"We start the poem earthbound with Plath’s speaker, already a lost cause, our human signs swallowed up. We don’t get to linger there long, though; Plath reframes our inquiry with that next line. Forget the null problem of that smile being lost, of being small and expendable—think instead about what you’re supposed to lose, need to lose. Think about your night dances. It’s a question that reminds me of that best Mary Oliver line: “And what will you do with your one wild and precious life?” Except that where Oliver closes her line with a question mark, Plath closes the first part of that question with a period. This isn’t interrogation so much as observation, the hinge that first opens up the mind of the poem.
“I shall not entirely sit emptied of beauties, the gift/ Of your small breath, the drenched grass/Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies,” Plath goes on. It’s hard to know who this breath belongs to—lover? Dozing child? What matters is the filling it does, the real hold it has for Plath’s speaker, the infinite reverberation it shares with those “pure leaps and spirals.”
But our time with this sleeping other does not hold. A few lines later, we’re speeding with comets that:
Have such a space to cross
Such coldness, forgetfulness,
So your gestures flake off
Warm and human, then their pink light
Bleeding and peeling
Through the black amnesias of heaven.
We’ve been propelled from the earth, from grasses and previous lines of lilies, into a giant of a universe to whom humanity is little more than flaking paint. But we’re gorgeous, awe-worthy paint, the source of the “pink light” that illuminates its whole depthless firmament. You—we—are at once immaterial to the comet and cometlike ourselves.
The last lines of the poem gut me. In high school, I used to write them, talismanic, in silver Sharpie on the backs of all my notebooks. Today instead I sleep under a tacked-up Xerox of Plath’s first draft, where they barely fit onto the bottom of her pink Smith College memorandum paper:
These lamps, these planets
Falling like blessings, like flakes
Six-sided, white
On my eyes, my lips, my hair
Touching and melting.
Nowhere.
Plath reels between scales: these lamps are planets are snowflakes; we are these beauties, we are their recipients, we are the no-place that is lucky enough to receive them.
I think of that smile in the grass, I think of those breaths, I think of those planets, those flakes. And then I think of Plath’s hair, and the real smallness of any human life, and how beautiful it is anyway, and how big the world."
Emma Komlos-Hrobsky on Plath's "The Night Dances"