Sylvia Plath's "Stone Boy With Dolphin"

Sylvia Plath's long short story "Stone Boy With Dolphin", written around 1957/58, is considered to be a novel-fragment. The Lilly Library, Mortimer Rare Book Room, and Emory University each hold manuscript versions of this story. Indiana also holds a short story called "The Bronze Boy" (mss. II, Box 7, f.8; Plath mss. II, in SP to ASP, Oct. 8, 1951) but I am unsure if this is a related story. The story, set in Cambridge, fictionalizes her meeting with Ted Hughes and draws heavily on real events. Additionally, Plath captured some scenes directly from her journals. The following is from her journal, dated 19 February, 1956,

"I went to the bronze boy whom I love, partly because no one really cares for him, and brushed a clot of snow from his delicate smiling face. He stoodthere in the moonlight, dark, with snow etching his limbs in white, in the semicircle

Below is the text from the story:

"Ever since the start of Lent term she had taken to brushing snow from the face of the winged, dolphin-carrying boy centered in the snow-filled college garden. In the vacant college garden, dark-needled pines made their sharp assaults of scent on her nostrils and the stone boy poised on one foot, wings of stone balancing like feathered fans on the wind, holding his waterless dolphin through the rude, clamorous weathers of an alien climate. Nightly after snows, with bare fingers, Dody scraped the caked snow from his stone-lidded eyes, and from his plump stone cherub foot. If not I, who then?"

The actual statue is a copy of Andrea del Verrocchio's Putto with Dolphin. It was given to Newnham College as a gift in 1930 by an ex-student, whom Karen Kukil identifies as a Miss Farmer in a note in the Journals of Sylvia Plath (Faber 2000). The "original" copy was stolen a few years ago, but has been replaced and placed in an enclosed herb garden, according to an email I recently received from Anne Thomson, Archivist at Newnham College.

Verrocchio's original Putto with Dolphin is held at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. There is yet another copy in the courtyard upon entrace, but the original is inside the building and can be seen only after paying the admission fee.

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