“Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper”: Discovery in the Insect World

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