CHAPTER-H

A CRITICAL ANALYSIS
OF SYLVIA PLATH’S
POETRY
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CHAPTER-H
A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF SYLVIA PLATH’S POETRY

2.1 AMERICAN POETRY IN THE MID-TWENTIETH

CENTURY

The modem period of American literature , marks its beginning with

the literature produced in America during the period between World War I
and World War II - the years between the historic depression and the mid­
twentieth century. The major element of modem American poetry is the
treatment of contemporary life in its own terms and not as an allegorical
creation of it upon pkst fable and histories.

The mid-twentieth century American literature is typically modem.

The term ‘modem’ has a variety of connotations, and it refers to fashions
or trends of that period. It may simply mean recent. It has the emphasis on
the themes of alienation, anxiety, depression, sadness, obsession with
death, futility of life and barrenness of mind and all other themes that form
I
a common trait with these twentieth century poets and the absurd; critical
and active response to social reality, a response often charged with irony
and satire. It tends to disrupt the rhetorical continuity. A marked tendency
of it is its international character. These elements have helped modem
American literature to attempt to study objectively, to assess and to
criticise the contemporary civilization in its own terms with a view to
gaining some control over the destiny of man. The great poetic renaissance
in American literature began with the imagists and it stretched into the
period between the two World Wars with varied and new extremes of
experimentation.
 21

In regard of modem poetry Suman Agrawal comments thus :

Modernism produced great number of poets whose works

have instilled their name permanently in the history of
English literature. Modem poetry is a poetry of revolt against
tradition and as such there is much in it that is experimental,
ephemeral and puerile. There is no denying the feet that some
of the modem poets are of outstanding excellence and the
poems produced by them are of permanent and universal
significance. Each poet of this era has written according to
his own mood and temper producing poems of merit. The
poets depicted reality and the individual’s inner feelings,
making it appear more close to heart. Personal influences,
feelings of loneliness, portrayal of death from the common
features of this era’s poetry. Suman Agrawal (2003 : 25-26)

American literature, particularly the poetry, emerged on the

international scene in the early decades of the twentieth century with the
emergence of the eminent poets of this period like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound,
Robert Frost and Wallace Stevence.

The poetry of this period took two different directions, each

expressing an attitude diametrically opposed to each other, just as
traditionalists and academicians. The other trends like The Beat, The
Blackmountain and the New York Group also produced poetry. And these
two major traditions, having their origins in Walt Whitman and T.S. Eliot
still persist. In feet, it does not mean to say that the type of poetry
Whitman and Eliot wrote did not exist before. For Whitman was inspired
by poets like William Blake and the tradition of the Oriental mystics, while
French symbolists, the Elizabethan dramatists and the Bible, served as
sources of inspiration to T.S. Eliot. Therefore, it cannot be denied that,
these traditions have grown out of the old material and the modernists have
employed them in accordance with their present relevance. On this Prof. V.
Rama Murthy says:
 22

The attitudes of these two poets (Whitman and Eliot) have

been determined not only by the sources of their poetic
inspiration but also by the way they have understood these
sources. For instance, in their poetry the same Bhagwad-Gita
appears in two different garbs. Whitman almost takes upon
himself the semblance of the Virat, whereas T.S. Eliot
broods over the message. In one there is a total identification,
and in the other an attempt at an objective
apprehension. S.M. Pandey (1971:22)

The modernists who dominated the scene during this period were
generally led by Eliot and Pound. The poets like Carl Sandburg, John
Gould Aclcher, William Carols Williams tried to revive the Whitman
tradition in American poetry. The poetry of Whitman was of
consciousness. The traditionalists like Carl Sandburg, Melville Cane,
William Rose Benet, Robert Hillyer, Edna Millay matured the trend of
traditionalism in poetry and followed the path of senior poets and
continued to write even after the end of World War-II.

On the other hand, the academic poets or the poets of establishment

like Richard Eberhart, Stanley Kunitz, Randall Jarrell, William Joy Smith,
Richard Wilbur, James Dickey were all committed to the poetry that was
related to the traditional concepts of competence rather than to the radical
values in their content or form. Their poetry is formal, elegant and
ritualistic. Its content is aesthetic experiences. As a matter of fact, the
rapidly changing quality of life in America during the forties and the
fifties has a profound effect on the poets attaining maturity during these
years. They were the witnesses to the accelerated growth of an urban and
technological society. In this connection Stauffer D. B. says :

The depression, Marxism, the labour movement, and the shift

from an agricultural to an industrial economy all played a part
in shaping their ideas and altitudes. D.B. Stauffer (1974:351)

Recalling the literary atmosphere of these years, the poet Richard

Wilbur writes:
 23

We were led by our teachers and by the critics whom we read

to feel that the most adequate and convincing poetry is that
which accommodates mixed feelings, clashing ideas, and
incongruous images. D.B. Stauffer (1974 : 351)

Poets like John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell and

Howard Nemerov began writing under the influence of T.S. Eliot but later
on, they revolted against him and developed their own individual styles.
Some of these academic poets took part in World War II but they wrote
about it without any exultation. Hie War had not created any disillusion
in their minds, or rather they thought that it could bring peace to mankind.
To them, World War I had been a traumatic experience but World War II
was almost cathartic. It gave them opportunity to explore if there was any
sanity in War. They felt the savagery of war and put their faith in human
values, transcending race, class, family, profession and nation.

Richard Eberhart (1904) was somewhat older than the others. He

earned his reputation as a poet for his Collected Poems, published in
1960. He won several prizes including the prestigious Shelley Memorial
and the Harriet Monroe Awards. Actually, his career began in 1930 with a
book-length autobiographical poem, “A Bravery of Earth”, which
contains some good lyrical stanzas. In the poem, “On Shooting Particles
Beyond the World”, he criticizes war, science, material comforts and the
world of gadgets. He describes the scientist as a kind of infant who has
got hold of a match box. His later poetry is inspired by the sea as a result
of his regular visits to Cape Rosier. On the whole, Richard Eberherf s
poetry is the poetry of men working steadily and patiently to record those
moments of inward vision and emotion that come spontaneously.

Stanley Kunjtz’s (1905) poems record a series of his personal

horrifying experiences in a voice of intelligent candour. He won Pulitzer
Prize in 1950. The strain of quiet terror that runs through his poetry is its
most distinctive quality. In the poetry of Kunitz we find three trends- the
 24

imagination of Blake, the terrifying ecstasy of Hopkins and the persistence

of quest for self integration. His poetry is scholastic and very polished.

Randall Jarrell (1914 - 1965) won the National Book Award for his
poetry in 1961. The distinctive quality of his poetry is its unusual
disconcerting combination of compassion and unpromising intellectual
honesty. Jarrell wrote poems dealing with the themes of childhood, war
and women. These subjects gave him an opportunity to write about the
evils caused by the War and the changes soon after the defeat of Germany.
A sort of compassion runs through all his work. Blood for a Stranger
(1942) expresses his experiences of World War II. Little Friend, Little
friend (1945) contains some of his best poetry. The Lost World (1965) is a
record of his strange, half real, half make-believe boyhood years in
Hollywood. In The Woman at the Washington Zoo (1960), his sympathy
with women is pronounced. His poetry is highly condensed, compact and
precise. It is witty, energetic and vividly suggestive.

Randall Jarrell had losses of a different sort and his principal poetic
means of redeeming them. From his poetry we know that, Jarrell gave
voice to his darkest imaginings, speaking from the viewpoints of war
victims, old women and children. In 1945, at the height of the war, Jarrell
wrote “Death of the Ball - Turret Gunner” a short poem that is very
representative of the feeling of desperation. Jarrell seems to think that
death is the only real thing in life. In the poem everything is referred to as
a dream and the nightmare of the enemy pilots awakens him from the
terrible dream that was his life. This theme is also present in the literature
of war which tended to have a detached look at the situation. This, of
course, was a result of the horrible conditions that they lived in, fighting,
watching friends, dying and fearing every day and every battle to be
one’s last.
 25

Kari Shapiro (1913) was also influenced by the poet W. H. Auden

and World War II. Along with satire, social consciousness, urban and
technological orientation form the basis of his poetry. His first collection
Person, Place and Thing (1942) is a record of his sense of the role of
external reality in his own world. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his V
Letter and Other Poems (1944). There is a synthesis of mythical
symbolism and urban realism in file verses of Shapiro. His poems have
two pre-occupations, sense of loss and crisis of identity.

John Berryman (1914-1972) always gave the impression of

heightened consciousness, of a man of painful intellectual awareness with
an undercurrent of sensuality and desire for freedom. Richard Wilbur was
one of the gifted and elegant writers among contemporary American
poets. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957. Wilbur was a formalist. He
does not seem to believe that society should look to poetry for new
philosophies and new religious synoptic intellectual structures. Wilbur’s
poems cover a wide variety of subjects, from aesthetics to potatoes,
celebrating with a warm and sensuous delight in the things of this world.
There is also in his work a shift from the ironic meditative lyric towards
the dramatic poem.

Howard Nemerov (1920) gives us the very thought, the startling

image and more than one glimpse into the abyss. His Image and the Law
was published in 1947 and was followed by five other distinguished
volumes of poems. In his poetry there is irony and paradox with an
unusual synthesis of the funny and the serious.

The direct use of the personal experience as themes of their poems

by academic poets Ayas an inevitable reaction to W.H. Auden and T.S.
Eliot’s poetic theory of impersonality. They deal with the most intimate
subjects in declarative statements made in the first person, and are
described by critics as ‘confessional’ poets. Other poets of this group are
 26

lyricists and they pen their experiences in a symbolic fashion. In this

context Rosenthal M.L. says, "confessional poetry has got three-fold
expression first, the self seeks to discover itself through the energy of its
insights into reality and through the sensuous excitement generated in it by
its experience of reality.” M.L. Rosenthal (1967 : 13) This poetry is a
constant struggle to assert the encompassing validity of the feeling of
personality in the face of depressing realization. Secondly, the
contemporary poetry o£ “political and cultural criticism centers on the
individual as the victim.” M.L. Rosenthal (1967 : 13) It also has the
elements of new existential subjectivity in which the poet sinks his
consciousness deep into every moment of this daily self. In the third
place, an extension from the previous point - As Rosenthal M.L. says,
“the private life of the poet himself, especially under the stress of
psychological crisis, becomes a major theme”. MX. Rosenthal (1967: 15)
This poetry becomes at once private and public, lyrical and rhetorical.

Sylvia Plath’s contemporaries include Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton,

Randall Jarrell and John Berryman. They all, like Sylvia Plath were
confessional and their lives were disastrous. Though these poets are
grouped in die post modem period, all of them are quite similar to the
poets of the modem era.

Robert Lowell (1917-77) has been recognized as the strongest and

most original poets among many who have made the post World War II
period an exciting and revealing one in American poetry. He was noted
for his complex oratorical poetry, and turbulent life, which was entangled
with the social, political and ideological movements in U. S. during the
second decade of the World War EL He won Pulitzer Prize in 1947. He is
a well-known poet of this ‘confessional’ group. His early poems are full
of violence and fury with grotesque images and a syntax to match his
style. Stauffer D. B. says about Lowell’s world:
 27

The modem world is not a wasteland awaiting the rains of

spiritual renewal, but Saint Bernard’s nightmarish land of
Unlikeness, where the unhappy inhabitants have lost their
likeness to God but are still aware of the falsity of the
material world. D. B. Stauffer (1974 :353)

He served five months in a federal prison but continued to condemn

venomously all wars faced by many of his generation. And all this he did
with savage daring.

Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959) marks a new and significant

departure in his career. In Life Studies his private life is exposed. It dealt
with the theme of mental illness. This new style was influential in the
works of Sylvia Plath and other poets. His personal life was full of marital
and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe episodes of manic
depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized. Partly in response
to his frequent breakdowns, and partly due to the influence of such
younger poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Allen Ginsberg, Lowell in the mid-
fifties began to write more directly from personal experience, and
loosened his adherence to traditional meter and form. His voice now is
strong, powerful, still strident, but less shrill, at the mercy of form.
Basically he has discovered himself in relation to his own past. This
confessional quality, according to Stauffer, grew partly out of Lowell’s
association with WJ). Snodgrass. Lowell himself recognized and admired
the same in the poetry of Sylvia Plath. The poems included in Life
Studies, are the studies of his own life : his boyhood, his parents, his
grand-parents, their lives and deaths, their houses, his marriages, his
friendships and his experiences in jail as a conscientious objector. But
these personal memories are also viewed against a larger backdrop, a
world where secularism, violence, political paralysis and uncontrolled
sexuality have reached alarming stages.
 28

His own acute awareness of the link between the public and private
sensibility raises his confessional poetry above the level of self
indulgence. His quality of suggesting the universality of his anguish,
even in his most personal and painful revelations, is a credit to his career.
His poetry is adorned with symbol, condensed metaphors and allusions,
which are sometimes completely private. He also strikes a new direction
by the repudiation of free verse and return to form. Among other
prominent figures of his group are W.D. Snodgrass, Anne Sexton, AJlen
Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath.

W. D. Snodgrass (1926) enjoys a unique place among the

confessional poets. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960. The complete
honesty with which he examined and revealed his feelings, stimulated
Robert Lowell and others to make similar explorations. In Hearts Needle
(1959) he left nothing unsaid in his painful and moving chronicle of the
disintegration of his marriage and the emotionally painful trials of his
divorce. After Experience is a continuation in his self-revelatory mode.

Anne Sexton (1928) has exactly followed W.D. Snodgrass. She is

a realist and deals with her personal experiences in a poignant manner.
She has been tormented by mental illness and has struggled hard to retain
a grip on life both private and institutions. All her creations, To Bedlam
and Part Way Back (1960), All My Pretty Ones (1962), Live or Die (1964)
subject the reader to horrifying revelations of her very personal
experiences without any compromise or self-deceptive attempts. Her
references to death in her last volume recall her friend, Sylvia Plath (to
whom one of the poems is also addressed). Her Love Poems (1969)
contains very frank and self revelatory poems, which are passionate and
sexually explicit. Anne sexton’s poetry is much involved with the
tensions between rules about motherhood and daughterhood and the
realities of obligatory relationship. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton acted
 29

out familiar scenes and carried the action beyond what was expected.
There was a lot of similarity in both of thorn. Both of them were
contemporary, both of them married and had children. They both
experienced fits of madness. Their marriages broke up. Their mental
tensions and struggle dominated their works. Their lives reinforce their
words. Both of them committed suicide (succeeding in this dying art
after earlier attempts had failed). This similarity of life and work gives
their writing a weight that goes beyond merely literary statement or
expression.

Anne Sexton offers the reader an intimate view of the emotional

anguish that characterised her life. She made the experience of being a
woman, a central issue in her poetry, and though she endured criticism for
bringing subjects such as abortion and drug addiction in her work, her skill
as a poet, transcended the controversy over her subject matter. In 1974 at
the age of 46, despite a successful writing career and winning the
prestigious Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1965 for her collection of poems
entitled Live or Die. She lost her battle with mental illness and committed
suicide.

Anne Sexton’s life and works are an open wound of confession :

confessions of love, regret, desires and fears. Haunted by mental illness
and personal torment, Sexton’s poems speak openly of a dark and
unhappy world. Anne spent most of her life battling mental illness and
much of her poetry reflects that. Sexton’s childhood had not been a happy
one, as her father had abused her both physically and verbally. These
events contributed to her depression. At twenty eight, she attempted
suicide and was hospitalized. Sexton became avidly suicidal; death was
always in her mind. She truly believed that there was an evil within her
and that the only way to be rid of it was to die.
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Brother Antoninus (1912) wrote in the tradition of confession, guilt

and sensuality. In his later works, The Crooked Lines of God (1959), The
Hazards ofHoliness (1962), and The Rose ofSolitude (1967) he refuses to
surrender to anything but his God.

The age also witnessed the emergence of the anti-academic poets

who may also be called the poets of literary underground. They are all
against all sorts of established traditions. In other words, they claim no
loyalties to any one but themselves. It is better to call them Bohemians,
because they make a fetish of ‘exile’ from society. They refuse to accept
their roots anywhere. Gay Synder, Phil Whalen, Gregory Corso and Leroi
Jones are the prominent figures among anti-academic poets. These poets
tend to deal with matters of real importance with slovenliness. These anti­
academic poets are from three groups. The Beat, the Blaekmountain and
the New York group.

The best known of these new trends in the contemporary American

poetry is the Beat movement or group. It developed around Allen
Ginsburg in the fifties. It is also known as San Francisco Renaissance.
The writers associated with him at San Francisco were Gay Synder, Phil
Whalen, Gregory Corso. The Beat poets often saw visions, mostly under
the influence of magical herbs. They recorded them in their poetry. Like
Whitman, they celebrated the first person singular ‘My Self and treated it
as the proper subject of their poetry. Their own spontaneous impressions
are expressed as things possessing a unique standard and value. Their
diction is colloquial and American and their metre is anti-iambic. Gregory
Corso’s poems are really subjective or confessional. This Beat Poetry
contains a strange amalgam of morality, surrealism and casual obscenities.
The key poem of this movement is Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”.

Allen Ginsberg (1926) began his career as a poet with his first
public reading of “Howl” in 1956. His poetry is certainly representative of
 31

an age of profound cultural transformation in America. He embodies the

disorders of civilization in his own disorders of poetry. “Howl” is a long
sustained cry of outrage against the injustice and inhumanity of America
that destroys the holy impulses and tendencies of young men and forces
them into excesses of drug taking, sex and alcoholism. Another volume,
Kaddish and Other Poems (1961), reveals Ginsberg’s attempts to come to
terms with himself by walloping in the madness and horror of his past.

The theory of projective verse by Charles Olson got popularity

among the Black Mountain School of American poetry. It was named
after the North Carolina College where all its members either taught or
studied. They are Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Charles Olson and
Jonathan Williams. The poets of this group rely on open forms in place of
the traditional fixed forms and they look for objective rather than
subjective content.

The New York group of poets appeared in the late fifties. They
derived their inspiration from Beat mystique as well as from Black
Mountain tradition. But their style of writing poems was different from
that of both the above schools of poetry. The Beats and the Black
Mountain poets wrote shock poems and joke poems. Denise Levertov and
Frank O’Hara are the prominent figures who emerged in this group.

In the post World War period the most outstanding among the
women poets are Elizabeth Bishop, Barbara Howes, May Swenson,
Phyllis Me Ginley, Vassar Miller, Muriel Rukeyser, Anne Sexton, Isabella
Gardner and Sylvia Plath. Barbara Howes uses some of the most rigid
classical forms to frame her modem material. She has also made some
typographical innovations in her poems. May Swenson’s poetry is
intellectual and argumentative. It reveals her attempt to probe into the
complex actuality of things from outside and inside the man’s self and to
determine relationship between them. Phyllis Me Ginley won Pulitzer
 32

Prize in 1961. Her poetry is serious and witty and it also reveals the
tolerance of man’s foibles. Elizabeth Bishop was awarded Pulitzer Prize
for her poetry in 1956.

Vassar Miller tries to overcome her cerebral palsy by dedicating

herself to poetry. Her poems have deep religious fervour and simplicity.
Isabella Gardner draws ideas from her female sensibility in recording the
sensations of modem life. Murial’s poems are musical and full of deep
meaning. Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are realists and deal with their
personal experiences in a poignant manner.

American poetry after World War II shows no new movements of

marked innovations in the 1950s. The poets of this period often express
the general dismay of the modem man in his failure to utilize his
potentialities to achieve an unflinching faith with a feeling of security.
Their poetry reveals a refreshing search for truth and spiritual values
which may uplift the whole mankind.
The modem American poetry is thus more personal and painful. It
is more mature, playful and yet serious. It exhibits the feminist
consciousness, and the characteristics of the feminist movement with
confessional mode. There is an expression of despair, disintegration and
frustration in the American poetry of this period. Madness is one of the
characteristics of the mid-twentieth century American poetry. Love and
death are the dominant themes of the American poetry of this period.
Modem American poetry emphasizes a sort of alienation with
anxiety and there is absurd, critical and active response to social reality.
This response is often charged with irony and satire. It is disrupting of the
rhetorical continui^. It is a meaningful revolt against advertisement and
propaganda. It is formal, elegant, ritualistic and it derives its experience
from aesthetic sense. The War has not created any disillusion in their
minds, rather they thought that it could bring peace to mankind.
 33

World War I had been a traumatic experience but World War II

was almost cathartic in the contemporary American poetry. It gave them
opportunity to explore their experiences and perceptions about modem
American life.
They started feeling the savagery of war. They put their faith in
human values, transcending race, class, family, profession and nation.
They criticized war, science, material comforts and the world of gadgets.
Their poetry is mainly concerned with men working steadily and patiently
to record those moments of inward vision and emotion that come
spontaneously. American poetry in this period is a serial of their personal
horrifying experiences in a voice of intelligent candour.
The modem American poetry has a strong satirical tone that
expresses social consciousness together with urban technological progress.
We find the use of the personal experience as the theme of the poets in the
mid-twentieth century American poetry. This poetry is a constant struggle
to assert the encompassing validity of the feeling of personality during the
period of depression. Their personal memories are also viewed against a
larger backdrop of a world where secularism, violence, political paralysis
and uncontrolled sexuality have reached alarming stages. It has the quality
of suggesting the universality of their anguish, even in their most personal
and painful revelations. There is painful and moving chronic
disintegration of their marriage ending in emotional trials of divorce. In
the American poetry there is also horrifying revelation of their personal
experiences without any compromise or attempts at self deception.
Sylvia Plath is a great American confessional poetess. She has
written a number of confessional poems. She has expressed her own
feelings, qwn experiences, own thoughts, her relationships with her father,
mother! friends, husband and society in a confessional mode. In her

poetry the dominant mode is confessional. Sylvia Plath and some of her
 34

contemporary American poets developed the confessional mode of writing

in their poetry.
Regarding the mid-twentieth century poetry, Suman Agrawal says,

“The relation between American, British poets in the

twentieth century has continued as a complex and often
uneasy dialogue between district cultures which share the
world’s most international language. Poetic modernism in
many respects, is an American invention, even if the poets
most responsible (Pound and Eliot) were expatriates living in
London and the overwhelming influence of American poetry
in this century has at times inhibited the appreciation and
awareness of the wealth of interesting poets writing in
English on the other side of the Atlantic.
The modernists and post modernists, thus, are in many
ways similar to each other in terms of personal life and poetic
career. The subject matter and the lives they led were
identical ... Though Sylvia Plath falls under the category of
confessional poets and is considered to be a post-modernist
but there is no doubt that the way she wrote and passed her
life, is traced in the works and lives of modernists mentioned
above. Suman Agrawal (2003 : 22)

To sum up, the mid-twentieth century American poetry has many

characteristics which occur in Sylvia Plath’s poetry. The major
characteristics of this period are love-hate, madness, painful experiences,
depression, sadness, obsession with death, futility of life, nihilistic
approach, alienation, anxiety, psychological complexities, universality of
anguish and broken relationships. All these find expression in Sylvia
Plath’s poetry. The confessional poets revolted against the tradition of
impersonality by being confessional in their work. The confessional
poetry of this period rose to the height of universality.
In the mid-twentieth century American poetry there are a number
of confessional poets who wrote about their experiences in their life. The
purpose of this survey is to understand the recurrent themes of Plath’s
poetry in comparison with the survey of the mid-twentieth century poetry.
 35

2.2 CONFESSIONAL MODE IN MODERN AMERICAN

POETRY WITH REFERENCE TO SYLVIA PLATH AND
HER CONTEMPORARIES

The confessional poets in modem American poetry were not

original. This kind of writing originated in the works of Augustine to
Genet. All of them have been engaged in defining their identity with
respect to the reality of their personal experience. The world outside for
these writers is merely the manifestation of their inner experiences. It is an
expression of their turbulent psyche. There have been a host of American
poets since 1957 which include Lowell, Kunitz, Jarrell, Roethke, Sexton,
Snodgrass, Kumin, Berryman and Plath who have exhibited some common
features. Most of them were the recipients of coveted Pulitzer Prizes and
National Book Awards for poetry. They were confessional in a sense that
their poetry was intensely personal. In other words, it was marked by
individual consciousness. The very source of their poetry was the
overburdened consciousness of the mid- twentieth century in all its
complexity. These poets were determined to be subjective in their writing
and they thought so because they were of the opinion that objectivity in
writing was impossible.

Confession means a disclosure of some sort which is strictly

personal and which has not been made public so far. In its literary
application, it is closely associated with the autobiography. The works of
this sort being highly personal, they present a subjective account of
experiences, beliefs, feelings, ideas and states of mind and body. Its
content tends ]to be intellectual. The author invariably identifies himself
with some ideas in religion, politics or art This in turn, makes life worth
writing. Saint Augustene appears to have invented the form. Rousseau
introduced it in various genres of literature. However the tradition of
confessional writing has undergone a significant transformation in the
 36

course of the time. Thus in the 19th century there was a personal novel that
branched out from the confessional tradition.

The modem confessional trend began with Robert Lowell, though

some traces of this trend could be found in the works from Benjamin
Franklin to Richard Wright in America. Till the mid-twentieth century,
American poetry seems to have followed transcendentalistic ideal. But the
first surfacing of the tradition 1ms often been traced to solipsistic poetry of
the Romantics. The twentieth century confessional poetry of America
embodies the American experience of rejecting the original situation. The
poets prefer to live as lost men or the drop-outs as they hunt for
alternatives. Thus the long confessional poem of Roethke is entitled as The
Lost Son, while Sylvia Plath’s love - hate relationship with her father
becomes a destructive passion making her a lost daughter. Robert Lowell’s
quarrel , with his family and ancestors made him a lost member. The
American culture forced him to be a conscientious objector during the
Second World War. Subsequently, he was one of the important members
of the protest march towards Pentagon for having been involved in war
against Vietnam during the sixties. These poets were quite capable of
identifying themselves with a permanent principle of religion or
metaphysics or even political significance.

The central experience of a confessional poem is psychological.

The poet of this tradition examines the psychological disintegration which
results from rejection of the established norms of a judgement. There is a
sense of guilt which springs from the poet’s inability to adopt the role
prescribed by his culture. His rebellion against the established norms
created in him an uncontrollable violence. In some cases it hastens to
neurosis. Hence, the poetry of Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia
Plath, Anne Sexton and others of the tradition has to be placed not only in
the context of private confessional poetry but also with the poetry of
 37

madness. For example Theodore Roethke suffered ffom depressions.

Some of them verged on insanity. Sylvia Plath’s frequent mental1
breakdowns compelled her to attempt suicide, a couple of times. She,
t

actually committed suicide in 1963. Here, neurosis becomes the part of thej
world of confessional poet grappling with the inner violence.

The disintegration of the poet’s mind might also be seen against the
background of the sixties in America. The sixties valued irrational!
experience for its own sake. It was a period of fierce individualism..
Paranoid fear and drug induced psychological trips. This period alsoj
i

witnessed inventions and visions. The concept of self- fulfilment was

i

central to the American culture of this period which made confessionali

poetry possible. It emphasized that each individual has an element of
I

uniqueness in his personality which must be released. This release then

might find either a way of personal mysticism or a political activity or
some sort of artistic activity. This desire to fulfill oneself through self
expression was then the basis of confessional spirit. During this period, the
twentieth century diffusion of poet’s taste and cultural barriers, between
high brow literature, influenced the sensibilities of the sixties. Their search
of authenticity energized their minds. This quest for authenticity was a new
concept of the self as a vast field of possibility.

It is here that the confessional poet’s treatment of insanity as an

essential element of contemporary culture becomes significant. The drug
was used to produce psyeholetic experiences in the sixties. This
phenomenon points out their workship of the irrational. This was the
method by which they hoped to create an environment in which they could
realize their identity. In fact, this was an absurd vision of the world and the
confessional poets shared with it. Therefore, in the poetry of Sylvia Plath
and Theodore Roethke we have the use of imagery that points out the

i
 38

presence of the fantastic and bizzare hallucinations as they experience

these in their world.

The motif of mental breakdown in the confessional poets seems to

have been closely associated with the theme of death. All the poems of
Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath reveal either an
imaginary threat or a real threat of breakdown. The central theme of
Theodore Roethke’s The Lost Son is this type of breakdown. Robert Lowell
began his Life Studies after a mental breakdown and he felt more conscious
of it during its progression. “Stones" and "Tulips” describes the first mental
breakdown of Plath. It marked her entry into the confessional phase. Since
these poets encountered many mental breakdowns, they had used
psychological images and symbols derived from their divided mental
world. In Theodore Roethke, thus ‘green house’ symbolizes and signifies
the divided world as it stands for a ‘womb’ and a ‘tomb’ at the same time.
Robert Lowell lists a number of animals in Life Studies that symbolize his
mental states and shelter his regressed self. The imagery used by Sylvia
Plath in her novel The Bell Jar carries connotations of an oppressional
reality that suffocated her life. A symbol of bee derived from her beekeeper
father also recurs in her writing. All these images carry psychological
associations and symbolize herself in inner desolation and hollowness.
This is in fact, resulted in their isolation from society and the poet of this
cult viewed himself a victim of his own culture. Theodore Roethke, Robert
Lowell and Sylvia Plath never identify themselves with the dominant
strains of American culture.

The theme of guilt seen in these poets adds to the existential vision
projected by them. Thus Sylvia Plath and Theodore Roethke felt
responsible for the deaths of their fathers. Because they died at the time
when the poets' minds were psychologically involved with their fathers. In
Sylvia Plath’s poetry, it remained a life-long guilt in her search for a father
 39

figure. Robert Lowell derived a sense of inadequacy from his father’s

failure to cope up with the demands of the world. In Theodore Roethke,
search for the father becomes the native-Indian dirge for the lost land.
These poets could not identify with the main stream of American culture as
they felt the presence of death, violence and guilt in it.

Confession in the poetry of these poets is a means of understanding

the perception of their own lives. There is the recurring association of the
‘eye’ and the T in their poetry. One of the crucial images, for Theodore
Roethke is that of the blind man, who lifting a curtain perceives as being a
morning. Theodore Roethke equates the vision with the real self. Robert
Lowell’s ‘Eye’ and ‘Truth’ speak of a triangular blotch as the eye. His
visionary power is affected with the result that an authentic existence is
made impossible. Sylvia Plath’s "Tulips" describes her crippled state as an
eye between two white eyelids that cannot be shut.

The metaphor of the journey is also common to Theodore Roethke,

Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. However, this metaphor of journey does
not carry any positive meaning for the poets. Theodore Roethke all the
time calls himself a beginner. In North American sequence, the poem
“Journey to the Inferior” describes the poetic career as a long journey cut
off from the self. In Life Studies, Robert Lowell narrates the journey from
Rome to Paris as a prologue to the large number of shiftings which
contribute to the sequence. History for him is a journey through violence.
In Sylvia Plath’s poetry, journeys are evoked as in Ariel as an attempt to
reach a point of no return.

Another dominant motif in the poetry of the confessional poets is

the search for existential identity. It is also a search for a meaningful
relationship. Right from the beginning, the writers of the confessional
tradition have shown a desire for meaningful relationship with the external
world. They have tried to connect their inner world with the outer. In such
 40

a harmonious relationship one can locate one’s true self. This poetry has
continuously tried for a proper sense of relationship in the given setting.

Self-expression of these poets becomes significant in a world of lost

connection. The act of representation is used by these poets as a metaphor
suggesting their states of being. For instance, Robert Lowell’s characters
are numerous mental patients and criminals who are people without any
sense of coherent expression. Their inability to manage language is an
indication of their moving away from reality. Sylvia Plath uses the
language of advertisement and commerce which is representative of her
own alienated self. These poets always use a violent metaphor as a way of
communicating the primacy of their perceptions. The confessional poets
mainly use the self as a sole poetic symbol. They are artists whose total
mythology is the lost self. Hence, confessional poetry is highly subjective
in nature. The expression of their personality is however, not an escape
from it. Its emotional content is merely personal. It portrays unbalanced
alienated protagonists. As the confessional poetry springs from the need to
confess, the poet strives for personalization rather than universalization.
Thus confessional poems are more revelations than conceptions.

To sum up, the main trends of the confessional poetry of the mid­
twentieth century American literature are personal experience, the concept
of being lost, the disintegration of poets mind, paranoid fear, psychological
trip, inner desolution, hollowness, feeling of guilt, death, violence, journey
and existential identity. All of them find expression in Sylvia Plath’s
poetry. She does not contribute this confessional mode as her contribution
but raises it to the height of universality through her search for anguish.
 41

2.3 CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF SYLVIA PLATE’S POETRY

The Colossus

This chapter deals with the critical analysis of Sylvia Plath’s poetry.
Here, this study focuses on Sylvia Plath’s four volumes of poetry in terms
of the poetry of myself as well as theme, style, imagery and language also.

The Colossus is the only collection of Plath's poems published in her

life time. This volume consists of forty-four poems composed between
1956 and 1959. This was the period when she toured to United States after
having education at Cambridge University. She returned to England with
full knowledge for permanent stay. This collection can be divided into five
groups, of which the first group was written between 1955 and 1957. The
first group deals with the Cambridge and West Yorkshire experiences and
her marriage with Ted Hughes. The poems she wrote for this volume are
lyrical and thundering ones, poems breaking open ho- real experience of
life. In this volume one becomes aware of the leashed powers of poetry
within her and her attempt to release these powers and write poetry of high-
l * i'

pitched intensity. jjVJte her initial suicide attempt, Sylvia Plath began to
.r ■ • ,

write at a fast and with furious pace. Her work became darker, more
i
melancholic. Her Work progressed or rather regressed as her life went on.
■ |
On June 16,1956, she married the British poet, Ted Hughes. Initially, their
marriage was idyllic and generally a happy one. Her home and husband
became Plath’s top priorities and she felt that she had found her true
soulmate in Ted. When she was 28, her first book The Colossus was
published; in England. The poems in this book formally precise, well
written, show clearly the dedication with which she had served her
apprenticeship; yet they gave only glimpses of what was to come in her
poetry. The first group includes the following well-known poems “Faun”
“Strumpet song,”, “Spinster”, “All the Dead Dears”, “Water Colour and

14692
 42

Granchester Meadows”, “Departure” “Hardcastle Crags”, “Sow”, “Black

Rook in Rainy Weather” and “Two Sisters ofPersephone.”

The second group written during the period from 1957 to 1958 deals
with her teaching at Smith College and the experiences of her summer visit
to Cape Cod. This group includes the poems like “Mussel Hunter at Rock
Harbour”, “The Thin People”, “Lorelei”, ‘Tull Fathom Five”, “Frog
Autumn”, “The Disquieting Muses”, “Snakecharmer”, “The Ghost’s
Leavetaking”, “Sculptor” and “Night Shift”.

The third group composed between 1958 and 1959 deals with her
experiences with her husband who lived on Boston’s Beacon Hill. This
group consists of “The Eye-mote”, “Man in Black”, “The Hermit at
Outermost House”, “The Beekeeper’s Daughter”, “Point Shirley”,
“Aftermath”, ‘Two Views of a Cadaver Room”, “Suicide of Egg Rock”, “I
Want, I Want”, “The Companionable Ills”, “The Times are Tidy”,
“Moonrise”, “The Colossus” and “The Bull of Bendylaw”.

The fourth group comprises of six poems. It includes “Blue Moles”,

“A Winter Ship”, “Mushrooms”, “The Burnt-out Spa”, “The Manor
Garden” and “A Poem for a Birthday” (a sequence of seven poems “Who”,
“Dark House”, “Maenad”, “The Beast”, “Flute Notes From a Reedy Pond”,
“Witch - Burning” and “The Stones”). These poems deal with her stay at
Yaddo with her husband. She wrote this group in the late autumn of 1959.
The final group consists of the following four important poems, published
in 1960, “Medallion”, “Ouija”, “Maudlin”, and “Metaphors”.

There is no chronological arrangement of the poems in The

Colossus. For example “The Manor Garden” (the first poem) belongs to
the fourth group. The interlink with all the groups is hardly observed even
if we take into consideration the themes of the poems. Sylvia Plath’s
literary taste was very fastidious, so she avoided to publish whatever she
did not like. In this regard Ted Hughes writes, “if she did not like a poem,
 43

she scrapped it entire. She rescued nothing of it.” Charles Newman (1970:
188) “Faun” was one of the earliest poems she saved. This poem was
composed in die spring of 1956, when Sylvia Plath was still an
undergraduate student at the Cambridge. Thus the early poetry of Sylvia
Plath displays a distinctly amateur and experimental quality. In The
Colossus the diction is always distinguished and elegant, but it is a written
language rather than a spoken one. More literary than actual. There are
lines not likely to come from a human throat:

Haunched like a faun, he hooed

From grove of moon-glint and fen-frost
Until all owls in the twigged forest. (TC, 18)

She feels a necessity to formulate a meaningful way of living this

life and'it provides her with the subject for two poems from the first group
titled “Spinster”, and ‘Two Sisters of Persephone”. They are similar in
subject-matter and treatment. The poem “Spinster” refers to her personal
experiences and as a result she withdrew reaction into a disciplined self
enclosure in the following way :
And round her house she set
such a barricade of barb and check
Against mutinous weather
As no mere insurgent man could hope to break
With curse, fist, threat,
Or love, either. (TC, 69)
This poem places herself beyond the reach of violence as well as
lover’s love. This poem deals with the feelings of an unmarried girl, who
is not attracted by actions of her lover. However she feels that, “lover’s
gestures unbalance the air.” (TC, 68) The poem reveals the disturbed self
of Sylvia Plath. She is rather sensitive but does not react to the gestures of
her lover like ordinary girls. The poem reveals the disturbed self of Sylvia
Plath. The speaker in “Spinster” is seen against a natural setting and is
depicted as being vulnerable to the moods of nature. The speaker of this
 44

poem is secret of her own emotions and prefers the cold winter season with
everything. She withdraws from the world of nature and man altogether.
The speaker in “Spinster” identifies men with nature’s assaults against
human beings and protects herself with barricades of barb and check.

The Spinster presumably has an abnormal sensibility, or is the

victim of unstable personal circumstances that warp her imagination. She
gives the impression of a person who is insecure, unstable and tightened; a
victim of deep-rooted personal inadequacy. The woman’s withdrawal or
alienation from normal life is one of pride and disdain. This picture of the
Spinster is further developed in “Two Sisters of Persephone”. The woman
in “Spinster” is adversely struck by nature’s tumult and barricades herself.
Thus “Spinster” and “Two Sisters of Persephone” clearly spell out Plath’s
attitude to two states of being. Married life to her no doubt, seems
preferable to spinsterhood.

The poem “All the Dead Dears” reveals her reactions to the visions
of skeletons of the fourth century woman, as a shrew-mouse that is
preserved in an archeological museum in Cambridge. In this poem Sylvia
Plath explains the difference between the living and the dead. However,
this difference is rather short lived and temporary. Soon she becomes
aware of mortality revealed in her identification with a skeleton of a
woman in the museum. This woman and memories of her past haunts
Sylvia Plath. She becomes contemplative and starts thinking about her
kinship with a dead woman. She bursts out with her total identification
with the ‘antique museum - cased lady’ thus :
. These barnacle dead!
This lady here’s no kin
Of mine, yet kin she is : She’ll suck
Blood and Whistle my marrow clean
To prove it. (TC, 27)
 45
c
She thinks that all these dead beings are keen to her as they remind
her of the memories of her father as reflected in the following lines :
An image looms under the fishpond surface
Where the daft father went down
With orange duck-feet winnowing his hair. (TC, 28)
Sylvia Plafh, a keen fisher-woman used to go early in the morning
to gather fish bait on a deserted beach which associates the idea of the
skeleton that reminds her of her relatives.
“All the Dead Dears” deals with the interrelatedness of life and
death with the later being the only reality. Everything in the poem is
death- directed and bears witness to the gross eating game. Set in the
Archaeological Museum in Cambridge, and written while she was a
student at Newhamn College, here Plath presents to us the harsh grinding
of the stars. Everything in the cosmos appears to be adept at this eating
game, rendering all creation to mere skeletons.
The narrator in “All the Dead Dears” experiences a kind of kinship
with the dead “museum-cased lady”, though really no kin of her’s. The
narrator is so pathologically caught up with file idea of death that she
imagines her ancestors beckoning her, her mother, grandmother and great
grandmother.
The beautiful nature poem “Watercolour of Granchester Meadows”
presents a curious combination of archaism, colloquialism and allusion. It
reveals her personal reaction to the world of vegetation and animal life,
which tries to examine man’s position in regard to the world of animal life
and vegetation. Her mixed reaction to the world is keenly observed in her
response to the world of nature as revealed in the following lines:
The small shrew chitters from its wilderness
Of grassheads and is heard.
Each thumb - size bird
Flits nimble - winged in thickets, and of good colour. (TC, 37)
 46

The calm and tranquility of the natural world hardly evokes any
feeling of approval in Sylvia Plath. She is rather dissatisfied with the
thought that the landscape is based on the cloistered pace of a country on a
nursery plate.

The use of the word ‘blood’ before the word berry indicates her
reaction that it is not a happy scene. These lines display concealed cruelty
beneath the flowery charm. Sylvia Plath thinks that neither human
affections nor academic learning provide protection to the people in this
world. Though apparently fascinating, it has wildness at work beneath its
calmness. She suggests that human knowledge is incapable of scrutinizing
the mysteries of nature. In this poem, the beauty of landscape cruelly
mocks at its own surface prettiness. The delicate classical pastoral sense
dwindles into the insignificant and cruel world.

This poem obviously reflects Sylvia Plath’s own gloomy self. Even
the beauty of the landscape and nature gives an impression of savagery. It
is the poet’s attempt to define the relationship between the self and the out­
side world. The imagery of the moon refers to temporary blindness due to
love, in addition to the implication of references of poet’s own self. This
poem suggests a meaning of self-occupation of lovers which makes them
blind to the cruel realities of this wicked world symbolized by savagery of
the owl and rat.

Her another poem “Departure” deals with her specific emotional

reactions to a specific situation. In this poem we really know that a
memory of the summer of 1956, when Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes spent
some time in a rented house in Benidorm, a Spanish fishing village, not
much spoiled at that time. The financial stringency faced by Sylvia Plath
at that time is matched with the hostility of nature and her surrounding. The
relationship between her inner self and outer world forces her to feel being
rejected by society and the natural surroundings :
 47

The figs on the fig tree in the yard are green;

Green, also, the grapes on the green vine
Shading the brickred porch tiles
The money’s run out
How nature, sensing this, compounds her bitters. (TC, 19)
In the above lines nature is presented as menacing and antipathetic
to man in a very general and undefined way. Unlike William Wordsworth
she does not find any relief from nature but instead the nature reinforces
her gloom see for instance the following lines :
Retrospect shall not soften such penury
Sun’s brass, the moon’s steely patinas,
The leaden slag of the world ...
Beats, is brutal endlessly. (TC, 19)
The sun and the moon instead of any co-operation are exposing ‘the
scraggy rock spit’. The beauty of the sea too is cruel. Thus “Departure” is
another illustration of how Plath responds to nature. Because money is run
out and her holiday with Ted has to be cut short. She complains that there
is no sympathetic response from nature at their departure. The deep sense
of personal disappointment of cutting short the vacation sours her
imagination and makes her view everything distastefully. The poem may
also be seen as an expression of Plath’s failure to strike a rapport with
nature and elicit a kindred response. In “Departure” she experiences a
sense of neglect at nature’s hands and complains of its penury.

Her poem “Hardeastle Crags” shows her reactions to her husband’s

native land York Shire. The woman in the poem is the poetess herself and
the village depicted is real which is an ancient one, situated on the top of a
hill. It sets out the usual recognition of disorder in the natural surroundings.
The poetess sets out for a walk from the village into the open nature. The
silence there proves oppressive as well as frightening. The darkness
(night) identifies her fear which forces her to return to the village quickly.
The darkness implies danger to her life by the surroundings of insecure
 48

village life. She believes that the village provides protection to human
beings, against any difficulties of nature. But she understood it in another
way. In this poem Sylvia Plath uses the terms like ‘steely street’ the stone
built town, and ‘the dark, dwarfed cottages’ which symbolise the threat of
the stony land around. Her fear is unidentifiable as she feels being reduced
to nothing in the midst of natural forces. She unwillingly becomes
conscious of the inactive but dominant nature around her as reflected in the
following lines:

All the night gave her, in return

For the paltry gift of her bulk and the beat
Of her heart was the humped indifferent iron
Of its hills, and its pastures bordered by black stone set
On black stone. (TC, 17)

Unlike Wordsworth she feels that man has not been able to make
any influence on nature. She finds that nature is indifferent to the presence

of man in a state of frozen sleep. This picture causes fear, so she runs
away from the sight, otherwise she will be overpowered and converted into
one of the components of the stony landscape.

"This poem represente her repeated fear of inevitable doom and her
urge to resist that inevitability. It also suggestively reflects the self­
preserving instinct. “Hardcastle Crags” may be looked upon as a triumph
of Plath’s in manipulating technique. The nine fixed stanzas are made the
flexible swing of the line, words have been carefully chosen to establish
the required sound quality and rhythm; and the images are so employed as
to create a feeling of isolation in a world that grows intractably alien
and threatening.

“Sow” is a distinct and more powerful poem among the other

poems, which reveals her lightheartedness. It deals with a prize pig which
she sees on a farm in York Shire. The pig arouses two types of feelings;
 49

one in the heart of the spectators and the other in the heart of the owner.
The money-minded owner is indifferent to the attitude of the spectators.
Here a sense of pride of the money- minded owner is displayed. This
poem has more artistic significance than its theme. The vocabulary shows
her instinct for the unusual. She very intelligently combines archaism,
colloqualism and literary allusion thus :
But our farmer whistled
Then, with a jocular fist thwacked the barrel nape
And the green-copse-castled...
On grunt, up in the flickering light to shape
A monument. (TC, 13)
The poem presents her ability to form a complex pattern of rhyme,
metre, and sound to support her self consciousness.

As opposed to “Sow”, “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” reflects

Plath’s contemplative mood. She contemplates the nature of her poetic
insights. Although the subject matter of this poem is as ordinary as “Sow”,
the poet here shows keen understanding and perception. She expresses
hope and desire from the routine world to be flashed suddenly in the
following lines:
I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant...
Trekking stubborn through this season. (TC, 43)

“Black Rook in Rainy Weather” has been widely acclaimed for the
precise choice of words and its halting rhythm, giving the impression of a
person who is guarded in her statements. The poem’s progression is from
observation and reflection to expectancy and waiting. It is at once a nature
poem and a poem about the craft of composition, though the later reading
seems more appealing. This poem may have been influenced by Ted
Hughes’s “The Hawk in the Rain”. The poem opens with Plath giving a
 so

description of the black rook, arranging and rearranging its feathers in the
rain. It is an ordinary spectacle and she does not expect any miracle.

In the poem a play of opposites, mundane factual observation is

contrasted with the heightened transformation possible; and likely
transformation poised between helplessness and expectancy. It is in that
conflicting mood that she walks warily through the dull, ruinous landscape.
The poem ends on a note of optimism. The foregone introspection has
convinced her that miracles occur, however sudden and brief their spells.
The poem has been carefully crafted. The stanza form is five lines whose
end sounds are repeated as rhymes in each succeeding stanza to organise
with considerable suppleness its rather prosaic utterances. The rhyme
scheme repeated in each stanza is a b c d e. this is a kind of interlocking
device that holds the stanzas technically together and registers an organic
growth thematically. Even the lines have been so arranged as to have the
long line in the middle of the stanza with the two short lines before and
after it, making cryptic statements.

The poem ‘Two Sisters of Persephone” is a study of two girls with

two different attitudes and temperaments. The one possesses barren
bitterness against the intellectual, while the other, against the physical and
spiritual fertility:
Two girls there are : within the house
One sits; the other, without.
Day long a duet of shade and light...
The first works problems bn
A mathematical machine. (TC, 63)
This poem presents a study in contrast. In fact, the girls in the poem
represent the mental state of Sylvia Plath who does not decide her own
course of life. In spite of the fact that she enjoys a place at home, in
society, her own complex temperament does not let her involve in it. So
she withdraws herself. ‘Two Sisters of Persephone” is to see the two
sisters as representatives of the contradicting of one and the same person, a
 51

person caught in the conflict between a sequestered and intellectual life and
the world/of social whirl.
v/The second group of poems also shows her own experience. She
tries to gather external reality by imagmative identification with it This
self projection reveals the poet’s/mdividuality to the extent of her
alienation from the other objects. ^‘Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbour” is the
first and finest poem in the second group. Sylvia Plath wrote this in die
summer, on Cape Cod (near Rock Harbour), before she started teaching.
This was one of her first poems in syllables, which was her first step,
technically in her self-exploration. Plath tries to understand the marine life
of the seashore but the effort culminates in the realization that she would
gain no insight as she was an outsider. In the first two stanzas, some of the
characteristic features of the beach are presented to us. It is early morning,
the beach is deserted, and the poet has come to collect fish-bait. Her
observant nature takes in the surrounding scene; her heightened
sensibilities become acutely alive to the sights, sounds and smell of the life
on the beach. It aims at understanding motives and nature of another form
of life which ends in an acceptance of the impossibility of ever achieving
such awareness. In this poem, Plath being a lover of fishing, goes early in
the morning to gather fish bait on the beach. The absence of any human
activity intensifies her perceptions of the strange world of fishes and
animal life around her. She discards the painter’s visual involvement in
certain aspects of the scene. Her concentration adds keenness to the
awareness of all her senses. But this awareness is replaced by the feeling
that some inner mystery of the other world has discarded her as reflected in
the following lines:
I smelt
Mud stench, shell guts, gull’s leavings;
Heard a queer crusty scrabble
Cease, and I neared the silenced
Edge of a cratered pool-bed. (TC, 71)
 52

Here Sylvia Plath awaits silently without making any movement and
the crabs appear repeatedly. This makes her believe that she is kept away
from a true knowledge of them. She describes their movements, and
behaviour without any keenness of sense and awareness in this poem.

Another poem, “The Thin People” represents the victory of lethargy

of moral darkness and that of spiritual blackness over the vitality of the
world. The vivid descriptions of various objects reveal Plath’s ability of
minute observation. It is more chilling in effect than poems like
“Mushrooms” and “The Manor Garden”. In this poem the threat comes
from ‘devitalized humanity’. She observes that the thin people are a threat.

Here in this poem Sylvia Plath seems to be influenced by her

predecessors’ illustrative way. In her ‘disenchantment’ with the world
which seems 'to lie teemingly with spiritual sterility and moral depravity'.
The thin people are mere symbols of spiritually wasted men of Sylvia
Plath’s own time:
They are always with us, the thin people
Meagre of dimension as the grey people
On a movie - screen. They
Are unreal, we say...
Were small that they famished and
Grew so lean and would not round. (TC, 30)
These lines easily recall our mind the following description of T.S.
Eliot's “Hollow Men”:
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaving together
Head piece filled with straw ...
In our dry cellar.
Shape without form, shade without color,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion.
S.K.Sarkar (1995:107)
 53

“Lorelei” and “Full Fathom Five” are in a way twin poems. These
poems introduce a new and puzzling element into her poetry. Descriptive
in nature these poems egress her obsession with death. This thought
becomes the theme of Ariel poems. “Lorelei” is a description of a river at
night time. It deals with all pervasive peace of the human world:
It is no night to drown in:
A full moon, river lapsing
Black beneath bland mirror-sheen,
The blue water-mists dropping...
Doubling themselves in a glass
All stillness. (TC, 22)

Lorelei presents a two-fold argument defined by its two opposing

statements, ‘It is no night to drown in’ and ‘stone, stone, ferry me down
there’. The poem has a dramatic opening with the poet toying with the
idea of committing suicide, and for the time being decides against it and
hence the opening statement, ‘It is no night to drown in.’ For the moment
the conflict appears to be resolved; the poet favours life over death. Then
we have a description of the quiet landscape with the river. The
description here is reminiscent of Arnold’s description of the calm night in
the opening lines of “Dover Beach”.

In this poem she craves for unity with this world, though it may
mean personal death. To Sylvia Plath the under-water world is a promise
of life, beyond the routine order which can transform boredom of this
earthly life into an external peace:
O river, I see drifting
Deep in your flux of silver
Those great goddesses of peace. (TC, 23)
In “Full Fathom Five” she mentioned both desire and fear more
clearly and beautifully. The old man in the poem who rises from the sea is
disfigured by some terrible injury. His being is rooted in the ‘tangible
 54

reminders of dead mortals’ and he is associated with the eternal presence of

the ocean. Like “Lorelei” the old man longs for unity with the spirit
through death as:
Below shoulders not once
Seen by any man who kept his head,
You defy questions;
You defy other godhood
I walk dry on your kingdom’s border
Exiled to no good. (TC,47)
We really know that resistance and self-preserving instinct are
significant features of Sylvia Plath’s early poems. And even where Sylvia
Plath shuns positive resistance to death as disintegration, she maintains a
perspectiv^/hich is less evident in her poems.

In “Lorelei” though the speaker finally cannot resist sisters song she
can recognize the madness and destructiveness of it:

Bears a burden too weighty

Bot the whorled ear’s listening. (TC, 22)
The poem “The Disquieting Muses” is an autobiographical poem, in
which she presents her conception of nature and art. It deals with mother
directly in a number of stanzas which presents a daughter’s childhood
recollection:
You fed
My brother and me cookies and ovaltine
And helped the two of us to choir
'Thor is angry : boom boom boom!
Thor is angry: we don’t care!'...
Not lift a foot in the twinkle - dress
But, heavy-footed, stood aside. (TC, 58-59)

In this poem the reference of the hurricane in the third stanza is, in
fact the personal experience of Sylvia Plath about the hurricane which hit
the New England Coast in her childhood. The other details of her early
experience are equally real. Even the title of the poem “The Disquieting
 55

Muses” is an evocation of the forces which she sees behind her work. The
poem mentions that the bleak muses have been haunting her since her
birth and influencing her in childhood, and has disturbing her normal
domestic life.

In this stanza obsession of the muses becomes stronger as she grows

up. It disturbs her social ease which worries her mother. She deliberately
chooses the world governed by the muses though it opposes ‘stony
blackness’ to the bright gaiety of the mother’s world of balloons, blue birds
and flowers in the following way:
Day now, night now, at head, side, feet
They stand their vigil in gowns of stone,
Faces blank as the day I was bom,
Their shadows long in the setting sun
That never brightens or goes down.
And this is the kingdom you bore me to,
Mother, mother. But no frown of mine
Will betray the company I keep. (TC, 59-60)

The poem has three characters, the narrator, the mother and the
muses who play surrogate mother and increasingly replace the mother. It
is addressed to the mother who is harshly rebuked by the daughter-narrator.
In the opening stanza, the narrator presumes that the mother fails to invite
some ill-bred aunt. The daughter finds fault with the mother for having
failed to protect her from the influence of the three ladies who nodded by
night around her bed. The mother, instead of allaying the daughter’s fears,
merely tells her stories about heroic bear and witcher. The daughter
wonders if the mother ever saw them. The mother’s incapacity to minister
to the children is further outlined in the third stanza. The mother is further
denounced in stanzas four and five for compelling the child to take up past
times for which she has no special talent.

The poem lends itself to a number of interpretations. It may be seen

as a simple conflict between human endeavour and fate, with the daughter
 56

blaming the mother for wanting her to be other than what the fate has
decreed. The poem may also be read as a conflict between social demands
of the inclination towards an artistic life, with the muses asserting their

The poem '“Snakecharmer” is a beautiful presentation of word

picture (like the picture of a snake) and imagery (like image of piping).
Here she shows a closeness to the world of the primitive painters. After
writing this poem she had specific vision generally revealed to yogies at a
certain advanced stage. Here she talks of snaky generations. “The Ghost’s
Leavetaking” refers to a quite different world. This poem presents two
levels of imaginative activity found in the dreamworld and the conscious
daily world. It also presente ‘the impossibility of ever fusing, the two for
longer than a moment’. As soon as any activity in this concrete world of
objects begins it replaces the very world:
Of suiphurous dreamscapes and obscure lunar conundrums
Which seemed, when dreamed, to mean so profoundly much,
Gets ready to face the ready-made creation
Of chairs and bureaus and sleep-twisted sheets. (TC, 39)

The poem “The Ghost’s Leavetaking” is fairly typical. It exhibits

her broad and flexible range of language, in which the unexpected, right
word comes so easily and her ability to make startling images out of
humdrum objects.

Her poem “Sculptor” is actually dedicated to Leonard Baskin whose

work inspired her to compose this poem. The feet is that some of the gods
Baskin carved, were also a part of her all the gods of people. For example
the huge bald angels, the mutilated deadmen, the person with the owl
growing out of his shoulder, were as much admiringly referred to by Sylvia
i

Plath as they were carved by Baskin. This poem presents her conception of
art and the role of the artist in relation to his fellow human beings :
 57

To his house the bodiless

Come to barter endlessly
Vision, wisdom, for bodies
Palpable as his, and weighty. (TC, 79)
Here the bald angel of Leonard’s work finds a counterpart in a
poem of the same period. The depiction of the “The Disquieting Muses”,
as mouthless and eyeless and with a stitched bald head recalls the bald
angel of the sculptor. The poem “Sculptor" describes Leonard Baskin’s
work struck her very hard as well it might, since some of the gods he was
carving out at the time were also part of her pantheon- namely the huge
bald angels, the mutilated dead men, the person with the owl growing out
of his shoulder.
The poem “Night Shift” in this group belongs to the time, when she
was teaching at Devon.. It is a poem as chilling as others. In this poem
she highlights the evils of industrialization due to which machines and men
work round the clock. The noise and ugliness of nightshifts in industries
reduce man to £a state of lifeless machine’. It successfully reflects the
atadsphere of chillness created by the indifferent attitude of workers in
4fight Shift”:

A metal detonating
Native, evidently, to
These stilled suburbs : nobody
Startled at it, though the sound
Shook the ground with its pounding.33 (TC, 11)

In this poem we know that the helpless and machine-like

functioning of workers in night shifts represents human misery as
described in the following lines :
Men in white
Undershirts circled, tending
Without stop those greased machines,
Tending, without stop, the blunt
Indefatigable fact. (TC, 11)
 58

We really know that the background of Sylvia Plath’s personal and

social circumstances reveal that the poems of this group reflect her desire
to define the relationship between her self and the outside world. These
poems also indicate her desire to come to the concept of art and the
relationship between the abstract absolute and the individual vision of
the same.

The poems of the third group belong to the period when she was at
Boston in 1958. Between these last and the next group of poems is a gap
of some months. It was the time from the summer of 1958 to mid 1959.

About these poems and the time, Ted Hughes writes, “It was a
difficult time for her, a life times training and fierce and highly successful
effort to prepare herself to teach in a University, with many of her deep
compulsions to the same end, where not surrounded so easily. From this
year there was not much poetry but it was a decisive time.” Charles
Newman (1970:190)

The third group includes “The Eye - mote”, “Man in Black”, “The
Hermit at Outermost House” “The Beekeeper’s Daughter”, “Point Shirley”,
“Aftermath”, ‘Two Views of a Cadaver Room”, “Suicide off Egg Rock”,
“I Want, I Want” “The Companionable Ills”, “The Times are Tidy”,
“Moonrise” and “The Colossus”. These poems reveal her intellectual and
spiritual power in poetry as well as subject matter and style. These poems
are written about her experience of the period from her childhood to
married life. It is an astonishing fret that she began to treat personal and
painful experiences as poetic subjects. These poems deal with the theme of
the contrast between man’s experience and existence of nature. In other
words, man’s relationship with nature is presented in this third group.

The poem “The Eye - mote” is the first poem composed during this
period. This poem deals with the daughter- father relationship. The theme
of this poem is the conflicting statement of her sexual attitudes. Her
 59

peculiar, surreal vision which operates only erratically in the poems in this
group but persistently in the later poems can be read as a metaphor in “The
Eye-mote”.
Blameless as daylight I stood looking
At a field of homes, necks bent, manes blown
Tails streaming against the green
Backdrop of sycamores. Sun was striking
White chapel pinnacles over the roofs. (TC, 14)

The horses in this poem strongly suggest the horse Ariel hurrying
towards the point, which is suggestive of the movement in the poem, “I
Want, I Want” towards death. The source of conflicts expressed in the
poem is mainly sexual. The manifestations of this dilemma are far
reaching and the tone of the poem is uncertain. It illustrates the conflict
between the strumpet and the spinster shown so clearly by the other poems.

Nature’s unprovoked hostility and the desire to go back to a state of

pre-fall innocence are the themes of “The Eye-mote”. As is customary of
her early poetry, she tries to balance two contradictory states of being. The
poem begins with Plath giving a painterly portrait of nature. “The Eye-
mote” should be read partly as a metaphor for Sylvia Plath’s peculiar,
surreal vision, which operates only erratically in the early poems but
persistently in the later ones. "The Eye-mote" actually presents to us a
glimpse of the eye of the storm. Plath, being aware of it, wishes to escape
the state of innocence that reigned before the fall.

The poem “Man in Black” deals with the theme of hostilities of the
elements towards human beings. In this poem it is clearly suggested that
by withstanding this hostility man defeats it. The poem places a human
figure sinijsterly clothed in dead or black as the central figure. It dominates
i
and ‘weld together the non human elements of poison like domestic
animals, sea, breakwaters and cliff as described in the following lines :
 60

And you, across those white

Stones, strode out in your dead
Black coat, black shoes, and your
Black hair till there you stood,
- Fixed vortex on the far
Tip, riveting stones, air,
All of it, together. (TC, 54)
The poem has a forceful visual effect, similar to the scenery, on
spectators. Here she forces the reader to witness the scene with her own
eyes. In the poem “Man in Black” the father figure strides before the sea’s
waves; in “Daddy” the speaker sees her father’s head in the breakish
Atlantic; and in “Full Fathom Five” the father is an old man beneath
the sea.

The poems “The Hermit at Outermost House” and “Point Shirley”

deal with the same theme of the hostility of natural elements towards
human creatures. In the poem “The Hermit at Outermost House” the
suggestion of the defeat of this hostility is not given through conventional
stance of feelings. It is by the formulation of obscure mystical insight, so
the poet expresses certain meanings of green as the following way :
Still he thumbed out something else.
Thumbed no stony, homy pot
But a certain meaning green.
He withstood them, that hermit.
Rock-face, crab-claw verged on green. (TC, 57)

The poem “Point Shirley”, “was a deliberate exercise in Robert

Lowell’s style. The setting is the bit of coast off Boston Harbour where
she spent her first year.” Charles Newman (1970:191) Here she highlights
the theme of temporariness of human experience. She also has focused
relatively on the gallant nature of the house of the weak grandmother,
though the home overpowered by hurricane. The house still stands firmly
against the overpowering sea but the grandmother is dead.
 61

Herein, Sylvia Plath’s desire to recapture and remember

grandmother’s spirit serves only to intensify her sense of the hostility of the
natural world. It is an elegy written on her grandmother:
A labour of love, and that labour lost.
Steadily the sea
East at Point Shirley. She died blessed. (TC, 25)
In “The Beekeeper’s Daughter” Sylvia Plath recounts a key event in
her Vita Nuova. Her father was a biologist, who wrote a book Bumble
Bees and Their ways which is the source of this poem. This poem is very
effective as a very sensuous evocation of a specific moment in a garden,
which has darker undertones for the daughter of the title. Sylvia Plath here
presents the colours of the flowers such as purple, scarlet, orange, red and
their scents which is almost too dense to breathe. The flowers with silent
and deliberate wantonness are opening themselves for fertilization and it is
depicted in the human tarns. The beekeeper moves in the old fashioned
majesty through this scene. Here he is the ‘priestly lord’ of bees and the
daughter who thinks that her love for him is a subjection of the self:
My heart under your foot, sister and a stone.
Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds.
The Golden Rain Tree drips its powders down.
In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red
The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings
To father dynasties. The air is rich. (TC, 75)

In the first stanza, she presents the profuse sexuality which may be
supplanted her mother by becoming the queen to the master of bees. The
meaning of the poem lies not on the surface but in the accumulation of
allusions and suggestions. The poem “The Beekeeper’s Daughter” is a
description of a lush, symbolically female sense of open flowers, dense
scented air and many-breasted hives. As a natural by-product of their food
gathering, the bees are cross fertilizing the flowers, and the entire poem has
an intensely sexual atmosphere. The man, the beekeper moves through this
 62

rich, lush landscape, spare, vertical and essentially alien to it Her father,
the beekeeper, is designated as priest-like, he both controls and sanctifies
the riot of fertilization going on around him while remaining aloof from it
himself. The speaker of this poem, the beekeeper's daughter is, one might
imagine, following along through the garden behind her father; her
response to what is emotionally taking place is given in three lines, one of
which follows each of the three stanzas. The speaker of the poem functions
primarily as an observer, watching both her father and the bees in the
garden, but there are already the beginnings of an identification of the poet
with the bees, especially with the queen bee.

In the poem “Aftermath” Sylvia Plath tries to refer to her painful

life. This poem may have been occasioned by her memories of the
reactions of others to her attempt of suicide and then the nervous
breakdown at the age of nineteen. Although her personal experiences are
cleverly expressed in her poem, it is possible to detect a new insistence of
personal experiences which were to develop into the autobiographical
poems later :
They loiter and stare as if the house
Burnt - out were theirs, or as if they thought
Some scandal might any minute ooze
From a smoke - choked closet into light;
No deaths, no prodigious injuries
Glut these hunters after an old meat,
Blood spoor of the austere tragedies. (TC, 29)

The poems, “Two views of a Cadaver Room” and “Suicide off Egg
Rock”, deal with the same treatment of personal pain and disaster. The
poem “Two views of a Cadaver Room” projects two views. In the first
sectioq it describes the visit of a girl to the dissecting room and in the
second with a Brueghel’s painting.
 63

In Brueghel’s panorama of smoke and slaughter

Two people only are blind to the carrion army
He afloat in the sea of her blue satin
Skirts, sings in the direction. (TC, 10)
Here she finds her own melancholy modified by an acceptance of
the power of love that persists despite its apparent fragility.

This poem is an analogy, is implied between poetry and the visual

arts, the poem, like Brueghel's painting, has the power to stall desolation
not to defeat death, but atleast to arrest it and thus purchase a kind of
immortality. This kind of idea that Keats sought to establish in his "Ode on
a Grecian Urn" is certainly not Plath's intention.

The reference of the theme of “Suicide off Egg Rock” also appears
in her novel The Bell Jar. This poem bears a close similarity to the
description of Esther Greenwood’s attempt to commit suicide by drowning
herself. It relates man’s successful suicidal attempt The following lines
relate this theme:
Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled
On the public grills, and the ochreous salt flats,
Gas tanks, factory stacks that landscape
Of imperfections his bowels were part of
Rippled and pulsed in the glassy updraught.
Sun struck the water like a damnation. (TC, 33)
The poems written during 1958 - 59 foreshadow Sylvia Plath’s
ideas of suicide which she committed on 11th February 1963. That the sea
itself opposing the human straggle is the theme of her another poem “Point
Shirley”. Here she highlights how the sea offers the only calm heaven to
the modem man tortured by the miseries caused by the industrialization.
A man in the industrialized society finds himself no better than a
lifeless machine:
He smouldered, as if stone-deaf blindfold,
His body beached with the sea’s garbage,
A machine to breathe and beat forever. (TC, 33)
 64

The man lives unwillingly to drag his life without interest. The
prospects of worldly decay or death disturbs him to watch it exemplified
in the flies eating the body of a dead fish. A man may escape from it only
when carried by the waves of sea into the curse of death.

The third group includes six other poems, “I Want, I Want”, “The
Companionable Ills”, “The Times are Tidy”, “Moonrise”, “The Colossus”
and “The Bull of Bendylaw”. They are similar in style and subject matter.
Among these “Moonrise” and “The Colossus” are the only poems having
t

thirty lines. These two poems are technically and thematically significant
These poems deal with the sense of doom similar to her usual mood of
despair. The fascination for disintegration and death is the subject of the
following lines:
Dry-eyed, the inveterate patriarch
Raised his men of skin and bone
Barbs on the crown of gilded wire,
Thoms on the bloody rose - stem. (TC, 36)
This poem is a more difficult one than "Sow", but it seems to
describe the terrible, insatiable demands of the baby-god' who 'cried out
for the mother's dug*. Its two final lines vaguely suggest the crucification
and set up a parallel between it and childbirth which Plath develops more
extensively in later poems.

The poem “Moonrise” acquires a much greater complexity and

significance as the moon stands symbolically for death, decay and
infertility. The red colour highlights ripeness, maturity and life. Here
Sylvia Plath develops her idea through usual and concrete images :
Grab-white mulberries redden among leaves.
I’ll go out and sit in white like they do,
Doing nothing. July’s juice round their nubs...
Cast a round white shadow in their dying.
A pigeon rudders down. Its fan - tails white. (TC, 66)
 65

The images of fertility accompany the change from white to red.

Images of death and decay are related to white men as are evident in lines
quoted above. The association of white colour with death and sterility has
emotional significance.

Some stanzas of the poem interrelate different images. The last two
stanzas present the allusion of the title ‘Lucina’ to the moon goddess who
is the source of all white men. Her cruelty reduces man to his own bony,
elemental starkness. The purple skin and the red blood of the berries
intrude into the white universe with sinister power expressed in this poem:
Lucina, bony mother, labouring
Among the socketed white stars, your face
Of candour pares white flesh to the white bone,
Who drag our ancient father at the heel,
White-bearded, weary. The berries purple
And bleed. The white stomach may ripen yet. (TC, 67)
“Moonrise” is the first important poem in the transitional period
between the early and yet mature work of Sylvia Plath, which tries to
interlink the external world with the internal mind. “The Beekeeper’s
Daughter”, “Daddy”, “The Colossus”, are powerful poems dealing with the
relationship between the daughter and father. These poems reflecting the
daughters obsessive ideas, which contain both desire and fear, affection
and an urge to destroy.

“The Colossus” the title poem of her first volume is concerned with
a broken ancient statue:
I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued and properly jointed. (TC, 20)

The metaphor is derived from the giant statue of the sun god which
was regarded as one of the seven wonders of the world. It is at the entrance
pf the harbour at Rhodes. Its feet are resting on the two moles, enabling
ships to pass between its legs. The actual statue was destroyed by an
s*
 66

earthquake. After its collapse it exists in ruins, a scattered piles of

remains, which the narrator clambers trying to put them together again. In
a way this poem anticipates the later poems like “Daddy”. In “Daddy” and
“The Colossus” the figure of her father has been expanded to include her
husband. Here Sylvia Plath abandons her patching efforts in “The
Colossus In this way in her life she struggles like:
Thirty years now I have laboured
To dredge the silt from your throat
I am none the wiser.
Scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails of lysol
I crawl like an ant in mourning...
The bald, white tumuli of your eyes. (TC, 20)
The last three lines of the poem present a striking image in the
following way:
My hours are married to shadow.
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing. (TC, 21)

The image has considerable pathos and beauty which links with the
growing despair of the poems. It expresses the submission of the restore, to
the broken statue. She shows that in our life everything is temporary and
shadowy. Sylvia Plath accepts her isolation almost with fervour, though
life is blank and lonely.

The cry in the fourth stanza 'O father1 helps us to realize that the
helpless and absorbed figure is described crawling laboriously like an ant
over the ruin of her God. Like a child, she is searching her dead father
among the fragments of the past. At first the broken statue seems comic
and absurd but then we realize something deeply serious and disturbing
underlying this.

In “The Colossus” the emotions are generalized by her

impersonality which makes it possible for the reader to share the deep and
painful feelings hovering in the poem. One can share the child’s desire for
 67

security so effectively caught in that image of herself at night. It is this

desire for security and protection which drives her into the hopeless task of
bringing her dead father, back to life.

This hopelessness finally becomes her dreadful, inescapable

servitude. When “The Colossus” stood all powerful and massive, she was
able to move away from it, protected by the immense being. The deserted
situation of the statue haunts and traps her in the harbour, which imprisons
her rather than protects her.

Ted Hughes mentions that, “In the Autumn of 1959 after touring
around the States, we were invited to Yaddo. The weeks spent at Yaddo
with only three or four other residents completed the poems in The
Colossus. It was in several ways, the culmination of the first part of her
life ... In those weeks she was changed at great speed with steady
effort”. Charles Newman (1970: 191) During the same period she
composed the poems, like, “Blue Moles”, “A Winter Ship” ‘Mushrooms”,
“The Burnt-out Spa”, “The Manor Garden” and “Poem for a Birthday”.

“Blue Moles” is the first poem of the fourth group which records
two dead moles found in the ground at Yaddo.

In her early poetry the quality of menace gets expressed everywhere

from a natural landscape. Almost every aspect of nature can serve as the
agent of doom as referred to in the early poems. The sea serves as a death
agent but this menace may lurk even in the hard landscape:
Nightly the battle-shouts start up
In the ear of the veteran, and again
I enter the soft pelt of the mole.
Light’s death to them: they shrivel in it (TC, 49)

This poem deals with the dead, like "Two Views of a Cadaver
Room". It is divided into two parts and each part consists of two stanzas.
The opening section is descriptive in nature. The dead moles are 'shapeless
 68

as flung gloves' and appear .like 'blue suede a dog'. Plafh attributes this
senseless slaughter to bad nature. In the second stanza, Plath describes the
surrounding atmosphere and finds nothing sinister about it. Here Plath
identifies herself with the world of the moles. The first section is harsh and
dominated by images of death, whereas the second section is more lyrical.
The third person narrative is abandoned and the T is more firmly rooted at
die cenfre of the poem.
The poem “A Winter Ship” is a beautifully planned poetic effort of
Sylvia Plath. But her expressed perceptions in this poem appear generally
less well informed than they do in the later poems. Like other early poems,
here too, the vague sense of doom hovers over her mind. That nature is as
usual antipathetic to man in a very general way and it is focused in the
poem thus:
Even our shadows are blue with cold
We wanted to see the sun come up
And are met, instead, by this iceribbed ship,
Bearded and blown, an albatross of frost.
Relic of tough weather, every winch and stay
Encased in a glassy pellicle.
The sun will diminish it soon enough
Each wave - tip glitters like a knife. (TC, 44-45)

The poem “Mushrooms” uses the image of organic growth and

development. But in comparison with “The Manor Garden” its implications
are a bit more sinister and darker. This poem is the result of the series of
the invocations and meditative exercises which Sylvia and Ted devised
during their stay at Yaddo. The poem describes the mass growth and
movement of mushrooms as they come upward through the ground. That
the mushrooms eventually have taken over the world is the scene
prevailing like in the following lines :

t
 69

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly
Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air. (TC, 34)
The most significant element in the poem is its wry humour,
achieved through rhythms.

In the poem “The Burnt-out Spa” Sylvia Plath tries to project

herself, leaving aside her specific individual existence as one member of
humanity unified by the common demands of existence. The emphasis is
now led on the inevitable outcome of the struggle and on the common
mutability between desire and actuality in life. The mirror is the symbol of
her other self, and it is this narcissistic image that she encounters in "The
Burnt-out Spa". Apart from the thematic concerns which the poem
presents, it also draws attention to its simple, everyday idiom. It is a very
good example of how effective her writing could be, when freed from
academic jargon. The voice is still prosaic and lacks the lilt of a
conventional song or lyric.

“The Manor Garden” deals with autumnal decay of a garden which

was at Yaddo where Sylvia Plath gave birth to her first child on 1st April
1960. Perhaps her pregnancy might have aroused her awareness of the
cycle of birth and death. This thought repetitively affects her unborn child
as well as herself. The poem presents a kind of monologue in which the
pregnant mother warns her baby that death and difficulty are the conditions
in which it has to be bom. The first two stanzas are addressed to the
foetus. The development of this foetus from its resemblance (to a pig and
fish) matches the decay and death of the natural world:
You move through the era of fishes,
The smug centuries of the pig -
Head, toe and finger
Come clear of the shadow. (TC, 9)
 70

The metaphor used here is definitely precise and brief. Her knitting
of images affords a unique balance among file motherly feelings of love,
regret and dread.

The last two lines of the poem are crucial. These lines unite the
perceptions of the external world of the garden with the thoughts of the
unborn child. They also depict and express the mixture of the poet’s mood
ofjoy and sadness as seen in the following lines :
The small birds converge, converge
With their gifts to a difficult homing. (TC, 9)

“Poem for a Birthday” is a series of poems in this collection.

Though all the poems are skilled and accomplished, these poems indicate a
change in attitude and attention. In all these poems, the subject and
imagery come closer with the only exception of the last poem “The
Stones”. The dominant themes of pregnancy, parents madness, and its
recovery are dealt with in this poem.

In the poem “Who” Sylvia Plath refers to her pregnancy, memories

of her experiences in the mental hospital, descriptions of her surroundings
at Yaddo. “Poem for a Birthday” which is the title of the series, indicates
its date of composition in October. Even the third line of the first stanza
refers to it; October is the month for storage. The month of October is the
month of Sylvia Plath’s birthday. The opening lines of this poem express
her own conditions of pregnancy similar to the images of autumnal
harvesting and storing for the winter.

Here the reference to the mummy, which encloses the dead body, is
a reference to the womb which protects the unborn child. The poem deals
with the repetitive thought of death and dullness in relation with her
natural surroundings. She longs to assume such a minute part of the
potting shed setting that even the spiders won’t notice. Ultimately she
 71

craves for death as a state of complete repose. The images of death and
birth are combined throughout die poem thus :
Let me sit in a flowerpot,
The spiders won’t notice.
My heart is stopped geranium
If only the wind would leave my lungs alone. (TC, 80)
The same type of images are seen in Emily Dickinson's poem
“Because I could not Stop for Death”. It is one of her best poems on death.
It is also remarkable for its imagery. In this poem the poetess suggests that
the best way to overcome death is to conquer it:
Because I could not Stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me,
Tie carnage held but just ourselves
And immortality. Sculley Bradley (1967 :198)

The second half of the poem “Who” refers to approaching maternity

and also the mental hospital. The experiences of mental illness have
imparted a sense of complete loss of identity. They give her a feeling
similar to inanimate nature occur in the following way :
I am a root, a stone, an owl pellet,
Without dreams of any sort.
Mother, you are the one mouth
I would be a tongue to. (TC, 81)

Here she longs for silence and repose of death. Death is seen as a
mother who devours her children. Even the experience of mental
disintegration has a ‘weird beauty’ of its own. It is generated by her own
feelings of insignificance and has enabled to see her surroundings with
heightened perspective ability thus :
I must remember this, being small.
There were such enormous flowers,
Purple and red mouths, utterly lovely. (TC, 81)
 72

Hie second poem “Dark House” bears the clear influence of

Roethke’s ‘I’m an outer with only one nape’ on Sylvia Plath’s ‘I’m round
as an owl'. 'I see by own light’ Even the technique of identification has
been the same with the animal world:

Any day I may litter puppies

Or mother a horse. My belly moves.
I must make more maps. (TC, 82)

My belly moves' refers not only to Sylvia Plath’s own pregnancy

but it also recalls the prevented fertility of Roethke’s poem in the
following way:
Sit and play
Under the rocker
Until the cows
All have puppies. Theodore Roethke (1961: 71)

The poem “Dark House” presents the movements of strange,

underground animals. These are linked with the pre-birth movements of
the developing child. A deeper, rather more obvious reference is to the
attempt of the mind to build a security from the depths of the self. Here the
quest for learning leads only to an acceptance of easy escape.

The poem “Maenad” is the third of the collection entitled “Poem of

A Birthday” in which Sylvia Plath nostalgically thinks of her childhood.
The memories of her childhood remind her of the time when she was not
differentiated from others as she is now. She used to live in a safe world
under the protection of her lather in the following ways :
Once I was ordinary :
Sat by my father’s bean tree
Eating the fingers of wisdom.
The birds made milk.
When it thundered I hid under a flat stone. (TC, 82)
 73

But after her father’s death, the harmony of the world of daughter
and mother was disturbed by their conflict. Time has separated the adult
from the past world of childhood and now the earlier symbols seem to be
meaningless:

Birdmilk is feathers,
The bean leaves are dumb as hands.
This month is fit for little. (TC, 83)

To her, the only way to overcome the childhood conflicts is to

repulse them by evolving a new identity.

The line 'I am becoming mother* suggests the end of Sylvia Plath's
quest in acceptance of the whole personality and is also reminiscent of
Theodore Roethke's, 1 am somebody else now'. This escape from the
struggle and conflict is to recognise the self in the silence of death. This is
till longed for but cannot be achieved.

This poem ends with the mention of the complete loss of identity
and self, but a ray of hope is still there for the person when it seeks a name
which will define her personality.

The poem “The Beast” actually shows and develops the contrast
between childhood and the present situation of spiritual desolation and
loss. The girl was happy under the protection and love of her father.
Nothing could go wrong in her father’s reign because he was all powerful
thus:

He was bullman earlier,

King of the dish, my lucky animal.
Breathing was easy in his airy holding.
The sun sat in his armpit (TC, 83)
But now she is deserted and finds herself wandering, lost and
abandoned in despair.

The poem “Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond” begins to move

towards its conclusion and the end of Sylvia Plath’s quest. Here the short
 74

lines are replaced by longer and lyrical lines. Here the poetess is for a
short while a fish or an insect living in the lily pond. The world evoked is
one of coldness, blackness and laziness :
There is little shelter.
Hourly the eye of the sky enlarges its blank
Dominion. The stars are no nearer. (TC, 84-85)
’’Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond” differs in imagery and rhythm
from the other sections of "poems for a Birthday". The rhythm is relaxed
and easy, in keeping with the mood of somnolence that pervades the poem;
the lines are longer, smoother, and more lyrical and stand in contrast to the
short, taut and choppy lines of the previous sections. The influence of
Theodore Roethke, so evident in the previous sections, is now missing.
We are in a different world altogether. The general mood is one of serenity.
Although the first; person singular T is absent for the first time, the poem
has not abandoned the subjective mode.

In the poem “Witch Burning” the restlessness of energy of the

earlier parts is regained. It is directed straight towards the discovery of a
birthday. Though the lines are longer, the tone becomes conversational.
She feels that she is tormented and the only escape from it is extinction:
I inhabit
The wax image of myself, a doll’s body.
Sickness begins here: I am a dartboard for witches.
Only the devil can eat the devil out. (TC, 85)

Finally, she accepts that she is both persecutor and the persecuted.
She is both the witch and the wax doll. This is the reason for her sufferings.
She begins to feel the recovery of her psychic identity and wholeness in the
month of October. She also realizes that her return to normal health will be
a painful process of growth and development from ’which there is
no escape.
 75

"The Stones" was the last poem she wrote at Yaddo, and the last in
America. The immediate source of it was a series of poems she began as a
deliberate exercise in experimental improvisation on set themes. She had
never in her life improvised. The powers that compelled her to write so
slowly had always been stronger than she was. But quite suddenly she
found herself free to let herself drop, rather than inch over bridges of
concepts. The poem “The Stones” is a description of the return to sanity.
It is with the technical and medical imagery of surgery. Her recovery of
health is not an organic awareness of the wholeness. It is a repairing or
mending process. She merely becomes a body worked on by doctors in the
following way:
The grafters are cheerful,
Heating the pincers, hoisting the delicate hammers.
A current agitates the wires
Volt upon volt. Catgut stitches my fissures. (TC, 87)
This imagery of surgery is linked with the experience of recovery
from mental disturbance. To her love becomes the healing process. But
sometimes love serves to be an ambiguous force of affection and menace
as occurs in the following lines :
Love is the uniform of my bald nurse.
Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.
The vase, reconstructed, houses
The elusive rose. (TC, 88)

The fifth and the final group of Sylvia Plath’s poems in The
Colossus, comprises of only four poems. The two poems “Medallion” and
“Metaphors” were published in 1960 and the other two, “Ouija” and
“Maudlin” are also supposed to be first published in the same year.

The poem “Medallion”, is quite interesting and it reveals some

flashes of the long standing imminence in Sylvia Plath of her final kind of
awareness. It is worth noting here that this image of death is one which
 76

deeply impresses, similar to the novel The Bell Jar with Esther
Greenwood. In the poem “Two Views of a Cadaver Room” the speaker
holds a ‘cut out heart’ and here in “Medallion” she holds a dead snake
which shines in the sun thus :
The bronze snake lay in the sun
Inert as a shoelace; dead
But pliable still, his jaw
Unhinged and his grin crooked,
Tongue a rose - colored arrow.
Over my hand I hung him. (TC, 61)
The early expression of Sylvia Plath’s association of death with
chastity and perfection is expressed in this poem. Here the menace comes
from the ‘tangible nature’. She also explores the contents and materials of
the same mode and nature.

The poem “Ouija” is a beautiful, picturesque one. The grandeur of

nature oppressed and fascinated her at the same time. In her poems the
apprehensions of ‘lurking menace, more, likely to test tolerance than joy,
are seldom absent’. Sylvia Plath responded to a landscape tamed by man,
with trifling. She felt more at home when she senses behind the nature its
naked inhospitability to man. Wind and sea were natural forces which she
detected waiting to improve or supplant the human race. In the poem
“Ouija” there is gloom and strange evocation of those unborn, ‘those
undone’, as they crowd into the room:
Imagine their deep hunger, deep as the dark
For the blood - heat that would ruddle or reclaim. (TC, 52)

“Maudlin” is a small poem. It is associated with a world of dreams.

It deals with the fairy tales in the nursery rhymes like:
Mud - mattressed under the sign of the hag
In a clench of blood, the sleep-talking virgin
Gibbets with her curse the moon’s man,
Faggot - bearing Jack in his crackless egg. (TC, 48)
 77

The moon is always the part of the other world of internal

experience. The poems ‘'Maudlin”, “The Ghost’s Leavetaking” and “The
Thin People” reinforce the growing significance of the moon. It is in many
ways opposed to the earthly reality which is ultimately resolved itself into
the world of death.

As a matter of fact, the occasionally humorous or mocking voice is

an aspect which is worth noticing in Sylvia Plath's poetry. In the poem
“Metaphors” the playfulness of the riddle and of the word game is evoked.
‘The nine syllable’ indicates both the nine-syllable lines of the poem as
well as the nine months of pregnancy. Here, pregnancy is the answer to
this riddle:
I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf s big with its yeasty rising. (TC, 41)
The train image in the poem does not suggest the death-driven
necessity of the later poems. Yet as it signifies birth and new life, the rail­
road image of “Metaphors” does point toward the death-car of the late
poems. It anticipates the theme of birth-death fusion which is central
to Sylvia Plath’s final vision. Life Studies is an expression of Robert
Lowell’s treatment of his personal history of mental illness. The modem
assumption is that, the reality itself is questionable, a condition of the
individual consciousness which is essentially in a state of neurosis,
disorder or alienation. As a matter of fact, what Robert Lowell does the
representation of life a taboo for which Sylvia Plath felt existed for her.
He gives her the example which enabled her to break out of her own
restricted outlook on what she feels as poetic.

For Sylvia Plath, this new, more nakedly personal poetry dealing
with experiences of mental disorder helped her to free from the creation of
 78

a newly uncomposing style of poetry which dealt more directly with the
subject matter, which she felt was close to her, and which she was to
explore increasingly in her later poetry. The emergence of this new kind of
poetry occurs in the final sequence of the poems in The Colossus entitled
“Poem for a Birthday”. It is significant that this is a sequence rather than
single poem, exploring different points of view just as Robert Lowell or T.
S. Eliot or Ezra Pound had done.

The Colossus is the only collection of Sylvia Plath’s poetry

published during her life time as it is said earlier. The poems included in
this collection are all composed between 1956 and 1959. These poems
deal with the theme of raw awareness of the mortality of a frail individual
in the face of the enduring nature. The sense of doom and the fascination
for disintegration, decay and death are prevailing in all these poems.
Technically these poems are more skilled, mannered, less spontaneous and
self conscious, in comparison to the Ariel poems. Nature presented in
these poems is menacing and antipathetic to man in a very general and
undefined manner.

Most of the poems in The Colossus are nature poems and imagery
is drawn from her apprehension of the worldly nature. Certain poems for
example ‘Two Views Of a Cadaver Room”, “Suicide off Egg Rock”,
“Spinster”, “Two Sisters of Persephone”, “The Colossus”, “The Manor
Garden”, “The Beekeeper’s Daughter”, “Point Shirley” and “Poem for a
Birthday” are concerned with evaluating and defining the relationship
between the self and the outside world. Poems in this collection also
indicate the poet’s wish to come to terms with the concept of art and
relationship between the abstract absolute and the individual’s vision of it.
Particularly, the “Poem for a Birthday” tries to accomplish the process of
fusion between internal preoccupations and outer perceptions. William
Wordsworth’s poetry is absolutely egoistic, personal and natural. For him
 79

nature is a mother, teacher, guide, preacher and philosopher. It is purely

lyrical, because it appeals to the senses. There is sensuality, sublime
divinity, divine sense and poetic pantheism. The trend is completely
changed in the period of T.S. Eliot. T.S. Eliot is rather impressed with
Marxism. It is a revolt against egoistic poetry of romanticism. In his
poetry there is modernity, industrialization, materialistic culture. He uses
objective correlative theory in his poetry. He uses very complex but rich
language in which he uses very deep images. His poetry is impersonal.

Sylvia Plath’s poetry is totally different from die poetry of

Wordsworth and that of T.S. Eliot. In her poetry there is gothic, horror,
terror, bones, churchyard. All these images lead to death, despair,
depression and frustration. Nature in William Wordsworth is an image of
happiness, whereas T.S. Eliot is impersonal in his image. But Sylvia Plath
in her poetry uses natural images which lead to death, depression,
frustration and despair. She is attracted towards death, and suicide. There
is a slight similarity in the poems of Emily Dickinson and Plath. In all
their works there is a common theme of suicide, frustration and rejection.
So this is a kind of tradition among the intellectual American writers to
incline towards suicide. We get the same kind of impression in drama,
poetry and the novel. They are totally frustrated with American day to day
life. Their mental make up is totally distorted by the American way of life.

Sylvia Plath was dissatisfied with herself. There was an intellectual

discontent around her. Her poetic work was a part and parcel of American
way of life. The theme of death dominated effectively in the works of
Emily Dickinson who wrote a master poem on death and Sylvia Plath
followed suit by writing her poems on the theme of death. She is
influenced by Robert Lowell's sense of confessional mode. The theme of
discontent and suicide was exploited by some poets even before Sylvia
Plath. Plath continued the tradition in all her works. There was an abnormal
 80

psychological element among some of the majot American writers. The

same was reflected in their life. This reflection was found in their literary
work of art This tradition was thus not new to Sylvia Plath. She just
exploited the same tradition in her works in such a way that she very soon
became one of the leading poets of the school of the confessional poetry

To sum up, Sylvia Plath’s poems in The Colossus have death as a

dominant theme. There are several sub themes in these poems which
appear in later anthologies too. Hence to conclude, the themes of the
poems of The Colossus would be best done in comparison with
later poems.

2.4 CROSSING THE WATER

The first collection of poems, namely The Colossus of Sylvia

Plath did not have chronological arrangement. It lacked in maturity of
thought and expression. However, she was regularly publishing
her poems in the fifties. Ted Hughes had also pointed out that,
“she scrapped many poems before The Colossus took its final
shape.” Charles Newman (1970 : 188) The next volume, written in her
traditional period is Crossing the Water which consists of thirty four
poems. It was written between the publication of The Colossus and
before the composition of Ariel. Crossing The Water is full of
perfectly realized works. Its most striking impression is of a front rank
artist in the process of discovering her true power. Such was Plath's
control that the book possessed singularity and certainty which should
make it as celebrated as The Colossus or Ariel. It was capable of
bearing the full weight of the grand style while staying true to the
sharpest observation of reality. She was now mature and confident in
expression which brought out Crossing The Water. A number of
poems from this collection were first published in journals and
magazines between 1960 and 1962. It was the period of her visit to
'hi
 81

England and her first year in Devon with Ted Hughes. Her marriage
with Ted Hughes was about to break up as he was indulged in extra­
marital relations with her friend. It was the most unhappy period for
her. She became helpless and hopeless and thought of committing
suicide. It affected her poetic career. Her daughter was born in 1960
and her son, in 1962. She was not really happy with her domestic
situation. In her letters addressed to her mother she complained about
her failing health. The Colossus was accepted for publication by
Heinemann, at the end of January 1960. Winter Trees and Ariel
belonged to the last phase of her poetic career. Her poems written
between 1959 and 1962 are included in Crossing the Water. These
i *

poems are quite different in several respects from the earlier ones.

The poems in this collection, generally, do not reveal either the

honesty of the early poems or the power of the later ones. Crossing The
Water reflects the events that happened in her life, during this period,
and its major exploration is her internal self. Here it is tried to mark the
difference between her earlier poetry and the later poetry on the basis
of the dates of composition, style and approach as weli. The poems of
Sylvia Plath in this volume are suggestively entitled as Crossing The
Water. These poems suggest that she is not at this end nor at that, in
other words her poetic vision developing mid changing finds
expression in these poems. About the poems of this period (1960 -
1962) Caroline King Bernard says, “do indeed evince, variously, a kind
of stepping-stone quality or sense of floundering of being neither on
one shore nor the other. Both in the form and in substance, these
poems are mainly interesting only because they are there, and because
they represent an important stage in Sylvia Plath’s poetic
development.” Caroline King Bernard (1978 : 57)
 82

Crossing the Water is the description of events which happened

in her life during these three years. In fact, they deal with her inner
psyche. Her disturbed family life and development in her literary
career go hand in hand in these years. This has effected a clearcut
distinction between , her early poems and her later poems in terms of
composition and style. The form and content of these poems matter
much, because they represent important phase in her personal life as
well as her poetic career.

The poems and the groupings began with, “Two Campers in

Cloud Country”. This poem was composed in 1960. The grouping of
the poems is made by Ted Hughes in his article “Notes on a
chronological order of Sylvia Plath’s poems”. “Face Lift”, ‘Heavy
Women”, “The Babysitters”, “In Plaster”, “Leaving Early”, “Widow”,
“Mirror”, “Zoo Keeper's Wife”, and “Last Words” were written in
1961. The poems, “An Appearance”, “Apprehensions” and “Pheasant”
were composed in 1962. The remaining poems were first published
during the years between 1960 and 1962. They are “Candles”,
“Parliament Hill Fields”, “Insomniac”, “I Am Vertical”, “Private
Ground”, “Magi”, “Small Hours”, “Sleep in the Mojave Desert”, “A
Life”, “On Deck”, “Whitsun”, “Wuthering Heights”, “Crossing the
Water”, “Finisterre”, “Blackberrying”, “Event”, “Love Letter” and
“The Surgeon of 2 a.m.”. Remaining three poems "Among the
Narcissi", "The Tour", and "Still born" are placed in this period taking
into consideration their treatment of the theme.

In Crossing The Water, Sylvia Plath maintains her own style.

There is novelty in the structure of these poems. There is a remarkable
change in her use of rhymes, rhythms and stanza forms which help her
in achieving accuracy. She enjoyed structural and verbal freedom.
Sylvia Plath preferred shorter and flexible stanza form to larger ones.
 83

The stanza form was simpler and more emphatic. This was due to the
shift from written to spoken language that Sylvia Plath used to write
her poems. Critics as well as Sylvia Plath also observed this
transformation from written to spoken language. This transformation
affected the syntax, diction and the sound of her poems.
The sounds are often effective and impressive that are seen in
The Colossus as :
And he within this snakedom
Rules the writhings which make manifest
His snakehood and his might with pliant tunes
From his thin pipe. (TC, 55)
In the second lines the sounds /r/, /t/, /m/ are repeated. In fact
they are examples of alliteration. In the third lines the sound /t/ is
repeated. These sounds reinforce the theme of the poem.
The same change can be observed in her later poems. She uses
natural diction and sound effects appropriate to the situation. For
example in “Insomniac” :
The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,
Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars
Letting in the light, peephole after peephole-
A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things. (CW, 21)
In the second line /b/ sound and in the third line the sound III is
repeated. They are appropriate to the situation of the poem which
gives the description of the night. The use of carbon paper much joked
periods. Peep hole bone, white are the natural diction for the
description of the night.
In Crossing the Water, Sylvia Plath seems so much aware of
herself, for the characters and situations are abstract. For example, the
failure of realization in “Magi” is expressed in the following lines :
The abstracts hover like dull angels
Nothing so vulgar as a nose or an eye
Bossing the ethereal blanks of their face-ovals. (CW, 40)
 84

This poem deals with maternal concern for the welfare of the
child. "Magi" was written in 1960 and included by Plath in her
intended second volume. In the poem, Plath wishes to protect her child
from abstractions that are completely cut off from the realities of life.
The poem begins with a definition of life's abstractions, the abstracts
hover like dull angels. These dull angels are none other than the
abstractions of philosophical concepts of Good, True, Evil and Love
and they hover over the crib of the baby like the wise men of the East.
They are dull or vague and uninspiring because they bear no
resemblance to anything tangible. In this poem Plath is not interested
in a life of intellect for her daughter. The simple joys of life would be
far better for the growing infant. She dismisses the "Magi" with the
query, 'what a girl ever flourished in such company?' the Magi would
do well to leave the girl alone.

It is a negation of his own cerebral world in favour of the

uncomplicated world of the infant. This very attitude is at the heart of
the declaration made by the first voice in "Three Women" about her
new-born son.

“I Am Vertical” and "Private Ground" are included in Crossing

the Water. They are superior in subject matter and mood to the poems
published in the last group of poems in The Colossus. The subject of
the Manor Garden and Private Ground is the description of the ground
at Yaddo. But here the moods are different. The poem presents a state
of regression and self enclosure. Everything is being cleared up and
packed up for approaching the rigours of winter. The boundary wall
imprisons her, in protecting the estate from the outer world. The
owner of the grounds decorate them with statues brought from Europe,
is the embodiment of older, calmer and declining civilization. But the
estate undergoes some transformations and changes in identity. She
 85

becomes melancholic by this regression which cannot calm her. The

different impressions are exposed through the medium of her
consciousness. Though in The Colossus there are visual descriptions
and annotations, we observe a typical seriousness in her poem. The
private world of this estate encourages her inner melancholy. She
becomes conscious of beauty and pain thus :
They glitter like eyes, and I collect them all.
Morgue of old logs and old images, the lake
Opens and shuts, accepting them among its reflections. (CW, 36)

Her separation from nature is revealed in her poem “I Am

Vertical”. Nature for her is worthy of worship. She forms many
meaningful associations of death with flowers and trees. She enjoys
them because they are representatives of qualities. She has no
temporary beauty of flowers and healthy life of trees. She aspires for
something from nature, but she is separated from it because she is
vertical and not horizontal. This poem simply deals with death and
there is no sign of any pain or urgency which is evident in her later
poems. It provides an effective contrast to the searing vitality of the
poems "Fever 103°" and "Lady Lazarus". But in "I Am Vertical" its
decisiveness is noteworthy. She writes about death thus :
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally :
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have
time for me. (CW, 26)
Certain poems composed in Crossing the Water are only her
reactions to particular places; one poem is from England and the other two
poems are from the United States of America. The poem “Wuthering
Heights”, “Finisterre” and “Parliament Hill Fields” refer to the places in
England. “Two Campers in Cloud Country” and “Sleep in the Mojave
 86

Desert” refer to the places in the U.S.A. She cherishes her memories of the
days she spends in camping for the holidays alongwith Ted Hughes in 1959
at Yaddo. “Two Campers in Cloud Country” reveals her feelings about her
native city Boston. “Finisterre” also expresses her fear of being effaced,
neutralised and silenced.

In the poem “Wuthering Heights” uncivilized nature is considered

as more powerful than all the fortifications of human society. To some
extent, it may be called or considered as a prologue to “Hardeastle Crags”
in The Colossus. “Wuthering Heights” expresses her feeling of personal
isolation and it refers to the landscape of West Yorkshire. In the poem the
elusive and indefinable promise of the distance always evades her as she
moves towards it. The sky itself offers her some kind of solidity. Her hope
is disturbed by the evocation of paleness and neutrality. She eagerly
moves towards the horizon. It does not fulfil the promise of warmth thus :
The horizons ring me like faggots,
Tilted and desperate, and always unstable.
Touched by a match, they might warm me,
And their fine lines singe
The air to orange.
Before the distances they pin evaporate,
Weighting the pale sky with a soldier colour.
But they only dissolve and dissolve.
Like a series of promises, as I step forward. (CW, 11)

She feels physically vulnerable in a stony landscape, like

“Hardeastle Crags” in The Colossus. But the moorland landscape
represents a serious threat for it tries to draw from her the light and life she
still retains. She thinks that the sheep are happier and luckier than her,
because they know what they are. The combination of shadow and
blackness in these images is powerful expression of constant feelings of
reality. In “Wuthering Heights” the melancholy of her vision is highlighted
by her picture of the sheep representing foolish elderly ladies.
 87

"Wuthering Heights" represents Plath's ambivalent response to life

and, by extension, to nature. The artistic and creative parts of the mind
conflict with the desire to escape into a numbered existence. She moves
confidently in the direction of the distant horizons only to retreat in the
final stanza. Plath's death wish is expressed in this poem in just the same
way as Robert Frost's in "Come In".

In "Wuthering Heights" terrified by the all-pervading darkness, the

poet heads in the direction of the valley where the house lights glow.

The poem “Parliament Hill Fields” portrays a quite different

landscape. It seems to have referred to her miscarriage, which she
experienced in 1961. The apparent rejection of the womanhood by the
landscape is a reflection of her inner loss.
Yet, the introversion of grief does not hinder her eye from the
brilliant perception of the visual effects. See for instance the following
lines:
.............. The Wan
Sun manages to strike such tin glints
From tile linked ponds that my eyes wince
And brim, the city melts like sugar. (CW, 19)

She feels rejected by the landscape and by the people. In the school
girls underestimate her as they consider her petty existence.

The imagery here depicts her mood of withdrawal. The vision of

landscape compels her to forget death. And the poem refuses all self-
indulgence by finally admitting the transcience of grief and reasserting the
desire for life. Relinquishing her grief for the dead, safely and warmly she
returns to the living child. In the poem the flock of seabirds flying over the
land reminds her of a person with invalid hands. Here the wind is like a
bandage, the mood is like the white skin over a seat The images of
hospitals, illness and suffering occur in her work regularly and thus they
 88

are the salient characteristics of her work. These images also occur in the
poems of Crossing the Water.

In “Finisterre” the visual appreciation of the painter creates the

opening image of the poem. To Sylvia Plath, the present is only gloomy
and the greatness belongs to the past Now the ocean is quite different
from ‘The Bay of the Dead down there’. It charms and attracts her
imagination in the following ways :
She is in love with the beautiful formlessness of the sea.
Gull-coloured laces flap in the sea drafts
Beside the postcard stalls.
The peasants anchor them with conches. One is told...
But from another place, tropical and blue,
We have never been to. (CW, 15-16)
The poem is regarding the name of the seashore. This is the country
of 'Black admonitory cliffs, and the sea exploding'. The sea in thrilling
fashion can do nothing less, one presumes, than explode here, as the surf
creamed in earlier poems. Compare this sea, by the way, with the well-
excavated grave of Marianne Moore and its terrifyingly prosey
acceptances. It is Moore who once said that the poet must be as clear as
natural reticence permits. The animations amid the pathos of Plath, as with
Hughes, permitted no such reticence.

The poem “Two Campers In Cloud Country” is subtitled “Rock

Lake Canada”. It expresses her feelings about America in general. The
campers run away from Boston to protest against its fastidiously organised
politeness. They want a larger landscape where nature is dominant and not
man. They arrive at 'the last frontier of the big, brash spirit and at first are
delighted by the empty spaciousness’ which represents American heritage.
But it becomes dangerous for her. Even the history has not affected this
vastness. Thus her troubled past in America is no more now. She is
dissatisfied with a mere description of her reactions to Rock Lake in the
 89

poem. She meditates over ‘the recurrent themes of herself; the frailty of
the individual’s sense of self.

The black stoniness which depressed Sylvia Plath in “Hardcastle

Crags” is very much dominant here. Actually, she wants to be a part of
this landscape. Being upright she feels too obtrusive. She identifies
herself with the grass in its horrifying revolt against the deep darkness. But
looking back to human communities in the far distant valleys she finds no
place of escape or peace there. It is because, they are mean and vain. To
her, it represents the death of the self

The poems “Two Campers In Cloud Country” and “Whitsun” show

that people are like stock figures. These stock figures raise the issue of
expression which is the main problem in the poems. This issue is
allegorised by undeniable intellect of Sylvia Plath. The problem of
expression is solved by Sylvia Plath by making it humourless in these
transitional poems. These poems lack in wit and drollery with a very few
exceptions. In the poem “Leaving Early” there are some witty lines, like,
‘Lady, your room is lousy with flowers’. Another example of the poem
“On Deck” may be given in this context, but in this example there is
humorous satire occurs in the following lines :
The untidy lady revivalist
For whom the good Lord provides (He gave
Her a poeketbook, a pearl hatpin
And seven winter coats last August)
Prays under her breath that she may save
The art students in West Berlin. (CW, 55)
In this poem, the poetess is also describing an ocean voyage.

The poem “Surgeon at 2 a.m.” reveals a fascination with various

aspects of surgery and disease. It gives expression to the tired surgeon’s
perceptions of the surreal beauty of the human body he operates. At times,
it reminds him of his own insignificance. However, the poem expresses tire
 90

self of Sylvia Plath in the sense that at the cost of her own insignificance in
male world. She expresses her reaction to the situation in which she
identifies herself with a nurse.

The wilderness of the body and the sense of ones significance and
reverence is balanced by the acceptance of the patients utter reliance on the
surgeon. The surgeon accepts the responsibility and he is the source of
hope for the patients in the following manner:
1 am the sun, in my white coat,
Grey faces, shuttered by drugs, follow
me like flowers. (CW, 49)
In the poem “Small Hours”, Sylvia Plath expresses the contrast
between expectation and actuality. It is one of the prominent and dominant
themes of The Colossus. Her persona accepts herself as an empty museum,
yearning for the magnificence of statues and fountains which play
constantly. She is faced with the world of sterility in which her dreams of
greatness give way to the reality that surrounds her. She is unable to find
any possibility of communication in this world. To her, this world is
symbolised by the lilies of death, watched over by the blankness of the
moon:
Empty, I echo to the least football,
Museum without statues, grand with pillars, porticoes,
rotundas.
In my courtyard a fountain leaps and sinks
back into itselfj...
The moon lays a hand on my forehead
Blank-faced and mum as a nurse. (CW, 46)
Taking into account the imagery of this poem it can be said that it is
clearly associated with her both earlier and later work. The references to
Apollo and Nike are a reminder of the classical figures of the earlier work
and the pillars. These statues are the remainders of The Colossus. In her
poetry we often come across neutral and sinister importance of the moon.
The same expression finds in “The Moon and the Yew Tree”. Now she is
 91

not concerned with the relationship between the individual and his
surrounding, but she depicts a subjective inner world.

“Pheasant” allows her to rejoice the pleasure which the Pheasant's

beauty brings into her world. Here she is happy to see the bird as it is.
Sylvia Plath appreciates such a unique reality. In this poem she expresses
the destructive power of the male world, but finally she appeals to her
husband not to kill the bird, as reflected in the line. She knows that she is
helpless before the power of the male world to destroy.

Sylvia Plath appreciates its solid but rare reality. It virtually

remains itself and in doing so extends her own precariously maintained
sense of self:
I am not mystical. It isn’t
As if I thought it had a spirit.
It is simply in its element. (CW, 13)
The poem “Widow” records the feelings of rejection, loss and deep
loneliness. They are the reflections of her own feelings at that time about
her failure in marriage. The problems with father, sex, love, despair
and frustration melt away with die poet’s energy. The poem begins with
these words:
Widow. The word consumes itself
Body, a sheet of newsprint on the fire
Levitating a numb minute in the updraft
Over the scalding, red topography
That will put her heart out like an only eye...
That opens at the top onto nothing at all. (C W, 38)
The third and the other stanzas intensely build in as the mood
gradually shifts from numbness to animosity. Here the poet confuses with
the exchange of husband with father.
»

second time, to have him near again and this intensity and depth
reaches its climax in the following lines:
 92

Widow: that great vacant estate!

The voice of God is full of draughtiness,
Promising simply the hard stars, the space
Of immortal blankness between stars. (C W, 3 8)
In the poem “Face Lift”, the woman’s face-lift operation seems very
much like suicide. This recurrent theme of suicide is carried as meaningful
reincarnation image in the Ariel. The poet uses satire to describe the
woman’s face lift-operation.

The saint sinner conflict is first expressed in The Colossus. Later it

is carried forward in the poems “Spinster”, “Strumpet Song” and “In
Plaster”. In “Strumpet Song” the poet identifies herself with the prostitute.
Sylvia Plath satirises this conflict in the poem “In Plaster". This conflict is
used to express the schizophrenia of the poets self. In the poem, "In
Plaster" the relationship between body and cast is described as a kind of
marriage. The metaphor is highly successful,. The poem working at both
the literal and the metaphorical levels. Thus the body and cast have an
interdependency, the cast playing a supporting role like 'the best of nurses'.
When the body begins to heal, however, and has visions of sucking the
cast, he discovers that 'living with her was like living with my own coffin'.
Marriage, like a cast or prosthesis, fills a need, according to Plath.
Certainly the relationship is about a prospective spouse, a groom. Being
wifeless, he is missing something, some primary possession. His hand is
empty. The poem also reveals that the bride will fit the groom like a
tuxedo for his wedding or a coffin for his funeral. Wedding or funeral, one
is the same as the other. The bride will obey. Whatever the man lacks, she
will supply. She will support him the way the cast supports the body. This
woman is a domestic blob.

“Magi”, the conflict is expressed in concrete terms. It sounds an

amorphous voice only. Here, Sylvia Plath seems conscious of herself.
Hence the characters and situations in the poem are abstract. The poem
 93.

"Magi" deals with maternal concern for the welfare of the child Magi. In
the poem, Plath wishes to protect her child from abstractions that are
completely cut off from the realities of life. The poem begins with a
definition of life's abstractions. 'The abstracts hover like dull angels'.
These 'dull angels' are none other than the abstractions of philosophical
concepts of Good, True, Evil and Love and they hover over the crib of the
baby like the wise men of the East They are dull or vague and uninspiring
because they bear no resemblance to anything tangible. In this poem, Plath
is not interested in a life of intellect for her daughter. The simple joys of
life would be far better for the growing infant. She dismisses the Magi
with the query, ’what girl ever flourished in such company?' The Magi
would do well to leave the girl alone. It is a negation of her own cerebral
world in favour of the uncomplicated world of the infant. This very
attitude is at the heart of the declaration made by the First Voice in "Three
Women" about her new-born son.

The concern of this mother in "Three Women" and that of "Magi"

reads like W. B. Yeats' "Prayer to my Daughter". The same principle of
abstractness is applicable to “A Life”. In it, characters fail to become the
real beings. Here both the speaker and the listener are present. Someone is
giving orders to the other but the other is not certain:
Touch it: it won’t shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here’s yesterday, last year...
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir.
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer. (CW,90)
In this poem there is a hidden satire of the abstract characters and
situations. In the poem ‘Magi” the poet uses Christian mythology to
express herself. But there is also an undercurrent of satire in this poem, as
the characters and the situations seem abstract.
 94

In “Event” quiet, restrained melancholy can be seen. It becomes the

egression of loneliness of the isolated self. This poem expresses Sylvia
Plath's separation from her husband Ted Hughes, and her feeling of
loneliness. The poetess also describes even the heaven that the young
lovers constituted in their mutual love now stands shattered. With "Event"
we are firmly in the world of Ariel, where there are a number of poems,
"Burning the Letters", "For a Fatherless Son", "The Courage of Shutting
Up", "Lesbos" dealing with loss of love, the breakdown of marriage and
the agony of separation. The poem ‘Leaving Early” was composed in
1961. Here the force and appropriateness of comparisons are particularly
effective, “Velvet pillows the colour of blood pudding”. (CW, 33) It is a
poem where,the things get pressing reality. In the poem, the Lady has
filled her room with vases of cut flowers.

Sylvia Plath’s melancholic awareness sees the flowers alive and

pressing on her. The end of die poem resolves itself into a more muted
melancholy. The recurrent stone image appears in “Poem for a Birthday”.
Here assertive strength of flowers is opposed to the cold withdrawal of the
human beings:
This mizzle fits me like a sad jacket.
How did we make it up to your attic?
You handed me gin in a glass bud vase.
We slept like stones. Lady, what am I doing
With a lung full of dust and a tongue of wood,
Knee-deep in the cold and swamped by flowers? (CW, 34)
In this poem the enigmatic piece in two stanzas of twenty two lines
each, certainly a rarity for Plath. The language of opening lines is
colloquial and the tone derisive. The mockery of the opening line, 'Lady,
your room is lousy with flowers' is startingly abrupt and reminiscent of the
vituperative outbursts of Donne in some of his love poems. The word
'lousy' undercuts the sense of politeness, refinement and good taste
associated with Lady' with 'flowers'.
 95

In “Stillborn” the poet herself expresses her dissatisfaction with her

work. Her assessment regarding these poems is harsh, ‘these poems do not
live’, sad diagnosis is described in “Stillborn”. It rather becomes an
expression of herself. In the poem 'Stillborn", Plath is seen mothering her
poems with utmost care only to deliver them stillborn. The poem creates an
atmosphere of a medical laboratory where foetuses are kept in jars for
i

clinical study. In 'Stillborn" foetus- like poems in various stages of

formation or development are examined and commented upon by Plath, the
doctor-mother. After a close analysis she declares them dead.

Sylvia seems to have selected a small group of images in the early

work. She thought that she would use them later. In Crossing the Water
she frequently uses these images in various combinations. The mirror is an
image which belongs to this particular group of death figures. She uses this
in association with the white colour in the poem, “Last Words”:
My mirror is clouding over -
A few more breaths, and it will reflect nothing at all.
The flowers and the faces whiten to a sheet
I do not trust the spirit It escapes like steam.
In dreams, through mouth-hole or eye-hole. I can’t stop it
One day it won’t come back. (CW, 63)
Li the poem “Last Words” she expresses the idea that she herself is a
woman to whom the world of domestic objects matter much because she
herself is a woman. In this poem she describes the coffin and burial which
she would like to have. The poem “Mirror” deals with the same thought
The “Mirror” is the symbol of the life that is approaching an aid. But
people feel that death is a ceremony which should be attended by bravery
and beauty as well. She emphasizes the importance of that coffin and
writes thus:
I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus
With tigery stripes, and a face on it
Round as the moon, to stare up. (CW, 63)
 96

To Sylvia Plath, the world of emotions and spirit threaten her. For
her it is illusive and confusing. For her the possessions and objects have a
comforting solidity. For the same reason, the stale objects for whom her
emotions are ceased continue to give her the power ofpoetry.

In the poem “Mirror”, Plath expresses an elaborate exploration of

the special connotations of this image. These connotations can be well
understood in terms of relation with death and drowning figures as
moonlight, candle light, silver and water etc :
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful - (CW, 52)

Moon imagery plays a significant role in Crossing the Water. One

of the problems that worried Plath was that of rearing children in a hostile
world. This appears to be the main theme of Plath in "Candles". The poem,
under the guise of describing the flame and the way in which the wax
drips, reflects on her family and its members, chief among them being her
new-born daughter. Striking a literary note she remarks in the opening line
of the poem, 'they are the last romantics, these candles'. The description of
the flame being over, the narrator accuses the light of the candle of
deliberately ignoring. "Candles" displays remarkable flexibility of rhyme,
sound and rhythm, consciously manipulated in the early poems, now
emerge more naturally and spontaneously. In the poem “Candles” the
moon is described as 'bald'. It is a description which 1ms also been
employed in “The Moon and the Yew Tree”. This word 'bald' is not
associated with age, but it carries the sense of bare and plain in Sylvia
Plath’s poems. Sylvia Plath achieves a terrifying mixing of blackness,
ugliness and here the word *bald' is central to this image. Her baldness is
also connected with blindness. This blindness is both physical- as is in
“The Colossus” and spiritual in “Love Letter”:
 97

You didn’t just toe me an inch, no -

Nor leave me to set my small bald eye
Skyward again, without hope, of course,
Of apprehending blueness, or stars. (CW, 44)
In the same poem she rises from insignificance to God which
expresses the following way:
Floating through the air in my soul-shift
Pure as a pane of ice. It’s a gift. (CW, 45)

The woman in "Love Letter" experiences joy as a result of spiritual

attainment. "Love Letter” an ambiguous poem, opens with a declaration of
appraisal, TSTot easy to state the change you made'. The change that has
come about her as a result of her partner's departure is not easy to define.
Precisely, though it 1ms had a radical impact on her she has been
transformed from death to life. If'I am alive, now, then I was dead.' Her
present state, the 'now' of the poem, is glorious and this is evident from her
declaration in the last stanza. The rest of the poem is devoted to describe
her former state 'than' of the poem, when she was dead or rather lived like
a stone.

We find that meaningful relationships are established between

candles and ‘bald-moon’. The candles ‘mollify’ the moon. In the poem
“Mirror”, the moon and the candles are grouped together as liars in contrast
to the truthfiilness of the mirror.

In her later poetry she has described the moon as deceased. The
poem “Heavy Women” attributes too much symbolic importance to the
moon. She writes in the following lines :
Over each weighty stomach a face,
Floats calm as a moon or a cloud. (CW, 37)
Here it establishes a strange relationship between the moon and
fertility. Its importance is usually as a force of infertility opposed to the
 98

human fertility of the woman who conceives and gives birth. The same we
find in her poem “Three Women”.

The poem “Blackberrying” belongs to the landscape tradition of

such earlier poems as “Point Shirley” and “Water Color of Granchester
Meadows”. In this poem, Sylvia Plath makes nature to sanction human
significance. It begins with a description of a road leading down to the
ocean. The road is also bordered by heavily laden black-berry thorns. But
all the details of this description are infused by a sense of urgency. Here
everything is bigger and larger than life. It includes ‘the huge berries, the
birds, the stillness of the afternoon’. The regular hooks of the black-berry
bushes are disturbing to a lady who picks them up. The ocean in the
“Blackberrying” is ‘the only thing to come to’ and yet when the lane ends
she finds herself opposed to the open sea. She accepts it and takes it only
as a further attack on her sense of identity:
Nobody in the lane and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving ...
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisteihood; they must
love me. (CW,24)
However, the poems of tins transitional period are relatively
subdued, compared with those in Winter Trees and Ariel. These poems are
subdued showing their transitional aspect and necessity. Her technique is
in the process of developing from an experimental to a natural mode. It is
in this transitional work that the change in oral quality occurs in the
individual poems of this period.

As a transitional and experimental volume Crossing the Water is

extremely valuable. It serves as a bridge between the early poems
published in The Colossus and the later poems published in Ariel. Truly
speaking, Sylvia Plath's extreme self-consciousness is perhaps a notable
 99

improvement in view of the precision and accuracy of her Ariel poems.

Moreover, it is responsible for the quality of certain poems in Crossing the
Water. Yet, here in these poems, Sylvia Plath comes to know herself. It is,
perhaps, because her attitudes are expressed, rather than explained in her
later works. In the poems of the Winter Trees and Ariel there is little search
for meaning and no self pity at all. As regards the motivation in the poems
of Sylvia Plath, it is purely in need of expression. As a matter of fact she
herself announces in the Ariel poems that:
The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it. (A, 82)

According to Robert Boyers, Crossing the Water, "is superior to

Ariel largely because Plath’s hunger to use her perception and transform
the objects of her poems into something they are not is resisted, and the
objects retain their identities. Plath’s only failures are, those poems in
which the hand of Roethke or Stevens is unmistakably heavy on the page.”
Robot Boyers (1973 : 96-104)

In short, “Crossing the Water ” indicates the trends expressed in her

poems during the period between 1959 and 1962. She faced health
problems. Her marriage was on the verge of breaking. It indicates the
descriptions of different events in her life. These events are related to her
life. Here Sylvia Plath exploited structural and verbal freedom. No doubt
there is also a considerable change in the rhymes and rhythms and
expression. The collection indicates abstractness. The natural diction and
sound effects are noteworthy. A state of regression with self-enclosure and
association of death with flowers and trees is highlighted. The personal
isolation and the landscape of the west are also highlighted in the poem
like “Wuthering Heights”. Her inner loss of self is noticeable, as she has
been rejected by the landscape and people. Further she has also exploited
the images of the hospital, illness and sufferings. Her feelings about
 100

America and the identification with the grass are remarkable. She
comments on classical figures like Appolo and Nike. Hie feeling of
rejection, loss, deep loneliness, melancholic mood, are regarded as themes
in this collection. The “Mirror” is not only a mirror but a symbol of life.
The poems of the transitional period are subdued. Her technique is in the
process of developing from die experimental mode to the natural mode.
Crossing the Water thus builds a bridge between The Colossus and Ariel.
The images like mirror, flower, trees, flying seabirds, wind, hospital,
illness, suffering, window moon, candles etc. convey meaning effectively.
These images enrich the message.

There are a number of poems, which Sylvia Plath composed

between 1960 and early 1962, which may be termed as transitional. Poems
in this collection neither reveal the honesty and skill of the early poems,
nor the power and pressure of die lata: poems in Ariel. This distinction
between transitional and later poetry has been made on the basis not only
of dates of composition but also of style and approach. The transitional
evaluation of Crossing the Water is, in fact, aptly entitied. Because the
poems of this period do indeed evince a kind of stepping stone quality.
They do have a sense of floundering, of being neither on one shore nor on
the other. Both in form and substance these poems are interesting because
they represent an important stage in Sylvia Plath’s poetic development

Sylvia Plath, after experimentation in long stanzas, generally

returns in her later works to shorter, more economical and more flexible
stanza forms. The tread is towards a simpler, more direct and emphatic
verse. She is changing it from written to spoken one. She herself made it
clear that while designing her poems to be effective, when she read aloud.

Here in these poems the speaker assumes an identifiable voice, a

veiy much individual identity so that they themselves present a clear
dramatic situation. In The Colossus it is the voice of a woman agonizingly
 101

facing the sirens’ temptation. It may be the voice of a daughter trying to

come to terms with a specific father relationship. It is, rather a voice of a
spinster shakily committed to self-denial. In Ariel poems also the same
dramatic concreteness prevails. But in Crossing the Water there is very
little dramatic concreteness and one hears mainly an amorphous voice. In
these poems, Sylvia Plath seems keenly conscious of herself so that the
characters and situations of her poems remain more or less abstract
and ambiguous.

Crossing the Water constantly confronts the known and the normal
with the unknown and the terrible. Her own assessment of some of these
poems is rather harsh. To her these poems do not live; it can be said as
diagnosis. Yet the poems of this period are relatively subdued compared
with those in Winter Trees and Ariel. In these poems her technique is in
the process of becoming or developing from an experimental to a masterly
skilled and spontaneous mode. Sylvia Plath’s extreme self-consciousness
serves, perhaps, a necessary qualifications for the precision of her later
work. In this work. Sylvia Plath comes to know herself, so much that her
attitudes can be expressed, rather than explained, in her later work. And as
an experimental and transitional volume Crossing the Water is very
valuable because it serves as a bridge between the early poems in The
Colossus and the later expressions in Ariel poems.
2.5 WINTER TREES

Almost all the poems in this collection were written in the last
nine months of Sylvia Plath’s life. The period between 1962-1963 was
the period of great personal upheavals in her life. She gave birth to her
son, Nicholas in January 1962. Her husband Ted Hughes deserted her
in the summer of 1962. Sylvia Plath lived alone with her two children,
in her home at Devon. She moved to London in the month of December
in search of a new life. During this period her health failed due to flu,
cold, high fever and the bad weather. Yet she continued with her
creative writing. Sylvia Plath composed poems regularly in the early
morning hours of the day.

The poems in Winter Trees published posthumously in 1971, are

divided into two sections. The first contains eighteen short poems and
the second contains a long dramatic poem entitled “Three Women, A
Poem for Three Voices”. It was especially composed for the BBC and
it was pre-recorded by the BBC on August 2, 1962, for broadcasting
schedule on September 13, 1962. As the poem “Three Women, A
Poem for Three Voices” was written earlier than the poems from the
first section, it is appropriate to analyse this poem first. The poem can
be considered as a bridge between The Colossus and Ariel. Sylvia Plath
composed her poems for reading aloud.

Sylvia Plath has chosen the matter for the poems from the events
and incidents of her own life. The long poem “Three Women, A poem
for Three voices” is an example of her ability to write about different
situations. These situations have only superfluous relevance to the
events of her life. The ‘Wife’ reflects her experience of pregnancy and
motherhood in this poem. Memories of her two years stay at
Cambridge are expressed through the experience of the Girl in the
poem. Her own miscarriage gave her an insight into the secretary’s
 103

situation. The poem is highly autobiographical. Technically the poem

resembles with the poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”. The poem
reveals the poet’s persona. The poem has some dominant themes. In
one situation it has three different aspects and attitudes. The mask of
the persona has disguised the self of the poet in the poem. The internal
conflicts are externalised in dramatic terms. The poem serves as a
mode to understand Sylvia Plath’s technique of using autobiographical
note as a structural device.

In this poem, Sylvia Plath depicts the experiences of three

pregnant women. In the choice of labels she is deliberate. The three
different experiences depicted here are typical. The characters are
developed out of their reactions to their circumstances. In all the three
cases the external events and incidents are resolved. The wife moves
from pregnancy to motherhood, through labour. The girl in the poem
renounces the illegitimate daughter. The secretary’s miscarriage ends
into a retreat to die routine of daily living as a compensation for the
loss of maternal fulfilment. The wife’s experience is important when
compared to the experience of the girl in the poem. The secretary’s
experience is implicitly compared and contrasted with the other two
experiences. The poem is dramatic in juxtaposing the three women,
containing internal and subjective monologues. There is no direct
dialogue between these characters. Each experience functions
independently.

In this poem the poetess expresses herself in three different

situations. She deals in detail with the experiences of the wife. In her
introspective state of mind pregnancy hovers over those experiences.
She introduces a vision of herself as a self-contented and calm woman.
It begins with thus :
 104

I am slow as the world -1 am very patient,

Turning through my time, the suns and stars
Regarding me with attention.
The moon’s concern is more personal. (WT, 40)
For the wife, the state of being pregnant is a welcome relief. It.
is relief from the necessity of disciplining her actions from own fear
and thought.

The wife concentrates on the birth of the child and rejects all
other considerations as irrelevant and unimportant. By doing so she
retreats into herself. Here, the pregnancy develops into isolation.
During the labour of maternity the wife endures and experiences
something very close to the physical death. It is a proof of her identity
in the following lines :
I am dragged by the horses, the iron hooves.
I last -1 last it out. I accomplish a work.
Dark tunnel, through which hurtle the visitations...
What pains, what sorrows must I be mothering?
Can such innocence kill and kill? It milks my life. (WT, 44)

Here the mother acknowledges miraculous metamorphosis brought

by the birth of the child. She questions the value of her past life. The birth
of the child arouses the feelings of tenderness and protectiveness. She
wishes that the child would be some solace to her. She regains her
complete self-confidence by microcosmic experience of pregnancy. The
theme of the alienated individual who is isolated in a hostile universe runs
through much of Sylvia Plath’s works. The presence of the child does not
fail to eradicate the prevailing despair and menace of the mother’s world.
The mother cannot protect the child due to her own fears and inadequacies.

The Mother makes a conscious effort to relinquish fears. She

dips herself in the existence of the child. The sense of isolation is
eventually replaced by reassurance. The reference to the deformed
 105

children provide a grotesque and horrible parody in contrast to the

perfection of her son occurs in the following lines :
I do not believe in those terrible children
Who injure my sleep with their white eyes, their fingerless hands
They are not mine. They do not belong to me. (WT, 51)

Here it reminds the thalidomide tragedy of the early sixties. The

imagery of thalidomide is very much similar and suggests that Sylvia Plath
was really disturbed by the reports of the deformity. It reflects one of her
recurrent fears.

The experience of the Secretary in the hospital is a loss of

identity. Her miscarriage is an indication of her physical and spiritual
failure. Her infertility is linked to her inability to live naturally. This
miscarriage is an evidence of the predatory savagery of the earth. It
exacts frequent sacrifices. It will ‘eat them in the end’ as their bodies
return to the ground after death. The peripheral area of daily living
becomes an escape from the constant cycle of infertility and pain.
Failure will result only by a rejection of the whole struggle.

Departure from the hospital is accompanied by the painful

assumption of identity. Separation from external normality symbolises
it. She puts on a face to meet this world. She assures herself about the
possibility of success next time. Her physical neatness is a misleading
mask. Under the misleading mask bitterness still triumphs. The
bitterness becomes the malice of the life. Eventually there is a sad
acceptance of her position. The desire of the Secretary that life should
be consequential is ironically matched with the Girl’s revulsion from
the consequential progression of living. Her pregnancy is taken as a
hateful result.

The Girl’s desperate wish is to undo the consequence of her act.

Hence she continues with her pregnancy. She is unable to break from
 106

the consequential progression of events. ‘I should have murdered this,

that murders me’. She deliberately chooses to relinquish the child.
She tries to deny the consequence. It causes considerable pain to
herself thus :
... There is an emptiness.
I am so vulnerable suddenly.
I am a wound walking out of hospital.
I am a wound that they are letting go...
fingers like bandages : I go. (WT, 49)
The girl returns to her University life, with a sense of loss. She also
finds it reflected in her natural surroundings.

Lois Ames in The Art of Sylvia Plath has mentioned, “Sylvia

Plath has a religious background”. Charles Newman (1971:159) But
her literary works are not religious in any conventional sense. “Three
Women, A Poem for Three Voices” has however, a few references to
Christianity. The Secretary’s opening speech has the first reference.
She feels women’s body to be the reason for spiritual and physical
destruction. It is indicated by ‘the cold angels, the abstractions’. At
another stage she refers to ‘the cold angel’ suggesting the angel of
death thus :
Am I a pulse
That wanes and wanes, facing the cold angel?
Is this my lover then? This death, this death? (WT, 41)

The poem "Magi” has a similar reference. A mother addresses her

infant child who is unaware of and therefore shielded from the forces of the
Good and the Evil around her bed. The child needs and demands from the
horizons of her world. They are real for mother is described in the
following way:
For her, the heavy notion of Evil
Attending her cot is less than a belly ache
and love the mother of milk, no theory. (CW, 40)
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In the poem “Three Women, A Poem for Three Voices”, the Girl
witnesses the swans in the river. They represent naturally, the events which
are bearing down on her. Her reaction contains some reference to the
temptations of Eve caused by the Serpent and the whole question of the
original sin. It also refers to the rape of Leda. She feels burdened by the
consequences of her acts.

In this poem the Secretary considers that her miscarried children

are being in a state of holiness in death. And it is this idea that hovers
over her in later work. But, here, she extends the reference to Christian
terms specifically. The poem associates the flatness of infertility to
that of the male body. She identifies the prime example in God. God
assumed the human body through Christ. The Secretary feels that her
infertility is a part of Divine scheme.

The labour is a ‘miracle’ for the wife. She calls herself Mary
while she waits for her the labour to begin. It is a direct reference to
Christianity, inescapable Biblical connotations are referred to the
Secretary’s personal experience of loss, suggests another part of the
Christian story. Here the metaphor of drinking echoes of Christ’s
prayer ‘take away this cup’ is described in the following lines :
I am accused. I dream of massacres.
I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them,
Hating myself, hating and fearing. (WT, 45)

There are references, the traditional Christian conception of

innocence and chastity of the infant are obvious. The mother and the
child are in a state of grace. The mother muses on her new bom baby.
The birth is a miracle. The child brings potential hope into the world.
In the poem, a clear reference to Christianity is made in the Wife’s
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wishes for the infant’s future. There is an allusion to Mary and the
infant reminding Jesus Christ is described in the following lines :

I have painted little hearts on everything

I do not will him to be exceptional.
It is the exception that interests the devil.
It is the exception that climbs the sorrowful hill
Or sits in the desert and hurts his mother’s heart. (WT,51)

In this poem, the hill refers to the hill of Calvary. The desert
reminds Christ’s temptation in the wilderness. Here, Christian
references are used for their symbolic values. For the Wife, Christ’s
sacrifice is the symbol of suffering. They predominantly present a
Christian view of life to which the experiences of the characters are
subordinated. The poem establishes a basic opposition between the
forces of fertility and infertility. The contrast forms the structural
basis of most of her poems. The poem compares and contrasts light
and dark, life and death and good and evil. These have been constantly
the focus of her imagination. The images, like trees, flowers and grass
which are associated with fertility, occur in the lines spoken by the
wife. The wife accepts the views of the Secretary, the fertility and the
Girl’s renunciation of her fertility.
The poem “Three Women, A Poem for Three Voices” begins
with the utterance of the Wife. She finishes her first utterance with
this statement, ‘leaves and petals attend me’. The very reference is
elaborated when Wife's sense of momentousness before labour is
concerned. The image used herein is almost the similar thus :
I am calm. I am calm. It is the calm before something awful:
The yellow minute before the wind walks, when the leaves
Turn up their hands, their pallors. It is so quiet here. (WT, 43)
The wife compares her pregnant body to a swollen seed which is to
bloom into a flower. She recalls the process of flowering which involves
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decay and death ‘the tree wither in the street’. The rain is corrosive.
Imagery of nature brings out softness of the new bom child thus :
His lids are like the lilac-flower
And soft as a moth, his breath. (WT, 46)
The relationship between the infant and the mother is that of a plant
and the sun. The child turns to the mother like a little, blind, bright plant.
The use of flower here makes the plant imagery effective. The description
of ‘the placenta as red lotus opens in the bowl of blood’ stands as a
testimony to Sylvia Plath’s creative poetic skill.

The imagery of the plant world suggests fertility. Infertility is

related to a world of torture and pain. The Secretary’s miscarriage
symbolises evil and malice of the world. The world is typically male
world. Man has employed his intellect to devise the different means of
torture, pain, and death.

The sense, that one should not think too much about pregnancy,
runs through the poem. Sylvia Plath identifies ideas about child-birth
with destructions. The wife rejoices her pregnancy. The Secretary
claims that she has ‘tried not think too hard’. The Girl thinks it is a
meaningless dream. The poem establishes a sharp contrast between the
natural world and the man-made world. The natural world evolves
around the cycle of life and death, whereas the man-made world
attempts to control the natural world through human means. The poet
uses the images of the plant group to depict pain, decay and withering.
At her miscarriage she means, ‘I saw a death in the base trees’. At the
height of her agony and pain she cries out, ‘I am a garden of black and
red agonies’. While leaving the hospital, she thinks bitterly about her
infertility. She finds it reflected in ‘the bare winter twigs’, and reflect
the Secretary’s infertility. But as she recovers from her physical and
mental illness, she begins to hope again as the spring grass forces its
 110

way through the barren stones of the city reflected in the following
lines:
The city waits and aches - The little grasses
Crack through stone, and they are green with life.(WT,52)

The Girl’s utterances employ the images of grass, flower and the
tree. The lines arc devoted to the girl to refer the ideas of loneliness and
vulnerability. The hostility of her surroundings sharpens her perception of
pregnancy as revealed in the line, ‘the willows were chilling’. But soon
after the birth of the child, the flowers in her room become a symbol of
vulnerability. They make a dual reference to her own emotional state and
the child’s physical state.

After the Girl’s return to the University, she is surrounded by

the beauty and warmth of a hot summer. But loneliness haunts her, ‘I
am solitary as grass.'

The Girl stands as a contrast to the fertility suggested by the

wife and the Secretary. She accepts fertility unwillingly. She
experiences the maternal tenderness of the Wife and the pain and grief
of the Secretary. As the Girl waits for labour, the Secretary’s reference
to white chamber reoccurs in the following ways :
I have seen the white clean chamber with its instruments.
It is a place of shrieks. It is not happy. (WT, 44)

Sylvia Plath suggests that the Girl’s eventual unhappiness starts

from her refusal to accept her fertility. Hospitals, pain and illness are
common in her work. They serve as a constant motif in Sylvia Plath’s
work. In her novel The Bell Jar she compares the labour table to a
torture table. This becomes a larger imagistic motif of the novel.
Sylvia Plath has started that her’s is an art in which image and symbol
are often related to preoccupations beyond the specific area of
the poem.
 Ill

Thus “Three Women, A Poem for Three Voices” suggests that

the fertility of women is opposed to the flatness of man. The flatness
becomes the source of ideas, destructions, bulldozers, guillotines,
‘white chambers of the shrieks proceed’. The opposition is established
through imagery. Pregnancy symbolises mental, physical and spiritual
creativity. It has been depicted in a progression of images drawn from
the plant world. The infertility represents spiritual aridity.

In “Three Women, A Poem for Three Voices” private and

public are fused together. The private is dramatised in this poem. In
other words, here the dramatic situation dominates the personal
concerns.

Another section of Winter Trees consists of eighteen short

poems. “The Rabbit Catcher”, “Lyonnesse”, “Gigolo”, “Winter Trees”,
“Brasilia”, “Childless woman”, “Purdah”, “The Courage of Shutting-
Up”, “The Other”, “Stopped Dead”, “Mystic”, “By Candlelight”,
“Thalidomide” and “For A Fatherless son” were composed during the
last nine months of her life; and are thus contemporaries to the Ariel
poems. Four of the poems in this collection, namely, “Lyonnesse”,
“Purdah”, “The Rabbit Catcher”, and “Stopped Dead” had been
composed by the end of October 1962. These four poems were among
the poems which she read for the recording of the British Broadcasting
Council. A revised version of “Stopped Dead” was published in
London Magazine in January 1963.

The world of these and the later poems is rather the world of
nightmare. The aspects of the early poems are assimilated into the later
poems, novel, short stories, letters and journals by transforming them
for adaption.

The most striking aspect of Winter Trees is the recurrence of

certain subjects and images. Some of the poems are personal and
 112

domestic while die others are with a certain dramatic focus. The
poems with dramatic focus reveal the private world of the poet. Her
poems can be labelled as ‘domestic’ or ‘personal’. In Winter Trees
Mary, Christ and God are referred to frequently. Sylvia Plath’s
Christianity is one of the dramatic elements of her poems. The poem
"Mary’s Song" deals with the lamentation of violence and randomness
rather than celebration of Christ’s birth. It begins domestically, calmly
with a Sunday joint cooking in the oven. It takes into the world of the
religious persecution and sacrifice.

In the poem, “Mary’s Song” the first line of the poem takes into
a world of religious persecution and sacrifice. In the poem, for Mary
the suffering is personal for the repeated holocaust of history is
contained in her heart as she contemplates the baby whose sacrifice
will not prevent suffering. The poem is disciplined and economical.
The mood of the poem is less hysterical. The smoke clouds of the
ovens hanging over Poland and Germany have the melancholy beauty
of utter desolation:
Their thick palls float
Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out
Germany.
They do not die.
Grey birds obsess my heart,
Mouth-ash, ash of eye. (WT, 39)
The study of the poem “Mary’s Song” reveals specifically how the
linking of images works. Mary of this poem symbolises Christ’s mother
and the poetess herself. The general concept of sacrifice controls specific
images thus:

The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.

The fat
Sacrifices its opacity...
A window, holy gold...
Melting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the Jews. (WT, 39)
 113

The ‘Sunday lamb’ cooked for dinner is the sacrifical lamb which
signifies Christ As this lamb gets cooked, the fat on the outside of it
‘sacrifices its opacity5. The lamb turns crispy golden and becomes
precious. The same fire which kills and cooks the lamb, melts its fat. It
makes him precious through sacrifice. It kills the Jews. The smoke and
ashes of the sacrifice float over Poland and Germany, the home of
victimizes. It suggests resurrection of Christ. The ash of sacrificial fire
settles on Mary. It reminds of the crucifixion and the Nazi’s ovens.
Sylvia Plath’s world is filled with ‘holocaust’ and ‘ash grey5. In the last
line of the poem, the process of eating suggests the sacrament of
communication. The presentation of juxtaposing of images in “Mary’s
Song” creates a new kind of reality. The motif of the Jew as Nazi victim
comes from Sylvia Plath’s treasure of symbols. She uses these images
frequently to depict her condition and herself.

The poem “Lesbos” gives an account of a fusion of external and

internal landscapes. It is weird and updated metaphysical conceit in its
particular manifestations. Sometimes this landscape seems like a death
trap. The elements of the seascape are both subjective and objective.
The common household things and objects become distorted, under the
surrealistic gaze of the poet. Plath's poems with domestic settings are
usually her most ominous ones. There is 'viciousness in the kitchen' as
she says in the first line of this poem in the following way :
Viciousness in the kitchen!
The potatoes hiss.
It is all Hollywood, windowless...
Stage curtains, a window’s frizz. (WT, 34)
The poem is the fusion of love and hate. Death works as a
catalyst. The opposites love and hate merge in death. Sylvia Plath
achieves excellence through her controlled and organic manipulation of
imagery. Here internal and external realities blend together and become
 114

indistinguishable. A. R. Jones rightly remarks that, “the relationship

between the inner and the outer worlds is fractured, the outer world
holding up a mirror in which the inner world can see its distorted self.”
A.R. Jones (1965 : 22)

Her another poem “The Rabbit Catcher” presents the dilemmas

of her visions and tensions. The opposites are stated with growing and
painful precision. The poem starts with an uncompromising note. The
winds wipe away her voice, the sea blinds her with its reflections but
she herself is the agent of this violence she writes :
It was a place of force-
The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair,
Tearing off my voice, and the sea
Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead
Unreeling in it, spreading like oil. (WT, 25)
And all extreme feelings are merged into one complex sensation
which is both painful and beautiful. Her vision of the gorse bushes
becomes a torture of the self in its intensity. It happens due to her raw and
immediate reactions to her surroundings. The poem points to the
subjugation and exploitation of women in a male dominated society and
thus lends itself to a feminist interpretation.

She identifies herself with the rabbit which was lured by the
intent concentration of the waiting rabbit catcher. ‘There was only one
place to get to’. The wild tensions of the wind, the sea and gorse force
her into a centre of suffering. The sense of unwilling but inevitable
progression towards a fixed doom recurs frequently in these poems.
The inner world is sharply defined. There is no escape from the inner
world. “The Moon and The Yew Tree” are filled with the feeling of
complete helplessness.

H<pr another poem, “Stopped Dead” expresses the tension as

being like, 'hung out over the dead drop':
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The wheels, two rubber grubs, bite their sweet tails.

Is that Spain down there?
Red and yellow, two passionate hot metals
Writhing and sighing, what sort of a scenery is it?...
There’s always a bloody baby in the air. (WT, 24)

The same treatment could be traced in “Mystic”, one of her finest

poems. The dilemma of “Mystic” is that of harmonizing ecstasy and
normality. The insights of the mystic bring out only pain. The enormous
vision of God leaves no possibility of human fulfilment see for instance the
following lines:
Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?
Once one has been seized up.
Without a part left over...
That lengthen from ancient cathedrals
What is the remedy? (WT, 26)
•j

In "Mystic", Sylvia Plath gives the impression of one who has

emerged from her dark night of terror by asking the question, "Once one
has seen God, what is the remedy?" What 1ms this mystic seen and what
truths have been realized by her? Reference to 'ancient cathedrals',
communion tablet, Christ and the walker upon the sea would suggest a
perception of insights connected with Christianity. Her life at this period is
characterised by doubts and half-truths, her inner landscape stands curved
like a question mark.

In this poem, the various reactions to normality are examined and

rejected. The severe pain strikes with its mute beauty.

Certain poems from this collection give an account of her

childhood tenderness and her children. These poems are “Child”, “By
Candlelight”, “For A Fatherless Son”. According to Sylvia Plath, the
child is innocent and unaware of pain. All these poems have the
expression of tenderness and protectiveness. The child combines
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feelings of loneliness and despair. Children represent the world of

happiness and heavenly peace. Their world is far removed from the
mother’s dark cruel world. She finds them untainted by her own
complexities of life. In the poem “Child” the poetess feels that the
natural clarity of the child is opposed to the dark loneliness of the
mother.

In “Child” the poetess expresses her feelings about the child in

the following way:
Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing
I want to fill it with colour and ducks. (WT, 12)

The imagery of disintegration and death used by the poet is present in

the following lines :
Should be grand and classical
Not this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star. (WT, 12)
She appreciates the child’s world because it is capable of
limitless expansion. The mother’s world is narrowed into a state of
self-enclosure.

Another Sylvia Plath’s poem. “By Candlelight” is an example of

her lyrical ability. It is a companion poem to “Nick And The
Candlestick" in Ariel and it includes certain lines from this poem. Her
lyrical power comes alive in her descriptions as in the opening lines.
This is winter, this is night, small love -
A sort of black horsehair,
A rough, dumb country stuff
Steeled with the sheen
Of what green stars can make it to our gate. (WT, 28)

These lines give picture of a mother and her child who are peeping
into a dark night It becomes a metaphor for the relationship between her
 117

perception of her own nightmarish world with shifting realities and sense
of child’s reality. As she lights the candle, it reveals the baby. She
honestly accepts with delighted wonder that ‘one match scratch makes you
real’. When the candle flame goes up, she realises that the symbol of light
has given way to a more powerful and implacable suffocation of the dark
night. The child is loved for the conscious demand, he makes on his
mother. Sylvia Plath, in these poems, feels inspired by her maternal
feelings. She reveals the cruel opposites of her world in their starkest
opposition. These poems cannot be called the black poems. The darkness
of her mother’s world is subordinated to the light of the child’s world. The
child cannot see her growing depression and melancholy.

Sterility is regarded as a disease in Sylvia Plath’s work. The

moon is a symbol of disease and infertility. In her another poem
“Thalidomide”, the deformed child has been affected by the diseased
sterility of the moon. It is conceived by life giving forces of love.
Here the moon is black and masked in whiteness. Whiteness does not
carry any references to purity and innocence, but indicates sterility,
disease, alienation and despair thus :
O half moon -
Half-brain, luminosity -
Negro, masked like a white,
Your dark
Amputations crawl and appal. (WT, 31)
Sylvia Plath’s another poem, “For A Fatherless Son” expresses
love and whimsical musing of a mother to her baby. The child’s 'clear
vowels rise like balloons’. Child is the precious little bundle of time.
And child's 'smiles are found money'. The poet thinks that this
fatherless son will grow :
You will be aware of an absence, presently,
Growing beside you, like a tree,
A death tree, colour gone, an Australian gum tree.(WT,33)
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The Strumpet Spinster conflict of the early transitional poems is

expressed in these late poems of Winter Tree. Only a few of her early
poems are personal. The later poems are centred in expressing her
personal experience. The world of inanimate objects play an
important role in these poems. In her poem “The Other” it is a part of
surrealist nightmare.

The poem “The Other” shows a growing isolation of the person

from Ted Hughes because of the other woman in his life. The
inanimate objects have a solid identity. The moon again symbolises
sterility in this poem. This poem really inaugurates the personal drama
in her poetry "The Other", written in July, 1962. It was about this time
that Ted Hughes was drawn towards the other lady, Assia Wevill. The
poem is difficult to understand as Plath makes use of imagery that is
private and unyielding. This was done to divest the poem to all direct
echoes to personal experience. Complete severance of ties between
Plath and Hughes had not taken place and hence the need to speak in as
indirect a manner as possible. The language of the poem is bitter,
belligerent and accusatory, clearly indicates that her mind was being
flapped by thoughts of betrayal. The tortured psyche supplies the
answers which are equally abrupt and short. The end-stopped lines
suggesting the freezing of thought under pressure, dominate the poem.
The sixteen two-lined stanzas give the poem a tight structure with just
that flexibility which occasionally permits the thought to flow on from
line to line.

The first three stanzas constitute a unit in which the "Other" or

the rival is openly confronted and accused of sexual impropriety. The
opening line is dramatic and abrupt : "You came in late, wiping your
lips." The "Other" is apparently caught in the act of destroying
evidence of a sexual escapade which becomes clear later on in the
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poem. The association between the "Other" and the man of the house,
apparently the speaker’s husband is downright physical and revolting.
However, the rival's presence in the house, her gross physicality and
the husband's adultery are the causes of much personal pain that hits
the speaker in her solar plexus. The affair between the husband and
the rival is characterized by in no uncertain terms.

In “Winter Trees” Sylvia Plath compares the trees to women.

She finds that the trees have a comforting stability. In that they ‘seed’
very easily, women lack this quality. The poem sketches Sylvia Plath5 s
agonies and complications of her real life thus :
Memories growing, ring on ring.
A series of weddings.
Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery,
Truer than women,
They seed so effortlessly. (WT, 11)
Sometimes, these later poems become a cry of sheer outrage. This is
expressed with a disciplined economy of “Mary’s Song” which deals with
the themes of randomness and violence of contemporary life. It has
biblical reference to Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. However, this cry
of sheer outrage is expressed with savage as in “Gigolo”.

My mouth sags,
The mouth of Christ
When my engine reaches the end of it...
And there is no end, no end of it. (WT, 14)
In this poem, the poetess describes paid male companion of wealthy
woman professional male dancing partner who may be hired by wealthy
woman. Thus to intensify the meaning word sounds are used. The word
sounds provide meaning and texture of language.

Another Sylvia Plath5 s poem “The Courage of Shutting-up”

deals with many of the recurring themes like hospitals, mirrors, politics
 120

etc. which frequently appear in her later poems. She feels that the
savage, unremitting violence of existence can be faced with true
courage in silence instead of protest. In this poem she very
systematically converts the disturbing elements of her external world
into a metaphor to illustrate her personal experience. The mind always
moves mechanically charting suffering. It encounters no relief or
beauty. It fights to disturb the calm of the closed lips. The tongue
destroys complacency by giving utterances to the brain's perceptions
but it also gets suppressed. Inner torture is reflected in the eyes.
Sometimes these eyes show black death. The boldness and courage lie
in living with knowledge of outrage and not seeking the relief
of utterance.

The poem has a very personal voice. Sylvia Plath uses dialogues
and speech in her poems. Ted Hughes has mentioned that Sylvia
Plath’s poetry has been written in “direct and even plain speech”.
Charles Newman (1970: 190) Easy fluency is achieved through the use
of exclamation marks, question marks and dashes. The simpler
statements and her voice directly addressing the reader also heightens
this very effect.

Sylvia Plath introduces phoenix as the symbol of rebirth. This

resurrected self may be pure and chaste virgin woman. “A Birthday
Present” and “Childless Woman” are the fine examples of this is given
below:
Myself the rose you achieve-
This body,
This ivory
Godly as a child’s shriek. (WT, 16)
In the poem “Childless Woman” the poet uses to convey the theme
of release. And the Wife in “Three Women” expresses a similar attitude.
She is like Mary about to give birth. She feels like herself being sacrificed.
 121

Later she fears for her boy’s body, swaddled in white hands. In the poem
“Brasilia” the baby is ‘a nail, driven, driven in’, ‘by you who eat, people
like light rays’. In the poem the child is a symbol of hope for the mother.
The child must suffer its existence and anticipate apocalyptic release.

This theme of oppression and release is invoked in another way

in the poem “Purdah”. The poet characterizes herself with raging for
release. The self tries for self destruction as a lioness :
I shall unloose- -
From the small jewelled
Doll he guards like a heart - .
The lioness,
The shriek in the bath,
The cloak of holes. (WT, 19)

The poems of this collection and of Ariel come from not an

externally imposed pattern but rather of the pattern demanded by the
poems' sense. In these poems, short lines, rhythms and the speaker’s
clipped tones effectively convey the emotions and ideas. In the poem
“Purdah” the poetess breaks the lines with tight restrictions thus :
I am his.
Even in his
Absence, I
Revolve in my
Sheath of impossibles,
Priceless and quiet
Among these parakeets, macaws! (WT, 18)

According to Jill Baumgaertner, "Winter Trees is a startling

creation of richly violent images and uncanny insights with black
humours and bitterness.” Jill Baumgaertner (1973 : 16-19)

Mark E. Leib, in his “Reviews of Winter Trees, says, “Plath is

as usual in full control of her craft as she handles familiar themes, the
encroachment of deaths, the search for escape for mental torment and
 122

pitiless cruelty of the world. Plath avoids the pit falls of much other
confessional poetry by refusing to be self-indulgent and by remaining
true to her commitment to art while dealing with merely human
subjects.” MarkE. Leib (1973 : 45-47)

And in these later poems she has achieved this very style. In her
last year, she disciplined her cry into a number of pregnant and
convincing poems in which all parts work perfectly together. Sylvia
Plath in these poems has succeeded in conveying her cries from the
heart. In Winter Trees both the poet and the poem ‘melt into a shreck’
which is at once utterly uncontrollable, but finally, controlled in the
poem. In the early poems the mind generally stays in the outer world,
analysing and commenting on it. In Winter Trees Sylvia Plath has
given an exposure of the inner icy world of pain and alienation. The
Colossus poems have mostly been ‘day time poems’. She has herself
made it clear that most of her later poems were composed in the very
early morning, a time of introversion and stillness.

Poems in this collection were written in the last nine months of

Plath’s life. This was the period of great upheavals. During this period her
health failed due to flue, cold, high fever and bad weather. She had chosen
the matter for these poems from the events and incidents of her own life.
The poem “Three Women, A Poem for Three Voices” shows her ability to
write about different situations. There is an autobiographical note in the
“Three Women”, “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus” that reveals the poet’s persona.
Through the wife in “Three Women” the poet introduces a vision of herself
as a self-contented and calm person. The theme of alienated individual
isolated in a hostile universe runs through much of Plath’s works. Sylvia
Plath has a religious background. But her literary works are not religious
in any conventional sense. Many times biblical references are used for
their symbolic value. Sylvia Plath uses the images of the plants to depict
 123

pain and decay. Hospitals, pain, and illness are common in Plath’s poems,
they serve as a constant motif in her works. Her imagery is also worth
noting. Pregnancy symbolizes mental, physical and spiritual creativity.
Infertility represents spiritual barrenness.

Winter Trees, a collection of Sylvia Plath’s poems, was published

by Faber and Faber, London in 1971. Its long narrative poem, “Three
Women” was composed in 1962. And the rest of the poems (eighteen) are
composed by Sylvia Plath’s last yearn of her life. So “Three Women”
stands as representative of these two stages. This long narrative poem for
three different voices shows her ability to write about different situations.
It happens to be a work in which Sylvia Plath moves away from her
autobiographical stance to embody some dominant themes in three
different aspects and attitudes towards one single situation. Its technique is
similar to that of “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”. It shows the mask worn by
the poet to disguise herself. The mask represents the transference of the
internal conflicts into external dramatic toms. Here Sylvia Plath employs
her conventional skill of transmutation into the created form of art, instead
of the intricate blend of creation and autobiography. Rather, it provides
only a useful approach to the work of a poet who used autobiography as a
structural device. In “Three Women” private and public worlds are
mingled together and the dramatic situation in the poem very much
dominates the personal concerns.

What distinguishes Sylvia Plath’s later poems from the poems of

her transitional period is their innate intensity combined with their ease of
creation. She finally found her own ‘voice’ for her compositions. And
here in these poems she abandoned her old method of working laboriously
and slowly to give birth to her poems. She now composed poems at top
speed, as one might write an urgent letter. Sylvia Plath composed in this
way all of these poems in the last year of her life.
 124

The most remarkable aspect of Winter Trees is the recurrence of

certain subjects and images. The poems in this collection are recognizably
domestic and personal. They also present a dramatic focus, yet one thing
is worth-noticing that the concern is ultimately a personal one.

Some of the poems are personal and domestic while the others
are with certain dramatic focus, that dramatic focus reveals the private
world of the poet. Thus Plath’s poems can be labelled as domestic or
personal. In Winter Trees Mary, Christ and God are referred so
frequently. The motif of the Jewr as Nazi victim comes from Sylvia
Plath’s treasure of symbols. She uses these images constantly to depict
her condition and herself. Plath has achieved excellence through her
controlled and natural manipulation of imagery. Her internal and
external realities blend together and become indistinguishable. The
inner world sees its distorted self in the mirror held by the outer world.
Some poems from this collection give an account of her childhood
tenderness and her children. In these poems she feels inspired by the
material feeling. The poems show her lyrical ability. Sterility is
regarded as a disease in Plath’s poetry. These later poems are related to
her personal experiences. Inanimate objects play an important role in
these poems. Plath uses dialogues and speeches in her poems. Easy
fluency is achieved through the use of exclamation marks, question
marks and dashes. In the early poems, her mind generally stayed in the
outer world analyzing and commenting on it. But in these poems,
Plath has given an exposure to the inner and icy world of pain and
alienation, as these later poems were composed in die very early
morning, a time of introversion and stillness. In this collection her
poetry shows simplicity of style, lyrical ability, mode of introspection
and mode of confession.
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2.6 ARIEL

Ariel, the posthumous volume of Sylvia Plath’s poetry was

published in 1965 by Faber and Faber, London. Most of the poems in Ariel
were written during the period between her son’s birth in 1962 and her
death on 11th February 1963 . This was the period of hardships for her. She
was living alone in Devon with her two children. Her health, too, was
deteriorating; yet she was trying to compose poems more than ever before.
The poems of this period have innate intensity combined with ease of
composition. Though these poems have been composed very rapidly, she
has been able to find her own voice in them. In these poems, Sylvia Plath
t, *
abandoned her , old method of working slowly and laboriously to compose
her poems. The speed, urgency, intensity and restlessness of the complete
work can be observed in the poems of this period.

Sylvia Plath’s poems help a lot to specify the date of composition of

“Elm” and “The Moon And The Yew Tree”. Both of these poems were
inspired by the immediate surroundings of the Devon home of Ted Hughes.
The poem “The Rival” was composed in July 1962 and was soon after
followed by “Berck-Plage”. It is a poem which recalls Ted Hughes’s visit
to a French searside resort bearing the same name in the summer of 1961.
“The Bee Meeting,” “The Arrival of the Bee Box”, “Stings” and
“Wintering”, all these were composed in the1 months of October and
November of 1962. After November 1962, seventeen poems were written.
They are included in Ariel. They are “The Couriers”, “Sheep in Fog”, “The
Applicant”, “Lady Lazarus”, “Cut”, “The Night Dances”, “Poppies in
October”, “Ariel”, “Death and Co.”, “Nick and the Candlestick”,
“Gulliver”, “Getting There”, “Medusa” “A Birthday Present”, “Letter in
November”, “Daddy” and “Fever 103°”. In the last month of her life i.e.
January 1963, she composed “The Munich Mannequins”, “Totem”,
“Paralytic” “Balloons”, “Contusion” “Kindness”, “Edge”, and “Words”.
 126

The four poems, “You’re”, ‘Tulips”, “Morning Song”, and “Little Fugue”
also belong to the later period but were composed somewhat earlier. The
poem “You’re” was composed shortly before the birth of her daughter
Frieda, in 1960. It was the time when Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath
returned to England. The other poems of this group were composed in
1961. And the remaining three poems “Poppies in July”, “The Hanging
Man”, and “Years” belong to the group of the later poems.

Despair and grotesque dominate the world of Ariel. Here the

maimed human creatures are ignored. This forms a world of nightmare.
Several aspects of the early poems reccur in Ariel. In Sylvia Plath’s
poetry, dark outlines of mythology serve as the structure to control the
landmarks into which the poetry is moving. Mythological characters like
Cerberus, Medusa and Ariel become the integral part of Sylvia Plath’s
poetry. The yew tree stands in dark and the gothic moon provides the light.
Sylvia Plath’s father, a German, represented here as the dark figure. He is
referred in the context of persons and also the concentration camps. The
emotions, and the feelings associated with her childhood become a part of
her poetic imagery and symbols.
Sylvia Plath offers comments on personal and public experiences in
Ariel poems. Her interest in the place is very much personal and objective.
The external and internal perimeters are being shifted. The link established
between the outer and inner world works as a metaphor. The conflict in this
volume is rather complex. The images of disintegration and death dominate
the poems. The unmitigated conflict bursts into a single cry in the poem
“Elm” thus:
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. (A, 16)
 127

Her poem "Elm" deals with the theme of death. The Elm tree itself
with its dark blue and dense shade represents death. In the beginning of
the poem "Elm" is the speaker and slowly the "Elm" merges with the poet
In the next stanza the moon, a major symbol of Plath's poetry, appears and
symbolises death. The bright full moon is merciless because she would
drag her cruelly and also because her radiance scathes her. The moon also
symbolises barrenness and sterility. The moon is presented as a gorgon
too. The poem employs the image of the Jelly fish. The last lines of the
poem embody the extreme agony. Elm presents the complexity of Plath's
mood of despair.

Regarding this poem Raza Raihan says, "Elm" “is characterised by a

dramatic tone, violence of imager}7, depth of feeling and suffering and
personalising of the external aspects of nature such as Elm and the moon.”
Abidi S. Z. H. (2005 :127)

The despair found in the earlier poems changes into resignation. Her
voice is empty, when she decries her fate in “The Moon And The Yew
Tree”:
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary,
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to. (A, 41)

The poem “The Moon And The Yew Tree”, presents the control of
her mood. The details of fire full moon shining over the yew tree in the
graveyard are internalized and allowed to approximate to the different
states of mind. The outer bleakness and loneliness correspond to inner
solitude in which the mind becomes a graveyard. It is because of her
persona that has reached a state of ultimate despair from which Sylvia
Plath can see no escape. ‘I simply cannot see where there is to get to’. The
 128

emphasis is clearly laid on the environment where the lady feels lonely
even at home. The graveyard represents the feeling of depression and
spiritual death. The shining moon overhead provides no relief. It
symbolizes the world of despair. And in such a world of darkness and
death the church bells ‘startle the sky’ as they affirm that resurrection has
followed death, though the lady likes to accept the promises of religion.
But the world of the moon forces her to reject the tenderness she strives
for, ‘the moon is my mother’. She is not sweet like Mary.
The inferiority of the church represents the world of love and hope
opposed to the bleakness of the graveyard. In this poem the words like
‘stiff and ‘cold’ are associated with death. There is a link between the
world of the church and the graveyard. Here in this poem Sylvia Plath
makes use of colour. In the first stanza she describes the light of the mind
as blue and the trees as black. The trees are to be considered as thought
and the light as imagination. In the third stanza ‘blue’ describes the robes
of the moon. The poet has established her kinship with the moon. The
ideas and feelings associated with the moon acquire new connotations
throughout this poem. In the final stanza the word blue has been used
twice:
Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue. (A, 41)
The first stanza suggests that the blue is the colour of the mind. The
blueness of the clouds and saints is opposed to the starkness of the
graveyard. The meaning of the colours acquired in the third stanza is
devalued in the last stanza.

Sylvia Plath’s world is the one where identity loses itself in the bald
bleakness. And despite all darkness of the mind and the nature, the poem
has a melancholy lyricism. To some extent, ‘the cold, icy world’ is
delineated with the power that denies the apparent despair. In general
 129

terms the poem visualizes the intimacy of both the worlds. The world of
despair is symbolized by the graveyard with its yew tree and the moon. The
other world of tenderness and affirmation, is represented by the church.
Although it 1ms some aura of coldness and stiffness, it contains the effigy
which gentled by candles as mild eyes.

In another poem “The Rival”, Sylvia Plath speaks of annihilating

beauty. The moon here reflects the sufferings. The moon is seen as a
controlling power. Moon affects identity. This idea occurs again and again
in many of her later poems. “The Rival” suggests that the powers of the
moon can be restricted in the following lines .
The moon, too, abases her subjects
But in the daytime she is ridiculous. (A, 48)
The daytime relief is incidental to her poetry. And the predominant
world of her poetry is an active insight where the white menace of the
moon reigns powerfully.

"The Rival" is a poem which focusses on man- woman relationship.

The female speaker of the poem compares and contrasts the moon and the
female figure. Both the moon and male figure combine beauty and
annihilation. The opening stanza establishes the points of similarity but the
next stanza totally focusses on the male figure with his strong difference
and insensitivity in relationship. His indifference is monolithic in the
poet's imagination. In the next stanza the moon and the male figure are
again compared and contrasted. The lover is more aggressive and
1 »

demanding. The relationship between the husband and wife has been
depicted on the level of personal conversation and contact and though the
letters which arrive through the mails lot with loving regularity. But the
letters are devoid of feelings, they are only newsy. Hence the husband is
more capable of inflicting the hurt on the wife than does the moon on the
world from a distance.
 130

Thus the structure of the poem consists of stanzas of irregular

pattern and length. The central image is that of die moon which reflects on
the nature of the male figure and die relationship of the husband and wife.
Her “Berck-Plage” celebrates the notion of death as a new
beginning. The idea of death has no revulsion. The poet's tone has entirely
changed here. The moon is not saddened by the deaths. Death becomes
the natural part of domain. She realizes that by stepping over the edge and
death, she can defeat the world of the moon. In her life death is
oppressive. In the poem, the day of death is a wedding day, in “Berck-
Plague” thus:
A wedding-cake face in a paper frill
How superior he is now
It is like possessing a saint
The nurses in their wing - caps are no longer so beautiful,
They are browning, like touched gardenias.
The bed is rolled from the wall. (A, 22)

The poem “The Bee Meeting” was composed in the autumn of 1962
and belongs to the “Bee-Poems”. The village friends ask Plath to watch a
protected expert moving the virgin bee. The verse becomes a metaphor of
isolation. The villagers are depersonalized by their protective clothing.
Sylvia Plath, in her sleeveless summer dress, feels herself to be an outsider
in the following way :
I am nude as a chicken neck,
does nobody love me? (A, 56)
She covers her arms and neck with the smock given to her. She tries
to get rid of the fear. She moves through the bean fields with the villagers
to the grove where the hives are kept The bean fields are beautiful and
menacing. When they reach the grove she dons a hat and veil and she
realizes that this completes a sort of initiation ceremony, ‘they are making
me one of them’. She is caught in the feelings of nightmare. She gets
trapped and cannot escape from the spot. There is no place of escape. ‘I
 131

could not run without having to run forever5. Sterility, hospitals and illness
are the prominent images used here. She is about to feel that she had
plunged into a momentous situation. The villagers search for the queen
bee, she stands aside in fear and sympathy for a while. She feels to be a
‘personage in a hedgerow’, so that nobody may notice her. She will not
suffer any hostility. She feels sympathy for the old queen bee. The queen
bee is forced to live for another year before the release of the bride’s flight
‘the upflight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her’. The poem
ends with thought of the preservation of life. The virgin bees are left to
dream for another year of duel. One of the virgin bees must definitely win.
But the queen bee does not appear. Sylvia Plath sees the life in terms of
coldness of death. She feels more isolated now. This state of mind is
presented thus:
I am exhausted, I am exhausted -
Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.
I am the magician’s girl who does not flinch...
What have they accomplished, why am I cold. (A, 58)
The speaker of "The Bee Meeting" represents the woman as a
victim. It is a situation of one against many that is the victim hunted down
by the entire community. This poem has undertones of a social tragedy.

In "The Bee Meeting" the poet herself has taken over her father's
role, has become the bee-keeper or is in the process of so doing. The poem
is a rite of investiture. As a rite, it can be seen from at least three ways in
this poem. First, she is being made a priest and dressed in priestly robes.
Her relationship to the beehive in this sense is not so much as an actor or
participant, but as a conductor of the action. She is also being initiated into
a group of priests, others robed as she is. Second, when they give her the
'fashionable white straw, Italian hat* they are not only making her one of
them, they are also to some extent setting her apart from them in their own.
Third, the white crown the speaker of the poem receives is possibly a
 132

scapegoat's crown as well, that is, because of her quite understandable fear
of the bees. She partly sees herself in the role of victim to them, a kind of
living sacrifice in a pagan religion.

The sequence of bee poems, “The Arrival of the Bee Box”,

“Wintering” and “Stings” are all written in the autumn of 1962. The
poems present continuous drama. The suffering of the poet is masked with
precise technical details. All her obsessions are present in the poems. She
is conscious of the danger posed by them. She is the oppressor:
How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appeals me most of all, the unintelligible
syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
1 Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!
I iay my ear to furious Latin
,
I am not a Caesar.
<•
(A, 59)
|l
In "The Arrival of the Bee Box" the hive is also conditionally and
initially compared to a coffin. The crate full of bees is an intrusion, though
she ordered it, it frightens her, though she reminds herself that she is the
owner. Like death, the crate of bees repels and attracts her at the same
time. The poem is a series of fantasies based on the question, what shall I
do with them? She can send them back, she can let them stay in the box
and starve.

The speaker of the poem imagines herself, like Daphne, turning into
a tree to escape a threat A follower of Artemis, goddess of the moon and
of purity and chastity, Daphne was the unwilling object of Apollo's
infatuation. Her allegiance to Artemis in danger, she appealed to her father,
a minor river god, for help, and he turned her into a tree. Plath's use of this
fable is revealing, and it suggests a number of possibilities for
transformation. Apollo, the sun god, the oracle, and a patron of poetry and
philosophy, represented to the Greeks who created him an intellectual,
rational approach to life. Experience could be understood and controlled to
 133

some extent in language. Dionysus, the god of wine and fecundity, was the
other side of classical Greek religion and philosophy. Also associated with
poetry, Dionysus represented divine inspiration or creative frenzy and a
sensual, organic approach to experience.

In her later poems, the ash red colour, fire, upward flight, dominate
the closing lines as in “Lady Lazarus” “Ariel” and “Stings”.

“The Couriers” is the first poem in the group of seventeen poems.

In Sylvia Plath’s later poetry she portrays the love and hate of the strumpet
and celibate for one another for their acts and for their chosen types of
lovers. For death can resolve frustration. A death which is at once actual
and sexual, an end and a beginning. Reconciliation in life is an absolute
impossibility. She desires and accepts death. There is a conflict between
love and hate, which ends with the beginning of love and death. “The
Couriers” uses the familiar images of the earlier poetry dealing with death :
Frost on a leaf, the immaculate
Cauldron, talking and crackling
All to itself on the top of each
Of nine black Alps...
Love, love, my season. (A, 2)
Sylvia Plath repeatedly expresses the notions of the present
suffering and servitude of violent and ecstatic death. Death gets an
expression of triumph and new life. This is expressed by the galloping of
hooves of Ariel. It can also be seen in “Sheep in Fog” thus :
I disappoint them.
The train leaves a line of breath
O slow
Horse the colour of rust,
Hooves, dolorous bells. (A, 3)
This poem is remarkable for Plath's feminist stance and imagistic
technique. The speaker of the poem feels trapped in her female and
domestic roles and seeks to come out of her victimized state. It is
 134

obviously a seathing attack on marriage. There are two quite distinct sets
of images used in the poem. The first set belongs to married life and
domesticity, which confines the speaker to stereo-typed female roles. The
second set of images, the burning cauldron on mountain tops and the
tumult and disturbance on the surface of the sea represent her sense of
freedom from domestic strains and passivity. In this poem the speaker
oppressed and imprisoned in marriage, wants freedom. She realises that
love, through which she can identify herself best, is not to be found in
married life but in external aspects of nature. This poem works effectively
as a poem deriving its beauty from imagistic connotations.

The poem “Cut” is about a sensation. And there is a description of

alienation in the poem:
Omy
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill
The thin
Papery feeling. (A, 13-14)
The sensation is the starting point of the poem. The sensation being
about a thumb cut. The images in the poem reveal the reaction of the
speaker- fear, fascination and narcissistic love of her own body. The poet
imagines herself as a little pilgrim whose scalp has been axed by the
Indian. The poet reveals in her wound and shows her fascination for the
red blood, described as a red carpet rolling straight from the heart. There is
a sort of celebration in which the poet images red corpuscles as red
coat soldiers.

The poem is remarkable because it reveals a heightened intensity of

perception on the part of Sylvia Plath, while file poet is acute in the
perception of the sensation of cut, her attitude is very clinical and reveals
her morbidity in so far as she luxuriates in the blood which gushes out of
 135

her wound. The red colour is both a menace and fascination for Plath.
Here her attitude is one of fascination.

“Lady Lazarus” is a poem presenting a typical fusion of the worlds

of personal pain and suffering. In the poem a disturbing tension is
established between the seriousness of the experience depicted and the
misguidingly light form of the poem. The poem modulates into a calmer
irony as the person mocks herself for her presentations to tragedy for
instance see the following lines:
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well. (A, 7)
The reference to suicide in “Lady Lazarus” reflects her own
personal experiences. But here the personal element is subordinated to
dramatic structure. She has used her personal and painful experiences to
introduce much wider themes and subjects.

She has survived from death more than once. She survived in the
drowning accident when she was only ten. In 1953 in a state of extreme
depression she took a large number of pills. It was really meant to die and
\
not to come back at all. She hid herself in a cellar beneath the house where
she was luckily found alive. She drove off the road deliberately and
survived again.

She controls and manipulates experience by means of metaphoric

transformations. Death becomes a doctor in the Nazi concentration camps.
Her sense of personal disintegration in death is generalized by allusions.
Allusions to the notorious Nazi commandant who had a lampshade made
out of a human skin, and the Nazi incinerator are used in the poem. The
personal impulse to death is shown as an obscene desire to be sensational.
She impersonalises the poem and keeps it away from self-indulgence.
 136

In “Lady Lazarus” she equates her sufferings with the experiences

of the tortured Jews. She herself becomes one of them :
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen. (A, 6)
The world of "Lady Lazarus" is the world of death, suicide and
resurrection. Sylvia Plath builds the poem on two myths simultaneously.
One is a religious myth taken from the Bible, according to which Christ
raised his friend Lazarus from the dead. The other myth is that of the
Phoenix, the legendary bird which is said to resurrect itself from its own
ashes, every five hundred years. Plath adopts various personae and
postures in the poem. At the outset she is a victim of Nazi concentration
camps. The horrific experiences at such camps are presented vividly. The
persona identifies herself with the Jews. Plath often presents herself as a
Jew. In the poem "Daddy" she identifies with the Jews. The image of the
. ✓
Jew, as a persecuted being is often used by Plath. Death attracted
immensely. She is good at dying, Dying, is an art, like everything else.'

The poem is confessional at a level, since Plath made repeated

attempts to commit suicide and here the persona does the same. Plath
employs stanzas of three lines. The tone is casual and non-serious and
contrasts effectively with the serious nature of the thought content.

The poem is an example of Sylvia Plath’s skill as an artist. The

poem makes use of the light verse technique. She uses personal experience
as material, she forms and controls her personal experience into a highly
wrought poem. This poem is purely ‘confessional’. It is also a social
poem with a strong didactic intent and social criticism. It is a work of art
revealing excellent intellectual and technical ability.
 137

The poems “The Night Dances” and “Nick And Die Candlestick”
were written in October 1962. The poems deal with simple domestic
incidents of daily life. The inner experience of the poet is effortlessly
translated into images. The poem "The Night Dances" is about Sylvia
Plath's child, Nicholas and in it the tender world of the child stands
contrasted with the frail world of the mother. The poet feels the smiles and
'small breath' of the child in the grass. We see Plath's technique of using
the landscape to externalise her feelings in the poem. The drawings and
vague figures the child makes are 'pure leaps and spirals' which travel 'the
world forever'. The company and experiences of the child constitute
beauties and are a source of pleasure for the poet. They are like lilies.
Then the poet becomes aware of the great distance between the child's and
her own world. While the child's world is full of beauties, lilies and the
grass, the poet's world is intruded upon by 'cold folds of ego'. The coldness
of this world causes forgetfulness to the poet. The pathos in the poem is
touching. The mother is capable of noticing the tender gestures of the child
but not relating to them. The tender world of the child melts, giving way to
a world of morbid imaginings in the 'amnesias'. In the poem “Nick And
The Candlestick”, a mother site nursing her baby by candle light. The
effect of the light in the room makes her to imagine that she is a miner in
the depths of the earth. The candle shows the way through caves where,
'waxy stalactites, drip and thicken’. The mood here is bleak and dark. As
the candle light grows, the mother’s thoughts turn to the child. The child
represents the world of warmth, beauty and happiness. They stand as a
direct contrast to the inner violence rejected by her mind. The child takes
the mother-world of pain and dissatisfaction. But the child does not share
it. The mother accepts her inability to escape the horrors of her existence.
The child becomes a promise of security. Mother’s love for her child
creates a place of warmth and beauty :
 138

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses.
With soft rugs-
Ihe last of Victoriana. (A, 34)
In "Nick And The Candlestick" Sylvia Plath writes about the birth
of her son and compares herself with her son named Nicholas. The poet
imagines herself as a miner, and the mine is full of homicides. In fact, the
mine is her mind, the mind contains creatures which are white,
symbolizing death and destruction. However, the child belongs to another
world of safety and reassurance of life. He is the Christ in the manager.

Thus in the poem two worlds stand contrasted with each other, the
world of the mind of the poet filled with objects of violence and danger and
the world of the womb in which the baby is safe. The first seven stanzas in
the poem are taken up with menace and threat whereas the remaining
seven symbolise safely and culminate in the final image of Christ in
the manager.

Thus "Nick And The Candlestick" illustrates Plath's method of

oblique treatment of nuclear holocaust and political tragedy of Hiroshima
with privatisation. The images in the poem are telling and precise.

The poem develops through images and associations. The logic of

the poem is inner and arbitrary. The depression and fear in the poem
progress into a qualified optimism and happiness. Her imagination lays
itself open to an impression and an image, which is developed in the
poem freely.

The title poem of the volume “Ariel” presorts the predominant

thematic concerns about the later poems. There is the sense of oppression
and despair. “Ariel” was the name of Sylvia Plath’s horse on which she
went riding weekly, “Long before, while she was a student at Cambridge,
her home bolted, the stirrups fell off and she came all the way home, about
 139

two miles at full gallop, hanging around the horse neck”. Charles Newman
(1970:194)

And the rider was Sylvia Plath herself. Like Ariel, Sylvia Plath
also can be variously a mother, a Jew, Lady Lazarus, an elm tree, a man
applying for a wife, a gigolo and so forth.

Ariel, stands for a poet, a rider and a horse. She is a swift horse
representing free spirit She has assumed herself to be God’s lioness.
“Ariel” becomes a metaphor for the poet’s vision. The poem reveals
specific aspects of that vision thus :
Nigger -eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks -
Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows. (A, 26)
Sylvia Plath's present condition, in fret is one of captivity and
suffering. And this suffering is a prerequisite to release. This release is
anticipated from the very beginning of the poem. The horses gallop into
the ‘substanceless world’. The effect of this ‘substanceless quality allows
the fusion of elements. This fusion is the source both of the poem's
abstruseness and of its strength. It is difficult to separate one element from
another in this poem. A. Alvarez 1ms pointed out that, “The difficulty of
this poem lies in separating one element from another. Yet that is also its
theme, the rider is one with the horse, the house is one with the furrowed
earth, and the dew on the furrow is one with the rider.” Charles Newman
(1970:194)

Thus "Ariel" is the title poem of the present collection. Like

"Daddy", "Lady Lazarus", 'Medusa” etc. it is a major poem. Ariel is a poem
about the experience of horseback riding at dawn. The horse's name is
Ariel as it is made clear earlier. It is also the name given to the city of
Jerusalem by Isaiah and means 'God's lion'. Here in the poem, God's
 140

lioness, the deify is an immanent and coercive animal power, remorselessly

pulling the rider out of her sense of personal identity and into a unity with
itself. The opening line ’Stasis in darkness' enacts the repetitive chum of
the hooves. The action peels objects from their substance while it weds the
rider to her horse. The horse ride which takes her forcibly out of her stasis
into kinesis her to feel that she is an 'arrow' in flight back to the sun.

Thus "Ariei" expresses a conventional death wish, a desire for

extinction but there is exhilaration due not so much to the sensation of
speed as to the new, purer reality which is momentarily achieved. The
flight into the sun constitutes the consummation of being as well as
of destruction.

This purifying process is continued in other poems. “Death and Co.”

is one of them. The goal of the ride is in sight. In the poem Death is
symbolised by the glitter and the dew. Death is dead bell’s companion in
“Death and Co.”:
The frost makes a flower,
The dew makes a star,
The dead bell,
The dead bell.
Somebody’s done for. (A, 28-29)
The death is a ‘glitter’ in the poem. The undertaker in “Death and
Co.” is a ‘bastard’. There is the fusion of external and internal. The
landscape of the poem is interior. The external objects get converted into
symbols of historical vision. Nature occupies the inside and the outside of
the poet. The poem “Getting There” serves as a good example of fusion of
external and internal. See the following lines :
-- There is mud on my feet,
Thick, red and slipping. It is Adam’s side,
This earth I rise from, and I in agony.
I cannot undo myself, and the train is steaming.
Steaming and breathing, its teeth
Ready to roll, like a devil’s. (A, 37)
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“Getting There” is filled with anguish. Here the progress of living is

seen as the journey of train carrying wounded and bleeding soldiers in
despair towards death. The progress of life is compared to the train, thus :
It is a trainstop, the nurses
Undergoing the faucet water, its veils, veils in a nunnery
Touching their wounded,
The men the blood still pumps forward,
Legs, arms piled outside. (A, 36)
The persona finds no moment of rest or peace. Here life means
suffering, pain, blood and wars. The traveller of “Getting There” can aspire
for stillness only in the absolute immobility of death. Death is seen as a
birth into purity:
Step to your from the black car of Lethe,
Pure as a baby. (A, 38)
In “Medusa” she speaks of death like landscape ‘Off that landspit of
stony mouth-plugs’. Here the landscape is deathly landscape. Death
imagery resides in her childhood incidents. The notion of rushing towards
the established and anticipated goal. It becomes the common ground for
the merger of the external and the internal thus :
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. (A, 40)

Really "Medusa" is a significant poem. Here Plath or rather the persona

adopted reveals her relationship with her mother. The speaker is caught in
the tentacles of Madusa, which is a jelly fish and also the gorgon which has
the power to turn the onlooker into stone. Right at the outset the strong,
stifling hold of the mother on the daughter is revealed. Here the myth of
’Medusa" applies doubly to the mother and the daughter. One exerting the
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influence and other becoming vulnerable to it But in the final rejection of

the mother by the daughter Plath departs from the myth.

Childhood incidents of her life and their associations become

images in her poem “A Birthday Present”. She can remember crawling
into water before she could walk, nearly drowning :
What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?
I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is just what I want.
When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking,
I feel it thinking. (A, 42)

In the poem “A Birthday Present” Sylvia Plath uses the symbol of

phoenix and expresses rebirth or release. The resurrected self, a pure,
virgin woman is described in the following way :

There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.

And the knife not carve, but enter
Pure and clean as the ay of a baby,
And the universe slide from my side. (A, 44)
The poem celebrates a desperate wish for death. It is seal as a
symbol of death. At the end of the poem, the thought of death is associated
with purity and birth. Death brings calm and peace.

Her another poem “Letter in November” is a beautiful example of

the conflict between strumpet and spinster. In this poem the speaker cries :
O love, O celibate.
Nobody but me
Walks the waist-high wet.
The irreplaceable
Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae. (A, 47)
This conflict is released in a number of ways. It may be either in the
words of the poem directly or in a close relation between its sound and
sense or in its imagery. But no matter how it renders, this conflict involves
 143

the love and hate, strumpet and celibate for one another, for their acts or for
their chosen types of lovers.

Her poems, “Daddy” and “Fever 103°” blend her private and
personal life with lbe public and common life. Sylvia Plath’s inner pain
and torture are associated with the concentration camps and tragic incident
of Hiroshima. The poem relates itself to the facts of Sylvia Plath’s life.
The poem embodies the distress Sylvia Plath suffered in her life.
Memories of her dead father appear in the poem. Her father, Otto Plath,
came to America at the age of fifteen. He died when Sylvia Plath was
only nine. Therefore, certainly he could not have been the active German
Nazi officer of the poem. The truth is he was a Prussian. It is Sylvia
Plath’s obsession which sees him as a Nazi, if he were in Germany. Her
mother, Aurelia Plath was of Austrian descent. She could have had Jewish
blood. If she had lived in Europe, she might have become one of the hosts
of the murdered Jews. She described this poem in dramatic terms.
According to M.L. Rosenthal, “Here is a poem spoken by a girl with an
Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was a God. Her
case was complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her
mother very possibly partly Jewish. In the daughter, the two strains marry
and paralyze each other. She has to act out the awful little allegory once
over before she is free of it.” M.L. Rosenthal (1967: 82)

Freudian psychology has been exploited by Sylvia Plath in this

poem for her reactions. The child in the poem is in love with a parent. She
hates her father. He has made her suffer by dying at an important juncture
of her early age. Her father is described as a ‘ghastly statue’ and ‘marble
heavy.’ The description of the father as a statue reminds us of the similar
concept used in The Colossus. The daughter is obsessed with the feelings
of fear which dwarfs and restricts her own life. She wishes to get rid of
these fears. For this reason she must destroy the memory of her father thus:
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Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time -
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God. (A, 49)
Sylvia Plath tries to destroy her father’s memory by committing
suicide. She finds an escape through marriage with a man whose qualities
were similar to her father’s.

The poem describes Sylvia Plath’s relationship with her father as the
torturer and the tortured. She extends this idea by referring to her father as
a Nazi and the daughter of a Jew. She establishes the relationship between
father and daughter on emotional and historical grounds. The poem refers
to the brutality associated with the father as a Nazi officer. This
relationship of father-daughter is like the relationship between Nazi and
Jew. This hatred of the daughter fuses into the emotional paralysis of her
recognition of the father as a German Nazi. It is described in the
following lines:
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your foot,
I never could talk to you
The tongue stuck in my jaw...
I thought every German was you. (A, 49-50)
This self-repeated, self-assertive Teh’ of the German language
recalls the sounds of the engines transporting Jews to these camps. As an
emotional revolt against her father, the daughter begins to talk like a Jew.
She identifies herself with an archetypal suffering in the concentration
camps. She sees her father as a German Nazi officer and does not associate
him with God. She associates him with a Swastika, ‘So black no sky could
squeak through’. The poem has the image of love and hate relationship.
She comments on the sexual fascination for brutality thus :
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Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute,
Brute heart of a brute like you. (A, 50)
This description again reminds her father ‘a man in black with a
Meinkampf look’, who has only been chosen for his similarities to the
father, in the hope that his presence will exorcise her obsession.

The poem begins with the references to the imagination about her
father to her massive size and crushing her in submission. The poem
furnishes specific autobiographical details such as the ‘Polish town’ and
her efforts to leam his tongue. The poem “Daddy” achieves, “The classic
act of generalization, translating a private, obviously intolerable hurt into a
code of plain statement of instantaneously public image which concerns
all.” Charles Newman (1970 :194) The poem “Daddy” remains painfully
personal in its effect. The poem brings together love and cruelty, as in
some sense connected, deep in our primitive selves. The personal subject
is shockingly dealt with by the poet using ‘free’ and ‘light verse’ and yet
disciplined in manner. According to Ashokkumar Sharma, “Sylvia Plath
gives expression to her emotions of love and sex. The feeling of love and
sex move parallel to Sylvia’s movement towards love and sex in her real
life. First it 1ms a forward movement, then it has a retrograde movement.
“Pursuit” and “Glutton” are manifestations of different shades of love. Her
love poems are full of passion. In her earliest poems “Pursuit” she is
pursued by man’s lust. And in the same poem she surrenders to the
panther of lust. Ha* another poem “A Secret” she serves sex openly. In
‘The Applicant” she ironically presents a suitor.

Really Sylvia Plath also shares with Kamala Das a general inimical
attitude towards menfolk. She believes in an independent existence of
women. She criticises herself for being under the influence of her father.
She writes in “Daddy”, ‘You do not do, you do not do, Any more black
shoe in which I lived like a foot” R. K. Dhavan (2006:220)
 146

"Daddy" is a complex poem. It explores the father fixation or the

Electra complex. The persona adopted by Hath in "Daddy" is obsessed
with her father's image. Sexual imagery is employed by the persona while
speaking about her father. This has a shocking effect. The untimely death
of her father is viewed by the persona as betrayal. She has attempted to
regain him but has failed. In this poem the relationship is also viewed as
one which exists between a victim and a victimizer. The persona herself
becomes a Jew and her father a Nazi.

The persona talks of her suicide attempt and also her marriage. She
has been tortured by her husband. She says, 'The image of the father and
the husband fuse together and both become her oppressors. She reasons
that if she kills one of them, then in reality she would have killed
them both.'

In this poem, the persona totally rejects both her father as well as
her husband and in doing so rejects and kills all men. It can be called a
poem of rage, of power of vengeance and of course it lends itself to a
feminist reading. Thus "Daddy" is a confessional and autobiographical
poem. But, inspite of this, the poem has a universal appeal. The form of
the dramatic monologue succeeds in distancing the speaker from the poet.
The tone is flippant and conversational. The rhythm is simple.

A companion poem to "Daddy" is “Fever 103°” in which she again

intermingles the worlds of personal pain and the suffering. The vocabulary
and rhythms have the colloquial simplicity of conversation. The
repetitions in the poem have the flippant note. The tension of all these
forces, desires and restraints is powerfully and matchlessly expressed in
this poem. In fact, Sylvia Plath’s inner conflict is powerfully expressed in
this poem. She identifies herself with the strumpet when she has been in
bed with her lover all night, but that brings her only limited success thus :
 147

Darling, all night

I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss. (A, 54)
The spinster, who has been asking odd questions about purity,
punishment, and adultery has finally gained control in the poem:
I am too pure for you or any one.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am lantern. (A, 54)
t

But this control is concerned with the mind only. Her passions and
heat are of an ‘acetylene virgin’. But it seems to be intensely sexual. As
the lines decrease in length, the poem grows rhythmically faster and
shorter. What we hear, not in words, is an incredible build towards orgasm
which insists on the conflict by denying its very existence at the moment of
climax. It is at once a sexual release, a release into death. In its use of the
word Virgin, “Fever 103°” combines with the symbol of phoenix. In the
poem, phoenix expresses release or rebirth in her poetry. The poem
"Fever 103°" is obviously a poem of hospital experience of high fever but,
as is Plath's tendency, she weaves a complex web of nuances out of
sickness. Fever is by metaphoric implication synonymous with fire. The
high fever as presented in the first part of the poem indicated in forms of
attitude, is not a source of purity. It rather creates a sense of unease and
suffering of sin which even infernal fire cannot purify. In the course of
time the poet remains in the state of high fever for three days. Fever brings
to her purification. Her fever shakes her up and lifts her up into an
elevating hallucination. Thus the tone of the poem is conversational.

Another poem “The Munich Mannequins” belongs to a group of

poems which was composed in January 1963, Sylvia Plath’s last month of
life. It is the first poem in her later poetry. The moon symbolizes
infertility. It is opposed to the human fertility of the woman who conceives
and gives birth to a child. This barrenness of the moon is hostile in the
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poem “Elm” and “The Munich Mannequins” gives a symbolic value to the
moon. It indicates the menstrual flow, which is a monthly sign of sterility:
Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb
Where the yew tress blow like hydras,
The tree of life and the tree of life
Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose.
The blood flood is the flood of love. (A, 73)
In this poem the yew tree and the moon are the images of physical
sterility. This poem brings into prominent focus the sterility and
artificiality of the metropolitan cities like Munich, Paris and Rome which
have a glittering facade of perfection but at the same time stand for lifeless,
affectionless futile existence. The poem employs the moon as a symbol of
sterility because the moon has a perfect round shape. The moon is also
associated with death, since perfection cannot be contained, it is also
sterile. The moon is constantly associated with die yew tree in the poetry
of Sylvia Plath. The yew tree symbolizes despair, sterility and helplessness.
Like the moon the yew is a symbol of annihilation and the moon is
associated with sterility. The poem also employs another symbol 'snow'
which represents death and sterility. All the images used in the poem point
out the mechanical sterility of city life.

The moon, yew, the black boot, hooks, glitters, the black telephone
etc. are all images of sterility. The last line of the poem sums the
impression of a city. The image of the city presented by Eliot in "Preludes"
and "The Waste Land" is realistic and its focus is on ugliness, the
mechanical nature of urban existence. Plath's central image of mannequins
stands fully illuminated in metaphoric league with the moon, the yew and
the snow. Her description is symbolic and is in tune with other symbols
which she employs for sketching the innerscape of her mind.
 149

The mirror in the poem ‘Totem” is the symbol of personality. It

suggests wisdom and monotony. ‘Totem” is associated with the
monotonous, inevitable and unchanging process of living thus :
There is no terminus, only suitcases
Out of which the same self unfolds like a suit
Bald and shiny, with pockets of wishes,
Notions and tickets, short circuits and folding mirrors. (A, 76)
This poem belongs to the group of poems exploring the world of
death. Totem" fills in many details, particularly the vision of the sinister
spider and fly, nature of life and the destructive element that is the finality
of the 'one death with its many sticks'. The central idea and the overriding
pattern of the poems imagery are indicated in the opening lines. In the
world envisioned by Plath, death is constant and meaningful. The
destroyer and the victim, but both are subject to the reality of death and
destruction. The silvery track is destroyed by the engine just as the
glittering cleaver of the butcher destroys the animal. Death in this world is
both terrifying and attractive, hi this poem two-line stanza pattern is used
to convey a sense of pause and meditation on the terrifying nature of life
and death. The diction is in consonance with the theme of the poem. It is
characterised by words jarring and striking by their sharpness of
shrillness, glitter, clever, circuits, sticks, aborted all suggestive of
concentrated violence.

The poem “Balloons” is one of the ‘baby’ poems. The speaker in

the poem addresses her child lovingly. The mother may provide partial
relief from the unrelieved world of nightmare. The poems “Balloons” and
“Morning Song” express mother’s love for her baby. In these poems the
intent’s, ‘clear vowels rise like’ balloons’. The child is a precious little
bundle of time and his ‘smiles are found-money’. The poem “Morning
Song” is also similar. It is described in the following way:
 150

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and
your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, mangnifying your arrival.
New statue. (A, 1)
"Morning Song" takes as its theme the relationship between Plath
and her daughter at the latter’s birth. The poem does not embody a
conventional relationship of filial love between a mother and daughter but
rather a cold, detached and somewhat clinical relationship. This cold and
clinical attitude is suggested by a number of images employed to describe
the child. Ironically, love is only the initial and incipient force which
brings the child into existence. Then in the rest of the poem we do not find
evidence of love between the mother of child in the conventional sense.
The child is bom like 'a fat gold watch'.
Here Plath employs free verse in the poem. We notice much more
design and structural pattern here than in the verse of other modem poets
who have employed free verse. The last word of each line contains a long
vowel sound which underscores the feelings of the mother and renders the
whole experience of childbirth vivid. In the poem “Morning Song”
the mirror becomes a part of the image of pregnancy. And in “Balloons”
she holds:
A red
Shred in his little fist. (A, 80)
Death is a glitter in certain poems. Mirror also glitters. The images
represent death and can ‘kill’ as in the poem “Contusion”. The image of the
broken mirror reflects the destruction of spiritual as well as physical calm.
Here the ‘mirrors are sheeted’ after ‘the heart shuts’. The mirror becomes
the symbol of individual life in the poem “Contusion”. This poem pours
out the feeling. This outpour would stop only with the lapse of the poet’s
hysteria. Like “Contusion” the poems “Kindness” and “Words” are also
 151

devoid of the passionate intensity. These poems were written in the last
week of her life. They miss the hysterical shade of the early poems.
“Contusion” develops through a series of ordered statements. In all, there
are the images of death. In the poem “Contusion” the mirror becomes a
significant symbol in this poet’s work:
The heart shuts,
The sea slides back,
The mirrors are sheeted. (A, 83)
"Contusion" is Plath's attempt at internalising the threat of death.
There are three separate sets of images which connote death and these have
been used to describe Plath's inner wounded condition. Containing a
striking and suggestive colour scheme, the first stanza describes the body
from which life has departed and looks 'The Colour of Pearl'. The purple
spot is found only on the wounded part which is 'The doom mask'. The
image of the sea extends to the last stanza which describes the final death.

Thus "Contusion" is an imagistic poem which employs concrete

images. Death has been looked upon in its various facets. Each line in the
poem presents a vivid image and the combination of the images presents a
compendious picture of death.

The poem “Kindness” deals with separation from Ted Hughes. The
poem “Words” deals with indifference and various modes together with
disappearing. The relation between body and poetry, between death and art
is the subject of "Words". "Words" is the last poem written by Plath. It
presents Plath's attitude towards language and death. The poem seeks
resolution of the existential dilemma in death. In the opening stanza words
have been described as axes which strike against the trees and the echoes
produced are travelling. In the next stanza the poet uses another metaphor
to describe the flow of the sap leaking out of the cut made by the axe.
Towards the end of the poem the white skull in the bottom takes the form
of permanent white stars which controls the self. The stars symbolize
 152

death. Here the self-feeling of the inadequacies of words is attracted

towards death.

In the poem “Edge” Sylvia Plath moves away from her anguished
brooding and suffering of living and moves towards the peace of death.
The theme of the poem is death. To her, death is perfection. Death is
beautiful and noble. The dead body has a dignity. In the poem, ‘Edge” the
dead children have been folded back into the mother’s body protectively.
It is an ultimate loving gesture. It is very much similar to the natural
folding of the rose around itself in the face of incoming night in the garden:
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden.
Stiffens tod odours bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower. (A, 84)
In the poem “Edge”, the persona enters the world of the moon. Her
hostility is reduced to acceptance. Here the moon represents death. The
poet moves towards the worlds of tenderness and love. Here children are
used as symbol of love. The poem 'Edge" celebrates death as a peaceful
noble accomplishment. As the title indicates, death is the terminating point
of life, its suffering and straggles. The poem is grounded in a complete
resolution of Plath's dialectic of life and death. She finds peace in death.
The death of the woman is viewed as perfection and a finality. Perfection
in death is analogous to perfection in craft. The dead body with its toga
and bare feet embodies the final scene of a mythical drama assisting
transcendence through completion. The speaker is not neurotic or sick, in
fact she is conceived as a grand heroine trapped in the illusion of a Greek
necessity. It is a poem of great peace and resignation, utterly without
self pity.
 153

Sylvia Plath’s another poem “Yor’re” is an affectionate droll poem.

There are wonderfully clever images in the poem. The baby in the poem is
described thus:
Clownlike, happiest on your hands,
Feet to the stars, and moon - skulled,
Gilled like a fish. A common-sense
Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode ...
Of July to All Fools' Day,
O high-riser, my little loaf. (A, 52)
This is one of Sylvia Plath's Lappy poems homely, American and
delightful, the poem is addressed to her unborn child. Plath's mother
persona addressing to the foetus is playful, this is clear from the amused
piling up of affectionate metaphors. The position of the foetus is described .
in meticulous but amusing detail. The upside down position of the child in
the womb has been mentioned, its skull compared with the moon and we
also learn that it is 'gilled like fish' etc. Though the child is so near in the
womb, since it is unborn, it is 'farther off than Australia' and something to
be expected like mail. The similes dovetailed in a succession, make the
poem interesting.

The poem takes its point from the fact that the pregnant and
expectant mother looks at herself objectively. "You're" is a singular poem
because the mood of the poem is one of comedy and flippancy and such a
mood is striking contrast to the poems of suffering morbidity and death. It
has a rapid, taping rhythm reflective of the rollicking mood.

hi the later poetry of Sylvia Plath, the thought of death is associated

with purity and birth because it brings peace. The poem “Tulips” erupts
into the whiteness of the microcosm. The patient becomes a painful
reminder of the health. The tulips require the emotional response. It will
arouse her from the numbness of complete mental and physical inactivity.
She is conscious of her feelings. The flowers have eyes which watch her
 154

and increase the sense of her own unreality. The tulips draw her attention
to the world of whiteness and tranquility.
f

"Tulips" is a poem that describes Sylvia Plath's experience of

hospital and sickness. "Tulips" used as a central image provoke a
prolonged contemplation of her diseased condition. What is remarkable to
note is that the poet uses the image of tulips in association with the entire
paraphernalia of hospital life which make a whole landscape of suffering.
Depicting her condition totally surrendered to her pitiable circumstances of
ailment. She compares herself to the pebbles which are at the mercy of the
waves. The poem reveals a miserable state of mind, a sense of being
completely resigned to the condition in hospital. She feels herself to be 'a
thirty year old cargo boat', realizing that she has never been so pure. It is
the purity of emptiness - an emptiness in which 'the dead close on'. In this
very state of mind she finds that the tulips are too excitable. The agony
depicted through the hospital scene and her surrender to the anaesthetist
and surgeons is highlighted by the impingement of the tulips upon her
consciousness. Plath is aware of the reality that has disappeared from
her life.

The poem “Tulips” exemplifies one particular style which Sylvia

Plath uses in her later works. Its lines are long and comparatively smooth.
The stanzas resemble paragraphs. Each one uses a new area of the central
idea. The effectiveness of images, used in the later poems stands in
contrast to the images used in the earlier poems. They stand as proof of her
achievement in her later poetry.

In Ariel poems, there is a progressive linking of one image with the

other. This linking of images creates a new order of reality. Here she is
depressed by the utter helplessness of the maimed human being in the face
of an uncaring and implacable destiny. The main weapon is the very
imperfection of man as seen in the following lines :
 155

The yew’s black fingers wag;

Cold clouds go over
So the deaf and dumb
Signal the blind, and are ignored. (A, 70)
The poem "Little Fugue" is one of Sylvia Plath's most successful
though less known poems. It is an autobiographical poem but is marked by
her meticulous craftsmanship and adroit use of poetic devices, the title of
the poem is inspired by Bee Thoven's Grosse Fugue in which the Grand
Fugue is a part. In the opening stanza the poet employs the yew tree as a
metaphor for her father. Even otherwise the poem is strongly reminiscent
of "Daddy". In the beginning of the poem the black twigs of the yew 'wag'
beckon the 'cold clouds' which ignore the signal as the blind ignores the
signals of the deaf and dumb. The ideas of blindness on the one hand and
of dumbness and deafness on the other are contrasted and developed as the
poem progresses. The poet presents a blind pianist playing Grosse Fugue
on the black and the white keys of the piano. In this poem Plath
remembers her childhood and her father, his "black and leafy voice'.

The use of colours is very suggestive, the black colour which stands
for death governs the meaning of the poem, the poem is characterised by
t

remarkable compression and is set in a fluid and sliding time frame. It has
a neat and formalised structure, containing stanzas of four lines each, the
yew is the central image of the poem and represents a complex of feelings.

In the poem “Little Fugue” the yew tree stands as a symbol of

blackness, despair, and sterility. It is associated with her father. The yew
tree represents senseless, ‘deaf and dumb7 tyranny and oppression. It
represents Nazi father and Christ’s executioners. The white cloud, in the
poem, stands for the innocent ‘blind’ victim, in its manifestations of
featurelessness and emptiness. As in “Berck-Plage” the death is seen as a
new beginning. Here death becomes a wedding day, a day of celebration
andjoy.
 156

The next three poems “The Hanging Man”, “Poppies in July” and
“Years” belong to the later poems, considering their treatment of subject
and style. The sense of oppression and anticipation of release and freedom
are the central themes reflected in Sylvia Plath’s short poem “The Hanging
Man” thus:
By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.
I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.
The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard’s eyelid:
A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.
A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.
If he were I, he would do what I did. (A, 69)

This poem is a short one, but very intense in its thought and
compact in structure. Hie poem is about divine visitation, an experience
which makes an intense impact on the sensibilities of the poet and
transforms her totally. She feels held up by the roots of her hair by 'some
god' and the poet feels struck by his blue volts'. The awareness of this
powerful spiritual experience crushing reality and darkness is 'snapped out1
like a lizard's eyelid'. All other experiences in comparison with this
spiritual awareness are 'a vulturous boredom'. The spiritual awareness is a
powerful gush of energy.

The poem has a tight structure. It is remarkable that Hath can render
such a profound intricate and intense thought in such a short poem - just
three stanzas of two lines each. The figures of 'a desert prophet', 'a lizard's
eyelid' contribute to the vividness of expression.

‘The hooks’ ‘blackness’ and ‘darkness’ are used as images for

suffering in Sylvia Plath’s later poems. In the poem “Years” every kind of
motion assumes death as terminal and a driven necessity. In the poem
“Years” Sylvia Hath confesses in the following way:
 157

What I love is
The piston in motion -
My soul dies before it
And the hooves of the horses,
Their merciless chum. (A, 72)
"Years" embodies Plath's passion for hyperactivity which is almost
neurotic in its dimensions. She hankers after a life of action and finds that
eternity bores her. The poem places stasis and kinesis in opposition and in
a cosmological perspective. "Years” presents a view of time and eternity.
The years enter at animals from the space of a dark and frozen eternity.
Here Plath expresses sentiments similar to those of Ariel preferring. The
Piston in motion and the 'merciless chum' of the hooves of the horses to
God’s great emptiness.

In this poem, the poet employs animal imagery which conveys and
adds to the impression of force and movement 'kinesis'. We also have the
colour symbolism of'the blood berries', which 'are very still'. The images
of blood berriers are recurrent in some poems in Ariel. They are a part of
Plath's morbid sensibility.

Plath's "Poppies in October" is yet another short poem which

sketches a vivid striking landscape that reveals the poet's mental landscape.
In Sylvia Plath, physical landscape saves to reveal her mental state. The
poet responds to the sheer beauty of the morning sky. In this poem there is
a strange element in some of Plath's poems that she establishes a
relationship between the beauty of nature and the human experience of
disease. Nature seems to underscore the disease and the consequent
sufferings of the patient. The poppies and the sun clouds are red and so is
the heart of the woman in the ambulance. Red symbolises life, vigour and
beauty. The last stanza constitutes the emotional climax. The beauty of
nature fills the poet with a sense of wonder. She finds herself transformed
intensely on mental and emotional planes. The physical landscape creates
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an ecstatic and wonderous mental state. The poet wonders at her own
identity in the bounty and beauty of nature. The device of using contrasting
colour symbolism is remarkable. The redness of Poppies and morning sun-
clouds stands in contradiction to the paleness of the frost of the forest and
of cornflowers. Red symbolises vigour, health and life, pale on the other
hand, symbolises disease and sickness.

Thus the imagery used in the poems is visual concrete. The beauty
of the poem is enhanced by the poetic energy which is derived from Plath's
use of colour symbolism and scheme. The interaction of nature with the
poet's threatened self results in a sense of a new identity on the poet's part.
The poet employs stanzas of three lines of varying length, the opening
stanza being of much longer lines. The words like 'ambulance' and 'Igniting
its carbon monoxides' put a stamp of modernity on the poem.

In her last years, Sylvia Plath disciplined her cry and anguish into a
number of convincing poems. In the later poems of the poet ‘the night
vision’ ‘the nightmare’ assume several meanings and identities. Caroline
King Bernard observes that, “the tribulation of Ariel may appear as the
anguish of Oedipus, the torture of the victimized Jew, the agony of the
ambivalent sexual attitudes, grief of rejections, or a mother’s poignant fear
for her child. But whatever guise it assumes, the world of Ariel is the
world of nightmare in substance as well as in the surreal quality of its
expression. Caroline King Bernard (1978 :104)

In her later poetry Sylvia Plath rejects life. She does not find even
the disciplined and contented life worth living. But her poems survive
death. They continue to live even after the death of their composer.

According to Raptone Anita “Ariel deals primarily with the Ariel

poems as describing the constricted world of one woman who speaks to all
women. Because the personal is depicted solely by her female body, she is
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locked into a mere physical presence, trapped, vulnerable and controlled by

others.” Anita Rapton (1973: 407-12)

According to Johnson Greg, Ariel “asserts that those critics who

label Plath’s poetry confessional, have misinterpreted her work. They have
focused so much upon Plath’s life that they have minimized the importance
of her art. In fact Plath has, from the beginning, emphasized artistic
transformation rather than personal confession. Several poems are
analyzed closely." Johnson Greg (1980 :1-11)

The most interesting poems in Ariel are not confessional at all. A

confessional poem would seem to be one in which the writer speaks to the
reader, telling him, without the meditating presence of an imagined event
of persona, something about his life. Her poetry is concentrated, detached,
and ironic to be a confessional work. In her earlier poetry there is an outer
world aspect and in her later poetry there is an inner aspect. In these
poems she discovers her own voice as well as her own identity. So these
poems run with an inner rhythm which alters with the pressure of feeling
and allows the images. In all her poems there is a combination of
exploratory intention, violent and threatened with personal involvement
They are the works of great artistic purity and despite all the nihilism, they
are the works of great generosity.

In this volume, the images of disintegration and death dominate the

poems. In the poems “The Moon and Yew Tree ” the graveyard represents
the feeling of depression and spiritual death. The Moon and the graveyard
symbolize the world of despair. In Ariel we find melancholy lyricism. In
this collection she portrays love and hate. Death can dissolve frustration
and lastly she desires and accepts death. There is conflict between love
and hate.

In this collection of poems the moon, the graveyard, virgin, bee,

Biblical and mythological references are used. The images of Phoenix
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Medusa, Cerberus and Ariel and Nazi occur in this collection. There is
simple, lyrical and self-centered style which we find throughout her poems.
The poems show her particular style. Its lines are long and comparatively
smooth. The stanzas resemble paragraphs. The effectiveness of images
used in the Ariel poems stands in contrast to the images used in the earlier
poems. In this collection linking of images creates a new order of reality.
There is a colour combination for each image in different sense. The
images like the hooks, blackness and darkness are used as images of
suffering in all her poems.

The world of Ariel is of despair, bleak, grotesque and suffering.

Here the maimed human creatures call in plight to each other and are
ignored. In such a world, love is but a shadow. Her marriage is a final,
desperate effort to gain peace and communication but even this marriage is
hopelessly rejected by Sylvia Plath. It brings only tension, suffering and
pain. The poet feels even more isolated now. The whole group of bee-
poems is a continuing drama in which technical details serve to be the
mask for the naked suffering and pain of the poet. The majority of the
poems in Ariel reflect an inner and very much personal world. Particularly
the poems “Lady Lazarus”, “Daddy” mid “Fever 103°” are the examples
where the private mixes with the public. She gives expression to her
feelings about bombing of Hiroshima and Nazi concentration camps in
conjunction with her own inner self and pain.

The uneasy apprehensions of The Colossus poems have now

developed into a systematic presentation which expresses the terrible
discrepancy between the actual and the desire. Sylvia Plath in her life’s
last week’s composition, moves away from an anguished brooding over the
suffering of living and concentration upon peace and calm of death. It is an
embodiment of perfection, beautiful, and noble. In these last poems,
Sylvia Plath exhibits her ability to write about death with ease and control.
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She has the capability of artistic creation. The most subjective feelings
take a certain appearance of reasoned out and reasonable in her later
poetry. Death is life in Sylvia Plath’s vision. This earthly life is merely a
pre-requisite for death at times with a preparatory series of small deaths.
Anne Sexton, a friend of Sylvia Plath, who herself committed suicide,
mentions that, ‘Suicide is, after all, the opposite of the poem. Sylvia Plath
and I often talk opposites, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric
light bulb’. Therefore, the poems of the last period move from a limited
private world to a limitless public one.

2.7 SYLVIA PLATH’S POETIC VISION

Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963) was known fairly well as a woman of

great talent. During her lifetime her collection of poems The Colossus
(1960) and the novel The Bell Jar (1963) were published. Three
collections of her poems, viz. Winter Trees, Ariel, Crossing the Water and
her Letters, Journals were posthumously published. Sylvia Plath’s poetry
was utterly personal and deals with experiences of mental disorder. Poetry
as a means of self experiences was common to the confessional poets.
Inspite of several hurdles in her short life she produced fine work. Her
state of mind was fluctuating but that was instrumental to her wrork. In
other words she used fluctuating state of her mind as the dominant theme
of her work. She always cared for writing, but she could not bear the
tension of expectations from her by her mother and others. Hence she
often experienced mental breakdown. Her mind was always preoccupied
by the thought of death. Hence we witness gloomy, disillusioned,
melancholy, depressed and pessimistic vision of life. Por her poetry was
self-revelations through similes, images, and metaphors. Her poetry
is a poetry of experience. Her poems have an emotional and
psychological depth.
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Her early poetry is thematically and technically significant because

most of the elements which are prominent in the later poems are present in
her poetry. Her early poetry The Colossus has experimental quality as far
as technique and structure are concerned but they changed drastically in her
later poetry. That is why her middle poetry published in the anthologies
Crossing the Water and Winter Trees have transitional quality. And her
final poetry published in the collection entitled Ariel has mastery, maturity
and excellence in the matters of poetic technique and structure. It is her
self-revelation through exquisite similes and metaphors. It seeks to
appropriate and assimilate the external reality by imaginative
identifications with it.

The poems in the early collection, The Colossus deal with the theme
of raw awareness of the mortality of frail individual in the face of cruel
nature outside. The sense of doom and fascination for disintegration,
decay and death are dominant themes of all these poems. Nature presented
in these poems is menacing. According to her opinion, the birds, bees,
spring and fall are absolute gifts to a person who does not have any
substantial interior experience to write about

Crossing the Water is Sylvia Plath’s second collection of poems

which was published in 1971. These poems are composed between 1960
and 1962, which may be termed as the transitional period of her life. These
poems do not seen to have honesty and skill we find in her early poems.
They do not seem to have the power and pressure of the later poems that
we find in Ariel. They do have a sense of floundering, not knowing
whether one or the other. Both in form and in substance, these poems are
interesting because they represent an important stage in Sylvia Plath’s
poetic development. Thenceforward, after experimentation Plath turns
toward a simple, more direct and emphatic verse. In these poems die
speaker assumes an identifiable voice and a very much individual identity.
In the later poems we find clear dramatic situations that are very rare in
The Colossus. These poems have the voice of the woman agonizingly
feeing the sirens and temptations. It may be the voice of a daughter, trying
to come to terms with a specific fatherly relationship. It is rather the voice
of spinster shakily committed to self-denial. In these poems Sylvia Plath
seems to serve her own consciousness and her poems, characters and
situations become more or less abstract and ambiguous. Crossing the
Water deals with the conflict between the known and the normal with the
unknown and the terrible as it is said earlier. In these poems, Plath’s self-
consciousness serves, as a necessary qualification for the precision of her
later work. In this work Sylvia Plath comes to know herself and her
attitudes expressed rather than explained, in her later work.

Sylvia Plath’s Winter Trees was published in 1971. Its long

narrative poem “Three Women, A Poem for Three Voices” was composed
in 1962. It stands as a representative long poem. This long narrative poem
deals with different voices. It shows her ability to write about different
situations confronting one another. It happens to be a work in which
Sylvia Plath moves away from her autobiographical stance to embody
some dominant theme in three different aspects and attitudes of three
women going through one single situation. She uses one single situation.
The techniques as the mask of persona disguising the self. She uses the
moderate technique in “Three Women”, to transfer internal conflicts into
external dramatic terms. Here Sylvia Plath employs the conventional
transmutation skill more into the created forms of her art. We find intricate
blend of creations, and autobiography. Recurrence of certain subjects and
images is witnessed in these poems. The poems in this collection are
recognizably domestic and personal. However, their treatment has dramatic
focus. But the theme concerned is ultimately personal one. The world of
these later poems is the world of nightmare. This world is made up of
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mostly aspects of the several worlds in her early poetry. The fusion of
external and internal landscape is presented in these poems. It is rather a
kind of weird and updated metaphysical conceit. In these poems the
opposites, hate and love are fused skillfully, with death as a catalyst. Here
death is both, the act of loving and the love. In these poems she returns to
the inner icy-cold world of pain and alienation. However, we find the
warmth of love in these poems.

The world of Ariel describes the bleak, the grotesque and the
sufferings. In some of her poems she describes the maimed human
creatures call in plight to each other and the awe is ignored. In such a
world love is like a shadow. Here we find marriage as the last effort to
gain peace and the communication but even this marriage is hopelessly
rejected by Sylvia Plath as an artificiality. It brings only tension, sufferings
and pains. Sylvia Plath feels even more isolated. Here she describes naked
sufferings and pain of her life. A majority of the poems in Ariel reflects an
inner and very much personal world. Particularly in the poems, like “Lady
Lazarus”, “Daddy” and “Fever 103°” private mixes with public. She gives
an expression to her feelings about bombing of Hiroshima and Nazi
concentration camps in conjunction with her own inner self and pain.

Sylvia Plath, in the composition she undertook in the last week of

her life, moved away from an anguished brooding of the suffering of living
to concentrate the peace and calm of death. It is an embodiment of
perfection. It is not only beautiful but also noble. In these last poems,
Sylvia Plath exhibits her ability to write about death with ease and
control. She is capable of artistic creation. Death is life in Sylvia Platfa’s
vision. Therefore, the poems of the last period move from a limited private
world to a limitless public one.

Hence her vision of poetry was gloomy, pessimistic, melancholy,

depressed and always marked by the apprehension of death. In fact, her
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life was nothing but death because she was in constant search of it Her
suicidal attempts prove the fact.

Sylvia Plath's vision of life is realised in her poetic development

through four stages. One, expression of the self two, awareness of the
expression of the self, three, an attempt to dramatise the self and four the
achievement of her perfection in dramatising the self. In Colossus we find
a majority of the poems dealing with the theme of personal pain, she gives
an expression to this personal pain and torture which leads her to the
thought of death as an escape from the personal pain. She finds that her
abnormal attachment of her father grows into the guilty consciousness. In
order to escape from it she thinks of putting an end to her life. In her
transitional poems, collected in the anthology Crossing , the Water she
I
expresses her awareness about this. She becomes aware that her early
poems are only an outcry of an anguish due to her personal pain. So in her
poems included in her third anthology Winter Trees, she tries to dramatise
the same theme, expression of the self. She realises that it is the right way
to express the self. In her next volume Ariel she tries to achieve the
perfection in dramatising the self. She succeeds to some extent that only
Ariel contains some five poems which qualify for the exquisite structure
and style. She exhibits herself as a perfectionist. This is a new conflict in
her poetic development. She wants to be perfect but she cannot succeed
completely. The only solutions to this conflict is death as release from life.
Hence her suicide. However, these four stages of her poetic development
leading to the partial perfection give her poetic vision of life.