Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea
by Sylvia Plath
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Rhyme schemeABAB (slant rhyme)
Publication date1955 (1955)
Lines24

"Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea" is a poem written by Sylvia Plath that was first published in 1955, the year she graduated from Smith College summa cum laude.[1] An abstract poem about an absent lover, it uses clear, vivid language to describe seaside scenery, with "a grim insistence" on reality rather than romance and imagination.[2][3][4][5]

The poem was awarded a 1955 Glascock Prize[1] and appeared in Mademoiselle in August 1955, accompanying an article about the prize.[6]: 163 

Plath used "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea" as the title poem of a collection she submitted unsuccessfully to the Yale Series of Younger Poets,[2][6][7] and as a working title for the collection that was eventually published as The Colossus.[2] But Plath later came to be critical of the poem; in 1958 she mentioned it as an example of the "old crystal-brittle and sugar-faceted voice" that she wanted to move past.[8][9][10]

Text and analysis

The poem has six stanzas of four lines each, featuring slant rhyme.[2] The regularity of the four-line stanzas, according to Linda Wagner-Martin, serves to suggest "a grim insistence".[2] The poem's literary allusions include references to Herman Melville's Moby Dick, William Shakespeare's The Tempest, and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.[3] Jon Rosenblatt draws a connection to the modernist poet Wallace Stevens's work about imagination, as reflected in Plath's lines "The imagination / shuts down its fabled summer house",[3] while Philip Gardner says that the poem's title is also reminiscent of Stevens.[11]

Plath's professor Alfred Young Fisher drew a parallel between the poem and James Joyce's Ulysses. In a manuscript held in the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith College, his margin notes appear to compare the poem's last line "And that is that, is that, is that" with Joyce's repetition in the line "showed me her next year in drawers return next in her next her next".[12]

As "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber" was written during Plath's college years, it can be considered part of her juvenilia, but it is not characteristic of this period of her work.[2] Plath's husband Ted Hughes wrote that the poem was an example of Plath "anticipat[ing] herself" and "seems to belong quite a bit later".[13] The Plath scholar Linda Wagner-Martin mentions this poem as an example of why more attention should be given to Plath's "juvenilia", saying that "Plath was a serious writer throughout her college years, beginning in 1950" and "her poetry should be considered 'mature' long before 1956".[2]

The scholar Keith M. Sagar called it one of Plath's finest poems.[9]

Wagner-Martin writes that the poem is typical of Plath's pre-Cambridge period and is "more about the poetic imagination than the two lovers of the title".[2] Wagner-Martin praises the work's formal qualities but says that it is "wordy and convoluted",[2] has an "aura of starched neatness",[14] does not display any distinctive voice, and is typical of 1950s poems like those of Richard Eberhart, Louis Simpson, and Richard Wilbur. According to Wagner-Martin, "nothing about the poem ... reflects that its author is young, female, or American."[2] She contrasts these characteristics with Plath's later poems such as "Lady Lazarus".[14]

According to Jon Rosenblatt, the poem's reference to "fractured Venus" and its tension between "the desire to reclaim a lost, dead love and the simultaneous recognition that the dead cannot be recovered" hint at themes that are explored more fully in Plath's later poetry collection The Colossus.[3]

References

  1. ^ a b "Sylvia Plath". www.u-s-history.com.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Wagner-Martin, Linda (2003). "The Journey Toward Ariel". Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 83–94, 152–154. doi:10.1057/9780230505926_8. ISBN 978-0-230-50592-6. Retrieved December 30, 2022.
  3. ^ a b c d Rosenblatt, Jon (June 15, 2018). Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation. UNC Press Books. ISBN 978-1-4696-4814-9. Retrieved December 30, 2022.
  4. ^ Roudeau, Cecile (2004–2005). "Crossing the Voice, Crisscrossing the Text: Writing at the Intersection of Prose and Poetry in Sylvia Plath's "Sunday at the Mintons'"" (PDF). RSA. 15–16. Retrieved December 30, 2022.
  5. ^ "Sylvia Plath's Days of Hope". Newspapers.com. The Sydney Morning Herald. May 28, 1988. Retrieved December 30, 2022.
  6. ^ a b Alexander, Paul (March 17, 2009). Rough Magic: A Biography Of Sylvia Path. Hachette Books. ISBN 978-0-7867-3025-4. Retrieved December 30, 2022.
  7. ^ Pollak, Vivian R. (2005). "Moore, Plath, Hughes, and "The Literary Life"". American Literary History. 17 (1): 95–117. doi:10.1093/alh/aji004. ISSN 0896-7148. JSTOR 3567994. Retrieved December 30, 2022.
  8. ^ Hammer, Langdon (2001). "Plath's Lives". Representations. 75 (1): 61–88. doi:10.1525/rep.2001.75.1.61. ISSN 0734-6018. JSTOR 10.1525/rep.2001.75.1.61. Retrieved December 30, 2022.
  9. ^ a b Sagar, Keith M. (January 1, 2006). The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes. Liverpool University Press. p. 55. ISBN 978-1-84631-011-9. Retrieved December 30, 2022.
  10. ^ Plath, Sylvia (January 16, 2013). The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. p. 194. ISBN 978-0-307-83039-5. Retrieved December 30, 2022.
  11. ^ Gardner, Philip (1980). "'The Bland Granta': Sylvia Plath at Cambridge". The Dalhousie Review.
  12. ^ Golden, Amanda (May 4, 2020). Annotating Modernism: Marginalia and Pedagogy from Virginia Woolf to the Confessional Poets. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-18063-0. Retrieved December 30, 2022.
  13. ^ Plath, Sylvia (March 12, 2015). "Introduction". Collected Poems. Faber & Faber. ISBN 978-0-571-26417-9. Retrieved December 30, 2022.
  14. ^ a b Wagner-Martin, Linda (1999). "Plath's Triumphant Women Poems". Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life. Palgrave Macmillan UK. pp. 106–118. doi:10.1007/978-1-349-27527-4_10. ISBN 978-1-349-27527-4. Retrieved December 30, 2022.

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