Wuthering Heights

Written in 1961, “Wuthering Heights” by Anglo American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath was first published in The New Statesman in January 1962. The poem is an example of Plath’s rich landscape poetry, and it takes its title from Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. Set in the same windswept moors that inspired Brontë’s novel, the lyric poem contains 45 lines divided in five nine-line regular stanzas. In the poem, a solitary speaker sets out for a walk in the highlands and feels overwhelmed by nature’s terrifying beauty. As is typical of Plath’s nature poetry, the landscape is used to symbolize its speaker’s inner tumult. Although the poem is based on actual walks taken by Plath in the Yorkshire moors, the emotions of alienation and ambiguity the poem describes are universal. Plath uses the imagery of horizons, grass, sheep, and wind to describe the solitary self at war with personal and institutional forces. The poem is notable for Plath’s use of sharp metaphors and similes, her unusual, vivid imagery, and her intensity of emotion.

Poet Biography

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, to Otto and Aurelia Plath in Boston, Massachusetts. After Otto—a world-renowned authority on bees—died in 1940, Aurelia, trained as a teacher, moved Plath and her younger brother, Warren, to Wellesley. Plath showed a precocious talent for writing, publishing her first poem when she was eight years old. She went on to attend the prestigious Smith College, where she won a prize as the guest editor of the magazine Mademoiselle in 1953. Shortly afterward, she experienced depression and attempted suicide. Plath was administered electroconvulsive therapy as part of her treatment, an event that deeply scarred her. After her recovery, Plath returned to Smith to graduate with honors. In 1955, she was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to Newnham College, Cambridge and moved to England.

Cambridge was where Plath met the poet Ted Hughes, an ex-student, in 1956. Plath and Hughes married just four months after their first meeting and moved back to the US in 1957 so Plath could teach at her alma mater, Smith. Plath was devoted to her writing and that of Hughes, typing out both their poems and regularly sending them out for publication. In 1959, Plath audited Robert Lowell’s writing of poetry course at Boston University, an immortal event in literary history as her co-students included poets Anne Sexton and George Starbucks. The same year Plath and Hughes decided to locate to London. Though Plath’s poems sometimes express an ambiguous relationship with England, she firmly chose it as her definitive place of stay, as she stated in a BBC interview. Throughout these years, Plath continued to publish in literary journals of repute. Her first collection of poems, The Colossus, was published in 1960, the same year her first child, Frida, was born. Plath and Hughes also found lucrative work recording poems and programs for the BBC, and after winning the Hawthornden Prize for his poems, Hughes was coming into literary fame.

In 1961, Plath and Hughes moved to Court Green, an old manor in Devon in the English countryside. Their son Nicholas was born in early 1962. Plath had already begun work on her novel The Bell Jar, based on her suicide attempt as a college student. Over the summer of 1962, the marriage between Plath and Hughes began to fray, with Hughes moving out of Court Green by October. Plath was left to care for an infant and a toddler, but she found herself on a creative streak, writing noteworthy poems such as “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” in the period. In December, she moved to London with the children, taking a lease on a flat in which the poet William Butler Yeats had once lived. Her October poems had already begun to attract the notice of influential literary critics like Al Alvarez, and Plath hoped to carve an independent, new identity. However, the brutal winter of 1962-1963, coupled with caring for two young children, began to take a toll on Plath, and she again experienced depression. The tepid response to The Bell Jar, published in January 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, worsened her condition (since then, The Bell Jar has come to be regarded as a classic of American literature).

Plath wrote her possibly last poem “Edge” in the first few days of February. On February 11, 1963, she died by suicide. Hughes found her manuscript of Ariel, which contained many of her recent poems and the famous bee-sequence poems, on her desk, and had the collection published in 1965. Ariel met with astonishing success, and in 1981, Plath’s Collected Poems, compiled by Hughes, won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, only the fourth posthumous work to receive the distinction. Plath’s work—impeccably crafted and filled with unusual, powerful imagery—has since endured, as has her mythos. In recent times, biographers and critics have focused on newer areas of study in her works, exploring themes such as Surrealism, nature, and politics in her poems.

Poem Text

Plath, Sylvia. “Wuthering Heights.” 1961. Allpoetry.com.

Summary

On a walk through the Yorkshire moors, the unnamed first-person speaker says the sunset-lit horizon circles her like “faggots” (Line 1)—bundles of wooden sticks—ready to be lit. Like the kindling, the horizon seems titled and unstable. If a match is set to it, the horizon may warm the speaker. A warm orange tint would spread through the sky (as the sun sets); after sunset a pale color would suffuse the landscape with courage. However, the sunset brings no such hope for the speaker. The landscape dissolves like empty promises, unfolding endlessly as the speaker walks on.

The moors are high (being a grassy plateau) but flat. No life exists here above the grass (there being few trees around) or the ubiquitous sheep. A sharp, cold wind blows across the landscape, making everything bend in one direction. To the speaker, it seems the wind has the force of destiny. It tries to siphon away the speaker’s bodily warmth. If the speaker, bent against the wind, stares too close at the heather shrubs covering the ground, the heather would invite the speaker to sink in and die right there. The speaker’s bones would bleach among the grass.

Unlike the speaker, who is unnerved by the landscape, the sheep are sure of their place in the moors. Their dirty gray fur matches the weather. The sheep study the speaker with their vertical pupils. The speaker feels the sheep’s eyes are a mailing slot through which the speaker is being mailed into space like an inconsequential message. The sheep seem disguised as grandmothers, their large teeth and wool seeming like false dentures and wigs.

Now the speaker discovers “wheel ruts” (Line 28), or the grooves left by wheels in the ground. Clear water flows through the grooves and the speaker’s hands (suggesting it may be raining). To the speaker, the water is like solitude that cannot be retained. The grooves seem like door arches through the grass, as if architecture has rid itself of people. Alternatively, the speaker may have come across ruins. Through the real or imaginary open structures, the moaning wind seems to echo with few, remembered words: “black stone, black stone” (Line 36).

The speaker is the one tall, upright thing in the landscape, the one vertical holding up the sky “among all horizontals” (Line 38). Buffeted by the wind, the grass is beating itself to oblivion. Being too delicate for the terrible company of the dark weather, the grass wants to disappear. As night descends, the lights from houses come on, gleaming like tiny coins in the purses of narrow valleys.