Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea

1955 poem by Sylvia Plath

"Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea" is a poem written by Sylvia Plath that was first published in 1955, the year she graduated from Smith College summa cum laude. An abstract poem about an absent lover, it uses clear, vivid language to describe seaside scenery, with "a grim insistence" on reality rather than romance and imagination. The poem was awarded a 1955 Glascock Prize

Plath used "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea" as the title poem of a collection she submitted unsuccessfully to the Yale Series of Younger Poets, and as a working title for the collection that was eventually published as The Colossus.

The poem has six stanzas of four lines each, featuring slant rhyme. Jon Rosenblatt draws a connection to the modernist poet Wallace Stevens's work about imagination, as reflected in Plath's lines "The imagination / shuts down its fabled summer house",

Plath's professor Alfred Young Fisher drew a parallel between the poem and James Joyce's Ulysses. In a manuscript held in the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith College, his margin notes appear to compare the poem's last line "And that is that, is that, is that" with Joyce's repetition in the line "showed me her next year in drawers return next in her next her next". As "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber" was written during Plath's college years, it can be considered part of her juvenilia, but it is not characteristic of this period of her work. The Plath scholar Linda Wagner Martin mentions this poem as an example of why more attention should be given to Plath's "juvenilia", saying that "Plath was a serious writer throughout her college years, beginning in 1950" and "her poetry should be considered 'mature' long before 1956". Wagner Martin writes that the poem is typical of Plath's pre Cambridge period and is "more about the poetic imagination than the two lovers of the title". Wagner Martin praises the work's formal qualities but says that it is "wordy and convoluted", does not display any distinctive voice, and is typical of 1950s poems like those of Richard Eberhart, Louis Simpson, and Richard Wilbur. According to Wagner Martin, "nothing about the poem reflects that its author is young, female, or American." She contrasts these characteristics with Plath's later poems such as "Lady Lazarus". According to Jon Rosenblatt, the poem's reference to "fractured Venus" and its tension between "the desire to reclaim a lost, dead love and the simultaneous recognition that the dead cannot be recovered" hint at themes that are explored more fully in Plath's later poetry collection The Colossus.