Ireland

Ireland enters the account as both the setting of a holiday and a point of transition in Sylvia Plath’s life. After a vacation there, Plath and Ted Hughes decided to separate for a while; the place also remained associated with her recollection of Yeats’s tower at Ballylea, which she had found beautiful and peaceful.

A Holiday at a Turning Point

The vacation in Ireland preceded Plath and Hughes’s decision to separate for a while. Their summer had been difficult, and Plath had suffered repeated attacks of flu accompanied by high fever. The thought of enduring another winter in Devon seemed impossible. Ireland therefore stands at a hinge in the account: the holiday is followed not by a return to settled domestic life, but by a decision to change their living arrangement.

The Tower at Ballylea

While in Ireland, Plath visited Yeats’s tower at Ballylea and remembered it as the most beautiful and peaceful place in the world. That impression later resurfaced during her search for a flat in London. Walking desolately around Primrose Hill, she recalled the tower as she brooded over the apparent hopelessness of finding a home; her eventual discovery of a flat in Yeats’s former house seemed to her a small miracle. Ireland thus remained connected to a remembered ideal of peace, even as Plath faced separation, illness, and a difficult relocation.

After the Vacation

Following the decision to separate, Plath began commuting to London, where she was seeking BBC work and looking for a flat. She eventually moved herself and the children there shortly before Christmas, taking a five-year lease on Yeats’s house. The account does not describe further events in Ireland, but the visit’s remembered landscape accompanies this later change: a place experienced as peaceful becomes part of the emotional background to Plath’s effort to establish a new home.