“Black lake, black boat, two black, paper-cut people.”
Who else does entrances like Ms. Plath? I would like to see. I haven’t read so many poets yet of her generation who were as playful with language and theme, or as sardonic. If you have seen my current header picture on twitter, then you might recognise this line I quoted. It is the first line from the titular poem of the Sylvia Plath collection, “Crossing the Water”.
Sylvia Plath has been dead six decades, still her art remains significant. If you follow me on Twitter, I suppose you know I post her work and quote her quite frequently. I adore her writing so much, the excellent range of her metaphors — wild sometimes, sometimes proper. So much that when recently I decided to begin sharing my experience reading poems and my thoughts about poetry, the first piece that felt right to start with was a piece by Ms. Plath herself.
“Pheasant is the second poem of the “Crossing the Water” collection. As you would expect from the title, it really is about a bird. This bird, a pheasant, is seen to frequent an elm tree close to the house that the poem’s persona lives in. Here, the speaker addresses an appeal to a second person in defence of the bird’s life.
The first time I encountered this poem, I skipped it. I couldn’t see what the point was. I had just discovered Sylvia Plath from a poem by Logan February, “Boy Lolita”, and I had been drawn to her more charged and confessional poems like: “Daddy” — (“You do not do, you do not do / Any more, black shoe”); and “Lady Lazarus” — (“Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air”). These poems appealed to me because of the sentimental “dead poet” aesthetic I ascribed to her poetry, young and troubled as I was, and the way they brimmed with emotion.
In this first stanza, the speaker of the poem is beseeching someone: “You said you would kill it this morning. / Do not kill it.” These lines infer that a decision had been made preceding this monologue to kill the bird.
There are two things really interesting about this poem. First, there is that reflective, domestic mood it has — domestic being a keyword. The pronoun “you” that the speaker of the poem uses immediately in the first line to address the person they are speaking to, pulled me in instantly, into the state of the second person, into a private discussion this intimate. The speaker was asking me not to take the life of the pheasant, since I had said that I would “kill it this morning”.
It is most interesting to me, however, how the poem navigates from an initially pensive tone to one very decided and evocative, as we’ll see in the end. From the second stanza to the last, the speaker defends their case to the addressee. They begin to express feelings other than shock from “The jut of its odd, dark head, pacing” that the pheasant strikes in them. Feelings like respect. “It is simply in its element. / That gives it a kingliness, a right.”
From the fourth stanza’s second line, the poem colours a vivid montage centreing the figure of this pheasant. First, it paints the image of “The print of its big foot last winter, / the tail-track, on the snow in our court — ”
Next, a feeling. In the first line of the fifth stanza, the speaker emotes the same time as they colour an image: “The wonder of it, in that pallor.” Wonder and pallor. And then, we realise after, in the last line of this fourth stanza that besides being kingly, the speaker also considers this bird a rarity. “It is rare.” Sylvia Plath ends the line.
As the poem progresses, the speaker’s appreciation of the bird intensifies. The language grows more expressive. In the sixth stanza, they associate the sight of this pheasant with beauty. That even though it was rare, if it were a dozen that they had on the elm tree, “A hundred, on that hill — green and red, / Crossing and recrossing” it would be “a fine thing!”
There are even more images in the seventh stanza. The bird is likened to a cornucopia, that symbol of abundance. Then the motion of its flying is illustrated with the image of a leaf, “It unclaps, brown as a leaf, and loud, // Settles in the elm, and is easy./ It was sunning in the narcissi.” With this, Plath establishes that nature really is just the pheasant’s habitat and they were the ones encroaching. “I trespass stupidly,” the speaker says. “Let be, let be.”
This lesson on tolerance is ageless. It is one of the ideas that really connected me to this poem. The bird is the bird, in its own habitat, living its life. And the speaker and addressee who they were, living their own lives. This poem embodies an important lesson on autonomy, something we should respect.
It really was a thrill to follow the pictures, to map the poem as it began as a pensive defence, taking up pace with feelings of respect and awe, as it acknowledged the truth of this bird’s existence — rarity, beauty, its right to life — and finally as it settled on tolerance. Perhaps erratic, all those images, but with a destination. Like a bird.
It is always a reward to sit with poems like this that do not instantly punch resonance with you. I should admit, though, this one is quite straightforward. I was only too inexperienced a reader to have appreciated it properly the first time. Reading, especially reading poetry, demands patience. It is a bore to read poems with a mystifying approach, to think that there must always be some inaccessible grand meaning; it closes the mind and limits understanding.
When I have tried patience — consciously reading with a present mind — and I still don’t understand a poem, I like to consider if it might just be that I lack context necessary to understand the poem. Sometimes it takes only a Google search to open up my understanding when there’s confusion about a word, or phrase, or line. It is delightful to see all the possibilities it opens when you discover what reasons a poet had for their word choices. Yet there are poems I have not been able to break down and understand sentence-level.
Even still, it is possible to enjoy such poems. By following the rhythm, the music. How it makes me feel. Sometimes poems just run on vibes, sometimes they’re simply a flex of dexterity with language. Poetry also is art after all — it is expression. Sometimes the purpose only is beauty.
There’s also the possibility that the poem is just not for me.
