This poem is called "Cottage Street, 1953."
Back in that year, we were living
in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and my mother-in-law, Edna Ward,
was living in Wellesley.
She asked my wife and me over one
afternoon, to have tea with her and to meet a young Smith girl,
who aspired to being a poet and who had just
tried to take her life.
It was Sylvia Plath, of course.
Our assignment was to demonstrate that poets could
be poets and still be happy.
A very tough assignment.
"Cottage Street, 1953."
"Framed in her phoenix fire-screen,
Edna Ward bends to the tray of Canton,
pouring tea for frightened Mrs. Plath;
then, turning toward the pale, slumped daughter, and my wife,
and me.
Asks if we would prefer it weak or strong.
Will we have milk or lemon, she enquires?
The visit seems already strained and long.
Each in his turn, we tell her our desires.
It is my office to exemplify the published
poet in his happiness, thus cheering Sylvia,
who has wished to die; but half-ashamed,
and impotent to bless.
I am a stupid life-guard who has found, swept to his shallows
by the tide, a girl who, far from shore,
has been immensely drowned, and stares through water now
with eyes of pearl.
How large is her refusal; and how slight the genteel chat
whereby we recommend life, of a summer afternoon,
despite the brewing dusk which hints that it may end.
And Edna Ward shall die in fifteen years,
after her eight-and-eighty summers of such grace
and courage as permit no tears, the thin hand reaching out,
the last word love.
Outliving Sylvia who, condemned to live,
shall study for a decade, as she must,
to state at last her brilliant negative in poems free
and helpless and unjust. "
I mean that word, unjust, to be a sort of scorpion sting
in the tail, but I don't mean Sylvia Plath
to be the victim of it.
I hope I've shown enough sympathy for her in the poem,
and setting helpless next to unjust should, I think,
make for a balance.