Sylvia Plath - Mary’s song

Mary's Song

The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
The fat

Sacrifices its opacity. . . .

A window, holy gold.
The fire makes it precious,
The same fire

Melting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the Jews.
Their thick palls float

Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out
Germany.
They do not die.

Grey birds obsess my heart,
Mouth-ash, ash of eye.
They settle.  On the high

Precipice
That emptied one man into space
The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.

It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child the world will kill and eat.

Mary's Song¹

"The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
The fat
Sacrifices its opacity....

A window, holy gold."

In typical fashion Plath begins with an intense observation of a material phenomena until a window opens into her imaginative world.

"Sun" day is the day of the bright burning Sun and the day of the Resurrection. Notice how the near "nuclear" effect of the solar resurrection in the Grunewald painting obliterates and stuns the soldiers who represent the hardening, material influences.

The lamb is the burning sacrifice of Pagan, Jew, and Christian and, in an interior alchemical sense, represents pure pre-self aware consciousness that must be painfully burned in order to transform into individual ego hood. All the pillars of pre-ego consciousness such as our instinctual relationship to the physical body and all its time processes and our instinctual relationship to feeling and intellect as well as our relationship to God and spirit are the "fat" in which our consciousness "cracks".

But the pain of this immolation provides the opportunity of more penetrating thinking and vision as the fat of old consciousness sacrifices its opacity to become a "window, holy gold". The fire burns away the illusion of the subject-object dichotomy where humans once again, not only see, but creatively unite with the spirit or the great cosmic thinking that underlies the material world. Sense bound thinking no longer blocks higher vision. Plath consistently opens "doors" or " windows" of perception as part of the process of poetic creation. Many times her struggle for new perception becomes the content of the poem.(see November Graveyard.) The Paschal Lamb of Mary's Song becomes a doorway. Adult sheep play a similiar role in Plath's "Sheep in Fog".

Plath now in one great sweep moves from the epistemological issue of burning of consciousness to the violence of holocaust on the world stage. She makes the connection between evolution of consciousness and human evil. The powers necessary for human change and growth may be hijacked and misused by dark forces. When we fail at self knowledge, we project inner processes into the outer world. What should be an inner working where our thinking and perception is transformed becomes a premature, untimely, and misdirected insertion of violent archetypes into the mass human psyche by murderous means.

"The same fire

Melting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the Jews.
Their thick palls float

Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out
Germany.
They do not die. "²

In these lines Plath confronts the enigma of annihilation. Here she recognizes that the fire forces of psychic evolution are necessary but can be misdirected and used in an evil way. The fire of spiritual vision is the same fire that melts the "tallow heretics"- "ousting the Jews". The Holocaust was both an inner and outer event. What Judaism developed from the time of Moses and gave to the West, a certain power in the cognitive spheres(see the "horns" of Moses), was set on fire by Nazi group soul atavism in a holocaust that is mirrored in every subsequent thinking human being. This attempted murder of the Jewish folk soul by the dark empowered shadow of the German folk soul was an act of suicide because what modern humans absorb from all cultures is thoroughly absorbed and "mixed" into our make up to such an extent that any extraction of one part destroys the function of the whole

.

So the outer event triggers an inner alchemical process where the unconscious desire to return to the atavistic group soul (i.e. Devolution) rises to the surface and ignites the sterile intellect. The fledgling individuated ego must transcend this conflagration and creatively work to harmonize the outcome. This harmonization will increase our self awareness as the ego grows into a form that unites and embraces all similarly developing egos. The higher self must not step aside in fear, but must eat and digest the dark, lower forces, effectively integrating the dragon power into the higher solar forces.

Kali and Shiva

"They do not die.

Grey birds obsess my heart,
Mouth-ash, ash of eye.
They settle. On the high

Precipice
That emptied one man into space
The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.

It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child the world will kill and eat."

Mouth-ash, ash of eye.

In "The Thin People" the victims of the holocaust live vividly in Plath's spirit. Here again "They do not die." The life forces of the dead leave their imprint in the dark smoke which permeates the spiritual atmosphere of the entire planet with a transforming energy that we cannot ignore. This energy works directly into our thoughts and must be consciously assimilated. The speech and vision of the victims is embodied in the ash and baptizes the planet as it settles and reunites with the material of the earth.

"Asuric gray birds" circle and threaten. They settle with the ash on the great precipice which "emptied one man into space". This gives the sense of a place where the human literally turns inside out, the inner man permeates the earth's spirit. Plath now moves through the image of the the death camps' ovens to the heart of the world. The evil "metabolism" of the Nazis transforms to the greater metabolism of the world's processes. Plath's higher ego, her "golden child", like Christ, becomes the food for world development. As we read her poetry we absorb the transformed ego of the poet. We are part of this great metabolism.

Revelation 12 from the New Testament may have provided Plath with some of the imagery for her poem:

Rev.12

[1] And there appeared a great wonder in heaven; a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars:
[2] And she being with child cried, travailing in birth, and pained to be delivered.
[3] And there appeared another wonder in heaven; and behold a great red dragon, having seven heads and ten horns, and seven crowns upon his heads.
[4] And his tail drew the third part of the stars of heaven, and did cast them to the earth: and the dragon stood before the woman which was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born.
[5] And she brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne.
[6] And the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that they should feed her there a thousand two hundred and threescore days.
[7] And there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels,
[8] And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven.
[9] And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world: he was cast out into the earth, and his angels were cast out with him.
[10] And I heard a loud voice saying in heaven, Now is come salvation, and strength, and the kingdom of our God, and the power of his Christ: for the accuser of our brethren is cast down, which accused them before our God day and night.
[11] And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.
[12] Therefore rejoice, ye heavens, and ye that dwell in them. Woe to the inhabiters of the earth and of the sea! for the devil is come down unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.
[13] And when the dragon saw that he was cast unto the earth, he persecuted the woman which brought forth the man child.
[14] And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle, that she might fly into the wilderness, into her place, where she is nourished for a time, and times, and half a time, from the face of the serpent.
[15] And the serpent cast out of his mouth water as a flood after the woman, that he might cause her to be carried away of the flood.
[16] And the earth helped the woman, and the earth opened her mouth, and swallowed up the flood which the dragon cast out of his mouth.
[17] And the dragon was wroth with the woman, and went to make war with the remnant of her seed, which keep the commandments of God, and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.