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.

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'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...

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...

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