Sylvia Plath swimming

The poet Sylvia Plath (October 27 1932 – February 11 1963) was a keen swimmer, and her writings make many references to being in the water.

For instance a 1947 letter to her mother mentions a long cycle ride to a beach where 'The waters were a light, salty blue and a sandy, smooth bar stretched out into the ocean. The water was free from crabs and seaweed, and I went swimming with Sally… We had loads of fun swimming underwater and sitting on the smooth sandy bottom pretending to comb our hair'.  Plath was staying at the time in a summer sailing camp at Oak Bluffs, Martha's Vineyard.

Going to Smith College in Massachusetts gave her plenty of time to spend at the beaches on Cape Cod. A 1951 letter describes a restless night-time swim:  'I looked at the angry grey ocean, darkening in late twilight. So I put on my bathing suit and ran barefoot down to the beach. It is a queer sensation to swim at night, but it was very warm after the rain. So I splashed and kicked and the foam was strangely white in the dark. After I staggered out, I put on my sweatshirt and alternately ran and walked the length of the beach and back. As I walked into the house, my purpose accomplished, I said good night to the Mayo's who gasped, “you went swimming alone?”'.

There are pictures of her looking happy on the beach from this period, such as this famous image on Cape Cod in 1954:

After meeting Ted Hughes at Cambridge, the couple stayed at Eastham on Cape Cod in 1957, from where she wrote 'We try to get four hours of writing done by noon, bike to Nauset Light Beach for the afternoon of swimming and running, and read books in the evening'.

But if  'swimming and sunbathing on America's North Atlantic coast were among her favourite activities', Plath's writings are also haunted by 'images of nautical death' and oblivion in the water (Peter J Lowe). Famously in her novel 'The Bell Jar',  the heroine contemplates swimming out to sea and drowning - but the sea refuses to help her:  'I brought my hands to my breast, ducked my head, and dived, using my hands to push the water aside. The water pressed in on my eardrums and on my heart. I fanned myself down, but before I knew where I was, the water had spat me up into the sun, the world was sparkling all about me like blue and green and yellow semi-precious stones. I dashed the water from my eyes. I was panting, as after a strenuous exertion, but floating, without effort. I dived, and dived again, and each time popped up like a cork. The gray rock mocked me, bobbing on the water easy as a lifebuoy. I knew when I was beaten. I turned back'.

In one of her last pieces Plath looked back longingly at her early years living by the sea: 'My childhood landscape was not land but the end of the land—the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own. I pick it up, exile that I am […] and in one wash of memory the colors deepen and gleam, the early world draws breath' (Ocean 1212 W, 1963).