Crossing the Water
Sylvia Plath
Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper-people.
Where do the black trees go that drink here?
Their shadows must cover Canada.A little light is filtering from the water flowers.
Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:
They are round and flat and full of dark advice.Cold worlds shake from the oar.
The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.
A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand.Stars open among the lilies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls.
In my quiet too-big-now house with no children here who once swarmed its corridors of light and cool late morning late spring air I find this poem by Sylvia Plath at the very end of a very thin book of poems. It is the last poem, the title poem of her book of “transitional poems” written when she was between different phases of her own life just as I am now transitioning to a new chapter of my life. The poem found connective regions with my brain too thanks to the many crossings of water I do come spring, summer, on into fall, loading up my little aluminum boat with it’s weathered black Mercury outboard that coughs and sputters to life when given a good yank and carries us across our small lake to our small cabin in the Adirondacks.
The poem, as with so many of Plath’s poems is somber and contains the hint of the tragedy to come, the stove gas left on one day alone in her London flat as she fell into her final sleep, but it also contains her vivid perceptive ability, her always-new, always-thrilling language. The first line is one of the best first lines I think I’ve ever read—just three nouns, the same adjective, “black,” though the people are not just black; they are “black, cut-paper-people,” a hyphenated thing, mere two dimensional wisps of black paper in a landscape of so many three dimensional, black things. The next line is playful, unexpected, introducing yet another black thing, the trees, but asking the first of two questions to come in the poem. “Where do the black trees go that drink here?” I can’t help but linger on that line. It stops me dead in my tracks. Trees don’t “go” anywhere; they are rooted in place at lake edge, like the black-green forests that come to all of the edges of my lake. Perhaps they “go” when we go, are only there “drinking” as the poet drinks everything in when she is present, like the cliche of the tree falling in the woods, no one there to hear it fall. And as I’m slowed and pulled deeply into the words of the poem by that line, the next is even more challenging, forcing my mind to move in still-newer directions—“Their shadows must cover Canada.” These black trees that can come and go to drink from the black lake possess a vastness, an enormity to them, their also-black shadows extending across an entire country even. In the poem’s first triplet we are thrust into a world of immensity, a natural order far vaster than us paper-cut-out-people whose own “blackness” is but a comparatively two-dimensional space.
“A little light is filtering from the flowers” in all this black shadowy space, though, and like the words of this poem itself, the light that filters from it, invite “us” to take our time, “not to hurry.” These small round, flat fissures of light are the words of the poem of the place she is visiting, inhabiting, and like her own small words in her poem (like all of Plath’s poetry) they are “full of dark advice.” Their beauty and slight light still speaks to us of something “dark,” though, and what is “dark advice”? Perhaps it is a way of thinking of what poetry, what art can bring to us, advice in a normative sense something to help us improve, to help make things easier, better—the dark advice of a poem a kind of inversion of this; yes, we improve, gain insight, see/sense/understand more deeply, but it may well not be practical or offer any overt improvement.
“Cold worlds shake from the oar.” Our first crossing of our lake in the Adirondacks is without a motor, the motor stored for the winter in the humble shed behind the cabin on the other side, and I often have trouble finding a rhythm and technique to keep the boat straight, back turned in the direction I want to go, trying to chart my path from what I’ve left behind, not what I’m slowly moving toward. This line pulled me back into that recent memory, and the cold, black, late-April lake water that fell from each oar with every stroke helps me find a response to that line. Plath’s lake is a cold world unto itself, one you pull your oars through. All of existence was a cold, foreign wondrous world to her. In her poems we find a perpetual sense of alienated wonder and awe at the collision of perceptions she faced every day, as if everything she encountered were new, charged, speaking to her in its own tongues. She felt that “spirit of blackness…in us” so strongly, that we are somehow an integral part of these cold, black worlds, that we too “drink from it” like the black trees, and this darkness, this “spirit” is “in the fishes” even who are swimming beneath her unseen. Then a “snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand.” The poem shifts to an even more complex, nearly inexplicable line here. What is “the snag”? As a fisherman, and with the fish mentioned in the previous line, I think of a fishing hook snagging on a stump or rock, but even if that is the primary event that brings her to this purely poetic expression, she ignores that, focusing instead on that word, “snag”—being caught on something, stopped, arrested—and the whole landscape she’s encountering in the poem becomes a kind of “snag,” for it has forced her into a poetic pause, a deep look at/into all the blackness surrounding her, within her. And this “snag” is somehow a “valedictory, pale hand” a formal, celebratory-even farewell, a pale wave goodbye, the poem itself a crafted, formal arrangement of language. The poem surely snags us. The “pale hand” here stands out, and I see perhaps her own hand, her rowing across (writing her poems) as the only “light” thing along with the flowers, but it is too small, a single “hand,” a pale wave goodbye, not “hands” and not a match for the black shadows of the trees which span an entire nation. Is the poem a kind of farewell to the intense interconnectedness of existence—(a foreshadowing of her suicide)?
The final stanza tries hard to escape, to cross these waters, to contend with the “sprit of blackness” in us all. We are given yet another grouping of words all at once familiar and strange: “Stars open among the lilies.” “Stars open” are two words I’ve never seen side by side. Stars “shine.” Lilies “open.” But waterlily flowers are star-like, circular, pointed. She’s pulling these two images together without simile or even overt metaphor. The lilies aren’t “like stars opening” nor are stars “like opening lilies.” Simply, “stars open among the lilies.” The human ability to make these kinds of associations and recast language in this way may be the very thing we are invited to consider here. Whatever it is, it brings her to a powerful question, but one she also must cast in new, wholly-poetic language, “Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?” A nod to Odysseus, the call of the sirens on that water crossing causing the men to be tied to the masts so as not to succumb and dive to their deaths. But she inverts/upends that image as well, these stars somehow opening among the lilies call to her visually, possibly blinding her even, though their gestures are somehow “expressionless.” Is it the human mind that inserts the meaning into them, that sees lilies as opening stars, or rather sees stars somehow becoming merged with lilies so much that they too “open”? Are the lilies, the stars, the trees, the lake, the oars, the fishes…all, themselves, “expressionless” on their own?
The final line seems to be a kind of summation of the entire poem, “This is the silence of astounded souls.” It picks up that blinding but somehow expressionless siren call (her own poem somehow a silence), that valedictory pale hand, that spirit of blackness…all of the poem—and gathers it in that one word—“this.” For me it’s a bit more hopeful, since that word “astounded” feels positive, as I am astounded every time I find myself mid-lake, rowing or motoring across the black surface of the water to my small, simple camp on the periphery of civilization, though for Plath it seems that this “silence” is also tinged with a different kind of “astounded,” one of longing and bewilderment that may, for her, go too deep. Plath seems overwhelmed by the rich complexity of existence that demands poetic language of her to be more fully seen and contended with. Her poetic vision and ability to craft language that always combines words in new, more forceful, often ineffable ways also seems a kind of curse for her, though I may well be overlaying my knowledge of her suicide at such a young age, still at the height of her artistic abilities, too strongly here. All I can say with certainty is that this poem, despite its innate sadness and deeply “confessional” nature reached out to me with summer just beginning and many days of “crossing the water” to come.
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Thanks, Tricia. I must have read this years ago (there was even marginalia), but it felt totally new to me too.
I love Plath but hadn’t read this poem. I love the way you interweave your reading of the poem with your rich observations of your own “crossings.”