In The Colossus, Plath’s attempt to conjoin two initially separate images, herself and a problematic world, takes the form of attempted transformation of self. She tries to undergo a metamorphosis into the world of nature into two ways: into animate nature, as in ‘Blue Moles’, “Frog Autumn”, “Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond” and “Mushrooms”, or into inanimate nature in “The Lorelei”, “Full Fathom Five” and “Suicide Off Egg Rock”. Plath also explores the divergence of the private and public realms in art, the motivation of artist and the role of creator in the poems like “Two Views of a Cadaver Room,” and “The Burnt-out Spa.” These poems cultivate a similar kind of wry oblivion, and at the same time suggest death and dismemberment which are commensurate with a mature and comprehensive vision of life. In fact, the struggle against the odds the availability of real voice in the midst of imaginative chaos and dysfunction, the realization of the poet of her own failures, her won betrayals in the Colossus poems. In place of a convincing voice with a full range of tones and nuance, the poet finds only a “blue and improbable” self- image. Fixed and static, aesthetically “framed in a basket work of cat-tails’” her vision muffles her voice in these flat, pictorial poems like “The Burn-out Spa”:
Learning over, I encounter one
Blue and improbable person
Framed in a basketwork of cat-tails
… … …
She is gracious and austere
Seated beneath the toneles water!
It is not I, It is not I. CP, 138.
In the poem, “The Stones”, the threat of a mental breakdown is no more a possibility but a fact. The poem deals with a hospital experience. Plath seems to have learnt from Roethke a way of handling experience of great inner violence through a surrealistic vocabulary. Like Roethke, Plath uses simple sentences and an elemental imagery:
This is the city where men are mended.
I lie on a great anvil.
The flat blue sky- circle
Flew off like the hat of a doll
When I fell out of the light. CP., 136.
Hospital is the city where men are mended. What underlines the metaphor is Plath’s view of the body as a constructed piece. As a hospital poem it is typical of a genre in confessional verse. Its apparent failure of regeneration in terms of metaphors and images indicates the developing horror of Plath’s inner world. A crisis of identity occurred for American women in the 1950s, which Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique suggests, “was caused by the existence of public and official images of women which were inimical to personal growth and which at the same time precluded, except in the most fortunate, a private image that would sustain the individual from day to day.”28
Plath’s preoccupation with fear in this phase is on intellectual level, but not on emotional level. In this phase nature has been the paramount agent to display the emotion with all externals, where Plath expresses her feeling of loneliness and fear through the mode of confession. Her landscape in the Colossus is distorted where she does not get a refuge from the turmoil of life. In her autobiographical prose piece “Ocean 1212 W,” she writes, “My childhood landscape was not land but the end of land- the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.” Like all the forces of nature the sea, also does oppose man. Plath is very much aware of its hostility and brutal force. Thus, struggling against all odds has become the important theme in the collection of poems, The Colossus. The confrontation with the problems of life of a young talent like Plath just begins here and takes a new mode in her latter poems.
In the poems of Crossing the Water, Plath’s technique is in the process of becoming, of developing from an experimental to a finely honed and natural mode. It is in the transitional stage that we see a shift in Plath’s verse from a written to a spoken language. Moreover, the poet’s extreme self-consciousness, responsible for the mediocrity of so many of these transitional poems, perhaps a necessary qualification for the precision of the late works: here the poet comes to know herself so that her attitude can be expressed, rather than explained. In her book Sylvia Plath, Pashupati Jha points out:
A cycle of Plath’s poem since October 1959 begins with
an acute and manifest withdrawal into self due to
overwhelming fears. Though fear is common to both,
the difference between the first phase and this
transitional phase (1959-61) is strong desire for
regression, coupled with a feeling of cultivated passivity
to escape the eagle eyed fear. Moreover, the largely
impersonal fear of the first phase, slowly but certainly,
moves now to the personal level. 29
The world constructed by the poems in Crossing the Water is mutable one, amorphous almost; a world in which, behind the apparent permanency of natural objects, things are breaking up; what makes it compelling is the shock of surprise which comes with recognition – the way in which personal themes are transmuted into poems which look intuitively outward for the effect. Sylvia is conscious of the deepest guilt in her own split personality and destructive forces within her own self. Her kinship with her mother smacks of a sense of violent unease. And there is a marked hostility with other women. In the poem “Lesbos,” she expresses her personal antipathy for them: “Every woman’s whore. I cannot communicate.” “Lesbos,” is a very concentrated statement about the false, hypocritical relationships between the so called enlightened young mothers in the modern world.
In a negative flow of her life, with all sorts of adversities and flaws like her mental breakdown, attempted suicide and subsequent shock treatment, she develops a kind of new, emerging creativity. While writing poems in Crossing the Water, she was improving, meditating and experimenting with words, breaking away from her earlier rigidities, public postures in order to hear her own stirring, nascent voice from within. Her vision changed by reading Paul Radins’ African Folktales and Sculptures and Theodore Roethke’s poems. These two artists immediately influenced Plath and made her acutely sensitive to her personal circumstances, and stirred her subconscious psyche deeply, ranking up fearful memories of the recent past. Radin’s folktales deal with bizarre miraculous, melodramatic stories of death, mutilation, betrayal, violence, revenge, retribution and magical resurrection with hallucinatory intensity. They fascinated Plath because of their immediacy. Being influenced by Roethke, Plath gets a way to equate the poetic process with a “kind of fishing deep down patiently in the dark pool of the unconscious, and coming up with all hidden, sinister as well as fascinating debris.”30 Radin supplied Plath the thematic equivalents of her own nightmare, the real spirit and framework for the poetic structure, while Roethke provided the most important sequence for her poetry in this transitional phase.
The transition from one set of images to another, from dialectic of self and nature to a dialectic of self and history in which mythology continues to play a crucial role. In “Barren Woman,” a poem originally published in Crossing the Water with the title “Small Hours,” sterility, especially female biological inability to bear children becomes a crucial metaphor in the post colossus poems for stasis, entrapment, noncreative, and an end to process. “For a woman poet, biologically barrenness can become a metaphor for aesthetic barrenness and in any case what is created may be dangerous and an instrument leading to death.”31
The poem describes an internal landscape, which reflects the image of her internal state. In the first stanza she describes herself as a museum.”Empty, I echo to the least footfall, /Museum without statues, grand with pillars, porticoes, rotundas. ”Everything is static, motionless, except the fountain, which seems at first to offer some possibility of movement. Like the grass in “Hard Castle Crags,” which also initially seemed to offer some possibility of movement and life in a stone frozen world but was “tied, as a moon bound sea/ moves on to its root.”The vision of her world is static as stated in “Barren Woman”, where there is no movement, at least no annihilation, ‘nothing can happen.’ The blankness brings out the sensory deprivation: “The moon lays a hand on my forehead/ Blank-faced and mum as a nurse.”
The hospital experience for Plath is a metaphor to develop the inherent contradictions of human existence. All her hospital poems indirectly concern with death and rebirth. In “Face Lift,” after her operation she says:
Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,
Pink and smooth as a baby. (CP, 156)
Here Plath projects a concept of rebirth, which is only physical. In “The Stones,” after the shock therapy, she had hoped to ‘be good as new.’ A similar image marks the end of “Getting There,” one of her most openly anguished poems included in the volume Ariel. The poem describes a train running across a war-torn landscape clotted with wounded soldiers and mutilated bodies. The journey is towards death, which really comes as a relieving comfort:
The carriages rock, they are cradles.
And I, stepping from this skin
Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces
Step to you from the black car of Lethe,
Pure as a baby. CP., 249.
The central metaphor here is that of the body as a mass of “old bandages, boredoms, old faces.”Against this chaos, death becomes a purifying experience. There is nothing beyond it, stepping from the skin is the ultimate act of salvation as well as destruction. In her transitional phase the sense of being lost in oblivion and confusion is also echoed in some of her poems. The concluding lines of “Leaving Early” express such sense:
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. CP,146 .
Plath’s poems are socio-psychological as she uses her personal situations as a model, an analogue, and a taking off point for horrors socially and historically based. In the midst of regression and passivity, the persistence fear remained like a familiar shadow in the confessional poetry. Plath’s later poems are vey much condensed with aggression and fury with a distinct mark of conflict between stasis and movement that claims the rebirth for self. These poems are mostly included in Ariel and Winter Trees that rave reviews of sensitive restoration of her dominant confessional mode. In fact, in her last phase of poetic development, Plath gathers an inner fury to confront the dark demons of fear, she had earlier strained to avoid, and instead of speculation, action enters her voice. It becomes vengeful and challenging where she loses her grip over her restraint emotion for the poetic expression. Though there is the impression of fear in the last poems of Plath, it appears as antagonistic in artistic flavour. In a poetic process it sustains the magnitude of fury against fear that dominates the poetic mode. Despite a marked influence of Roethke, there is sign of an evolving individual style since “Plath has abandoned narrative linearity for tonal nuance, Villanelles for vernacular, impersonal ideals for personal ambivalence, external description for internal symbolism.” 32
The last phase of poetic development shows aggression and germination of internal fury that dominates her poetic development later on. “Three Women” reflects the frightened feminine experiencing childbirth. There are three different voices in the poem like a wife, a secretary and a girl student. The voice of the wife is expressive of the normal attitude, for her expectation of delivering a child is ‘great’ event, and she feels herself like “a seed to break.”But she is also aware of “cargo of agony,” the labour pain and hence she is quite apprehensive of the “calm before something awful.”She has prepared herself, nevertheless, for this troublesome future; the image of an innocent child in her mind is portrayed:
I have never seen a thing so clear.
His lids are like the lilac flower
And soft as moth, his breathe.
I shall not let go. CP., 181.
The second voice of the “Three Women” is the secretary, who is apprehensive of the death of her unborn baby, “I saw death in the bare trees.” For her abortion means to become flat like men- and she considers flatness the source of all misery on earth:
The flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions,
Bulldozers, guillotine, white chambers of shrieks proceed
Both the wife and the secretary accepted their motherhood happily, but the third woman, the student, resents her ill-timed pregnancy. Subsequently the student gives birth to a baby girl and leaves it behind the hospital with regret:
I am so vulnerable suddenly.
I am a wound walking out of hospital
I am wound that they are letting go
I leave my healthy behind. I leave someone
Who would adhere to me: I undo her
Fingers like bandages: I go.
The sense of aggression is very clear in “Three Women.’ For instance, the student loathing her pregnancy grinds her teeth contemplating foeticide: “I should have murdered this, that murders me.”In the second voice the secretary has also the murderous rage:
Men have used her meanly .She will eat them
Eat them, eat them, eat them in the end.
The three women create together a complex woman as demanded by nature, man and society. But there is a strong undercurrent of a different woman growing side by side and suggesting the possibility of additional dimensions to a woman’s existence other than mere biological creativity. The poem thus becomes a relentless exploration of the ambiguous dimensions of the universe as envisioned by the female psyche.
In the Ariel group of poems “Tulips” and “Cut” there is a deep level of conversation between the poets’ heart and the violence of the external world. “Cut” reverses the process of “Tulips” by beginning with the personal wound and bringing it back to the physical level. The poems of Ariel pass on from physical violence to psychological violence. Garry Lane while noting the abruptness of the closing lines in “Cut” finds a new speaking voice developing in its jerky lines that will find full expression in “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy”, where “a taut linguistic violence” strikes us “almost like a physical blow”33
“Daddy” is typical of a group of poems that draw on metaphors of psychological violence. Alvarez heard some of these poems from Plath and offers his opinion in The Savage God:
Her voice, as she read them was hot and full of venom
…I was appalled: at first hearing, the things seemed to
Be not so much poetry as assault and battery.
The poem “Cut” extends the correspondence into a historical vision. The ‘bowl of red’ that the “Tulips” ends with is, here, the starting point for a wild imaginative flight into a “maniac and cunningly associative imagery” (“Lane,” 130).The thumb begins its transformation into a series of breath taking images in “Cut”:
Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz. CP., 235.
Avenging the various fearful presences in her poetry through “Purdah,” “Medusa,” “Lesbos,” “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus” and other poems, the poet has still to confront the greatest fear of death. This conception persists to the end of Plath’s poetic career. The imagery of last poems is particularly suggestive of death and desolation, bloodied mouths, balloons squeaking like a cat, the blood jet, the sea sucking obsessively in a pit of rock , area closing when the garden stiffens, a white skull eaten by weedy greens and sheeted mirrors. The calm of these poems is neither mystical nor mysterious. Rather it springs from sheer exhaustion, and acceptance of failure.
The last freezing months of her life she was visited, like some waiting stigmatist, by an almost hallucinating creativity- the astonishing poems in Ariel and in later volume called Winter Trees. Most of the poems in these volumes are more emphatic, more direct, simpler and more linguistically natural. In Winter Trees, Sylvia Plath continually confronts her complex biology and fierce temperament and seems continually affronted by both. It is her own particular vulnerability and her transcendent awareness of the nature of things, which gives a terrifically prophetic aura to her voice, her lines and images; the stark and restless landscape over which she travels with such intensity, a landscape seductively beckoning to her for a further advance or a terrifying descent. Sylvia Plath in “For a Fatherless Son” compares her child’s smile to ‘found money,’ thus expressing the joy that a mother feels in seeing her child. Love and dread for the child are best expressed in the last lines of “Mary’s Song:”
It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child the world will kill and eat. CP., 257.
In the final analysis, however, it is the perfection, as well as of, death, which emerges the ultimate victor as evident in the last poem Plath wrote- “Edge,” perhaps the most frightening poem in Ariel. The mood is calm, even peaceful. The speaker of the poem describes in a detached and slow, almost incantatory rhythm, a woman who is already dead. The poem has the quality of a still photograph:
The woman is perfected
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment. CP., 272.
In “Edge,” the folding rose is the metaphor of ultimate violence and death. The self merges into the order, obliterating all tensions. The calm acceptance of her fate becomes obvious, evidence of which is in the lines of “Contusion”, written just a week earlier than her suicide:
The heart shuts
The sea slides back
The mirrors are sheeted. CP.,271.
Plath was accompanied in suicide by other gifted poets like Randall Jarrell in 1965, John Berryman in 1972, Anne Sexton in 1974. The tranquil composure of death in woman’s body is telltale eventually of the resolve in the poet’s mind- a resolve that would be translated into real death all too soon. The poem has unfolded her confession, through poem upon poem, about the vulnerability, regressive wish, and aggressive rage: now all is “unfolding” in death’s silence. It is such a detached experience of death that’s sets the poet apart from others: “the only difference between the artist and the people like me,” says Charles Newman “is that the artists watch themselves die, while we are dead before we know it.” 34
Despite being ‘confessional’ with highly personal, private or subjective approach- the poems of Sylvia Plath seem to have been dignified with a universal acceptability. Having analyzed the major themes and motifs found in the works of Sylvia Plath, one might venture to summarize what her philosophy of life is. The world, to her, seems to be full of pain and suffering and the human lot far from enviable. The world, feels Plath, is wrongly considered to be a place of enjoyment; it is, in fact, an unpleasant experience- necessary but unpleasant in the course of which man is bowed down by sorrows from all quarters. The analytical study of Plath’s poetry supports the fact that the first phase of her creativity is marked by a sense of frightening doom- a doom brought on by the immense but indifferent cosmic order, the dread of death triggered off by the untimely death of father, and many feminine and existential fears. The zeal of a youthful mind dominates the suffering persona, and formal design cover up the thin surface of experience.
Learning over, I encounter one
Blue and improbable person
Framed in a basketwork of cat-tails
… … …
She is gracious and austere
Seated beneath the toneles water!
It is not I, It is not I. CP, 138.
In the poem, “The Stones”, the threat of a mental breakdown is no more a possibility but a fact. The poem deals with a hospital experience. Plath seems to have learnt from Roethke a way of handling experience of great inner violence through a surrealistic vocabulary. Like Roethke, Plath uses simple sentences and an elemental imagery:
This is the city where men are mended.
I lie on a great anvil.
The flat blue sky- circle
Flew off like the hat of a doll
When I fell out of the light. CP., 136.
Hospital is the city where men are mended. What underlines the metaphor is Plath’s view of the body as a constructed piece. As a hospital poem it is typical of a genre in confessional verse. Its apparent failure of regeneration in terms of metaphors and images indicates the developing horror of Plath’s inner world. A crisis of identity occurred for American women in the 1950s, which Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique suggests, “was caused by the existence of public and official images of women which were inimical to personal growth and which at the same time precluded, except in the most fortunate, a private image that would sustain the individual from day to day.”28
Plath’s preoccupation with fear in this phase is on intellectual level, but not on emotional level. In this phase nature has been the paramount agent to display the emotion with all externals, where Plath expresses her feeling of loneliness and fear through the mode of confession. Her landscape in the Colossus is distorted where she does not get a refuge from the turmoil of life. In her autobiographical prose piece “Ocean 1212 W,” she writes, “My childhood landscape was not land but the end of land- the cold, salt, running hills of the Atlantic. I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.” Like all the forces of nature the sea, also does oppose man. Plath is very much aware of its hostility and brutal force. Thus, struggling against all odds has become the important theme in the collection of poems, The Colossus. The confrontation with the problems of life of a young talent like Plath just begins here and takes a new mode in her latter poems.
In the poems of Crossing the Water, Plath’s technique is in the process of becoming, of developing from an experimental to a finely honed and natural mode. It is in the transitional stage that we see a shift in Plath’s verse from a written to a spoken language. Moreover, the poet’s extreme self-consciousness, responsible for the mediocrity of so many of these transitional poems, perhaps a necessary qualification for the precision of the late works: here the poet comes to know herself so that her attitude can be expressed, rather than explained. In her book Sylvia Plath, Pashupati Jha points out:
A cycle of Plath’s poem since October 1959 begins with
an acute and manifest withdrawal into self due to
overwhelming fears. Though fear is common to both,
the difference between the first phase and this
transitional phase (1959-61) is strong desire for
regression, coupled with a feeling of cultivated passivity
to escape the eagle eyed fear. Moreover, the largely
impersonal fear of the first phase, slowly but certainly,
moves now to the personal level. 29
The world constructed by the poems in Crossing the Water is mutable one, amorphous almost; a world in which, behind the apparent permanency of natural objects, things are breaking up; what makes it compelling is the shock of surprise which comes with recognition – the way in which personal themes are transmuted into poems which look intuitively outward for the effect. Sylvia is conscious of the deepest guilt in her own split personality and destructive forces within her own self. Her kinship with her mother smacks of a sense of violent unease. And there is a marked hostility with other women. In the poem “Lesbos,” she expresses her personal antipathy for them: “Every woman’s whore. I cannot communicate.” “Lesbos,” is a very concentrated statement about the false, hypocritical relationships between the so called enlightened young mothers in the modern world.
In a negative flow of her life, with all sorts of adversities and flaws like her mental breakdown, attempted suicide and subsequent shock treatment, she develops a kind of new, emerging creativity. While writing poems in Crossing the Water, she was improving, meditating and experimenting with words, breaking away from her earlier rigidities, public postures in order to hear her own stirring, nascent voice from within. Her vision changed by reading Paul Radins’ African Folktales and Sculptures and Theodore Roethke’s poems. These two artists immediately influenced Plath and made her acutely sensitive to her personal circumstances, and stirred her subconscious psyche deeply, ranking up fearful memories of the recent past. Radin’s folktales deal with bizarre miraculous, melodramatic stories of death, mutilation, betrayal, violence, revenge, retribution and magical resurrection with hallucinatory intensity. They fascinated Plath because of their immediacy. Being influenced by Roethke, Plath gets a way to equate the poetic process with a “kind of fishing deep down patiently in the dark pool of the unconscious, and coming up with all hidden, sinister as well as fascinating debris.”30 Radin supplied Plath the thematic equivalents of her own nightmare, the real spirit and framework for the poetic structure, while Roethke provided the most important sequence for her poetry in this transitional phase.
The transition from one set of images to another, from dialectic of self and nature to a dialectic of self and history in which mythology continues to play a crucial role. In “Barren Woman,” a poem originally published in Crossing the Water with the title “Small Hours,” sterility, especially female biological inability to bear children becomes a crucial metaphor in the post colossus poems for stasis, entrapment, noncreative, and an end to process. “For a woman poet, biologically barrenness can become a metaphor for aesthetic barrenness and in any case what is created may be dangerous and an instrument leading to death.”31
The poem describes an internal landscape, which reflects the image of her internal state. In the first stanza she describes herself as a museum.”Empty, I echo to the least footfall, /Museum without statues, grand with pillars, porticoes, rotundas. ”Everything is static, motionless, except the fountain, which seems at first to offer some possibility of movement. Like the grass in “Hard Castle Crags,” which also initially seemed to offer some possibility of movement and life in a stone frozen world but was “tied, as a moon bound sea/ moves on to its root.”The vision of her world is static as stated in “Barren Woman”, where there is no movement, at least no annihilation, ‘nothing can happen.’ The blankness brings out the sensory deprivation: “The moon lays a hand on my forehead/ Blank-faced and mum as a nurse.”
The hospital experience for Plath is a metaphor to develop the inherent contradictions of human existence. All her hospital poems indirectly concern with death and rebirth. In “Face Lift,” after her operation she says:
Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,
Pink and smooth as a baby. (CP, 156)
Here Plath projects a concept of rebirth, which is only physical. In “The Stones,” after the shock therapy, she had hoped to ‘be good as new.’ A similar image marks the end of “Getting There,” one of her most openly anguished poems included in the volume Ariel. The poem describes a train running across a war-torn landscape clotted with wounded soldiers and mutilated bodies. The journey is towards death, which really comes as a relieving comfort:
The carriages rock, they are cradles.
And I, stepping from this skin
Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces
Step to you from the black car of Lethe,
Pure as a baby. CP., 249.
The central metaphor here is that of the body as a mass of “old bandages, boredoms, old faces.”Against this chaos, death becomes a purifying experience. There is nothing beyond it, stepping from the skin is the ultimate act of salvation as well as destruction. In her transitional phase the sense of being lost in oblivion and confusion is also echoed in some of her poems. The concluding lines of “Leaving Early” express such sense:
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. CP,146 .
Plath’s poems are socio-psychological as she uses her personal situations as a model, an analogue, and a taking off point for horrors socially and historically based. In the midst of regression and passivity, the persistence fear remained like a familiar shadow in the confessional poetry. Plath’s later poems are vey much condensed with aggression and fury with a distinct mark of conflict between stasis and movement that claims the rebirth for self. These poems are mostly included in Ariel and Winter Trees that rave reviews of sensitive restoration of her dominant confessional mode. In fact, in her last phase of poetic development, Plath gathers an inner fury to confront the dark demons of fear, she had earlier strained to avoid, and instead of speculation, action enters her voice. It becomes vengeful and challenging where she loses her grip over her restraint emotion for the poetic expression. Though there is the impression of fear in the last poems of Plath, it appears as antagonistic in artistic flavour. In a poetic process it sustains the magnitude of fury against fear that dominates the poetic mode. Despite a marked influence of Roethke, there is sign of an evolving individual style since “Plath has abandoned narrative linearity for tonal nuance, Villanelles for vernacular, impersonal ideals for personal ambivalence, external description for internal symbolism.” 32
The last phase of poetic development shows aggression and germination of internal fury that dominates her poetic development later on. “Three Women” reflects the frightened feminine experiencing childbirth. There are three different voices in the poem like a wife, a secretary and a girl student. The voice of the wife is expressive of the normal attitude, for her expectation of delivering a child is ‘great’ event, and she feels herself like “a seed to break.”But she is also aware of “cargo of agony,” the labour pain and hence she is quite apprehensive of the “calm before something awful.”She has prepared herself, nevertheless, for this troublesome future; the image of an innocent child in her mind is portrayed:
I have never seen a thing so clear.
His lids are like the lilac flower
And soft as moth, his breathe.
I shall not let go. CP., 181.
The second voice of the “Three Women” is the secretary, who is apprehensive of the death of her unborn baby, “I saw death in the bare trees.” For her abortion means to become flat like men- and she considers flatness the source of all misery on earth:
The flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions,
Bulldozers, guillotine, white chambers of shrieks proceed
Both the wife and the secretary accepted their motherhood happily, but the third woman, the student, resents her ill-timed pregnancy. Subsequently the student gives birth to a baby girl and leaves it behind the hospital with regret:
I am so vulnerable suddenly.
I am a wound walking out of hospital
I am wound that they are letting go
I leave my healthy behind. I leave someone
Who would adhere to me: I undo her
Fingers like bandages: I go.
The sense of aggression is very clear in “Three Women.’ For instance, the student loathing her pregnancy grinds her teeth contemplating foeticide: “I should have murdered this, that murders me.”In the second voice the secretary has also the murderous rage:
Men have used her meanly .She will eat them
Eat them, eat them, eat them in the end.
The three women create together a complex woman as demanded by nature, man and society. But there is a strong undercurrent of a different woman growing side by side and suggesting the possibility of additional dimensions to a woman’s existence other than mere biological creativity. The poem thus becomes a relentless exploration of the ambiguous dimensions of the universe as envisioned by the female psyche.
In the Ariel group of poems “Tulips” and “Cut” there is a deep level of conversation between the poets’ heart and the violence of the external world. “Cut” reverses the process of “Tulips” by beginning with the personal wound and bringing it back to the physical level. The poems of Ariel pass on from physical violence to psychological violence. Garry Lane while noting the abruptness of the closing lines in “Cut” finds a new speaking voice developing in its jerky lines that will find full expression in “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy”, where “a taut linguistic violence” strikes us “almost like a physical blow”33
“Daddy” is typical of a group of poems that draw on metaphors of psychological violence. Alvarez heard some of these poems from Plath and offers his opinion in The Savage God:
Her voice, as she read them was hot and full of venom
…I was appalled: at first hearing, the things seemed to
Be not so much poetry as assault and battery.
The poem “Cut” extends the correspondence into a historical vision. The ‘bowl of red’ that the “Tulips” ends with is, here, the starting point for a wild imaginative flight into a “maniac and cunningly associative imagery” (“Lane,” 130).The thumb begins its transformation into a series of breath taking images in “Cut”:
Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz. CP., 235.
Avenging the various fearful presences in her poetry through “Purdah,” “Medusa,” “Lesbos,” “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus” and other poems, the poet has still to confront the greatest fear of death. This conception persists to the end of Plath’s poetic career. The imagery of last poems is particularly suggestive of death and desolation, bloodied mouths, balloons squeaking like a cat, the blood jet, the sea sucking obsessively in a pit of rock , area closing when the garden stiffens, a white skull eaten by weedy greens and sheeted mirrors. The calm of these poems is neither mystical nor mysterious. Rather it springs from sheer exhaustion, and acceptance of failure.
The last freezing months of her life she was visited, like some waiting stigmatist, by an almost hallucinating creativity- the astonishing poems in Ariel and in later volume called Winter Trees. Most of the poems in these volumes are more emphatic, more direct, simpler and more linguistically natural. In Winter Trees, Sylvia Plath continually confronts her complex biology and fierce temperament and seems continually affronted by both. It is her own particular vulnerability and her transcendent awareness of the nature of things, which gives a terrifically prophetic aura to her voice, her lines and images; the stark and restless landscape over which she travels with such intensity, a landscape seductively beckoning to her for a further advance or a terrifying descent. Sylvia Plath in “For a Fatherless Son” compares her child’s smile to ‘found money,’ thus expressing the joy that a mother feels in seeing her child. Love and dread for the child are best expressed in the last lines of “Mary’s Song:”
It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child the world will kill and eat. CP., 257.
In the final analysis, however, it is the perfection, as well as of, death, which emerges the ultimate victor as evident in the last poem Plath wrote- “Edge,” perhaps the most frightening poem in Ariel. The mood is calm, even peaceful. The speaker of the poem describes in a detached and slow, almost incantatory rhythm, a woman who is already dead. The poem has the quality of a still photograph:
The woman is perfected
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment. CP., 272.
In “Edge,” the folding rose is the metaphor of ultimate violence and death. The self merges into the order, obliterating all tensions. The calm acceptance of her fate becomes obvious, evidence of which is in the lines of “Contusion”, written just a week earlier than her suicide:
The heart shuts
The sea slides back
The mirrors are sheeted. CP.,271.
Plath was accompanied in suicide by other gifted poets like Randall Jarrell in 1965, John Berryman in 1972, Anne Sexton in 1974. The tranquil composure of death in woman’s body is telltale eventually of the resolve in the poet’s mind- a resolve that would be translated into real death all too soon. The poem has unfolded her confession, through poem upon poem, about the vulnerability, regressive wish, and aggressive rage: now all is “unfolding” in death’s silence. It is such a detached experience of death that’s sets the poet apart from others: “the only difference between the artist and the people like me,” says Charles Newman “is that the artists watch themselves die, while we are dead before we know it.” 34
Despite being ‘confessional’ with highly personal, private or subjective approach- the poems of Sylvia Plath seem to have been dignified with a universal acceptability. Having analyzed the major themes and motifs found in the works of Sylvia Plath, one might venture to summarize what her philosophy of life is. The world, to her, seems to be full of pain and suffering and the human lot far from enviable. The world, feels Plath, is wrongly considered to be a place of enjoyment; it is, in fact, an unpleasant experience- necessary but unpleasant in the course of which man is bowed down by sorrows from all quarters. The analytical study of Plath’s poetry supports the fact that the first phase of her creativity is marked by a sense of frightening doom- a doom brought on by the immense but indifferent cosmic order, the dread of death triggered off by the untimely death of father, and many feminine and existential fears. The zeal of a youthful mind dominates the suffering persona, and formal design cover up the thin surface of experience.