All taken from Vol. I of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K. Steinberg.
it is saturday night, turning as I write into sunday morning. the dark world balances and tips and already I can feel the dawn coming up under me.
outside it is raining and the black streets are inky with wet and crying with wind. I have just come back from a film: die letze brucke.
It was a german-jugoslav film about the war, and the partisans fighting the germans. and the people were real people with dirty shining faces and I loved them. they were simple. they were men and both sides were wrong and both sides were right. they were human beings and they were not grace kelley, but they were beautiful from the inside like joan of arc, with that kind of radiance that faith makes, and the kind that love makes.
the kind of radiance too that suddenly comes over you when I look at you dressing or shaving or reading and you are suddenly more than the daily self we must live with and love, that fleeting celestial self which shines out with the whimsical timing of angels.
that confident surge of exuberance in which I wrote you has dwindled as waves do, to the knowledge that makes me cry, just this once: such a minute fraction of this life do we live: so much is sleep, tooth-brushing, waiting for mail, for metamorphosis, for those sudden moments of incandescence: unexpected, but once one knows them, one can live life in the light of their past and the hope of their future.
in my head I know it is too simple to wish for war, for open battle but one cannot help but wish for those situations that make us heroic, living to the hilt of our total resources. our cosmic fights, which I think the end of the world is come, are so many broken shells around our growth.
sunday noon: very stingily blue whipped to white by wind from russian steppes. the mornings are god's time, and after breakfast for those five hours somehow everything is all right and most things are even possible. the afternoons however slip away faster and faster and night cheats by coming shortly after four. the dark time, the night time is worst now. sleep is like the grave, wormeaten with dreams.
it would be easy to say that I would fight for you, or steal or lie; I have a great deal of that desire to use myself to the hilt, and where, for men, fighting is a cause, for women, fighting is for men. in a crisis, it is easy to say: I will arise and be with thee. but what I would do too is the hardest thing for me, with my absurd streak of idealism and perfectionism: I do believe I would sit around with you and feed you and wait with you through all the necessary realms of tables and kingdoms of chairs and cabbage for those fantastic few moments when we are angels, and we are growing angels (which the angels in heaven never can be) and when we together make the world love itself and incandesce. I would sit around and read and write and brush my teeth, knowing in you there were the seeds of an angel, my kind of angel, with fire and swords and blazing power, why is it I find out so slowly what women are made for? it comes nudging and urging up in me like tulip bulbs in april.
It is somehow march and very late, and outside a warm large wind is blowing so that the trees and clouds are torn and the stars are scudding.
I have been gliding on that wind since noon, and coming back tonight, with the gas fire wailing like the voice of a phoenix, and having read Verlaine and his lines cursing me, and having just come newly from Cocteau's films "La Belle et La Bete" and "Orphee" can you see how I must stop writing letters to a dead man and put one on paper which you may tear or read or feel sorry for.
So it is. Stephen Spender was at sherry this afternoon, blue-eyed and white-haired and long since become a statue who says "India, it depresses me terribly" and tells of the beggars who will always be beggars throughout eternity. Young men are leaving ships full of flowers and poems, and souls---delicate as snowdrops---duck bellied white heads in my teacups.
I can hear the wounded, miraculous furry voice of the bete whispering so slow through the palace of floating curtains. And the Angel Heurtebis and Death melt through mirrors like water. Only in your eyes did the winds come from other planets, and it cuts me so, when you speak to me through every word of French, through every single word I look up bleeding in the dictionary.
I thought that your letter was all one could ask; you gave me your image, and I made it into stories and poems; I talked about it for awhile to everyone and told them it was a bronze statue, a bronze boy with a dolphin, who balanced through the winter in our gardens with snow on his face, which I brushed off every night I visisted him.
I made your image wear different masks, and I played with it nightly and in my dreams. I took your mask and put it on other faces which looked as if they might know you when I had been drinking. I performed acts of faith to show off: I climbed a tall spiked gate over a moat at the dead hour of three in the morning under the moon, and the men marveled, for the spikes went through my hands and I did not bleed.
Very simply, you were not wise to give me your image. You should know your woman, and be kind. You expect too much of me; you know I am not strong enough to live merely in that abstract Platonic realm out of time and flesh and on the other side of all those mirrors.
I need you to do this one more thing for me. Break your image and wrench it from me. I need you to tell me in very definite concrete words that you are unavailable, that you do not want me to come to you in Paris in a few weeks or ask you to come to Italy with me or save me from death. I think I can live in this world as long as I must, and slowly learn how not to cry at night, if only you will do this one last thing for me.. Please, just write me one very simple declarative sentence, the kind a woman can understand; kill your image and the hope and love I give it which keeps me frozen in the land of the bronze dead, for it gets harder and harder to free myself from that abstract tyrant named Richard who is so much more, being abstract, than he really is in this world.... For I must get back my soul from you; I am killing my flesh without it.
Only listen to me this last once. For it will be the last, and there is a terrible strength to which I am giving birth, and it is your child as it is mine, and so your listening must christen it.
The sun is flooding into my room as I write and I have spent the afternoon buying oranges and cheese and honey and being very happy after having for two weeks been very ill, because I can see every now and then how one must live in this world even if one's true soul is not with one; I give of my intensity and passion in minute homeopathic spoonfuls to the world; to the cockney woman in the subway lavatory when I said: look I'm human and she looked in my eyes and believed me and I kissed her; and the crooked man who sells malt bread; and a little dark-haired boy running a dog which urinated on the bridge post over a pool of white swans: to all these, I can give my fantastic urges of love, in little parcels which will not hurt them or make them sick, for being too strong.
I can do this, and must do this. I hoped in a night of terror that I was not bound to you with irrevocable love, for ever. I fought and fought to free myself as from the weight of a name that could be a baby or could be a malignant tumor; have gone crying (god, have I) and battering my head against spikes desperately thinking that if I were dying, and called, you might come. I have found that which I most feared, out of my weakness. I have found that it is beyond your power to ever free me or give me back my soul; you could have a dozen mistresses and a dozen languages and a dozen countries, and I could kick and kick; I would still not be free.
Being a woman, it is like being crucified to give up my dearest lares and penates, my "household gods": which are all the small, warm gestures of knowing and loving you: writing you (I have felt smothered, writing a kind of diary to you, and not mailing it: it is getting ominously huge, and each time is a witness of a wrestling with my worst angel) and telling you my poems (which are all for you) and little publishings, and, most terribe of all, seeing you, even for the smallest time, when you are so near, and god knows when we shall be pardoned for being so scrupulous.
This part of the woman in me, the concrete, present, immediate part, which needs the warmth of her man in bed and her man eating with her and her man thinking and communing with her soul: this part still cries to you: why, why will you not only see me and be with me while there is still this small time before those terrible years and infinite years; this woman, whom I have not recognized for 23 years, whom I have scorned and denied, comes to taunt me now, when I am weakest in my terrible discovery.
For, I am committed to you, out of my own choice (although I could not know when I let myself first grow toward you that it would hurt, hurt, hurt me so eternally) and I perhaps know now, in a way I never should have known, if you made life easy and told me I could live with you (on any terms in this world, only so it would be with you)---I know now how deeply, fearfully and totally I love you, beyond all compromise, beyond the mental reservations I've had about you, even to this day.
I am not simply telling you this because I want to be noble; I very much didn't want to be noble. That most intimate immediate woman (which makes me, ironically, so much yours) tormented me into delusion: that I could ever free myself from you. Really, how ridiculous it was: how should a mistress free me. When even you, and even what gods there are, can not free me, tempting me with all kinds of men on all sides?
I thought even, at the most desperate time, when I was so sick and could not sleep, but only lie and curse the flesh, whom I was going to marry two years ago in a splurge of contrived social-conscience: we looked so well together! So he is coming to study in Germany, and I thought perhaps if I could keep him skiing and swimming I might live with him, if only he never wrote, or let me argue with him (because I always win) or looked at a bed. This cowardice terrified me; for it was that. I could not admit then, as I do now, the essential tragic fact: I love you with all my heart and soul and body; in your weakness as in your strength; and for me to love a man even in his weakness is something I have never all my life been able to do before. And if you can take that weakness in me which wrote my last cringing, begging-dog letter and admit that it belongs to the same woman who wrote the first letter in her strength and faith, and love the whole woman, you will know how I love you.
I was thinking of the few times in my life I have felt I was all alive, tensed, using everything in me: mind and body, instead of giving away little crumbs, lest the audience be glutted with too much plum-cake.
Once, I was on the top of the ski slope, having to go down to a small figure below, and not knowing how to steer; I plunged; I flew, screaming with joy that my body braced and mastered this speeed; and then a man stepped carelessly into my path and I broke my leg. Then there was the time with Wertz when the horse galloped into the street-crossing and the stirrups came off leaving me hanging around his neck, jarred breathless, thinking in an ecstasy: is this the way the end will be? And then there are the many many times I have given myself to that fury and that death which is loving you, and I am, to my own knifing hurt, more faithful than is kind to my peace and my wholeness. I live in two worlds and as long as we are apart, I always shall.
Now that this sudden articulate awareness of my most terrible eternal predicament has come to me, I must know that you understand this and why I had to write you then and now: if you do not ever want to write to me again, send me a blank, unsigned postcard, something, anything, to let me know that you did not tear my words and burn them before knowing that I am both worse and better than you thought. I am human enough to want to be talking to the only other human who matters in this world.
I suppose I was most appalled that you should bind me to you (so that neither of us have the power to break this, through all hate, venom, disgust and all the mistresses in the world) and that you could leave me this cut open, my heart utterly gone, without anesthetic or stitching; my vital blood was spilling on the barren table, and nothing could grow. Well, it still is spilling. And I wonder why you fear seeing me even in the time we have: for I have faith in you, and cannot believe (as I once wanted to) that it's merely for convenience, so I won't overlap with other women. Why must you be so much like Brand: so utterly intransigeant?
I could see it, if you thought your being with me would bind me to you more, or give me less freedom to find someone else, but knowing now, as I do and you must, that I am so far bled white that no mere abstinance of knives can cure me, why do you forbid our making the small, limited world we have. Why so tabu? I ask you you to ask yourself this. And if you have the courage or understanding in you, to tell me.
When I was weak, there was a reason; now I see none. I see not why I should not live in Paris with you and go to your classes and read French with you. I am not any more perilous, outside myself. Why do you make our case (which is hell enough, and we have enough to test us in these coming cruel years) so utterly and absolutely rigid? I can take the even harder horror of letting myself melt into feeling again, and knowing it must freeze again, if only I can believe it is making a minute part of time and space better than it would have been by stubbornly staying always apart when we have so little time to be near.
I ask you to turn these things in your heart and mind, for I see a sudden deep question now: why do you flee me, if you know I would rather make life rich under the shadow of the sword? You said before that I wanted something of you you couldn't give. Well, so I do. But now I understand what must be (which I didn't then) and understand also that my faith and love for you cannot be blunted or blinded by drinking or hurling myself into other men's beds. I found this, and know this, and what do I have?
Understanding. Love. Two worlds. I am simple enough to love the spring and think it foolish and terrible that you can deny it to us when it is the wonder of it that is uniquely ours. With that strange knowing that comes over me, like a clairvoyance, I know that I am sure of mself and my enormous and alarmingly timeless love for you; which will always be. But in a way, it is harder for me, for my body is bound to faith and love, and I feel I cannot really ever live with another man; which means I must become (since I could not be a nun) a consecrated single woman. Now if I were inclined to a career as a lawyer or journalist that would be all right.
But I am not. I am inclined to babies and bed and brilliant friends and a magnificent stimulating home where geniuses drink gin in the kitchen after a delectable dinner and read their own novels and tell about why the stock market is the way it will be and discuss scientific mysticism (which, by the way, is intriguing: in all forms: several tremendous men in botany, chemistry, math and physics, etc. here are all mystics in various ways)---well, anyhow, this is what I was meant to make for a man, and to give him this colossal reservoir of faith and love for him to swim in daily, and to give him children; lots of them, in great pain and pride. And I hated you most, in my unreason, for making me woman, to want this, and making me your woman alone, and then making me face the very real and terribly immediate possibility that I would have to live my life chastely as a schoolteacher who sublimated by influencing other women's children. More than anything else in the world I want you bear you a son and I go about with the full darkness of my flame, like Phedre, forbidden by what auster pudeur, what fierte?
In a way, I suppose, I felt like you were Signor Rappacini who bred his only daughter to exist solely on perilous poisonous food and atmosphere exhaled by a poisonous exotic plant: she became fatally unable to live in the normal world, and a death-menace to those who wanted to approach her from this world.
Well, that is what I became, for a while. I really cruelly wounded several people here, desperately, because I wanted to get back to that normal world and live and love in it. Well, I couldn't, and I hated them for showing me that.
Now this is all, and you must know it. But you must also let me know by some means that you know it. If you are not too scrupulous and why, now, are you? You might write me a letter and tell me honestly why, if you do not fear my childish pleadings, which are far far away and dead after today, why you refuse to let me make a few days of spring with you in Paris? I am coming, and I feel it is somehow now honestly superfluous and much too abstract and stringent of you to pretend there is left any important reason why you do not wish to see me.
I know if I were coming in a chaos, a turmoil of accusations, or even making it harder to leave you again (which it may well be, but it is possible to manage this)---I know then that you would have a right to forbid. But all I want is to see you, be with you, walk, talk, in a way which I imagine people past the age of love could do (although I am not pretending I would not passionately want to be with you) but we have come into the time and understanding where we could be most kind and good to each other. Even if those eternal years are upon us, why do you now refuse to see me?
I believe I can ask you this, and not have you feel that there is some disease of over-scrupulosity that makes letters reveal weakness or carry contagion. As a woman who knows herself now, I ask you. And if you have courage and look into yourself, you will answer. For I shall come, and respect your wish; but I shall also now ask you why you so wish. Do not, o do not make an artificial stasis which is unbreakable; break and bend and grow again, as I have done only today.
now the forces are gathering still against me, and my dearest grandmother who took care of me all my life while mother worked is dying very very slowly and bravely of cancer, and she has not even been able to have intravenous feeding for six weeks but is living on her body, which will be all sublimed away, and then only she may die. my mother is working, reaching, cooking, driving, shoveling snow from blizzards, growing thin in the terror of her slow sorrow. I had hoped to make her strong and healthy, and now she may be too weak herself after this slow death, like my father's slow long death, to come to me. and I am here, futile, cut off from the ritual of family love and neighborhood and from giving strength and love to my dear brave grandmother's dying whom I loved above thought. and my mother will go, and there is the terror of having no parents, no older seasoned beings, to advise and love me in this world.
something very terrifying too has happened to me, which started two months ago and which needed not to have happened, just as it needed not to have happened that you wrote that you did not want to see me in paris and would not go to italy with me. when I came back to london, there seemed only this one way of happening, and I am living now in a kind of present hell and god knows what ceremonies of life or love can patch the havoc wrought. I took care, such care, and even that was not enough, for my being deserted utterly. you said that when you returned to paris, you said that you told me "brutally" your vacation would be spent. well, mine is spent too, brutally, and I am spent, giving with both hands, daily, and the blight and terror has been made in the choice and the superfluous unnecessary and howling void of your long absence. your handwriting has gone so wild and racked not all the devils could burn a meaning out of it.