On The 50th Anniversary Of Sylvia Plath's Death, A Look At Her Beginning
Except for the harsh music of "sluttish" and "rutted" raking across that comma, these lines, which sharply describe but still lack a reason for their sharpness, could have come from one of any number of skillfully written books of midcentury American poetry that are now forgotten.
But in a poem written the same year as "Point Shirley," something begins to happen that points the way toward the poet Plath would become, and the excruciatingly intense gaze that Plath has been honing begins to become not just the poems' tool, but their subject. In "The Eye-mote," Plath's speaker "stood looking / At a field of horses," their
Tails streaming against the green
Backdrop of sycamores. Sun was striking
While chapel pinnacles over the roofs,
Holding the horses, the clouds, the leaves
Steadily rooted though they were all flowing
Away to the left like reeds in a sea
When the splinter flew in and stuck my eye,
Needling it dark ...