 Photo above from Marine Insight “The Suez Canal Crisis: Events that Shaped Maritime History” http://www.marineinsight.com/marine/life-at-sea/maritime-history/the-suez-canal-crisis-events-that-shaped-maritime-history/
On February 20, 1956, Plath wrote “Tale of a Tub,” while in her own bathtub (CP, 24). “[T]ake care it doesn’t get too general,” she noted to herself. The poem does not get too general, but rather it becomes a parody of Jonathan Swift’s work of the same name, also echoing the latest news of Egypt selling cotton to Communist China, buying arms from the Soviets, and signing an agreement with Britain. For Plath, the Suez Canal becomes the “tub,” and Britain, Egypt and the USSR stand in for Swift’s three brother characters. Plath’s metaphorical washbowl, towel, and window seem to be their rights, their charges, and ambiguities. In the news, Egypt had just declared its “holy calling” to become a Muslim state. Plath references the “ample batch of omens” that began twenty years prior, mainly with Britain having been given control of Sudan and maintaining a garrison of 10,000 men in the Suez. Plath’s crab[1] and octopus imagery fits red, communist sickle-claw symbols, as well as spidery Nazi swastikas, “waiting for some accidental break” to steal power. Britain’s Prime Minister Anthony Eden had recently lost the support of the United States and he made a series of blunders at this time, referenced in Plath’s “green of eden,” which pretended the future would be shining fruit springing from “this present waste.” While Hughes placed Plath’s poem, “On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad” in the 1957 section of The Collected Poems, author Nancy D. Hargrove suggests it is actually a 1956 poem in her work, The Journey Toward Ariel: The Chronology of Sylvia Plath’s Poems 1956-1959 (1991, University Press of Virginia). The circumstances of the world’s events seem to agree. In Greek mythology, a dryad is a tree nymph, the spirit of the tree. Legend holds that when Apollo chased the goddess Daphne to rape her, the Mother Earth, Gaia, swallowed her up and turned her into a Laurel tree to avoid him. Plath’s poem, while referencing this legend, attempts to do the reverse, or to undo the doings of the Earth: to turn the tree into the spirit. Dryads also appear in the ballet Don Quixote, the story of a man foolishly jousting with windmills; and dryads also make an appearance in the ballet, Sylvia, where a shepherd and a maiden come together among forest sprites and the deities’ goodwill. “On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad” therefore appears to be another Suez Crisis poem (CP, 65). It begins with the British and French “bric-à-brac” among a busy politician’s desk cluttered with blunt pencils, coffee cup, postage stamps, and piles of books. Coffee, grown in the Middle East and Northern Africa, has been an important import for Europeans (“rose-sprigged coffee cup”). The rooster (“Neighborhood cockcrow”) is a traditional symbol of Egypt. It is a bird that crows with the sun, a representative of the Egyptians’ solar god. Saint Anthony of Egypt was often depicted with a rooster, and Egypt is known for its special breed of Fayoumi rooster. Egypt’s then-president Nasser, arrogant and “vaunting,” snubbed the “impromptu spiels of wind” from the United Kingdom, France, and Israel, and relations with the West grew tense as Egypt stood firm in their neutral stance through the Cold War. Nasser’s decision to compose the crisis is shown in Plath’s second stanza, and he nationalized the Suez Canal, “To stun sky black out, drive gibbering mad” the powerful nations who were initially so confident they would continue to govern this space. Now, Nasser would control the waters of the trout, the lands of the cock, and the mountains of the ram (Plath’s “Trout, cock, ram”). The United Nations’ logo is that of a wreath of olive tree branches around a map of the world. This is the “damn scrupulous tree” that “won’t practice wiles.” The “obstinate bark and trunk” called an emergency session. There was no consensus on collective action, due to the vetoes of France and the UK. The “Uniting for Peace” resolution called for a ceasefire and the withdrawal of all foreign forces (France, Britain, and Israel) from occupied territories in Egypt, who had planned to “hoodwink” the canal territory. Plath’s “Palmed off” is not only Nassar receiving arms and/or money but the palm trees of Egypt. Queen Elizabeth II, the “jilting lady” of Britain, had squandered her “coin, gold leaf stock” for the ditch of the canal, while the beggars of Egypt hatched “no fortune,” and were regarded at that time as “Thieves.” Double-meanings were becoming a natural poetic process for Plath now, like her idols Shakespeare and the other mystic greats, who wove history into their poems while also addressing their personal experiences. [1] One might also read this as another of Plath’s premonitions regarding British diver Lionel Crabb’s disappearance which would happen in April of that year. Plath addressed this event in “Winter Landscape, with Rooks,” and “Firesong,” also discussed in this blog. ANTHONY EDEN, COLD WAR, EGYPT, GREAT BRITAIN, JONATHAN SWIFT, MUSLIM STATE, NASSER, ON THE DIFFICULTY OF CONJURING UP A DRYAD, PLATH POEM, SUEZ, SUEZ CANAL, SUEZ CRISIS, SYLVIA PLATH, TALE OF A TUB
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