""A Dew That Flies"
A dew that flies.'For Sylvia Plath
Beyond the shades
of the coupled
ash and phoenix,
across a small dirt road,
in a neighbouring field,
I find
her headstone,
heavily erect,
'Sylvia Plath Hughes’;
spirit of the air
pegged
in cloven pine.
Someone has picked
at the scab of earth;
cherished her, cursed him;
planted flowers,
limp in the heat,
and a ragged mosaic of flat stones,
artless
as a child’s fancy
on a summer beach.
Lady Lazurus unrisen.
So poets die,
mouths plugged with earth,
lips censured by worms,
chemistry stopped,
direction altered
unalterably,
silenced,
left to change,
under the benign blue,
promises unfulfilled;
dry mornings
of unfetched dew.
This is a place
where storms gather
to destroy churches.
The one,
a shell,
gapes, gale-torn,
a wound
unhealed
by the obliterations of grass;
the carved cornice
of the other, toppled
by a fusing bolt.
Notes.
This could prove a difficult poem unless one knows the place Heptonstall which is just over the hill from where I live.
Sylvia Plath is buried in the churchyard there.
In the past there was a great storm that felled the old church one night. It is still in ruins. They built the new church right next to the old and one can stand looking at both from a path.
Plath wrote a collection called ‘Ariel’, and her reputation, richly deserved , is based mainly on that collection.
Ariel is the spirit of the air from ‘The Tempest’. Ariel says how he was released from being imprisoned in a pine tree by a witch, by Prospero, for whom he fetches dews from the Bermudas and obeys other whims. Plath wrote in one of her poems ‘I am the dew that flies suicidal into the eye of the sun’ or something like that.}
© 2006 Arthur Seeley
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