To Sylvia Plath

Those three years
in Senior High English class
with Mr. Crockett
we sat not at desks but at tables
arranged in a "U",
you to my left
on the side by the windows,
I along the bottom
two or three seats away,
all of us friends.

You were tall and slender,
your straight honey-colored hair cut long.
Smart in class you spoke not a lot
but well,
a lot more easily than me,
You had a warm welcoming smile
and an intense zest, a classmate recalled,
for doing things.

When I asked you
to write some lines
I might put to music
for our new Senior Class song,
yours was a right-off-the bat "yes".

Hard and long then,
on our sunporch piano I worked,
trying out notes, index finger sounding phrases,
that Mother's ears thought would come to naught,
until that suspenseful day
our classmates voted our song
the one we would sing!

Everyone knew publishers
already had said "yes" to your poems,
and you graduated top of the class.
I never quite could figure out though
Mr. Crockett's deference to you.
Little did most if any of us suspect
where your path would lead.
Little did most if any of us know,
apart from a rumor or two,
of your struggles even then,
your torment.

Never did we imagine
fifty years along singing our song
in Wellesley together again,
dedicating a plaque in tribute to you,
mindful of your fame and your pain,
remembering you,
with pride, with deference,
re-claiming you
as one of us.

© 2007 by Robert G Blakesley

click to enlarge




From the Wellesley Townsman, October 5, 2000:
A Great Poet's Wellesley High Classmates

Pay Her Tribute
by SUZANNE HANSMIRE,TOWNSMAN CORRESPONDENT

Betsy Wallingford, a classmate and friend of Sylvia Plath, unveiled the plaque erected at Wellesley High in Plath's honor. Photo credit: JENNIFER LINDBERG. She touched their young lives as deeply as her words would later touch the world. Half a century later, they can still remember her voice and her smile. So when they gathered last weekend in the lobby of Wellesley High School to honor her, Sylvia Plath's classmates spoke less of the poetry that made her famous and of the despairing life that ended in tragedy than of the young woman who ate lunch with them or suffered through math class with them.

Betsy Powley Wallingford, one of Plath's most intimate childhood friends, said her classmates were eager to pass on the Sylvia Plath heritage to the town. "When our [reunion] committee began to contemplate a class gift ... it took but a few brief moments to decide that a memorial to Sylvia Plath was long overdue," she told her fellow alums at a ceremony in the WHS lobby on Saturday afternoon. "We discerned that there was no lasting memorial to her at her alma mater of Wellesley High School, so we decided to have a bronze plaque created in her memory from all of us after 50 years." Plath's yearbook image smiles out from the newly installed plaque, which has her name, the dates of her birth and death, and a quote from a poem she wrote when she was about 15 or 16: "I write only because there is a voice within me that will not be still."

"My first memory of Sylvia is when I entered the fifth grade at the Marshall L. Perrin School," recalled Wallingford. "The first day of school I sat in my seat and across the aisle was a new girl who had just moved from Winthrop. It was Sylvia. And Sylvia and I began a long and wonderful friendship. We grew up together -she lived half the time at my house and I lived half the time at her house. We built tree huts in the woods and wrote poetry together - you can imagine how well mine was accepted. We went to Girl Scout camp together in the summer time.

Those were the early memories of Sylvia's very wonderful, happy childhood. That brings us to her high school years." One by one former classmates came forward to share the snippets of the post-World War II years in Wellesley when they were students together. "When I talked to Betsy [about the tribute] we were thinking of the fact that this group of people here ... day in, day out had shared the high school years with Sylvia," Patty O'Neill Pratson reminded the group. "No matter what other classes come by, it will not be quite the same as it was for us." O'Neill was the new kid in town that first year of high school, and when placed in alphabetical order found herself seated next to Plath. "And you know how you are when you don't have a friend and you're kind of like hoping you're going to make a friend? The first day I'm sliding my eyes over and the first thing I see is a lunch bag like you don't believe. I'm talking like major-size lunch bag. And this is without any drinks in it. And I thought to myself, 'Wow. She's thin, she's tall, she's beautiful - but look at the lunch she's packing.'" There were knowing laughs from the rest of Plath's friends, and Pratson continued to remember Plath's after-school snack - a huge hamburger for the walk home.

"Maybe that represented for me ... a person who had a tremendous hunger and love for life in her high school years. And along with being a really warm personality, which she was, she just yearned to take part in as much as she could, to expand in everything."

"I think very few of us realized the extent of Sylvia's enormous creative capacity as a writer and that's why I feel the plaque is so appropriate," added Louise Giesey White. "I do not remember a single word that I wrote in three years of high school for any class. Not a word. But I do remember something Sylvia wrote. Mr. Crockett had asked her to read aloud from a story she wrote. And I remember the name of it: 'Five Smooth Stones.' " As she tells her story, many members of the gathering nod their heads, recalling similar events. "It was a very sensitive perspective, kind of an evocation, of a small boy who was going through a lot of sadness in his life, and somehow he had five smooth stones. He had found them by the river, and he always carried them and rubbed them in his pocket. They helped him restore his sense of identity. I was so impressed that she was so able to evoke this image and this mood. She was very eloquent. She brought all of us into the story." When the bell rang in that long ago classroom, the students remained in their seats, spellbound." And finally Mr. Crockett said, 'You can finish it tomorrow.' But it was such a moving, wonderful account, and it was one time when I was caught up in just what a wonderful world she was able to evoke and create for all of us. She's very special."

It wasn't just academic pursuits that enthralled the young Sylvia Plath. While O'Neill remembers a friend who loved art classes, performing in plays, and even playing tennis, Frank Irish, one of her closest friends and co-editor with her of the school newspaper, remembers Plath's zest for life. "Everybody has adjectives for her – mine would be 'intense,' " Irish said. "She wanted to do things, she wanted to accomplish things. She sometimes set herself goals that were not within her field as we think of it. I remember we were all sort of klutzy at ice skating. She wanted to learn how to skate - she opened up to me once about how important that was to her. And she was very intense that she was going to do it. She was like that about everything. And she would try to make it work." He also remembers Plath's efforts to do well in math. "Tenth-grade geometry was not her subject, "Irish said. "We had to do all these proofs.

Sort of Euclidean kinds of things. And for some of us for whom it came naturally, we would simply learn the basic principles and then the proofs were easy. It didn't come that way to Sylvia - she memorized every proof so she could keep up with those of us who were better mathematicians than she was. But nobody was better at literature than she was." Irish reminisced about what it was like to work together. "Sylvia and I were editors of the school paper. Once again she was intense. I have to admit that I wasn't. She was the one that made that newspaper go - she really was." He remembers dedication and a lot of hard work. "Once she was sick for a week or two right before the deadline date, and she put that paper out from her sickbed. I had to go over to her house to get things done. That's the way she was - she'd make things work. She was not, in those days, what we think of as an 'aesthete.' She was a down-to-earth person who wanted to do things. The thing she wanted to do above anything else was to write. But there were a lot of things she wanted to do."

Irish touched on the sadness that members of the class feel when they remember the happy times that just don't seem to match the much-chronicled depression and aberrant behaviors that marked the years leading up to Plath's suicide at age 30. "She became a different person after she left high school, I think. I did have one date with her after high school, and she had become an urbane sophisticate that she was not when she was in high school. She had moved into that world of the literary people. And that was the last time I saw her." Out of the class of about 150, 85 returned to Wellesley for the reunion's weekend events.

One classmate pointed out that Sylvia Plath would be on their minds at other times during their activities. "I think it's wonderful and fitting that tonight we will all be singing together one of Sylvia's poems, since she wrote the words to the senior class song that we all sang together 50 years ago," Robert Blakesley said. "All I can say is that the highlight of my being in Wellesley was being able to write the music to the class song that she wrote the words for." Blakesley told his classmates that he has kept the manuscript from that collaboration.

"I wasn't going to say anything but you've inspired me to say something," said Bill Hunter as he recalled dancing with Plath at the prom. Recently he was at an antique show, he recalled, and his wife called him over to show him a book of Plath's poetry. "The [antique seller] said 'Oh, are you a Sylvia Plath fan?' And I said, 'I like to think I was her friend.' "

"For all the people who are in this group, Sylvia is our legacy," said Colonel Robert McCartney. "Whether you like it or not - and we all did like her - she was in our class. She was a wonderful, wonderful person who came to a really bad end at the end, but while we knew her she put her mark on all of us. We'll all live with that for the rest of our lives." McCartney's pride in a close high school friend who became the most famous member of the Wellesley High School Class of 1950 was apparent as he spoke from the back of the crowd. "She was one of our crowning stars of our time," he said.