claire m. tylee
iconography in ‘Mary’s Song’. He argues that in this poem ‘Plath’s cosmology
implicateseverything—the vast panorama of human history [including the burning
of heretics and the extermination in the camps]—in one universal holocaust.’^51
Antony Rowland takes issue with this in his bookHolocaust Poetry. Accusing
Plath of lacking rigour and of ‘theological muddle’, he finds that ‘ ‘‘Mary’s Song’’
constitutes a confusion of images that does not question the ethics of representation,
and its Christian framework’.^52 He justifies this by taking exception to Plath’s image
of the Jews’ ‘thick palls’ that float over Poland and Germany. A normal reader would
recognize the ideas latent in this phrase to be both a dark pall of smoke and the pall
or funeral cloth that covers a coffin, hearse, or tomb. That cloth is a way of making
sacred the taboo object of the dead body whilst symbolically hiding it from sight, so
Plath’s phrase implies that Poland and Germany are one huge, appalling graveyard
still overshadowed by the past burning of the Jews. It seems to me perverse of
RowlandtosuggestthatthephraseisascribingtotheJewsaCatholicpriest’sshoulder
band (what on earth could that mean?). Rather, I hear a latent allusion to Blake’s
poem ‘London’, where he castigates this so-called Christian city for its treatment of
the weak: ‘the Chimney-sweeper’s cry / Every black’ning Church appalls’.^53 It was
surely appropriate for Plath similarly implicitly to condemn a so-called Christian
country for its indecent treatment of Jewish bodies and blatant disregard of the
Commandments. Her poem breathes meaning into the phrase that Gershon uses
ironically when she says, ‘ ‘‘the appalling Jewish experience’’ was my own’.^54
However, Rowland does give Plath faint praise for her ‘camp poetics’ (a facetious
pun which implies that she is ‘camping it up’), claiming that her satire in ‘Lady
Lazarus’ is ‘moving in the directionof the more self-reflexive, awkward poetics
to be found in the work of Geoffrey Hill and Tony Harrison’, although Rowland
still confesses himself ‘sometimes unclear where the unreflective reproduction of
Holocaust icons ends and the satire begins’ in her work.^55 ‘Awkward poetics’ is an
aesthetic technique that Rowland defines in the course of his book as partly involving
‘a self-critique which emphasizes that the post-Holocaust poet can only write self-
consciouslyasasecondarywitnessofhistoricaleventsinEurope’.^56 Whilstadmitting
that poetry always comprises ‘subtle irregularities to inaugurate creative tensions’,
Rowland claims that, cognizant of Adorno’s warning, yet recognizing the impossible
necessity of representing the Holocaust, ‘post-Holocaust aesthetics utilize these self-
conscious moments to emphasize the specific difficulties of engaging with an event
(^51) Kendall,Sylvia Plath, 127. (^52) Rowland,Holocaust Poetry, 79 and 52.
(^53) William Blake, ‘London’, inComplete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1966), 216.
(^54) Karen Gershon, ‘To My Children’, inWe Came as Children(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989),
- In ‘On Reading Karen Gershon’s ‘‘Poems on Jewish Themes’’ ’, Gerda Mayer teases herself about
not being able to follow Gershon down into the pit of desolation, but remaining clowning about at
its lip, lest she should ‘notappal...those decent English’ (Mayer,Monkey on the Analyst’s Couch
(Sunderland: Ceolfrith Press, 1980), 22).
(^55) Rowland,Holocaust Poetry, 29. (^56) Ibid. 66.