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Sylvia Plath S Poems A Critical Analysis by Qaisar Iqbal Janjua PDF
Sylvia Plath S Poems A Critical Analysis by Qaisar Iqbal Janjua PDF
Sylvia Plath
(1936-1967)
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Hughes had left her, are among her most famous: Lady Lazarus, Daddy,
Fever 103, Purdah, Poppies in July, Ariel, and others. The
magazines to which she sent these poems did not accept them; although the
New Yorker magazine had a First Reading contract, its poetry editor refused
all her late work except for a few lines.
Moving with the children to a London flat in December 1962, Plath
tried to make a new life for herself, but the worst winter in a century added
to her depression. Without a telephone, ill, and troubled with the care of the
two infants, she committed suicide by sleeping pills and gas inhalation on 11
February 1963, just two weeks after the publication of The Bell Jar (written
by Victoria Lucas).
That novel, and the various collections of her poems that appeared
during the next twenty years, secured for Plath the position of one of the
most important women writers in the States. The mixture of comedic selfdeprecation and forceful anger made her work a foreshadowing of the
feminist writing that appeared in the later 1960s and the 1970s. Like
Friedans 1963 The Feminine Mystique, Plath's Bell Jar followed in 1965
with the posthumously published collection Ariel, was both a harbinger and
an early voice of the women's movement. As the posthumous awarding of
the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry to Plath's Collected Poems showed, her
audience was not limited to women readers, nor did her writing express only
feminist sentiments.
Plath's work is valuable for its stylistic accomplishments--its melding
of comic and serious elements, its ribald fashioning of near and slant rhymes
in a free-form structure, its terse voicing of themes that have too often been
treated only with piety. It is also valuable for its ability to reach todays
reader, because of its concern with the real problems of our culture. In this
age of gender conflicts, broken families, and economic inequities, Plath's
forthright language speaks loudly about the anger of being both betrayed and
powerless.
After she had graduated, summa cum laede, from Smith in 1955, she
went to Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship, and there she met
the poet Ted Hughes. They were married in London in June 1956. The
marriage was for six years a strong union of supremely dedicated writers.
Sylvias wholehearted enthusiasm for Hughes's work, which she sent off to
the competition that won him fame, was balanced by his steadfast belief in
her exceptional gift. They lived in Massachusetts (Cambridge, Northampton-where Sylvia taught for a year at Smith--and Boston), then in London and
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Devon. A daughter, Frieda, was born in April 1960, and a son, Nicholas, in
January 1962.
Sylvia Plaths early poems--already drenched in typical imagery of
glass, moon, blood, hospitals, foetuses, and skulls--were mainly exercises
or pastiches of work by poets she admired: Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats,
Marianne Moore. Late in 1959, when she and her husband were at Yaddo,
the writers colony in New York State, she produced the seven-part Poem
for a Birthday, which owes its form to Theodore Roethkes Lost Son
sequence, though its theme is her own traumatic breakdown and suicide
attempt at 21. After 1960 her poems increasingly explored the surreal
landscape of her imprisoned psyche under the looming shadow of a dead
father and a mother on whom she was resentfully dependent.
A fanatical preoccupation with death and rebirth informs her sad,
cynical novel, The Bell Jar, as it does her first book of poems, The Colossus,
published in London by Heinemann in October 1960, and by Knopf in New
York, in 1962. Plaths mature poetry, too exalted to be merely
confessional, frequently treats of this resurrection theme, together with a
related one which attempts to redeem meaningless life through art. Lines
like I am lost, I am lost, in the robes of all this light ('Witch Burning), and
On Fridays the little children come / To trade their hooks for hands (The
Stones) foreshadow the powerful, wholly convincing voice of poems like
The Hanging Man, published posthumously in Ariel: By the roots of my
hair some god got hold of me. / I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert
prophet.
Ted Hughes has described how Sylvia Plath underwent a searing,
curiously independent process of gestation' during the spring of 1962,
when, two months after giving birth to a son, she produced a powerful radio
drama, Three Women. The first deathly Ariel Poems appeared soon
afterwards with 'The Moon and Yew Tree, Little Fugue, Elm, Event,
Berck-Plage, and others. During the summer of 1962 her marriage to
Hughes began to buckle; she was devastated when she learned that he had
been unfaithful to her. Although she and Hughes travelled to Ireland
together in September, the marriage was by then in ruins, and in October she
asked her husband to leave for good.
It was after Hughess departure that Plath produced, in less than two
months, the forty poems of rage, despair, love, and vengeance that have
chiefly been responsible for her immense posthumous fame. Throughout
October and November of 1962 she rose every day at dawn to take down, as
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from dictation, line after miraculous line of poems like The Bee Meeting,
Stings, Daddy, Lady Lazarus, Ariel, and Death & Company, as well
as those heartbreaking poems to her baby son: Nick and the Candlestick
and The Night Dances.
In December 1962 she moved with her children from Devon to London.
What she recognized as the genius of her poetry temporarily restored her
self-confidence, but in January 1963, after the publication of The Bell Jar,
and during the coldest winter of the century, she descended into a deep,
clinical depression, and in the early morning of 11 February, she gassed
herself.
In the quarter-century following her suicide Sylvia Plath has become a
heroine and martyr of the feminist movement. In fact, she was a martyr
mainly to the recurrent psychodrama that staged itself within the bell jar of
her tragically wounded personality. Twelve final poems, written shortly
before her death, define a nihilistic metaphysic from which death provided
the only dignified escape.
The Sylvia Plath papers are housed at the Lilly Library, Indiana
University, Bloomington, and at Smith College, Northampton, Mass. Ted
Hughes published selections from her journals (The Journals of Sylvia Plath,
ed. Frances McCullough, 1982) and some of the short fiction (Johnny Panic
and the Bible of Dreams, Short Stories, Prose and Diary Excerpts, 1980);
Aurelia Plath published Letters Home by Sylvia Plath, Correspondence
1950-1963 (1975). Lynda K. Bundtzen, Plath's Incarnations: Woman and the
Creative Process, (1983). Steven Tabor, Sylvia Plath: An Analytical
Bibliography (1987). Linda Wagner-Martin, Sylvia Plath, A Biography
(1987). Linda Wagner-Martin, ed., Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage
(1988). Anne Stevenson, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, (1989). Steven
Axelrod, Sylvia Plath, The Wound and the Cure of Words, (1990).
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working slowly and laboriously to compose her poems. She now wrote at a
much faster pace, producing poem after poem. Plath's British collection of
Ariel includes thirty-five poems and her fourth collection of poetry, Winter
Trees was published posthumously.
Plath continues to thread her trademark themes of death and doom and
of emotional conflict through her late poetry. Much of this death imagery
seems to grow from Plaths recollection of her sea childhood. In Ocean
1212-W she recalls how she could not watch her grandmother drop the
dark green lobsters... into the boiling pot from which they would be, in a
minute, drawn-- red, dead, and edible. I felt the awful scald of the water too
keenly on my skin. Death is red in Getting There, as it is in easily one
half of the poems in Ariel and Winter Trees.
The theme of conflict is as prominent in Plaths later works as it is in
her early works. In Plaster expresses this theme in a kind of schizoid
manner. In The Other, the I and the you are interchangeable; I, the
speaker exclaims: Cold glass.
How you insert yourself
Between myself and myself.
Scratch like a cat.
This conflict is very complex and irresolvable. The despair, which it
engendered in the earlier poems, has now changed to resignation, expressed
in various moods.
In spite of the conflict and despair apparent in her late poems, Plath
does include several baby poems in her late poetry. The speaker addresses
the child in a loving manner. Perhaps, the mother's love may provide partial
relief from an otherwise unbelievable world. In Child, the child is
innocent, new, unacquainted with pain; his clear eye is the one absolutely
beautiful thing. / I want to fill it with colour and ducks:
In Morning Song and Balloons and For a Fatherless Son, Plath
displays the loving and whimsical musings of mother to baby.
Although these poems seem very different from Plaths death-related
poems, they are not. She allows the imagery of death to invade even these
upbeat works. In For a Fatherless Son, the child will be aware of an
absence, presently, / Growing beside you like a tree, / A death tree, colour
gone.
Clearly, Plath has truly become a master of her form. Her poems are
controlled, powerful, incisive, and original. She grew from an amateur,
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Ans:
In the first poem, The Bee Meeting the speaker finds herself in the
midst of other people. The long, Whitmanian lines sprawl horizontally to
accommodate the crowd of villagers, The rector, the midwife, the sexton,
and the agent for bees and later the butcher, the grocer, the postman,
someone I know. There may be a pun in the title of this first poem (and in
the running title for the sequence) since the word bee itself refers to a
group of neighbours. In an interesting etymological loop, the word bee,
meaning a meeting of neighbours who unite their labours for the benefit of
one of their number (as in a barn raising bee or a quilting bee), is an allusion
to the social character of the insect. This sense of bee may account for the
fact that the villagers all appear to be doing something specifically to or for
the speaker and may qualify the speakers paranoid response to their
attentions toward her.
The place and time of the meeting suggest that the speaker is at a
transitional stage. She meets the townspeople at the bridge, a symbolic
place of connection between divided locales and, therefore, a site of change.
The way the speaker is dressed confirms the time of the year is summer, a
season traditionally associated with the final harvest that precedes decline.
Further, the sequence itself moves from summer to winter--and even beyond
since the final poem promises spring. Many readers are fond of emphasizing
that Plaths Ariel began with the word love and ended with the word
spring, but none has stressed the significance of summer in this culminating
sequence. She began the Bee poems shortly after moving to the country
cottage she had dreamed of, giving birth to her second child, losing her
husband to another woman, seeing her first book of poems in print, and
finding a publisher for her first novel.
Clearly, the new volume of poetry would reap the sweet and bitter fruits
of these recent events. The Bee poems assess the speakers relation to her
neighbours, children, husband, other women, and herself, as well as her
place in history. The summer season hints that one phase of her life is
ending, and so it is an appropriate time for re-evaluation and change.
The most distinctive feature of The Bee Meeting is its gothic tone. If
this is a poem about transition, then the speaker finds change extremely
disorienting--even nightmarish. The speakers paranoia is conveyed through
her confused and incessant questions, inability to recognize familiar people,
stuttering repetitions, monstrous personifications, and obsession with
violence and death. Likewise, the bizarre setting is created through imagery
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the virgins. Yet the bees misinterpret the smoke (that is used to drive them
out so the hives can be moved):
Smoke rolls and scarves in the grove
The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything.
Likewise, the queen hides from the people who are trying to help her:
The old queen does not show herself, is she so ungrateful?
The intensely lyrical quality of some of these passages (the long os that
almost seem to loop and curl like the smoke they are describing
Smoke rolls and scarves in the grove
The long is that tighten and enclose the bees in a unity of sound--The
mind of the hive) again belies the speakers sympathetic identification with
the bees. Strategic repetitions further link the speaker to the bees; she says of
herself,
They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear
And have the queen,
She is old, old, old.
This connection between the speaker and the bees must be read
carefully, however, for its purpose is to separate her from the villagers every
bit as much as it is to associate her with the bees. She is like the bees
primarily in that she is unlike the townspeople. Further, the bees themselves
are similar to the villagers in some ways (in their group function, in their
hierarchy, in the threat they pose to the speaker). This point is more
important than it first appears. Many readers interpret the sequence,
especially the third poem Stings, as a work in which Plath attempted to
create an image of herself from the bees, whether as victimized wife (the
drudges) or victorious poet (the queen bee). Yet the larger success of the
sequence depends on the speakers recognition that the hive is an
unsatisfactory model for human social relations (indeed, the metaphor of the
hive amounts to a critique of heterosexual social relations) and that the bees
are outside of her, as everything that oppresses her is. Distinguishing herself
from her conceits makes possible the relationship to the bees she
acknowledges in The Swarm --How instructive this is! Here at the end
of The Bee Meeting she still confuses herself with the bees,
Whose is that long white box in the grove . . . why am I cold,
And experiences a foreboding of death (an early draft of this line read
that coffin, so white and silent. Yet, like the bees, she must learn that this
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is not the end of everything. By the last poem, she has established her
autonomy as well as her connection to the world; despite the fact that Plath
changed the sequence title from The Beekeeper and The Beekeepers
Daybook to Bees, the speaker is aware in the last poem that she is a
beekeeper not a bee. When she says in Wintering, It is they [the bees]
who own me, she does not mean that she cannot distinguish herself from
them--only that she is connected to them by their dependence upon her, a
relationship she assents to:
This is the time of hanging on for the bees.
Thus, the speakers rhetorical and emotional identification with the bees
in the first poem, like the other intensely imaginative elements, stems from
excesses that the sequence as a whole works to overcome.
Another aspect of The Bee Meeting that often diverts critical attention
from the speakers unreliability is the penultimate stanza in which the new
virgins:
Dream of a duel they will win inevitably, a curtain of wax dividing
them from the bride flight, the up flight of the murderess into a
heaven that loves her.
The appeal of this stanza, of course, is that it prefigures the violence of
the bride flight in Stings and is consistent with the theme of vengeful selfdestruction that is said to monopolize Plaths imagination. And, indeed, it
does foreshadow the third poem of the sequence in its vision of recovering
a queen, as Stings will say. However, much more important here is the
fact that the bride flight remains merely a dream. This poem ends with
exhaustion and uncertainty not, like Stings, with energy and selfassurance. And, as might be expected, the speaker recedes even further into
the unreality she has been struggling throughout the poem to cast off.
The failure of her effort to distinguish between the real and the surreal is
anticipated in the opening of the final stanza which signals her defeat, I am
exhausted, I am exhausted, and confirmed in the last line where three
accusing questions give vent to her worst fears, Whose is that long white
box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold. She sees
what appears to be a coffin, realizes something has ended, and feels the chill
of the grave already upon her. Yet the box, the sense of accomplishment,
and the iciness of death all derive directly from her own metaphor in the
preceding lines. When she claims to be a Pillar of white in a blackout of
knives.
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The magicians girl who does not flinch, she is, in effect, conjuring up
her own box and stepping into it. Reneging on all the other images for her
the poem has contrived, this last metaphor makes passivity a performance
and tinctures the funereal atmosphere with the carnival. Embracing virginity
with a vengeance, she becomes the magicians girl--both daughter and
assistant--who participates in the trick of sawing the Lady in Half. The box,
then, is the prop that makes the optical allusion possible.
She is the pillar of white in a blackout of knives because she is the
stoical girl in the box who remains unscathed even as the phallic knives
appear to pass through her, a variation of Daphne who becomes the
unfeeling tree in order to avoid Apollos sexual assault. The knives do not
cut her because they are merely a blackout, that is, an optical illusion. The
term is taken from the theatrical expression blackout, meaning to dim the
lights while a scene changes or, in a magicians act, to allow a trick to be
accomplished under the cover of darkness; it is also a word that suggests the
magicians occupation, black art. She is unflinching, not because she is
brave, but because she is in on the trick. The shock at the end of the poem
that inspires the final three questions is her surprising realization that she is
the only one left performing. The villagers are untying their disguises, but
the speaker is still caught in hers. While the townspeople were carrying out
their chores, and there is no evidence in the poem that they were doing
otherwise, the speaker has nailed her own coffin, so to speak, with her
fantastic imaginative constructions. Moreover, her role as the magicians girl
associates her with witchcraft since it allies her with sorcery as well as with
illusion.
The exhaustion she feels at the end of the poem makes her unable to
answer the last battery of questions. This is appropriate since the voice of the
poem is expert at heightening rather than allaying fears and uncertainties.
She will, however, approach the last enigma from another angle in the
second poem. The Arrival of the Bee Box must be understood as
responding to her demand in this first poem to know,
Whose is that long white box in the grove.?
Q: GIVE A CRITICAL APPRECIATION OF ARIEL.
Ans:
A poem that moves from Stasis in darkness, substanceless, to the
cauldron of morning cannot be adequately described as an expression of
suicidal impulses, although Plaths use of that word demands explanation.
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The arrow and the dew, although in apparent apposition, do not reinforce
each other. The arrow kills, the dew is killed; the arrow at one with the red
eye is its apotheosis, while the sun consumes the dew. The dew, like the
childs cry melting and the unpeeling dead hands and even the foaming
wheat and glitter of seas, symbolizes all that will be overcome or
sacrificed in this arrows drive into morning. But the speaker, identifying
with the arrow, presents herself as no sacrificial victim on the altar of any
god. The arrow, like the horse, God's lioness, absorbs the power of the
avenging God: at one with the drive/ into the red/ Eye, it is associated with
the fury that lit the holocaust.
Ariel, the title poem of Sylvia Plaths posthumous volume of the same
name is one of her most highly regarded, most often criticised, and most
complicated poems. The ambiguities in the poem begin with its title, which
has a three-fold meaning. To a reader uninformed by Plaths biography
Ariel would probably most immediately call to mind the airy spirit who
in Shakespeares The Tempest is a servant to Prospero and symbolizes
Prosperos control of the upper elements of the universe, fire and air. On
another biographical or autobiographical level, Ariel, as we know from
reports about the poets life, was the name of her favourite horse, on which
she weekly went riding. Robert Lowell, in his forward to Ariel, says, The
title Ariel summons up Shakespeares lovely, though slightly chilling and
androgynous spirit, but the truth is that this Ariel is the authors horse. Ted
Hughes, Plaths husband, adds these comments,
ARIEL was the name of the horse on which she went riding weekly.
Long before, while she was a student at Cambridge (England), she
went riding with an American friend out towards Grantchester. Her
horse bolted, the stirrups fell off, and she came all the way home to
the stables, about two miles, at full gallop, hanging around the horses
neck.
These two allusions, to The Tempest and to her horse Ariel, have
often been noticed and pointed out, with the emphasis, from a critical
perspective, being placed on the biographical referent. But there is another
possible referent in the title of the poem, which no one has yet noted,
although the poet, apparently, went out of her way to make reference, even
obvious reference, to it. I refer to Ariel as the symbolic name for
Jerusalem. Ariel in Hebrew means lion of God. She begins the second
stanza of the poem with the line Gods lioness, which seems to be a direct
reference to the Hebrew or Jewish Ariel.
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the next twenty-two lines. Then, after six more as, we have ls ending
eleven of fourteen lines, and then several rs, leading into the six or
more air rhymes that conclude the sequence. Almost Skeltonian: the
poet seems to carry on a sound about as long as she can, although not
in consecutive lines.
Now up to the seventh stanza of the poem (and continuing on through
the remainder of the poem once the transitions has been made in the seventh
stanza, White / Godiva, I unpeel / Dead hands, dead strigencies), the
rhyme scheme has been, for the most part, regular in terms of the slant
rhymes Nims has suggested, each stanza having two lines which rhyme,
given Plaths approach to rhyme. Darkness / distance, grow /
furrow, arc / catch, dark/ Hooks, mouthfuls / else, air /
hair, I / cry, wall / arrow, and drive / red. It is true that the
rhymes do not all fit the categories Nims has set forth, although some of
them do. Where the rhymes do not fit his scheme, another scheme, equally
justifiable, could be suggestedone which the poet apparently used equally
often, here as well as in other poems in Ariel. For instance, in the case of the
rhymes darkness / distance, the rhyme works on the duplication of the
initial ds and the final ss; in arc / catch, arc ends in the
consonant c which is picked up as the initial letter in catch (also the
sequence ac in arc is reversed in catch to ca); the k in dark and
Hooks carries the rhyme for the lines ending in these two words; in the
wall / arrow rhyme Plath has apparently worked the words so that the
letters of the one word become inverted and duplicated backwards in the
letters of the other, thus w begins wall and ends arrow and the double
1 in wall is duplicated by the double r in arrow, each of the double
consonants following the vowel a; and the initial d of drive goes with
the final d of red, and so forth.
But, to show the change in theme in the Godiva stanza, Plath breaks the
rhyme within the stanza itself, while, and at the same time, she joins this
transitional stanza to what has gone before and to what will follow by
interlocking its rhyme with the dangling or unused line in both the preceding
and following stanzas. Thus heels from the preceding stanza is made to
rhyme with unpeel in the Godiva stanza, and seas of the following
stanza is made to rhyme with stringencies. The unity of the poem as a
whole has thus been maintained while the shift in its theme is signalled both
thematically and structurally by a shift in the rhyme scheme.
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another. Yet that is also its theme. Indeed, Plath seems to have always had a
similar difficulty in separating one element of her life from another. But,
that, too, was also, and always, her theme.
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