Playing A Dazzler

I can think of only one sensible way to read the poems of Sylvia Plath: very slowly, and then repeat. It's the only way to do her gifts justice. Even those poems that TH tells us were completed as exercises (as opposed to being the products of some kind of inspiration in the usual sense) are invariably dazzling in parts, and often in their entireties. Earlier today I read the seven sections of Poem For A Birthday written in November 1959 and was surprised to find out it began as a pastiche of the work of Theodore Roethke, with Plath using the imitation as a way out (in TH's words; I assume he's referring to some kind of block SP was experiencing.) The poem itself seems so full of direction with an unnerving quality typical of this period - a quality even more apparent in the poems from 1960. Yet it turns out the writer was unsure even of the quality of Mushrooms, the final poem from 1959 and a stone-cold classic if ever there was one, as the editors of numerous anthologies of modern poetry will readily testify.
 
I'm now reading the poems written early in 1961, at a point when SP has clearly found her Muse, and the darkness beckons, though the fact that the year begins with You're, possibly one the loveliest, happiest poems ever written, indicates the range of which she is capable even as despair mounts. Indeed, it occurs to me that one of the reasons I've been moving through the poems so slowly is an unconscious reluctance to deal with the final reality of that despair. This is all so sad, finally. But what a gift!