...Sylvia Plath at Yaddo 1959...

Yaddo: The Grand Manor (1959 - all poems that follow are also attributed to the same year):
"...The fir tree's thick with grackles.  Gold carp loom in the pools."

The Manor Garden:
"History Nourishes these broken flutings, These crowns of acanthus, And the crow settles her garments."

Selected excerpts: A Poem for a Birthday:
I. Who
"This shed's fusty as a mummy's stomach: Old tools, handles and rusty tusks.  I am at home here among the dead heads."
II. Dark House
"This is a dark house, very big.  I made it myself, Cell by cell from a quiet corner....It is warm and tolerable In the bowel of the root."
III. Maenad
"This month is fit for little.  The dead ripen in the grapeleaves.  A red tongue is among us.  Mother, keep out of my barnyard, I am becoming another."
IV. The Beast
"...Fido Littlesoul, the bowel's familiar.  A dustbin's enough for him.  The dark's his bone.  Call him any name, he'll come to it."
V. Flute Notes form a Reedy Pond
"This is not death, it is something safer."
VI. Witch Burning

 

A draft of  'Ariel'.

"It is easy to blame the dark: the mouth of a door, The cellar's belly...What large eyes the dead have!  I am intimate with a hairy spirit."
VII. The Stones
"Drunk as a foetus I suck at the paps of darkness."

The Colossus:
"Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.  The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.  My hours are married to shadow."

Sylvia Plath spent a fall in Yaddo from early September to before Thanksgiving of 1959.

Flora on the Yaddo Grounds

Dark Wood, Dark Water:
"This wood burns a dark Incense.  Pale moss drips In elbow-scarves, beards From the archaic Bones of the great trees."

Mushrooms:
"Overnight, very Whitely, discreetly, Very quietly Our toes, our noes Take hold on the loam, Acquire the air."

...a visit to Yaddo in Saratoga, NY State...24jul14...

Yaddo (yeah dough) is an artist colony that was bequeathed (through a trust) to future artists to use the grounds as a place of contemplation and collaboration, it is located near the Saratoga Race Track in Upstate New York.  The estate was given over by Spencer and Katrina Trask, he a venerable financier and she an author.

Walking the grounds does induce in the spirit of the artist a sense of contemplation.  It is far from overly showy, and instead is conducive to the temperament of those that are taking the inward journey necessary to create their art.  The grounds lack contradiction - with a wide open lawn, several fountains, marble benches and statuary that set a fixed gaze on order.

 

The natural font (the picture of the mound of rock below) allows for a gentle sound of falling water, proving the contemplative attributes of rain as it falls softly on the rounded stones below.  From it, it runs down a small rivulet.  The rounded cup of water hosting a small nymph playing lithely under the shadows of the thin trees. Overlooking this is a small plant of blue Harebell.

There are koi.  There is a small lake that does not allow fishing, so I could only imagine the creatures lurking in its muddy depths.

   




One could imagine the footfalls of so many authors as they walked alone around these gardens for months at a time.  It is thought that Poe worked on "The Raven" here.  Some 5,500 artists since its inception have used the grounds to help in their work.  The NY Public Library has archives of some of the material available to view.  There are even rolls by type of media the artist uses, like this roll of writers.

Having just read much of Sylvia Plath's poetry in Manhattan, I was pleasantly surprised by my Aunt Pam's insistence on visiting here.  Then, seeing that Edith Wharton spent time here as well, I was induced to purchase The Touchstone at Albany Airport.  I was captivated all the way home by the novella and finished it by the time I touched back down at John Wayne.

"Thin as ferns and fronds,
The woodland settles down,
Drowned in that still pool,
Where stars will stream and drown"
- The Lake, Edith Wharton (at Yaddo)