poem was written, Plath suffered from menstrual cramps, cancelled appointments, and dreamed of drops of blood and tiny white rabbits, seeming to be her subconscious echoing the old adage for a positive pregnancy test, the rabbit died.

“Maudlin” addresses the narrator waking up in blood, seeing herself as both a virgin and a hag, a woman without children and getting older. She is “sleep-talking” because she is ruled by her subconscious and hormonal urges. The menstrual cycle is parallel to the moon’s 28-day phases, and this explains “Faggot-bearing Jack,” the man on the moon who carries his load of sticks within the moon-shaped egg that does not crack. This expression “does not crack” might also symbolize a strong man. A gibbet is an upright post with a projecting arm, used to hang men for execution. Plath turns this instrument of death into a verb here, seeing it as a woman pointing and cursing. She curses the man on the moon for causing her this pain every twenty-eight days. He is no good to her without a pregnancy, just as Plath saw menstrual cramps as “ridiculous” (UJ, 486). Plath’s “crackless egg” is one that does not hatch and bring life. She may have also had fun with the slang (and now politically-incorrect) meaning of faggot as a gay man, who is just as likely not to make a woman pregnant as the man on the moon.
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In “Maudlin,” first entitled, “Mad Maudlin,” Plath is jealous of men, who are seen with disgust. This “Jack,” an everyman’s name, is macho (“He kings it”), with ugly descriptive words such as “hogshead” instead of a prettier cask. He is “hatched” from these eggs and he swigs, not sips or drinks, his claret-wine, a symbol of blood. Plath’s journal entry from May 20, 1959, around the time this poem was probably written, revealed a fight and tedious silences between herself and Hughes (UJ, 484). Everyman Jack, her Hughes, and all men, are “navel-knit to no groan” from the pain of menstrual cramps. Yet Plath believes that any woman would give up being the perfect dream of a mermaid to purchase two separate legs in order to bear a child. Her “at the price of a pin-stitched skin,” sounds painful, and it is. She knows that the maternal body is sometimes torn to give birth, and a body after a baby is never the same.

28-DAY CYCLE, EARLY POEM, JEALOUSY OF MEN, MAUDLIN, MENSTRUAL CRAMPS, MENSTRUATION, PLATH POEM, SYLVIA PLATH, TED HUGHES, THE MOON​