Owl-Hollowed Willows – Sylvia Plath’s ‘Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows’ (1959)

In her ‘Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows’ (1959), Sylvia Plath presents a quintessentially English scene in exactly the way we might expect of an American. Today more than ever, Americans are apt to look upon little England as a kind of quaint backwater, a ‘country on a nursery plate’, as Plath has it. Cambridge students (of which Plath was one) get something of a send-up here too; the poem closes out with the observation that as they stroll on, ‘Black-gowned’ and blithe, in a ‘moony indolence of love’, they remain nevertheless ‘unaware/ How in such mild air/The owl shall stoop from his turret, the rat cry out’. The idea, then, is that all this picturesque beauty enfolds and obscures the something darker and more atavistic in the surrounding ecosystem, something like that nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ of which Tennyson memorably told. Pictured above is Plath’s own illustration of a member of Cambridgeshire fauna, entitled ‘Cow near Grantchester‘.

The owl, seen in a darker aspect in these last lines, prompts us to revisit the ‘owl-hollowed willows‘ in the above excerpt with new eyes.