“The Eye-mote”: “That’s racing!”

Written in Paris on March 26, 1956, according to Plath’s pocket calendar, and not in 1959 where it is placed in The Collected Poems, “The Eye-mote” was written “through tears” over Richard Sassoon. Readers of Plath’s letters and journals may also remember that in the last week of her trimester term at Cambridge, on March 17, 1956, Plath got a splinter in her eye. The discomfort could not be subdued and it had to be removed surgically. She wrote to her mother that as the doctor operated, she recounted “how Oedipus and Gloucester in King Lear got new vision through losing eyes, but I would just as soon keep my sight and get new vision, too” (LH, 229).
Certainly, Plath’s experience affected and inspired her poem. And yet, “The Eye-mote,” is full of horses and the sense of horse racing: we see “a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown, / Tails streaming against the green” and the images continue through the poem’s five stanzas (CP, 109). This is important because just two days earlier, on March 24, 1956, the 110th renewal of the world-famous Grand National horse race took place in England. The event is probably best remembered for the horse owned by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. The horse, named Devon Loch, took an inexplicable fall on the final straight, just forty yards away from what had looked like a certain victory as it had a five-length lead over his nearest challenger. No one could explain the horse’s strange leap and collapse in what became the world’s most famous steeplechase. It was said the horse jumped a ghost fence, perhaps thinking a shadow was another hurdle. The event coined the term, “To do a Devon Loch,” when something looks like a sure-win yet is a last-minute failure. In “The Eye-mote,” Plath writes that she dreams she is Oedipus. In Sophocles’ plays, Oedipus stabs his own eyes out using the brooch from his mother Queen Jocasta’s gown. This “brooch-pin” is another connection to the British Queen Mother, who famously commented after the event, “Oh, that’s racing!”
DEVON LOCH, GRAND NATIONAL HORSE RACE, PLATH POEM, QUEEN ELIZABETH II, SYLVIA PLATH, THE EYE-MOTE