She listens to the disconsolate creaking of her house, its resigned settling. She can hear everything; she can practically see it. It is the pellucidity of truth she sees through, its awesome clarity. The rustle of the appliqués on the baby’s animal quilt beyond this wall. The dead mouse putrefying under the floorboards in the larder. Ted cocking his big head in the guest room, contemplating his defection, stomping down the stairs. Like life in a house of wax, in a mausoleum, that stifling. She has sequestered herself in her study morning after morning, avoiding him, hating him, keeping her mouth shut, refusing to walk the plank. Bent over a sheet of paper, grim and stubborn, skinny and brittle, her body wasted and careworn. After today, he’ll be gone. Will he marry her?

A declaration, not a question—that’s the act that shields her from the dismemberment happening outside her study. She keeps stacks of reusable paper under her desk: old manuscripts, drafts, Ted’s and her own, words she can reclaim to protect herself, to urge herself forward. Thrift and omenizing at the same time—a practice as old as her marriage. She’s been using the reverse of The Bell Jar typescript to draft her poems since she got home from Yeats’s tower. She scans each page before she turns it over; sometimes the very words she reads help her get started. What she’s written these last two weeks, then, the poem each morning before breakfast, has been laced with the question she asked herself at the end of her novel. How did she know, she had Esther Greenwood wonder, that madness would not reassert itself? How could she be sure she would make it? Now that Ted is back, packing up at her insistence, Sylvia wants stronger medicine for her poems. She wants to assert the act of will that endows her own survival. Not Tarot; not prayer. Like her bees, all those maids, those frugal ordinary women, huddled in a ball at the dead dark center of their hive, a sisterhood rationing its store of honey to last the winter, she’s going to make it through this poor and benighted time. When she was ready to type the final version of “Wintering,” the last of the sequence of bee poems she was writing when he showed up and interrupted her, she put away the chapters of The Bell Jar, that potboiler. She reached, instead, for pages from Ted’s play The Calm, the first one—his answer to Shakespeare’s Tempest. Sylvia wants calm, no more tempest: stasis in this time of darkness. She wants a woman’s story, not a man’s. She wants her fingerprints all over his page: her page, her words, her survival. His manuscript was right there, under her desk, to reinscribe. The bird flies itself to the hunter.