{"id":63,"date":"2023-05-03T08:16:37","date_gmt":"2023-05-03T12:16:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/?p=63"},"modified":"2023-09-05T10:03:15","modified_gmt":"2023-09-05T14:03:15","slug":"geraniums","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/geraniums\/","title":{"rendered":"Geraniums"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Influence of Lyman on Plath\u2019s Poetry and Mental Health<\/strong><\/h1>\n

By Marge Poma Alarcon (’23)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Content Warning: this post contains gruesome language and <\/em>references to <\/em>death.<\/em><\/p>\n

In an interview a year before her death, Sylvia Plath notes that her poetry has been heavily influenced by nature, which she described as an \u201cabsolute gift\u201d to a young poet seeking to understand themselves and their world (Plath 1966: 171).\u00a0I share Plath’s enthusiasm. My experience at Smith College has been heavily influenced by my interactions with the diverse plant collections at Lyman Conservatory. Plath, an American poet, novelist, and Smith alum, would’ve reaped the benefits of these same green spaces, as is evident in her journals, letters, and poetry. From her academic experience with botany in her first year at Smith, including through lab experiments with geraniums, Plath developed interspecies relationships that positively impacted her poetry and mental health.<\/p>\n

In her first year at Smith, Plath completed a year-long course called Botany 11: General Botany. She worked directly with the geranium species known as the “silverleaf geranium” Pelargonium sidoides<\/em> in the early weeks of Fall semester, conducting experiments focused on photosynthesis where she used bell jars that would later became the inspiration for her famous novel (Hoag n.d.). While her studies were primarily focused on English literature, she excelled in retaining and practicing botanical knowledge inside and outside the classroom, contributing to her exceptional skill of observation that is crucial for any good writer. In one journal entry from 1951, she seemed to be developing skills of description across botanical and human contexts. Recounting her botany professor observing a moss under a microscope, Plath comically blurs the lines between botanical description of the moss and human anatomical description of the professor (Plath 2000: 62):<\/p>\n

[T]he slow tedium of rusty scalpels scraping clumsily on moss and blindly twirling lenses and knitting in between the languid sight of protococcus, and the dry factual volley of information from the loose fleshy mouth of the instructor. When he bends over the microscope before you, you trace the purple clusters of capillaries under the coarse porousness of his skin, striped with short bristly hairs and rutted where loose creases swing flabbily from his neck and jowls. “Here at the end of the pointer is a protonema with buds on it.” Here at the end of the pointer is a sick and squirming human intestine.<\/p>\n

This entry serves as a starting point for her future works in which similar language and powerful descriptions of natural subjects are employed, making her distinct from other poets at the time as someone who was “born to write.”<\/p>\n

After her Smith career, Plath periodically returned to think with geraniums in her poetry. Though using the more general term “geraniums,” it seems clear she is calling upon her knowledge of Pelargonium sidoides<\/em> in her 1960 poem, \u201cLeaving Early\u201d (Plath 2018: 145):<\/p>\n

Are those petals or leaves you’ve paired with them \u2014
\nThose green-striped ovals of silver tissue?
\nThe red geraniums I know.<\/p>\n

Plath takes advantage of what she knows of the plant’s morphology, describing the variegated leaves of the silverleaf geranium, with its \u201cgreen-striped ovals of silver tissue.” She continues to use the natural, blood-red colorations of the geranium flowers for comparison with a beating or stopped heart in \u201cPoem for a Birthday\u201d (1959) and \u201cMystic\u201d (1963). While Plath was not necessarily considered a naturalist poet (Kerridge 2019),<\/a> she uses the skills of one combined with her love of writing to produce work that considers the struggle between life and death, which will prove to have a positive impact on her mental health.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Pelargonium sidoides at Lyman Conservatory, 2023. Photo by Colin Hoag.<\/p><\/div>\n

Mental health was a taboo topic during Plath\u2019s time and unfortunately suffered immensely for it, but her interaction with nature eased the pain she felt from living in a patriarchal society, and her poetry led a charge to de-stigmatize discussions of mental health. Evident in letters she writes to her mother, “co-becoming” (Haraway 2008; see also Tsing 2011) with nearby floral organisms cultivate positive interactions with herself and with others. In one letter from October 1950, as she dreaded her fate of staying inside the greenhouse for her botany lab, she finds out that they were taking a field trip around campus: “Even though I find it tough going to learn technical names, I’ve got a curiosity about plant life which should help me over the rough spots.” She finishes this thought by saying that \u201clife seems very rich on a day like this\u2014especially because [she\u2019s] rested & healthy\u201d (Plath 2017: 198).<\/p>\n

In contrast to common beliefs about Plath’s preoccupation with death and darkness, I contend that Plath celebrates life as she creates interspecies relationships with her natural surroundings. Plath had profound and important experiences at Lyman and they carry on for students such as myself. Rather than thinking of Plath as this luminary of a distant past, the transformative encounters that propelled her work and her sense of self are happening all around us\u2014and for her, it started with a geranium like this one.<\/p>\n

\n

Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2008. When Species Meet<\/em>. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.<\/p>\n

Hoag, Colin. N.d. \u201cThe Bell Jars: Smith College, Pelargonium sidoides<\/em>, and Sylvia Plath\u2019s Botanical Imagination.\u201d Environmental Humanities<\/em> in press.<\/p>\n

Kerridge, Richard. 2019. \u201cPlath and Nature.\u201d In Sylvia Plath in Context<\/em>, edited by Tracy Brain, 221\u201332. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<\/p>\n

Plath, Sylvia. 1966. \u201cSylvia Plath.\u201d In: The Poet Speaks: Interviews with Contemporary Poets Conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press and Ian Scott-Kilvert<\/em>. Orr, Peter, ed. Pp. 167-172. London: Routledge.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014. 2000. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath<\/em>. Edited by Karen V. Kukil. New York: Anchor.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014. 2017. The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1: 1940-1956<\/em>. Edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil. New York: Harper.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014. 2018. The Collected Poems<\/em>. Reprint edition. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics.<\/p>\n

Tsing, Anna. 2011. \u201cUnruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species.\u201d Environmental Humanities<\/em> 1: 141\u201354.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Influence of Lyman on Plath\u2019s Poetry and Mental Health By Marge Poma Alarcon (’23) Content Warning: this post contains gruesome language and references to death. In an interview a year before her death, Sylvia Plath notes that her poetry has been heavily influenced by nature, which she described as an \u201cabsolute gift\u201d to a young […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1188,"featured_media":31,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1188"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":319,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions\/319"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/the-plath-conservatory\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}