“Winter Landscape, with Rooks” and “Firesong”: Tales of British Diver Lionel “Buster” Crabb

“Winter Landscape, with Rooks,” was written on February 20, 1956, per Plath’s pocket calendar. She had written it just after reading Eugene O’Neill’s plays, all full of despairing characters on the fringes of society.  Plath found herself likewise feeling “very depressed & antagonistic & hollow”[1] “Winter Landscape with Rooks” is full of O’Neill’s absurdities, the brooding alcoholic’s “clouded mind,” and an absolute bleakness about the future (CP, 21). Plath’s “Winter Landscape” is probably most suggestive of O’Neill’s great work, The Ice Man Cometh.
“Winter Landscape, with Rooks” is also another prophetic poem, as it mirrors the BBC’s headlining story that would occur two months later, about the missing British diver, Lionel Crabb. Crabb was sent on a spy mission to investigate the Soviet cruiser Ordzhonikidze, which had brought Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin on a diplomatic mission to Britain.  Under the cover of darkness, Crabb dove into Portsmouth Harbour to investigate the propeller (“Water in the millrace”) and was never seen again. Plath’s “cyclops-eye” sun resembles a periscope. Plath’s words of “rock,” “fen,” “bleakness” and “swans” are all particular to this topic. This story must have been a shock to Plath, as she had been quite enchanted with her own meeting of Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin on this very same visit. Now, “Last summer’s reeds are all engraved in ice,” and her sympathies toward communism appeared to be shifting before she even knew they were. The poem cast against Crabb’s April 19, 1956 disappearance declares the hopelessness for peace between the Soviets and the West.
The first draft of Plath’s “Firesong” was finished on April 22, 1956, after the Crabb disappearance had made the news. In her pocket calendar, Plath also mentioned working on “Firesong” again on September 5, 1956. In this calendar, Plath considered “Firesong” one of two “slight” poems, and Hughes believed the title “Firesong” felt like a cliché. As in her poem, “On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad,” previously discussed, Plath uses “buck, cock, trout” in a similar way to her Dryad’s “trout, cock, ram,” to represent the conquering of mountains, land, and water.
Plath’s “no straight inquiring” in the second stanza of “Firesong” was probably either consciously or unconsciously an influence of Plato’s Gorgias, which she was reading the same day as her first draft in April (CP, 30). The work argues that philosophy is an art, and rhetoric is simply clever word trickery, as seen in the last line of the first stanza.
“Firesong” seems to speak of frogman Crabb “Born green” and “from his crabbed midden,” as he gets into a muddy mess and saltwater, tricked into a snare like a “shrewd catch.” Crabb’s body was found in the water, missing its head and hands, on June 9, 1957. The story of this diver dominated the news for months and would later be portrayed in the 1958 film, The Silent Enemy, and in Ian Fleming’s James Bond adventure, Thunderball.
[1] Plath’s calendar notes for February 20, 1956. This calendar is held in the Sylvia Plath Archives of the Lilly Library, at Indiana University-Bloomington.
BRITISH DIVER, COLD WAR, EUGENE O'NEILL, FIRESONG, FROGMAN, GORGIAS, JAMES BOND, LIONEL BUSTER CRABB, NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV, NIKOLAI BULGANIN, PLATH POEM, PLATO, PLATO'S GORGIAS, PRESCIENCE, PROPHETIC POEM, SOVIET UNION, SYLVIA PLATH, THE ICE MAN COMETH, THUNDERBALL, WINTER LANDSCAPE WITH ROOKS