I know it's irrational, but I resent Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton for requiring me to talk about suicide on such a beautiful day. On the other hand, maybe it's better to talk about suicidal poets when the sun is shining and the cherry trees are blooming and the air feels crisp and fresh and full of life, because talking about suicide on a gloomy day would feel gratuitously bleak.
I really hate to teach Plath and Sexton anyway because students are always tempted to read the poems as extended suicide notes, seeking clues to solve the mystery instead of examining the interplay of form and content. Maybe if we count every fifth letter from the end of the poem we'll uncover a cipher clearly naming the culprits who drove them to take their own lives! It's a futile effort and I resent the poets for making it possible. Why couldn't they have lived on to ripe old age? Then we could read the poems as poems instead of as puzzles.
When I read the tender poems both women wrote about their children (such as Plath's "Morning Song" and Sexton's "Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman"), I resent the poets even more. How could they write such love notes to their children and then cause those same children such pain? And how could they snuff out their poetic gifts and deprive the world of future gifts of poetry? Selfish, I tell you. Just selfish.
Before I teach Sexton and Plath, I have to take some deep breaths and remind myself that whatever mental aberrations drove them to suicide is beyond my comprehension that my resentment is a futile waste of energy. Let's just focus on the poems, the poems the poems the poems, and on the fact that it is a beautiful day, a beautiful beautiful day.
Deep breath. Now teach!
1 comment:
I really dislike the practice of reading all the poems as leading up to and preparing the suicide (or whatever death, and so on). As if the poets were planning their suicides years and years in advance, and everything should be read teleologically.
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