I Wish I'd Written This

Last Words

By Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963)

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus

With tigery stripes, and a face on it

Round as the moon, to stare up.

I want to be looking at them when they come

Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.

I see them already — the pale, star-distance faces.

Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.

I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.

They will wonder if I was important.

I should sugar and preserve my days like fruit!

My mirror is clouding over —

A few more breaths, and it will reflect nothing at all.

The flowers and the faces whiten to a sheet.

I do not trust the spirit. It escapes like steam

In dreams, through mouth-hole or eye-hole. I can't stop it.

One day it won't come back. Things aren't like that.

They stay, their little particular lusters

Warmed by much handling. They almost purr.

When the soles of my feet grow cold,

The blue eye of my turquoise will comfort me.

Let me have my copper cooking pots, let my rouge pots

Bloom about me like night flowers, with a good smell.

They will roll me up in bandages, they will store my heart

Under my feet in a neat parcel.

I shall hardly know myself. It will be dark,

And the shine of these small things sweeter than the face of Ishtar.

As many do, I consider Sylvia Plath one of the greatest poets of our age — and no slouch as a fiction writer, either. In that respect, I'd love to have written any of her work. I wouldn't wish for her sad, disturbed life, which makes so many of her poems dark, but I think her genius outshines her subject matter. If anyone doesn't know the details of her story, you can read a summary in these biographical notes.

I remember someone, at the height of Plath's first posthumous fame, saying to me and another admirer (also a poet) that Plath would not be considered so great were it not for the drama of her life and death. We poets were adamant that, no, it was her use of language that made her great. Eventually the other woman stopped trying to persuade us; she coud see, at least, that we were convinced. I think now that she was confusing greatness and fame. Plath's fame may indeed owe something to her tragedy having captured public imagination. Her greatness seems to have been the product of natural talent and very hard work. She was a perfectionist in her poetry, very driven and very dedicated. Her Collected Poems, published after her death, won the Pulitzer Prize.

Even when dark, her poetry has great beauty. I think she had a wonderful ear, as revealed in such lovely lines as:

The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve.

My bones hold a stillness, the far

Fields melt my heart.

They threaten

To let me through to a heaven

Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

...  in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pours bean green over blue

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.

... I

Am the arrow,

The dew that flies,

Suicidal, at one with the drive

Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

(Transcribing them now, I notice her masterly use of internal rhymes.)

Though many of her other poems are more famous and even more startlingly original, Last Words is a favourite of mine. With the knowledge of hindsight concerning her suicidal tendencies, we might suppose it to be one of her confessional pieces; instead the speaker seems to be someone from an ancient culture. The bandages and stored heart suggest Egypt, but Ishtar was a Babylonian Goddess. Historical accuracy, though, is less important than the feeling of the poem. I like the sarcophagus with tigery stripes, and the comfort the speaker expects to derive from having her 'small things' around her in death.

Perhaps, at a deeper level, it does indeed reveal the poet herself. Don't all our poems inevitably reflect us in some way, even when we intend to create fictions? We know that she did want to be 'important', i.e. an important poet, and we know that she also had a domestic side which would have enjoyed the copper cooking pots and understood the niceties of preserving fruit.  In any case, she has imagined herself very well into the persona of this lady from the far past. I find myself identifying, even though I am a very different kind of person. That too is Plath's genius, I think — she makes you feel whatever she wants you to.

You can find more of her poems here (scroll down) and her books here. I don't think her books will be going out of print any time soon.

Poems and photos used in ‘I Wish I’d Written This’ remain the property of the copyright holders (usually their authors).