Sylvia Plath and the Glow-Worm Song

Sylvia Plath's mother loved to tell the story about how her daughter co-opted some of her own experiences in the lines in the fourth stanza of the poem "The Disquieting Muses" which read,

In December last year, a random thought popped in my own dismal head and that song mentioned, "the glowworm song". The reason this song and this stanza came to the forefront of my mind was the lovable scene in Love, Actually, where the children are on stage for their Christmas nativity play--the one with multiple lobsters that were present at the birth of J. C. They are singing and in costumes and what not..., so it is natural that I thought of Plath.

Anyway, Wikipedia to the rescue with this article on The Glow-Worm (aka "Das Glühwürmchen").

"The Glow-Worm Song" appears in the Paul Lincke operetta Lysistrata (1902).The article includes some translated-into-English lyrics and some historical information such as the fact the lyricist Johnny Mercer later revised the original for a song that became a popular hit in 1952 and was performed by the Mills Brothers. The page on "The Glow-Worm Song" concludes with a helpful list of other performances and renditions for further study.

So that is a brief post on the possible origins of the reference to the "glowworm song" in "The Disquieting Muses" on the sixty-first anniversary of Plath's death.

In 2017 I visited the glow-worm caves in Waitomo, New Zealand. My photographs stink, but here is a National Geographic video to amuse you. As well, a video of a dance to it.

All links accessed 5 December 2023 and 3 and 10 February 2024.

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