A Clean Slate With Your Own Face On

Rather shamefacedly, I must admit I have not only never read any Sylvia Plath, I have actively avoided her work. Just like the next man I am full of petty prejudices but I am quite happy to be proved wrong. This time it happened when flicking through the booklet about her given away with today’s Guardian. The first thing I read was the poem ‘You’re’ and I thought it lovely.

On first reading I thought it about a newborn infant and I related to it by remembering my own children at that age, all full of vague potential. “O high-riser, my little loaf” just made me smile. But a number of lines did not make sense (e.g.Gilled like a fish) until I realised it was about the unborn child she was carrying.

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,
Gilled like a fish. A common-sense
Thumbs-down on the dodo's mode.
Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,
Trawling your dark, as owls do.
Mute as a turnip from the Fourth
Of July to All Fools' Day,
O high-riser, my little loaf.

Vague as fog and looked for like mail.
Farther off than Australia.
Bent-backed Atlas, our travelled prawn.
Snug as a bud and at home
Like a sprat in a pickle jug.
A creel of eels, all ripples.
Jumpy as a Mexican bean.
Right, like a well-done sum.
A clean slate, with your own face on.

Whatever its actual meaning, the poem started a train of thought about beginnings – the optimism, playfulness, and hope. The first word ‘clownlike’ made me think about how much and how easily children laugh and how we lose that giggliness when we get older and activity turns into work. We are at our best when we recover just a fraction of that delight and it is the purpose of our hobbies, pastimes, and obsessions, to give us some glimpse of it.

But even our recreations, if done often enough, can become an obligation, a pressure like work. So all the time we need to recover the sense of the new, the freshness of the beginning when every run is a discovery and hopes are ‘as vague as the fog and looked for like the mail’.

This can be done in so many ways – new routes, looking at old routes in a different way, forgetting about speed, time, distance, or trying a new training plan. It does not matter what. All that matters is keeping fresh and feeling alive, and with any luck finding some delight.