sylvia plath's poems (a critical analysis by qaisar iqbal janjua)

By

Qaisar Iqbal Janjua From Lahore, Pakistan. Contact (92) 300 8494678

[email protected], [email protected], [email protected]

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SELECTED POEMS

Sylvia Plath

(1936-1967)

“How you insert yourself,

Between myself and myself,

Scratch like a cat”.

“Cold Glass”

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LIFE AND WORKS OF SYLVIA PLATH

Sylvia Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, the older child

of Otto and Aurelia Schoeber Plath. Her father was professor of German and

entomology (a specialist on bees) at Boston University; her mother, a high

school teacher, was his student. Both parents valued learning. In 1940 Otto

died of complications from surgery after a leg amputation, and Aurelia's

parents became part of the household to care for the children when she

returned to teaching.

Sylvia's interests in writing and art continued through her public school

years in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and at Smith College, where she attended

on scholarships. Her extensive publications of poems and fiction led to her

selection for the College Board of Mademoiselle magazine in 1953. The

depression that was endemic in her father's family troubled her during her

junior year; when her mother sought treatment for her, she was given bi-

polar electro convulsive shock treatments as an outpatient. In August 1953,

she attempted suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. Recovered after six

months of intensive therapy, Sylvia returned to Smith and her usual

academic success. A senior, she wrote an honours thesis on Dostoyevski's

use of the double and graduated summa cum laude in English; she also won

a Fulbright fellowship to study at Newnham College, Cambridge. In the fall

of 1955, she sailed for England.

Plath studied hard but her life in England was also sexual. As her

writing showed, she was angry about double-standard behaviour, and

claimed for herself the right to as much sexual experience as men had. She

believed combining the erotic and the intellectual possible, and when she

met Ted Hughes, a Cambridge poet, she felt that life with him would be

ideal. The two were married in London on 16 June 1956, accompanied by

Sylvia's mother.

After a honeymoon in Spain, the Hugheses set up housekeeping. Sylvia

passed her examinations while Ted taught in a boys’ school; in June they

sailed for America. The next year Sylvia taught freshman English at Smith;

in 1958 and 1959 they lived in Boston and wrote professionally. Ted's first

poem collection, The Hawk in the Rain, won a major poetry prize; Sylvia's

promise that she would make him a success seemed fulfilled. Unfortunately,

giving such single-minded attention to Ted's work meant that developing her

own voice as a writer was difficult. She visited Robert Lowell's class in

poetry writing, where she met George Starbuck and Anne Sexton; Sexton’s

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work became an inspiration to her. Plath worked part-time as a secretary in

the psychiatric division of Massachusetts General Hospital, transcribing

patients' histories, which often included dreams. She also resumed therapy

with the woman psychiatrist who had helped her after her breakdown.

The years in the States convinced Ted that he needed to live in England.

After an autumn at Yaddo, the writers' colony, Ted and Sylvia sailed for

London in December 1959. Sylvia was happy: she was writing good poems

(she had written 'The Colossus' at Yaddo, where she had discovered

Theodore Roethke’s poetry), and she was five months pregnant. Soon after

Frieda’s birth on 1 April 1960, they began looking for a country house to

escape cramped, expensive London. In late summer of 1961, they moved to

Devon, where Sylvia was ecstatic about their centuries-old manor house.

Before that time, however, they wrote efficiently (sometimes in the

borrowed study of poet W. S. Merwin), and Plath was able to finish most of

The Bell Jar. Influenced by J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Sylvia's

novel narrated a woman's life from adolescence, ending with a positive

resolution of rebirth.

Ted wrote programmes for the BBC and became a Faber author, in

contact with T. S. Eliot and other important British poets; Sylvia was

publishing new kinds of poems, content that William Heinemann had

contracted to publish her book, The Colossus and Other Poems. Its

publication in October 1960 was well received, and Alfred Knopf published

the collection in the States.

Personal jealousies, differences in American and British views of

gender roles, and a return of Sylvia’s depression complicated the Plath-

Hughes marriage. Despite their happiness when Sylvia became pregnant

once more, after an earlier miscarriage, the marriage of two aspiring writers

living in an isolated village with an infant and little money was difficult.

After Nicholas’s birth in January 1962, Sylvia faced the fact of Hughes’s

infidelity, expressing herself through increasingly angry--and powerful--

poems. In contrast to such work as “The Rabbit Catcher” and “The

Detective,” her radio play for the BBC, ‘Three Women,” is a beautifully

wrought, sombre poem about maternal choice.

Plath had learned to find joy in her women-centred world, and the care

of her children and friendships with other women were increasingly

important. But she could not tolerate male irresponsibility. Living with the

children in lonely Devon, Plath wrote many of the poems that later appeared

in Ariel. Her so-called October poems, written during the month after

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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 self-

deprecation and forceful anger made her work a foreshadowing of the

feminist writing that appeared in the later 1960s and the 1970s. Like

Friedan’s 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--it’s 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 today’s

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.

Sylvia’s 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 Plath’s 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 Roethke’s ‘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. Plath’s 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 Hughes’s 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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MOST EXPECTED QUESTIONS

Q: TRACE OUT THE MAJOR CONFLICTS IN SYLVIA’S

POETRY?

Q: SYLVIA’S POETRY EXPRESSES A MORBID MIND AND

FEELING HEART, DISCUSS?

Q: IN SYLVIA’S POETRY, WE FIND, VARIED HUMAN

PASSIONS IN DEPTH, DISCUSS?

Ans:

Sylvia Plath’s poetry progresses from early to late, from

experimentation to maturity, just like the works of any poet. However, the

themes she presents in her works remains fairly constant throughout.

Plath's early works can be dated between 1955 and 1959. Plath wrote

some of the first Colossus poems when she was twenty-three and therefore,

her early poetry displays an amateur, experimental quality. Her early poetry

is collected in The Colossus. In these works, the sense of doom and death,

the use of subtle humour, and the display of emotional conflict are

identifiable themes.

Nearly all of Plath’s early poetry is death related. In “Temper of Time,”

Plath uses sombre terms to describe the landscape:

The Colossus was first published in 1960, but Plath wrote several poems

between this time and early 1962. This period may be termed transitional.

This was the time of the Hugheses’ two years in London and their first year

in Devon, a period ending with the break-up of their marriage.

During this time, the poet continued her efforts to develop her own

style. Plath gains more structural freedom and flexibility. She gains a

simpler, more direct verse and she uses rhythms and diction in a more

elementary manner. Her transitional poetry is generally over intellectualised,

humourless, and lifeless. In fact, the figures described in Plath’s transitional

poetry are colourless, two-dimensional, and have a cut-from-paper quality.

Collected in the volumes Ariel and Winter Trees, most of Plath’s late

poetry can be dated from the birth of her son Nicholas in January 1962, and

her suicide in February 1963. This period was a time of great creative

productivity for Sylvia Plath. What characterizes Plath's late poems from her

transitional poetry is their innate intensity combined with their ease of

composition. She found her true voice, which she struggles to find in her

early and transitional poetry. Plath abandoned her customary method of

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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 Plath’s 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 Plath’s 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 Plath’s 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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experimental poet to a poet of experience, style, and controlled rhythm.

Although Plath died before many of her poems received due credit, her

works live on.

Perhaps Sylvia Plath’s most famous work is The Bell Jar. The Bell Jar is

a recording of a period of confusion, disintegration, and renewal in the life

of its protagonist and narrator, Esther Greenwood. This semi

autobiographical novel draws its materials primarily from the time of Plath’s

Mademoiselle guest editorship in 1953, through her subsequent breakdown

and attempted suicide, to the time when, she was rehabilitated enough to

return to college.

Esther, like Plath, was the American Girl. Esther grew up suburban,

with saddle shoes and ‘fifteen years of straight A’s’, attended an eastern

women’s college, received scholarships and spent weekends at Yale. At the

end of her third year, Esther receives a guest editorship for a New York

fashion-fiction magazine. The novel opens with twelve little editors, taking

advantage of their sponsors-- free lunches, free sunglasses cases. Four pretty,

intelligent, ambitious girls riding around in a taxi together, exploring New

York.

Death is a conception for the mad virgin. She arranges an encounter

with death like one arranges a doctor’s appointment. Esther Greenwood

survives her several attempts at suicide, but another patient, a lesbian, hangs

herself because of it. The bell jar is a relief to the mad person, separating the

air she breathes from the air of the sane. The fluted glass allows the girl to

breath “fresh” air.

Babies are also present in and out of this novel, often representing

horror or desire. The girl stands under her bell jar “blank and stopped as a

dead baby.” But when death looked like the “white sweet baby” in the

womb, she plunged down to reach it.

“The babies perhaps represent Esther's desire to be reborn.”

The extremes of this semi autobiographical novel are those of the

poems, suicides, and childbirths. Before madness, Esther Greenwood is self-

made and self-sufficient. After the transformation into insanity, she is torn

between dying and being reborn.

Q: BEE IS A RECURING MOTIF IN SYLVIA’S POETRY, WHAT

DOES IT IMPLY?

Q: GIVE CRITICAL APPRECIATION OF “THE BEE MEETING”,

“THE ARRIVAL OF THE BEE BOX”?

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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 speaker’s 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 Plath’s 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 speaker’s 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 speaker’s 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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and metaphors of violence, a mixed atmosphere of the ritual, the carnival,

and the funeral, and mythic allusions. These elements are intensified

rhetorically with alliteration, assonance, and dissonance. Noticeably, then,

the formal features that lend the poem its gothic tone are the staples of

Plath’s poetics of excess. In this expressionistic landscape the speaker must

begin to puzzle out her relationship to others. Significantly, the task

demands that she control her overactive imagination, that is, that she sees

through the thematic and rhetorical trappings of excess that she herself has

contrived.

The poem opens and closes with questions and is riddled with questions

throughout. Of the eleven stanzas, all but two have at least one question and

most have more. Through much of the poem, the speaker tries to answer

them herself; but when the last line closes the poem with yet another

question, obviously it cannot be answered (at least not within this poem).

Consequently, it is the one inquiry in the poem that is not punctuated with a

question mark as though the atmosphere of enigma and uncertainty has been

naturalized in this perplexing setting, and the interrogative is now as

definitive an utterance as she can formulate.

Her first questions concern the people around her and what they are

doing:

“Who are these people at the bridge to meet me?”

“Which is the rector now, is it that man in black?

“Which is the midwife, is that her blue coat?”

“Is some operation taking place?”

“Is it the butcher, the grocer, the postman, someone I know?”

“What have they accomplished?”

The manuscript drafts from this poem reveal that Plath changed many of

these questions from straight declarative sentences apparently in order to

intensify the speaker’s confusion and disorientation. Her sense of alienation

from her neighbours naturally serves to emphasize her isolation, but this is a

larger point than we may at first realize. A central issue of the Bee sequence

is the speaker’s autonomy; the sequence, in fact, works to separate her from

others. In itself, isolation is not a problem; on the contrary, it is a state the

speaker must achieve in order to know herself, gather her resources, and

pursue a new direction. The anxiety and dislocation she experiences in “The

Bee Meeting” suggest it is the community of neighbours--not isolation--that

the speaker cannot tolerate. She receives their attempts to help her, well

intentioned though they may be, as assaults upon her. She feels vulnerable

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(“In my sleeveless SUMMARY dress I have no protection”), effaced by

their efforts to protect her.

“Here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock,

Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees

Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice.”

Forced to conform

“They are making me one of them”,

And yet finally betrayed

“The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands.

Whose is that long white box in the grove?

What have they accomplished?

Why am I cold”.

However, there is no evidence in the poem that the villagers actually

behave suspiciously. Instead, what should be obvious is that participating in

the collective life of the village has disastrous effects on the speaker; clearly,

she is not “one of them,” and thus she finds their attempts to include her

extremely threatening.

It is not only in her dealings with the townspeople that the speaker’s

perceptions are distorted and exaggerated. She views the setting with the

same expressionistic sensibility that informs her apprehension of the

villagers. Stanzas four and five depict a dangerous and frightening

landscape:

Moreover, the metamorphosis into a plant concerns the definition and

boundaries of the human. One could change into a god or an animal

(categories believed to be the outside limits of the human), but these beings

are still sexually vulnerable. Only by relinquishing all claims to the human

can Daphne escape sexual assault. For the speaker of the Bee sequence,

however, such a metamorphosis is simply another conceit and one she must

give up in order to achieve the self-awareness and new self-definition of

“Wintering”. Significantly, then, the allusion occurs early in the sequence in

the two most technically wrought poems with their personifications, myths,

alliterations, repetitions, and what has been termed their “manic metaphor-

making”. “The Bee Meeting” and “The Arrival of the Bee Box.” By the last

poem, “Wintering,” the association between the woman and the plant is

merely analogous, not metamorphic. She is clearly human, knitting over the

cradle of her child (and therefore no longer like the virginal Daphne):

“The woman, still at her knitting,

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At the cradle of Spanish walnut,

Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.”

One might be tempted to say that the baby is encased in the Spanish

walnut like Daphne in the laurel tree and that the woman too is becoming a

plant, no longer even able to speak. However, the walnut tree merely serves

the mother and child, by being fashioned into a cradle, in the same way that

the metaphor of the bulb serves the poet, by providing an image for her

hibernation. Her ability to control these plant metaphors attests to the

progress she has made since the beginning of the Bee sequence. These are

distinctions the earlier poems fail to make. Such restraint is still far off in

“The Bee Meeting” where personification and metamorphosis are employed

to heighten the speaker’s strangeness, vulnerability, and confusion.

The frequency with which readers of “The Bee Meeting” conclude that

the villagers fiendishly draw the innocent speaker into their demonic ritual

attests to the poem’s success in evincing the speaker’s point of view. Yet,

the townspeople appear menacing because her fantastic imagination distorts

perception. It is true, as nearly every reader points out, that the first list of

villagers includes the town officials--the rector, the midwife, the sexton, and

the agent for bees--and therefore suggests some sort of public ritual. Yet the

second list, an even more important one since it enumerates the people who

might be the central mysterious “surgeon” performing the ritual, is

noticeably composed of common, insignificant, and thus innocuous

characters: the butcher, the grocer, the postman, and most vaguely,

“someone I know.” Moreover, the setting of the mysterious ritual is

borrowed, like the Daphne imagery, from literature and thus gives the poem

self-conscious literariness rather than emotional veracity. The event is

modelled on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, “Young Goodman Brown,”

in which the title character, like the speaker here, has a nightmarish meeting

with his neighbours in a shorn grove. That Plath wants to tap the literariness

of this allusion rather than merely its theme and mood is obvious in the more

playful, imbedded references to Hawthorn--the hawthorn tree in the grove

and the “scarlet” flowers that recall The Scarlet Letter. Like Young

Goodman Brown, the speaker of “The Bee Meeting” is a dubious judge of

the intentions of the villagers.

In some ways, her position in relation to the villagers is very much like

that of the bees. The townspeople do not intend to harm the bees; they

merely want to divide the hive into three hives and save the queen bee from

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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 o’s 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 speaker’s 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 speaker’s 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 Beekeeper’s

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 speaker’s 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 speaker’s 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 self-

destruction that is said to monopolize Plath’s 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 self-

assurance. 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 magician’s 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 magician’s “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 Apollo’s 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 magician’s act, to allow a trick to be

accomplished under the cover of darkness; it is also a word that suggests the

magician’s 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 magician’s 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 Plath’s 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

child’s 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 arrow’s 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 Plath’s 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 Plath’s biography

“Ariel” would probably most immediately call to mind the “airy spirit” who

in Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a servant to Prospero and symbolizes

Prospero’s 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 poet’s 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 Shakespeare’s lovely, though slightly chilling and

androgynous spirit, but the truth is that this Ariel is the author’s horse.” Ted

Hughes, Plath’s 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 horse’s

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 “God’s lioness,” which seems to be a direct

reference to the Hebrew or Jewish “Ariel.”

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Plath’s obsession with Judaism and the Jewish people is clearly

indicated in many of her poems.

Indeed, some of the imagery, which informs the passage concerning

“Ariel” in the Book of Isaiah, appears to have been drawn on directly by

Plath for her imagery in her poem “Ariel.” In Isaiah we read,

“And in an instant, suddenly, you will be visited by the Lord of hosts

with thunder and with earthquake and great noise,

with whirlwind and tempest, And the flame of a devouring fire”.

In short, then, the poet seems to be combining these three references to

“Ariel” in her poem, and creating a context where each of the possible

meanings enriches the others. She even seems to imply this when she says,

in the second stanza, “How one we grow.” Each of the three “Ariel’s”

contributes its part to the totality of the poem, and each of them merges into

the others so that, by the end of the poem, they are all “one.”

Now, of these three references to “Ariel,” the two that seem most

fruitful in terms of an analysis of the poem appear to be the autobiographical

and the Biblical In terms of the autobiographical overtones, the poem can be

seen as what apparently it is in fact—an account of the poet’s going for a

ride on her favourite horse. Each of the details she mentions with respect to

the ride (at least through the first six stanzas) can be seen as exact reporting

of what it is like to ride a horse. The last five stanzas of the poem obviously

move beyond the literal telling of taking a horseback ride and move into

something which partakes of the mystery whereby the rider experiences

something of the unity which is created between horse and rider, if not

literally, at least metaphorically. This change in the theme of the poem is

signalled both by a change in tone and by a change in technique, and

specifically by the break in the rhyme scheme.

In talking of the rhymes in Plath’s poetry, John Frederick Nims points

out that in The Colossus, Plath’s first book, she chooses to rhyme “atonally”

using one of several variations:

“In Ariel, the use of rhyme is very different. In some poems it is

ghostlier than ever. But more often it is obvious: rhyme at high noon.

The same sound may run on from stanza to stanza, with much

identical rhyme. “Lady Lazarus” illustrates the new manner. The

poem is printed in units of three lines, but the rhyme is not in her

favourite terzarima pattern. Six of the first ten lines end in an n-

sound, followed by a sequence in long e, which occurs in about half of

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the next twenty-two lines. Then, after six more a’s, we have l’s ending

eleven of fourteen lines, and then several r’s, 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 Plath’s 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 suggested—one 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 “d’s” and the final “s’s”; 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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In addition to this rather complex patterning of rhyme, Plath also has

her own alliterative-devices to bind together individual lines and, at times,

larger units of her poems. In “Ariel,” for instance, we find lines like, “Pour

of tor and distances,” “Pivot of heels and knees,” and “Of the neck I cannot

catch.” In each of these lines, the internal rhyme (“pour” / “tor”) or the

alliteration (“cannot catch”) or the assonance (“heels and knees”) creates a

kind of music, which takes the place of exact or even slant rhyme.

On at least two other occasions, then, Plath has set forth similar

experiences to the one she details in “Ariel,” and in each case she has

communicated her experience in terms of horses and horseback riding. All

demonstrate a desire to have her reader feel, if not see, the unities of the

interconnected emotions, which she is attempting to express in these poems.

Particularly in “Ariel,” she is careful to link the thematic and rhyme devices

already mentioned to an overall structure, which suggests the special kind of

fusions that she intends. The poem is written in three line stanzas, and, in the

sense that two of the lines in each stanza rhyme, the poem might be

considered to fall into a loose terza rima. Another way in which the form

works to complement the meaning is in the stanzaic form itself. The very

fact that the stanzas are tri-fold parallels the tri-fold allusions to horse, Ariel

in Shakespeare, and “Ariel” as a reference to Jerusalem, Therefore, the

stanzaic structure as well as the structure of the individual stanzas

corroborates the theme of the poem.

But perhaps the most important structural, as well as thematic, line in

the poem is the last line, which is also the final stanza of the poem. This line

is important in a three-fold way: first, the “ro” of “cauldron” is inverted to

“or” in “morning,” thus continuing the duality of the double, and here

internal, rhyme that occurs throughout the poem, but at the same time

tightening the rhyme even further into the space of a single line; second, the

words “eye” and “morning,” carrying as they do the overtones of “I” and

“mourning,” at once incorporate the personal activity (riding a horse) with

the communal concern of the Biblical passage (where “Ariel” comes to

signify the whole history of the Hebrew race and the suffering, the

“mourning” so immediately identified with that history); and, thirdly, the

word “cauldron” mixes all of the foregoing elements together into a kind of

melting pot of emotion, history and personal involvement. Thus, the poem

takes on the richness and complexity we have come to expect from the poet,

and, not without reason, stands as the title poem of the book. As A. Alvarez

has said, “The difficulty with this poem lies in separating one element from

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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.

sylvia plath's poems (a critical analysis by qaisar iqbal janjua)

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