LYONNESSE: Poems by Sylvia Plath

First edition, first printing. Limited edition. Number 1 of 10 copies bound by Zaehnsdorf in full vellum (300 numbered copies were issued in quarter leather and 90 in full calf). This copy is additionally signed by Ted Hughes along with an original autograph quatrain to the half title. Published by Olwyn Hughes, Ted's sister, who also selected the poems (it is likely that this was her own copy). Printed by Will and Sebastian Carter at the Rampant Lions Press, Cambridge in Monotype Ehrhardt on Hodgkinson hand-made paper. The endpapers reproduce Plath's manuscript. A near fine copy, the vellum a little toned, the front board a little bowed. In the publisher's felt-lined cloth box, lightly spotted to the white-fleeced interior, with a tan calf label to the spine lettered in gilt. The book was originally sold by Rick Gekoski, whose invoice is loosely laid in. A uniquely resonant copy, brimming with numerous and complex biographical and personal associations.

The prefatory note to 'Lyonness' states that its twenty-one poems "are hitherto uncollected" and that "a few of them will be included in 'Winter Trees', a collection of poems […] to be published shortly by Faber and Faber, London, and Harper and Row, New York." The title, borrowed from the final poem, mobilises a cluster of associations (mythological, literary, linguistic) of significance to (and for) Plath, Hughes, their marriage and her death: associations which ramify in relation to this particular copy. During the summer of 1961, following a decision leave London, Hughes and Plath drove to Devon and Cornwall in search of a place to live, eventually settling on Court Green, "a rambling, ancient house in Devon" (Wagner) which Hughes kept until his death (it remains the home of his widow, Carol). Their first months in the house were, by all accounts, happy (a second child Nicholas was born in early January 1962 joining the nearly two-year-old Frieda) but things quickly darkened. Hughes had been conducting an affair with Assia Wevill (she and her husband David were renting out Plath and Hughes' London flat) which Plath discovered in July 1962. She and Hughes separated in September. In December, she returned to London with the children, renting the flat at 23 Fitzroy Road where, the following February, she would take her own life. The manuscript of 'Lyonnesse' (the poem) is dated October 21, 1962. The myth of Lyonesse (usually spelled with a single 'n' rather than Plath's two) as an English Atlantis, a drowned city situated off the coast of Cornwall, can be found in English literature from Malory to Thomas Hardy (via the Arthurian poems of Tennyson and Swinburne). Plath's poem engages with this tradition, while at the same time dealing with matters closer to home. "Lioness", homophone of Lyonnesse, was a word which held particular significance for Plath. 'Ariel', the title poem of her posthumously published second collection (a poem completed a few days after 'Lyonnesse') is named not just for Shakespeare's Island sprite but also the Old Testament Hebrew word for "God's lioness" (mentioned in line 4), with whom the speaker of the poem associates ("How one we grow"). Ariel was also the name of a horse that Plath rode at a riding school on Dartmoor. The lines written by Hughes on the half title of this copy (no. 1) of 'Lyonnesse' tease out these, and other, associations: "As I rode out to Lyonesse / What should I meet but a Lioness / She licked my fingers and she purred / Such a strange word!". The quatrain alludes to Thomas Hardy's poem 'When I set out for Lyonnesse', published in 1914 but looking back forty-odd years to the period when he was courting his first wife Emma Gifford in Cornwall. Emma died in 1912, prompting Hardy to write a remarkable series of poems about the marriage and his loss. Like Hardy (and using Hardy), Hughes looks back. His first meeting with Plath, fifteen years earlier, took place not in Devon or Cornwall but in Cambridge, at a launch party for the student-run literary journal, 'St. Botolph's Review', during which Plath famously bit Hughes' cheek with sufficient force to draw blood. He gave an account of the meeting – and "the swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks / That was to brand my face for the next month" – thirty years later in 'St Botolph's', one of the 'Birthday Letters' (1998) addressed to Plath's ghost (and dedicated to Frieda and Nicholas). Plath's 'Lyonnesse' presents the deluged mythical city and its inhabitants as abandoned and forgotten by a male God-like figure who has "lazily closed one eye and let them slip / Over the English cliff and under so much history!". It is hard not to associate this figure, "the white, high berg on his forehead", with Hughes, who seems to acknowledge the connection in 'Error', another Birthday Letter: "I brought you to Devon", he begins, "I brought you into my dreamland. / I sleepwalked you / Into my land of totems. Never-never land: / The orchard in the West." He locates the poem in "Lyonnesse" (named once with Plath's spelling), with its "inaccessible clouds, submarine trees / The labyrinth / Of brambly burrow lanes." Like Plath, Hughes weaves the personal and mythical, the failing marriage and the drowning city: "What wrong fork / Had we taken? In a gloom orchard / Under drumming thatch, we lay listening / To our vicarage rotting like a coffin[.]" (Tabor A13; Jutta and Karl Heinz Göller, 'Sylvia Plath's "Lyonnesse" Wordplay and Mythical Meaning', University of Regensburg; Erica Wagner, 'Ariel's Gift: A Commentary on Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes', London: Faber and Faber, 2000); Ted Hughes, 'Birthday Letters', London: Faber and Faber, 1998)