‘Stone Boy with Dolphin’ is about the rather ugly statue of a winged little boy holding (or strangling, depending on your perspective) a big fish, supposedly a dolphin. The statue is currently in a corner of a square internal garden in Newnham, leading through the Sidgwick building to the new Library. Invisible in spring, hidden away by the thick foliage of the surrounding bushes, in the winter the boy stands out as the sole inhabitants of the stark, cold, empty garden. It is winter in Plath’s story; “the February air burned blue and cold”. As it follows its protagonist Dody through her day, ‘Stone Boy with Dolphin’ cracks through the shiny, icy surface of a student’s social life and reaches for her loneliness, one of Cambridge’s more ephemeral ghosts. I have a memory of looking for the statue in the main college garden (as per Plath’s instructions), then of finding it in its present location. I wished, like Dody, to develop a habit of “brushing the snow from the face of the winged, dolphin-carrying boy”, but it doesn’t snow in Cambridge like it used to in 1957. Anyway, as I said, the statue had been moved.
First published in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, Faber 1977
A Personal Anthology 