Sylvia Plath

A signed manuscript of one of Plath's earliest poems, in a version preceding the 1946 revision published in her junior high school literary magazine and collected nowhere else.

• Sylvia Plath (American).
• [Wellesley, Massachusetts]: n.p, [circa 1945]. 
• Single ruled leaf.
• Handwritten in pencil in three stanzas, with title and "by Sylvia" above.
• Housed in a custom gilt-stamped black cloth clamshell case with black leather spine.

"The Snowflake Star" was one of a small cluster of early poems in which Plath first began experimenting with a group of images that would in many ways come to define her later work. In "A Winter Sunset," written around the same time (and published in the same issue of her junior high literary magazine The Phillipian), the moon hangs above "the bare, black skeletons of trees." And in "To Miss Cox," from later in 1946, "The winter skies are leaden / The flying snowflakes sting." Plath biographer Heather Clark identifies the beginnings of Plath's "mature poetic voice" in these poems, a voice also heard in "The Snowflake Star." Its opening lines ("On a dark and cloudy day / I wandered in the woods away") point, in all their simplicity, directly ahead to 1956, when Plath would write "I stalk like a rook, / brooding as the winter night comes on [...] Who'd walk in this bleak place?" ("Winter Landscape, With Rooks"); to 1960: "Winter dawn is the color of metal / The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves" ("Waking in Winter"); to 1962: "The woods are a well" ("Stars over the Dordogne").

"The Snowflake Star" revolves around subjects and images that would become enduring in her work: snow, winter, stars, trees. The list of poems in which these ideas are central is long and includes many of her best-known works: "Crossing the Water," "Words" ("fixed stars / Govern a life"), "Winter Trees," "Snow Blitz," "Wintering," "The Snowman on the Moor," "The Munich Mannequins" ("The snow has no voice"), "Winter Words," "To A Jilted Lover" ("a mosaic of stars / diagrams the falling years"), "Elm" — to name only a selection.

Metrically precise and lettered in a dauntingly perfect hand, this three-stanza version of "Snowflake Star" was composed before the poet turned 14. Plath's juvenile diaries record that on January 10th, 1945, assigned to write a poem or story about a star, she wrote two: "King of the Ice," and "another even better 'The Snowflake Star.'" The poem was completed by February 21 of that year, but would not appear in The Phillipian until the following year (the only time it was published in any version), in February of 1946. Notably, scholar Edward Butscher's assessment of Plath's juvenilia quotes words and phrases not present in this sparer, starker draft: the "temporary return to strained gaiety and a continued pursuit of the conventional" characteristic of her other winter poems from the same period have not yet been written into the close of this version. Avoiding the "happy thought" which "lingers on" in the final stanza of the published version, this draft ends simply with the word "star," the poem's only unrhymed line, the snowflake just caught, still frozen, in the mittened hand — an ending more in keeping with Plath's later work, where danger always lurks just below the surface of beauty.

Material of any kind entirely in Plath's hand is rare on the market. While typescripts of her poems appear from time to time (many submission copies to periodicals and publishers), almost all original handwritten drafts remained with Plath's papers (which now reside variously at Smith College, the Lilly Library at the University of Indiana, and Emory University). This manuscript, which originates with Plath's mother's estate, represents one of just a tiny handful of occasions when a handwritten poem of Plath's has come to market.

A rare opportunity not only to own an original work in Plath's own hand, but one that prefigures many of her most important images and themes.