The Lost Lines of "Eavesdropper"

On October 15, 1962, in the middle of composing her Ariel poems, Sylvia Plath wrote the poem “Eavesdropper,” a lengthy, hateful vent about a nosy neighbor caught eyeing and judging the speaker’s property, spying through curtains after midnight, and crouching in the bushes to get an earful. And the eavesdropper was ugly, too! The poem’s final line: “Toad-stone! Sister bitch! Sweet neighbor!”

 

The “eavesdropper” was a real-life married woman in her fifties, Irene Sampson. Sampson and her husband bought the stone cottage vacated by Plath’s neighbors Rose and Percy Key, making Sampson Plath’s next-door neighbor during the turbulent autumn of 1962. In 2013 Irene’s niece wrote a blog post identifying Irene—who never read the poem “Eavesdropper”—as a much nicer person than the poem says.

 

Both the Hughes edit and the Plath edit of the book Ariel exclude “Eavesdropper.” Sylvia had submitted the poem in its original form to Poetry magazine, which accepted it and published it in August 1963 with more lines than appear in either Winter Trees (1971) or Plath’s Collected Poems (1982). Plath at the end of 1962 looked it over, deleted some lines and skillfully revised and rebroke others to form the version most of us know. Hughes noted that she made no final copy of the poem.

 

Poetry magazine’s online archive revealed the vivid line I had long searched for: “Sweater sets and treachery!” Will the forthcoming Complete Poems of Sylvia Plath print both versions of “Eavesdropper”? Even with the ethnic slur? Below, in italics, are the words that were cut. What is below is what followed the original’s stanza 5:

 

O yellow

Weasel unable

To rearrange the bitchy starvation,

  the dust lust!

I had you hooked.

I called, you crawled out,

A weather figure, boggling,

Chink-yellow, Belge troll, the low

Church smile

Spreading itself, bad butter.

 

This is what I am in for!

Your bone plates,

Your creaky biscuits,

Sweater sets and treachery!

Come to tea! Come to tea!

I shall stuff you with pillows!

Pillows and pillows of pure silence.

Flea body!

Eyes like mice

 

Flicking over my property . . .

 

“Belge troll” refers to Scandinavian legends about trolls crouched in the woods, ready to do mischief or evil.