As the COVID positive cases go on rising unabated it seems that we are witnessing a danse macabre. The danse macabre was a term inspired by innumerable deaths in late-medieval Europe - a period spanning the years from1250-1399. It was a time when millions died of the Great Famine (1315-1317) and the bubonic plague ('Black Death') which peaked in 1347-1351.
Danse macabre, was a surreal dance where Death was personified as mingling with living people and ushering them to their death. It was an allegory which drove home the point that no one - no matter his/her station in life - could escape death. Visual depictions gained currency in the early fifteenth century.
The theme continues to fascinate artists across time, however, few twentieth century poets have used the term to frame the current pandemic.
Reading Sylvia Plath's poem 'Danse Macabre' (1960) one gets to see the creative depiction of death up close. Like the medieval proponents of the concept she visualizes a scene where:
Arranged in sheets of ice, the fond
skeleton still craves to have
fever from the world behind.
In other words, the skeleton longs for life - even if it is a life struck by fever. Later she writes:
Eloping from their slabs, abstract
couples court by milk of moon:
sheer silver blurs their phantom act.
So much is their desire to live, that they continue to copulate even though they are lifeless. Once they are sated:
With kiss of cinders, ghosts descend
compelled to deadlock underground.
If I were to overstate the case, Sylvia's life itself was a dance macabre. In many ways it was a living hell for her - and she wanted to end it all too soon. In 'Amnesiac' (Ariel, 1965) she abhors domesticity desperately pleading:
O sister, mother, wife,
Sweet Lethe is my life.
I am never, never, never coming home!
The role model of the American family woman of the 1950s was not for her. Plath (1932-1963) forged her own path writing about her pain as she drained herself emotionally and physically.
Her relationship with Ted Hughes, her husband, was a far cry from the love extolled between man and wife in Anne Bradstreet's Puritan poem 'To My Dear and Loving Husband' (1678). When Plath wrote of death she spoke of it as a lover, as it were, not in the detached way like Emily Dickinson's 'Because I Could Not Stop For Death' (1862).
Her only novel The Bell Jar (1963) written the year she took her life, takes us through the happy heyday of Esther Greenwood, a 19-year-old girl, going through depression and being subjected to electro-convulsive therapy (ECT) in hospitals. Listening to the audiobook of Bell Jar (click) rendered by American actress Maggie Gyllenhaal is as though Plath is sitting beside you in the living room and talking to you . . . her still sad drawl reaching across the decades. The ghastly image of the cadaver in the opening lines makes you shiver as you would through the pages of Poe.
In 'Lady Lazarus' published in Ariel in 1965, two years after her death, Plath jokes about the times she tried to end her life:
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is number three.
The preoccupation is echoed in 'Daddy' (1962) grieving for an absent father, hoping that they could be united in death.
I was ten when they buried you
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
Plath's conception of death was sophisticated. In 'Death and Co.' (1962) she imagines death as a schizophrenic - a split personality - come to claim its next victim. One has the face of Blake's death mask, with its closed eyelids; the other wears his hair long. Frozen at their unexpected visit she writes:
I do not stir.
The frost makes a flower,
The dew makes a star,
The dead bell,
The dead bell.
Somebody's done for.
This 'pure acetylene / Virgin / Attended by roses' who wrote 'Fever 103' (1962) continues to be a mirror for our times. Paranoid of being trapped in 'Isadora's scarves' - which choked Isadora to death - she let out the howl most of us feel but are helpless to voice.
Pic courtesy drlindseyfitzharris(dot)com. In the pic. Death leads a beautiful woman to a freshly dug grave. Inspired by a discussion on Sylvia Plath with Sara Christina Barneto and Nerissa Rosanne Zuzarte on 7 May 2021 in Goa. Updated 12 May 2021.
Comments