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Last Minute Notes on - Plath
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05-06-2007 6:52pm#1Sylvia Plath [1932-1963]
Relevant Background
• Born in Boston USA. She grew up in a well-off middle class home on the coast.
• Early years were influenced by the living near the ocean. ‘I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.’
• Experiences of family life caused her inner conflicts and pain → Father Otto died when she was 8 → depression was widespread in her family.
• From her mother’s influence, she tried to live up to an old fashioned feminine ideal of perfection and purity.
• Plath hid her lack of confidence behind her energy and brilliant achievement. Even as an outstanding student, she never fulfilled the very high expectations she set for herself. She experienced self-doubt and depression. She pushed herself relentlessly at work.
• Much of Plath’s poetry reveals her struggle against herself and the world.
• Plath suffered a nervous breakdown in Smith College, Boston, after intense overwork in 1953. She was given bi-polar electro-convulsive shock treatments; a horror alluded to in the poem ‘Elm’ of 1962. Treatment further damaged her sanity → attempted suicide. Six months in a private hospital set her on her feet again, but she never fully recovered. Depression and the threat of insanity remained a problem.
• Plath also went to university in Cambridge, England after she won a scholarship in 1955.
• When she met Ted Hughes, a Cambridge poet, she felt that life with him would be ideal in a physical and aesthetic sense → married
• For a while after her marriage, Sylvia focused so much Hughes’ poetic work that she found it difficult to develop her own poetry. She was recognised for being the wife of Hughes rather than for her own poetry.
• She secretly resumed therapy → this influenced her poetic writing. Plath and Hughes concentrated on helping each other’s poetic writing.
• Plath’s poetry became more confessional in style after she attended a seminar run by the American poet Robert Lowell.
• From 1959, her poetry began to evoke her intensifying mental illness.
• Under Hughes’ influence, they moved to England in December 1959 at a time when Sylvia was writing good poetry—she had written the material for The Colossus and Other Poems which she got published in October 1960 in England. This book was well received.
• When they left Boston Sylvia was five months pregnant with her first child, Frieda.
• Plath’s writing became both an escape and a burden.
• February 1961 a new pregnancy ended in a miscarriage that left Sylvia feeling depressed. At this time she wrote the poem ‘Morning Song’.
• Personal jealousies, rural isolation and a return of Sylvia's depression created complications in her marriage.
• After her son Nicholas's birth in January 1962, Plath began to realise Hughes was unfaithful; she expressed herself through increasingly angry—and powerful—poems. It was during the following April that Plath ‘Elm’, which dealt with his infidelity and other subjects.
• In June 1962 Plath started beekeeping and was briefly overjoyed with it. Her father had been a beekeeper and had written two books about bees. In July 1962, Sylvia confirmed Ted's affair. That month she began ‘Poppies in July’.
• Sylvia and Ted separated in October 1962 → Plath became very depressed and became addicted to sleeping pills
• October 1962, Plath wrote at least 26 of the Ariel poems. She wrote about her beekeeping in the poem ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’. That poem referred to her brief time as a beekeeper but was also an expression of her unhappy inner thoughts and feelings.
• The magazines to which she sent many of these poems refused them, adding further to her depression.
• Caring for her children and friendships with other women became increasingly important to Plath.
• Very bad winter weather added to her depression. She hated being without a telephone, had bouts of illness and had the hassle of caring for her two infants. As she became increasingly depressed, she composed the poem ‘Child’ in January 1963.
• She committed suicide by sleeping pills and gas inhalation on 11 February 1963.
These comments shed further light on the Plath:
• She was a bright, intelligent, and determined young woman with a need to succeed; she had a burning desire to write.
• She dreamed of the comfort of a home of her own where she could belong and be loved for herself.
• She worked very hard, pushing herself relentlessly, whether in her studies, her teaching, in her relationships or her writing.
• In its blend of amusing self-criticism and potent rage, her work anticipated the feminist writing that appeared in the later 1960s and the 1970s. But her work also transcended feminism.
• Her work often reveals a harsh, demonic, devastating inner-self.
Themes
1. Plath struggles against herself and the world.
She is troubled by human frailty and vulnerability:
‘Your nakedness shadows our safety’ [Morning Song]
She battles against a negative self-image:
‘An old woman rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish’ [Mirror]
She is shocked by her powerful, violent and uncontrolled subconscious:
‘A wind of such violence will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek’ [Elm]
She battles against inner demons:
‘I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me’ [Elm]
She fights and surrenders to mental exhaustion:
‘I am incapable of more knowledge’ [Elm]
She is numbed by her failed relationship:
‘I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns’ [Poppies]
She battles against her deep fears:
‘The box is locked, it is dangerous I have to live with it overnight’ [Beebox]
She tries to fight off her neurosis so she can be a mother:
‘This troublous wringing of hands’ [Child]
2. Plath’s poetry depicts her quest for poetic inspiration and vision:
In the poem ‘Mirror’, the poet’s quest for beauty and vision has turned inwards. She gazes inwards towards the self. She seeks despairingly for enlightenment through self-examination. What she finds appals her:
‘A woman bends over me, searching my reaches for what she really is… tears and an agitation of hands’.
In ‘Elm’ Plath probes her subconscious, and states she is saturated with self-knowledge. Plath experiences harrowing visions within the inner self. Plath invents a demon in her subconscious that gives her a very self-destructive vision:
‘I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?—
Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.’ [Elm]
In ‘Poppies in July’, Plath seems so emotionally exhausted that she has given up the rational pursuit of the truth or any kind of vision. She longs for drugged relief, for a ‘colourless’ state:
‘Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules’.
In ‘Child’ Plath has lost the capacity to find beauty for herself:
‘this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star’
But she feels a desire to provide visions of wonder and beauty for her infant’s eye:
‘I want to fill it with colour and ducks,
The zoo of the new’ [Child]
3. Plath explores her own depression.
Plath predicts her own fading away, destruction or ‘effacement’:
‘I'm no more your mother than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow effacement at the wind's hand’ [Morning Song]
Plath confesses her deep anguish:
‘She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands’ [Mirror]
Plath’s fears becomes ever more nightmarish:
‘I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me’ [Elm]
Plath reveals that she is inflicting suffering on herself:
‘Is it for such I agitate my heart’ [Elm]
Plath confesses the traumatic effect of electric-convulsive treatment:
‘I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires’ [Elm]
Plath confesses that isolation and lack of love haunt her:
‘I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love’ [Elm]
Plath reveals that she is becoming powerless to deal with her illness:
‘Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will’ [Elm]
Plath has moments when she longs to escape her mind through drugs: ‘Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule, dulling and stilling’ [Poppies]
Plath also experiences anger and fear at her condition, comparing her inner demons to a new consignment of bees:
‘It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.’ [Beebox]
Plath reveals her mental torture two weeks before her suicide:
‘this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star’ [Child]
4. Plath explores aspects of childhood and childhood imagination:
Newness and vulnerability:
‘New statue in a drafty museum’ [Morning Song]
The sense of wonder:
‘Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with colour and ducks,
The zoo of the new…
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical’ [Child]
5. Plath depicts nature, often using it as a poetic device to reflect her own emotional and mental state:
The temporary cloud stands for a weeping Plath:
‘the cloud that distils a mirror’ [Morning Song].
The elm represents the troubled inner self of Plath:
‘What is this, this face so murderous in its strangle of branches?’ [Elm]
The bees represent the inner demons of Plath:
‘It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering’ [Beebox]
Poetic Techniques
Plath's work has a mixture of comic and serious elements; it combines various types of rhymes and half rhymes in structured and free verse. At times Plath’s persona is curt. Her poems are graphically morbid, hallucinatory in their imagery, but full of ironic wit, technical brilliance, and tremendous emotional power.
She is known for her controlled stanzas, heavy with assonance and consonance, her elaborate syntax with its inversions and subordinate clauses, her ingenious metaphors.
There are many detailed examples of the poetic techniques used by Plath illustrated in Arrival of the Beebox and Child on the Ordinary Level English web pages.
Rhythm
Many of Plath’s expressions echo everyday speech, giving those poems a light and easy rhythm.
‘Poppies in July’ is also a good example:
‘Little poppies…little…hell flames,
Do you do…no harm?’
The repetition of ‘little’ and the addressing of the question to the poppies give the voice in the poem a natural feeling. The words in the quote are everyday words and are mainly monosyllables. The first line has three beats; the second has two. In the quoted example … indicates the end of a beat.
The beat varies a lot in this poem and extends to five and six beat lines:
‘Flickering...like that…wrinkly…and clear red…like the skin…of a mouth’.
The varied beat shows the erratic nature of Plath’s emotional state.
In ‘Mirror’, the diction is mainly everyday, but the effect of the lines is sombre. The long five beat rhythm of the final two lines reverberate with the heavy burden the poet carries within her as she meditates on her subconscious terrors:
‘In me…she has drowned…a young girl…and in me… an old woman
Rises…toward her…day after day…like a terrible…fish.’
Tone
There are many contrasting tones used within Plath’s poems. Tone reveals the poet’s inner state when she wrote these poems. The tones reveal a lot about her personality. She could be ironic and melancholic, elated and sombre in the same poem.
Here are examples of tone:
Gentle and sensuous: ‘moth-breath’ [Morning Song]
Troubled: ‘The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars’ [Morning Song]
Cold and impartial: ‘unmisted by love or dislike’ [Mirror]
Callous: ‘What ever I see I swallow immediately’ [Mirror]
Horror: ‘Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires’ [Elm]
Unbearable pain: ‘I must shriek’ [Elm]
Vile: ‘Little poppies, little hell flames’ [Poppies]
Vivid: ‘Little bloody skirts’ [Poppies]
Numb: ‘Dulling and stilling’ [Poppies]
Angry and frantic: ‘Black on black, angrily clambering’ [Beebox]
Tender, excited and charming: ‘The zoo of the new’ [Child]
Humorous and wacky: ‘Stalk without wrinkle’
Desolate : ‘Ceiling without a star’ [Child]
Imagery
Plath’s poems are dark and moody in their imagery, surreal, ironic, clever and emotional.
‘The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren…
Her radiance scathes me’ [Elm]
‘All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf’ [Elm]
‘This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic’ [Elm]
‘I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.’ [Poppies]
‘I know it with my great tap root’ [Elm]
Note the recurring images of a mirror:
‘I am silver and exact’ [Mirror]
‘the cloud that distils a mirror’ [Morning Song]
‘Your mouth opens clean as a cat's’ [Morning Song]
Note the recurring images of the sea:
‘A far sea moves in my ear’ [Morning Song]
‘Is it the sea you hear in me, its dissatisfactions’ [Elm]
Note the recurring images of violent wind:
‘slow effacement at the wind's hand’ [Morning Song]
‘A wind of such violence will tolerate no bystanding’ [Elm]
Note also the recurring images of the moon, which was traditionally linked to mental illness.
In ‘Elm’, surreal imagery about the frightening face of the moon is conveyed in everyday spoken English:
‘The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me…
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?’
The commonplace moon appears nightmarish to Plath. She projects her neurotic fears onto the moon as observed between the branches of the elm.
In ‘The Arrival of the Bee box ,’ Plath brilliantly interlinks madness and suicide in the surreal manner in which she refers to her beekeeper’s outfit:
‘In my moon suit and funeral veil’.
In ‘Mirror’ Plath uses the moon to denote self-deception:
‘Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.’
Metaphor:
‘New statue. In a drafty museum’ [Morning Song]
‘moth-breath’ [Morning Song]
‘cow-heavy’ [Morning Song]
‘Little poppies, little hell flames’ [Poppies]
‘Little bloody skirts’ [Poppies]
‘it was the coffin of a midget’ [Bee box]
‘in its strangle of branches’ [Elm]
Simile:
‘like a fat gold watch’ [Morning Song]
‘The clear vowels rise like balloons’ [Morning Song]
‘like a terrible fish’ [Mirror]
‘love... it has gone off, like a horse’ [Elm]
‘like the skin of a mouth’ [Poppies]
‘It is like a Roman mob’ [Bee box]
Paradox [apparent contradiction]
‘I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me’ [Elm]
‘I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns’ [Poppies]0
Comments
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well they're not the exact same. i deleted loadsa ****e that ya done need etc..
..and some people dont! thought i was doing some people a favour.. *sheesh*0 -
Emu McEmuerson wrote:well they're not the exact same. i deleted loadsa ****e that ya done need etc..
..and some people dont! thought i was doing some people a favour.. *sheesh*
0 -
Thanks a lot emu0
-
your welcome!!
(finally someone sees that im actually tying to help people! :P)0 -
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thanks sincerely - it is kind, very kind of you to do this. What a guy, thanks, special prayer for u tmrw that you do extraordinarily well , so Good Luck!Emu McEmuerson wrote:Sylvia Plath [1932-1963]
Relevant Background
• Born in Boston USA. She grew up in a well-off middle class home on the coast.
• Early years were influenced by the living near the ocean. ‘I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.’
• Experiences of family life caused her inner conflicts and pain → Father Otto died when she was 8 → depression was widespread in her family.
• From her mother’s influence, she tried to live up to an old fashioned feminine ideal of perfection and purity.
• Plath hid her lack of confidence behind her energy and brilliant achievement. Even as an outstanding student, she never fulfilled the very high expectations she set for herself. She experienced self-doubt and depression. She pushed herself relentlessly at work.
• Much of Plath’s poetry reveals her struggle against herself and the world.
• Plath suffered a nervous breakdown in Smith College, Boston, after intense overwork in 1953. She was given bi-polar electro-convulsive shock treatments; a horror alluded to in the poem ‘Elm’ of 1962. Treatment further damaged her sanity → attempted suicide. Six months in a private hospital set her on her feet again, but she never fully recovered. Depression and the threat of insanity remained a problem.
• Plath also went to university in Cambridge, England after she won a scholarship in 1955.
• When she met Ted Hughes, a Cambridge poet, she felt that life with him would be ideal in a physical and aesthetic sense → married
• For a while after her marriage, Sylvia focused so much Hughes’ poetic work that she found it difficult to develop her own poetry. She was recognised for being the wife of Hughes rather than for her own poetry.
• She secretly resumed therapy → this influenced her poetic writing. Plath and Hughes concentrated on helping each other’s poetic writing.
• Plath’s poetry became more confessional in style after she attended a seminar run by the American poet Robert Lowell.
• From 1959, her poetry began to evoke her intensifying mental illness.
• Under Hughes’ influence, they moved to England in December 1959 at a time when Sylvia was writing good poetry—she had written the material for The Colossus and Other Poems which she got published in October 1960 in England. This book was well received.
• When they left Boston Sylvia was five months pregnant with her first child, Frieda.
• Plath’s writing became both an escape and a burden.
• February 1961 a new pregnancy ended in a miscarriage that left Sylvia feeling depressed. At this time she wrote the poem ‘Morning Song’.
• Personal jealousies, rural isolation and a return of Sylvia's depression created complications in her marriage.
• After her son Nicholas's birth in January 1962, Plath began to realise Hughes was unfaithful; she expressed herself through increasingly angry—and powerful—poems. It was during the following April that Plath ‘Elm’, which dealt with his infidelity and other subjects.
• In June 1962 Plath started beekeeping and was briefly overjoyed with it. Her father had been a beekeeper and had written two books about bees. In July 1962, Sylvia confirmed Ted's affair. That month she began ‘Poppies in July’.
• Sylvia and Ted separated in October 1962 → Plath became very depressed and became addicted to sleeping pills
• October 1962, Plath wrote at least 26 of the Ariel poems. She wrote about her beekeeping in the poem ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’. That poem referred to her brief time as a beekeeper but was also an expression of her unhappy inner thoughts and feelings.
• The magazines to which she sent many of these poems refused them, adding further to her depression.
• Caring for her children and friendships with other women became increasingly important to Plath.
• Very bad winter weather added to her depression. She hated being without a telephone, had bouts of illness and had the hassle of caring for her two infants. As she became increasingly depressed, she composed the poem ‘Child’ in January 1963.
• She committed suicide by sleeping pills and gas inhalation on 11 February 1963.
These comments shed further light on the Plath:
• She was a bright, intelligent, and determined young woman with a need to succeed; she had a burning desire to write.
• She dreamed of the comfort of a home of her own where she could belong and be loved for herself.
• She worked very hard, pushing herself relentlessly, whether in her studies, her teaching, in her relationships or her writing.
• In its blend of amusing self-criticism and potent rage, her work anticipated the feminist writing that appeared in the later 1960s and the 1970s. But her work also transcended feminism.
• Her work often reveals a harsh, demonic, devastating inner-self.
Themes
1. Plath struggles against herself and the world.
She is troubled by human frailty and vulnerability:
‘Your nakedness shadows our safety’ [Morning Song]
She battles against a negative self-image:
‘An old woman rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish’ [Mirror]
She is shocked by her powerful, violent and uncontrolled subconscious:
‘A wind of such violence will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek’ [Elm]
She battles against inner demons:
‘I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me’ [Elm]
She fights and surrenders to mental exhaustion:
‘I am incapable of more knowledge’ [Elm]
She is numbed by her failed relationship:
‘I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns’ [Poppies]
She battles against her deep fears:
‘The box is locked, it is dangerous I have to live with it overnight’ [Beebox]
She tries to fight off her neurosis so she can be a mother:
‘This troublous wringing of hands’ [Child]
2. Plath’s poetry depicts her quest for poetic inspiration and vision:
In the poem ‘Mirror’, the poet’s quest for beauty and vision has turned inwards. She gazes inwards towards the self. She seeks despairingly for enlightenment through self-examination. What she finds appals her:
‘A woman bends over me, searching my reaches for what she really is… tears and an agitation of hands’.
In ‘Elm’ Plath probes her subconscious, and states she is saturated with self-knowledge. Plath experiences harrowing visions within the inner self. Plath invents a demon in her subconscious that gives her a very self-destructive vision:
‘I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?—
Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.’ [Elm]
In ‘Poppies in July’, Plath seems so emotionally exhausted that she has given up the rational pursuit of the truth or any kind of vision. She longs for drugged relief, for a ‘colourless’ state:
‘Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules’.
In ‘Child’ Plath has lost the capacity to find beauty for herself:
‘this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star’
But she feels a desire to provide visions of wonder and beauty for her infant’s eye:
‘I want to fill it with colour and ducks,
The zoo of the new’ [Child]
3. Plath explores her own depression.
Plath predicts her own fading away, destruction or ‘effacement’:
‘I'm no more your mother than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow effacement at the wind's hand’ [Morning Song]
Plath confesses her deep anguish:
‘She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands’ [Mirror]
Plath’s fears becomes ever more nightmarish:
‘I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me’ [Elm]
Plath reveals that she is inflicting suffering on herself:
‘Is it for such I agitate my heart’ [Elm]
Plath confesses the traumatic effect of electric-convulsive treatment:
‘I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires’ [Elm]
Plath confesses that isolation and lack of love haunt her:
‘I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love’ [Elm]
Plath reveals that she is becoming powerless to deal with her illness:
‘Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will’ [Elm]
Plath has moments when she longs to escape her mind through drugs: ‘Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule, dulling and stilling’ [Poppies]
Plath also experiences anger and fear at her condition, comparing her inner demons to a new consignment of bees:
‘It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.’ [Beebox]
Plath reveals her mental torture two weeks before her suicide:
‘this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star’ [Child]
4. Plath explores aspects of childhood and childhood imagination:
Newness and vulnerability:
‘New statue in a drafty museum’ [Morning Song]
The sense of wonder:
‘Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with colour and ducks,
The zoo of the new…
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical’ [Child]
5. Plath depicts nature, often using it as a poetic device to reflect her own emotional and mental state:
The temporary cloud stands for a weeping Plath:
‘the cloud that distils a mirror’ [Morning Song].
The elm represents the troubled inner self of Plath:
‘What is this, this face so murderous in its strangle of branches?’ [Elm]
The bees represent the inner demons of Plath:
‘It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering’ [Beebox]
Poetic Techniques
Plath's work has a mixture of comic and serious elements; it combines various types of rhymes and half rhymes in structured and free verse. At times Plath’s persona is curt. Her poems are graphically morbid, hallucinatory in their imagery, but full of ironic wit, technical brilliance, and tremendous emotional power.
She is known for her controlled stanzas, heavy with assonance and consonance, her elaborate syntax with its inversions and subordinate clauses, her ingenious metaphors.
There are many detailed examples of the poetic techniques used by Plath illustrated in Arrival of the Beebox and Child on the Ordinary Level English web pages.
Rhythm
Many of Plath’s expressions echo everyday speech, giving those poems a light and easy rhythm.
‘Poppies in July’ is also a good example:
‘Little poppies…little…hell flames,
Do you do…no harm?’
The repetition of ‘little’ and the addressing of the question to the poppies give the voice in the poem a natural feeling. The words in the quote are everyday words and are mainly monosyllables. The first line has three beats; the second has two. In the quoted example … indicates the end of a beat.
The beat varies a lot in this poem and extends to five and six beat lines:
‘Flickering...like that…wrinkly…and clear red…like the skin…of a mouth’.
The varied beat shows the erratic nature of Plath’s emotional state.
In ‘Mirror’, the diction is mainly everyday, but the effect of the lines is sombre. The long five beat rhythm of the final two lines reverberate with the heavy burden the poet carries within her as she meditates on her subconscious terrors:
‘In me…she has drowned…a young girl…and in me… an old woman
Rises…toward her…day after day…like a terrible…fish.’
Tone
There are many contrasting tones used within Plath’s poems. Tone reveals the poet’s inner state when she wrote these poems. The tones reveal a lot about her personality. She could be ironic and melancholic, elated and sombre in the same poem.
Here are examples of tone:
Gentle and sensuous: ‘moth-breath’ [Morning Song]
Troubled: ‘The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars’ [Morning Song]
Cold and impartial: ‘unmisted by love or dislike’ [Mirror]
Callous: ‘What ever I see I swallow immediately’ [Mirror]
Horror: ‘Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires’ [Elm]
Unbearable pain: ‘I must shriek’ [Elm]
Vile: ‘Little poppies, little hell flames’ [Poppies]
Vivid: ‘Little bloody skirts’ [Poppies]
Numb: ‘Dulling and stilling’ [Poppies]
Angry and frantic: ‘Black on black, angrily clambering’ [Beebox]
Tender, excited and charming: ‘The zoo of the new’ [Child]
Humorous and wacky: ‘Stalk without wrinkle’
Desolate : ‘Ceiling without a star’ [Child]
Imagery
Plath’s poems are dark and moody in their imagery, surreal, ironic, clever and emotional.
‘The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren…
Her radiance scathes me’ [Elm]
‘All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf’ [Elm]
‘This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic’ [Elm]
‘I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.’ [Poppies]
‘I know it with my great tap root’ [Elm]
Note the recurring images of a mirror:
‘I am silver and exact’ [Mirror]
‘the cloud that distils a mirror’ [Morning Song]
‘Your mouth opens clean as a cat's’ [Morning Song]
Note the recurring images of the sea:
‘A far sea moves in my ear’ [Morning Song]
‘Is it the sea you hear in me, its dissatisfactions’ [Elm]
Note the recurring images of violent wind:
‘slow effacement at the wind's hand’ [Morning Song]
‘A wind of such violence will tolerate no bystanding’ [Elm]
Note also the recurring images of the moon, which was traditionally linked to mental illness.
In ‘Elm’, surreal imagery about the frightening face of the moon is conveyed in everyday spoken English:
‘The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me…
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?’
The commonplace moon appears nightmarish to Plath. She projects her neurotic fears onto the moon as observed between the branches of the elm.
In ‘The Arrival of the Bee box ,’ Plath brilliantly interlinks madness and suicide in the surreal manner in which she refers to her beekeeper’s outfit:
‘In my moon suit and funeral veil’.
In ‘Mirror’ Plath uses the moon to denote self-deception:
‘Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.’
Metaphor:
‘New statue. In a drafty museum’ [Morning Song]
‘moth-breath’ [Morning Song]
‘cow-heavy’ [Morning Song]
‘Little poppies, little hell flames’ [Poppies]
‘Little bloody skirts’ [Poppies]
‘it was the coffin of a midget’ [Bee box]
‘in its strangle of branches’ [Elm]
Simile:
‘like a fat gold watch’ [Morning Song]
‘The clear vowels rise like balloons’ [Morning Song]
‘like a terrible fish’ [Mirror]
‘love... it has gone off, like a horse’ [Elm]
‘like the skin of a mouth’ [Poppies]
‘It is like a Roman mob’ [Bee box]
Paradox [apparent contradiction]
‘I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me’ [Elm]
‘I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns’ [Poppies]0 -
well.. im a girl
but thanks! good luck to you too x0 -
Don't start a "Last Minute Notes - Grammar" please.Emu McEmuerson wrote:your welcome!!
(finally someone sees that im actually tying to help people! :P)
"you're"
I am pedantic.0 -
Here's where Emu McEmeurson got those notes from:
http://www.skoool.ie/skoool/examcentre_sc.asp?id=1246
http://www.skoool.ie/skoool/examcentre_senior.asp?id=3633 Go there if you want other poets notes on the same basis.
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oh i really should have told that to people first...
im a TERRIBLE student for spelling and grammar - oops!0 -
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Idiot, go and study.
Thanks for bothering to type these up instead of trollong people on their grammar.0 -
Emu McEmuerson wrote:Sylvia Plath [1932-1963]
Relevant Background
• Born in Boston USA. She grew up in a well-off middle class home on the coast.
• Early years were influenced by the living near the ocean. ‘I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.’
• Experiences of family life caused her inner conflicts and pain → Father Otto died when she was 8 → depression was widespread in her family.
• From her mother’s influence, she tried to live up to an old fashioned feminine ideal of perfection and purity.
• Plath hid her lack of confidence behind her energy and brilliant achievement. Even as an outstanding student, she never fulfilled the very high expectations she set for herself. She experienced self-doubt and depression. She pushed herself relentlessly at work.
• Much of Plath’s poetry reveals her struggle against herself and the world.
• Plath suffered a nervous breakdown in Smith College, Boston, after intense overwork in 1953. She was given bi-polar electro-convulsive shock treatments; a horror alluded to in the poem ‘Elm’ of 1962. Treatment further damaged her sanity → attempted suicide. Six months in a private hospital set her on her feet again, but she never fully recovered. Depression and the threat of insanity remained a problem.
• Plath also went to university in Cambridge, England after she won a scholarship in 1955.
• When she met Ted Hughes, a Cambridge poet, she felt that life with him would be ideal in a physical and aesthetic sense → married
• For a while after her marriage, Sylvia focused so much Hughes’ poetic work that she found it difficult to develop her own poetry. She was recognised for being the wife of Hughes rather than for her own poetry.
• She secretly resumed therapy → this influenced her poetic writing. Plath and Hughes concentrated on helping each other’s poetic writing.
• Plath’s poetry became more confessional in style after she attended a seminar run by the American poet Robert Lowell.
• From 1959, her poetry began to evoke her intensifying mental illness.
• Under Hughes’ influence, they moved to England in December 1959 at a time when Sylvia was writing good poetry—she had written the material for The Colossus and Other Poems which she got published in October 1960 in England. This book was well received.
• When they left Boston Sylvia was five months pregnant with her first child, Frieda.
• Plath’s writing became both an escape and a burden.
• February 1961 a new pregnancy ended in a miscarriage that left Sylvia feeling depressed. At this time she wrote the poem ‘Morning Song’.
• Personal jealousies, rural isolation and a return of Sylvia's depression created complications in her marriage.
• After her son Nicholas's birth in January 1962, Plath began to realise Hughes was unfaithful; she expressed herself through increasingly angry—and powerful—poems. It was during the following April that Plath ‘Elm’, which dealt with his infidelity and other subjects.
• In June 1962 Plath started beekeeping and was briefly overjoyed with it. Her father had been a beekeeper and had written two books about bees. In July 1962, Sylvia confirmed Ted's affair. That month she began ‘Poppies in July’.
• Sylvia and Ted separated in October 1962 → Plath became very depressed and became addicted to sleeping pills
• October 1962, Plath wrote at least 26 of the Ariel poems. She wrote about her beekeeping in the poem ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’. That poem referred to her brief time as a beekeeper but was also an expression of her unhappy inner thoughts and feelings.
• The magazines to which she sent many of these poems refused them, adding further to her depression.
• Caring for her children and friendships with other women became increasingly important to Plath.
• Very bad winter weather added to her depression. She hated being without a telephone, had bouts of illness and had the hassle of caring for her two infants. As she became increasingly depressed, she composed the poem ‘Child’ in January 1963.
• She committed suicide by sleeping pills and gas inhalation on 11 February 1963.
These comments shed further light on the Plath:
• She was a bright, intelligent, and determined young woman with a need to succeed; she had a burning desire to write.
• She dreamed of the comfort of a home of her own where she could belong and be loved for herself.
• She worked very hard, pushing herself relentlessly, whether in her studies, her teaching, in her relationships or her writing.
• In its blend of amusing self-criticism and potent rage, her work anticipated the feminist writing that appeared in the later 1960s and the 1970s. But her work also transcended feminism.
• Her work often reveals a harsh, demonic, devastating inner-self.
Themes
1. Plath struggles against herself and the world.
She is troubled by human frailty and vulnerability:
‘Your nakedness shadows our safety’ [Morning Song]
She battles against a negative self-image:
‘An old woman rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish’ [Mirror]
She is shocked by her powerful, violent and uncontrolled subconscious:
‘A wind of such violence will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek’ [Elm]
She battles against inner demons:
‘I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me’ [Elm]
She fights and surrenders to mental exhaustion:
‘I am incapable of more knowledge’ [Elm]
She is numbed by her failed relationship:
‘I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns’ [Poppies]
She battles against her deep fears:
‘The box is locked, it is dangerous I have to live with it overnight’ [Beebox]
She tries to fight off her neurosis so she can be a mother:
‘This troublous wringing of hands’ [Child]
2. Plath’s poetry depicts her quest for poetic inspiration and vision:
In the poem ‘Mirror’, the poet’s quest for beauty and vision has turned inwards. She gazes inwards towards the self. She seeks despairingly for enlightenment through self-examination. What she finds appals her:
‘A woman bends over me, searching my reaches for what she really is… tears and an agitation of hands’.
In ‘Elm’ Plath probes her subconscious, and states she is saturated with self-knowledge. Plath experiences harrowing visions within the inner self. Plath invents a demon in her subconscious that gives her a very self-destructive vision:
‘I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?—
Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.’ [Elm]
In ‘Poppies in July’, Plath seems so emotionally exhausted that she has given up the rational pursuit of the truth or any kind of vision. She longs for drugged relief, for a ‘colourless’ state:
‘Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules’.
In ‘Child’ Plath has lost the capacity to find beauty for herself:
‘this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star’
But she feels a desire to provide visions of wonder and beauty for her infant’s eye:
‘I want to fill it with colour and ducks,
The zoo of the new’ [Child]
3. Plath explores her own depression.
Plath predicts her own fading away, destruction or ‘effacement’:
‘I'm no more your mother than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow effacement at the wind's hand’ [Morning Song]
Plath confesses her deep anguish:
‘She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands’ [Mirror]
Plath’s fears becomes ever more nightmarish:
‘I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me’ [Elm]
Plath reveals that she is inflicting suffering on herself:
‘Is it for such I agitate my heart’ [Elm]
Plath confesses the traumatic effect of electric-convulsive treatment:
‘I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires’ [Elm]
Plath confesses that isolation and lack of love haunt her:
‘I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love’ [Elm]
Plath reveals that she is becoming powerless to deal with her illness:
‘Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will’ [Elm]
Plath has moments when she longs to escape her mind through drugs: ‘Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule, dulling and stilling’ [Poppies]
Plath also experiences anger and fear at her condition, comparing her inner demons to a new consignment of bees:
‘It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.’ [Beebox]
Plath reveals her mental torture two weeks before her suicide:
‘this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star’ [Child]
4. Plath explores aspects of childhood and childhood imagination:
Newness and vulnerability:
‘New statue in a drafty museum’ [Morning Song]
The sense of wonder:
‘Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with colour and ducks,
The zoo of the new…
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical’ [Child]
5. Plath depicts nature, often using it as a poetic device to reflect her own emotional and mental state:
The temporary cloud stands for a weeping Plath:
‘the cloud that distils a mirror’ [Morning Song].
The elm represents the troubled inner self of Plath:
‘What is this, this face so murderous in its strangle of branches?’ [Elm]
The bees represent the inner demons of Plath:
‘It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering’ [Beebox]
Poetic Techniques
Plath's work has a mixture of comic and serious elements; it combines various types of rhymes and half rhymes in structured and free verse. At times Plath’s persona is curt. Her poems are graphically morbid, hallucinatory in their imagery, but full of ironic wit, technical brilliance, and tremendous emotional power.
She is known for her controlled stanzas, heavy with assonance and consonance, her elaborate syntax with its inversions and subordinate clauses, her ingenious metaphors.
There are many detailed examples of the poetic techniques used by Plath illustrated in Arrival of the Beebox and Child on the Ordinary Level English web pages.
Rhythm
Many of Plath’s expressions echo everyday speech, giving those poems a light and easy rhythm.
‘Poppies in July’ is also a good example:
‘Little poppies…little…hell flames,
Do you do…no harm?’
The repetition of ‘little’ and the addressing of the question to the poppies give the voice in the poem a natural feeling. The words in the quote are everyday words and are mainly monosyllables. The first line has three beats; the second has two. In the quoted example … indicates the end of a beat.
The beat varies a lot in this poem and extends to five and six beat lines:
‘Flickering...like that…wrinkly…and clear red…like the skin…of a mouth’.
The varied beat shows the erratic nature of Plath’s emotional state.
In ‘Mirror’, the diction is mainly everyday, but the effect of the lines is sombre. The long five beat rhythm of the final two lines reverberate with the heavy burden the poet carries within her as she meditates on her subconscious terrors:
‘In me…she has drowned…a young girl…and in me… an old woman
Rises…toward her…day after day…like a terrible…fish.’
Tone
There are many contrasting tones used within Plath’s poems. Tone reveals the poet’s inner state when she wrote these poems. The tones reveal a lot about her personality. She could be ironic and melancholic, elated and sombre in the same poem.
Here are examples of tone:
Gentle and sensuous: ‘moth-breath’ [Morning Song]
Troubled: ‘The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars’ [Morning Song]
Cold and impartial: ‘unmisted by love or dislike’ [Mirror]
Callous: ‘What ever I see I swallow immediately’ [Mirror]
Horror: ‘Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires’ [Elm]
Unbearable pain: ‘I must shriek’ [Elm]
Vile: ‘Little poppies, little hell flames’ [Poppies]
Vivid: ‘Little bloody skirts’ [Poppies]
Numb: ‘Dulling and stilling’ [Poppies]
Angry and frantic: ‘Black on black, angrily clambering’ [Beebox]
Tender, excited and charming: ‘The zoo of the new’ [Child]
Humorous and wacky: ‘Stalk without wrinkle’
Desolate : ‘Ceiling without a star’ [Child]
Imagery
Plath’s poems are dark and moody in their imagery, surreal, ironic, clever and emotional.
‘The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren…
Her radiance scathes me’ [Elm]
‘All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf’ [Elm]
‘This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic’ [Elm]
‘I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.’ [Poppies]
‘I know it with my great tap root’ [Elm]
Note the recurring images of a mirror:
‘I am silver and exact’ [Mirror]
‘the cloud that distils a mirror’ [Morning Song]
‘Your mouth opens clean as a cat's’ [Morning Song]
Note the recurring images of the sea:
‘A far sea moves in my ear’ [Morning Song]
‘Is it the sea you hear in me, its dissatisfactions’ [Elm]
Note the recurring images of violent wind:
‘slow effacement at the wind's hand’ [Morning Song]
‘A wind of such violence will tolerate no bystanding’ [Elm]
Note also the recurring images of the moon, which was traditionally linked to mental illness.
In ‘Elm’, surreal imagery about the frightening face of the moon is conveyed in everyday spoken English:
‘The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me…
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?’
The commonplace moon appears nightmarish to Plath. She projects her neurotic fears onto the moon as observed between the branches of the elm.
In ‘The Arrival of the Bee box ,’ Plath brilliantly interlinks madness and suicide in the surreal manner in which she refers to her beekeeper’s outfit:
‘In my moon suit and funeral veil’.
In ‘Mirror’ Plath uses the moon to denote self-deception:
‘Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.’
Metaphor:
‘New statue. In a drafty museum’ [Morning Song]
‘moth-breath’ [Morning Song]
‘cow-heavy’ [Morning Song]
‘Little poppies, little hell flames’ [Poppies]
‘Little bloody skirts’ [Poppies]
‘it was the coffin of a midget’ [Bee box]
‘in its strangle of branches’ [Elm]
Simile:
‘like a fat gold watch’ [Morning Song]
‘The clear vowels rise like balloons’ [Morning Song]
‘like a terrible fish’ [Mirror]
‘love... it has gone off, like a horse’ [Elm]
‘like the skin of a mouth’ [Poppies]
‘It is like a Roman mob’ [Bee box]
Paradox [apparent contradiction]
‘I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me’ [Elm]
‘I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns’ [Poppies]
Skoool.ie ftw0 -
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ok, i think we've all grasped i got them from skoool.ie...
ps, spank? cheer up!0 -
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im really thinkin that too... im sittin here waiting for responses which is STUPID since ya know, my leaving cert is in about 13 hours! AHH!!0
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Pff we've all done it. Its only english paper 1 - in my day that was the nice one
As for people giving out - fair enough its spam from skoool.ie - but if it helps even one person prior to exams then its fair enough.0
Maybe I should exit the internet lol 
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