Institute of Social Science
SYLVIA PLATH: THE CONFESSIONS OF A POETIC SOUL
Thesis submitted to the
Institute of Social Sciences
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Master of Arts
in
English Language and Literature
by
Merve ÖZÇELİK
Fatih University
Istanbul 2014
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© Merve ÖZÇELİK
All Rights Reserved, 2014
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Dedication Page
For all those who never give up on their dreams.
And for all those who have a key for a problem, a light for every shadow, a plan for
every tomorrow, and a joy for every sorrow.
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APPROVAL PAGE
Student : Merve ÖZÇELİK
Institute : Institute of Social Sciences
Department : English Language and Literature
Thesis Subject : Sylvia Plath: The Confessions of a Poetic Soul
Thesis Date : April 2014
I certify that this thesis satisfies all the requirements as a thesis for the degree of
Master of Arts.
Assist. Prof. Dr. Mustafa USLU
Head of Department
This is to certify that I have read this thesis and that in my opinion it is fully
adequate, in scope and quality, as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts.
Assist. Prof. Dr. Vassil H. ANASTASSOV
Supervisor
Examining Committee Members
Prof. Dr. Mohamed BAKARI
……………………….
Prof. Dr. Barry Charles THARAUD
……………………….
Assist. Prof. Dr. Vassil H. ANASTASSOV
……………………….
It is approved that this thesis has been written in compliance with the formatting
rules laid down by the Graduate Institute of Social Sciences.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Mehmet KARAKUYU
Director
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AUTHOR DECLARATIONS
1. The material included in this thesis has not been submitted wholly or in part
for any academic award or qualification other than that for which it is now
submitted.
2. The advanced study of English Language and Literature graduate program of
which this thesis is part has consisted of:
a. Research Methods courses both in the undergraduate and graduate
programs.
b. English literature as well as American literature including novel, poetry,
and drama studies, a comparative approach to world literatures, and
examination of several literary theories as well as critical approaches
which have contributed to this thesis in an effective way.
c. The thesis is composed of main sources including two collections of
Sylvia Plath’s poetry, The Colossus and The Other Poems and Ariel
discussed in relation to each other; and the secondary sources including
scholarly articles from a variety of academic journals; and theoretical
books on poetry, confessional poetry, structuralism, and the semiotics in
general and Sylvia Plath’s poetry in particular.
Merve ÖZÇELİK
April, 2014
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ABSTRACT
Merve ÖZÇELİK
April, 2014
SYLVIA PLATH: THE CONFESSIONS OF A POETIC SOUL
American poet and writer Sylvia Plath is recognized as developing the genre of
confessional poetry. Confessional poetry has autobiographical reflections in addition
to the aesthetic qualities of language that distinguish poetry from other forms of
writing. Because poetry is a creative act of language, the final version of a poem may
be very different from the one in the writer’s mind at the beginning. The use of
symbolism, irony, metaphor, and poetic diction leave a poem open to multiple
interpretations. An autobiographical interpretation in isolation may be inadequate to
fully understand Plath’s poetry.
Plath’s scholars generally focus on her personal background and only a few of
her poems gained popularity and have been analyzed in the light of her personal life.
Therefore, the main aim of this study is to identify common themes and motifs in
Plath’s first poetry book, The Colossus and Other Poems, and to show how these
elements and her poetic tone change in her second book, Ariel. These changes reveal
Plath’s personal and professional development in her poetry.
Key Words: Sylvia Plath, confessional poetry, autobiography, symbolism,
metaphor.
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ÖZET
Merve ÖZÇELİK
Nisan, 2014
SYLVIA PLATH: ŞİİRSEL BİR RUHUN İTİRAFLARI
Amerikan şair ve yazar Sylvia Plath, confessional (itirafsal) şiir türünü geliştirmesi
ile tanınmaktadır. Kısa ve yalın bir açıklamayla confessional şiir, kendi içerisinde
otobiyografik yansımalara sahiptir. Yine de şiir sanatı açısından, şiiri diğer yazı
formlarından ayıran dilin estetik nitelikleri göz ardı edilemez. Bununla birlikte, şiirin
son hali, yazarın en başta aklındakinden çok farklı olabilir çünkü şiir sanatı, dili
kullanmanın yaratıcı bir eylemdir. Sembolizm, ironi, mecaz (metafor) ve şiirsel
söyleyişin diğer stilistik unsurları, şiiri birden çok yorumlamaya açık bırakır. Bu
yüzden, tek başına otobiyografik yorumlama Plath’in şiirlerini tam olarak anlamak
için yeterli olmayabilir.
Plath’in şiirleri üzerine yapılan birçok inceleme genellikle onun özgeçmişine
odaklanmaktadır. Plath’in hayatıyla bağlantılaşarak, sadece bazı belli başlı şiirleri
seçilmekte ve incelenmektedir. Bu sebepten dolayı, bu çalışmada, Plath’in ilk şiir
kitabı olan The Colossus and Other Poems’deki yaygın tema ve öğeler bulunacak ve
bu tema ve öğeler, Plath’in ikinci kitabı Ariel ile kıyaslayarak onun şiirsel tonunun
nasıl değişmiş olduğu ortaya koymak için kullanılacak. Bu çalışma, Plath’in kişisel
ve profesyonel anlamda gelişimini ortaya koymayı amaçlamaktadır.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Sylvia Plath, confessional (itirafsal) şiir, otobiyografi,
sembolizm, ve metafor.
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CONTENTS
Dedication Page ....................................................................................................................... iii
Approval Page ......................................................................................................................... iv
Author Declarations ................................................................................................................. v
Abstract .................................................................................................................................... vi
Özet .......................................................................................................................................... vii
Acknowledgement ................................................................................................................... ix
Introduction .............................................................................................................................. 1
Chapter 1 Plath’s Career as a Writer .................................................................................. 12
Chapter 2 Confessionalism .................................................................................................... 24
Chapter 3 Ideas on Poetry: Form and Content ................................................................... 27
Chapter 4 Poetic Style and Aesthetic Qualities of Plath’s Language ................................ 57
1. Metaphors and Symbols .................................................................................................. 59
2. Mythology in Plath’s Poems ........................................................................................... 85
Chapter 5 Plath’s Use of Language in The Colossus and Other Poems, and Ariel ........... 99
Conclusion............................................................................................................................. 113
Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 116
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I would like to thank one special person who made this thesis possible. My
undergraduate professor Dr. Ralph Joseph Poole introduced me to Sylvia Plath and I
fell in love—this paper would not even exist without him.
While preparing my thesis, I have received a great deal of help from my
professors and my beloved husband. All my undergraduate and graduate professors
directly and indirectly contributed to this thesis with their erudition, and excellent
and inspiring courses. All of my professors have sharpened my understanding and
reading in various ways. They help me gain different perspectives. I appreciate my
committee members who were more than generous with their expertise and precious
time. I appreciate Dr. Vassil H. Anastassov, my supervisor for his countless hours of
reflecting, reading, encouraging, and most of all patience throughout the entire
process. Whenever I asked for help, my supervisor was always ready to respond with
his generosity and goodwill.
I am grateful that Prof. Mohammed Bakari, Prof. Barry Charles Tharaud, Assoc.
Prof. Carl Jeffrey Boon, Dr. Tahsin Çulhacı, and Assoc. Prof. Agnes E. Brandabur
for agreeing to serve on my committee. I must express my special thanks to Prof.
Barry Charles Tharaud for the time and effort he dedicated to reading, evaluating and
correcting my thesis. His feedback is precious to me.
I am indebted very much to my thoughtful and caring husband, Turgut Özçelik
for his patience, generosity, and support. He has always been a great source of
motivation for me.
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INTRODUCTION
Sylvia Plath is a woman of great talent. Her suicide in February 1963
transformed her into a literary celebrity. The posthumous publication of her poems
made readers and critics to sit up with shock and to consider the bad circumstances
that led to her desperate death. Plath’s daughter, Frieda Hughes, who is both a poet
and a painter, is neither pleased with the cruel criticism against her father, nor is she
in favor of the arguments about her mother’s death. She does not want people to see
her mother as a heroine who suffered and wrote a great number of poems whose
themes are seen as a declaration of her suicide. Instead, Frieda Hughes wants people
to look for the artistic value of Plath’s works. Recounting an event that took place
after her mother’s death, Frieda underlines her displeasure with the approach to her
mother as a poet:
I was even accosted in the street on the day of the unveiling by a man
who insisted the plaque was in the wrong place. “The plaque should
be on Fitzroy Road!” he cried, and the newspapers echoed him. I
asked one of the journalists why. “Because,” they replied, “that was
where your mother wrote all her best work.” I explained she’d only
been there eight weeks. “Well, then,” they said, “it’s where she was a
single mother.” I told them I was unaware that English Heritage gave
out blue plaques for single motherhood. Finally they confessed, “It’s
because that’s where she died.” “We already have a gravestone,” I
replied. “We don’t need another.” I did not want my mother’s death to
be commemorated as if it had won an award. I wanted her life to be
celebrated, the fact that she had existed, lived to the fullness of her
ability, been happy and sad, tormented and ecstatic, and given birth to
my brother and me. (The Guardian Saturday, 13 November 2004)
Sharing the same opinion with Frieda Hughes, I claim that critics and readers seek
for the stereotypes of desperate housewives, unhappy marriages, and a miserable
death as a result of unhappy womanhood. Plath’s life and work constitute a space in
which criticism articulates our culture’s fantasies. Annika Hagström asserts, “Instead
of revealing the truth about Plath, it is my belief that they tell us something about
ourselves – our culture and our time – and about contemporary methods of
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constructing meaning” (35). There is no need to underestimate her artistic efforts and
praise her because she was a single mother, had an unhappy marriage and unfaithful
husband, suffering from depression and struggled to stand on her feet with two kids.
As Frieda tells us, Plath is “extraordinary in her work,” and her efforts to be a great
poet cannot be underestimated:
I think my mother was extraordinary in her work, and valiant in her
efforts to fight the depression that dogged her throughout her life. She
used every emotional experience as if it were a scrap of material that
could be pieced together to make a wonderful dress; she wasted
nothing of what she felt, and when in control of those tumultuous
feelings she was able to focus and direct her incredible poetic energy
to great effect. And here was Ariel, her extraordinary achievement,
poised as she was between her volatile emotional state and the edge of
the precipice. The art was not to fail. (Ariel: The Restored Edition xixxx)
Sylvia Plath considered writing a way of life. For her, writing was an expression of
her personality. Thus, creativity was related to her inner life and it nourished her
intellectual being. Her life and work were symbiotic, and her poems marked the
various signposts of her life. Her poetry synthesized life and art. Since she was
credited with advancing confessional poetry, critics turned into code-breakers after
her death. However, the confessional interpretation of her works led some critics and
readers to dismiss certain aspects of her works. In Plath’s poetry, the destructive
forces of life were counteracted by the creative forces of art. Her poetry was an
implicit act of self-revelation. Plath herself was the theme of her poetry. Yet, her
works were not merely an autobiography: she perfected her technique of expression
with verbal manipulation of her life experience. She gained control over her
emotions through writing and the mastery of words. Hence, I argue against a strict
autobiographical interpretation of Plath’s works because she spent her time looking
up words in the thesaurus. She sought words not only for their subtle shades of
meaning but also for their effect. She chose her words carefully. She always had an
intimate relation with words. She treated words like living and breathing objects.
Words were not just names or signs to describe something; they could also speak and
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mean. They were like living organisms that echo beyond the writer’s control.
Defining her relation with words, Plath stated: “I cannot live for life itself: but for the
words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and
stories which relive it perpetually in time” (Journals 286). Through the variety of
metaphors and styles, Plath expanded beyond her personal situation. Helen Vender,
who is in favor of poems that give insights about the writer, argues that “When Plath
turns her loathing back on herself, she instantly resumes control of structure and the
newly stoic poems recover shape and power” (11).
Many studies have been done on Sylvia Plath and her poetry. Seven Plath
biographies have been published, each with its own spin on her life: Anne
Stevenson’s Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath (1989), Ronald Hayman’s The Death
and Life of Sylvia Plath (1991), Paul Alexander’s Rough Magic: A Biography of
Sylvia Plath (1991), Diane Wood Middlebrook’s Her Husband: Ted Hughes and
Sylvia Plath, a Marriage (2003), Linda Wagner-Martin’s Sylvia Plath: A Literary
Life (2003), Edward Butscher’s Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (2004), and Peter
K. Steinberg’s Sylvia Plath (2004). Each biographer emphasizes the moments in
Plath’s life that they consider valuable, and their interpretations of events seem to
overshadow her artistic efforts. Additionally, only a few of her poems have gained
popularity among scholars because of their strong biographical references. Those
studies are delimited, and have a specific approach to Plath’s poetry. They try to put
her poetry into a rigid scheme, and the poems that do not fit into autobiographical
explanations are glossed over. However, we can only get a picture of the person and
the poet if we study her work together with her journals and the letters she wrote to
her mother. Jo Brans suggests her letters offer the clearest portrayal of Plath’s
personality: “My point is simply that we can learn very little of the Sylvia of the
poetry, the only Sylvia in whom we can take a legitimate interest, from these letters”
(57). Also, Brans argues that “To ‘know’ Sylvia Plath, finally, we must return to the
poems, where she created her most singular self” (“The Girl Who Wanted to Be
God” 216).
“Sylvia Plath’s poetry has been variously termed confessional, symbolist even
surrealist as critics have sought to find a suitable term to describe her highly original
poetic voice” (Susan Bassnett 43). As a follower of the Confessional Poetry
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Movement, Plath intentionally wrote about the facts of her life. In an interview by
the BBC a month before her death in 1962, Plath explicitly stated that she could not
“sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a
needle or a knife, or whatever it is.” She continued, “Personal experience shouldn’t
be a kind of shut box and a mirror-looking narcissistic experience. I believe it should
be generally relevant” (Orr 169-70). Speaking so, Plath especially promoted the
relevance of her latest poems. Confessional poetry encouraged poets to produce their
works with strong “I” personas; it was the age of visible poets and the re-emergence
of the persona “I.” Following the same stream, Plath’s poems had strong references
to her biography, but poetry has always been more than that. A post-structuralist
point of view asserts “the death of the author”: after the text is written down, there is
no place for the author because it is open to the multiple interpretations of readers
from different backgrounds. Regarding Ted and Frieda Hughes’ concerns about
interpretations of Plath’s writing, Jo Gill states:
There is an anxiety in both of these cases about reading – about the
power of other people’s reading to yield unexpected, proliferating and
uncontrollable meaning. Interpretation is experienced (or interpreted)
as an attack on the hermetic body of the text, on the singular truth
which is presumed to hide there. What I wish to argue here is that the
text – Plath’s poetry, any writing – cannot exist outside of such
interpretative processes; it does not “mean” alone. To suggest that it
does is, arguably, to deny the complexity and richness of the writing,
to reduce it to singularity. (xv)
Like Gill, Bassnett indicates that “A reading of Plath’s poems that hunts for prefigurations of her suicide is an obviously tempting approach and many critics have
chosen to do just that. But it is nevertheless just one kind of reading and it is a
restricted reading at that” (20). According to that view, Plath’s poems can be
analyzed and evaluated from a wide range of critical perspectives from feminist to
modernist. In a 1952 journal entry, allowing for the various interpretations of not
only her writing but also of the “reality of her life,” Plath seemed to be giving
messages to her critics and readers a long time before her death:
Each person, banging into the facts, neutral, impersonal in themselves
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(like the Death of someone) – interprets, alters, becomes obsessed
with personal biases or attitudes, transmuting the objective reality into
something quite personal... Hence, “Thinking makes it so.” We all
live in our dream-worlds and make and re-make our own personal
realities with tender and loving care. And my dream-world – how
much more valid, how much nearer to the truth is it than that of these
people? (Journals 121)
Plath highlights that each person interprets and understands something according to
their personal point of view. There is no objective reality; and we continuously make
and re-make our own personal realities. In Paris Review, Robert Lowell, interviewed
by Frederick Seidel, states that the illusion of “reality” is an aesthetic effect. Seidel
says, “These poems, I gather from what you said earlier, did take as much working
over as the earlier ones.” Lowell responds:
They were just as hard to write. They’re not always factually true.
There’s a good deal of tinkering with fact. You leave out a lot, and
emphasize this and not that. Your actual experience is a complete
flux. I’ve invented facts and changed things, and the whole balance of
the poem was something invented. So there’s a lot of artistry, I hope,
in the poems. Yet there’s this thing: if a poem is autobiographical –
and this is true of any kind of autobiographical writing and of
historical writing – you want the reader to say, this is true. In
something like Macaulay’s History of England you think you’re really
getting William III. That’s as good as a good plot in a novel. And so
there was always that standard of truth which you wouldn’t ordinarily
have in poetry – the reader was to believe he was getting the real
Robert Lowell.
As Lowell points out, confessional poems are hard to write but at the same time they
are not always true about the poet’s life. Lowell invented and changed things, so
poems are invented and they demonstrate artistry. By labeling a poem
autobiographical, poets want readers to believe it is true and they witness the realities
of the writer. Then Seidel asks, “Have many of your poems been taken from real
people and real events?” Lowell responses:
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I think, except when I’ve used myself or occasionally named actual
people in poems, the characters are purely imaginary. I’ve tried to
buttress them by putting images I’ve actually seen and in indirect
ways getting things I’ve actually experienced into the poem. If I’m
writing about a Canadian nun the poem may have a hundred little bits
of things I’ve looked at, but she’s not remotely anyone I’ve ever
known. And I don’t believe anybody would think my nun was quite a
real person. She has a heart and she’s alive, I hope, and she has a lot
of color to her and drama, and has some things that Frost’s characters
don’t, but she doesn’t have their wonderful quality of life. His Witch
of Coös is absolutely there. I’ve gathered from talking to him that
most of the North of Boston poems came from actual people he knew
shuffled and put together. But then it’s all important that Frost’s plots
are so extraordinary, so carefully worked out though it almost seems
that they’re not there. Like some things in Chekhov, the art is very
well hidden.
As Lowell states, the characters in poems are not necessarily about real people and
events; they are imaginary, and the poet supports them with images and imaginative
experience. The writer gives the illusion that the poem is a personal record of life.
Indeed, poetry is not autobiography or history but art. George Steiner stresses that
“the vehemence and intimacy of the verse is such as to constitute a very powerful
rhetoric of sincerity” (“Dying Is an Art” 211-12). In “Dangerous Confessions: the
Problem of Reading Sylvia Plath Biographically,” Tracy Brain questions
biographical reading of Plath’s poems. Brain first introduces David Yezzi’s
definition of confessional poetry to argue that confessional poetry is not a direct
exposure of one’s emotions and experiences: “What makes a poem confessional is
not only its subject matter […] but also the directness with which such things are
handled;” and she states, “what sets them [confessional poems] apart from other
poems is […] their artful simulation of sincerity. […] the poet makes an artifice of
honesty” (13). Brain emphasizes that the sincerity or honesty sensed in such poems is
“an artifice” to revise the understanding of the word, “confessional.” Both Brain and
Steiner claim and clarify that the word “confessional” does not mean that the content
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in a poem is a writer’s confession of personal life. Hence being sincere and sounding
“confessional,” which necessitates a biographical reading of Plath’s poetry to explore
what she achieves in her writing, should be seen as her “powerful rhetorical” effect.
Jon Rosenblatt states that “Those who read Plath in confessional terms thus
confuse the point of departure for the poems with their transformed and completed
state” (The Poetry of Initiation 15). Rosenblatt believes that “The supposed
inseparability of biography and poetry turns out to be nothing more than these critics’
preference for biographical criticism” (15). He reminds us that “Careful verbal
notation of an object or an event could be no substitute for the imaginative
transformation of the private life through the process of art” (Protean Poetic ix).
Mary-Lynn Broe criticizes the tendency of biographical criticism of Plath’s poetry:
“What ought to be read forward as the creative skill of poem making informed by
artistic control has been read backward as the footnoted suffering of a broken
psyche” (Protean Poetic x). The attempt to claim that Plath’s work has a
representational meaning of her real life shows a lack of understanding about the
paradoxical foundation of language. Plath has “artistic control”: her life experiences
are not directly recorded in her poems but go through “imaginative transformation”
that shows her creativity.
Additionally, Bassnett adds that “The poem, once written, is rewritten in every
reading and the notion of a single definitive reading becomes the absurdity it is. The
power of her writing, combined with the power of the reader’s rewriting cannot fail
to transform” (35). Believing in the changeability and fluidity of identity, Plath, at
the age of nineteen, noted down in her journal:
Next year I will not be the self of this year now. And that is why I
laugh at the transient, the ephemeral; laugh while clutching, holding,
tenderly, like a fool his toy, cracked glass, water through fingers […].
Delude yourself about printed islands of permanence. (Journals 130).
Thus Plath herself knew a person both intellectually and emotionally was open to
change, and her writing could not have a permanent meaning. There are still many
critics who do not think biographical and historical materials are essential to interpret
one’s work. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes had public reputations as poets; they were
productive and had a distinct voice in poetry, but for some people their private life
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and marriage was more interesting so that the main focus slipped from their art to
their personal life. Janet Malcolm explains this tendency: “The biographer’s
business, like the journalist’s, is to satisfy the reader’s curiosity, not to place limits
on it. He is supposed to go out and bring back the goods – the malevolent secrets that
have been quietly burning in archives and libraries and in the minds of
contemporaries” (“Plath the Object of Poetry; Ted Hughes Offers his Perspective of
Tragic Marriage” 10). Tim McNamara adds, “people who never knew Plath or
Hughes commandeer the facts and possibilities of their lives and use them for their
own purposes – an entirely unpleasant experience” (4). The market needed
something that people want to see and hear, and it sold the most conspicuous gossips
to them. Sylvia Plath’s life became a scenario in a film in 2003. Frieda thinks this
kind of film is misleading and profits the filmmakers from her mother’s death.
Stating her objection to cinematic and novelistic attempt to present Plath, she states:
My mother’s poems cannot be crammed into the mouths of actors in
any filmic reinvention of her story in the expectation that they can
breathe life into her again, any more than literary fictionalization of
my mother’s life – as if writing straight fiction would not get the
writer enough notice (or any notice at all) – achieves any purpose
other than to parody the life she actually lived. Since she died my
mother has been dissected, analyzed, reinterpreted, reinvented,
fictionalized, and in some cases completely fabricated. It comes down
to this: her own words describe her best, her ever-changing moods
defining the way she viewed her world and the manner in which she
pinned down her subjects with a merciless eye. (Ariel: The Restored
Edition xx)
We do not know whether or not Plath wrote her last poems with the idea of suicide in
her mind, but she knew that her poems would make her famous as far as it was
understood from her journal entries. Even Al Alvarez claims that she did not mean to
die but to be found; hence her death was an accident. The legacy of her poetry was a
result of poetic success, and the idea of death did not inspire her to write. For Plath,
“Poetry is the most intense and ingrown of the creative arts” (Journals 282). If we did
not have any records about Plath’s life and if we did not read her journals to
8
understand her life conditions and if we did not connect her suicide with her collapsed
marriage and if Ariel had not been published posthumously, would we still try to
analyze her poems or connect them with her life? My answer is no. If she had not
decided to commit suicide in a dramatic way, then we would just look at the formal
and stylistic aspects of her poetry. Analyzing Plath’s writing for patterns can shed light
on her textually-formed thoughts and emotions and herself as a creator and a writer.
Dr. Reiff comments:
Historically, Plath scholars have been intrigued with her life –
understandably so. Their fascination with the poetry written right
before her death has led scholars to look at all of her poetry through
her biography. Perhaps they are looking for clues that led the young
poet to be tormented and to end her own life. Whatever their reasons
for viewing her work this way, it has limited Plath’s reputation as a
skilled poet. Furthermore, it has limited the types of poems critics
explore because they focus only on her later works. (1)
Esin Kumlu criticizes the same point: “The works written before the Ariel poems
were the seeds of her successful Ariel poems. Therefore, ignoring Plath’s work
before Ariel is the worst way to approach her works” (135). Georgiana Banita
mentions that the covers of The Bell Jar, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, and
The Colossus and the Collected Poems, all display images of Plath and these pictures
carry “a blunt message that links the poet’s life with her work”:
Like her life story and the rumors about her marriage, the pictures
used on the book covers are trade tricks, but as cautious readers we
should not allow them to lure us. Since writing poetry is a way of
creating something aesthetic and effective through the use of rhythm,
rhyme, metaphor, symbols, and irony, I believe that the poet can end
up with something very different from her original intention.
Without getting deep into autobiographical explanation, I will study her writing style
and the change of her voice in her poetry books. The main focus of my study will be
on the aesthetic values of Plath’s poetry – giving examples from her first and second
poetry books, and demonstrating how Plath enhanced her poems with metaphors and
symbols. I will show how she reached poetic maturity in her second book. I will use
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quotations from her journals and letters to illustrate her strong desire to be a good
writer, and her artistic development. While studying some of her poems, both from her
first poetry collection, The Colossus, and Ariel, I will mainly focus on her use of
language and look for the formalistic aspects of the poems and evaluate their form and
structure. I will draw connections between her poems and their semiotics. I will also
try to demonstrate Plath’s high dependence on metaphors, symbolism, and
mythological themes. With all of these, I will provide a new perspective on Plath’s
poems, showing that.
In Chapter 1, I explain Plath’s development as a writer. I show Plath’s interest in
writing poems. She always spent time improving her writing. Her childhood and
college poems differ from each other in form, style, and content, but they are not part
of this study. Still, her first collection of poems, The Colossus, and the last book,
Ariel, demonstrate a great shift from strict structure with traditional rhyme scheme,
to free verse with confessional voice and strong “I” speaker.
In Chapter 2, I explain confessional poetry as a new technique, starting with
Robert Lowell’s poetry classes as the greatest influence on Plath’s poetry. Plath is
labeled as a confessional poet, and especially Ariel is purely in confessional mode –
like having a chat about some private secrets with readers. During her career, Plath
tried different techniques and styles. Also in this chapter, I connect symbolism and
metaphor with confessionalism.
In Chapter 3, I gather perspectives on poetry and evaluate Plath’s style. I
describe the formalistic aspects of her poems as well as her major themes, and I
continue to develop my discussion in Chapter 4 in which I discuss the aesthetic
quality of Plath’s language. I divide this chapter into two sections: in the first subsection, I explain Plath’s dependence on metaphor and symbol, which she employs
as figurative devices to create images in the reader’s mind. Moreover, she connects
her thoughts and feelings with deep philosophical ideas and illustrates them through
these images. The second sub-section is about Plath’s use of mythology. I analyze
some of her poems in which she identifies herself with mythological figures.
In the last chapter, I focus on the use of language in The Colossus and Ariel. I
discuss how her poetic voice and the persona of her poems changes and evolves. She
improves herself and empowers her voice, and finally the Ariel poems produce a
10
strong “I” persona.
11
CHAPTER 1
PLATH’S CAREER AS A WRITER
Plath was a “child prodigy,” and her genius erupted in her writing. Plath’s desire to
be a writer was encouranged from her childhood. She wrote complete poems by the
age of five. At the age of eight, her first publication, “Poem,” is in the children’s
section of the Boston Herald in 1941. Emphasizing her mother’s help and
encouragement, Connie Ann Kirk describes it:
Unusual for one so young, Sylvia began sending out her poems to
newspapers and magazines (probably with Aurelia’s urging and help).
On August 11, 1941, nine months after her father’s death, young
Sylvia Plath had her first publication. She was eight years old. It was a
poem called “Poem,” published in the children’s section of the Boston
Herald. (47)
Plath enjoyed her early success and the publication of her first poem. She began
writing mostly about nature: “birds, bees, spring, fall, all those subjects which are
absolute gifts to the person who doesn’t have any interior experience to write about”
(Orr 167). In junior high school, she continued to write and publish her poems and
drawings in the school newspaper. In Voices and Visions, her mother mentioned that
as a present for her tenth birthday, Plath wanted a diary in which to write each day.
Keeping a record of her thoughts and emotions took many forms, from short stories
to poetry and journal entries, which were an evolving part of Plath’s life from
childhood until her death.
Throughout her high school years, Plath received good grades and earned
recognition and publication as a writer, artist, and editor. Plath’s originality and
poetic arrangement were hidden as she studied and wrote poetry throughout her
college years. The poetic voice of Plath’s college years is generally imitation, which
her professors and peers urged her to develop. Her early college poetry is often
considered “too derivative, too highly schooled, too timid” (Wagner-Martin 85). Yet,
Plath notes in her journal: “There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to
me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me
to grasp it” (Journals 11). “Expectancy” is used for her creative process of
12
reproducing and creating ideas and images. Sandra Gilbert describes Plath’s desire to
express herself in the following passage:
Being enclosed – in plaster, in a bell jar, a cellar, or a wax house – and
then being liberated from enclosure by a maddened or suicidal or
“hairy and ugly” avatar of the self is, I would contend, at the heart of
the myth that we piece together from Plath’s poetry, fiction, and life.
(247-48)
Just after her high school graduation in 1950, her story “And Summer Will Not
Come Again” was accepted for Seventeen magazine and “Bitter Strawberries”
appeared in The Christian Science Monitor as the first national publication of one of
her poems. Her success in publication came after much hard work as creative energy
and confidence emerged within her writing. The distinguishing characteristic of
Plath’s genius is the voice she harnessed in her poetry. She applies the powers of
language, imagery, and emotion. Her poems spill forth onto the page with strength
and imagination. According to Alvarez, Plath perceives how “the violence of the self
could be written about with control, subtlety and a dispassionate but undefended
imagination” (40). Plath’s voice breaks through the words and stands out above the
page. Arranging and directing reaction to her desired effect, Plath controlled her
poetic development. For the pressures of her desired artistic success, Plath knew
writing is “as necessary for the survival of my haughty sanity as bread is to my flesh”
(Journals 157).
In 1950, Sylvia entered Smith College and continued her writing career. In a
1951 journal entry she wrote, “I must be lean & write & make worlds beside this to
live in…” (157). She wrote and published in the college newspaper, in magazines
like Seventeen, Harper’s, and Mademoiselle, and in the international newspaper, The
Christian Science Monitor. Her story “Sunday at the Mintons” won an award in
Mademoiselle’s fiction contest in 1952. In 1953, Sylvia was a “guest editor” at
Mademoiselle. Mademoiselle’s August issue featured several articles by and about
Plath and her poem, “Mad Girl’s Love Song.” She was awarded a scholarship for the
next year at Smith and also to Harvard’s summer school. Again, she won a poetry
prize and earned excellent grades. In 1954 and 1955, she published “Go Get the
Goodly Squab” in Harper’s, and “Parallax” earned an honorable mention in
13
Mademoiselle’s Dylan Thomas Poetry Contest. In January 1955, she submitted her
undergraduate thesis titled The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of
Dostoyevsky’s Novels.
She was accepted to both Oxford and Cambridge Universities in England and in
April 1955. “Circus in Three Rings” was published in The Atlantic Monthly. Sylvia
Plath graduated summa cum laude, and won a Fulbright scholarship. She continued
to write poetry and publish her work in the student newspaper Varsity. At Newnham
College, Cambridge, she studied with Dorothea Krook. In 1956, Plath won the
Glascock Prize for her poem, “Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea.” In
1956, Plath married Ted Hughes. The marriage with a poet makes Plath jealous
because Ted’s works continued to publish at the time Plath faced writer’s block.
Shortly after marrying Ted, Plath noted her desire to be strong female writer,
declaring whatever she writes will demonstrate her procreativity: “My poems and
stories I want to be the strongest female paean yet for the creative forces of nature
[…]. I believe it is destructive to try to be an abstractionist man-imitator, or a bitter,
sarcastic Dorothy Parker or Teasdale” (Letters Home 316).
Plath became tired of dealing with the kids, household chores, and working for a
living, and she tried to focus on her writing. She was an only caretaker, and an
accommodating and serving wife and mother as she writes in her letters: “Ted will
have a study and utter peace by the time I have all my strength back and am coping
with baby and household” (Letters Home 436). Writing at that time created stress and
tension, and she started to feel that she was an inadequate writer whose works were
hardly praised by critics and accepted to be published compared with Hughes:
Last night Ted and I went to a cocktail party at Faber and Faber, given
for W.H. Auden. I drank champagne with the appreciation of a
housewife on an evening off from the smell of sour milk and diapers.
During the course of the party, Charles Monteith, one of the Faber
board, beckoned me out into the hall. There Ted stood, flanked by
T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Louis MacNiece on the one hand and
Stephen Spender on the other, having his picture taken. “Three
generations of Faber poets there,” Charles observed. “Wonderful!” Of
course, I was immensely proud. Ted looked very wonderful at home
14
among the great. (Letters Home 448)
Plath seemed to play her part as a silent and admiring wife at that party. Although
she said she was proud of her husband’s success, his achievement was the thing she
had been working for and was jealous of. On the other hand, her marriage brought
about a significant turning point in her writing as she composed her poetry with her
husband. During their marriage, Plath assisted Hughes by typing, arranging, and
sending out his poems to journals and magazines. Then Hughes’ first book of poetry
was published. Plath wanted her husband to be the creator: “I can appreciate the
legend of Eve coming from Adam’s rib as I never did before; the damn story’s true!
[…] away from Ted, I feel as if I were living with one eyelash of myself only”
(Letters Home 315). Plath wanted to appreciate her husband’s accomplishments;
Hughes was the creator, and she was a part of his creative body. She noted in her
journal that “I got rid of my gloom and sulking sorrows by spending the day typing
sheafs of Ted’s new poems. I live in him until I live on my own” (Journals 185).
During this time, she was living in Ted, she found his poems valuable, and her
writing waits in the background until she could find her own voice.
Hughes assigned her writing exercises, and he tried to challenge her to write and
free herself from worrying about financial stability. With the given assignments,
Plath managed to break her writer’s block. One of the assignments was writing about
the elm tree outside her house in Devon, England. Then she published her poem
“Elm” in The New Yorker.
Trying to find her own poetic voice, she usually worked with a thesaurus when
composing her poems. During those times, she was not able to write with creative
freedom, and the poems were not as confident as her Ariel poems. Yet her earlier
poems led her to explore structure and to master the mechanics of poetry. Later, she
was able to write more skillfully. At that time, her subject matter was mostly steeped
in mythology. She found her subject matter limited and described her struggle with
developing her subject matter: “My main thing now is to start with real things: real
emotions, and leave out the baby gods, the old men of the sea, the thin people, the
knights, the moon-mothers, the mad maudlin, the Lorelei, the hermits, and get into
me, Ted, friends, mother, and brother and father and family. The real world”
(Journals 471).
15
Then, she started to teach at Smith but realized the work was both boring and
overwhelming. In a letter to her mother, Plath listed all of her responsibilities:
This brooding and isolation is something I must avoid. As soon as I
am busy, with a hundred things to do, read, forms to fill out, I function
very happily and efficiently. I am sure that as soon as I get into a daily
routine, I’ll find that I don’t have to spend all my time on class
preparation and correcting papers, and it will be a relief to know we
are discussing only two stories for tomorrow, say, instead of feeling,
as I do now, the abstract simultaneous pressure of the term
challenging me all at once. (Letters Home 326)
She talked about the pressure of the term and she added “[I] am overflowing with
ideas and inspirations, as if I’ve been bottling up a geyser for a year” (Letters Home
336). She was so busy with preparation for the classes she taught and grading papers
that she lost the desire to write under the increasing emotional stress. She became
consumed by writer’s block: “I am stymied, stuck, at a stasis. Some paralysis of the
head has got me frozen” (Journals 272-73). Plath broke her writer’s block by writing
eight poems in eight days during her spring vacation in 1958. In a journal entry from
late 1958 she wrote, “I felt if I didn’t write nobody would accept me as a human
being. Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don’t love me, love my
writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and
reordering the chaos of experience” (Journals 448).
In 1958, Plath worked as a receptionist in the psychiatric unit of Massachusetts
General Hospital, which gave her inspiration and insight for her semiautobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, and in the evenings she took writing seminars
given by poet Robert Lowell, who encouraged Plath to write from her experience; he
gives her confidence to pursue her inner voice and express it publicly. She discussed
her depression with Lowell and her suicide attempts with Anne Sexton, who led her
to write from a female perspective. Lowell offered Plath a different approach for the
creation of poetry that focused heavily on her own personal experiences; he inspired
her to explore herself. Then she started to write confessional poetry which was a
break-through.
Liz Yorke notes that the poetry Plath wrote during that time “symbolizes the
16
aggressive return of the repressed through a dramatic poetry of mythic formulas,
plots and patterns – in which the stage is set for the poet/ woman to introduce her
shrieks, her suffering, her anguish, her murderous fury, her disruptive disorder into
the well-regulated, gendered codes of conventional patriarchy” (81). However, Plath
had always dreamed of ignoring popular models, and she was able to write
remarkably strong and original poems. She had grown and “outgrown the person
who had written in that oblique, reticent way […] she was able to write as from her
true center about the forces that really moved her: destructive, volatile, demanding, a
world apart from everything she had been trained to admire” (Alvarez, The Savage
God 24-25). After ten years of trying, Plath’s “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor” and
“Nocturne” were accepted by the prestigious and well-paying New Yorker.
Ted and Sylvia were introduced in a Mademoiselle article about “Four Young
Poets” in 1959. Previously, she was obstructed by the styles of other poets, and her
real voice seemed to be trapped in a cage; she consistently tried to create poems in
the forms of other poets; she was experimenting with a range of poets’ styles she
admires. Also, Plath was eager to produce poems to be sold. She tried to write poems
that would be liked and praised by readers. Hughes describes her approach:
Nearly all her earlier writings […] suffered from her ambition to see
her work published in particular magazines, and from her efforts to
produce what the market seemed to require. The impulse to apprentice
herself to various masters and to adapt her writing potential to
practical, profitable use was almost an instinct with her […] this
campaign of willful ideas produced everything in her work that seems
artificial. (Journals Foreword xi)
She wanted to write poems which would please everybody and gain acceptance from
a great number of critics. Identifying the relationship between the writer and her
readers in Plath’s poetry, Marni Jackson claims: “In her formal writing Plath
struggled constantly with self-consciousness and her desire to please a certain
audience (she sometimes dreamed in New Yorker typeface). But in her journals she is
all vulnerability: not only is the writer’s love of the world here, but so is the fearful
‘50s woman driven to be everything to everyone” (304). Plath did not want to be just
a poet but to be a published poet and to be heard. Plath asked herself: “Why am I
17
obsessed with the idea that I can justify myself by getting manuscripts published?”
(Journals 33).
Her early tendency was writing on themes and topics that would find her a place
in the market, and she turned her focus into herself and started writing about the
familiar things. Throughout her career she struggled to find her own voice. While
experimenting with different voices, her use of language, image, and tone were still
distinguishing thanks to her sharp eye and challenging sound and poetic structure.
Plath evolved skillfully and masterfully. In her journal entry of May 1959, Plath
expressed her desire to create “a queer, rather smallish place” in literature (Journals
303). Around 1959, Plath decided to write in a more “inward” style, and her real
voice was free to be heard. Recognizing the range of Plath’s perspective, Jacqueline
Rose argues that
Even from inside the space of her writing, Plath offers no singular
form or vision on which such a diagnosis could safely alight. From the
poems to the stories, to letters, to journals, to the novel, what is most
striking is the differences between these various utterances, each one
contradicting as much as completing the others, each one no less true
for the disparity which relates them and sets them apart. (4)
Plath explored and benefited from different subject matters and used them as themes
of her poems. At the same time, she approached each of her themes with a
significantly different tone and form. In Over Her Dead Body, Elizabeth Brofen,
comparing Plath and Anne Sexton, states that
Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton probably come most readily to mind
when one thinks of twentieth-century woman poets who resort to the
topos of the dead woman as muse. They repeatedly invoke their own
suicide attempts, their fascination and desire for death, yet the
apostrophe to the dead muse is addressed to themselves. The imagined
own death makes up the inspirational source and the thematic content
of this poetry. (401)
Sylvia signed a contract with the British publisher, Heinemann, for the publication
of her first book, The Colossus and Other Poems in 1960. Most of the poems in this
collection were written during Plath and Hughes’ visit at Yaddo which is a writer’s
18
residence. When she first arrived at Yaddo, she had not written a poem since April
1959. In September, she began writing tentatively. These poems were written with
strict structure and rhyme schemes. When The Colossus and Other Poems was first
published in October in Britain, some readers had no idea who Plath was. However,
the reviews it received were good. The reviews of her work focused on her technical
skill and the role of gender in literature. Plath was neither considered as the persona
of her poems nor were her poems interpreted or analyzed according to her life.
The Colossus was reviewed and analyzed largely on its merit without being
contaminated by the details of autobiography. In its initial review, The Colossus was
considered to be fine as a first publication of a young poetess. An anonymous review
published in Poetry Review described the book as “a revelation suitcase, bulging,
always accurate, humor completely unforced, wresting a certain beauty from the
perhaps too-often-preferred ugly, but with a control and power of expression
unsurpassed in modern poetry” (Brain 4). Another critic declared that Plath has “a
skill with language that is curiously masculine in its knotted, vigorous quality,
combined with an alert, gay, sometimes whimsical sensibility that is wholly
feminine” (Brain 4). Pamela A. Smith stated, “a crossword puzzle challenge of sound
and poetic structure. In The Colossus, the intellect, that puzzle-solving logic,
overrules emotion” (328).
By October and November 1959, Plath had gained momentum in her writing,
experimenting by shedding her strict structure and rhyme schemes and the new
technique she had learnt in her interaction with Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton.
During 1960, Plath completed some of the poems: “You’re,” “The Hanging Man,”
“Sleep in the Mojave Desert,” “On Deck,” and “Two Campers in Cloud Country.”
During February she wrote seven poems: “Parliament Hill Fields,” “Whitsun,” “Zoo
Keeper’s Wife,” “Face Lift,” “Morning Song,” “Heavy Women” and “Barren
Woman.” Also, she was offered a contract with The New Yorker. She underwent an
appendectomy and her hospital stay inspired the poem “Tulips” at the end of the
month. In March she completed “I Am Vertical,” and her “Magi” appeared in The
New Statesman. She began writing a semi-autobiographical novel about a young
college co-ed who suffers a nervous breakdown. From the spring to the fall, Plath
wrote many more poems including “Insomniac,” “Widow,” “The Rival,” “Stars over
19
the Dordogne,” “Wuthering Heights,” “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” and
“Blackberrying.”
Her first novel, The Bell Jar, was submitted to her British publisher Heinemann.
Around this time, she produced “Little Fugue,” “An Appearance,” “Crossing the
Water,” “Among the Narcissi,” “Pheasant,” “Elm,” “Event and The Rabbit Catcher.”
Plath’s The Colossus and Other Poems was finally published in America in May
1962; however, it received a poor reception and few reviews. During this time Plath
wrote “Words Heard, by Accident over the Phone,” “Poppies in July,” and “Burning
the Letters,” which were about Hughes’ infidelity and affair. Then, she wrote “For A
Fatherless Son” and “A Birthday Present.” Then, nearly in a week she produced “The
Detective,” “The Courage of Shutting Up” and “Bees,” “The Bee Meeting,” “The
Arrival of the Bee Box,” “Stings,” “The Swarm,” and “Wintering.”
She went beyond her expectation and “a smallish place” in literature was not
enough for her, and she declared: “I am a writer … I am a genius of a writer; I have it
in me. I am writing the best poems of my life; they will make my name” (Letters
Home 553-54). In September, Plath and Hughes decided to divorce and start to live
separately because of Ted’s affair. During that time, Plath started to write with the
rush of creative freedom: “Every morning, when my sleeping pill wears off, I am up
about five, in my study with coffee, writing like mad – have managed a poem a day
before breakfast. All book poems. Terrific stuff, as if domesticity had choked me”
(Letters Home 550).
From the second week of October through the first week of November, she
wrote more than twenty-five poems, and all of them were appreciated as the best of
her career. These poems included: “A Secret,” “The Applicant,” “Daddy,”
“Medusa,” “The Jailer,” “Lesbos,” “Stopped Dead,” “Fever 103,” “Amnesiac,”
“Lyonesse,” “Cut,” “By Candlelight,” “The Tour,” “Poppies in October,” “Ariel,”
“Purdah,” “Nick and the Candlestick,” “Lady Lazarus,” “The Couriers,” “Getting
There,” “The Night Dances,” “Gulliver,” “Thalidomide,” “Letter in November,” and
“Death & Co.” Plath arranged most of these poems into a manuscript, Ariel and
Other Poems which she submitted to publishers but were rejected. Later, she added
“Years,” “The Fearful,” “Mary’s Song” and “Winter Trees.” Before her kids got up,
Plath composed these poems early in the morning “at four, that still blue hour, almost
20
eternal, before the children’s cry” (Letters Home 560). Tillie Olsen comments on
Plath’s life at this time:
A woman poet of stature, accustomed through years to the habits of
creation, began to live the life of most of her sex: the honey drudgers:
the winged unmiraculous two-angel, whirled, mother-maintenance
life, that most women, not privileged, know. A situation without help
or husband and with twenty-four hours’ responsibility for two small
human lives whom she adored and at their most fascinating and
demanding. (35)
Then Plath began to work on a new novel, Doubletake (later titled, Double
Exposure) in which the heroine’s husband turns out to be an adulterer. She also wrote
the poems “Brasilia,” “Childless Woman,” and “Eavesdropper”. Afterward, The Bell
Jar was published in England under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, and it received
positive reviews. During January to February 1963 she wrote: “Sheep in Fog,”
“Child,” “Totem,” “The Munich Mannequins,” “Paralytic,” “Gigolo,” “Mystic,”
“Kindness,” “Words,” “Contusion,” “Balloons,” and “Edge.”
Plath’s writings including her journal entries, letters, poems, and short stories
revealed her struggling for poetic progress. Ironically, her posthumous life made
Plath more famous because of the circumstances of her death. Vanessa Curtis asserts
that “The mood of [Plath’s] volume is as different as possible to the dark, desperate
1965 version which made Plath more famous for her death than her life (6). Ted
Hughes was the heir to Plath’s estate because they were still married at the time of
her death and she died without a will. Hughes rearranged her poems in Ariel and
Other Poems, which were published in 1965. In an interview in The Guardian
(Saturday, 13 November, 2004), Frieda Hughes praised her father’s choice of
arrangement of the manuscript:
When Ariel was first published, edited by my father, it was a
somewhat different collection from the manuscript my mother left
behind. My father had roughly followed the order of my mother’s
contents list, taking 12 poems out of the US publication, and 13 out of
the UK publication. He replaced these with 10 selected for the UK
edition, and 12 selected for the US edition. These he chose from the
21
19 very late poems written after mid-November 1962, and three
earlier poems. […] My father read “Event” in the Observer that winter
and was dismayed to see their private business made the subject of a
poem.
Criticizing Hughes’ editorial changes, Sarah Churchwell states: “Hughes’s
reordering, editing and control of virtually all of Plath’s published writing [since it]
renders questionable any claims that her poetry, journals or letters tell her version of
their “story” as she saw it or chose to make it public” (111). Not only did Ted
Hughes rearrange the manuscript of Ariel, he also rewrote and added some other
poems for the publication. In her response to Ted Hughes’ editorial intrusions in “In
Search of the Shape Within,” Marni Jackson comments, “long editorial shadows that
fall over these pages” (76). By contrast, Frieda Hughes, more romantic and idealistic,
empathizes with her father:
He wished to give the book a broader perspective to make it more
acceptable to readers, rather than alienate them. He felt that some of
the 19 late poems, written after the manuscript was completed, should
be represented. “I simply wanted to make it the best book I could,” he
told me. He was aware that many of my mother’s new poems had
been turned down by magazines because of their extreme nature,
though editors still in possession of her poems published them quickly
when she died. (The Guardian)
As stated before, reviews of Plath’s works largely focused on their form and pattern.
However, with the posthumous publication of Ariel and its well-known foreword by
Robert Lowell in the American edition, the approach to Plath’s works and the major
points of criticism started to undergo a significant change. The main focus shifted
away from technical aspects toward her autobiographical details, and Lowell’s
statements in the Foreword contributed to this approach. In the Foreword, Lowell
declared “everything in these poems is personal, confessional, felt, but the manner of
feeling is controlled hallucination, the autobiography of a fever” (vii), and he
describes Plath as being “like a racehorse, galloping relentlessly with risked,
outstretched neck, death hurdle after death hurdle topped” (vii). On Lowell’s
declaration about Plath’s poetry, Tracy Brain observes, “Few critics or readers would
22
dispute the idea that interpretation is affected by foreknowledge. Of course, readers
cannot “un-know” what they know, but the packaging of Plath’s work ensures that
they are predisposed to “know” as much as possible about the connection between
her life and her writing before they even begin to read” (8).
Identifying a major shift in the critical view toward Plath without being aware of
its significance, Rosenthal claims Plath’s first volume of poetry’s “bearing is clearer
and more harshly moving now that Ariel and The Bell Jar have illuminated the mind
behind them for us. I feel rebuked not to have sensed all these meanings in the first
place, for now they seem to call out from nearly every poem” (Wagner 34). Many of
Plath’s poems pull us into their sound, rhyme, and rhythm, and they urge us to read
or listen for the subtle meanings and emotions as they are delivered to us by aural
dictation and language.
Plath’s “Collected Poems” was published in 1981 and posthumously awarded a
Pulitzer Prize in 1982. The voice she harnessed in Ariel is powerful and controlled.
The emergence of Plath’s true voice depended on her precise and conscientious
attention to details and hard work throughout her career. Developing her voice, she
tried out different voices and personas in her poetry. Plath’s persona reconciles the
roles and voices, as we see in “Lady Lazarus,” in which the self is annihilated before
rising. Eventually, she succeeded in expressing her real inner self within the Ariel
poems. Although published posthumously, Plath’s voice is still alive.
23
CHAPTER 2
CONFESSIONALISM
I come to explore the wreck
The words are purposes
The words are maps
I come to see the damage that was done
[...]
this is the place
And I am here...
We dive into the hold
I am she: I am he.
(Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck 23-24)
In the twentieth century, playing on traditional values, many poets were seeking new
techniques and forms in poetry. In contrast to traditional poetry based on
impersonality, confessional poets try to develop and find new ways to express
themselves through poetry. In the mid-1920s, confessional poetryF emerged as an
innovation and a new kind of experimental attempt in American poetry. The
development of confessional poetry, therefore, is a new trend in contemporary
American poetry. As a literary movement, confessional poetry was embraced by a
number of poets in the 1950s and ‘60s who were called “confessionals.” The Oxford
Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms defines the term:
Confessional poetry: an autobiographical mode of verse that reveals
the poet’s personal problems with unusual frankness. The term is
usually applied to certain poets of the United States from the late
1950s to the late 1960s […]. Other important examples of
confessional poetry are […] Sylvia Plath’s poems on suicide in Ariel
(1965). […] its distinctive sense depends on the candid examination
of what at the time of writing were virtually unmentionable kinds of
private distress.
According to Diane W. Middlebrook, the only confessional poets are Robert Lowell,
24
Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and W.D. Snodgrass. She argues for limiting the
confessional label to these four writers based on the enormous number of
commonalities among the group:
What they had in common were several definitive social conditions.
First, they had developed close personal affiliations. Lowell was the
teacher and mentor of Snodgrass, Sexton, and Plath, who also knew
each other’s work very well. Second, they had all been through early
psychological breakdowns and treatment, following rather early
marriages. Third, all four poets had become parents – of daughters, as
it happens – not long before writing their confessional poems. Finally,
they understood the dynamics of family life in terms of Freudian
psychoanalysis. (636)
The modern techniques that confessionals used gave them fame and popularity.
Confessional poetry is blended with the poet’s inner psychology and directly related
with their lives and personal experiences. Describing the content of confessional
poems, Christopher Beach states: “The poems were presented in the first-person
voice with little apparent distance between the speaker and the poet; they were highly
emotional in tone, autobiographical in content, and narrative in structure” (154-55).
Using aesthetic forms and styles, the confessionals try to reveal something about
their lives to show and share with others. Confessionals use their own personal
experiences or major personal traumas, depression, and relationships as a source of
their works. However, they do not just record their emotions on paper; craft and
construction are also important to their work. Joyce Carol Oates suggests that intense
psychological dramas were often risky for poets but “a delight” for their readers
(“Death” 133). Therefore, the subject “I” becomes the central and explicit expression
of private life, and confessional poets express themselves through themes such as
madness, alcoholism, liberation, sexuality, and despondence. Thus, the works of the
Confessionals unite us to explore the details in the texts about poets. Beach explains:
The appeal of confessional poetry was heightened by its seemingly
direct portrayal of poets’ tempestuous lives. In fact, it was often the
biographies of the confessional generation as much as their poetry that
attracted the attention of scholars, critics, and readers. Plath,
25
Berryman, Anne Sexton, and Delmore Schwartz were all suicides, and
Jarrell attempted suicide. Other confessionals experienced problems
with alcoholism (Lowell, Bishop, and Berryman), emotional
breakdowns and depressions (Lowell, Berryman, Bishop, Plath, and
Sexton), and divorces (Lowell, Berryman, Jarrell, and W.D.
Snodgrass). (155)
Confessionals use spontaneous language, and they show the creation of new poetic
forms and content. In confessional poetry, poets reflect their personal stories in their
works. For that reason, intimate connections between poets and their texts are easily
found. Therefore, there is a strong tie between the poets and the topics they choose.
The symbols, signs, motifs, and other elements of their poetry are intentionally
selected to reflect their personal experiences and their outcomes. However, “There
can be no simple, definitive reading of Sylvia Plath’s poetry or of her life. Only by
accepting that contradictions exist in a dialectical relationship with each other can we
move beyond a dead-end ‘reading to find out the truth’ kind of process” (Bassnett
33). Throughout her career, Plath experimented with different styles. First, she began
writing about nature. At college, she was interested in traditional poetic forms, and
she mostly wrote sonnets. Then she experimented with confessional poetry, not as a
place for her to share her personal experiences and thoughts, but as a new stage to be
explored with candor and art. Moreover, by means of the style and the structure,
Sylvia Plath’s poems are really different from traditional poetry. She writes free
verse with run-on lines, minor stresses, irregular rhyme and irregular rhythms and
meter: her poems rhyme like a “beat” in music, and as Nims suggests, we are “caught
into the rhythm” (151). There is rhythmic richness in Plath’s poetry. Additionally,
she enriched each of her poems with metaphors and figurative language.
26
CHAPTER 3
IDEAS ON POETRY: FORM AND CONTENT
Poetry distinguishes itself from other forms of discourse. Poets project their inner
world into something textually constructed, and it is called poetry. In the poem, the
poet constructs the structure, and the speaker –who sometimes differs from the real
poet because the poet imagines and creates the personas she wants. The descriptive
expressions in the imagery, structure, meter, and other elements of the poetry serve
to spotlight the poet’s ego, and the expression of the individual self is a primary
source for information and inspiration. The confessional poets focus on the self; they
write and express their thoughts and feelings. They express painful personal
experiences and emotional suffering, and they expose their private selves. According
to Julia Kristeva, elements of the semiotic – rhythm, sound, nonsense words,
obscenities – deepen the understanding of the relation between language and pain.
Intense emotions like rage, defiance, fear, and jealousy are defining characteristics of
Plath’s poetry. She tries to restage her emotional experience in her poems through
rhythm and sound –especially in her Ariel poems.
In traditional poetry, words are arranged in a rhythmic pattern with regular
accents, and they are carefully selected for sound, accent, and meaning to express
imaginatively ideas and emotions. Each poem has rhythm, melody, imagery, and
form. Poetry follows patterns of sound: it uses rhythm, rhymes, meter, and
alliterations. Plath uses assonance, consonance, alliteration, along with free verse
rhythms. Poetry should include and consist of rhythm, figurative language, and
harmony; otherwise it would neither be a poem nor different from prose, because
they are inseparable parts of poetry. It is a text with a regular or irregular rhythm; it
may be metrical, and creates images. M.H. Abrams defines rhythm as “a
recognizable though variable pattern in the beat of the stresses in the stream of
sound” (Glossary 101). The pattern of beats is a regularly arranged order of stressed
and unstressed syllables. English meter is based on combinations of stressed and
unstressed syllables, and these form feet. However, Plath’s poems are free verse
which has no metrical pattern but depends on the natural cadences of speech. Plath
focuses on the sound and rhythm of words and writes many of her poems with
27
unstressed syllables followed by stressed ones. Like music, poems have melody
through sound devices. A poet chooses words both for their sound and their
meanings. Rhythm is a kind of sound device that contributes to melody and the
musical quality of poetry. Plath’s poems have rhythm, her language is rich and
versatile, there is a harmonious structure in her poems, and her concepts are
remarkable.
Using assonance, consonance, alliteration and rhyme, Plath creates melodious
structure. For example assonance can be seen in “Lady Lazarus.” Plath writes,
“Soon, soon the flesh/ The grave cave ate will be/ At home on me.” The use of
alliteration and consonance is found in “The Dead”: “Couched in cauls of clay as in
holy robes/ Dead men render love and war no heed.” Examples of consonance are
also seen in “Death & Co.”: “I do not stir./ The frost makes a flower./ The dew
makes a star.” Another example is from “Cut:” “O my/ Homunculus, I am ill./ I have
taken a pill to kill:” in these lines “ill” rhymes with “pill” and “kill.” In one poem,
Plath employs rhyme with alliteration, assonance, and consonance. For example, in
“Medusa,” the use of assonance starts from the beginning: “Off that landspit of stony
mouth-plugs” (line 1). The roughness started with “o” sound continues in the poem.
The sound used in each line is rough, not fluid. Each word appears as a separate
phrase. “Eyes rolled by white sticks,/ Ears cupping the sea’s incoherences” (lines 23). There is alliteration in the second stanza: “Plying their wild cells in my keel’s
shadow,/ Pushing by like hearts” (lines, 7-8). Both alliteration and rhyme with “r”
consonance convey the speed and power of the poem: “Red stigmata at the very
center,/ Riding the rip tide to the nearest point of/ departure” (lines 9-10). There is
alliteration is in the following stanza in lines 11 and 12: “Dragging their Jesus hair./
Did I escape, I wonder?” The use of consonant and vowel sound highlights the
strong dependence of sound in the poem: “My mind winds to you” (line 13). There
is assonance created with “e” sound in the following line: “Keeping itself, it seems,
in a state of miraculous repair” (line 15). Then alliteration and assonance are used
together: “In any case, you are always there” (line 16). In the next line, there is
assonance “e”: “Tremulous breath at the end of my line” (line 17). There is repetition
of vowel and consonant sound in lines 18, 19, and 20: “Curve of water upleaping/ To
my water rod, dazzling and grateful,/ Touching and sucking. In the next stanza, the
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repetition of the same sentences and phrases increase the power of the poem: “I
didn’t call you./ I didn’t call you at all” (lines 21-22) and “Nevertheless,
nevertheless” (line 23). The sound of “ea” suggests the speed of the poem: “You
steamed to me over the sea” (line 24). The use of assonance can be seen in the
following lines: “Fat and red, a placenta” (line 25). In the next stanza, there is
alliteration of the “b” sound: “Squeezing the breath from the blood bells” (line 28).
The next line starts with assonance of “e” and “o” sounds: “Overexposed, like an Xray./ Who do you think you are?” (lines 35-36). The following lines show the use of
assonance of “a” and “o” sounds and alliteration of “b” sound together: “A
Communion wafer? Bluberry Mary?/ I shall take no bite of your body,/ Bottle in
which I live” (lines 37, 38, 39). “Berry” rhymes with “Mary” and “body.” “Take”
rhymes with “bite.” There is a repetition of “s” sound and assonance of “a” sound
through the last stanza: “Ghastly Vatican/ I am sick to death of hot salt/ Green as
eunuchs, your wishes/ Hiss at my sins” (lines 40-43). Also, there is assonance of “o”
and “e” sounds in the last stanza: “Off, off, eely tentacle!” Although Plath’s poems
are written in free verse, they have melodious structure created by various forms of
rhyme, alliteration, assonance and consonance.
Kristeva states Plath is a poet who is “disillusioned with meanings and words,
who took refuge in lights, rhythms, and sounds” (The Kristeva Reader 157). For
Plath, rhythm becomes a means of expression. According to Kristeva, Plath’s
language evokes the materiality of language, and we are enveloped by the sound and
rhythm. On the nature of poetry, Kristeva indicates:
Poetic language is distinct from language as used in ordinary
communication – but not because it may involve a so-called departure
from a norm; it is almost an otherness of language. It is the language
of materiality as opposed to transparency (where the word is forgotten
for the sake of the object or concept designated), a language in which
the writer’s effort is less to deal rationally with those objects or
concepts words seem to encase than to work, consciously or not, with
the sound and rhythms of words in transrational fashion. (Desire 5)
The Colossus received relatively good reviews and the poems in this collection are
extolled because of their perfect form and pattern. Furthermore, the collection shows
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careful skill with poetic meter, rhyme, and sound. Plath offers herself as a poet of
controlled form. Kathleen Spivack recalls Plath’s poems as “very tightly controlled,
formal, impenetrable” and “without the feeling that was later to enter them” (214).
Sometimes, this collection is observed as “a little too careful and calculated,” but
the craftsmanship behind the poems is always praised. E. Lucas Myers, in his review
entitled “The Tranquilized Fifties,” comments that there “is not an imperfectly
finished poem in Sylvia Plath’s book. She is impressive for control of form and tone,
appropriateness of rhythmic variation within the poem, and vocabulary and
observation which are often surprising, and always accurate” (Wagner 31). The
Colossus also shows a wide variety of poetic meter, rhyme, and sound. Urging
readers to study The Colossus, John Nims urges: “Notice all the stanza-forms, all the
uses of rhythm and rhyme; notice how the images are chosen and related; how
deliberately sound is used” (136).
Plath coordinates stanza forms, rhythm, and rhyme together to make her poems
effective. She consciously relates images and names, and she also uses sound to
create poetic impact. Rhythm, language, and harmony can occur in poetry, separately
or combined; Plath uses all of them in many of her poems. While writing The
Colossus, Plath experimented and expanded her previous styles and techniques, and
developed her later works. For example, “Full Fathom Five” has a traditional format.
It shows a tightly controlled verse structure. It seems that Plath uses strict forms to
maintain control over her poetry.
The poem is made up of fifteen stanzas. The rhyme scheme is aba bcb cdc
except for the 21st line. It comes nearly in the middle of the poem. The poem has
strong stresses and is full of trisyllabic substitution, as well. The poem depicts a
“father-sea-god muse” through hesitant and fearful eyes. Plath describes her father as
an “old man” with “white hair, white beard, far-flung,/ A dragnet, rising, falling, as
waves/ Crest and trough” (1, 4-6). The father appears as a mythic character, or more
likely as a mythic ghost-like figure. Jahan Ramazani states that “he holds within his
web […] the secret story of his daughter’s origins, he retains absolute power over
her, preventing her from turning fear into rebellion or from drawing strength from
her occluded origins” (1145). He threatens to overwhelm the daughter as his
“dragnet” hair stretches out “miles long” and “extend the radial sheaves” (5, 6-7).
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The poem shows a speaker on the edge of self-discovery. However, there is hesitancy
in the structure of the poem: “Plath protects herself with a coldly formal tone,
diction, and syntax, nearly freezing the poem’s momentum with clotted alliterations
and impeded rhythms” (1145).
The poems in Ariel are generally based on the effects of rhythm and sound, and
are unforgettable for their subject matter, voice, metaphor, and frenzied production.
Some of them rely on traditional meter but they highly depend on rhythm and sound
for their effect and meaning. On Plath’s dependence on traditional meter, Bassnett
claims: “Sylvia Plath’s carefully crafted earlier poems had given way to other kinds
of structuring, most notably the patterning of sounds. These poems, after all, were
written to be read aloud” (108). Rhythm and sound transmit meaning in poetry.
Harvey Gross explains rhythm as a cognitive element created or recognized by
“rhythmic consciousness”:
Rhythm is neither outside a poem’s meaning nor an ornament to it.
Rhythmic structures are expressive forms, cognitive elements,
communicating those experiences that rhythmic consciousness alone
can communicate: emphatic human responses to time in its passage.
(Sound and Form in Modern Poetry 10)
Rhythmic consciousness suggests that we recognize rhythmical patterns in poems
generally without realizing it. According to Gross, “The mind interprets prosody as
feeling, whether we name as feeling crude sensation, violent emotion, or the most
delicate of responses to the outside world” (16). Rhythmic patterns are recognized by
the mind as meaning and emotion, and a sense of rhythm and sound accompanies the
emotional side of a poetic passage. Poetry cannot occur without rhythm, language,
and harmony.
Plath’s works have the basic formal elements, and her poems are effective
thanks to these elements. Furthermore, the poems in Ariel are different from her
earlier works and demonstrate a great deal of poetic growth, development, and
refinement. Even Plath herself is aware that she is creating something new and
different from her earlier works, but she worries about their originality at the same
time. She notes that “I wonder about the poems I am doing. They seem moving and
interesting, but I wonder how deep they are. The absence of a tightly reasoned and
31
rhythmed logic bothers me. Yet it frees me” (Journals 326). For example, Plath’s
best-known poem, “Daddy,” is accepted as the poem where Plath declares her love
and hatred against her father because of emotional deprivation of a father figure from
her childhood.
“Daddy” became one of her best-known poems because it can be used as a proof
that the father-daughter relation is the primary source for Plath’s writing process. She
herself announced in a BBC interview in October 1962 that “Daddy” was “spoken by
a girl with an Electra Complex. Her father died while she thought he was God” (The
Cambridge Companion 38). Her father had a poignant and prolific impact on her
work. According to Lajos Székely:
Psychoanalytic and psychiatric literature contains several descriptions
of cases where anniversaries of painful and conflictual events in an
individual’s life possess crucial significances, as in the loss of an
ambivalently beloved person. Individuals who seem to function well
and to enjoy sound inner stability can suddenly suffer a mental
breakdown on anniversaries: neurotic or psychotic symptoms are
manifested. (115)
Scholars have tried to find out the facts about her descent and her thoughts about her
father. They generally connect the use of words, symbols, and metaphors with
Plath’s family and life. However, many of these scholars have missed something.
Any poem may be written under the influence of its writer’s life experience. Plath
was a highly sensitive person, and what she encountered in life had an undeniable
effect and influence on her writing: “I think my poems come immediately out of
sensuous and emotional experiences I have. I believe one should be able to control
and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, and should be able to
manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind” (Rosenblatt
13).
While the language is dark and violent, it also contains coded meanings. Hughes
comments directly on Plath’s coded language: “I would have cut out ‘Daddy’ if I’d
been in time (there are quite a few things more important than giving the world great
poems). I would have cut out others if I thought they would ever be decoded”
(Winter Pollen 167). The reference to “decoding the meaning of the poems” suggests
32
that Hughes is not pleased with the general approach of the scholars who interpret
the meaning of the poems according to Plath’s biography. Plath shows us in her
poetry more than the secrets of her life: she spends much of her precious time on
mastering her style. Therefore, I prefer to analyze her poems according to the formal
aspects of her poetry.
When we observe and analyze the formal elements of “Daddy,” Plath writes the
poem with unstressed followed by stressed syllables that echo the heartbeat. Also,
the poem is written in the song rhythms that echo nursery rhymes which often
depend on nursery rhyme for their fast-moving cadences. The use of nursery rhymes
is important because it puts us directly into the world of a child, which depends on
the aural imagination, on rhythm and sound rather than the sense of language.
“Daddy” has an astounding emotional range within the persona’s voice. Stevenson
suggests that “The wizardry of this amazing poem is that its jubilant fury has a
sobbing and impassioned undersong. The voice is finally that of a revengeful, bitterly
hurt child storming against a beloved parent” (264).
As in “Lady Lazarus,” Plath connects her childhood memories with
comprehension of the world as a grown woman. Yet, she still appears as an old child
who looks for love and attention and finds nothing because the father as a desired
object is lost. She wants to be her father’s daughter. For Calvin Bedient, her longing
to be father’s girl is the root of Plath’s poetic project: “Her romanticism was her wish
to live, if at times only in that touchingly qualified transcendence (located on no
one’s map of earth or heaven) where she could be born again as her father’s little
girl” (3). Helen Vender argues that
Poems like “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” are in one sense
demonically intelligent […] and in another, and more important, sense
not intelligent at all, in that they willfully refuse, for the sake of
cacophony of styles (a tantrum of style), the steady centripetal effect
of thought. Instead they display a wild dispersal, a centrifugal spin to
further and further reaches of outrage. (4)
Connecting both “Daddy and “Lady Lazarus,” Frieda Hughes states:
The collection of Ariel poems became symbolic to me of this
possession of my mother and of the wider vilification of my father. It
33
was as if the clay from her poetic energy was taken up and versions of
my mother made out of it, invented to reflect only the inventors, as if
they could possess my real, actual mother, now a woman who had
ceased to resemble herself in those other minds. I saw poems such as
“Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” dissected over and over, the moment
that my mother wrote them being applied to her whole life, to her
whole person, as if they were the total sum of her experience. (The
Guardian)
Van Dyne notices in both “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” that Plath is constantly
dealing with male figures on which she is dependent:
In the worksheets, the ire of this poem is directed not at the
monolithic brute of “Daddy” but at multiple forms of male authority;
many more are named in the drafts than in the finished poem: enemy,
professor, executioner, priest, torturer, doctor, God, Lucifer. What
Lady Lazarus suffers is not male brutality but the gendered
asymmetry of her relationship to power in which her role is always
defined as dependent and defective: to male professor she is student;
to executioner, criminal: to priest, sinner; to doctor, patient. (54)
So far, “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” are analyzed and compared with each other.
Both of these poems have the same theme, images, symbols, and language. Along
with “Mary’s Song,” they are called “Holocaust poems.” In these poems, Plath
identifies herself with the Jew suffering under the Nazi regime as a victim of the
Holocaust. For references to “Jew,” “Nazi,” and the “Holocuast” in “Daddy,”
Marjorie Perloff thinks that Plath’s “identification with the Jews who suffered at
Auschwitz has a hollow ring” (173). In contrast to Perloff’s opinion, George Steiner
evaluates that “Daddy” “achieves the classic act of generalization, translating a
private, obviously intolerable hurt into a code of plain statement, of instantaneously
public images” (“Dying Is an Art” 218). Helen Vendler argues that Plath’s subject
matter is not narrow: “What is regrettable in Plath’s work is not the domestic
narrowness of her subject matter […] but the narrowness of tone” (The Music of
What Happens 276). She further states that “Plath has another narrowness, too – her
scrupulous refusal to generalize, in her best poems, beyond her own case” (276).
34
For the formalistic aspect of the poem, Alvarez articulates the aural genius of the
poem, which “works on one single returning note and rhyme, echoing from start to
finish “You do not do, you do not do/ …/ I used to pray to recover you/ …/ Ach, du.”
Alvarez continues, “There is a kind of cooing tenderness in this which complicates
the other, more savage note of resentment” (“Sylvia Plath” 66). Alvarez recognizes
that “cooing” is a perfect expression for describing hatred and pain. There are eighty
lines, and forty-two end in an ‘oo’ sound like the words “through,” “you,” “blue,”
“do,” and “shoe,” creating a sonic landscape that contains almost a beat, a rhythmic
march through the words. “Connors agrees, drawing a curious parallel: ‘the heavy
rhyming, repetition and simple iambic pentameter [of ‘Daddy’], reflects some of the
books of Dr. Seuss, one of Plath’s favorite childhood authors” (Kathleen Connors
139).
In the German tongue, in the Polish
Daddy
town
You do not do, you do not do
Scraped flat by the roller
Any more, black shoe
Of wars, wars, wars.
In which I have lived like a foot
But the name of the town is common.
For thirty years, poor and white,
My Polack friend
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Says there are a dozen or two.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
So I never could tell where you
You died before I had time –
Put your foot, your root,
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
I never could talk to you.
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
Big as a Frisco seal
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
Where it pours bean green over blue
I could hardly speak.
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I thought every German was you.
I used to pray to recover you.
And the language obscene
Ach, du.
An engine, an engine
35
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
Any less the black man who
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I think I may well be a Jew.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer
And get back, back, back to you.
of Vienna
I thought even the bones would do.
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my
But they pulled me out of the sack,
weird luck
And they stuck me together with glue.
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc
And then I knew what to do.
pack
I made a model of you,
I may be a bit of a Jew.
A man in black with a Meinkampf
look
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your
And a love of the rack and the screw.
gobbledygoo.
And I said I do, I do.
And your neat mustache
So daddy, I’m finally through.
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
The black telephone’s off at the root,
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You –
The voices just can’t worm through.
Not God but a swastika
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two
So black no sky could squeak through.
–
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The vampire who said he was you
The boot in the face, the brute
And drank my blood for a year,
Brute heart of a brute like you.
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
There’s a stake in your fat black heart
A cleft in your chin instead of your
And the villagers never liked you.
foot
They are dancing and stamping on
But no less a devil for that, no not
you.
36
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m
through.
“Daddy” is accentual free verse based on principle of stres but does not follow
formal meter with slack and stressed syllables. Accentual meter generally has heavier
stress than regular metrical verse, and there is often a pause or caesura at or near the
center of the line. The first line “You do not do, you do not do” increases the pace
and then stops in the next line with the spondee, and this rhythm creates an angry
tone. Also, “Daddy” has heavy stresses: “You do not do, you do not do/ Any more,
black shoe/ In which I have lived like a foot/ For thirty years, poor and white,/ Barely
daring to breathe or Achoo” (stanza 1), “Daddy, I have had to kill you./ You died
before I had time--/ Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,/ Ghastly statue with one gray
toe/ Big as a Frisco seal” (stanza 2), “I used to pray to recover you./ Ach, du” (line
14-15), “In the German tongue, in the Polish town/ Scraped flat by the roller/ Of
wars, wars, wars” (lines 16-18) and the last line of the fourth stanza and the first line
of the fifth stanza are divided parts of a full sentence: “My Polack friend/ Says there
are a dozen or two.” The other anapestic lines go through the poem. About the effect
of anapests, John Nims claims: “Probably not since the Assyrian came down like a
wolf on the fold has there been so high a proportion of anapests in an important
collection of poems” (148). The example of anapests can be observed in line eleven:
“And a head in the freakish Atlantic,” in line twenty-one: “In the German tongue, in
the Polish town,” in line sixty-six: “And a love of the rack and the screw.” They
show how the lilting rhythm creates tension.
The lines, like “A man in black with a Meinkampf look,” and “There’s a stake in
your fat black heart,” contain anapestic substitutions. In the first stanza, Plath
addresses herself as a foot and her father as a shoe “black shoe/ In which I have lived
like a foot.” The symbolism of shoe and foot is brilliant; we see that Plath uses
ordinary objects and makes them significant. To Plath, her father is a shoe which is
protective and she is a foot in this shoe feeling herself secure. At the same time, the
foot recalls the sense of being trapped in a shoe. The color black symbolizes Plath’s
depressive feelings against her father because he is experienced with the absence of
light: her father died and left her in the dark. Plath tries to show her physical pain and
emotional suffering through meter, and it shows us that expression of pain in
37
symbolic language is possible. Moreover, she illustrates her painful situation; she is
like a child vulnerable to danger and seeking for protection, but at the same time she
is aging; she is trapped in the shoe for thirty years. Elaine Scarry explains the
connection between language and pain in the following passage:
Whatever pain achieves in part through its unsharability, and it
ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language […]
Virginia Woolf writes: “let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head
to a doctor and language at once runs dry.” True of the headache,
Woolf’s account is of course more radically true of the severe and
prolonged pain that may accompany cancer or burns or phantom limb
or stroke, as well as of the severe and prolonged pain that may occur
unaccompanied by any nameable disease. Physical pain does not
simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an
immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and
cries a human being makes before language is learned. (4)
According to Scarry’s argument, pain activates pre-verbal expressions, and it suggests
Plath represents her pains as a catalyst in rhythm. In the second stanza, Plath refers to
her father as a God-like figure, which is always present, like an omnipotent God.
Though her father is dead, his memory haunts her. Then her father appears as the
Devil, because the memories about him never leave Plath in peace. As an emotional
person, Plath feeds on her feelings. She chases her inner self and reflects her feelings
and emotions which she enriches with figurative language in her poetry. Her father has
a decisive impact on her life; therefore, he became a major theme and figure in Plath’s
poems. The presence of her father is clearly visible, and usually overpowers any of the
other character in her poetry.
Susan Gubar claims that a “bag full of God,” a “Ghastly statue,” an “Aryan” blueeyed “Panzer-man” with a “neat mustache,” “Daddy” deploys all the regalia of the
fascist father against those robbed of selfhood, citizenship, and language, for the
speaker’s stuttering tongue is “stuck in a barb wire snare. / Ich, ich, ich, ich, / I could
hardly speak.” The daughter confronts a symbolic order in which the relationship
between the fragile “ich” and the overpowering rational and linguistic authority of
Daddy frustrates any autonomous self-definition” (203-4). Expressing the subject “I”
38
in German illustrates both visually and aurally the feeling of disconnection between
the signifier (the word) and the signified (the self). The sense of empowerment is
strengthened by the repetition of “ich.” For the line, “Ich, ich, ich, ich” shows that
Plath recognizes her own otherness. Jacqueline Rose observes this line as an attempt to
“outline the conditions under which that celebrated loss of the symbolic function takes
place […] Irruption of the semiotic […] immediately transposes itself into an alien,
paternal tongue” (226-27).
There are a lot of repetitions of the same words or the phrases throughout the
poem: “You do not do, you do not do” in the first stanza, “Of wars, wars, wars” in
the forth stanza, “Ich, ich, ich, ich,” in the sixth stanza, “An engine, an engine” in
the seventh stanza, “And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack” in the eighth stanza,
“Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You” in the ninth stanza, “The boot in the face, the
brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you” in the last two lines of the tenth stanza, “And
get back, back, back to you” in the twelfth stanza, “And I said I do, I do” in the
fourteenth stanza, and “If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two” in the fifteenth
stanza. Repetition generally shows relation between similar words and makes
readers notice the familiarity, but repetition of a single word or phrase creates an
opposite effect and causes de-familiarization. Repetition breaks open the relation
between the signifier and the signified, and it shows how the gap widens and words
become unfamiliar and gets away from the objects they intend to name.
The more a word is repeated, the more obscure the meaning becomes. Even the
sound of a word becomes unfamiliar. Plath addresses her defamiliarization with the
line “I have always been scared of you,/ With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.”
“Gobbledygoo” is the abbreviated form of “gobbledygook,” which refers to a
convoluted obscure language that is hard to understand or even incomprehensible.
Plath admits that “I could hardly speak” because the language she uses is already
on the edge of fracturing. Thus, “The black telephone’s off at the root,/ The voices
just can’t worm through.” Labeling “Daddy” as “a poem of total rejection,” Robert
Phillips notes:
When she writes that “the black telephone’s off at the root,” she is
turning her back on the modern world as well. Such rejection of
family and society leads to that final rejection, that of the Self. Her
39
suicide is everywhere predicted, in poems of symbolic annihilation
such as “Totem” and in statements of human fascination with death.
(3.2)
As a poet, Plath fractures the language with German words, and she pushes the
limits of language as well. This unfamiliar language creates confusion in the poem.
She uses German words not with literal meanings, but she Americanizes the words
and switches the meaning. “Achoo,” in the last line of the first stanza is the sound of
a sneeze. In the last line of the third stanza, “ach” is an expression of sorrow,
mourning, or grief, and “du” means “you.” The repetition of “ich” in the sixth stanza
addresses the subject “I.” Luftwaffe in the ninth stanza is the German air force and
“panzer” in this stanza means a “tank” but Plath combines this word with “Panzerman.” “Meinkampf” in the thirteenth stanza can be read in two words; “Mein kampf”
meaning
“My
Battle”
or
“My
Struggle”
which
is
an autobiographical manifesto by Nazi leader Adolf Hitler. The use of German
words, and newly created half-German and half-English words like “Panzer-man”
and “Meinkampf look” disrupt linguistic function by obscuring the relation between
the signifier and the signified. Plath blurs the boundaries and disrupts the stability of
language. She deconstructs words and meanings. Paul de Man explains the
importance of understanding the deconstructive nature of language:
The reading is not ‘our’ reading, since it uses only the linguistic
elements provided by the text itself; the distinction between author
and reader is one of the false distinctions that the reading makes
evident. The deconstruction is not something we have added to the
text but it constituted the text in the first place. A literary text
simultaneously asserts and denies the authority of its own rhetorical
mode, and by reading the text as we did we were only trying to come
closer to being as rigorous a reader as the author had to be in order to
write the sentence in the first place. Poetic writing is the most
advanced and refined mode of deconstruction; it may differ from
critical or discursive writing in the economy of its articulation, but not
its kind. (“Semiology and Rhetoric” 17)
Moreover, Plath gains authority and control over her father. In Plath’s “Daddy,”
40
Roger Platizky argues that Plath is “trying to make his hold on her history,
personality, identity, and destiny illegitimate” (106).
“Daddy” is the poem in which Plath shows her lack of shame as she pours out
herself, and she finds comfort and resolution while writing. In “The Poetics of
Torture: The Spectacle of Sylvia Plath’s Poetry,” Lisa Narbeshuber argues: “‘Daddy’
makes the invisible visible, the private public […]. Plath stages a public trial, turning
the commonplace into spectacle, revealing form as deformity, the natural as
commodity, domestic life as torture” (188). For me, what is obvious in the poem is
Plath’s feeling of abandonment as she angrily cries out,
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time -Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
In the first line, Plath declares that she has to kill her father although her father is
dead. There is a contradiction here because in the physical world there is no sign of
her father, but mentally she is not able to get rid of her father and her memories and
her feeling of abandonment. She has been obsessed with her father’s absence for so
long, and now it is the right time to forget and kill the image in her mind. Plath refers
to her father as “Ghastly statue with one gray toe/ Big as a Frisco seal.” Plath
represents her father as an isolated body part –“one gray toe” – to destroy his power
and control his image.
Moreover, Plath minimizes the power of the memories of her father with the
wierd “Frisco seal.” Kristeva connects this kind of fantasy of dismemberment with a
desire to control the lost object for which the subject mourns: “melancholy
cannibalism […] accounts for this passion for holding with the mouth […] the
intolerable other that I crave to destroy so as to better possess it alive. Better
fragmented, torn, cut up, swallowed, digested […] than lost” (Black Sun 12). The
father figure is presented as less than human. In this poem, Plath’s language is
encoded to express subversive ideas in a playful language and imagery, and it is the
language of the suppressed Other who feels herself an outsider and who needs an
indirect way to question the power structure. Like Freud, Kristeva links
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dismemberment to fetishism connected with mourning and denial:
Fetishism appears as a solution to depression and its denial of the
signifier; with fetishists, fantasy and acting out replace the denial of
psychic pain (of pain’s psychic representative) following upon the
loss of biopsychic balance due to object loss. The denial of the
signifier is shored up by a denial of the father’s function, which is
precisely to guarantee the establishment of the signifier. Maintained in
his function of the ideal father or the imaginary father, the
depressive’s father is deprived of phallic power. (Black Sun 45)
Some critics say that “[Plath] accentuates linguistically the speaker’s reliving of her
childhood. Using the heavy cadences of nursery rhyme and baby words such as
‘chuffing,’ ‘achoo,’ and ‘gobbledygoo,’ she employs a technical device similar
to Joyce’s in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where the child’s simple
perspective is reflected through language” (Concerning Poetry 11:1).
Also, we see Plath’s success in the choice of words and their use. “I have had to
kill you” flashes another idea here. She does not say “I wish I could kill you” or “I
wanted to kill you.” She says “I have had to kill you” because her father is not
literally dead for Plath. Since her father is still alive in her mind, it defines Plath’s
current feelings. However, the next line continues in the past simple tense: “You died
before I had time,” and Plath combines the past and the present which are not strictly
separated for her. Plath sees the past and the present simultaneously and jumps in
time. The critic Robert Phillips writes:
Finally the one way [Plath] was to achieve relief, to become an
independent Self, was to kill her father’s memory, which, in “Daddy,”
she does by a metaphorical murder. Making him a Nazi and herself a
Jew, she dramatizes the war in her soul […]. From its opening image
onward, that of the father as an “old shoe” in which the daughter has
lived for thirty years – an explicitly phallic image, according to the
writings of Freud – the sexual pull and tug is manifest, as is the degree
of Plath’s mental suffering, supported by references to Dachau,
Auschwitz, and Belsen. (3.2)
For the formal structure of the poem, we observe that the poem is written
42
in quintains with free verse and irregular rhyme. It consists of sixteen verses of five
lines each. A recurring rhyme is a pattern that appears more often than the other
rhyming patterns in the poem. More often in the poem, there is a steady beat of
stressed and unstressed syllables and line rhymes and internal rhymes that give the
impression of military marching. The rhymed lines end with a strong beat except line
six. The sixth line, “Daddy, I have had to kill you,” ends in a feminine ending. The
former word, “daddy” has a strong beat but the latter one has a weak beat. In lines 31
and 32, “An engine, an engine/ Chuffing me off like a Jew,” the rhythm gives the
impression of a train. There is synchrony of rhythm in the last stanza, and the
recurring rhyme cause a forceful end to the poem. In line 76, there is a triple
assonance and consonance strong stresses, and it makes a sort of echo, “fat black
heart.” In line 77, the end syllables of “villagers” and “never” are eye rhyme. In line
78, “dancing” and “stamping” rhyme with initial strong beats. In line 79, “knew”
rhymes in a strong position with the recurrent “you,” “do” and “two.” In the last line,
all with initial strong positions “Daddy, daddy” contradicts with “bastard” in a strong
position, and “through” fulfills the recurrent rhyme. The strength of the poem mainly
comes from rhythm.
Harris says; “we hold rhythm to be an inseparable adjunct of poetry, and meter a
separable adjunct” (xxii). Rhythm, language, or harmony can create a poem alone or
separately and that is true for Plath’s poetry. Harris tells us that “Words must succeed
each other musically, but they need not succeed each other in set fashion, or in lines
of fixed length” (xxii). Poetry does not necessarily require strict form, meter, or
verses; it can be prosaic if it still has rhythm. Plath’s poems in The Colossus are
perfect in form and they all have rhythm and rhyme. For example, the syntax of “The
Stones” is direct, and it can be seen in the beginning of the poem:
This is the city where men are mended.
I lie on a great anvil.
The flat blue sky-circle
Flew off like the hat of a doll
When I fell out of the light. I entered
The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard.
The voice Plath uses in this poem is different from her earlier poems, and the
43
directness of her statements is obvious. Also, the syntax of the poem is clear and
direct. Ted Hughes thinks that “The Stones” is “unlike anything that had gone before
in her work” and that “throughout the poem what we hear coming clear is the nowfamiliar voice of Ariel” (“Sylvia Plath and Her Journals” 114). According to Hughes,
“The Stones” marks “the turning point” of Plath’s writing career (114) and sees it as
a poem that dates Plath’s discovery of “her real poetic voice” (74).
The Stones
I suck at the paps of darkness.
This is the city where men are mended.
The food tubes embrace me. Sponges kiss
I lie on a great anvil.
my
The flat blue sky-circle
The jewelmaster drives his chisel to pry
lichens away.
Open one stone eye.
Flew off like the hat of a doll
When I fell out of the light. I entered
This is the after-hell: I see the light.
The stomach of indifference, the wordless
A wind unstoppers the chamber
cupboard.
Of the ear, old worrier.
The mother of pestles diminished me.
Water mollifies the flint lip,
I became a still pebble.
And daylight lays its sameness on the wall.
The stones of the belly were peaceable,
The grafters are cheerful,
The head-stone quiet, jostled by nothing.
Heating the pincers, hoisting the delicate
Only the mouth-hole piped out,
hammers.
Importunate cricket
A current agitates the wires
Volt upon volt. Catgut stitches my fissures.
In a quarry of silences.
The people of the city heard it.
A workman walks by carrying a pink torso.
They hunted the stones, taciturn and
The storerooms are full of hearts.
separate,
This is the city of spare parts.
The mouth-hole crying their locations.
My swaddled legs and arms smell sweet as
Drunk as a foetus
rubber.
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Here they can doctor heads, or any limb.
Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.
On Fridays the little children come
The vase, reconstructed, houses
The elusive rose.
To trade their hooks for hands.
Dead men leave eyes for others.
Ten fingers shape a bowl for shadows.
Love is the uniform of my bald nurse.
My mendings itch. There is nothing to do.
I shall be good as new.
Plath does not use any compound sentences. The poem consists of free verse
rhythms. Lines and stanzas are slightly shorter than Plath’s earlier poems. Kenner
calls this “the first free-fall poem.” According to Kenner, “The Stones” no longer
pretends to exhibit “a sassy phrase-maker’s control and commenced spewing out
family secrets” just like the poem “All the Dead Dears” (72). Instead, “The Stones”
“installs itself at a bound in the madhouse of six years before” (Kenner 74). The
poem is free verse but the rhyme scheme of the poem is abb caa dcc eff gee hgg. It
remains steady to the end. The metaphors used in the poem are profuse. The lines are
set apart where the body and the physical world separated from the mind: in lines 56, “When I fell out of the light. I entered/ The stomach of indifference, the wordless
cupboard.” In lines 9-10, “The stones of the belly were peaceable,/ The head-stone
quiet, jostled by nothing.” In lines 20-21, “The jewelmaster drives his chisel to pry/
Open one stone eye.” In lines 23-24, “A wind unstoppers the chamber/ Of the ear,
old worrier.” In lines 36-37, “On Fridays the little children come/ To trade their
hooks for hands.”
The first line of the poem, “This is the city where men are mended,” gives the
impression of mechanical life where people are seen as objects to be mended. The
poem is about her suicide attempt, and it demonstrates the parallel with the speaker’s
resignation to the idea of return or rebirth. Plath had recently discovered Theodore
Roethke’s poems, and especially “A Birthday Present” is an imitation of his poetry.
In his essay “Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath” in The Art of Sylvia Plath,
Hughes states:
[Plath] was reading Paul Radin’s collection, African Folktales, with
great excitement. In these, she found the underworld of her worst
nightmares throwing up intensely beautiful adventures, where the
45
most unsuspected voices thrived under the pressures of a reality that
made most accepted fiction seem artificial and spurious. At the same
time, she was reading – closely and sympathetically for the first time
– Roethke’s poems. The result was a series of pieces, each a
monologue of some character in an underground, primitive drama.
(192)
Van Dyne highlights this poem as the beginning of the Ariel poems: “In late
September, Plath drafted the poems that sought to reclaim a powerful poetic voice
for herself […]. Beginning with ‘A Birthday Present’” (Revising Life 9).
The poems in Ariel are written in free verse, which has its own kind of rhythm
and rhyme. Since English is an accentual language, stressed and unstressed word
pattern is intrinsic to the language so that any line consists of stressed and unstressed
syllables and creates a musical effect. For example, “Elm,” written in free verse, has
fourteen stanzas of three lines each, composed of varying line lengths. The poem is a
dramatic monologue in which Plath personifies objects, and the speaker of the poem
becomes a tree. The elm is perceived as a woman in labor.
Elm
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?
Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.
All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
46
Echoing, echoing.
Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.
Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.
The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.
I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
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Is it for such I agitate my heart?
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? –
Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.
Plath uses three pronouns; “she,” “I,” and “you” which are the divided selves of an
identity in three separate characters. The first line, which is one of the longest lines in
the poem, starts: “I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root.” The
image of the elm occurs as a woman who knows “the bottom,” which can be the
essential nature of truth through personal experience. The length of the first line
seems to represent the bottom. The third line has two sections of equal length: “I do
not fear it: I have been there.” In the second stanza, the speaker has knowledge of
truth in herself, and this knowledge is represented by the image of the sea. The
phrase
“the
voice
of
nothing”
alludes
to
Shakespeare’s
famous
lines
from Macbeth (1606): “sound and fury,/ Signifying nothing.” The poet creates an
atmosphere of maddened sound and fury to unfold bitter experience.
Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?
Line six brings the feeling of nothing into itself. The speaker declares love “a
shadow,” and it is irretrievable as the sound of the hooves of a horse running away,
as indicated in the ninth line: “Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a
horse.” Line 12 sounds out, “Echoing, echoing.” I show stressed syllables in italics.
Line 14 has a caesura, marked by a comma in the middle: “This is rain now, this
big hush.” Lines 20 and 21, “A wind of such violence/ Will tolerate no bystanding:
I must shriek,” have stress on their final syllables and the shriek is set off from the
rest of the line. Line 24 has a choppy rhythm, but the next line returns to
smoothness: “I let her go. I let her go.” In line 27, there is a strong beat, “How your
48
bad dreams possess and endow me.” In line 29, there is a cry, “Nightly it flaps
out.” In line 30, there is assonance of two different “o” sounds, “Looking, with its
hooks, for something to love.” The bottom is described as “All day I feel its soft,
feathery turnings, its malignity,” in line 33. There is a sharp division in mid-line of
35 showing off the irretrievable qualities: “Are those the faces of love, those pale
irretrievables?” The thirteenth stanza shrinks in feet: “I am incapable of more
knowledge.” Then it turns back the seven foot line, and at the bottom of the last
stanza, the speaker talks about fear: “It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow
faults.” It shows the slowness and the sentence continues on to the next line. In the
last line of the poem, there is sharpness of rigid unstressed followed by stressed
syllables: “That kill, that kill, that kill.” Analyzing Plath’s repetition of words in
three poems, Patricia Hampl writes:
Without the saving metaphor of the journey, which does not explain
anguish but rather gives it location and renders it potentially useful as
metaphor, the road of the pilgrim soul is an exhausting conveyor belt,
leading nowhere but back to a repetition of wished-for embarkations.
Even that stylistic habit of Plath’s, the triple beat of the verb or of
central nouns, seems, in this light, not so much an insistence as an
impotent stutter: [...] “These are the isolate, slow faults/ That kill, that
kill, that kill.” – “Elm”” (25)
The structure of the poem is coherent. There is a chain reaction of imagery or verbal
associations: “Horse” in stanza 3 and “gallop” in stanza 4 are paired; “sound of
poisons” and “arsenic” are used in stanza 5; “atrocity of sunsets,” “scorched,” and
“red filaments” are used together in stanza 6; and “shriek” in stanza 7 and “cry” in
stanza 10 are linked with each other.
“Elm” was written under the influence of Theodore Roethke. It is important to
understand that Plath is an innovative artist who writes effective poems. She tries
new trends and styles to enrich her poems. In the poem “Elm,” Plath develops the
Roethkean system of relation between nature and the human. She makes the elm
speak in a human voice, and the images of the tree change through different
circumstances. The poem shows Plath’s observation of nature with the elm as the
controlling image of the poem; however, other images like the sea and the moon are
49
abundant. The sea symbolizes conflict and distress. Plath uses the moon image in
some of her other poems, and it works in two ways: as a symbol of barrenness, and
as the moon goddess. There is the image of the snake developed by “sound of
poisons” and “snaky acids kiss,” which evoke the image of Medusa. Also, there is a
great deal of artistic and philosophical vision within this poem. “Elm” does not
rhyme much at all, but still retains a musical quality.
Whether poetry is accentual or syllabic, rhymed or blank; formal or free, it never
loses its contact with language. Poetry is something both meaningful and musical; it
is rhythmical and it also makes sense to readers, and the music of poetry does not
exist apart from meaning. According to A. Alvarez, “The Moon and the Yew Tree”
is one of her major transitional pieces. It shows a change in Plath’s style and
approach to poetry.
The Moon and the Yew Tree
Th s is the l ght of the m nd, cóld and plánetár(y)
The trées of the m nd are bláck. The l ght is blúe.
The grásses unlóad their gr efs on my féet as f I were Gód
Pr ckling my ánkles and múrmuring of théir hum litý
Fúmy, sp ritous m sts inhábit this pláce.
Séparáted fróm my hóuse by a rów of head(stones).
I s mply cánnot sée where there s to gét (to).
The móon is no dóor. It s a fáce in its ówn r ght,
Wh te as a knúckle and terr blý úpset.
It drágs the séa áfter it l ke a dárk cr me; it is qúi(et)
With the Ó-gápe of compléte despáir. I l ve (here.)
Tw ce on Súnday, the bélls stártle the ský –
E ght gréat tóngues aff rming the Résurréc(tion)
At the énd, they sóberlý bóng out théir námes.
The yéw trée póints úp, it hás a Góthic shápe.
The éyes l ft áfter t and f nd the móon.
50
The móon is my móther. Śhe is not swéet like Már(y.)
Her blúe gárments unloóse smáll báts and ówls.
Hów I would l ke to beliéve in tendernéss –
The fáce of the éffigý, géntled by cán(dles,)
Bénding, on mé in part culár, its m ld éyes.
I have fállen a lóng wáy. Clóuds are flówer ng
Blúe and mýstical óver the fáce of the stárs
Ins de the hurch, the sáints will áll be blúe,
F oating ón their délicate féet óver the cóld péws,
Their hánds and fáces st ff with hólinéss.
The móon sees nóthing of this. She is báld and w ld.
And the
essagé of the yéw trée is bláckness – bláckness and s l(ence.)
“The Moon and the Yew Tree” is iambic which alternates between pentameter and
hexameter, and ending on a heptameter. It has four stanzas of seven lines each with
each line formed of five to seven unstressed followed by stressed syllables. There is
no end rhyme or alliteration. It seems Plath wrote the poem spontaneously from her
feelings. Line 1 starts with trochee and has a combined foot. The second line consists
of iambic stress. Line 3 and 4 has a loose iamb with extra slack syllable. The fifth
line is trochaic, with one unstressed syllable added to foot two, and an unstressed
syllable turned into a stressed syllable in foot five, and it appears as trochaic
pentameter:
│Fúmy│sp rit│ous m sts│in háb │ it th s pláce.│
The first thing we realize while reading this poem is the power of rhythm.
Also, the third line is filled with consonants made by exhaling breath like a
hissing sound with f, s, is, i, h and th:
F umy, sp i r i tou s m ist s i n h ab it th is place.
Plath never totally abandons the powerful techniques of traditional poetry but they
become secondary to the spontaneity of the poem. There is assonance and
consonance as well as alliteration, but obvious end rhyme is avoided. Yet, mists and
this are put skillfully in the same line near internal rhymes. In lines 12 and 13, sound
preempts visual imagery: “Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky–/ Eight great
51
tongues affirming the Resurrection.” The first syllable of the line is in a strong
position. Then the following lines keep a regular beat pattern until line 21, where the
imagination of the moon interacts with the speaker, “Bending, on me in particular, its
mild eyes.” Lines 21-25 give a black and cold backdrop to the poem:
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews […].
The poem returns to its stiff regular beat. The last line finishes with regular seven
feet with two stresses on final syllables, and it echoes the blackness and silence of
the setting.
Plath wanted to create something new and submerged traditional patterns to
create her own poetic style: “Throughout The Colossus she is using her art to keep
the disturbance, out of which she made her verse, at a distance. It is as though she
had not yet come to grips with her subject as an artist. She has style but not properly
her own style” (Alvarez 58). Yet Plath reaches her own style with the poems in Ariel
and she reflects her own style properly throughout her poems. Therefore, as readers,
we must both know the technical details of traditional poetry and develop new
insight for understanding Plath’s style and her new techniques, which include poems
tangled in “a crossword puzzle challenge of sound and poetic structure” (Pamela A.
Smith 328) Thus, we must not merely look at stanzas and lines as a whole but also
we must consider the effects of single consonants, or even a half of a consonant.
Plath used form and structure to portray her message. Rhythm and rhyme of the
poem, and personification and symbols are the elements that convey the meaning.
Hence, Edgar Allan Poe’s statement, “Poetry is the rhythmical creation of beauty in
words” is true for Plath’s poetry.
Rhythm and sound carry meaning in poetry, and the cognitive process is fulfilled
by rhythmic patterns. Harvey Gross states that rhythm is a cognitive element which
is produced and recognized by what he calls “rhythmic consciousness.” Gross
explains that “Rhythm is neither outside a poem’s meaning nor an ornament to it.
Rhythmic structures are expressive forms, cognitive elements, communicating those
experiences that rhythmic consciousness alone can communicate: emphatic human
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responses to time in its passage” (10). Gross states that rhythm is not separate from
meaning, and it is not an ornament to just make a poem seem nice. Readers expect to
see the rhythmic patterns in a poem, and according to the concept of rhythmic
consciousness, readers first recognize the rhythmic pattern of poems, even if
unconsciously. Additionally, some poems are written to be sung and some to be
spoken, and the whole poem does not need to be wholly melodious. The work of the
poet is to arrange and create something out of a rich combination of words.
Some poems are closer to music than other poems. Before reaching expressions and
meaning in words, a poem should have a particular rhythm. A poem or a part of a poem
combines rhythm and meaning through words. Experimenting with language, Plath
mixes words as if they were colors. Plath comments on her writing style: “Technically, I
suppose the visual appearance and sound of words, taken alone, maybe much like the
mechanics of music […] or the color and texture in a painting” (The Unabridged
Journals 88). As T.S. Eliot points out, “this rhythm may bring to birth the idea and the
images” (38); before expression and meaning, there is always rhythm and melodious
structure, and even the ideas and images of a poem emerge with rhythm. For Plath,
sound and image come first, and then meaning. Gross emphasizes that “The mind
interprets prosody as feeling, whether […] crude sensation, violent emotion, or the most
delicate of responses to the outside world” (16). In Plath’s case, rhythmic intensity
accompanies and develops thematic emotion; thus, rhythmic patterns are recognized
before meaning and emotion in her poems. The emotional strength of her poems is
conveyed by rhythm and sound.
Writing on language and literature, Julia Kristeva sees them as modes of
signification. Words operate as general signifier and they signify a situation to
express the speaker’s particular desires, needs, or emotions. Kristeva writes on the
connections between emotional intensity, especially pain and depression. She talks
about non-referential language, which includes rhythm and sound along with other
preverbal forms of expression. Her theory of the semiotic explains the relation
between pain and nonverbal language. According to Kristeva’s semiotic theory, we
experience constant drives or pulsations expressed or felt as rhythms, sounds, and
other non-verbal patterns. We cannot express metalinguistics, but we can study
rhythm, sound, repetition, alliteration, nonsense and the like as the manifestations of
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the semiotic (The Kristeva Reader 13).
Also, emotional intensity is held by rhythm and sound as expressions of nonsymbolic language. Thus, we might come across various representations of the
semiotic as there is a link between pain and rhythm in Plath’s poetry, so that the
poems with the most painful themes are based on rhythm and sound for their
meaning and effect. An exaggerated sense of rhythm and sound seem an inseparable
part of Plath’s poems. The rhythmic patterns Plath uses are particularly violent and
accusatory, and the intensity depends on Plath’s rhythms that show pain and
suffering. Rhythm appears to be a way to control pain and emotions. Kristeva notes
that “poetic language by its very economy borders on psychotic” (Desire in
Language 125). She does not refer to all poetry, but she addresses a particular kind of
language:
In the first echolalias of infants as rhythms and intonations anterior to
the first phonemes, morphemes, lexemes, and sentences […] it is later
reactivated as rhythms, intonations, glossalalias in psychotic discourse
[…] it produces […] “musical” but also nonsense effects that destroy
not only accepted beliefs and significations, but, in radical
experiments syntax itself […] We shall call this disposition semiotic,
meaning […] a distinctive mark, trace […] imprint, in short a
distinctiveness
admitting
of
an
uncertain
and
indeterminate
articulation because it does not yet refer (for young children) or no
longer refers (in psychotic discourse to a signified object. (133)
In Black Sun, Kristeva equates art with madness and depression. The relation
between the semiotic and depression seems a bit complicated. The moments of loss
and pain as an experience of intense emotions like sadness, frustration, or alienation
emerge as a form of depression. Kristeva’s theory suggests that Plath’s works should
be read as “conquered depression” instead of observing them as a declaration of
suicide or suicidal depression:
When the struggle between imaginary creation (art, literature) and
depression is carried out precisely on that frontier of the symbolic and
biological we see, indeed, that the narrative of the argument is ruled
by primary processes. Rhythm, alliterations, condensations shape the
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transmission of message and data. That being the case, would poetry
and more generally, the style that bears its secret and imprint bear
witness to a (for a time being) conquered depression? (Black Sun 65)
Plath’s depression has long been debated among scholars. Her inner psychology
triggered her to express her feelings and thoughts intensely. Rhythm, alliteration, and
concentration transmit message; writing emerges as a way of expressing emotion.
Poetry picks up word combinations that have “symbolic meaning.” Poetry orders its
words and sounds in a way that can mimic rhythmic delight or evoke shrieking,
pleading, enticing, or enact the calm of a lyric.
Poetry is artistic and emotional experience, so true poems must be written with
passion. For Plath, writing poetry itself is passion, and she expresses herself through
poetry. In her journal she writes that “I will write until I begin to speak my deep self,
and then have children, and speak still deeper” (165). As Plath acclaims, writing is a
lifelong process and she writes to express her deep inner self. She may have other
plans and expectations from life like having children, but she aims to write under
every condition because writing is her life and passion. Poems can give a sense of
morality and instruct people about how they should live their lives, but this is less
important than poetry’s element of pure beauty. Nothing should stand before an
emotional and soulful experience of a poem: the primary purpose of poetry is to
present beauty and emotion, and it can teach morality as long as it stays loyal to its
primary purpose. Besides, there are many beautiful things in nature, but just
describing beautiful things is not enough: a poet has to make readers experience
these beautiful things on an emotional level; a poet should write to readers’ hearts,
minds, and souls. Passion addresses the heart, duty the conscience, and truth the
mind.
Moreover, a poem should be at an acceptable length to be understood. In The
Colossus, many of the poems are written with regular stanza length and have three,
four, or five lines per stanza; just one poem, “The Thin People,” has two lines per
stanza, and nine of the poems have six or more lines per stanza. Terza rima, with a
rhyme scheme: aba bcb cdc, is used four times. Some of the poems have a rhyme
scheme but do not have a particular rhythmic pattern and repetition. Twenty of the
poems lack specific rhyme patterns because Plath has used eye rhyme or half rhyme
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or slant rhyme. For example, “Yaddo: the Grand Manor,” is written in terza rima.
Also the poem has such slant rhyme as “speaker/ clear,” “bean/ pumpkin,” “pools/
crawls,” “studios/ compose,” “fireplace/ sleighs,” “post/ toast,” and “window/ snow.”
At the same time, through the beauty of nature, the poem must have an
emotional effect upon readers to be a rhythmic creation of beauty. The words of a
poem should be the rhythmical creation of beauty. Technically, being concerned with
the syllabic system, Plath wrote six poems in The Colossus with traditional prosody.
Poetry should be rhythmical because rhythm is a part of its nature. The change in
stanza structure is obvious throughout The Colossus especially in the poems she
wrote while teaching at Smith College: the stanzas are shorter and the most
significant change comes in experimentation with stanza structure and meter.
Art provokes the technique and skills behind the artist’s ability to represent an
object. Plath’s writing is based on her ability and her hard work to improve her skill
in poetry. “Since writing was for her a craft, something that could be improved by
hard work and concentrated effort, it is unfair to compare poems written at such
different stages of her development of that craft” (Bassnett 47). Art is a conscious
process; therefore, it can be claimed that behind Plath’s poetic ability. There is
always her conscious mind because she has been working on every detail of her
poems. Also, distortion and disfigurement are intentional and are not caused by lack
of skill; what an artist does is all intentional. The content of art is conscious, and the
artist’s duty is to create the content from consciousness. The content is in the artist’s
consciousness – it does not occur out of nowhere – and the structure and the
techniques used by the artist are intentional: “one thing is very clear from Sylvia
Plath’s experiments with form – she conceives of poetry as word-craft, as a medium
through which experience can be shaped and represented” (Bassnett 50-51).
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CHAPTER 4
POETIC STYLE AND AESTHETIC QUALITIES OF PLATH’S
LANGUAGE
There is generally little consideration of Sylvia Plath’s poetic style while
studying her poems. “A confessional poet, an extremist poet, a post-romantic poet, a
pre-feminist poet, a suicidal poet – all these terms have been used (and are still being
used) in attempts to define and explain Sylvia Plath’s writing” (Bassnett 117). Since
it is easy to interpret her works as the product of a psychotic woman who feeds from
her uneasiness, the major tendency and the standpoint from which to understand
Plath’s poetry has always been her biography. However, from a broader perspective,
the realities of her biography limit interpretation and comprehension of her poetic
style in general. Plath is the only writer to win the Pulitzer Prize posthumously. As
Susan Van Dyne disputes, “Because the poems and novel that have made Plath’s
name came to almost all her readers as posthumous events, her work has inevitably
been read through the irrevocable, ineradicable and finally enigmatic fact of Plath’s
suicide. The challenge for her biographers has been to puzzle out the relationship not
merely of her life to her art, but of her art to her death” (3). Since she gained much
popularity after her death, both critics and readers of Plath search for clues or facts to
help them understand why she died in such a horrible circumstance. Robin Peel tells
us:
The problem is that as new readers encounter her work there is
enormous pressure on them to interpret “specific time” and place in
terms of Plath’s known life story, as if she were a character from
some epic drama such known life story, such as Gone With the Wind.
So much general reporting has discussed Plath’s work as the
interiorizing of experience dictated by the politics of personal
relationships, that other possibilities have been overshadowed. This
tendency has been fuelled by the succession of biographies,
newspaper articles, documentaries, and films which explore her life.
The Plath industry tends to distort Plath’s own writing, for the endless
discussion of her relationships make it difficult to locate the published
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work in other frames, in other contexts. (18)
The disadvantage of this search is that it overlooks her poetry and underestimates
her poetic and artistic style in the search for biographical information. Her
biographical data should not dominate readings of her works. As Alvarez writes in
The Savage God: “the suicide [of Plath] adds nothing at all to the poetry” (40). Thus,
I separate Plath from a consideration of her poetry and poetic style.
Interpreting her poetry according to her biography just gives an impression
about what her life conditions and psychology are like. “Sylvia Plath, like the rest of
us, was a complex human being full of contradictory impulses and feelings and,
perhaps more honestly than many of us, she recorded those contradictions in her
work” (Bassnett 34). Her life is history, not aesthetics. Moreover, poetry is not
psychoanalysis, but art. Surely, her life conditions have an effect upon her writing
and creativity, but her poems are more than confessions about her life and her inner
psychology. “Better to read the poems, as Ann Sexton suggests, for their own sake,
for what they say to those who read them, rather than in an attempt to use them in the
making of the text that is Sylvia Plath’s life” (Bassnett 20). In a word, even though
Plath’s life experiences affected her, the poet behind the work is important and
illuminating to some degree. Susan Van Dyne argues that Plath had a talent and
desire to recreate her life experiences in her poetry:
I see Plath’s creative choices in the poems as at once symptomatic and
strategic, symptomatic in that they suggest her culture’s powerful
shaping influence on her imagination, yet strategic in that they
represent her effort to rewrite her lived experience in a poetics of
survival. In her poetry Plath’s goal was to rewrite her life; in her
practice, I argue, we can understand how she also revised the very
notion of ‘woman.’ (5)
Poetry, as Alicia Ostriker observes, is not “some kind of sterile swabbed tissue of
language uninfected by the poet’s life and incapable of infecting the reader’s life”
(Wagner 98). Additionally, her life experiences may prevent us from seeing the
whole picture of what her poetry does. In sum, her biographical data is a supplement
to her poetry, not a component. Her poems have figurative language and aesthetic
elements that mesmerize readers. Also, readers do not need to know the historical
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background of a writer although the biography may help us to understand why the
writer chose her topics. “Examining Plath’s life does, indeed, illuminate one’s
understanding of her work, for much of the imagery and attitudes and events one
finds in Plath’s poetry and fiction have their genesis in her life experience” (Barnard
13). Her life may provide topics or themes for her poems, and readers can understand
why she has chosen these subjects. Still, a closer evaluation of her poetic style is
needed. While examining Plath’s poetic style, my main consideration will be on
figurative language, rhythm, and their aesthetic effect upon readers. I will start with
metaphors and symbols as parts of figurative language.
1. Metaphors and Symbols
Without considering the philosophical origin and function of metaphors, writers
in literature use language to share both ordinary and sublime thoughts. Metaphors
mix aesthetic appreciation with cultural or personal experience. Metaphors give
different dimensions to Plath’s poems as she employs a wealth of metaphors to
express her thoughts. Plath is consciously immersed in symbolism. In the
introduction to Collected Poems, Ted Hughes refers to Plath’s “supercharged system
of inner symbols and images” as “an enclosed cosmic circus” which is evident in
“even her very early poetry” (16). In her use of metaphor, we can observe not only
their necessity as a means of expressing the concepts and feelings that she wants to
transfer to her readers, but also the tool through which she manages to free her
thoughts from the binding dichotomies embedded in language.
In Plath’s poetry, metaphors have an essential cognitive role, as she uses
metaphors and other figures of speech for rhetorical purposes: “Reading her works
today, we read them as part of the text that also comprises her letters, Journals, and
biography, but even if we did not have access to all this additional material, there
would still be clear lines through the poetry, in terms of imagery, theme, patterning
and language” (Bassnett 67). Establishing the cognitive role and recurrence of
metaphors in Plath’s poetry does not imply a search for an unchanging core of her
thought.
Metaphor in Plath’s poetry is a useful tool for navigating the complexity of her
thoughts. The range of representations she provides is vast and well-organized.
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Figures of speech produce images. It can be in many forms but the literal meaning of
words are affected by rhetorical methods. Literal meaning (denotation) of words may
appear synonymous, figurative meaning (connotation) of the words can be different,
and figures of speech work in the same way. To generalize, there are three kinds of
figures of speech: comparisons, substitutions, and ambiguities. To analyze Plath’s
poetry we must consider Plath’s use of figures of speech. Analogy, metaphor, simile,
personification, allusion, allegory, and symbolism are classified under the title of
comparison. We can observe these rhetorical and poetic devices in Plath’s poetry.
Carl Jung describes symbols as “natural attempts to reconcile and reunite
opposites within the psyche” (90). According to Jung, the symbol relies on two levels
of meaning. On the one hand, it is familiar; on the other, it “possesses specific
connotations in addition to its conventional and obvious meaning” and implies
something vague, unknown, or hidden below the surface (Jung 3). Plath’s use of
metaphor is seen as the center both in the formation and formulation of her thoughts
and writings. Plath heavily relies on her experiences, and she consciously invokes
visions of her experiences – both from her father and from her children. The symbols
she employs exhibit various degrees of her imaginary projection from mythological
figures to figures in real life.
From a different perspective, interestingly the term “confession” by itself is also
metaphorical because it is a term generally used in a religious context, where it
means admitting having done something wrong and confessing one’s sins to a priest.
However, confessionals are not necessarily religious or related to a crime or sin.
Miranda Sherwin points out: “The poet becomes the sinner, the poems become acts
of penance, and the readers become priests. This latter role is at once the most
interesting and the most troublesome, as it obliges readers to judge poets for their
sins” (25). Confessional poets openly reflect and express what they have lived, seen,
and suffered. Middlebrook argues, “Confessional poetry […] is an act of creation,
performed not for the poet’s sake alone (in the sense that confession is good for the
soul) but for the sake of art itself: to make poetry more inclusive” (65).
Comparing Plath to Augustine, Emma K. Hrobsky states:
Plath confesses first in the sense that Augustine did, in which
confession is an examination of the location of God within the
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individual and the relationship between the mortal and the divine. As
she performs this confession, Plath testifies to her conception of the
individual’s smallness before a vast and indifferent universe and the
ambiguous God that might rule over it. In this confession, she asserts
the inextricability of the self and knowledge of the self from the
context of the sublime. But where Augustine confesses a faith in God,
Plath confesses a faith in poetry and the self-making of poesis. For
Plath, poetry possesses the power to make a new, literal reality that
undoes the subjections of her lived one, chief among these that
subjection to language and the traumatic conception of difference
upon which it operates. (35-36)
Another point is that metaphors originate from the study of biblical literature. “It
cannot be overemphasized, however, that in practice man has always used metaphor
to give expression to abstract concepts. This is true of authors of the books of the Old
Testament” (Nelly Stienstra 19). Biblical literature uses a mix of realistic narrative
and imagistic poetry as it addresses the deepest concerns of humanity. Religious
discourse introduces the issues concerning meaning and understanding through
metaphors. Both the term confessional poetry and the use of metaphors have
religious references. Although Plath is not religious, writing is something religious
and spiritual to her. She expresses her point of view in her journals: “Writing is a
religious act: it is an ordering, a reforming, a relearning and reloving of people and
the world as they are and as they might be. A shaping which does not pass away like
a day of typing or a day of teaching. The writing lasts: it goes about on its own in the
world” (Journals 436). With the help of writing, Plath reconstructs meanings and the
life she dreams of; she relearns and re-loves people and the world. For her, writing
shapes and re-shapes the world; it is everlasting
Again, confessionals do not confess their sins but they openly express and reveal
the most private and secret subjects about their personal lives. Indeed, it is also
connected with religion because religion has the same effect as confessional poetry.
In religion, while confessing one expresses the most shameful experience or the most
terrible sin he has committed and asks for forgiveness from God. The person reveals
everything to a religious man, and at the same time he is psychologically relieved. It
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can be claimed that confessional poetry has the same effect on poets. The poet puts
the reader in the place of the religious man who is sacred and she confesses
everything to the reader. While revealing the secrets about their lives, they are also
psychologically relieved. About the function of a literary work, Kristeva says
“literary (and religious) representation […] has a real and imaginary efficacy:
belonging more to the order of catharsis than of elaboration, it is a therapeutic
method used in all societies throughout the ages” (“On the Melancholic Imaginary”
9).
For Plath, writing poetry is a therapeutic exercise: it helps her to relax or to feel
better about the things and situations that have made her unhappy. Thus her poetry
becomes central to her life, and she finds mental stability and solace while writing
poetry. She defines her poems as “antidote”: “My poems are so far in the background
now. It is a very healthy antidote” (Unabridged Journals 491). Also, poems are
important to Plath since they make her thoughts free, as Plath notes: “I wonder about
the poems I am doing. They seem moving, interesting, but I wonder how deep they
are. The absence of a tightly reasoned and rhythmed logic bothers me. Yet frees me”
(Unabridged Journals 521). As Plath herself indicates, she needs to write because
her poems are indicative of her understanding of the world and her life; she seeks a
kind of shelter and refuge in writing. She applies the confessional technique to her
poetry to release thoughts and feelings, so “the organic connection between herself
and the text that would ‘speak of her’ was a crucial trope” (Axelrod 146). Therefore,
Plath’s poetry could not have emerged without the life experiences that influence her,
and metaphors and symbols are tools for her to display her artistic power to create
and produce her art.
Related with that point, her use of metaphor shows her power of language. Paul
Ricoeur says that “We are prepared to inquire into the power of imagination, no
longer as the faculty of deriving ‘images’ from sensory experiences, but as the
capacity to let new words build our self-understanding. This power would not be
conveyed by emerging images but by emerging meanings in our language.
Imagination, then, should be treated as a dimension of language. In that way a new
link would appear between imagination and metaphor” (110). Thus, the power of
imagination comes from the power of language, and images derived from sensory
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experiences produce new meanings in language.
Also, the link between the imagination and metaphor provides a new dimension
to language. Metaphor is the true maker of language (Walker Percy 96). Metaphors
open minds and nurture imagination. Hence, Plath enriches her imagination and
language with metaphors and she creates new meanings with them because
“metaphor is a primary tool for understanding our world and ourselves; entering into
an engagement with powerful poetic metaphors is grappling in an important way
with what it means to have a human life” (Lakoff and Turner xii).
For Plath, metaphor is a rhetorical device as a figure of speech, but at the same
time it enhances thought. Metaphors not only carry new ideas or information but also
they operate the similarity. “Metaphors create new meanings of various types;
without them, neither knowledge nor language can grow. Without cognitively based
linguistic devices to juxtapose the old in unfamiliar ways, new ways of thinking and
new expressions for those thoughts cannot emerge” (MacCormac 206).
Metaphor not only enhances literal statements but also produces insight. Plath’s
poetry is like a prism – each word and line has a facet. “The recently (re)discovered
truth that metaphor is not just a decorative device, but that metaphors express truths
that cannot be expressed otherwise, has always been tacitly and even unconsciously
assumed by speakers and writers who wanted to convey an abstract or metaphysical
concept” (Nelly Stienstra 19). Thus, apart from the ornamental function of metaphor,
it is a powerful cognitive device. Metaphors are also stylistic elements and affect
both speaking and writing. They function as a rhetorical means. Rhetoric is the art
and skill of using language and words effectively, and rhetorical language can be
grand and impressive. Most important, metaphors express ideas that cannot be stated
in plain language without losing the meaning. As Black indicates, “a metaphor
consists in the presentation of the underlying analogy or similarity” (35).
Metaphor is complex and open-ended because it not only uses existing
similarities but also creates new ones throughout linguistic creativity. Therefore,
Plath accepts metaphors and symbols as an everlasting source to create her own
images. For example, “Lazarus” is a character in the Bible, but she twists the
meaning and creates her own metaphor imposing femininity and calls it “Lady
Lazarus,” so that Lazarus becomes not a symbol of a man reborn after death, but
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something new and different. Thus Plath produces her own imaginary through her
art.
As previously emphasized, metaphors have an essential role in Plath’s poetry.
One of the commonly-used metaphors in Plath’s poetry is pregnancy. Plath develops
the metaphors of pregnancy, labor, fertility, and barrenness. Some of Plath’s poems
that share these themes are “Childless Woman,” “Barren Woman,” “Munich
Mannequins,” “The Fearful,” “The Rival,” “Three Women” and “The Other.” During
her early years of her marriage, Plath begins to worry about not being able to get
pregnant, and she implies that she can sacrifice her writing career to have children.
The image of Earth Mother conflicts with her desire to be a writer but she has never
disregarded her writing career in favor of being a mother or a housewife:
I want to be an Earth Mother in the deepest richest sense. I have
turned from being an intellectual, a career woman: all that is ash to me
[…]. And I have come, with great pain and effort, to the point where
my desire and emotions and thoughts center around what the normal
woman’s center around, and what do I find? Barrenness […]. My
writing hollow and failing substitute for real life, real feeling.
(Journals 312)
Critics have written on the associations Plath makes among maternity, pregnancy,
childbirth, fertility, and creativity, and Plath’s journal entries provide textual
evidence for these discussions. Many critics and theorists argue that pregnancy is a
return to the semiotic as mother and child are unified in one body. Plath feels that she
merges with her mother, and it is frightening experience on Plath’s side:
And you were frightened when you heard yourself stop talking and
felt the echo of her (Plath’s mother’s) voices if she had spoken in you,
as if you weren’t quite you, but were growing and continuing in her
wake, and as if her expressions were growing and emanating from
your voice. (Journals 26)
Plath’s relation with her mother in terms of language is a demonic possession. Her
mother possesses her body and language, and Plath loses her own ‘self.’
Additionally, Al Strangeways observes that Plath connects marriage to the condition
of childhood in her notes:
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She notes, for instance, a number of points Jung makes about
marriage as a state which, in its perfect union of two people returns
those involved to childhood, and, in their new desire for creativity,
robs them of their rationality and individuality, as they are “made
instruments of the life urge. (140)
According to Luce Irigaray, the relation between language and body is reminiscent
of the semiotic order where sounds and rhythms are fused with the maternal body.
Claiming mothers reconnect with the semiotic through pregnancy and childbirth,
Irigaray states: “The desire to return to the semiotic can almost be realized by
carrying a child in the womb. And pregnancy and childbirth can erase the thetic”
(109). Plath’s poems about maternal themes represent the return to the semiotic
linguistically. Bassnett says “Again and again, she uses the metaphor of pregnancy to
talk about producing a poem or a story” (64). Plath finds pregnancy both a burden
and productive. For Plath, pregnancy is something which takes place by herself, and
she wants to succeed.
Eileen Aird believes that Plath’s pregnancy “increased her awareness of the
cycle of birth and death which is endlessly repetitive” (31). She titles one of her
poems, “Metaphors,” which is about her pregnancy. Since Plath confesses through
her poems, the persona of her poems is Plath herself. She wrote this poem when she
learned she was pregnant. It is a simple poem and the title is appropriate for each
line. The poem consists of nine lines and each contains nine syllables, so structurally
the poem is also symbolical because it is set up on the number nine, which refers to
the nine months of pregnancy. When the lines are divided, the first three lines are
about the physical appearance of the persona, the next three lines are about the baby
and its growing, and the last three lines are about the pregnancy and the feeling it
creates. The poem shows the wide range of emotions a woman experiences through
different stages of her pregnancy. Axelrod lists them:
Humiliation (a “melon strolling on two tendrils”), grotesquerie (an
“elephant” woman), instrumentality (a “means”), capitalist reification
“money’s new-minted in this fat purse”), sexual powerlessness
(“boarded the train there’s no getting off”), and pain (“I’ve eaten a
bag of green apples”). (144-45)
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The first stanza of the poem is about the physical appearance of a pregnant woman:
I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
The poem is actually a riddle to be solved, as it says in the first line: “I’m a riddle in
nine syllables.” The first line asks the reader to figure out what it is or who it is.
Plath’s riddle enacts a complicated recovery of language, metaphor, and desire. The
poem also shows the power of the riddle as a literary form. The use of the riddle in
her poem allows her to balance Modernism and Confessionalism. Dorothy Dyer
claims that the riddle lets the poet express contradictory ideas and have a “doublevision.” The relation between the signifier and the signified is integral for the
solution of a riddle. Robert Georges and Alan Dundes point out that “a riddle is a
traditional verbal expression which contains one or more elements, a pair of which
may be in opposition; the referent is to be guessed” (113). Stephen Gould Axelrod
writes, “the riddle poem demonstrates […] the independence of the signifier from the
signified” (142). The immediate verbal context makes multiple referents clear, and
the solution to a riddle resides in the recognition of an alternate meaning for a
metaphor. An ambiguous use of the verbs in a riddle provides a clue to the puzzle,
but the poem tends to rest on the connection between a series of metaphors and their
missing referents rather than the ambiguity created by a single word.
Semiotics suggests language is not independent but a relational system of signs.
As Ferdinand de Saussure argues, signs, which acquire meaning from their relation
to other signs, are understandable within a particular context because they are
relational. Riddles depend on linguistic context, which produces multiple meanings.
Riddles seek for linguistic meaning by revealing multiple referential possibilities.
Recognizing linguistic units becomes challenging because riddles challenge the way
we understand and use words, and they demonstrate the instability and arbitrary
nature of language. Words and their referents seem arbitrary. Thus, solving a riddle
involves linguistic connections recognized within the symbolic realm, and it means
unifying disparate categories or breaking down boundaries because riddles ask
readers to classify and generalize. Also, Kristeva’s semiotics sees riddles as a test of
the ability to generalize. Kristeva describes the evolution of this idea:
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Starting from Saussure, for whom phonemes were “the first units
obtained by cutting up the spoken chain” and which he had defined as
“above all, oppositional, relative, and negative units”, Jakobson wrote,
“We shall call the phonological system of a language the repertory”,
proper to this language, of “significant differences”; that exist among
the ideas of the acoustic-motor units, that is, the repertory of
oppositions to which can be attached, in a given language, a
differentiation of significations. (Language The Unknown 225).
Riddles seem to disguise meaning at first but metaphors are thought to clarify an
idea or show connection. Galit H. Rokem and David Shulman claim: “The riddle can
reveal in a brief flash an excluded cosmos, a non-world or topsy turvy world lurking
just beneath or within our properly ordered and familiar one” (4). In the poem, each
stanza emerges as a riddle and the whole poem become a series of smaller puzzles all
moving toward the same solution. The riddle is Plath, as stated, “I am a riddle”; the
completion of the riddle depends on the solution, and with the metaphors as
referents, the solution is Plath’s own pregnancy.
The first line serves as an introduction capturing the reader’s attention, and each
of the following lines are parts of the whole concept. The organization of the poem is
clear; it goes from general to specific using vivid and fresh language. Her tone is
casual. There is a series of images and clues starting in the second line: “An elephant,
a ponderous house.” She describes pregnancy using images of something very big,
which represents slowness or uselessness. She feels that she is an elephant and a
ponderous house because during pregnancy she gains weight and there is an obvious
physical transformation. The visual images elephant and ponderous house – bulky
things – express how she feels in a pregnant body. In June 1959, Plath writes in her
journal: “A woman has 9 months of becoming something other than herself, of
separating from this otherness, of feeding it and being a source of milk and honey to
it. To be deprived of this is a death indeed” (Unabridged Journals 310). In metaphor,
an individual word is transferred to or addresses something else, but the word and the
diverse uses are bound to each other by similarity. Also, for Plath there is similarity
between the growing belly of a pregnant woman and the bulky images of elephant
and house. In the third line, she depicts a funny picture of a pregnant woman’s round
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belly with thin legs as “A melon strolling on two tendrils.” Here she is making fun of
the appearance of a pregnant woman walking with a big belly. As Plath talks about
the physical appearance of a pregnant woman, she actualizes words in specific
settings. The melon with tendrils is just an ordinary fruit, but it has a different
reference in this particular setting because every word can potentially be understood
metaphorically. The next three lines are about the baby growing inside the persona:
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
The fourth line starts with “O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!” There is a biblical
allusion to “fruit of your womb” related to having a baby. In the Bible it is stated:
“Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! (Luke 1:42).
However, Plath thinks that she is neither worthy nor blessed as a carrier of a baby, but
the baby is itself the worth. The next metaphor is the ivory, which connected with the
elephant image. Elephants are valued and esteemed because of the ivory tusks they
carry. Although the ivory tusks are valuable, elephants are unfortunate since they are
killed and forced to the brink of extinction, so she is just a carrier of precious ivory.
Moreover, the fine timbers are related to the house image in the previous line. A
house is an important dwelling for people and it provides shelter. Thus, she compares
herself to a house that is a shelter for the baby. Also, ivory and house address another
concept in Christianity. In The Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, which is a
Christian prayer, the Virgin Mary is called out to pray for Christians and she is named
as a Tower of ivory and a House of gold. In this prayer, the emphasis is on Mary’s
motherhood. The Virgin Mary is purely responsive to God’s will, so she is the
reflection of God’s own holiness. Ivory is indicative of peace and wealth because
wealthy ancient people decorated their palaces with ivory.
Mary is called a “Tower of Ivory” which is the sign of peace, and she herself is
the wealth of grace coming from the union with God. In I Kings: 6 and 7, it is
mentioned that Solomon built a house made of gold as a temple dedicated to God.
Mary is the temple of God and her womb “housed” Christ. Therefore, she is the
“House of Gold.” For Plath’s case, she is neither the reflection of God nor the temple
of gold. Also, she does not house the most worthy person in her womb. Therefore,
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she refers to the house made of timbers, not gold. The fifth line, “This loaf’s big with
its yeasty rising” is the most understandable metaphor: the rising loaf of dough
symbolizes the baby’s growing inside the body. Also, it recalls the slang, “a bun in
the oven,” so the baby is growing inside the oven that gives it shelter. The sixth line,
“Money’s new-minted in this fat purse,” again shows the materialistic difference
between the money and the purse. The money is valued and the money is the baby,
thus the purse is a container holding precious things inside. Throughout those lines,
Plath likens herself to worthless things and underestimates the value of her body. At
the same time, “bread and money” show Plath’s connotative style symbolizing her
daily necessities will be increased. The following lines express the anxiety and
complexity of the feelings caused by pregnancy:
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.
As stated in the seventh line, “I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf,” she sees herself
as a means to an end; she is a way for a baby to be born. Like the container, she is a
stage or a platform where a play is performed or the place the baby is growing just as
a play is prized rather than the stage. In these lines, she sees herself as a useful but not
valuable container or platform. “A cow in calf” is another metaphor that recalls cows
raising their offspring which refers to her own breast feeding the baby. The eighth
line is “I’ve eaten a bag of green apples.” For Linda Sue Grimes, “Eating a bag of
green apples dramatizes the nausea and bloated sensations that accompany
pregnancy. Often, the pregnant woman will feel as though she has eaten too much,
even when she has not, because the growing child is crowding the mother’s internal
organs, and the sensation is very uncomfortable.” However, there is another biblical
allusion in the apple metaphor: when Eve ate an apple, she was cursed and brought
suffering on all women with childbearing and the pain of childbirth and rearing. Plath
says she ate a bag of green apples. If one bite is bad, then the bag of apples is worse
and the color green possibly signifies that the apples are unripe, so she is not ready
for pregnancy or the responsibilities of having a child.
Furthermore, she was an aspiring young poetess who wanted to be recognized
and to leave her mark in literature. Therefore, having a baby would prevent her
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concentrating on her work as a professional writer. On the other hand, she says she
has “Boarded the train there’s no getting off,” the train symbolizes the pregnancy and
there is, indeed, no way to get rid of it by having an abortion in the 1950s, so she has
to have the baby despite all the difficulties she might encounter. Additionally, the
poem helps the reader to visualize the fear and anxiety every pregnant woman can
have. Although each line seems irrelevant, at a deeper level the whole poem appears
is a coherent body. The poem clearly expresses Plath’s mixed feelings about being a
mother, which she communicates in the poem.
Poetry is a way of communication for Plath; she communicates both with the
reader and herself. She sees it as a reflection of her real self, so she faces with her
fears and the things she can hardly accept through her poetry. According to Pamela
Annas, “A poem is a room in the house of language. A poem is a stage in the process
of self-definition, a grounding and realizing of self-image and image of the world”
(9). We need to consider Plath’s language, her style, use of simile, symbols, and
other stylistic elements. Plath’s language is fertile and fruitful, and her poems use
original language and images. However, some critics find her poems obscure and
sometimes confusing. Plath uses many images and symbols that become coherent
and meaningful when we look for deeper meanings. For example, one of her poems
called “Departure” uses a number of biblical allusions and other religious concepts
including Judaism and classical mythology.
In the first line, “The figs on the fig tree in the yard are green.” Both the New
and Old Testaments are books of symbols. Religious stories are told with a wide
range of symbols. As readers we can find it confusing because Plath was not a
religious person. Even in her journals she declares her commitment not to believe in
God after her father’s death. However, Plath sees the Bible as a literary text which is
beneficial in terms of storytelling, narration, and symbols. According to WagnerMartin, “While Plath may have been too inexperienced to use religious allegory well,
she later employs that approach in The Bell Jar, changing the twenty actual
Mademoiselle college editors to the symbolic twelve of Jesus’ disciples and
heightening each narrative scene so that it has some parallel with the last years of
Christ’s life” (22). Even the poem, “Ariel” uses biblical symbolism (including both
Jewish and Christian symbols) in its title and content. Excepting its references to
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Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the biographical reference to Plath’s horse, Ariel is
the symbolic name for Jerusalem. In Hebrew, Ariel means “lion of God.” The second
stanza of the poem begins with “God’s lioness,” which is a direct reference to the
Hebrew or Jewish Ariel. Referring to one of her stories, Plath writes, ‘‘The Christian
symbols which appear in the story are intended to be subtle suggestions of the everpresence of Bible figures in modern life’’ (“Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom”
(1).
For Plath, the figs and the fig tree are symbols and metaphors. The fig tree first
appears in Genesis and it is the tree whose leaves Adam and Eve used to cover their
nakedness (Genesis 3:7). Then, the figs appear in Hosea again, when God calls out
the Israelis: “The LORD says, ‘O Israel, when I first found you, it was like finding
fresh grapes in the desert. When I saw your ancestors, it was like seeing the first ripe
figs of the season. But then they deserted me for Baal-peor, giving themselves to that
shameful idol. Soon they became vile, as vile as the god they worshiped” (Hosea
9:10). Here, the figs are said to be ripe, but Plath mentions that the figs are green:
green figs may be one kind of fig tree or they may be unripe. The second and third
lines mention the grapes in the vineyard, which are also green. “Green, also, the
grapes on the green vine/ Shading the brickred porch tiles.”
Moreover, figs occur as a symbol in the New Testament: “Now learn a parable
of the fig tree: When his branch is yet tender, and putteth forth his leaves, ye know
that summer is nigh. So likewise ye, when ye shall see all these things, know that it is
near, even at the door” (Matthew, 24:32, 33). Then in Luke 13:6-9: “Then he told
this parable: ’A man had a fig tree growing in his vineyard, and he went to look for
fruit on it but did not find any. So he said to the man who took care of the vineyard,
‘For three years now I’ve been coming to look for fruit on this fig tree and haven’t
found any. Cut it down! Why should it use up the soil?’ “‘Sir,’ the man replied,
‘leave it alone for one more year, and I’ll dig around it and fertilize it. If it bears fruit
next year, fine! If not, then cut it down.’” These texts show us that even though Plath
is not a religious person, she benefits from these stories and symbols because they
are adaptable to her life experiences.
Also, the fig tree seems to be a major metaphor to Sylvia Plath. She addresses
the fig tree in her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, in which the protagonist
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Ester refers to the fig tree saying:
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the
story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful
future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy
home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig
was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing
editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and
another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other
lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was
an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs
were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in
the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t
make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each
and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest,
and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go
black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet. (77)
Here the fig tree symbolizes life for Plath, and it is the metaphor of her desires for
perfection and fear of loss. For Plath, the sense of perfection is a driving force which
Alvarez describes: “She seemed effortlessly good at things: she was a prize scholar
as well as a prize poet; and later, when she married, she was good at having children
and keeping a house clean, cooking, making honey, even at riding horses. There was
a ruthless efficiency in all she did which left no room for mistakes or uncertainties”
(57). Turning back to the point, we can say that the fig tree, whose branches are full
of fruit, symbolizes fertility and fruitfulness; the fig tree is life itself and its fruits are
Plath’s desires for perfection because she wants to be a good mother and a good wife
but at the same time she wants to be perfect in her career as a writer, and she knows
she cannot have all of them at the same time and must choose to be perfect at one of
them – being a good mother or a good writer – and she is afraid of losing any of
them. Plath is obsessed with sterility and fertility: “The Munich Mannequins” open
with the lines: “Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children./ Cold as snow breath, it
tamps the womb.” There are 13 couplets in the poem and it ends with a single one
line stanza following no rhyme scheme. From a feminist point of view, “The Munich
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Mannequins” displays the lives of women in a patriarchal culture. Pamela J. Annas
argues “The Munich Mannequins” describes “particularly well the social landscape
within which the “I” of Sylvia Plath’s poems is trapped” (171).
Plath’s poetic tone has never been simple. Her poems have always shown
complexity of language and scheme, and she creates versatile layers of worlds within
a stanza. Presenting her knowledge of European history, religious studies,
psychology, and personal observation, Plath creates chilling images in “Lady
Lazarus.” Susan Gubar claims:
“Lady Lazarus” offers up a chilling warning about the fetishization of
suffering with which the figure of prosopopoeia flirts. Indeed, Plath’s
verse uncannily stages the bases for accusations of exploitation,
larceny, masochism, and sensationalism that would increasingly
accrue around Holocaust remembrance. In addition, her impersonation
of the real victims invariably generates awareness of the spurious
representation put in the place of the absence of evidence. (207)
The title “Lady Lazarus” also recalls the image of rebirth because Lazarus is based
on a biblical story about a man resurrected after death by the miracle of Jesus.
“Lady” echoes the biblical Madonna and Lady Godiva, who were legendary in their
suffering and ability to withstand various forms of torture. Additionally, both “A
Better Resurrection” and “Lady Lazarus” are connected with each other:
The entire symbolic procedure of death and rebirth in “Lady Lazarus”
has been deliberately chosen by the speaker. She enacts her death
repeatedly in order to cleanse herself of the “million filaments” of
guilt and anguish that torment her. After she has returned to the
womblike state of being trapped in her cave, like the biblical Lazarus,
or of being rocked “shut as a seashell,” she expects to emerge reborn
in a new form. (Jon Rosenblatt 39)
There is a group of Plath scholars that approaches her poems like a doctor who
tries to diagnose the process of her poetry for the signs of her inevitable suicide.
For them, “Lady Lazarus” is read as a poem where Plath declares her wish to die.
Critics recognize the fascinating language used in the poem, but the rhythmic
patterns of the poem do not receive enough attention. The dominant voice of the
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poem achieves its strength from controlled rhythmic structure. The poem is
entirely based on powerful rhythms and sounds like many of Plath’s poems. This
poem also reflects her experience and appears as the summary of her complex
life, or sometimes it is seen as foreshadowing her suicide. Julia Kristeva explains
that “suicide is not a camouflaged act of war but a reuniting with sorrow and,
beyond it, with that impossible love, never attained, always elsewhere. Such are
the promises of the void, of death” (“On the Melancholic Imaginary” 7).
Some critics believe she sees death as a game where she dies and is reborn
again, while others believe it is a declaration of her future suicide. Still others
think that Plath wants to become “a walking miracle” when she manages to
survive her suicide attempt. Yet, they miss a point that the real Lazarus did not
commit suicide. Susan Van Dyne observes, “Lazarus is simultaneously the
performer who suffers and the director who calculates suffering’s effect” (57).
Moreover, some critics suggest that she arranged everything to survive, leaving a
note in open view and a phone number to call, and if she had managed to stay
alive, she would have been more productive. Susan Bassnett tells us that while
introducing this poem for BBC radio, Sylvia Plath introduces the poem: “The
speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only
trouble is, she has to die first. She is the Phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you
will. She is also just a good, plain resourceful woman” (113).
The form and stylistic mode of the poem is a dramatic monologue of twentyeight stanzas, like a play in verse. In the dramatic monologue, a single person, who is
not the poet himself, utters the entire poem in a specific situation or at a critical
moment. The monologue is organized to show its focus on the character that the
dramatic speaker reveals in the course of what he says. In dramatic monologue, the
speaker usually addresses a specific audience. Plath uses the monologue to address
the spectators as the agent of her self-destruction, but at the same time the pronoun
“I” is used to reconcile the dual aspects of the speaker and the reader of the poem. In
Plath’s dramatic monologue, we are invited to identify the speaker with the poet, and
the organizing principle is not only the revelation of the speaker’s distinctive
temperament but also the evolution of her observation, thought, memory, and
feelings.
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Susan Bohandy asserts: “The speaker of “Lady Lazarus” shifts her tone
dramatically in line 43, using repetitions, alliteration, and simple rhymes in a manner
akin to a childlike singsong. However, her theme is far from innocent. The remark
“Dying/ Is an art, like everything else./ I do it exceptionally well./ I do it so it feels
like hell./ I do it so it feels real./ I guess you could say I’ve a call” (lines 43-48) is
tinged with sophistication, paradox, and nonchalance” (16). The “I” persona is
important here because it has a more personal nature. Also, Plath associates with the
combined Lazarus and the Phoenix in the female speaker. Additionally, her dramatic
monologue shows poetic originality and becomes powerful, containing a dynamic
female consciousness that is not seen in any works of her contemporaries. In the
beginning, she identifies herself with a Jew tortured during the Nazi Holocaust, and
at the end of the poem, the speaker transmutes into the rising phoenix.
In Linda Wagner’s Critical Essays on Sylvia Plath, Leonard Sanazaro points out
“This willfulness to arise and devour humankind in the form of a self-fulfilled deity
points up the impotence of the traditional concepts of good and evil” (71). Plath uses
the Confessional tone with figurative language. Furthermore, Plath uses contrasting
metaphor and mythological allusions and color imagery to produce and develop a
poetic vision while following a confessional track. For “Lady Lazarus,” Frank Bidart
observes that Plath is “using something from the tradition […] using a form or
container, but […] making it seem so necessitous, it is so animated by a sense that
this is how I must speak, that it feels fresh and original.”
“Lady Lazarus” shows the cyclical rhythm of death and revival reflecting
Plath’s concerns with the Jungian concept of the individual’s dual nature. Plath
starts the poem by describing her previous suicide attempts: “I have done it again.”
However, if the poem is evaluated from an artistic point, she uses the stream of
consciousness technique and free verse. Plath allows the voice of her unconscious,
and Lady Lazarus becomes the representation of a deviant voice of poetic
orthography.
Lady Lazarus
I manage it –
I have done it again.
A sort of walking miracle, my
One year in every ten
skin
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Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
Them unwrap me hand and
foot--
A paperweight,
The big strip tease.
My face a featureless, fine
Gentlemen, ladies
Jew linen.
These are my hands
Peel off the napkin
My knees.
O my enemy.
I may be skin and bone,
Do I terrify?-Nevertheless, I am the same,
The nose, the eye pits, the full
identical woman.
set of teeth?
The first time it happened I
The sour breath
was ten.
Will vanish in a day.
It was an accident.
Soon, soon the flesh
The second time I meant
The grave cave ate will be
To last it out and not come
At home on me
back at all.
I rocked shut
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
As a seashell.
And like the cat I have nine
They had to call and call
times to die.
And pick the worms off me
like sticky pearls.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
Dying
To annihilate each decade.
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
I do it so it feels like hell.
Shoves in to see
I do it so it feels real.
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I guess you could say I’ve a
So, so, Herr Doktor.
call.
So, Herr Enemy.
It’s easy enough to do it in a
I am your opus,
cell.
I am your valuable,
It’s easy enough to do it and
The pure gold baby
stay put.
It’s the theatrical
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Comeback in broad day
Do not think I underestimate
To the same place, the same
your great concern.
face, the same brute
Amused shout:
Ash, ash-You poke and stir.
‘A miracle!’
Flesh, bone, there is nothing
That knocks me out.
there--
There is a charge
A cake of soap,
For the eyeing of my scars,
A wedding ring,
there is a charge
A gold filling.
For the hearing of my heart-It really goes.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
And there is a charge, a very
Beware.
large charge
For a word or a touch
Out of the ash
Or a bit of blood
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Or a piece of my hair or my
clothes.
The poem is accentual free verse. It also has artistic and modernist techniques: she
uses run-on lines to connect her stanzas. While using an open verse structure, Plath
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never completely abandons symmetry in stanzas or rhyme. It has near rhymes that
spill onto the next line or create internal rhymes such as “hair” and “air,” and
“shell” and “call.” Plath also uses perfect rhyme which is obvious in line 72: “I turn
and burn.” She uses anaphora to accentuate rhythm in lines 49-50: “It’s easy
enough to do it in a cell./ It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.” The repetition of
particular words such as “Ash, Ash” in line 73 and “Beware,/ Beware” in lines 8081 create a disturbing tone. “Plath sets a tone of urgency by repetition of the word
“soon,” the use of hanging and incomplete clauses and grammatical deviation”
(Mick Short 47).
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
In line 35, “The first time it happened I was ten,” there is the “in medias res” effect
and there is anaphoric metonymy between lines 46 and 54. The first stanza has the
end rhyme “again/ ten.” The lines are short and divided by caesura; the sentences are
cut into lines by clause or punctuation, as is seen in the second stanza: “A sort of
walking miracle, my skin/ Bright as a Nazi lampshade […].” She compares herself to
a Jew who is tortured by Nazis in the Holocaust. Despite all the domestic problems
she goes through and her on-going depression, she defines herself as a “walking
miracle”. Plath even divides a stanza in mid-sentence: “My right foot” is in the first
stanza and it continues in the second stanza: “A paperweight,/ My face a featureless,
fine/ Jew linen.” Indeed here Plath is both the Nazi and the Jew herself, because the
source of her pain and despair is not caused by any specific thing or person but
herself, and the things happening around her just work as a catalyst.
Jon Rosenblatt notes that Plath’s comparison of the sufferings of her speaker to
“the sadistic medical experiments on the Jews by Nazi doctors and the Nazis’ use of
their victims’ bodies in the production of lampshades and other objects” is intended
not to make realistic historical comparisons but to “draw the reader into the center of
a personality and its characteristic mental processes” (42).
Yet, there is still disagreement among scholars; some consider Plath an activist
when she refers to World War II and the Holocaust. For example, Rosenthal states
that Plath’s poetry places the Holocaust on a humanistic scale “through the
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transforming force of imagination” (11). Additionally, Alvarez describes Lowell and
Plath as “Extremist” poets for their “courageous response” to popular culture’s
usurpation of high art (“Beyond All This Fiddle” 21). Middlebrook argues that the
politics of confessional poetry hinged on the poet’s resistance to impersonality and
the deliberate breaking of social taboos (“What Was Confessional Poetry?” 646). In
“Sylvia Plath’s ‘Sivvy Poem: A Portrait of the Poet as Daughter,” Perloff claims,
“Plath’s limitation is that, having finally ceased to be Sivvy, she had really only one
subject: her own anguish and consequent longing for death” (173). Perloff
acknowledges that Plath uses some “political and religious images,” but she thinks
that Plath “camouflaged” the narrowness of her only subject by introducing these
images (173). Perloff further stresses that Plath’s references to “Hiroshima ash” or
“the cicatrix of Poland” in “Mary’s Song” are simply “calling attention to their own
cleverness” (173).
Still others think that she devalues these traumatic events using them as a
metaphor for her personal and domestic troubles. However, Plath is just twelve when
she writes in her diary: “We learned that the United States dropped the first atomic
bomb on Japan and that it destroyed 60% of Hiroshima! This bomb, it is said by
President Truman, can be used for constructive as well as destructive purposes. For
instance, the same power may be used to cultivate and save food crops or of
starvation” (Plath Diary 1945, MSS II, Box 7, Folder 1). That passage proves Plath
has never been insensitive to politics, war, and world peace. Plath justifies her NaziJew allusions by claiming:
Out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, I must say that
I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed
by nothing except a needle and a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that
one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the
most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience
[…]. I believe it should be relevant, and relevant to the larger things,
the bigger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on. (Wagner
90-91)
Diana Fuss categorizes “Lady Lazarus” as a corpse poem with political implications.
She argues cadavers can be powerful political symbols due to their capacity to instill
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respect and terror.
These corpse poems fall into two general categories: poems that deflate and
poems that redeem. The first group humbles those corpses that have been
culturally canonized, while the second group elevates those corpses that have
been culturally debased. Both kinds of corpse poems aim to correct a social
injustice. (13)
For Plath, the manipulation of personal experience is essential in the creation of
poetry, and in this way she mythologizes the people and events of her life. Yet, this
myth-making ends unexpectedly with being taken as a fact by many. From another
point of view, Alicia Suskin Ostriker comments that “when defining a personal
identity, women tend to begin with their bodies and, moreover, to interpret external
reality through the medium of the body” (1986: II) in Stealing the Language, a study
of American women’s poetry. Susan Bohandy supports Ostriker’s point and states
that “the body is both the product and communicator of the culturally specific
symbols and values that play a crucial role in determining who one is” (2).
According to Bohandy, Plath uses the body images to display her identity. How she
uses body images can be observed clearly in lines 26-32: “The peanut-crunching
crowd/ Shoves in to see/ Them unwrap me hand and foot—/ The big strip tease./
Gentlemen, ladies/ These are my hands/ My knees.” Ostriker remarks about these
lines that Plath’s “mastery of colloquial idiom illustrates her contempt for the vulgar
and cruel social relations which generate such idioms. She becomes a mocker of the
vernacular, using language against itself” (101). Bohandy interprets these lines as
following: “These lines evoke the atmosphere of a circus sideshow in which the
resuscitated body is a freak and its unveiling is a major attraction. Yet in spite of
what is happening to her body, the speaker keeps her voice strong, clear, and
sardonic” (15). Highlighting the victimization and vulnerability in the poem,
Kathleen M. Lant states:
“Lady Lazarus” presents most clearly one of the central problems with
Plath’s use of the metaphor of nakedness, for in this poem Plath refers
to this act of unclothing as “The big strip tease.” And in this act, no
woman is terrifying, no woman triumphant, no woman is powerful, for
she offers herself to “the peanut-crunching crowd” in a gesture that is
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“theatrical” rather than self-defining, designed to please or to appease
her viewers more than to release herself. (653)
In lines 20-22, Plath says that: “I am only thirty./ And like the cat I have nine times
to die./ This is Number Three.” Bohandy explains: “The image of the cat connotes
inscrutability as well as sensuality, femininity, and seductiveness. Furthermore, the
belief in the cat’s nine lives comes from popular superstition, which the speaker
exploits along with the language of popular culture” (15). Plath compiles the
language of popular culture, colloquial language, and slang in her poetry. In line 23,
she adds slang to the poem “What a trash.” In these ways, we see that Plath does not
write her poems as an aristocratic work for a specific group of people to comprehend,
but her poems can be understood and enjoyed by common people as well. She
incorporates a high level of intellectual understanding with simple expressions and
language.
According to Kristeva’s semiotic theory, the poem demonstrates an intimate
relation between the rhythm, pain, and the semiotic. For example, the last two
stanzas of the poem reveal the poet’s psychic pain and reader’s discomfort. The
rhythms transport the poet’s painful memories. The rhythmic variation all through
the poem is compressed into these two stanzas. Each stressed syllable is left alone on
the line “Beware” and it is repeated twice in the following line. It is a sort of
warning, and it is followed by a trochee which reverses the rhythmic pattern. The last
stanza begins with “Out of the ash,” which is a trochee followed by stressed and
unstressed syllables that accelerate the rhythm in the middle of the line. The long
“sh” sound and the stress on the word “ash” create a sense of anxiety.
Some critics hold the idea that “ash” evokes Plath’s memories about Assia
Wevill, a German-born woman who escaped from the Nazi regime; henceforth, Plath
identifies herself with Jews and her father with the Nazis in the poem. She is the Jew
because her memories are like a torture, and her father is the Nazi who is cruel to her
leaving her behind when she needs him. Also, another point in the story is when
Plath accidently overheard the conversation between Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill
on the phone; she burned some of Ted Hughes’ works because of her jealousy and
anger. Commenting on her mother’s bad-temper, Frieda Hughes states:
It was many years before I discovered my mother had a ferocious
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temper and a jealous streak, in contrast to my father’s more temperate
and optimistic nature, and that she had on two occasions destroyed my
father’s work, once by ripping it up and once by burning it. (The
Guardian)
The following line, “I rise with my red hair” moves faster but there is a slight pause
on the stressed “rise,” and with my “red hair” is combined foot. Another point is, if
we accept that all Plath’s poems are confessional, then we should suggest that she
has never been a woman with red hair. But she uses the color red to create a sense of
terror, and it addresses sexuality as well. Rosellen Brown claims Plath “appeared to
have been preoccupied with being an obedient girl in her prose: the woman ate men
like air emerged elsewhere” (116).
Plath does not need Jesus for resurrection like the biblical Lazarus but she
appears more like the phoenix, a mythical bird that bursts into flames – reference to
red hair – and then is reborn out of its ashes. The sense of terror given in the previous
lines with the warning “Beware,” and she fulfills her vow in the following line: “And
I eat men like air.” This line consists of straight unstressed followed by stressed beat,
and the stress on the “I” shows the revenge and hatred against men or the male ego.
The rhythmic pattern of “hair” and “air” shows the continuity with the previous
iamb pattern and combined foot. On the other hand, if we take “eat” as a stressed
word then this line can be interpreted as a combined foot. If “eat” is stressed then it
make a sense of rhythm with “rise” in the previous line, and “rise” and “eat” become
verbs of power in the poem. Then, we can say that the rhythmic variation and pattern
of the whole poem echoes the distress, discomfort and anger of the speaker. Margaret
Homans theorizes that the female poets’ use of rhythmic voice to distinguish their
experiences as women are symbolic. Also, Homans criticizes Kristeva’s theory
which states that women repress the semiotic when they enter the symbolic order. In
contrast to Kristeva, Homans claims that women do not reject pre-oedipal language:
Although […] the daughter does enter the symbolic order, she does
not do so exclusively. Because she does not perceive the mother as
lost or renounced, she does not need the compensation the father’s
law offers as much as does the son. Furthermore, she has the positive
experience of never having given up entirely the pre-symbolic
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communication that carries over, with the bond to the mother, beyond
the pre-oedipal period. The daughter therefore speaks two languages
at once. (Bearing the Word 13)
While Kristeva’s study on language acquisition grants the symbolic order too much
power that women can never enter and master the language of the father, Homans’
theory expands the limits of Kristeva’s theory because her theory proposes that the
symbolic is connected with rationality and ordered language, and the semiotic is
related to desire and motherhood. While Homans claims that pre-oedipal language
continues from childhood, Kristeva assumes the semiotic is lost but accessible in
limited ways. Whereas the idea that the mother-daughter language is “socially and
culturally suppressed and silenced […] silencing and suppression are a very different
matter from repression” (Bearing 19) – an idea, put forward by Homans. By contrast,
Kristeva perceives the semiotic as a “return to the repressed” and a potential threat to
sanity. Although semiotics are not a language available to only female writers,
women writers and especially female poets seem to look for a way to return to
wholeness and seek ways to depend and force the language in order to represent their
status as suppressed beings in patriarchic society. Plath revolts against maledominant society: “I eat men” threatens the male ego as a powerful being. Susan Van
Dyne claims that the speaker uses her position as a child to express emotions and
desires, rage and cannibalism, which are observed as a taboo especially for women:
To speak as a woman in the guise of a child may be one of the most
duplicitous narrative strategies of the woman writer. Feminist critics
of Emily Dickinson, who like Plath, adopts the persona of the child to
articulate her relationship to male authority, have indentified some of
the motives and consequences of this voice. The child persona
dramatizes a woman writer’s powerlessness; it mirrors the cultural
allegation that woman is child, and it gives form to her experience of
being treated like one to pose as a child also authorizes naughty
deviance, a mad playfulness in which blasphemy might be uttered but
go unpunished. Because words are instrumental in a child’s effort to
gain approval and independence, choosing to become a child as an
aesthetic strategy may give access to rage, pain, and deprivation that
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are necessary motivation to make words. The child’s oppositional
stance, driven as it is by desire and defiance, may provide the dialectic
that defines the speaker’s sense of the self and power. (48)
According to some critics, the language she uses in the poem reflects the position of
a child because like children, women are powerless including language use, thus
women writers should seek for alternative ways in symbolic language. To Kristeva,
these alternatives reside in the semiotic. Yet women, according to Homans, write
differently from men, although she does not support the idea of “female language,”
which indicates the replacement of symbolic language with a new feminist language:
“The naive wish for a literal language and the belief in poetry’s capacity for the
duplication of experience foster a conception of the feminine self in poetry that is,
paradoxically, even more egotistical than some of the masculine paradigms from
which it intends to free itself” (Women Writer 217-18).
Homans sees the “I” or “self” as literal and present and she blames for “popular
superstition that Sylvia Plath’s death was the purposeful completion of her poetry’s
project, the assumption being that if the speaker is precisely the same as the
biographical Plath, the poetry’s self-destructive violence is directed towards Plath
herself, not toward an imagined speaker” (Women Writer 219). Back to the point
whether the language Plath uses is a child’s, we can say that the poem is not spoken
by a child but it is connected with childhood experience repeated through Plath’s
adulthood life as an attempt to suicide. Thus, non-referential language is associated
with the semiotic. Some critics state that since non-referential language is connected
with the semiotic and directly to childhood, Plath uses nursery rhyme candences –
mostly anapests – to express the experience of an outsider or the Other both as a
child and as a painful and helpless woman.
Plath is well-informed about literature, philosophy, European history, and of
course mythology. Plath intentionally chooses many of her symbols like Medusa,
Persephone and her sisters, muses, Poseidon, and the Moon Goddess from
mythological sources. She creates her own style which requires a sharp eye to grasp
the meaning beneath these symbols. I will now examine Plath’s use of mythological
figures.
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2. Mythology in Plath’s Poems
Sandra Gilbert comments on women writers in general that the mythologizing of
life events in poetry is a common theme in women’s literature, and she notes that
“Women writers, especially when they are writing as women, have tended to rely on
plots and patterns that suggest the obsessive patterns of myths and fairy tales” (248).
Plath’s poetry is like a collection of myths: “The poems are chapters in a mythology
where the plot, seen as a whole and in retrospect, is strong and clear” (Newman 187).
“Ariel is a collection of poems that display not only Plath’s profound brilliance as a
poet, but which can be read as an exposition of her personal mythology” (Bassnett
42-43). Plath’s poetry is based on a connection between life, myth, and motion. She
uses mythological elements as metaphors and symbols to illustrate a vivid
imagination. The effect and nature of those mythological figures are determined by
the tales that surround them. Those figures inhabit a symbolic system that defines the
nature of these symbols. Eileen Aird states that in fusing “her recreation of the
external world with her intense, inner perceptions,” Plath creates “a mythological,
visionary world which was both grotesque and beautiful” (5-6).
Plath also creates her own myths; she combines her autobiography with fiction
and myths and she becomes the only heroine and protagonist of her poetry.
Constance Scheerer notes that “Plath demonstrates in her poetry how the mythic, in
its immemorial pre-Christian (even pre-Greco-Roman) dress of birth and death,
seasonal and vegetative changes, moon and sea phases, and archaic concepts of
beginnings and endings, is the only way to express the cosmos, is, in fact, the only
way the cosmos can express itself” (167). Karen Jackson Ford observes that
“Initially, the myth was based on the terrible precedent set by Sylvia Plath, and the
tragic way in which her life and her art complete each other”. Elizabeth Hardwick,
who admires Plath’s writing, says: “She, the poet, is frighteningly there all the time.
Orestes rages but Aeschylus lives to be almost seventy. Sylvia Plath, however, is
both heroine and author; when the curtain goes down, it is her own dead body there
on the stage, sacrificed to her plot” (109). The Plath myths are neither unusual nor
unique, but the way she defines her life experiences and the context within which she
presents them to the reader are exceptional and effective. Moreover, Plath herself
becomes a myth. The Plath myth unfortunately dominates readers’ perception of the
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poet and overshadows her poetry. Tim Kendall states that “A recent study which
devoted more space to an examination of what it called ‘The Plath Myth’ than to
Plath’s poetry is worryingly symptomatic of a general trend. It shouldn’t be
controversial to assert that the most interesting thing about Sylvia Plath is her poetry”
(Sylvia Plath ii).
We need to stress that the word “myth” comes from “mythos” whose meaning is
“tale” or “story,” so myth can be considered a traditional tale with secondary
reference to something of collective importance. Also, myth does not ultimately have
to deal with religion or religious practices. Joel Schmidt defines mythology as “the
everlasting and constantly renewed translation of the major collective principles that
govern humanity beyond the contingencies of time and space” (2). Myths can be
seen as literary text primarily concerned with the gods and their relations with
mortals. Mythology also deals with the life, labor, and magnificence of heroes. Plath
benefits from those mystical and supernatural stories by which her poems gain
strength and effectiveness, because myth itself attains immortality and those mythical
elements and stories give background and carry hidden messages. Plath hides
messages beneath the written words in her poems through the use of myth, which
adds layers and layers of meaning. When her poems are analyzed, each layer is
uncovered, and the message and the meaning she wants to pose is expressed.
In a collective sense, myth is the oral wisdom of a community. In mythology,
“consciousness is generally projected onto the geographical surface of the earth. The
depths of the earth appear as a symbol of the unconscious” (Singer 155). The written
work is the stage where the writer reflects his unconscious. Besides, these invented
stories are usually treated as secular fictional stories which are placed frequently
outside time and place. Plath transcends time and space by inserting those elements
into her poetry. Myths refer to the human tendency to shape their experience of
reality through stories and symbols, and Plath uses these stories and symbols to
enrich her visual imaginary and artistic style. Moreover, myth is a way “of
expressing the inexpressible reality of the unconscious” (Singer 236). Myth and
mythical stories or elements help Plath to express her thoughts and feelings that
cannot be expressed with a word. Thus, Plath uses mythical metaphors and symbols
as a kind of economy or shorthand. Additionally, only the persons who have a good
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knowledge of world literature and culture can comprehend the meaning that she
gives through mythological symbols. Furthermore, myth is frequently considered a
largely symbolic genre. Therefore, for Plath, mythological elements are just symbolic
devices, and it is important to know the references, meanings, and functions of the
mythical symbols and motifs to understand many of Plath’s poems.
Mythology has always been more than storytelling, rituals, or cultic activities.
Lane defines myth as:
Pure action, the motion of a hero through time and space, usually
toward more abundant life. What counts is [...] the urge, wrestle, and
resurrection, the thrust toward the light, which drives the hero onward.
The power of the myth is not a matter of plot, but of tropism, not a
function of structure, but of energy and direction. The “structure” of
the myth [...] is a kind of artificial construct, a graspable metaphor
created to stand for the unstructured flowing that is life itself. (69)
Myths exemplify the human tendency to shape experience through stories and
symbols. Plath benefits from those well-known stories to create her own poetic
legends. Looking into Joseph Campbell’s explanation of the relation between human
contemplation and myths, myths reflect the spiritual potentiality and need to explain
natural phenomena. “The myths are metaphorical of spiritual potentiality in the
human being, and the same powers that animate our life, animate the life of the
world” (Campbell 22). Hence myths are metaphors that have symbolic meaning
throughout time. During the transformation of narrative through myth, symbolic
meaning becomes more important as facts become less important. Plath uses myth to
energize her thought and to speak directly to readers through symbols.
Another point related with mythology is archetypes. There is a close relation
between archetypes and the unconscious; both myth and the conscious speak through
images. Jung portrays the unconscious as a type of nature goddess: “Our actual
knowledge of the unconscious shows that it is a natural phenomenon and that, like
Nature herself, it is at least neutral. It contains all aspects of human nature – light and
dark, beautiful and ugly, good and evil, profound and silly” (Jung 94). In archetypal
literary criticism, the text is interpreted using mythical sources, and archetypical
description is used to analyze the symbols, motifs, personality, and behavior of
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characters. Pointing out the difference between the collective and the personal
unconscious, Carl Jung refers to archetypes as a primal element of the unconscious
of humanity. According to Jungian argument, archetypal processes such as death and
resurrection are part of the transpersonal symbolism of the “Collective Unconscious”
and can be utilized in the task of psychological integration. Hence, a Jungian analysis
envisions the death-rebirth archetype as a “symbolic expression of a process taking
place not in the world but in the mind. That process is the return of the ego to the
unconscious – a kind of temporary death of the ego – and its re-emergence or rebirth
from the unconscious” (Segal 4). Plath discloses her unconscious with her
intellectual capacity and artistic labor. Also, the themes she uses point to her
unconscious because “sometimes the archetype represents the boundaries of identity,
threatened by what is outside; at other times it represents the mysterious and
frightening aspects of the inner, unconscious mind, from which things intermittently
rise up into consciousness” (Lane 210). Archetypal criticism is generally occupied
with death and rebirth. Plath makes use of archetypal myths and images of death and
rebirth referring to the myth of the Phoenix. As Suzanne Juhasz points out: “The
struggle between life and death may not always be the ostensible or overt subject of a
poem, but the perceptions and ideas of a consciousness that is struggling between life
and death not only color but indeed control the vision of every poem produced”
(104).
Judith Kroll argues that Plath’s concern about death is incorporated into her
vision of life: “In Plath’s poetry there is one overriding concern: the problem of
rebirth or transcendence; and nearly everything in her poetry contributes either to the
statement or the envisioned resolution of this problem” (3). For Plath, the images of
death and rebirth become themes in her poems; one of them is called “A Better
Resurrection,” the other one is “Fever 103,” but it is especially obvious in her
famous poem “Lady Lazarus,” which emphasizes that “best-known ‘narrative rite of
rebirth’ in Plath’s canon” (Gill 59). In “A Better Resurrection,” Plath indicates her
wish to die and uses biblical reference to Jesus and resurrection. While describing
her depression and miserable life she says, “My life is like the falling leaf,” and she
prays Jesus to trigger her to have a better life at the end of the poem. “Fever 103,”
describes her illness when she suffered from a high fever. Plath herself stated, “Fever
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103° details two kinds of fire – the fires of hell, which merely agonize, and the fires
of heaven, which purify. During the poem, the first sort of fire suffers into itself into
the second” (Plath 197). About “Fever 103,” Judith Kroll states:
To see the autobiographical details only as such is to regard Plath’s
vision of suffering and death as morbid, but to appreciate the deeper
significance of her poetry is to understand her fascination with death
as connected with and transformed into a broader concern with the
themes of rebirth and transcendence. (5)
Since Plath’s greatest fear is “the death of the imagination” (Journals 129), her
struggle and efforts are for transforming death into a fruitful theme or image in her
works. For Plath, Greek mythology is the sign of a brilliant creative imagination and
she is influenced by its creativity. In modern times, legends and mythological
sources still influence Western literary works, and mythological stories and
characters are often used as motifs and symbols in literature. For example, the term,
“Electra Complex” in psychology originates from the myth of Electra whose parents
are Agamemnon and Clytemnestra in Greek mythology. Agamemnon sacrificed his
daughter Iphigenia to the Goddess Artemis. On the return home, Clytemnestra
murdered her husband with the help of her lover Aegisthus. Because of his father’s
death, Electra grudged her mother and encouraged her brother Orestes to kill their
mother and her lover to take revenge for his father’s death. Therefore, Electra is
associated with love for the father and hatred of the mother.
According to Freud: “The girl passes over – by way of a symbolic analogy, one
may say – from the penis to a child; her Oedipus-complex culminates in the desire,
which is long cherished, to be given a child by her father as a present, to bear him a
child” (171). The Electra Complex displays that girls understand their inferiority when
they realize the absence of the penis and lack of an equivalent. First the girl attaches
herself to the mother figure, but then she attaches herself to the father and fancies she
will be impregnated. Because of penis envy, she becomes hostile toward her mother
and the mother becomes the object of jealousy. According to Freud, “With the female
too the mother must be the first love object, for the primary conditions for objectchoice are the same for all children. But at the end of the girl’s development it is the
man – the father” (187-88). Although Plath does not remember any sexual traumas
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from her early childhood, she is generally associated with the Electra Complex. Plath
even diagnosed herself with an Electra Complex expressing that she lost her father
when she thought he was God, and the poems such as “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” and
“Electra on Azalea Path” have the marks of the Electra phenomena. She was deeply
affected by her father’s early death and felt this reality difficult to accept. As a result,
she denied his death and she accepted her father as alive in her mind.
Some scholars believe that Plath’s delayed mourning of her father turn her poems
into elegies, packed with rage and remorse, and an ambivalence many people
overlook. Additionally, Plath’s mother has a great impact on Plath and the characters
in her poem “Electra on Azalea Path,” because Plath’s mother Aurelia kept Sylvia in
the dark about the life and death of her father, Otto. The distance between Otto and
Sylvia made Plath incapable of coping with his absence in her early childhood, and
with his death during her adolescent and adult life. The anger against her mother,
which is visible in “Electra on Azalea Path,” adds another dimension to Sylvia Plath’s
self-diagnosed Electra complex.
She even deifies her father as Poseidon in her revision of mythology in “Electra
on Azalea Path,” which Plath wrote after visiting her father’s grave. In the first
stanza, she refers to her mother “As if you never existed, as if I came/ God-fathered
into the world from my mother’s belly:/ Her wide bed wore the stain of
divinity.” “Electra on Azalea Path” presents the father figure as a ghostly image that
the “I” of the poem is desperately trying to reach. The intensity of the declarative
voice in “Daddy” is not yet present here, but the speaker is very much in search of
the triumphant resolution that “Daddy” offers.
Moreover, one of her poems is called “The Disquieting Muses.” Stories on
muses have a rich history in literature. This poem is important to understand what
Plath considers as a muse or inspiration. As a background to the poem, Plath was
inspired by Giorgio de Chirico’s 1917 painting of the same title as Plath explains:
It borrows its title from the painting by Giorgio de Chirico – The
Disquieting Muses. All through the poem I have in mind the
enigmatic figures in this painting – three terrible faceless
dressmaker’s dummies in classical gowns, seated and standing in a
weird, clear light that casts the long strong shadows characteristic of
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de Chirico’s early work. The dummies suggest a twentieth-century
version of other sinister trios of women – the Three Fates, the witches
in Macbeth, de Quincey’s sisters of madness. (Collected Poems 276)
In the painting, a hallucinatory and even ominous timeless space is created by the
background, colors and elements used within it. The three muses depicted in the
painting are featureless, cold, and bald and the colors make the muses appear as
inhuman, pale mannequins. The colors and the depiction of the objects in the
painting create a tense, disturbing, and even sinister atmosphere. The landscape is
motionless: everything stands still and the background is cold, emotionless, and
impersonal. No action or definite consequence are either indicated or foreshadowed.
Like the negativity and the pessimistic atmosphere that the painting created within
itself, Plath keeps on her negativity from every beginning to the end. By
metaphorizing its subject and the shifting from “abstract” to “illusionism,” Plath
makes the poem the process of representation. She creates a different perspective and
allows the observers to reflect their subjective perception back on the work as this
poem does.
As depicted in the painting, the negativity starts from the title because the muses
that are seen as the source of inspiration are “disquieting.” The poem opens with the
persona as a small child in her crib visited by three maternal figures, god-mothers.
Plath defines the muses as disquieting and then, in the opening stanza, the negative
elements are demonstrated by the adjectives and adverbs “illbred,” “disfigured,”
“unsightly,” “unwisely” and “unasked”. These figure become metaphors for the
anxiety Plath feels about her own ability to find a safe place in literature.
Strangeways tells us that “The muses are blankfaced and enigmatic rather than
supportive, and the daughter’s relationship with them is characterized not by feeling
of comfort and supportiveness, but by a sense of awful and fearful pride in her
oppression” (32). Suzanne Juhasz observes these figures are new companions for the
speaker, and they give her a creative life:
These evil fairies are her Muses, and the gift they have given her is
the power to see the real. The real is disquieting – frightening,
because it contains within itself at all times the existence of death; but
the ability to see th real is the price this poet must pay for the ability
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to make poems. (98)
Approaching from a different point of view, Gina Wisker argues the disturbing
female images represent gendered struggles unique to the woman performer. She
points out that
Successful female performers are always in danger of revenge taken
by those whose mastery and skill they are convicted of usurping: male
performers and the everyday world. The tightrope of being your own
woman is perilous in Plath’s poetry. Her women are wary of dangers
inherent in a fixed sense of being-in-the-world. (111)
In the next line the speaker cries out, “Mother, mother” in anger. After her
sessions with her psychologist Ruth Beuscher, Plath writes down, “Ever since
Wednesday I have been feeling like a new ‘person.’ Like a shot of brandy went
home, a sniff of cocaine, hit me where I live and I am alive & so-there. Better than
shock treatment: ‘I give you permission to hate your mother’” (Unabridged
Journals 429). Plath shows her anger toward her mother through her poem. Plath’s
meetings with her psychologist are important because they are a way of confessing
one’s inner thoughts and emotions. Plath deems her mother responsible because of
her beloved father’s death. She blames her mother: “My mother killed the only man
who’d love me steady though life: came in one morning with tears of nobility in
her eyes and told me he was gone for good. I hate her for that” (Unabridged
Journals 431). Thus, with the repetition of “Mother, mother,” Plath’s persona
reflects her anger and accusation of her mother. I mention Plath’s relation with her
mother because she is one of the primary influences on her life and work. Mary
Lynn Broe claims: “the impulse to transform the mother-daughter bond is a model
for the transforming protean impulse behind all of Plath’s poetry” (84).
There is an irrefutable relation between an artist and her work. An artist feeds
and benefits from her real life experiences to create. In this way, her work can drift
apart from an abstract and artificial façade and create a touching effect on readers,
and readers generally seek something real about life and want to see that they have
common ideas and feelings with the writer. For Plath’s readers, her poems are the
declarations of a real person who loves, hates, and suffers as she writes and talks
about feelings many people would probably hesitate to mention. Lucy Rosenthal
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writes: “Miss Plath doesn’t claim to ‘speak for’ any time or anyone – and yet she
does, because she speaks so accurately” (365). Therefore, Plath becomes familiar to
us, and we have tenderness and sympathy toward her because we identify with her
poetry.
In the first stanza, she accuses her mother for sending these witch-like muses as
godmothers in her stead to her baptism. Thus, instead of a loving mother, there are
dreadful godmother figures “With heads like darning-eggs to nod” and they are
“Mouthless, eyeless, with stitched bald head.” Also, as she explains, she addresses
“three terrible faceless dressmaker’s dummies” in the painting. The witch-like
figures stand “at foot and head/ And at the left side of my crib,” thus associating her
mother, who stands by the right side of her crib with the witch-like figures. The story
in the first stanza resembles the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, but there is no prince
to save her. Britzolakis comments upon the opposition of mother and godmother as
characters from fairy tales where the mother figure is divided into good and bad
halves:
In “The Disquieting Muses,” the speaker is inheritor of a
treacherously double maternal legacy. The “good mother,” who
“makes stories to order” […] offers a pastoral and sentimental idyll
[…]. Her disquieting surrogates (with whom, it is hinted, she is in
secret collusion) inhabit a bleakly antinatural, “metaphysical”
landscape borrowed from Giorgio de Chirico’s painting, “The
Disquieting Muses” (1917). The speaker’s inheritance, the ghastly
“kingdom” of negation, is inscribed as the obverse of maternal
sentiment, and linked with the modernist image of the defaced
mannequins. The reign of the Muses implies the ruin of paternal law,
signaled by the broken window panes of the father’s study in the third
stanza. Although the speaker continues to play the role of smiling
dutiful daughter […] on the familial stage, she becomes, in effect, a
daughter-in-mourning. (59)
As previously stated, Plath mixes fairy tale and reality to create her own myths.
In the next stanza, the persona draws a line between the tales and reality: “Mother,
who made to order stories/ Of Mixie Blackshort the heroic bear,/ Mother, whose
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witches always, always/ Got baked into gingerbread.”
As Plath explains in her journal, she likens three faceless dummies with the
Three Fates, the witches in Macbeth, and de Quincey’s sisters of madness. According
to Greek mythology, the Three Fates are generally described as ugly old women who
control the metaphorical thread of life of every human being from birth to death. In
addition, in the last stanza the persona explains that these disquieting muses have
been with her since her birth:
Day now, night now, at head, side, feet,
They stand their vigil in gowns of stone,
Faces blank as the day I was born,
Their shadows long in the setting sun
That never brightens or goes down.
Since these muses have been with her since childhood, Plath shows that she depends
on these unconstructive images and negativity. Muses in Greek mythology are the
goddesses of inspiration of literature and the arts. They are the source of knowledge,
and some muses are attributed to literature and poetry. Muses are thought to be the
source of knowledge and inspiration, which for Plath are her deepest
unconsciousness and darkness. Erica Jong argues, “The muse may be many things to
the woman poet: mother, lover, doppelganger. Often, when the woman poet writes to
her muse, she writes to that witchy aspect of her own soul – the goddess of death and
destruction within herself” (32).
Her use of language in poetry has always been rhythmic and angry. She uses
unstressed iambic tetrameter with an occasional unstressed syllable in “The
Disquieting Muses.” There are seven stanzas of eight lines; lines two and four rhyme,
and lines five and seven rhyme with each other. The structure of the poem is regular.
The stanzas appear to be blocks on the page. The accented words fall in alternating
strong positions in lines 6 and 7. The adherence to iambic tetrameter in these lines
gives the impression of a military march sort of rhythm, and when reversed feet
occur it is more dramatic. Wherever “mother” occurs, it starts a line with a reversed
foot followed by a grammatical break, dramatically interrupting the established
military rhythm. The last two lines of the poem are especially powerful. Line 55,
“Mother, mother. But no frown of mine,” starts with two reversed feet and divides in
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the middle with a full stop. Then the final line “Will betray the company I keep”
returns to a regular iambic pattern, despite the extra slack syllable at the head of the
line. These last two lines are at first choppy and then regular, “Mother, mother. But
no frown of mine/ Will betray the company I keep.”
Moreover, Plath shows her volatile emotions with an extensive vocabulary. Her
pessimism and irrepressible effervescence occur throughout her work except in her
poems about her children. Hence her muses are a bit frightening and disturbing.
Plath’s self-dramatizing highs and lows evolve into pure horror and her tone
becomes desperate.
Plath’s poem “Medusa” evokes the tension between mother and daughter. Its
original title was “Mum” but changed later. Medusa is the name for a genus of
jellyfish, synonymous with Plath’s mother’s first name, “Aurelia.” Additionally, the
title refers to one of the three Gorgons in mythology to give the image “your
unnerving head-God-ball.” Medusa has snakes for hair turns men into stone. The title
suggests both Plath’s mother and the mythical Medusa who is feared by men. The
poem tells us the story of a woman who struggles to separate herself from the
dominant mother who does not recognize her daughter’s individuality. Plath’s
Medusa-as-mother wants to seize the daughter back into a womb where nothing can
grow.
Sister Bernetta Quinn, quoting a conversation with Gary Lane, in “Medusa
Imagery in Sylvia Plath” states that there is “the desired […] exorcism of the mother,
and beneath it the recognition that (a) we’ve nothing in common, and (b) we, two
separate images, are merged” (76). The mother-Medusa threatens to stare the
daughter into eternal blankness and the daughter fights to break the gaze by cutting
the umbilical cord that connects the daughter and the mother. The daughter wants to
defend herself from her mother’s deadly gaze. Once Plath wrote that “I write as if an
eye were upon me. That is fatal” (Journals 317). By writing, Plath wishes to create
her own identity and femininity, free from her mother’s gaze and pressure.
Lynda Bundtzen describes the poem: “The umbilical cord between mother and
daughter is stronger than Daddy’s iron-fisted dominance because it poses a subtler
threat and is an older, primal connection” (94). In her analysis, Bundtzen describes
the dense imagery that characterizes the relation between mother and child:
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Medusa is the immature form of the adult jellyfish, Aurelia, so that it
works as a code for her mother’s name; but it also applies to the child,
to Plath as an immature medusa to the adult Aurelia […]. Both of these
metaphors – mother as jellyfish and Gorgon – help to define the tie
between mother and daughter, in imagery drawn from birth and
infancy: they are bound together by an “old barnacled umbilicus;” the
jellyfish mother is “fat and red, a placenta;” and the “hot salt” of the sea
water is like amniotic fluid. What Plath explores, then, is the emotional
effect of this primary mother-infant relationship on her adult life. (94)
The image shows the primal bond between mother and child. Kristeva states that
with every return to the semiotic comes pain –not only from the loss inspired by the
subject’s separation from the mother, but also from the danger of losing herself in the
primordial union with the mother. “Did I escape, I wonder?” She does not know
whether or not she has the distance to create herself and her lines because “My mind
winds to you,” and there is “Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,/ Keeping itself,
it seems, in a state of miraculous repair.” The persona admits there is a link to mother
and it is underlined by repeated vowels and consonants. The poem implies that the
Medusa-mother is a period, a grammatical stop: “you are always there,/ Tremulous
breath at the end of my line. The mother threatens the daughter to stop her lines, and
the daughter fights back to protect her poetic creativity.
Medusa
Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs,
Eyes rolled by white sticks,
Ears cupping the sea’s incoherences,
You house your unnerving head-God-ball,
Lens of mercies,
Your stooges
Plying their wild cells in my keel’s shadow,
Pushing by like hearts,
Red stigmata at the very center,
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Riding the rip tide to the nearest point of departure,
Dragging their Jesus hair.
Did I escape, I wonder?
My mind winds to you
Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,
Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous repair.
In any case, you are always there,
Tremulous breath at the end of my line,
Curve of water upleaping
To my water rod, dazzling and grateful,
Touching and sucking.
I didn’t call you.
I didn’t call you at all.
Nevertheless, nevertheless
You steamed to me over the sea,
Fat and red, a placenta
Paralysing the kicking lovers.
Cobra light
Squeezing the breath from blood bells
Of the fuscia. I could draw no breath,
Dead and moneyless,
Overexposed, like an X-ray.
Who do you think you are?
A Communion wafer? Bluberry Mary?
I shall take no bite of your body,
Bottle in which I live,
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Ghastly Vatican.
I am sick to death of hot salt.
Green as eunuchs, your wishes
Hiss at my sins.
Off, off, eely tentacle!
There is nothing between us.
“Medusa” progresses quickly, it is impelled by anger. In “Kindness,” Plath writes
“The blood jet is poetry/ There is no stopping it.” So, “Medusa” is “a blood jet”
poem in Plath’s terms. It is a long poem written in a monologue. There are uneven
line lengths. The first stanza opens with “off:” “Off that landspit of stony mouthplugs,” and “off” is doubled nearly at the close of the poem, “Off, off, eely tentacle!”
It neither closes Medusa’s eyes nor turns Medusa’s terrifying gaze in another
direction. The fifth stanza, particularly the first three lines, is like a chant. There is a
repetition of the long “a” and “s” sounds like a hissing. There is a long “e,” which
lengthens the line, in “steamed,” “me,” and “sea,” and the last line in this stanza ends
the elongated sounds with short and quick syllables “fat and red:”
I didn’t call you.
I didn’t call you at all.
Nevertheless, nevertheless
You steamed to me over the sea,
Fat and red, a placenta
In the sixth stanza, the language returns to the reserved and colloquial diction and
characteristic of the rest of the poem. Plath produces intense moments with the
repetition of a single word or phrase in the poem. There is a single line at the end of
the poem. By standing alone, the final line seems to break the cord between the
mother and the daughter: “There is nothing between us.” Arguing the importance of
the female sphere, Linda Bundtzen thinks “‘Medusa’ has neither the psychological
clarity nor dramatic ease of “Daddy,” which suggests that the effort for control
through language […] is not completely successful” (94). She concludes her
argument that the poem “remains incoherent, inadequate to the feelings toward her
mother that Plath is trying to express (106).
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CHAPTER 5
PLATH’S USE OF LANGUAGE IN THE COLOSSUS AND OTHER
POEMS, AND ARIEL
From her early to late poems, Sylvia Plath progresses from experimentation to
maturity. However, her themes remain constant throughout her early works dated
between 1955 and 1959. Plath wrote some of her Colossus poems when she was
about twenty-three, so they display an amateur experimental quality. Additionally, in
both The Colossus and Other Poems, and Ariel, Plath has the same negative,
pessimistic attitudes, with themes of death, desperation, victimization, patriarchy,
alienation from society, the body, the self, and motherhood. She criticizes people
who talk about happy things instead of bad things:
Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the
person out of Belsen – physical or psychological – wants is nobody
saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet, but the full knowledge that
somebody else has been there and knows the worst, just what it is like.
It is much more help for me, for example, to know that people are
divorced and go through hell, than to hear about happy marriage.
(Letters Home 559-60)
Plath has gone through many negative turnabouts in her life: her father’s early death,
depression, betrayal in marriage, and struggling to get by with two little kids in the
1960s. Thus, her tone is depressive and melancholic and “the poems are full of pain,
of references to suffering and death as release from suffering but to read them as
coded references to her suicide seems unfair (Bassnett 20). Alvarez argues that
Plath’s self-destructiveness is “the very source of her creative energy. […] It was,
precisely, a source of living energy, of her imaginative, creative power” (99). Her
depressive state of mind triggers her creativity; she benefits from the pain that she
feels in her soul.
Julia Kristeva explains that “Depression is the hidden face of Narcissus” (“On
the Melancholic Imaginary” 5). Apparently, Plath’s continual depression feeds her
creativity and the power of the imagination. Kristeva asks the questions: “What is a
melancholia? What is a depression? (“On the Melancholic Imaginary” 6) and
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answers, “We find ourselves faced with an enigmatic chiasmus that will continue to
preoccupy us. If loss, mourning, and absence set the imaginary act in motion and
permanently fuel it as much as they menace and undermine it, it is also undeniable
that the fetish of the work of art is erected in disavowal of this mobilizing affliction”
(“On the Melancholic Imaginary” 6). According to Kristeva, loss, mourning, and
absence prompt the imaginary and fuel it. Ted Hughes supports Kristeva in the
introduction to The Journals of Sylvia Plath:
The root system of her talent was a deep and inclusive inner crisis
which seems to have been quite distinctly formulated in its chief
symbols (presumably going back at least as far as the death of her
father, when she was eight) by the time of her first attempted suicide,
in 1953, when she was twenty-one. […] Though, its preoccupation
dominated her life, it remained largely outside her ordinary
consciousness, but in her poems we see inner working of it. It seems
to have been scarcely disturbed at all by the outer upheavals she
passed through, by her energetic involvement in her studies, in her
love affairs and her marriage, though she used details from them as a
matter of course for images to develop her X rays. (154)
Plath notes that “It is as if my life were magically run by two electric currents:
joyous positive and despairing negative –whichever is running at the moment
dominates my life, floods it” (Journal 240). On the other hand, only a few of Plath’s
poems have a happy and joyful tone. Plath has always wanted to be a bit melancholic
and desperate to focus her writing and use of symbols. Many of her symbols are
chosen intentionally to reflect her depressive mood basically focusing on death. Aird
states, “to write about death with control, almost with objectivity, or rather the ability
to make in the process of artistic creation the most subjective feelings acquire a
certain appearance of reasoned and reasonable, is one of the most remarkable
qualities which Sylvia Plath’s last poetry exhibits” (86). Also, she has always felt the
loss and absence of her father, and the images she uses in her poetry are connected
with her father, like the “bee” symbols in her poems. As Kristeva explains: “The
artist: melancholy’s most intimate witness and the fiercest fighter against the
symbolic abdication enveloping him until death strikes and suicide imposes its
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triumphant conclusion upon the void of the lost object” (“On the Melancholic
Imaginary” 6). The lost person is her father, Otto, and the lost object is her love of
her father.
On the other hand, criticizing her negativity, Webster Schott asserts that “Sylvia
Plath was a sick woman who made her art of her sickness. One or two of her poems
will be read a long time but absent from her work are joy, glory, strong love, any
sense of the interdependence of human relationships and the infinite alternatives of
life. Some young people, having limited experience, need literature to help them feel
bad, and people, having limited experience, and they will celebrate Plath for a while”
(3).
Kristeva claims that “Literary creation is that adventure of the body and signs
that bear witness to the affect –of sadness as the mark of separation and the
beginnings of the dimension of the symbol, of joy as the mark of triumph […;] this
testimony is one produced by literary creation in a medium entirely different from
that of mood, affect being transposed into rhythms, signs, forms” (“On the
Melancholic Imaginary” 8). According to Suzanne Juhasz:
For Plath, poetry had always been symbolic of action. In The
Colossus, she had used language to impose an order upon experience,
but the order in her poems contradicted her vision of reality as
fragmented and perpetually disintegrating. Only in a poem could the
world be composed and controlled, and so poetry was artificial: it lied.
In the later poetry, she begins to tell the truth. When she comes to see
that reality resides in her own mind, words and poems become as real
as anything else. The expression of her vision in words unleashes
reality, for her poems describe what is real: her own consciousness.
The action that is poetry is recognized as symbolic action (she never
ceases to know the difference between art and life), but the symbols
now reflect rather than counteract her own life. (102)
The content and the themes stay almost the same throughout her first and second
poetry book. About the negativity of her poems, Steven Axelrod remarks that
Plath not only depicted scenes of torture, she also regularly tortured
her readers with these graphic scenes of sadism, thereby awakening
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them to the complexities of torture. The poems confront readers with
torture’s ambiguous powers of repulsion and gratification in our
fantasy life and with the pointless, painful, and often fatal recurrence
of it in our political life. In scenes of gruesome violence, Plath forces
readers to collaborate with her in fantasizing about a dimension of
experience most would prefer to suppress. (“Plath” 73)
She feels herself depressed and tortured, and the depiction of her own sadness
tortures and makes her readers feel her sadness in turn. Her readers witness the
horrific images she creates and the graphic image of her pain can be observed
throughout her poetry. Christopher Beach suggests that “Plath pushes beyond poetic
convention in her choice of metaphors, assaulting the reader’s sensibilities with the
lurid violence of her images” (159). Emphasizing the “I” persona that Plath uses
throughout her poetry, Susan Bassnett states that “The I that is Sylvia Plath writing
dissolves into the I of each of us reading, and we bring our own subjective responses
to those lines” (35). About the personae of Plath’s poems, Beach suggests: “Plath’s
speaker is a composite based on her own life experience as well as other, fictional
personae. Though the poem deals in a general sense with Plath’s own suicide
attempts and their aftermath, the personal details are left vague, and the poem’s
speaker focuses more on the creation of her mythic persona (160). Furthermore,
Plath’s persona has always been a female and in Ariel the only two poems based on a
male voice are “The Hanging Man” and “Paralytic.” About Plath’s experiment of
exploring male personae, Jacqueline Rose writes:
The point of drawing attention to these poems is not, however, to
suggest that Plath lives the drama she describes any the less intensely
as a woman, but that, in a gesture which can be variously described as
empathy, pleasure, diagnosis and revenge, she can see, represent – she
cannot avoid representing – its other (sexual) side. Another way of
putting this would be to say that it is because she becomes it (the male
‘part’) in fantasy that she knows it and can diagnosis it so well. (135)
Her effort to write with a male persona may be seen as her deliberate aim to make
her poems mingle with different perspective and in this way she is able to succeed in
passing over the sexual boundaries in her writings. The identifiable themes of the
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poems in The Colossus show the sense of doom and death and the display of
emotional conflict. As for the content of the poems in Ariel, it must be emphasized
that “Sylvia Plath’s poetry, full as it is of references to death, is by no means focused
on her own death. In the poems collected in the volume Ariel and some of the later
ones, there are references to different kinds of death, in particular to death in the
concentration camps” (Bassnett 21).
Generally, Plath’s language depends on sounds and rhythms rather than
complicated diction. On the other hand, the formal and structural aspects of her
poems change radically from her first poetry book to the later Ariel. For example,
“Tulips” is a dramatic monologue written in first person narration with nine sevenline stanzas; it has sixty-three lines in total, thus it is a long poem and it seems like an
epic that follows no rhyme scheme. The verses are free but with a general iambic
rhythm. Also the poem has hidden melody. About the poem, Ted Hughes notes:
The two years between 1960 and 1962 produced some beautiful
poems, but only three that she selected for Ariel. She had heard what
her real voice sounded like, and now had a new standard for herself.
The poem called TULIPS was the first sign of what was on its way.
She wrote this poem without her usual studies over the Thesaurus, and
at top speed, as one might write an urgent letter. From then on, all her
poems were written in this way. (187-95)
“Tulips” marks a new stage in Plath’s development. Her earlier efforts to train her
vision outward, toward the landscape, and to concentrate on realistic details, as well
as her early efforts in set forms combine with the Yaddo exercises to produce her
final poems, of which “Tulips” is the first example. “Tulips” is an unusual poem,
written as a first-person narrative poem with the speaker being Plath herself. It is not
a cheerful poem, but it moves from cold to warmth, from numbness to love, from
empty whiteness to vivid redness, a process manipulated by imagination. It reveals
what Plath means when she states the manipulative mind must control its most
tarrying experiences. The poem demonstrates how the mind may generate hyperboles
to torture itself, and how this generative faculty may have not only a positive but also
a negative function.
The poem shows the way in which the mind may intensify its pain by
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objectifying it. Jeannine Dobbs notes that “Ted Hughes says she wrote ’Tulips’ after
being hospitalized for an appendectomy in March of 1961.” The poem is full of
images and symbols. Hardy notes that the “slow, reluctant acceptance of the tulips”
signifies “a slow, reluctant acceptance of a return to life” (132). The imagery of the
first four stanzas is repeated and reversed in the imagery of the last four, and in this
way the poem moves into and out from a central stanza with unusual symmetry. The
poem does not allow the speaker to sympathize and unify with the environment
because the responsibilities and commitment to the family remain constant:
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
In the beginning of the poem, Plath implies her desire to disappear in the whiteness
to feel peace and tranquility. Plath wants to be invisible – “nobody” – as she wants to
get rid of all social categorization. The first stanza continues:
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.
She gives her identity and clothes: there is no background or history for her, and she
leaves her body to surgeons. Neither her identity, history, nor her body is important.
There is no social categorization for or pressure on her identity or body. “Tulip” is
contradicted with matching stanza and correspondences developed between external
objects and states of consciousness. According to Vanessa Curtis, “Plath had
discovered sanctuary there that was not to be found at home, and in the poem her
speaker cherishes the quietude of the hospital” (177). The speaker is responsive to
inner and outer compulsions and is able to handle her situation. As the inner tensions
intensified in the last months of her life, Plath was forced to create a persona much
more rigid than the speaker of “Tulip.” At this point however, rigidity is what she
desires.
For the form and the structure, Plath was previously interested in villanelle and
sonnets, but “The woman writing villanelles in her college days was to write very
differently about love and about men in her later poems” (Bassnett 97). We can state
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that Plath arranges her poem so she wants readers to read it to get its sound, rhythm,
and emphasis. The length of lines and the location of pauses affect the speed of
reading. In free verse the typographical arrangement of words produces emphasis, as
regular rhythm and rhyme produce emphasis in metrical verse. On the other hand, we
can realize that Plath’s earlier poems are more concerned with the formal aspects of
poetry and they have traditional forms consisting of rhythmic pattern. Hugh Kenner
thinks that “The formalisms of The Colossus – assonance, rhyme, stanzaic pattern –
serve a number of interdependent offices, one of which is to reassure the genteel
reader” (“Sincerity Kills” 69, 72). Although Plath’s approach to poetic structure is
traditional, her content has always been fresh. Plath’s poetry shows her ability to use
metaphors: especially in her later poems her ability is sharpened and it is a
consciously developed skill rather than inspiration. Commenting on her technique in
The Colossus, Ted Hughes emphasizes that
She wrote her early poems very slowly, Thesaurus open on her knee,
in her large strange handwriting, like a mosaic, where every letter
stands separate within the work, a hieroglyph to itself. If she didn’t
like a poem, she scrapped it entire. She rescued nothing of it. Every
poem grew complete from its own root, in that laborious inching way,
as if she were working out a mathematical problem, chewing her lips,
putting a thick dark ring of ink around each word that stirred for her
on the page of the Thesaurus. (188)
As Hughes points out, Plath benefits from a thesaurus while writing, and it suggests
the rich diction of her poems. “Certainly the poems of The Colossus do show a
concern for trying out different forms, for experimenting with imagery. They are
often self-consciously intellectual poems, testing the reader’s capacity to pick up on
allusion and to join the writer in complex games that are played with words”
(Bassnett 47). Also, her approach to writing is like an artist at work; she writes as if
she were composing a picture made from overlapping photographs or pieces. In his
introduction to Sylvia Plath’s Collected Poems, Hughes states that “Her attitude to
her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn’t get a tale out of the material, she was quite
happy to get a chair, or even a toy” (13). Her writing is hieroglyphic; every word has
a hidden or mysterious significance and every word is a symbol that conveys an idea
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nonverbally. “Plath’s technique of zooming in on a small image from everyday
reality, then expanding it outwards to acquire new layers of meaning is one that is
repeated over and over in her poetry” (Bassnett 30).
The Colossus was first published in 1960 during the period when Plath spent
effort to develop her own style. The poems in this volume have more structural
freedom and flexibility compared with her college poems. She uses simple and direct
verses, and she uses rhythms and diction in an elementary manner. In The Colossus,
Plath moves from traditional form to focus on prosody. For Plath, this book is a kind
of experimentation with syllabic and poetic meters and there is only one sonnet and it
syllabic verse. In that volume, as Susan Bassnett states, “Sylvia Plath is consciously
experimenting, as a stage in her development as a poet” (47). These poems have
irregular line lengths and are written in free verse. Nevertheless, Robin Peel calls
Plath a “deeply formal writer” who “saw traditional form as liberating rather than a
constraint” (22).
Her later poems collected in Ariel date from her son’s birth in 1962 to her
suicide in February 1963. During this period, Plath was living with her children in
Devon, and she regained her self-assurance and concentrated on her works after
learning of her husband’s infidelity. In this period, Plath reached the highest level of
creative productivity. Thus, the poems in this volume display an innate intensity
combined with an ease of composition. Finally, Plath found her true voice. She was
writing her poems much faster, producing one poem after another. In her later
poems, Plath clearly becomes a master of form, and her poems are original and
powerful. She is transformed from an amateur and experimental poet to a poet of
style and controlled rhythm.
The poems in Ariel tend toward free verse and abandon her earlier
experimentation with syllabic verse; her style is technically developed. In Ariel,
Plath’s poetic strength comes from image linking and metaphor. “Plath’s conscious
focusing on minute detail is almost cinematic, as the eye of the poet functions like a
camera. At the same time, the skilful use of words, particularly adjectives and verbs,
endows the scene with significance” (Bassnett 30). From an early age, Plath wrote
poetry and worked on it like a craft. She was writing poems and short stories for
publication in magazines when she was still in high school. Yet, it is in Ariel where
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she finally found a voice that suits her best. Peter Davison offers more direct
criticism toward the poems in The Colossus: “The early poems, many of them
published in a collection called The Colossus […] seemed to have no absolute
necessity of being: they read like advanced exercises” (76-77). In comparison with
her earlier poems, her later poems are advanced and skillful. Davison comments on
the shift away from the poems in The Colossus toward the context of Ariel in which
Plath’s new voice emerges:
It has become fashionable – or if not fashionable, at least common –
for poets to set down their autobiographical crises, first person and
second person and all, as a qualifying confession to admit this to the
fraternity – a kind of professional good conduct pass. All the
difference in the world, however, lies between such antics, performed
always with an audience in mind, whether explicitly in the poem or
implicitly in its tone, and, on the other hand, such terrifying lines as
these, from several of the poems in Ariel. (76-77)
After being influenced by Robert Lowell and his new techniques in poetry, Plath
began to focus on her real life experiences and developed a strong inner voice. Thus,
she started to apply new techniques and methods she learned in those classes. Also,
free verse and the stream of consciousness are new techniques she learned from
Robert Lowell. On the advancement of Plath’s later poems, her daughter Frieda
Hughes asserts:
There was no lack of choice. Since the publication of The Colossus in
1960, my mother had written many poems that showed an advance on
her earlier work. These were transitional poems between the very
different styles of The Colossus and Ariel (a selection of them was
published in Crossing the Water in 1971). But towards the end of 1961,
poems in the Ariel voice began to appear here and there among the
transitional poems. They had an urgency, freedom, and force that was
quite new in her work. In October 1961, there was “The Moon and the
Yew Tree” and “Little Fugue;” “An Appearance” followed in April
1962. From this point, all the poems she wrote were in the distinctive
Ariel voice. They are poems of an other-worldly, menacing landscape.
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(The Guardian)
John Frederick Nims evaluates the poems in The Colossus from a technical point of
view. Admitting Plath’s advances in Ariel, Nims states that
It is true that Sylvia Plath was struck by lightning from the spirit but it
is also true that she had spent much of her life forging speech of a
metal to conduct the lightning without being instantly fused. […]
Perhaps for writers this is the gist of the Plath case: without the
drudgery of The Colossus, the triumph of Ariel is unthinkable. (137)
As Nims points out, Plath devoted all her time to writing poetry: she started to write at
the age of eight and published her poems since then, and finally she achieved success in
her last poetry book. Peter Dawson comments that the poems in Ariel “would never have
come into being without the long, deliberate technical training that preceded them. We
can only perform with true spontaneity what we have first learned to do by habit” (7677). Like Nims, Dawson also indicates that she has trained herself to be successful in her
poetic technique and style. As Susan Bassnett points out, “Through Ariel we see several
different aspects of Plath’s writing, and the arrangement of poems foregrounds the
differences and shows the range of her technical ability” (42).
To find her authentic poetic voice and style, Plath has used many techniques and
worked with different structures and systems up to the writing of Ariel. In The Facts
On File Companion to 20th-Century American Poetry, Burt Kimmelman explains the
title “Ariel”:
The title alludes to Plath’s horse, which was named after the “airy
spirit” from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest (1611). Ariel is
Prospero’s servant, and at the end of the play, when Prospero sets him
free, it is clear that Ariel represents creative power and poetry. Thus
Plath’s “Ariel” literally describes the physical sensation of riding a
speeding horse across a landscape, while also pointing to the
transformative powers of poetic language. (14)
About the speculations on the name, “Ariel,” Pamela A. Smith in “The Unitive
Urge in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath” expands the topic comparing and combining
Plath’s artistic effort with the name: “She attained at last a still point […] within
herself
as
her
life
and
work
merged,
108
became
interchangeable
and
indistinguishable. A ride on her horse, Ariel, comes to embody the unity she
searched for, the active, ecstatic oblivion” (336). Many of the poems collected in
Ariel had been submitted to literary magazines to be published before Plath’s
death. Most of them were rejected because they were found too difficult to
understand and too extreme. It was a new kind of poetry. The poem “Ariel” was
one of the few accepted and published in The London Observer, whose editors
decided to change the title to “The Horse” believing that readers would find it too
hard to understand what the poem was about. As a first-hand source, Frieda
Hughes explains the title of the poem: “For the title poem my mother simply
writes: “Another horseback riding poem, this one called ‘Ariel,’ after a horse I’m
especially fond of” (Ariel: The Restored Edition xx). About the notes for the
poems, Frieda adds: “These introductions made me smile; they have to be the
most understated commentaries imaginable for poems that are pared down to their
sharpest points of imagery and delivered with tremendous skill. When I read them
I imagine my mother, reluctant to undermine with explanation the concentrated
energy she’d poured into her verse, in order to preserve its ability to shock and
surprise”(Ariel: The Restored Edition xx)
Sylvia found writing in formal patterns easy. The difficulty was discovering the
true life of the poem inside its technical scaffolding (Wagner-Martin 160). Then, she
stopped being concerned with the formal elements and structural patterns. In Ariel,
she mostly focuses on metaphors. In fact, the title is itself metaphorical. Concerning
the horse as a metaphor in Plath’s poetry, Christina Britzolakis suggests that “the
experience of riding a horse becomes a metaphor for the process of writing a poem”
(156). In Ariel, she expresses her feelings and thoughts more concisely and directly.
Through vivid imagery, the poems depict moments and events, and readers visualize
scenes through her poetry: “They are rich and dense with images, often loosely
connected though always sharp and focused” (Bassnett 39).
The interplay between realistic description and metaphor play an important role,
and she creates symbolic awareness throughout her poems. Also Plath uses the horse
metaphor in “Elm”: “Love is a shadow/ How you lie and cry after it/ Listen: these are
its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse” (Stanza 3). The use of “horse” to suggest
movement and echoes is similar in both poems. “Ariel” is the speaker’s experience
109
of riding a horse, but it also refers to Godiva. According to legend, Lady Godiva rode
her horse naked in the streets of the town “commanding all Persons to keep within
Doors and from their Windows, on pain of Death” (The History of England 135), and
a man named Tom watched her riding, and it “cost him his life” (135); he became
blind or dead. In “Elm,” “love” is connected with a horse that goes off and evokes
the sense of death in the next stanza: “All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,/ Till
your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf” (stanza 4). In both poems, “horse”
represents and symbolizes energy, motion, and death.
Concerning Plath’s early poetry, Anne Sexton indicates that “Those early poems
were all in a cage (and not even her own cage at that). I felt she hadn’t found a voice
of her own, wasn’t in truth, free to be herself […] at the end, Sylvia burst from her
cage and came riding straight out” (174-81). Sexton indicates that in Plath’s earlier
poems she had not yet found her real voice, but then she uncovered her most private
personal life, wrote down exactly what she had in her mind, and found her real voice.
Ariel emerged when Plath reached poetic maturity.
In Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson writes that Plath “clos[ed] in on her mind’s
light as she had not before, and her grasp of this unearthly illumination was by now
masterly, her armory of poetic techniques impressive, the voice completely her own
– her mature voice” (229). Plath herself states: “I know that within a year I shall
publish a book of 33 poems which will hit the critics violently in some way or
another. My voice is taking shape, coming strong. Ted says he never read poems by a
woman like mine; they are strong and full and rich – not quailing and whining like
Teasdale or simple lyrics like Millais; they are working, sweating, heaving poems
born out of the way words should be said” (Letters Home 29 April 1956).
Additionally, the poems in Ariel should be read as Margaret D. Uroff suggests:
Ariel must be read as several chapters of a creative autobiography,
written by a woman whose purpose in the last years of her life was to
come to terms with the various female roles and identities into which
she had been split. It is full of wrong leads, frustrated efforts, obscure
and private battles that attest to the difficulties she had to face and to
the energy she expended on them. Her final poetic accomplishment
was not to transcend these hardships, but to face them directly and to
110
leave a record of that confrontation. In the image of the rising lioness/
Virgin/ red comet, she identified a female figure violent enough to
triumph in a world that Plath imagined would reduce the woman to a
jade statue – but a female also with creatively violent powers of her
own. (169)
Moreover, commenting on the poems in Ariel, Robert Lowell tells us that
In these poems written in the last months of her life and often rushed
out at the rate of two or three a day, Sylvia Plath becomes herself,
becomes something imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly created –
hardly a person at all, or a woman, certainly not a ‘poetess,’ but one of
those super-real, hypnotic, great classical heroines. […] Everything in
these poems is personal, confessional, felt, but the manner of feeling
is controlled hallucination, the autobiography of a fever. (Ariel viii)
As Lowell states, the poems were written in a very short time; therefore, the fortythree poems have less variety than the earlier book. “Despite the speed with which
she apparently wrote many of her later poems these earlier poems are, in the most
literal sense of the word, crafted. She uses the form of the poem to shape the
experience she wants to convey; not for her the notion that freedom of expression is
somehow linked to the idea of ‘free’ verse” (Bassnett 50).
If she had lived longer, she may have written more creative and artistic poems,
but she gained much more popularity with her posthumously published poetry book,
Ariel. Nevertheless, regarding her two poetry books, Ariel is different from The
Colossus in form and tone. Adam Kirsch suggests in The Wounded Surgeon:
Plath’s writing life was so brief that it lacks the usual milestones. […] Most
of her lasting poems were written in an incredibly short period of time –
roughly the five months before her suicide in February 1963, to which they
inevitably seem connected. As a result, her artistic growth seems to take place
not in stages, as with most poets, but in a few violent convulsions. (237)
On the other hand, Sarah Hannah says that “As a result of the poet’s troubled and
well-publicized life, as well as the extremely emotional subject matter of the Ariel
poems, these later poems have received far more attention for what they are saying
than for how they are saying it” (232-33). Hannah points out that the tragic events in
111
Plath’s life contributed to her poetry, so that the main focus is often on what her
poems are saying rather than how they are describing her thoughts. Wagner-Martin
points out,
Sylvia had learned a great deal. She had become a mother and a
homeowner; she had learned to share her life, and she had come into
her own as a woman. In so doing, she had become a stronger writer.
She knew that it would do no longer to write poems that are only
exercises. Poems, like life, had to be honest and direct, arrowlike in
their aim, relentless in their intensity. Sylvia had learned to write
those poems – without advice, criticism, or lists of suitable subjects.
She had learned to take the fury and the joy, the feelings she could
both deny and boast of, and from them create art that spoke
powerfully to readers. (243)
Throughout her poetry, neither aesthetic nor stylistic elements can be dismissed, nor
can it be claimed that Plath’s poetry lacks aesthetic value. “Today, the best-known
collection of Plath’s poetry is Ariel. The 40 poems included in the volume include
the most frequently cited and most powerful pieces of her entire output (Bassnett 41).
Among those poems, there are nine poems with two-line stanzas and there are only
six poems with more than five lines per stanza as well as the use of caesuras. Plath
uses caesuras in the middle of her verse lines, often marked by punctuation or by
phrase or clause. When a caesura splits the line in unequal parts and occurs toward
the beginning or end of the line, it is termed, respectively, initial and terminal.
112
CONCLUSION
Plath’s posthumous publication and the following events made her voice heard much
sharper than when she was alive. Her poems raised interest among readers and
critics. Subsequently, the critics began to analyze and interpret her poems in the light
of her life. Most studies are generally based on her private life. For many critics and
readers, Plath’s suicide is a closed book that needs to be opened. Rumors started to
spread out. Thomas was responsible for spreading one of the most damaging rumors.
In his memoir, he claims Hughes held a “party with bongo drums in Plath’s flat on
the night of her funeral” (193).
Some critics accuse Ted Hughes of being an unfaithful husband and
irresponsible father, and take him to be responsible for her suicide. Plath’s fans
vandalized her gravestone because Ted Hughes’ name is written on it. They did not
consider it an offence to the poet they love but they think that her husband’s name
does not deserve to be written on that gravestone. Elizabeth Bronfen suggests:
It is equally a commonplace of anthropology that an unmarked grave
points to the fact that the body is not in place, that the boundary
between the living and the dead has not fully been drawn so that a
severement of the bond between the deceased and the survivors has
not yet been symbolically cemented and the questions her death posed
not yet settled. The debate over the marking of Sylvia Plath’s grave
can, then, also be read as a trope for the manner in which this
particular author has taken on an uncanny ghostly existence in our
collective-image
repertoire
[…].
Owing
to
the
posthumous
publication of a large bulk of her work, though dead she has also been
returned to the living, so that she seems to haunt her readers and
critics with a spectral voice. (7-8)
Each of Plath’s poems has been searched and examined to find details that fit her
life. Miranda Sherwin claims this kind of judgment distorts our understanding of
confessional poetry: “in its emphasis on the autobiographical and on authorial
intention […] the term ‘confessional’ seems to have acted as an invitation to view a
poem less as an art form than as a documentation of the poet’s life. As a result, much
113
criticism of confessional poetry depends on some foreknowledge of the author’s life
and relies upon this information to interpret the poetry” (24). All great writers and
poets die; the manner of their deaths is not the case study, but their works, and we
should praise their works. Plath always had a talent to express herself through
writing. She improved her writing skills by working on different styles. Writing is a
life source for her; she believed in the power of words. Plath stated that “Writing
breaks open the vaults of the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels
hide. The mind makes and makes, spinning its web” (Journals 286). She approached
and treated words as living organisms, and she tried to reach and tell beyond words.
Hence, she timidly worked with treasures and found words that exactly fit the poem,
both for their meanings and sounds. She was an intellectual woman who studied
many subjects at college, and these subjects gave her insight to create new themes
and topics.
On the other hand, after Assia Wevill, for whom Hughes abandoned Plath, killed
herself and her daughter exactly in the same way as Plath, harsh criticism turned on
Hughes to be the only person behind these two women’s deaths, and he has been
accused as an abusive husband. Some critics focus on Plath’s psychological
conditions; they mainly look for the details of how Plath was affected by her father’s
death and how long she suffered from depression, and the resulting shock therapy.
Some critics label her as “a mad genius” and claim her madness triggered her
creativity. They try to find clues about her pathological and unhealthy psychological
state. Neither Plath’s poems nor her stories are documents written for her
psychological treatment, nor do they make a psychological approach necessary; and
nor are we psychologists or psychiatrists to diagnose her. Analyzing her works
through a pathological perspective or through psychoanalytic theory is futile to
understand her artistic capability, and underestimates her efforts and hard work to be
a good poet. In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Rose addresses the diagnostic critics:
There are those who pathologise Plath, freely diagnose her as
schizophrenic or psychotic, read her writings as symptom or warning,
something we should both admire and avoid. Diagnosis of Plath tends
to make her culpable –guilt by association with the troubles of the
unconscious mind. The spectre of psychic life rises up in her person as
114
a monumental affront for which she is punished. (3)
Psychoanalytic theorists assert that Plath is a poet with an Electra Complex since she
longed for her dead father and hated her mother. Some feminist critics approach her
works to find proofs to underline the position and conditions of a woman writer and
women in general. They try to draw a picture of a woman suffering under patriarchal
society. For them, Plath’s private experience is not an individual matter because
Plath emerges as a holistic picture of a female. They read Plath’s works as a
declaration of her battle to survive as an individual female body. Some of them even
claim that Plath had a problem with patriarchy and male control, so that she shows
her father as the Nazi and herself as a Jew tortured and suppressed. According to
their argument, Hughes interfered and altered the list of the poems while publishing
Ariel, and he destroyed some of Plath’s journals and prevented them from being
published. In this way, feminists accuse Hughes of silencing Plath. James Atlas
writes that Plath “became a Silent Woman, unable to respond to those who reinterpret her life and blame survivors for her death” (5). Yet feminists consider that
everything Hughes did is proof of his oppressive and dominant nature and his
subjection of a female body and voice.
The studies done on Plath provide different approaches and perspectives about
her life and her art. Plath was born to be a writer, and she improved her writing to be
one of the greatest poets of her time. I believe someone’s personal life is of limited
use in analyzing her works. Thus I focus on her writing and analyze her poems in
terms of language, figurative elements, and the use of metaphor and symbolism. I
analyze her poems according to sound, rhythm, and rhyme. Plath plays with words.
She knows the power of words. I point out Plath’s dependence on sound with
assonance, consonance, and alliteration. She enriched her voice with strong sound
effects. Her poems are written to be read out loud. All the images and words are
selected with a sharp eye and a sharp ear, and nothing is accidental in her poetry.
Therefore, the focus of my thesis is on the formalistic aspects of her poems.
115
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