"Full Fathom Five": the dead father in Sylvia Plath's seascapes.

 
  Well, I tried drowning, but that didn't work; somehow the urge to 
  life, mere physical life, is damn strong, and I felt that I could swim 
  forever straight out into the sea and sun and never be able to swallow 
  more than a gulp or two of water and swim on. The body is amazingly 
  stubborn when it comes to sacrificing itself to the annihilating 
  directions of the mind. 
  --Sylvia Plath, unsent letter, 28 December 1953 (1) 

In a song from his 2001 album Gold, Ryan Adams expresses the wish that "I had me a Sylvia Plath" and lists swimming amongst the activities that he imagines sharing with her:

 
  With rain falling fast on the sea 
  While she was swimming away she'd be winking at me 
  Telling me it would all be okay 
  Out on the horizon and fading away. 

There is ample evidence in Plath's writings that swimming and sunbathing on America's North Atlantic coast were among her favorite activities, and although she traveled far from the beaches of Nauset, Massachusetts, they retained a strong hold on her emotions. In later years, however, such memories were both a source of comfort and, more darkly, a measure of something Plath felt she had lost, something she attempted, through her poetry and also through an increasingly strong suicidal desire, to regain. Adams's image of Plath "out on the horizon and fading away" reminds us that although she was undoubtedly happy in such a situation, we should not overlook the desire for personal extinction that is also inherently present.

Plath's account of her childhood by the sea, "Ocean 1212-W" will be examined in more detail below, but it is important here to cite its closing lines:

 
  And this is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My 
  father died, we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my 
  life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle--beautiful, 
  inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth. (JP, 124) (2) 

Childhood happiness ends with the death of the father, prompting a move, both physical and emotional, away from the location in which such happiness was found. These early summers remain happy memories for Plath, but the self that figures in them is crucially distinct from the person she becomes. Return to Nauset may prompt imaginative engagement with the past, but, as in other areas of Plath's life and art, her dead father's presence remains an integral and psychologically disruptive element, reminding her that although the happiness located by the coast has been enjoyed, it is also irretrievably lost.