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Waking In Winter, Sylvia

Plath
I can taste the tin of the sky —- the real tin thing.

Winter dawn is the color of metal,

The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves.

All night I have dreamed of destruction, annihilations —-

An assembly-line of cut throats, and you and I

Inching off in the gray Chevrolet, drinking the green

Poison of stilled lawns, the little clapboard gravestones,

Noiseless, on rubber wheels, on the way to the sea resort.

How the balconies echoed! How the sun lit up

The skulls, the unbuckled bones facing the view!

Space! Space! The bed linen was giving out entirely.

Cot legs melted in terrible attitudes, and the nurses —-

Each nurse patched her soul to a wound and disappeared.

The deathly guests had not been satisfied

With the rooms, or the smiles, or the beautiful rubber plants,

Or the sea, Hushing their peeled sense like Old Mother Morphia.

Analysis :
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This may sound like a poem describing a natural scene, but in fact ‘Waking in Winter’ is about a

nuclear winter. Written in 1960 and infused with Cold War and environmentalist elements,

‘Waking in Winter’ offers a bleak vision of a post-nuclear winter where the sky doesn’t just look

like tin – the whole atmosphere tastes metallic, too. ‘Waking in Winter’ examines the bleakness

of a winter created by man rather than nature – of ‘destructions, annihilations’.

Sylvia Plath is a generational talent. And her intriguingly complex, often dark, style of poetry

can leave one stunned - a "What Did I Just Read?" type sentiment. Yet that's what makes her so

memorable. She is raw in her descriptions, and even more raw in her emotions (requiring a

biography read to fully grasp). Walking in the Winter is a symbolic statement, and one that I

believe captures both her profound skill as a poet and purity as a philosopher questioning the

very nature of humanity.

The poem screams death. Words such as "annihilations," "cut throats," "skulls," and "deathly"

scatter across the page. And everything is colored in "metal" and " gray". The ingenuity lies in

Platt's imagery of "you" (us) and "I" (Platt) driving towards a "sea resort" (ie, a place of comfort

and escape) as the setting. The deliberate contrast ridicules the imagined reality of a happy,

peaceful life that we grow up as children believing in. But as we mature and soon discover

society's violent contradictions, that idea is sliced in half. Platt's line break in Line 6 highlights

this point. Whereas I initially thought the word "green" would be followed by "tea", the line

splits and instead, reads "green poison." A haunting, yet genius maneuver.

It would be remiss to exclude that this poem was written with the Cold War (and use of atomic

bombs) as a backdrop - a period of time that shook the world into an existential crisis. If life

could be so fragile, and one decision could take so many, we truly are cogs privy to the
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insecurities of an "assembly-line of cut throats," as Plath proclaims. The "sun" in Line 9 is likely

referencing that notion - further accentuated by "Winter" and "Space! Space!", both tributes to

the decades-long conflict.

The scene of the nurses and the "deathly guests," is especially gruesome. Despite the various

justifications for war (eg, nation building, economic competition) that societies purport, Platt

suggests that the people who die for those causes, are just that: dead. The places they've been

("rooms"), people they've known ("smiles"), and lives they've lived ("sea"), are practically

meaningless if they cannot take those experiences with them. War is thus unjustifiable, because

at the end of the day, it takes away the precious thing it ultimately seeks to enhance: life.

Like Waking in the Winter, war is a bundle of human hypocrisy, and Plath delivers the message

with a vigor and depth unrivaled in history.