 A political cartoon mocking the British Empire. The caption read: “New Crowns for Old Ones!” By Benjamin Disraeli for Punch Magazine.
Begun on April 18, 1956, and finished the next day per her pocket calendar, Plath’s poem, “Complaint of the Crazed Queen,” was enclosed in a letter to her mother on April 29, 1956. It was later retitled, “Mad Queen’s Song,” and finally titled “The Queen’s Complaint.” In this poem, Plath uses the same language she had used in describing Hughes in letters to her mother and brother. She called Hughes “hulking” and his movements were like gallows’ “derricks” (CP, 28). Plath said Hughes broke both things and people. He was used to walking over women, and yet she felt that she was strong enough to match him. She claimed his many women of the past and even those in the future did not disturb her, and that she could see into the core of him. It seems that Plath had fallen victim to a young woman’s favorite myth of changing a man, and she believed that she would teach Hughes gentleness.[1] “The Queen’s Complaint” poem features a burly man intruding upon a dainty maiden to have his way with her. Plath’s poetic “at cock’s crowing” of course bears a double sexual meaning. She looked and tried “all doughty men,” doughty meaning brave, persistent and courageous, and all characteristics of military men. Plath’s poem reveals (and is backed up by her journals and letters) that none could compare with Hughes in sexual force or in his matching her mind. She saw their match as a metaphorical military coupe. To Plath, everyone around her, as well as Plath herself, grew small in the shadow of Hughes’ importance. Was this a good thing? It seems that Plath didn’t know. It should also be noted that Plath had seen the John Webster play, The White Devil, at the ADC Theatre in Cambridge that past October with her friend Jane,[2] and that she read the book on March 10, 1956.[3] White Devil addresses the political and moral state of England and the corruption of the royal court in particular. Its first successful production was in 1920, there at the ADC where Plath played a couple of parts in other productions.[4] That same month, she was reading political satires such as “The Little World of Don Camillo,” as well as Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, and Hedda Gabler plays satirizing society with themes of social change, as well as Henry Brooke’s tyrannical government in Gustavus Vasa.[5] Might this poem be another one of Plath’s premonitions? Plath’s first two versions of the title suggest that the Queen was not in her right mind to make such claims. Therefore, looking at the times and the mystical ordering of the poem,* “The Queen’s Complaint” seems to also be a playful address of the British claim on the Suez that took place mid-year, about two months after Plath’s writing of the poem. The Suez, with its own derricks, tanks, pipes, oil tankers, and platforms, looks “fierce and black as rooks” and is a marine highway of industry. Ships ramp through its acres, as Plath begins her second stanza, and Britain rudely and incorrectly assumed they would remain in control. In “fury,” Egypt “urged him slay” this agreement. Britain tried to reason that the deal was meant to be “naught but good.” The antelope symbol in “The Queen’s Complaint” is native to Africa, and antelope are treasured in Egypt where herds have been kept since ancient times for both meat and as pets. Other Egyptian symbols of domestication and prey are doves (“gentle doves”), the Egyptian Fayoumi rooster, a native chicken species along the Nile, and another meaning of Plath’s crowing “cock.” Egypt’s president used Britain like a cad and then left with the goods: the canal, in this case. Plath illustrates this in her third stanza of “The Queen’s Complaint.” The soldiers are seen sent into Egypt in the fourth stanza, and there are battles at “this rare pass” until the British are forced to retreat and give up, “How sad, alas.” Like the formerly mighty Sylvia Plath using and discarding men as she pleased, the Suez was conquered. *For more on understanding Plath and Hughes’ mystical system, see the introduction to my first book, Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath (2014, Stephen F. Austin State University Press) [1] An excerpt from a letter from Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath dated April 19, 1956. (LSP: Vol. 1, 1164-1166) [2] American student Jane Baltzell Kopp attended Cambridge at the same time as Plath. [3] Plath’s calendar notes that White Devil was seen with Jane on October 14, 1955, after an ADC meeting re: parts in future productions. This calendar is held in the Sylvia Plath Archives of the Lilly Library, at the Indiana University-Bloomington. [4] Plath had bit parts in ADC Theatre productions of Bartholomew Fair and Three Hours After Marriage. [5] Per Plath’s calendar notes for October 29, November 5, 1955, and January 17, 1956. This calendar is held in the Sylvia Plath Archives of the Lilly Library, at the Indiana University-Bloomington. BRITAIN, EGYPT, GREAT BRITAIN, PLATH POEM, POLITICAL SATIRE, PRESCIENCE, PROPHETIC POEM, SOCIAL CHANGE, SOCIETY SATIRE, SUEZ, SUEZ CANAL, SUEZ CRISIS, SYLVIA PLATH, THE QUEEN'S COMPLAINT, THE WHITE DEVIL, TYRANNICAL GOVERNMENTS, UK, UNITED KINGDOM
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