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The Meaning Of Fear
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 Posted: Wed Sep 02, 2009 12:01 am Post subject: Sylvia Plath's poetry |
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Hey there Ifians!
I've been away for a while, haven't I? Need a bit of time to catch up on all those SG's coming from everywhere, like rabbits! 
Anyway, I just came in and suddenly realised that you could be a huge help, and hell I need all the help I can get.
For an english assignment I've decided to do something about Sylvia Plath's poetry, but out of about five poems I've attempted to read, I only made it through two, and I only barely managed to understand one, The Trial of Man.
What I want to ask is, has anyone read any of her poetry before, and if so, can you suggest some good ones? If you do have a suggestion, a light summary of your interpretation would be appreciated, as I doubt I could read the first two lines without my brain shutting off, especially not with this annoying flu.
I've found a site with links to most poems she wrote, here, should you need to refresh your memory or want to help. And, please, please, please someone tell me I'm not the only one who feels inferior after reading those poems.
Or confused, for that matter.
-Meanie
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Doors to the truth, an SG where a boy is propelled into worlds he is unfamiliar with. He crosses many worlds, and sees many things that force him to throw away his innocence, once, and for all. Fourth Chapter, out for viewing!
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solus.serpen
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| Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2009 12:12 am Post subject: |
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Ugh, I did her poems for my GCSE coursework two years ago. Whilst hard to understand at first, the beauty about Plath's poetry is the once you know a little bit about her past you can twist almost anything in her poems to reflect that and so gain bonus points for adding in your own knowledge.
Also, exactly the same as most other poetry, you can ramble, picking up on a few words and expanding on them.
Unfortunately (and I'm not sure how this happened) I don't have the full five pages or so I wrote on her poems, but I do have two saved on my computer so I'll post them later.
The poems I wrote on were 'blackberrying', 'mirror' and a little bit of 'daddy'. They're all similar because of her recognisable style of writing, but daddy is particularly useful if you want to draw in bits about her past because it is (from my very bad memory) basically a rant about her father. (her father died when she was young). An Interesting thing to note about this poem (daddy) is that she twists her past, saying that she was 'ten when they buried [her father]' when I actually think she was much younger when her father died.
I wish I'd kept more stuff saved on the computer but as luck has it I made annotations on the poems after printing them and have since chucked out my notes. I've also (as I said before) lost most of my coursework essay.
Providing there isn't a word limit though, I'll post the part of the essay I still have tonight (I've got to go to work now).
Hope this has been helpful,
~Solus 
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solus.serpen
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| Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2009 7:47 am Post subject: |
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Okay~ so I've finished work now and can finish off my earlier help.
As I said, I'll post the bit of the essay I have in the hope that it'll help but I'll also read through the poems again and give a quick summery and pick on a few specific points.
First though, here's the essay;
‘Blackberrying’, ‘Mirror’ and ‘Daddy’ are all written by Silvia Plath, an over imaginative, sensitive and depressed woman who (after several failed attempts) finally managed to end her own life when she was thirty one. Her tragic past is clearly visible in many of her poems and these three are no exception.
‘Mirror’ is a riddle poem with the themes of identity and a loss of youth. The poem doesn’t rhyme or have a clear rhythm, making the poem sound disordered and ‘mirroring’ Plath’s disordered mind. The poem contains a few metaphors such as ‘now I am a lake’ and ‘the eye of a little God’ but no similes. Throughout the poem Plath uses personification to make the mirror appear more human, giving it emotions such as ‘love or dislike’ and insinuating that the mirror now has a ‘heart’. This personification gives the mirror a sense of ‘fake importance’ as opposed to its real importance of being highly valued by its owner who ‘comes and goes’ and whose face it is that ‘replaces the darkness’ each morning. In the second stanza Plath likens the mirror to ‘a lake’ and this image is repeated several times through the last verse( ‘I am a lake…searching my reaches…drowned…rises…like a terrible fish’), emphasising the image in the reader’s mind. Many people believe that Silvia Plath is talking about herself when she writes about the women and line seventeen, ‘in me she has drowned a young girl’, could be interpreted as actual physical drowning as Plath once tried to drown herself when she was younger. The poem goes on to speak though about an old woman rising towards the mirror instead ‘like a terrible fish’. A typical symptom of depression is low self esteem and, here, the mirror appears to see Plath as she might have seen herself in her later years - as an ‘old woman’. If you read more deeply into the poem then a clear contrast is visible in line eleven which starts off with the image of a deep lake but ends on a shallow moral note that ‘looks are everything’ as the woman believes that the mirror (or the ‘lake’) can show her ‘what she really is’.
‘Blackberrying’ is a nature poem with the themes of loss and disappointment. Like mirror, the poem is disorganised in it’s layout, suggesting the equally disorganised and unsettled mind of its writer. The poem contains several metaphors (in line eleven she calls the choughs ‘bits of burnt paper’, and in line fifteen she calls the flies’ wings a ‘Chinese screen’) and similes (in line five she likens the ‘dumb’ blackberries to ‘eyes’, and in lines twenty-six to twenty-seven she likens the sound of the sea to that of ‘silversmiths beating and beating at an intractable metal’). The poem starts off by repeatedly stressing the fact that there is ‘nobody…nothing, nothing’ in the lane ‘but blackberries, blackberries…a blackberry lane’. All in all, Plath mentions the fact that there are blackberries around her four times in the first four lines and that she is alone with the blackberries three times in the first line. Repeating ‘blackberries’ in this manner at the start of the poem emphasises the lack thereof later on when Plath reaches the sea and the first line serves only to stress her apparent loneliness and the barrenness of the countryside around her, stressed again later in line twenty-five when there is ‘nothing, nothing but a great space’; this could also link to the loneliness she felt in real life, brought on by her depression. The poem starts by describing one of the poet’s walks in the countryside blackberry-picking, but gradually the poem becomes less centred on the blackberries and focuses in on the sea that is waiting at the end of the winding lane. In the first stanza Plath informs us that there is ‘a sea somewhere at the end’ of the blackberry lane and that it is ‘heaving’. In the second stanza she shares with us that she doesn’t ‘think the sea will appear at all’, adding a note of urgency and worry into the poem and causing the readers to briefly focus on the sea and its importance in the poem and, indeed, to the poet. In the third stanza the blackberry-picker finally reaches the end of the lane and Plath finishes the poem with an altogether louder and harsher image of the sea than the former imagery of the poem; ‘a great space of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths beating and beating at an intractable metal’. In view of Plath’s mental state of mind some people could interpret this ending imagery as a reflection of her deep-rooted attraction to ‘darkness’ as, even whilst she is surrounded by ‘one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies’ and ‘the high, green meadows’ that are ‘glowing, as if lit from within’, she is still intrinsically drawn to the overwhelmingly cold and impersonal sea that greets her at the end of the poem. In the third stanza Plath describes the hills as being ‘too green and sweet to have tasted salt’ - something someone might say about a young and innocent child. The fact that Plath then walks past these child-like hills to the ‘hills’ northern face’ could represent her maturity and passing from childhood to adulthood, linking to how she sees herself as an ‘old woman’ in ‘Mirror’. In the first stanza she talks of the blackberries squandering on her fingers and giving her a ‘blood sisterhood’. A blood sisterhood is an old tradition of sharing blood with someone you are close to so that you are linked by blood as a family member would be, even if you do not share the same mother or father. The fact that a ‘blood’ sisterhood springs to her mind when she sees the blackberries’ juices on her fingers could be linked to her morbid way of thinking, immediately associating ‘red’ with ‘blood’. In the second stanza Plath writes about the ‘coughs in black’ overhead, their voices as ‘the only voice, protesting, protesting’. The repetition of ‘protesting’ stresses its importance and some people might come to the conclusion that the cries of the red-legged crows sound like protests to Plath/the blackberry-picker because, inside, Plath herself is protesting. A unique and useful trait of Plath’s is her ability to perceive things differently to other people. This is shown in many of her poems and is how she always saw life. In ‘The Bell Jar’, an autobiography of her life, Plath writes about a trip to buy some meat - but when she sees the pork it turns into a live pig in her imagination and charges at her. Although this must have affected her in a negative manner, it does give her poems an interesting and novel twist that helps to keep the reader captivated.
----
I'll go re-read the poems now and see if I can pick some stuff out for daddy etc
~Solus
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solus.serpen
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| Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2009 8:07 am Post subject: |
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^ I'd like to point out that you would have to expand on the similies/metaphors etc. I mentioned in the essay and explain why they are important/what they add to the poem. Listing them isn't a great thing to do and won't gain you the highest marks.
Now for summeries.
Mirror;
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
To be honest I've covered most of this in the short essay thing I just posted. I am absolutely certain that the 'pink speckled wall' is a reference to her past, but I can't remember how it links/what used to be pink and speckled. My teacher was the one who told me, but she's since moved to the Carribbean! If you search on google then you can come across quite a few sites which analyse this poem, so that might be a helpful thing to do (I think I did it when making notes on Mirror).
Whilst Plath is writing from the mirror's point of view the woman she is talking about is generally accepted to be herself.
'No preconceptions' - this is a little contradictory, as the mirror then goes on to liken itself to a god and call the moon and candles 'liars'.
'I am not cruel, only truthful.' - Plath realises that the truth can be, and often is, unpleasant and has presumably learnt this through experience.
'Each morning...' basically when you're depressed you tend to follow a routine, and so this is just insinuating that the woman (Plath) is depressed.
'Terrible fish.' - even though Sylvia was only 31 when she committed suicide (and so younger when she wrote this) she has low self esteem (due to depression) and sees herself as ugly and old.
I think that's all that I didn't mention in the essay.
Next post will be blackberrying.
~Solus
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solus.serpen
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| Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2009 8:21 am Post subject: |
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Blackberrying;
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. Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.
Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks ---
Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.
Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.
I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.
The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.
One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.
The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,
Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
To the hills' northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.
Again, i've covered most of it in the essay.
'they must love me.' < Plath's need to be loved means she gains pleasure from thinking of the blackberries as forming a blood sisterhood with her. Or some might see it as a sarcastic comment.
'Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks --- Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.' The repitition of 'c's and 'b's in these two lines make them sound harsh which ties in nicely with the imagery.
'they believe in Heaven' - again I saw this as a sarcastic comment, positioned at about the same place as in the first verse.
'slapping it's phantom laundry...' - the imagery here is a strange one as 'slapping' is harsh and contrasts with the idea of 'phantom laundry' which is light and airy. Maybe Plath is hinting that even something that appears harmless (phantom laundry) can be harsh or cause pain (slapping).
'I follow the sheep path...' - the path less travelled. I don't think Plath is insinuating that she's an animal like a sheep here but that it isn't commonly used by humans. Like the saying 'I took the road less travelled'...and here it leads to the sea, a very harsh image.
The fact that Plath can see 'nothing, nothing' suggests that she can't see anything more for her in life, that her life isn't going anywhere execpt for the sea. I think this might be another reference to her trying to drown herself when she was younger; perhaps she is thinking about commiting suicide again and is referring to that thought here.
Apart from that I don't think there's much more to say on this poem. I'll post 'Daddy' next but after having read it again I'm a little lost, haha!
~Solus
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solus.serpen
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| Posted: Sat Sep 05, 2009 9:56 am Post subject: |
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~Okay, this one has far too many stanzas/verses!
Still, I'll have a go.
I'll probably annotate underneath each verse though so it's easier to read.
Daddy
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
I think this is Plath saying she is tired of depression. The Black shoe is (I believe) a reference to her depression in which she has lived her whole life pretty much (she tried to kill herself when she was very young). Being a poet isn't a well-paid job and she is inside a lot so the 'poor and white' bit is fairly straight-forward. She has also been overshadowed by people in her life; first her father and then Ted Hughes her husband who she likens to her father later in the poem.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time---
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
More confusing as a verse. I'm not sure if Plath is blaming herself for her fathers death (she was only eight when he got ill and died) or whether she's saying that she has had to kill her memory of him/his influence in her life. Perhaps she is refering to separating from Ted Hughes, who she links strongly with her dad. And I'm not sure what she didn't have time for. To get to know him? That's likely as she was only eight at the time.
Here's a paragraph I found to explain the rest of this stanza;
While most of the geographical references in Plath's poetry are to New
England or England, "Daddy" refers to San Francisco in the lines "Ghastly
statue with one gray toe / Big as a Frisco Seal / And a head in the freakish
Atlantic." These lines identify the daddy in the poem as a colossus who
stretches across America from the Atlantic to the Pacific--a colossus even
larger than the one described in "The Colossus." These seemingly obscure
details are in fact references to Plath's father: the "Ghastly statue with one
gray toe" is Otto Plath's gangrenous leg, and San Francisco Bay is where
he conducted his research on muscid larvae.
...and Otto Plath was obviously her father.
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
Okay. I know the paragraph I found above says that the 'head in the freakish atlantic' bit refers to her dad being a colossus, but I remember my teacher telling me that Plath used to have a picture of her father on the window and the blackboard where she wrote her poetry - and because she lived near the sea presumably the head of the father in the picture on the window would have the sea out of the window behind it and so it would seem like his head was in the 'freakish atlantic'.
I'm ignoring the second and third lines because you don't need to analyse every single bit of a poem to do an assignment on it.
Plath looks back on her younger self as loving her father deeply and missing him because she 'prayed to recover him' but it is clearly in the past.
'Ach du' is German for 'Oh, you'. It sounds reminiscent - and links into her talk about him being a Nazi later.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
I am very confused. Perhaps you should google this verse, but for now I'll skip it.
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
Plath couldn't understand her father. She couldn't talk to him for several reasons; firstly he worked quite a lot on his research and so was busy. Secondly he was oppresive and not easy to talk to. And thirdly she was hardly old enough to hold a reasonable conversation with him. Though she loved him unconditionally whilst she was young she was probably subconsciuosly wary of him and didn't talk to him often.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
'barb wire snare' is simply bringing in the imagery of the Nazis and their camps. 'Ich ich ich ich' is german for 'I I I I' as if she was stuttering, emphasising that she 'could hardly speak'. Again, she didn't know her father very well because she 'thought every German' was him; she stereotyped him as oppressive.
An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
this just emphasises the suffering she went through by likening herself to a Jew, persecuted so badly in the Holocaust.'
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I'm not sure about this. I'd simply pick up on the last line to emphasise the point she is making about being a Jew. This poem is so long you don't have to study every little bit of it.
I have always been sacred of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You----
Here she is likening her father to Hitler, making a parrallel with her being a Jew and her father Hitler. It shows how far apart they were/are - especially now he is dead.
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
Emphasising how she was overshadowed by her father with his facist like regime over her. Yet she still loved him unconditionally when she was young and her mother also loved him, so here she jibes that 'every woman adores a fascist'...hmm, I detect some sarcasm again. The boot image is used again, but it has changed. She associates the boot with her father now. I have attached a site with some extra information at the bottom of this post. It has a different interpretation of the first use of the boot image which I quite like.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Plath has a picture of her father by the blackboard like she has one of him on her window, so a reference to the fact she has pictures of him yet again. Satan is often depicted with a cleft in his foot like a hoof (sort of) so here Plath is saying that even though her father has a cleft in his chin instead of his foot it still makes him like the devil.
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
She was actually eight when they buried him because he died when she was eight. I think she is rounding the years though, because it probably wasn't when she was exactly twenty when she first tried to kill herself (I thought it was earlier). It seems like she was still obsessed with her father back then as she claims that her reason for trying to kill herself was to get back to her father.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
'Stuck me together with glue' - They tried to make her better but it was only a temporary fix in that she was still cracked and broken really. The model of a man in black is referring to her Husband Ted Hughes who reminded her of her father because of his personality and often dressed in black (from head to toe, apparently). Meinkampf is obviously another Hitler reference - for both their personalities.
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.
Some people have argumanted that this verse has a double meaning. The rack and the screw could simply refer to his love of torture but some say that it refers to sex (s&m?) and that it is as if Plath is marrying her father (probably by marrying Ted Hughes) by saying 'I do, I do'.
Either way, her tone changes in this verse to be more authoriative with 'daddy I'm finally through'. She seems to have taken action against his memory because the telephone is off at the root and she has blocked his voice and memories from coming through.
If I've killed one man, I've killed two---
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
Again, she is authoriative. Killing refers to forgetting here so she has cut herself off from the memory of both her father and of her ex husband. She likens Ted Hughes to a vampire who suppressed her for seven years whilst they were married. 'Daddy you can lie back now' is almost like saying rest in peace, but it is obviously twisted when you read the next verse.
There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
the stake in his heart means Plath is also likening her father to a vampire. Now she is in control it seems that the villagers agree with her and it is her father who is being suppressed and trodden on. 'Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through' is a very effective line and shows her emotions clearly. She has finally managed to get rid of his oppressive influence from her life. It could also be an obscure reference to her being through with life - as she wrote this poem shortly before committing suidice by sticking her head in an oven and inhaling gas (<when she was 31).
~~So there ya go. Wah, this has taken me a while but I hope it helps. It was more fun than I thought it would be, sorting through my old work like this and looking back over these poems - but I'd forgotten just how depressing they were! Haha.
I'll link you to a site which has a nice summery of this poem;
http://www.echeat.com/essay.php?t=30961
I hope you do well on your assignment! If there's any questions you have then feel free to post and I'll see if I can help.
Obviously, you might decide you don't like these poems but nevermind; pick whichever you want. I'm sure there are easier ones among the list of her works.
~Solus
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