Visiting graveyards
In honour of Sylvia Plath's birthday (of course she was a Scorpio) and the spooky season
During an intense Arvon creative writing course in Yorkshire last March, I visited Sylvia Plath’s grave twice.
The first time was at night. After dinner, one of the other participants suggested an evening walk. We went down to Heptonstall and decided we may as well look for the gravestone. It was hard to find but Google maps helped us stumble across the familiar name. One quiet monument among dozens of others.
Standing there, I thought perhaps this is why so many people bring gifts to the graves of famous cultural figures: to seal the experience with meaning. A gentle ringing sounded out in the dark. It was the bell on the collar of a cat, wending its way towards us. ‘Oh, it’s Sylvia’s spirit', we joked.
The second time was also unplanned. It was the last full day of the course, and each of us were required to read out a piece of work written during the week that evening. I had my second mentoring session in the day. A piece of writing I’d typed out desperately in the early hours of the morning met with unexpected encouragement. Suddenly torturous hours spent tinkering with word order and fearing public speaking dissipated into a mellow, spare afternoon. I threw my burst of elated energy into another walk to Heptonstall.
I took a different footpath through woodland, scrambling over slabs of rock with a view of the land below. There were horses in the fields. I passed cyclists carrying their bikes and dog walkers. The church, its ruins, and graveyard were almost tiger-striped with sun and shadow. Daylight gave definition to the area: slabs of engraved stones creating a jaunty patchwork underfoot.
Over the week flowers and candles had been left by the headstone. I didn’t have an offering. This wasn’t a pilgrimage. I chose to visit Plath’s grave again because it gave my walk a point to reach and return from.
But it was still where I went in excitement at having achieved something, a confirmation, however small, that my writing wasn’t (completely) delusional. The place felt friendly, especially with the gifts of other people there. Plath would surely have understood, like any writer, the joy of having found your right word, even better, a whole sequence of right words. One of the most well-known things about Plath is her absolute dedication to her work. ‘I wrote something I’m proud of, Sylvia,’ I tried, muttering under my breath.
After a little more exploration, I went back and had a wonderful evening sharing words and laughter and almost-tears with my course-mates, sad that this years-long week was over.
Some of my favourite lines from Plath’s poetry:
I have my honey,/Six jars of it,/Six cat’s eyes in the wine cellar (Wintering)
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you./You leave the same impression/Of something beautiful, but annihilating. / Both of you are great light borrowers. (The Rival)
Now, in valleys narrow/And black as purses, the house lights/Gleam like small change (Wuthering Heights)
Writing this post, I read Ariel for the first time and looked more into Sylvia Plath’s life and mythology. Something under-discussed is her use of racist, orientalist and antisemitic language in writing both personal and intended for publication. Gail Crowther addresses this topic and the importance of self-reflection as a white woman in her blog post ‘The comforts of whiteness’. She writes: ‘I suspect that Plath’s readership is not exclusively, but predominantly, white; Plath scholarship is certainly so.’
Emily van Duyne is even more critical of those skating over this aspect as merely ‘of the time’. In contrast to discussions about Plath's ‘appropriation of both Jewish identity and the particular tragedy of the Holocaust’, (e.g. Daddy) van Duyne argues that ‘we have yet to tackle the anti-Black racism that pervades her work’, attributing this to the limited way Plath has been perceived as a ‘maniacal woman “confessing” her sins to the world’. The article is well worth a read: ‘Dark Hooks: The overt racism of Sylvia Plath's "Ariel".
If you’re interested in the controversies over Plath’s life and legacy, Van Duyne has another brilliant article: 'No One Gets Sylvia Plath’.
Thank you for reading! Do you have any favourite poems? Have you ever visited a famous person’s grave? I hope you enjoy Halloween, Samhain, All Saints’ and All Souls’, and the Day of the Dead if you mark them, and any of the other celebrations at this time of year.