Skip to main content

Sylvia Plath's "Desert Song"

In the Sylvia Plath Collection at Mortimer Rare Book Room, there is a typescript of a poem entitled "Desert Song." Plath dated this poem April 21, 1955 and submitted it to her creative writing professor Alfred Young Fisher as part of the course requirement. "Desert Song" remains unpublished to this day, but the poem is about, well, it is a sex poem - or lack thereof in the metaphor of an arid desert in want of saturation. The course for which this poem was submitted was a special study course in creative writing which Plath most certainly earned based on her academic credentials, her success in publishing her creative writing in both local and national periodicals, and the promise of her future in the field of poetry and creative writing.

On the verso of this typescript, in Plath's hand and in pencil, she cryptically made note of a date (29 April), a page number (30) and a newspaper title (Union). It is evident from the typescript being dated 1955 that Plath was referring to 29th April of that year; and the Union must be the Springfield Union, one of the newspapers out of Springfield, Mass. Familiarity with her biography allows one to remember that around this time Plath was quite busy: winning awards as the school year ended, preparing to graduate summa cum laude, receiving a Fulbright to Cambridge, and competing in the Kathryn Irene Glascock Poetry Competition at Mt. Holyoke.

For her poetry class with Fisher, Plath produced a number of poems that are both dated and undated.

Dated poems Plath submitted in that spring semester of 1955 were:

"Harlequin Love Song" on 20 January;
"Danse Macabre" on 10 February;
"The Princess and the Goblins" on 3 March;
"Sonnet to a Shade" on 10 March;
"To a Jilted Lover" on 17 March;
"On the Futility of a Lexicon" on 24 March;
"Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea" 14 April; and
"Desert Song" 21 April

Undated poems (and by undated, what I mean is that we know these were written circa 1955, but what is not known is the specific date the poem was written) submitted were:

"Apology for an April Satyr"; "Black Pine Tree in Orange Light"; "Complaint"; "The Dream"; "Elegy" [submitted between 1952 and 1955]; "Epitaph in Three Parts"; "Ice Age" (I); "Insolent Storm Strikes at the Skull"; "Lament" (Variant title "Dirge"); "Million Dollar Month"; "Moonsong at Morning"; "New England Winter Without Snow"; "Notes on Zarathustra's Prologue"; "Notes to a Neophyte"; "On Looking Into the Eyes of a Demon Lover"; "Prologue to Spring"; "Rondeau"; "Second Winter"; "Song for a Revolutionary Love"; "Song for a Thaw"; "Song of Eve"; "Sonnet for a Green-Eyed Sailor"; "Sonnet to Satan"; "A Sorcerer Bids Farewell to Seem"; "Temper of Time"; "Terminal"; "Triolet Frivole"; "Wayfaring at the Whitney: A Study in Sculptural Dimensions"; "White Girl Between Yellow Curtains"; and "Winter Words."

Plath submitted the poems in batches, so only the top poem in each batch would be dated. But, what a prolific spring! It would be interesting to try to determine which poems belonged to which batch, but that might not be knowable.

Getting back to "Desert Song." We ask the question: did Plath get it back the following Thursday, on 28 April? It is unlikely for on "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea," which she submitted on the 14th, Fisher noted, "No meeting next week on Thursday 28 April." He would have given back the batch of poems with "Two Lovers" on the 21st: the day she submitted her next batch headed by "Desert Song."

In some ways this little annotation by Plath takes on a life of its own. It is not the only time Plath used whatever sheet of paper she had handy to jot down a note. How did Plath get the "Desert Song" and the other poems back? Did Fisher leave them in her mailbox? Did they meet somewhere? Does it even matter? And then there is that annotation in Plath's hand on the verso of "Desert Song"... Where was she on the 29th? At a coffee shop? In a common room on somewhere campus? Was she reviewing this poem? Others? Or did she write this at a later date?

Using the microfilm of this newspaper at the Boston Public Library, I found the article to which this annotation referenced: an article covering the results of of the Glascock poetry contest. The article title was "Senior at Smith, Wesleyan Junior Poetry Winners." The article includes this hardly flattering picture under the caption "Compete in Poets' Contest." (Another photograph from the same competition is much more kind.) It should be noted that not all editions of this issue of the Springfield Union-News ran this story. News of the results of the Glascock Poetry Competition reached other Massachusetts newspapers including The Christian Science Monitor and The Townsman (Wellesley).

Nothing in the article is new or anything, but it has never been listed in a Plath bibliography; it does not appear to be in her archives. What other clues exist in Plath's manuscripts that might uncover other articles we can conclude she read? And, for the record and for what it is worth, the majority of those poems created in 1955 for that poetry class remain unpublished. For those interested in reading them, copies of the poems are held by Smith College, and in addition some (or all) may also be held by the Lilly Library.

All links accessed and revised 10 April 2020.

Popular posts from this blog

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last