Wintering : : By Sylvia Plath
This is the easy time, there is nothing doing.
I have whirled the midwife’s extractor,
I have my honey,
Six jars of it,
Six cat’s eyes in the wine cellar,
Wintering in a dark without window
At the heart of the house
Next to the last tenant’s rancid jam
and the bottles of empty glitters–
Sir So-and-so’s gin.
This is the room I have never been in
This is the room I could never breathe in.
The black bunched in there like a bat,
No light
But the torch and its faint
Chinese yellow on appalling objects–
Black asininity. Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me.
Neither cruel nor indifferent,
Only ignorant.
This is the time of hanging on for the bees–the bees
So slow I hardly know them,
Filing like soldiers
To the syrup tin
To make up for the honey I’ve taken.
Tate and Lyle keeps them going,
The refined snow.
It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.
They take it. The cold sets in.
Now they ball in a mass,
Black
Mind against all that white.
The smile of the snow is white.
It spreads itself out, a mile-long body of Meissen,
Into which, on warm days,
They can only carry their dead.
The bees are all women,
Maids and the long royal lady.
They have got rid of the men,
The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.
Winter is for women–
The woman, still at her knitting,
At the cradle of Spanish walnut,
Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.
Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas
Succeed in banking their fires
To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses The bees are flying. They taste the spring.
‘Wintering’ is Sylvia Plath’s last poem in her Bee Sequence poems written in the early days of October 1962. She wrote all of these five poems in a state of turmoil and anger. Her marriage to English poet Ted Hughes had failed following his affair. This poem first appeared in the book Ariel, published 1965. The poem is all about survival, for the bees, the hive—the poet and her work. The speaker observes her own internal feelings, the season, the environment, and the domestic atmosphere – all in the hives of the bees. Sylvia both loved and hated her father Professor , Otto Plath, a German-speaking biologist / entomologist and author of Bumblebees and Their Ways (1934), who died when she was eight and, in her confusion, struggled to assert her identity. Her few poems , for example “Daddy”, are revisited here in “Wintering”, the speaker has come to her most important confrontation — with herself. Her work is completed and she is able to live with the natural rhythms of the seasons. She views her ‘wintering’ in a darkness without window: which is a decided part of a larger cycle, that involves hibernation, so that this is a poem about passivity and death. : : : : The Speaker knows that spring will follow this introspection and stillness and waiting ( as she said, “the easy time , nothing doing”) : The bees will ‘taste the spring’, and she concludes the Ariel collection on a note of hope, made possible by her recovery of her ‘self’. : : The 10 stanzas are quintains, that is five lines each , all unrhymed, though she also uses assonance and consonance The lines are of uneven length. : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : The dark cellar like “room” is a metaphor for her inner self; the gothic imagery of fear that she must overcome; and the woman whose “body, a “bulb’ in the cold and too dumb to think”, will survive and ‘enter another year” : : Six Jars of Honey represents her marriage with Ted Hughes which did not survive more as she left him , his home in the town of Devon and started together with her school going children living in London in a small Flat which she referred in as ” room”. The new room is suffocating ( she ” could never breath”) may be, because , she was not accustomed to daily house chores of cooking , preparing for her children to go school , etc. She did not feel alive here. ( It was hard to find time for working on her poetry. : It was as she wrote elsewhere, that only in the very early morning hours of 4 To 5 that she had to get up to start her day.) Black colors mentioned refers her father , and/ or Ted as she felt as if they both were owning her making her life unhappy. “Smile of the snow” is white”, a sign of life and purity in contrast of ” black , Mind against all white ” trying to devour her life . The last line : ” The bees are flying. They taste the spring.” : meaning , she wanted the next year(s) to run through for her. Thus she wanted light. Unfortunately , she died the next year , February , 1963 suffocating herself with gas in that Same small house/ room. : : : :
Notes for each of the 10 stanzas Pending visit this post again later on to enjoy the appreciation of the poem. : : Information Appreciation and poem Analysis Presented by V Jayaraj Pune India October 26, 2022 : : : :
MADHU MALTI 