Sylvia Plath's Wuthering Heights

The Age publishes an article on Sylvia Plath's poetry. Her Brontë connections are highlighted:

But Plath worked self-consciously in the tradition - Full Fathom Five, Ariel and Wuthering Heights directly evoke their forerunners in Shakespeare and Bronte. Her meshing and re-shaping of modes to establish her own voice and dark lyrics is part of her distinctiveness. And her predominant use of the first-person "I" contributes to the poems' immediacy and impact. (Colleen Keane)

The poem Wuthering Heights (1961) was included in Crossing the Water (New York: Harper & Row, 1971). Joyce Carol Oates in her article The Magnanimity of WH, says about the poem:

This bleak, somber, deathly wisdom is as memorably expressed by Sylvia Plath in her poem "Wuthering Heights," with its characteristic images of a dissolving landscape opening upon the void. Plath, like the fictitious Catherine, suffered a stubborn and irrevocable loss in childhood, and her recognition of the precise nature of this loss is expressed in a depersonalized vocabulary. How seductive, how chill, how terrifying Brontë's beloved moor!

There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.

Categories: Poetry, Wuthering Heights