Sylvia Plath | Typed letter signed, to Ted Hughes, on her love of drawing, 7-8 October 1956

Sylvia Plath

Typed letter signed, to Ted Hughes

on her drawing ("...it gives me such a sense of peace to draw; more than prayer, walks, anything. I can close myself completely in the line, lose myself in it..."), describing an afternoon spent sketching cows in Grantchester Meadows just outside Cambridge, also describing the beginning of the new term in Cambridge and her sense of estrangement from her peers ("...There are very dear girls here; sweet, pretty, serious; but I feel like some eon-old matriarch who has been through ice age and 40-day flood; they chirp like new-hatched sparrows..."), also touching on her nightmares, with a postscript full of excitement at the news in Hughes's latest letter that his Yeats programme has been accepted by the BBC ("...fought and conquered a huge urge to rudely interrupt Miss Abbott & sweet numberless Co.'s discussion about gowns and bicycle numbers, leap up in the center of the table and shout: MY HUSBAND IS GOING TO READ OVER THE BBC!..."), scattered autograph corrections and with two autograph post-scripts (9 lines), 6 pages, 8vo (177 x 140mm), blue writing paper, [Whitstead, Newnham College, Cambridge], 7-8 October 1956

"...It is as if, by concentrating on the 'inscape', as Hopkins says, of leaf and plant and animal, I can know the world a new and special way; and make up my own versions of it..."

SYLVIA PLATH ON THE IMPORTANCE OF VISUAL ART. She found solace in drawing but also complains that "my whole sense of being is blasted by your absence". She is having nightmares ("...this gruesome series of Ethiopian tribal ceremonies all centering about totems, purifying rituals, and most terrible...") and has come to dread the night. Nevertheless, her vivid description of her Saturday afternoon sketching cows by the banks of the Granta provides a charming vignette of her Cambridge life:

"...So I forged ahead, sat down on the river brink, and did a quick sketch of one grazing, or, rather, of several put into one, as they all moved continually, so the side muscles are all wrong, but most decorative; I got a kind of peace from the cows; what curious broody looks they gave me; what marvellous colossal shits and pissings. I shall go back soon; I shall do a volume of cow-drawings..."  

She also writes of her workload for the coming term, and with biting sarcasm of the latest developments in the university poetry scene. The news that Hughes's pitch to the BBC of a reading of Yeats's poems would indeed, as Sylvia predicted, raise his profile in important ways. As always, she has useful advice, reminding him to "Ask shyly about your own poems" when he comes to read. Her letter concludes with comments on a collection of essays, Modern Abnormal Psychology, with its treatment of "manic-depressive geniuses".

LITERATURE:

The Letters of Sylvia Plath: Volume One, pp.1283-88