“Southern Sunrise”: a Political Potboiler

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