Sylvia Plath's "Berck-Plage," which contains 126 lines of
seemingly unmitigated malaise and funereal gloom, stands in many
readers' estimation as one of her heaviest and least appealing
works, even considering its autobiographical significance. The
occasion for the poem is described by Ted Hughes in a note to the
poem written in 197O:
In June, 1961, we had visited Berck-Plage, a long
beach and resort on the coast of France north of Rouen.
Some sort of hospital or convalescent home for the
disabled fronts the beach. It was one of her nightmares
stepped into the real world. A year later -- almost to
the day -- our next door neighbour, an old man
[Percy Key] died after a short grim illness during which
time his wife repeatedly needed our help. In this poem
that visit to the beach and the death and funeral of
our neighbour are combined. [1]
In a notebook entry later published as "Rose and Percy B" in the
Johnny Panic collection, Sylvia Plath recorded her own feelings
several days after the funeral, which took place on June 29,
1962: "I have written a long poem, 'Berck-Plage,' about it. Very
moved. Several terrible glimpses". [2] Indeed, Plath's description
of Percy's stiffening corpse is a glimpse even more ghastly than
the drowned face looming under the fishpond surface in "All the
Dead Dears". That earlier poem (1957) offers an important clue to
Plath's purposes in her later poems about the dead and the dying:
"How they grip us through thin and thick, these barnacle dead."
Faces in an endless mirror of preceding generations -- these
skeleton-kin, she says, "Reach hag hands to haul me in."[3]
Plath's motivation in writing such ugly and terrifying pictures of death is certainly not its glorification. Far more likely a motive, given Sylvia Plath's abundantly demonstrated lust for the rich textures of life, is her concern for physical and psychic survival in the face of suffering and death.[4] In many of her poems, what Plath perceives is a death-figure which threatens to swallow her up unless she can reassert her living identity by "fixing" and thus immobilizing her enemy in a structured poetic image. The otherwise uncontrollable fear brought on by what she perceives can thus be allayed by its transference to what she can control: the image.[5] For Sylvia Plath, the spectacle of the maimed French war veterans at Berck-Plage and of Percy Key, the cancer-ridden English Everyman next door, were to become emblems of her own struggle to confront death and defeat its power to poison the mind. The early drafts of the poem show that Plath had an even larger purpose in mind than the fusion of the two incidents when she began to compose it during the week following the old man's death (June 26-3O, 1962).[6] According to the dates on the drafts, there emerged by June 28 a third element of great personal importance: an ironic parallel between the dying processes she had witnessed and the birth and growth into life of Nicholas, her second child, who came into the world at almost the same time that Percy Key was entering his final decline into death. Few readers of the published version of "Berck-Plage" would suspect that Sylvia Plath had deleted a whole section of the poem before the final typescript. The deleted section shows in juxtaposed "buntings" a dying man and a hungry, growing baby.[7]
As we shall see, Plath had justifiable reasons for deleting the section, but the knowledge of what it contains compels us to reconsider carefully the published version of the poem. In spite of its size and complexity, "Berck-Plage" has attracted relatively scant attention from scholars and critics, especially in connection with rebirth and affirmation of life. Although Judith Kroll does not discuss the poem specifically in her book-length st udy, Chapters in a Mythology, her introductory comment about the death/rebirth theme can serve as a keynote for the present study:
To see the autobiographical details only as such is
to regard Plath's vision of suffering and death as
morbid, but to appreciate the deeper significance of
her poetry is to understand her fascination with
death as connected with and transformed into a
broader concern with the themes of rebirth and
transcendence.[8]
Plath's basic method of "transforming" death is to assume,
figuratively speaking, the role of a photo-journalist at the
scene, keenly observing details with her camera and narrating
interpretive commentary in such a way as to "control" what she
sees with the transforming power of her language. Her technique
resembles that of cinematic montage, which juxtaposes and thereby
fuses diverse visual images in a meaningful way, beyond the normal
parameters of space and time. In this way, Plath's "lens" can both
record and transcend the literal immediacy of what she witnesses,
thereby creating order out of chaos.
"Berck-Plage" opens with a strange seaside scene. In a fragmentary rough draft, Plath's first image is not of the sea, as it is in the finished version, but of the sun:
Silent and violent, the sun
Laid its bright poultices on the promenade.[9]
The recollection also includes pretty girls selling ice cream
cones, but as the draft continues, the images shift into the
realm of the bizarre: the girls are adjusting wigs over their
bald scalps, Their identical heads glistening in the cool,
little china eggs. Part of the nightmare-come-to-life that Ted
Hughes mentions is evidently Plath's association of these heads
with Giorgio de Chirico's The Disquieting Muses and her own
obsessive poem with the same title, which have been examined
closely by Judith Kroll.[1O] From the very beginning of her work
on "Berck-Plage," Plath envisioned grotesque, surrealist
transformations of what she had actually seen, as if she herself
were doing a Chiricoesque painting or a Fellini film.
The sun's poultice -- a poultice of silences, she calls it in the first draft -- is simply a covering laid or unrolled over the concrete promenade, but then Plath uses its medicinal qualities to assuage the pain of seeing once again the darning-egg heads: "How the sun's poultice draws on my inflammation."[11] The cause of this inflammation is not yet revealed. In her second try at opening the poem, she says that the sun, like a poultice, draws my poison into the light.
We may call this the poison of festering memory, which in turn poisonously distorts her vision of the scene. The sun's act or process of drawing forth such poison can in medicinal terms heal the infection. The poet's corresponding act is also to have healing power. A father (Otto Plath) once died of a gangrenous infection, leaving his daughter bereft of her belief in God: "I'll never speak to God again," the young Sylvia said to her mother.[12] Now, more than twenty years later, an old man (Percy Key) has died of a cancerous poison within him, and the spectacle of his dying recalls the scene at Berck-Plage the year before. These awful images, already fused in Plath's mind and thereby all the more poisonous, must be drawn out by the poultice of the poem's making, and be replaced by healthy tissue. That is Sylvia Plath's evident purpose and challenge in writing "Berck-Plage."
The bald-headed girls must be changed, played down. Plath shifts the emphasis to their function, the dispensing of sherbets:
Electrifyingly-colored sherbets, scooped from the freeze
By pale girls, travel the air in scorched hands. (1.3-4)
Soothingly cold sherbet -- it too is a poultice, against the
fiery heat. But there is a sinister note in the fifth line: "Why
is it so quiet? What are they hiding?" the speaker asks. Bald
scalps under their wigs -- by implication there may be other
deformities lurking about in this scene: amputees, perhaps, like
Otto Plath, the one-legged father, the eminent entomologist. The
speaker-as-daughter reassures herself, and as always, she puts on
her own disguise: "I have two legs, and I move smilingly" (1.6).
Plath's next step is to develop the silence of the scene. The manuscript shows considerable experimentation with the effect of sand that dampens her breathing and deadens vibrations like a piano damper, muting voices and the sounds of boats. The speaker expresses fear: I carry my twangling apprehensions, she says at one point, as if anticipating the disabled patients, their "shrunk voices/ Waving and crutchless, half their old size" (1.8-9) becoming part of the general deadening of the sense of hearing in the scene. Ironically, the sense of sight is at the same time being stung sharply by what is seen:
The lines of the eye, scalded by these bald surfaces,
Boomerang like anchored elastics, hurting the owner. (1.1O-11)
Such scalding baldness both literally and figuratively must be
filtered out, evidently because the underlying truths brought to
light by the sun's poultice are unbearable. One must put on a
face, a disguise, so as not to be "seen" as unbearable. One must
put on dark glasses, so as not to "see" the unbearable.
Given Sylvia Plath's known distaste for the hypocrisies and blindness of men of the church (one of whom is shocked by what is revealed in her poem, "Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest"), it is not surprising that she now brings into view a priest:
Is it any wonder he puts on dark glasses?
Is it any wonder he affects a black cassock? (1.12-13)
The poem is to end with a climactic funeral ceremony in which
"the priest is a vessel,/ A tarred fabric, sorry and dull" (7.5-6). Black
is the absence of color, the absence of living sunlight
in which one can have vision. [13] The death of the senses, in
particular the death of the visionary imagination, is what Sylvia
Plath feared most. For her, a rebirth, the making of a new life,
is a psychic necessity.
The priest, like the bald-headed girls and later the maimed veterans, represents a disturbing intrusion upon the natural landscape. As the first section of the poem ends, we see the priest moving among the mackerel gathers, "who wall up their backs against him" (1.15) as they go on "handling the black and green lozenges like parts of a body" (1.16). Plath's early draft describes the mackerel gatherers as simple, the way we would all like to be/ And dressed in a washed, good blue, signifying grace. She admits they would appear sinister, were it not for their faded blue work shirts, honest potato-colored faces? And their absolutely blank, skylike expressions. Unlike the surgeons who presumably have been amputating body parts of the mutilated veterans, the fishermen are simply sorting out the biggest. Yet the first section ends with the protesting sounds of the hitherto silent and inactive sea:
The sea that crystallized these,
Creeps away, many-snaked, with a long hiss of distress. (1.17-18)
The draft indicates that the sea's distress is over the loss of
the fish, to whom it had given birth out of its darkness.
Plath's worksheets often show her tendency to delete or alter
explicit references or reasons so that her images in final form
are more subtle and ambiguous.
As the first section ends, the tone is ominous. The first draft of the second section shows no separation as yet from the first. Who is this priest? Has he come to bless the salt flats, she wonders? It is full of shells, orange-pink and delicate, like lacquered fingernails, which she is collecting for her daughter. But then the edge of the priest's cassock is blown back, revealing a deformed, shortened leg in an orthopedic boot which precedes the longer leg like a compass point whose faulty ovals paste their deformities in the air like bitter mouths... such faulty ovals, engendered by a bad compass.
This priest in dark glasses who "affects a black cassock" might as well be the black-booted Nazi we see fantasized in "Daddy." The finished version of section 2 opens with Dr. Death, reading his missal at a funeral service:
This black boot has no mercy for anybody.
Why should it, it is the hearse of a dead foot,
The high, dead, toeless foot of this priest
Who plumbs the well of his book,
The bent print bulging before him like scenery. (2.1-5)
The printed words of the funeral service are voluptuous to the
priest. They are his pornography. He does not see "the real
stuff" nearby, the sickly and ugly spectacle of raw human sex:
Obscene bikinis hide in the dunes,
Breasts and hips a confectioner's sugar
Of little crystals, titillating the light,
While a green pool opens its eye,
Sick with what it has swallowed --
Limbs, images, shrieks. Behind the concrete bunkers
Two lovers unstick themselves. (2.6-12)
Beside the sea, the locus of beauty and the source of life, we
are made to watch here a deathscaped travesty of spirituality and
procreation that is reminiscent of Eliot's "The Waste Land." As
yet, there is nothing affirmative to be understood apart from the
poem's opening proposition: "How the sun's poultice draws on my
inflammation."
The second section ends with the speaker's exclamation over delicate shells ("white sea crockery") which, as one crossed-out line in the draft says, have been crunched by the priest's blind boot. The priest himself, an onlooker, warped & dark in the draft, is now seen as being drawn in his wind-trembling cassock "through a still virulence,/ And a weed, hairy as privates" (2.17-18). As we know from the last stanza of Plath's "In Plaster" and from Buddy Willard's exposure of his "turkey neck and gizzards" to Esther in The Bell Jar, hairy to Plath is ugly, and "hairy privates" are even uglier.[14] Near the end of "Berck-Plage," the blackness of the priest's cassock and the blackness of shoe polish are to be negative images in opposition to the colors of earth and the funeral flowers.
In the third section of the poem, the scene shifts from the beach to the balconies of the "hotel" and a glimpse of glittering "things." As the speaker in Plath's draft observes, these glittering things are not jewelry but steel wheelchairs and aluminum crutches -- the miracles of science, she calls them sarcastically. As her eyes shift away toward the sea's edge, her nostrils pick up its scent: Such salt-sweetness. Why should I walk Beyond the breakwater, spotty with barnacles? I am not a nurse, white and attendant, I am not a smile. (3.4-7) In this fusion of images, we see that an emotional barrier of stone separates the speaker both from the maimed and barnacled veterans and, in the lines next to come, from the children digging in the sand. She is attracted to them, but as she says, "my heart is too small to bandage their terrible faults" (3.9). These faults may be the children's emotional wounds, prefiguring the physically wounded side of a man that is shockingly revealed in the following lines: "his red ribs,/ The nerves bursting like trees" (3.10-11). The draft contains far more description: empty sleeves and trouser legs, an emaciated man no more than the suit he wears,[15] poled on a crutch, another man wheeled by on his back, like a family scandal, and the children meanwhile, poking the waste sand, their terrible fault now clearly understood as the fate they share with the speaker-as-child and the man on the gurney cart: abandonment to the impersonal, mirrory eye of the surgeon. His mirror, she says, is but "a facet of knowledge" (4.13), capable of mending broken bodies, but by implication incapable of mending broken souls.
That capability or power is not to be found in surgery, nor, as Plath has shown, in religion: the priest we have just seen drawn through a virulence. The capability might be found in art: the poultice of the poem is at work, but its efficacy is still under question. Now instead, the image of the man on the gurney fuses with the image of an old man lying on a striped mattress --old Percy Key next door, whose dying and funeral are to be the main focus of the poem:
An old man is vanishing.
There is no help in his weeping wife.
Where are the eye-stones, yellow and valuable,
And the tongue, sapphire of ash (3.15-18)
The spareness of the finished version of the third section is the
result of five manuscript pages of experimentation with various
image combinations and details that were finally omitted. "The
stones of his eyes," in the line above, for example, are turned
up and melt from us like water in the draft. The stones are
yellow and valuable-looking because of the light reflected from
an electric fire, which also cauterizes the blunt stumps of the
furniture. In the early evening of June 25, when Plath actually
saw the old man dying (he died at midnight), she carefully
observed such details, recording some but not all (as we see in
the draft of the poem) in her notebook entry for July 2:
The living room was full, still, hot with some awful
translation taking place. Percy lay back on a heap of
white pillows in his striped pajamas, his face already
passed from humanity, the nose a spiraling, fleshless
beak in thin air, the chin fallen in a point from it,
like an opposite pole, and the mouth like an inverted
black heart stamped into the yellow flesh between,
a great raucous breath coming and going there with
great effort like an awful bird, caught, but about to
depart. His eyes showed through partly open lids like
dissolved soaps or a clotted pus. I was very sick at
this.... The end, even of so marginal man, a horror.[16]
Together with the eye-stones, the beak-like nose preoccupied
Plath as she was composing the first view of the old man in the
poem. The cognitively dissonant catechresis, "And the tongue,
sapphire of ash" (3.18), added later, underscores the shockingly
ironic nature of this transformation from jewel-valuable life to
ash-reduced death -- ashes to ashes.
After the long and difficult job of making her transition
from the beach scene to the death scene, Sylvia Plath wrote the
fourth section of the poem very readily, much as we see it in the
published version. Percy Key, now dead, has been transfigured
into a sort of religious icon that appears grotesquely comic:
A wedding-cake face in a paper frill.
How superior he is now.
It is like possessing a saint. (4.1-3)
The wing-capped nurses, no longer so beautiful since their
"blooming days" of caring for Percy are done, "are browning like
touched gardenias" (4.5). With the death scene ended, there
remain only "things, things," as on the balconies of the hotel:
the bed, rolled from the wall, the bird-beaked effigy, now
stiffening, encased in a glued white sheet. In death, says the
speaker, "This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible"
(4.7). Most poignant of all in the description are the hands, now
folded, "that were shaking: goodbye, goodbye" (4.12).
The next stage in the aftermath is the application of a ritual poultice, to draw out the grief and return life to the living. As in Emily Dickinson's "The Bustle in a House," grief after death is more quickly put behind by housecleaning:
Now the washed sheets fly in the sun,
The pillow cases are sweetening. (4.13-14)
The speaker, having already pronounced the completeness of death
to be horrible, now mouths unconvincingly a typical death-room
platitude at the sight of the coffin and "the curious bearers:
"It is a blessing, it is a blessing" (4.17).[17]
Some draft pages of "Berck-Plage," including the first part
of the next (fifth) section of the poem, are written on the backs
of pages from Ted Hughes' play, "The Waking," which is probably
not coincidental. Indeed, Susan R. Van Dyne of Smith College has
been compiling extensive evidence of Plath's deliberate use of
certain pages in manuscript by herself or by Hughes for writing
the drafts of poems in some way related thematically and/or
emotionally to what is on the other side or to what is written
above or below the space she uses.[18] In the case of "Berck-Plage,"
Plath's first draft begins on the back of a page from
"The Waking" and below four fragmentary lines from "Child"
(which is thus a poem begun earlier in 1962 but not finished
until January 28, 1963), an important fact considering what
"child" material Plath wrote in (and later deleted) before the
funeral scene in "Berck-Plage." The fifth section of the poem is
the transition scene, moving from the parlor of the stone house
where, as the earliest draft says, the dead man awaits his
tribute, to the cemetery scene where he is to be buried. Plath's
first full draft of section 5 is written on another sheet of
paper that is even more remarkable than "The Waking" for what we
find on the other side: the last two stanzas from "Two Sisters of
Persephone" (1956):
Freely become the sun's bride, the latter
Grows quick with seed.
Grass-couched in her labor's pride,
She bears a king. Turned bitter
And sallow as any lemon,
The other, wry virgin to the last,
Goes graveward with flesh laid waste,
Worm-husbanded, yet no woman.[19]
Appropriately enough, section 5, which opens with a distance
shot of green Devon hills under a lowering sky, moves in on the
concealed hollows of a wife's thoughts on losing her husband:
practical details about trunks -- "Blunt, practical boats/ Full
of dresses and hats and china and married daughters" (5.4-5).
Things: a curtain flickering from the open window the speaker
calls "the tongue of the dead man: remember, remember" (5.9).
Amid the "Pallors of hands and neighborly faces" (5.13), the
memory begins to fade. Color is draining, even from the flying
iris in the room, "flying off into nothing" (5.15). As the images
dissolve, we hear the plaintive cry of all who are dying:
"remember us."
At this point, the scene abruptly shifts to the graveyard, and the speaker in the poem observes:
The empty branches of memory look over stones
Marble facades with blue veins, and jelly-glassfuls of daffodils. (5.16-17)
No one is there but the stones, the spirits of the dead within
them, their "flesh" reduced to blue-veined marble. The stones are
flanked, not by reverently placed vases, but by cheap jelly
glasses containing what the draft of the poem refers to as
yesterday's malingering daffodils. Memory is indeed fading,
but as the fifth section of the poem concludes, the speaker
affirms the value of the site as a way station on the road to
eternity: "It is so beautiful up here: it is a stopping place"
(5.18). As in her poem with that title, "Getting There" for Plath
is an arduous journey with an unknown destination.
In the first handwritten drafts and typescript, Sylvia Plath interrupts the description of the graveyard and funeral in order to reflect upon the opposite end of the life cycle. The speaker hears a sound, and as usual in this long procession of sensory observations, she must make sense of it, put it in place within her structure of meaning:
This dovey moaning is not an old man, it is a baby.
A baby delivered in the same January
As the old man's tears for himself:
One eye weeping and weeping
Through the blue of the boxing, the blue of the news.
A wintry body felt itself thinning.
O hungry substance, greedy for color!
The tulips had a part of him that spring,
The green came in late, wiping its lips.
The pallors so much emphasized in the fifth section are now seen
as the result of the voracious renewing phase of the death-to-life cycle.
As Kroll puts it, this is "an ironic version of the
idea of spring-as-rebirth (seen instead as death masquerading as
renewal)."[20] Treacherous for the aged, then, is the boxing time,
the festival week of midwinter celebration in anticipation of
spring. Treacherous too are the tulips, for a pallid hospital
patient: "The vivid tulips eat my oxygen," says the speaker in
"Tulips."[21] The green of spring has sucked the life from Percy
Key, and now, before we see him buried, we see in retrospect his
waning life transferred to the waxing life of an infant,
unmistakably that of Nicholas Hughes, the poet's second child:
And this is the baby --
This collocation of delicate vowels,
This singular distillation in which I admire myself.
I too have given him valuables.
And am rewarded with smiles,
Two wise eyes in a worm's body,
Smells of sweet oil and cotton.
The speaker dwells upon the ironies of reversal and trans-
formation: the coos of the mourning dove become the coos of the
baby; Spring the life-destroyer just above now becomes Spring the
life-creator, with the speaker herself as its agent, as a mother
re-creating herself. She admires the product as if looking into a
mirror: the gift of "valuables" is repaid with the baby's smiling
face and wise eyes, which, as Plath's draft says, assess the
value of the giver. That she admires herself through her
offspring says a great deal about the value of creativity as a
counter-force to death, and about Plath's own artistic counter-balancing
in this poem, even if she later changes her intent and
deletes the baby section.
The last two lines of this sixth section in the draft contain a sharply focused and ironic contrast between the old man and the baby:
Old man, what a dirty bunting!
My baby's cries are round and blue. They fly off like pigeons.
Baby bunting is white and fresh; "bunting" for a withered corpse
is dirty: bury it -- so the argument runs -- and behold instead
the swelling of a new life, taking independent flight from its
creator. This is the most positive line in the whole poem as
originally conceived by Plath, but it is a personal reassurance
for Plath herself, not really an integral part of the
death/burial narrative. As a life-creator, Plath can make her
speaker mock the old man and boast of her creation, thereby
working the medicine of the sun's poultice in the opening of the
poem: it has drawn off her inflammation, and she is restored to
health, ready to attend the funeral with a lighter heart.
If one sees the sixth draft section as a digression for the purpose of psychic and emotional self-medication, then it is easy to see why Plath then discarded it. Having been healed by what she thought and wrote, she could then regain her poet's aesthetic distance and restore the poem's unity of focus upon Percy Key's death and burial.
The sixth section in the final version of the poem, then, "pans" from the graveyard above to the narrow lane below, along which the funeral procession will move:
The natural fatness of these lime leaves!--
Pollarded green balls, the trees march to church.
The voice of the priest, in thin air,
Meets the corpse at the gate,
Addressing it, while the hills roll the notes of the dead bell;
A glitter of wheat and crude earth. (6.1-6)
The scene is striking for its blending of human artifice and
transformation (sculptured lime trees, marching as the actual
procession will march) with the larger landscape that echoes the
death-knell while displaying its life-face, "A glitter of wheat
and crude earth." The earth is a central image here; it is
labeled as bloodily colored in the draft, but Plath wants to
say more and crosses that out to write the following:
What is the name of that color?--
Old blood of caked walls the sun heals,
Old blood of limb stumps, burnt hearts. (6.7-9)
That last line evokes the memory of Otto Plath, who, as we gather
from many of her poems, is in Sylvia Plath's mind and emotions
not as yet properly "buried." The idea of "Berck-Plage" as a
symbolic burial of the father, in association with images of
renewal out of the same red earth, is considered by Olwyn Hughes
to be the central significance of the poem.[22] Eventually, Sylvia
Plath focused her many images of red earth/blood/flower/womb in
her late poem, "Brasilia" as "Red earth, motherly blood."[23] So
it is in this poem: the open grave that waits for Percy Key is
the red womb of the Earthmother -- the final image of "Berck-Plage," for
which these lines in section 6 are a preparation.
Plath now re-establishes the healing power of the sun for
"Old blood of limb stumps, burnt hearts" (6.8) -- a metaphor of
our old but still untranslatable sense of Weltschmerz. That pain
is healed, in the end, by the sun, the giver of life. Four months
later, Plath's Ariel will fly "Into the red/ Eye, the cauldron of
morning."[24] There is a purity in redness, a release from the
pain of lies and "fatuities."
With the graveyard setting thus described and labeled, Plath is ready for the tableau of the widow and her three daughters, all in black, final and theatrical as the draft says, and "Necessary among the flowers" (6.11) as if they too were props on a stage. The widow "Enfolds her face like fine linen,/ Not to be spread again" (6.12-13) just as her dead husband's face has been shrouded. The departed facial expressions of once-living people now reappear in the low-flying clouds of "a sky, wormy with put-by smiles " (6.14). Thus far the speaker seems to mock the tableau of the mourners for its staginess, but in the following lines, Plath does some serious mythologizing:
And the bride flowers expend a freshness,
And the soul is a bride
In a still place, and the groom is red and forgetful, he is featureless. (6.16-18)
Birth, marriage, death -- in this description we recognize the
mythic fusion of the three as the female soul, released from the
male body, "remarries" the red, impersonal earth enroute to fresh
procreation of life. In the draft, Plath envisions an
intermediate step As the lone soul marries itself/ To the flesh
of a leaf. In this myth, then, the dead man is physically
enfolded in earth to become organic fertilizer for new life that
is already extant in the spiritual marriage of soul-bride and
red-earth groom. The groom is "red and forgetful, he is
featureless." In the chronology of the poem, the earth-groom now
awaits the "bridal party," the funeral procession that is
ascending the hill to "put by" the shrouded, soul-bereft body of
Percy Key.
The seventh and final section of the poem re-creates the actual event in which Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes participated. The speaker first positions herself in the procession:
Behind the glass of this car
The world purrs, shut-off and gentle.
And I am dark-suited and still, a member of the party,
Gliding up in low gear behind the cart. (7.1-4)
She is at the moment an insulated observer, in the draft version
Lugging my small grief up behind the cart -- a modest grief by
comparison to that of the widow, but a real one, as we know from
her journal. As usual, she is an ambivalent observer, as she was
at Berck-Plage, sensitive to the inconguities of the scene. The
deformed priest on the beach now reappears as a pale and
shabby imitation of a priest -- another functionary prop on the
stage. These rites are "fatuities" compared to the transforming
death/marriage/birth rite that ends the previous section of the
poem. "And the priest is a vessel," declares the speaker in the
final version, "A tarred fabric, sorry and dull" (7.6-7). There
cannot be a "true" burial rite with such a figure in charge. The
speaker will conduct her own rite, then, and she proceeds
immediately to do so, shifting attention from the priest to the
coffin and the flowers, and shifting the tone as well within a
half-line. The priest is
Following the coffin on its flowery cart like a beautiful woman,
A crest of breasts, eyelids and lips
Storming the hilltop. (7.7-9)
Now we realize the importance of the marriage rite previously
described. A dead human being lives again as the flowers and
leaves of plants, climbing toward the sky, the red eye of
morning.
The speaker's burial rite could be considered as a triumph of beauty over death, but now its efficacy is threatened. The speaker passes children in a schoolyard, who smell the shoe blacking of the mourners. Anointing with shoe polish is not consecration, she implies; blackened shoes too, like the priest, are "tarred fabric." One must see beyond the sorry and dull appearances of Devon villagers to discover Something Else on that hill.
Then from the barred yard, the children
smell the melt of shoe blacking,
Their faces turning, wordless and slow,
Their eyes opening
On a wonderful thing-- (7.10-14)
Literally speaking, the children see a funeral procession, but
Plath manages the narrative so that the images which follow
become the children's vision as well as the speaker's.
Appropriately, it is an aerial view, looking down on the
gravesite:
Six round black hats in the grass
and a lozenge of wood,
And a naked mouth, red and awkward. (7.15-16)
These are difficult lines to interpret. For instance, Judith
Kroll notes that death here is a mere physical extinction, only a
parody of completeness versus the transcendence in some of
Plath's last poems.[25] On the other hand, one could argue that
these lines contain an image that is emblematic amd enduring,
more than mere physical extinction. Sights and sounds are removed
from the everyday world and persist in the mind much as they do
on Keats's Grecian urn: the mourners' hats superimposed upon the
green grass, the coffin reduced in scale to a lozenge (one
recalls the fish-lozenges in section 1), and the naked mouth, red
and awkward -- an earth-mother's vagina about to take back her
offspring.
The image is not entirely static, however, because the red mouth is like a gaping wound (reminiscent of the red ribs of the wounded veteran in section 3) that the "surgeon" must try to repair. In the last two lines of the poem, the attempt apparently fails:
For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma.
There is no hope, it is given up. (7.17-18)
The poem would appear to end in despair (most readers take it
that way), but one must not forget the image of the coffin among
flowers now transformed into a beautiful woman. The "giving up"
in the final line becomes as much an exorcism of death as it is a
yielding unto death. The hole claims its human sacrifice. For
Percy Key, there is no hope of return to mortal life; he (and
perhaps Otto Plath as well) is given up so that the life cycle
can renew itself. The next stage of the grieving process is to
let him go, so that the speaker and the mourners in the black
hats can go back down the hill to the living world.
The speaker, who is here transparently Sylvia Plath herself, has risen above the world's tumult and has seen renewal after death, even a triumph of rebirth, as we know from these images recently discussed and from the omitted section about the infant Nicholas. Her hope has not dissolved into futility, as Holbrook contends, [26] but rather she has through the act of composing "Berck-Plage" transformed her grief over Percy Key's death, her revulsion concerning human "deformity," and her latest ordeal of existential despair into a life-renewing vision. One might say that this vision in philosophical terms is rather superficial and lacking in life-sustaining force -- a mythic vision of renewal, after all, does not help much when one is dead -- but the essential point about Plath in writing "Berck-Plage" is the power of her images to re-fashion her sense of self by ridding her mind of self-destructive garbage. It is the act of image-making -- horrific as well as beatific images -- that liberates the troubled mind of the modern artist and enables her or him to go on living. Since Sylvia Plath could not and would not bear the loss of creative imagination because of psychic paralysis, she was compelled to imagine the worst (deformity, disease, death) as eclipsed by the best (newborn children, woman-flowers, sky-plasma). The act of juxtaposing the two was her reality, her method of making order out of chaos.
The opposition life/death, kinesis/stasis lies at the heart of Plath's work, and most her poems, especially the last ones, make it quite clear that, given a choice, she always preferred the passionate intensity of human life with all its imperfections to the final impersonality and ugliness of death (p.34).