You’re

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,Gilled like a fish. A common-senseThumbs-down on the dodo's mode.Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,Trawling your dark as owls do.Mute as a turnip from the FourthOf July to All Fool's Day,O high-riser, my little loaf.Vague as fog and looked for like mail.Farther off than Australia.Bent-backed Atlas, our travelled prawn.Snug as a bud and at homeLike a sprat in a pickle jug.A creel of eels, all ripples.Jumpy as a Mexican bean.Right, like a well-done sum.A clean slate, with your own face on

‘You’re’ Copyright © 2000-2009 Gunnar Bengtsson http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/sylviaplath/1465

The Manor Garden

The fountains are dry and the roses over. Incense of death. Your day approaches. The pears fatten like little buddhas. A blue mist is dragging the lake.

You move through the era of fishes, The smug centuries of the pig- Head, toe and finger Come clear of the shadow. History

Nourishes these broken flutings, These crowns of acanthus, And the crow settles her garments. You inherit white heather, a bee's wing,

Two suicides, the family wolves, Hours of blankness. Some hard stars Already yellow the heavens. The spider on its own string

Crosses the lake. The worms Quit their usual habitations. The small birds converge, converge With their gifts to a difficult borning.

‘The Manor Garden’ © Collected Poems: Sylvia Plath

Nick and the Candlestick

I am a miner. The light burns blue. Waxy stalactites Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb Exudes from its dead boredom. Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls, Cold homicides. They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium Icicles, old echoer. Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes. And the fish, the fish - Christ! they are panes of ice,

A vice of knives, A piranha Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes. The candle Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten. O love, how did you get here? O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep, Your crossed position. The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby. The pain You wake to is not yours.

Love, love, I have hung our cave with roses, With soft rugs -

The last of Victoriana. Let the stars Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric Atoms that cripple drip Into the terrible well,

You are the one Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.

‘Nick and the Candlestick’ Collected Poems: Sylvia Plath

ms: Sylvia Plath

Nick and the Candlestick’ Collected Poems: Sylvia Plath

Poppies in July

Little poppies, little hell flames,Do you do no harm?

You flicker. I cannot touch you.I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

And it exhausts me to watch youFlickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.Little bloody skirts!

There are fumes that I cannot touch.Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules? If I could bleed, or sleep! -If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,Dulling and stilling. But colorless. Colorless.

‘Poppies in July’

http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/july.html

Poppies in October

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts. Nor the woman in the ambulance Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly --

A gift, a love gift Utterly unasked for By a sky

Palely and flamily Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I That these late mouths should cry open In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

‘Poppies in October’ Neurotic Poets Web Site, © 1997-2009

http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath/poem/poppies/

‘

Tulips

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here. Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions. I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in. The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble, They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps, Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another, So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently. They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep. Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage - My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox, My husband and child smiling out of the family photo; Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address. They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations. Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head. I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty. How free it is, you have no idea how free - The peacefulness is so big it dazes you, And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets. It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me. Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby. Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds. They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down, Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour, A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched. The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins, And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips, And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself. The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough, Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss. Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise. Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine. They concentrate my attention, that was happy Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves. The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals; They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat, And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me. The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea, And comes from a country far away as health.

‘Tulips’ http://www.eliteskills.com/analysis_poetry/Tulips_by_Sylvia_Plath_analysis.php

Daddy

You do not do, you do not doAny more, black shoeIn which I have lived like a footFor thirty years, poor and white,Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

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 toeBig as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish AtlanticWhere it pours bean green over blueIn the waters off the beautiful Nauset.I used to pray to recover you.Ach, du. In the German tongue, in the Polish townScraped flat by the rollerOf wars, wars, wars.But the name of the town is common.My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.So I never could tell where youPut your foot, your root, I never could talk to you.The tongue stuck in my jaw.

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

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. The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true.With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luckAnd my Taroc pack and my Taroc packI may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been sacred of you,With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.And your neat mustacheAnd your Aryan eye, bright blue.Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You –

Not God but a swastikaSo black no sky could squeak through.Every woman adores a Fascist,The boot in the face, the bruteBrute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,In the picture I have of you,A cleft in your chin instead of your footBut no less a devil for that, no notAny less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.I was ten when they buried you.At twenty I tried to dieAnd get back, back, back to you.I thought even the bones would do.

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

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.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two -The vampire who said he was youAnd drank my blood for a year,Seven years, if you want to know.Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heartAnd 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.

‘Daddy’ http://www.internal.org/view_poem.phtml?poemID=356

Wuthering Heights

The horizons ring me like faggots,Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.Touched by a match, they might warm me,And their fine lines singeThe air to orangeBefore the distances they pin evaporate,Weighting the pale sky with a solider colour.But they only dissolve and dissolveLike a series of promises, as I step forward.

There is no life higher than the grasstopsOr the hearts of sheep, and the windPours by like destiny, bendingEverything in one direction.I can feel it tryingTo funnel my heat away.If I pay the roots of the heatherToo close attention, they will invite meTo whiten my bones among them.

The sheep know where they are,Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,Grey as the weather.The black slots of their pupils take me in.It is like being mailed into space,A thin, silly message.They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,All wig curls and yellow teethAnd hard, marbly baas.

I come to wheel ruts, and waterLimpid as the solitudesThat flee through my fingers.Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.Of people the air only Remembers a few odd syllables.It rehearses them moaningly:Black stone, black stone.

The sky leans on me, me, the one uprightAmong the horizontals.The grass is beating its head distractedly.It is too delicateFor a life in such company;Darkness terrifies it.Now, in valleys narrowAnd black as purses, the house lightsGleam like small change.http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/13576-Sylvia-Plath-Wuthering-Heights

Ariel

Stasis in darkness.Then the substanceless bluePour of tor and distances.

God's lioness,How one we grow,Pivot of heels and knees! - The furrow

Splits and passes, sister toThe brown arcOf the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eyeBerries cast darkHooks –

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,Shadows.Something else

Hauls me through air -Thighs, hair;Flakes from my heels.

WhiteGodiva, I unpeel -Dead hands, dead stringencies. And now IFoam to wheat, a glitter of seas.The child's cry

Melts in the wall.And I Am the arrow,

The dew that flies,Suicidal, at one with the driveInto the red Eye, the cauldron of morning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJbX5o2gqhM

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/ariel.htm

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. What ever 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

‘Mirror’

http://poem-of-the-week.blogspot.com/2009/04/mirror-by-sylvia-plath.html

Face Lift

You bring me good news from the clinic,Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight whiteMummy-cloths, smiling: I'm all right.When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetistFed me banana gas through a frog-mask. The nauseous vaultBoomed wild bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.The mother swam up, holding a tin basin.O I was sick. They've changed all that. TravelingNude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,I roll to an anteroom where a kind manFists my fingers for me. He makes me feel something preciousIs leaking from the finger-vents. At the count of twoDarkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard...I don't know a thing.

For five days I lie in secret,Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.Even my best friend thinks I'm in the country.Skin doesn't have roots, it peels away easy as paper.When I grin, the stitches tauten. I grow backward. I'm twenty,Broody and in long skirts on my first husband's sofa, my fingersBuried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;I hadn't a cat yet.

Now she's done for, the dewlapped ladyI watched settle, line by line, in my mirror - Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.They've trapped her in some laboratory jar.Let her die there, or whither incessantly for the next fifty years,Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,Pink and smooth as a baby.

English Literature Poem GridPoem: You’re

OverviewThink about: content, context, audience, attitudes, purpose, tone, themes

Content : the speaker addresses her unborn child, comparing it to humorous and original images.

Context : Plath wrote this poem when pregnant with her first child, her daughter Frieda. It can therefore be argued that the poem is autobiographical.

Audience : the speaker’s unborn child Attitudes : celebration; wonder; awe. The speaker clearly loves

their child and is looking forward to the birth. The speaker is optimistic and looks to the future. However, she is also aware of the child’s essential ‘otherness’ – it is different to her.

Purpose : to celebrate her impending motherhood; to acknowledge the existence of her unborn child as an individual.

Tone : celebratory; excited; humorous; joyous; proud. The tone is also impatient at times (e.g. in the simile ‘looked for like mail’).

Themes : parenthood; nature; expectation; love.

Form and StructureTechniques to analyse include: confessional poem, free verse, stanza, line length, rhythm, rhyme,

enjambment, development of ideas

The poem can be viewed as a dramatic monologue as there is an implied listener (even though the foetus cannot hear her). However, a dramatic monologue usually has the poet taking on a persona; while Plath may be taking on a persona here, it is likely that the poem is about her (see context).

Each of the two stanzas has nine lines, mirroring the nine month gestation period. The title ‘You’re’ has to be placed at the start of each complete sentence. Notice

the shift from the contracted ‘You are’ (to mirror the contractions of pregnancy?) to the possessive ‘your’ at the end.

The use of enjambment (‘Mute as a turnip from the Fourth / Of July to All Fool’s Day’ – referring to the nine months of pregnancy) mirrors the length of the pregnancy.

SentenceTechniques to analyse include: sentences (declarative, imperative, interrogative, exclamative),

punctuation, lists, ellipsis

The whole poem is written in the declarative, i.e. as a series of statements. This suggests that the speaker is sure of her love for the child – she is being truthful and honest.

LanguageTechniques to analyse include: simile, metaphor, personification, juxtaposition, oxymoron, paradox,

symbol, pathetic fallacy, hyperbole, litotes, lexical sets, connotations of words

Plath uses a range of humorous and original similes and metaphors to describe her unborn child.

The simile ‘Clownlike’ – connotes humour and children’s parties; the baby is like a clown because it is upside down in the womb. The humour is reinforced by the image of the child ‘mute as a turnip’.

The child is described as having its ‘Feet to the stars’ – in the womb, the child’s feet point upwards; the use of ‘stars’ connotes wonder, freedom, beauty and potential/possibility (cf Oscar Wilde; ‘We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking up at the stars’). The idea of the child having potential, and the link to possibility, is reinforced by the metaphor in the final line, ‘A clean slate’ – the child can be anything it wants to be. ‘Clean’ also connotes purity and innocence. This is juxtaposed with ‘with your own face on’. The child is presented as an individual, not just a part of its mother. This idea can be linked to the simile ‘wrapped up in yourself like a spool’ – this connotes a sense of independence. ‘Wrapped up’ literally, and also metaphorically (aware of nothing but itself; connoting a sense of contemplation?). The use of ‘self’ in ‘yourself’ emphasises the separate identity of the child.

The unborn child is bald, referred to in the metaphor ‘moon-skulled’ – ‘moon’ links the child to nature; the moon is powerful (esp. in Plath’s poetry). This also connects with the image of the stars (reinforcing the presentation of the child as beautiful). It can also be argued that the references to ‘moon’ and ‘stars’ link the child to higher entities (the moon is often presented as a Goddess, especially in Plath’s poetry; see also the reference to the Titan Atlas); they are above the human world, which could connote superiority (again linking to the idea of the speaker being proud of the child). Further, these are night images (reinforced by the image of the owl, a nocturnal bird ‘trawling its dark’). The child is secure in the darkness of the womb. The word ‘owl’ links the child again to natural images, and connotes wisdom.

The foetus is linked to images of fish, for example in the simile ‘gilled like a fish’ – the foetus is at home in amniotic fluid; ‘fish’ connotes elegance, swimming.

Metaphor: ‘bent-backed Atlas’ – in Greek mythology Atlas was one of the Titans who challenged the Olympian Gods. His punishment was to carry the heavens (planets, stars, sky etc.) on his shoulders. This describes the way the child is curled in the womb; however, it could connote the burdens that the child carries (or will carry?) – the plosive ‘b’ sound reinforce the idea of a heavy burden. It is also humorous to link the foetus (something small and vulnerable) to a Titan. Another reading is that Atlas is strong and powerful (again reinforced by the plosive ‘b’ sounds) – this suggests that the child too is strong and powerful. This juxtaposes with the idea of vulnerability connoted by ‘little’.

The speaker addresses the child as ‘oh high-riser, my little loaf’. ‘Oh’ connotes wonder and joy. The use of ‘my’ connotes ownership, but it is also protective and affectionate. ‘Little’ emphasises the child’s vulnerability. ‘High-riser’ is part of the metaphor of the child being like bread (she gets bigger and bigger as time passes); however, like ‘stars’ it also connotes potential and possibility. Plath later shifts to the pronoun ‘our’ – again there is a sense of protection; however, here the emphasis is on unity; this suggests the parents are a stable unit. The metaphor ‘our travelled prawn’ is humorous; the baby stays in the one place, but travels everywhere the parents go.

Plath uses the simile ‘snug as a bud’; here she disrupts the expected image (a cliché) ‘snug as a bug in a rug’ – one of the key aspects of Plath’s poetry is her use of startling or unusual images. The child is presented as secure and perfect. The word ‘bud’ connotes new life and suggests the child will blossom. This security and ‘rightness’ reinforced by the assonance and internal rhyme; the short ‘u’ sounds make the words sound snug and tight fitting. This is reinforced by the word ‘home’ (which again connotes security and a sense of belonging) and the simile ‘Right, like a well done sum’. Everything adds up as it should do. The tone here is pride.

Many of the images link the child to a fish, appropriate as it is slippery and at home in the amniotic fluid in the womb.

The womb is linked to a ‘pickle jug’ – could this also connote the cravings people

get in pregnancy? The baby is close to the speaker, tight in her womb; however, this is juxtaposed

with the metaphor ‘Farther off than Australia’ – this emphasises her impatience for the child to be born.

SoundTechniques to analyse include: alliteration, assonance, consonance, sibilance, fricatives, plosives,

onomatopoeia

Alliteration/assonance: ‘happiest on your hands’ – image of the contented foetus is reinforced by the alliteration and assonance – makes it sound neat. ‘Happiest’ suggests contentment.

‘A common-sense /Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode’. A humorous image is created through the plosive ‘d’ sound and the assonance, and the colloquial language: ‘thumbs down’ means rejecting something; the ‘dodo’ is extinct, so the child in her womb stands as a symbol of life.

Internal rhyme: ‘a creel of eels, all ripples’ – humour; ‘eels’ wriggle; the ‘l’ and ‘p’ consonance mirrors the wriggling and rippling.

English Literature Poem GridPoem: The Manor Garden

OverviewThink about: content, context, audience, attitudes, purpose, tone, themes

Content: the speaker walks in the garden of a ruined manor house; she talks to her unborn child.Context: like ‘You’re’ (which was written after this poem), Plath wrote this poem while pregnant with her first child, her daughter Frieda. The poem was published in Plath’s first collection, The Colossus.

Audience: the speaker’s unborn child.

Attitudes: pregnancy as part of a larger cycle of nature; fear of birth?

Purpose: to explore her feelings about her pregnancy and the impending birth of her child.

Tone: the tone is both positive and negative; it is up to you to decide whether the positive images outweigh the negative, or vice versa.

Themes: motherhood; children; love; nature; time.

Form and StructureTechniques to analyse include: confessional poem, free verse, stanza, line length, rhythm,

rhyme, enjambment, development of ideas

Development of ideas: in stanza 1 the speaker describes the abandoned garden; sterility and endings (dry fountain and dead roses) are juxtaposed with beginnings (pears, baby); in stanza 2 the mother talks to her foetus about its stages of development, linking it to a larger cycle of nature; in stanza 3 she describes the ruined (but beautiful) manor house; at the end of stanza 3 and the beginning of stanza 4 the speaker talks about the child’s metaphorical inheritance; in stanza 4 and 5 night begins to fall and the speaker focuses on the creatures in the garden (spider, worms and birds). The poem ends with the words ‘difficult borning’.

The enjambment between stanza 2 and 3 emphasises the lexical set of time.Sentence

Techniques to analyse include: sentences (declarative, imperative, interrogative, exclamative), punctuation, lists, ellipsis

The poem is written in the declarative (a series of statements), which suggests the speaker is being honest about her feelings.

LanguageTechniques to analyse include: simile, metaphor, personification, juxtaposition, oxymoron,

paradox, symbol, pathetic fallacy, hyperbole, litotes, lexical sets, connotations of words

The title ‘The Manor Garden’ is interesting. The use of ‘the’ (rather than ‘a’) suggests a specific place, grounding the poem in reality (Plath wrote the poem while at an artists’ colony in Yaddo). ‘Manor’ has connotations of grandeur (which contrasts with the ‘broken flutings’ of the manor house itself – it is abandoned). ‘Garden’ connotes beauty and new life; however, it also connotes the Garden of Eden, and this links to themes of innocence and experience.

The opening of the poem focuses on the abandoned garden: the fountains are ‘dry’, which connotes sterility, and the roses are ‘over’; ‘roses’ and flowers are a common image in Plath’s poems about motherhood and children (in ‘You’re’ the child is presented as a ‘bud’ (full of promise and potential); in ‘Morning Song’ the

‘flat pink roses’ of the wallpaper connote the fragility of life; in ‘Nick and the Candlestick’ the child ‘blooms’ with vitality, and the cave of darkness is hung with ‘roses’ – all positive images). The metaphor ‘incense of death’ is interesting. ‘Incense’ connotes a powerful and intoxicating smell (often associated with churches); it seems to be the smell of the dead (and decaying) roses. These images of death and sterility are juxtaposed with the approaching birth of the child: ‘Your day approaches’. The child is presented as important. ‘Approaches’ builds suspense (and tension?).

Plath uses a vivid and humorous simile: ‘The pears fatten like little buddhas’. This vividly evokes the ripeness of autumn and the baby fattening in the womb; the religious connotations of ‘buddhas’ suggests the baby is special (sacred?).

The metaphor ‘A blue mist is dragging the lake’ is ambiguous. ‘Dragging’, with its heavy ‘g’ sounds and elongated ‘a’ sound connotes exhaustion – the exhaustion of the year? Of the mother from carrying her heavy baby? The image is of ‘blue mist’ is also beautiful and ethereal (and could evoke the ‘Vague as fog’ simile in ‘You’re’; in ‘You’re’ the fog suggests the speaker’s inability to picture her baby). ‘Blue’ often has connotations of sadness.

The baby is presented as being part of a larger cycle (similar to the baby’s ‘bald cry’ joining the ‘elements’ in ‘Morning Song’): there is a lexical set of time: ‘era’, ‘centuries’, ‘history’. This suggests the baby is part of something bigger, and it is connected to something elemental. This connotes power and strength (similar to the image of ‘Atlas’ used in ‘You’re’).

The baby’s growth in the womb is evoked through a series of vivid and original images: it moves through ‘the era of fishes’ (recalling the fish imagery used in ‘You’re’ – ‘gilled like a fish’; ‘creel of eels’; ‘sprat’); the child then goes through the ‘smug centuries of the pig’ – it gains limbs. Plath uses tripling (‘Head, toe and finger’) to continue the development of the foetus. Further, she says they ‘come clear of the shadow’; ‘shadow’ connotes danger’; is the child now free of danger? Further, ‘clear’ connotes purity and innocence (see below).

The manor house in the garden, though ruined is still presented as beautiful. The damage of the ‘broken flutings’ is refuted by the beautiful language used by Plath to describe them (further, while ‘flutings’ refers to the architecture, it also connotes beautiful music). History is imagined as ‘nourishing’ the damaged architecture; this evokes life, and also the mother nourishing her baby. The word ‘History’ connotes the past of the garden, making it powerful and important. This links to the speaker imagining her baby as part of a larger cycle. Plath also uses the metaphor ‘crowns of acanthus’ to describe the columns of the manor house. Acanthus is a shrub; here it refers to an architectural design based on the leaves of the acanthus (often used in Corinthian columns). The use of ‘crown’ connotes royalty; thus the ruins of the manor house are presented as old, beautiful and regal. Further, the reference to the flower again connotes life and growth.

The ‘crow’ is linked to the Gothic, and to omens; however, the personification ‘the crow settles her garments’ is a beautiful way to describe a bird fluffing its wings; it gives the crow a sense of grandeur. It is interesting that the crow is female, reinforcing the theme of motherhood.

The baby’s inheritance is presented as both positive and negative: the baby inherits ‘white heather’ – this is a symbol of luck; further, white connotes the purity and innocence of the child (this is similar to the images of the ‘clean slate’ in ‘You’re’, the ‘nakedness’ and ‘clear vowels’ in ‘Morning Song’ and the ‘clean’ blood of the baby in ‘Nick and the Candlestick).

The baby also inherits ‘a bee’s wing’; the word ‘wing’ connotes freedom; however, in the singular it suggests an inability to fly. Plath’s father kept bees, so this may be a reference to her difficult relationship with him (he died when she was young and she wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral – she has written a lot of poems about him).

The baby also inherits ‘Hours of blankness’. In some ways this is disturbing:

‘blankness’ connotes nothingness, and ‘Hours’ (linking to the lexical set of time) suggests boredom. However, it is possible ‘blankness’ links to the baby as ‘blank’ (i.e. the ‘clean slate’ of ‘You’re’).

The baby is told that it inherits ‘Two suicides’ – again Plath juxtaposes life and death; it also inherits the ‘family wolves’; the word ‘wolves’ connotes violence and danger (although the juxtaposition with ‘family’ makes this ambiguous – ‘family’ connotes protection).

Plath uses the image ‘Some hard stars / Already yellow the heavens’. This suggests that the day is passing into night (another link to endings). This contrasts with the image of the mother in ‘Morning Song’ sitting up all night breastfeeding her baby until dawn. Plath references stars a lot in: in ‘Morning Song’ they are ‘dull’ (because the sky is getting light, to rival the stars’ brightness), while in ‘You’re’ the child with its ‘feet to the stars’ connotes magical possibility. Here the stars are hard, which connotes physically hard, but also emotionally hard. However, ‘yellow’ is a positive colour, full of life and warmth (as in ‘Nick and the Candlestick’, when the candle’s ‘yellows hearten’), and the word ‘heavens’ connotes something sacred.

‘The spider on its own string / Crosses the lake’. ‘Spider’ connotes something evil & sinister; this links to the imagery of the ‘crow’ and ‘wolves’. However, as with the crow, the imagery here can be read as positive: the spider is a creator (just like the speaker) – it has its ‘own string’; further, the ‘string’ connotes the umbilical cord that joins mother and baby together. The spider is crossing the lake – the use of ‘string’ rather than the more usual ‘thread’ makes it seem less fragile, suggesting the spider will make it across the lake (a metaphor for life?).

The use of ‘worms’ connotes death (linking to the opening); however, worms are vital & alive & needed in a garden; once again, the disturbing imagery can be read in a more positive way.

In the final line of the poem ‘The small birds converge, converge / With their gifts to a difficult borning’, ‘small’ connotes vulnerability; however, ‘birds’ connotes freedom. The repetition of ‘converge’ suggests huge numbers of them gathering (perhaps like starlings hundreds of starlings join together at dusk and participate in beautiful co-ordinated flights); the metaphor ‘gifts’ connotes their desire to protect the child. ‘Difficult borning’ suggests the mother is afraid. Interestingly Plath uses the word ‘borning’ rather than ‘birth’ – the ‘ing’ makes it seem longer, perhaps mirroring a fear of a long, drawn-out birth? The misgivings could be about the oncoming winter (the ripening pears suggest the poem is set in Autumn). The juxtaposition of the positive ‘gifts’ and ‘birds’ with the negative ‘difficult’ suggests the speaker’s ambivalence about the birth (an ambivalence seen in ‘Morning Song’, but entirely absent from ‘You’re’). You decide how negative the ending is.

SoundTechniques to analyse include: alliteration, assonance, consonance, sibilance, fricatives,

plosives, onomatopoeia

The sibilant ‘fishes’ mirrors the sound of a fish swimming. The plosive ‘d’ in ‘hard’ emphasises the hardness of the stars.

English Literature Poem GridPoem: Nick and the Candlestick

OverviewThink about: content, context, audience, attitudes, purpose, tone, themes

Content: the speaker sits up at night, contemplating a candle. Context: written October 1962. Plath’s son Nicholas (Nick) was born in January 1962, during a harsh winter. By October Plath had separated from Hughes; she was living on her own with the children.

Audience: initially the speaker seems to be talking to herself; when the candle lights up again, she addresses her son directly. The direct address makes this personal and intimate.

Attitudes: she is afraid in the dark as the candle starts to flicker and go out; the darkness starts her on a meditation of grim and disturbing thoughts (the natural world and religion are threatening); however, when the light comes back she is cheered; she sees her baby Nick and he comforts her.

Purpose: to explore her fears; to express her love for her son.

Tone: the tone shifts: dark; anxious; melancholic; personal; intimate; wondering (at her child); loving.

Themes: motherhood/parenthood; love; children; fear; nature; natural world as threatening; religion.

Form and StructureTechniques to analyse include: confessional poem, free verse, stanza, line length, rhythm, rhyme,

enjambment, development of ideas

Development of ideas: in stanza 1 the speaker sits in a dark room with a candle; the candle starts to go out; she imagines the wax as tears and the room as a cave in which she is a miner; the blue candle connotes poison, suggesting the outside world is dangerous; in stanza 2 the smoke looks sinister and she meditates on dark thoughts; in stanzas 3-7 she imagines the inhabitants of the cave of darkness that is encroaching upon her (white newts and piranha fish); in stanza 7, however, the candle flickers back to life; in stanza 8 the flame brings warmth and comfort; in stanzas 8-14 the mother addresses her sleeping baby directly; in stanza 11 the sleeping baby comforts her – the cave now has flowers and rugs; in stanzas 10 & 11 the speaker says the world and time can come to an end because (stanza 12) no matter how bad things get her son will get her through anything; he is solid and real. To summarise: there is a shift from the dark, disturbing imagery of stanzas 1-7 (brought on by the candle flickering out and the encroaching darkness), and the warm imagery of security (in the rest of the poem) created by the candle coming alight again and revealing the image of the sleeping baby.

As the poem is addressed to Plath’s son, this is clearly a confessional poem. Many critics argue that the dark thoughts explored in this poem are linked to her depression about the breakdown of her relationship with Hughes. While this seems to be a fair reading of the poem, remember not to get too focused on contextual issues and on reading Plath’s life into the poems – ensure you focus on the language and techniques used.

The poem is written in free verse (often used by feminist poets and confessional poets).

The enjambment across stanza 1 and 2 mirrors the wax dripping down the candle

(described using the metaphor ‘tears’). The enjambment across stanza 2 and 3 mirrors the movement of the smoke (described using the sinister metaphor ‘Black bat airs’).

SentenceTechniques to analyse include: sentences (declarative, imperative, interrogative, exclamative),

punctuation, lists, ellipsis

The interrogative (question) ‘O love, how did you get here?’ with the ‘O’ connotes wonder – she is awestruck by her baby (similar to her feelings in ‘Morning Song’). She cannot believe that she created this baby. The use of ‘love’ as a vocative (a name you call someone) emphasises her deep affection for the baby (as in ‘Morning Song’, where ‘Love’ is the first word). [contextual point: Plath suffered a miscarriage in February 1961 – perhaps this means she views the baby as all the more precious].

The use of the declarative (statement) for the final line connotes a sense of certainty, which reinforces the idea of the baby as ‘Solid’, the one real thing she can lean on.

Plath uses challenging imperatives near the end of the poem, saying let the world end – she doesn’t care because whatever happens, she has her son. This shows a shift from the depressing imagery of the opening stanzas, which threatens to suffocate her.

LanguageTechniques to analyse include: simile, metaphor, personification, juxtaposition, oxymoron, paradox,

symbol, pathetic fallacy, hyperbole, litotes, lexical sets, connotations of words

Title: ‘Nick’ refers to Plath’s son Nicholas – the use of the diminutive (nickname) ‘Nick’ suggests fondness and closeness. There is internal rhyme with ‘Nick’ and ‘Candlestick’, suggesting a link between the two. The fact that it is ‘the’ candlestick and not ‘a’ candlestick makes this very specific – it is pointing to a specific incident. The ‘candle’ is central to the poem – it gives light, and when it starts to flicker and fail, darkness encroaches and with it, dark thoughts. Candles are often used as a metaphor for the brevity of life.

The poem opens with a metaphor: ‘I am a miner’. Does this suggest she digs too deep (into her psyche)? She becomes too introspective? The speaker is looking at a candle; for miners, candle flames were their lifeline – when they burned yellow, the miners knew they were safe; when they burn blue (as at the start of the poem) this indicates the presence of dangerous poisonous gases. The speaker therefore views the outside world as dangerous. The candle burning blue in the bedroom where the speaker watches her baby is dimming, flickering as if to go out. This starts the speaker on a meditation of dark thoughts. The candle ‘burns’ – this takes on a metaphorical meaning, connoting the speaker’s pain. The candle wax dripping is described as ‘tears’ (clearly connoting sadness and despair), as if cried by the earth itself. The darkness of the night closing in, which Plath compares to a cave, is further described using the metaphor ‘earthen womb’. ‘Womb’ has positive connotations of protection and safety (and she has recently given birth); further, ‘earthen’ links the speaker to the earth and the elements (recalling the baby’s voice joining the ‘elements’ in ‘Morning Song’). However, instead the image is negative and threatening. This is in part due to the image of the ‘tears’, but also because the tears are described as being exuded from ‘its dead boredom’. The womb is referred to as ‘its’ – there is no sense of comforting femininity here. ‘Dead’ is shocking after the reference to the womb (something connoting new life); the juxtaposition suggests despair.

Plath describes the smoke from the candle using the metaphor ‘black bat airs/ Wrap me, raggy shawls, / Cold homicides’. Plath here uses shocking and disturbing imagery – sitting in the encroaching darkness, the speaker thinks darker

and darker thoughts. ‘Black’ connotes evil and death, while ‘bats’ (cave dwellers and creatures of the night) are often associated with horror and terror. The word ‘shawls’ connotes a sense of protection, and ‘wrap’ could reinforce this. However, the shocking death imagery of ‘cold homicides’ makes the word ‘wrap’ seem sinister and constricting. ‘Cold’ connotes both the opposite of heat (it is night time) and an emotional coldness – the atmosphere is one of desolation. The cold imagery is reinforced by the reference to ‘icicles’ – the dripping wax, initially envisioned as tears, is now frozen icicles, connoting something hard; icicles are also sharp and resemble daggers.

Plath uses the metaphor ‘They weld to me like plums’ to describe the ‘bat airs’ (i.e. the smoke). The juxtaposition between ‘weld’, which suggests pain, something permanently fixed, and ‘plums’ which has connotations of sweetness and ripeness is interesting. Plath is known for her startling and original use of imagery. ‘Plums’ could connote the purple colour of a bruise. ‘Weld’ suggests she is permanently changed (scarred?)

The ‘cave’ of darkness becomes a cave of despair. The cave is described as ‘old echoer’, the word ‘echo’ connoting something ghostly, perhaps something haunting her? The newts are described as ‘white’. In Plath white often connotes death; the newts are lifeless. Further, she describes the fish as disturbing. ‘And the fish, the fish – ‘ – the repetition of ‘the fish’ suggests her disgust and fear; the dash suggests breaking off in fright, as if she cannot go on. The speaker then exclaims ‘Christ!’ reinforcing the image of shock and fear. The fish are described using violent imagery – the unexpected metaphor ‘panes of ice’ (we would expect panes of glass) continues the lexical set of cold and ice that runs through the poem, and suggests both hardness and her isolation. ‘Pane’ also evokes the homophone ‘pain’, which links to the imagery of death and despair that runs throughout the first part of the poem. The word ‘ice’ finds its rhyme and counterpart in the original and disturbing image ‘a vice of knives’, which connotes entrapment and violence. Fish are often linked to religion, and here Plath seems to criticise religion (she uses the metaphor ‘A piranha / Religion, drinking / Its first communion out of my live toes’) and calls the newts as ‘Holy Joes’ (a dismissive term for religious people).

The speaker’s introspective meditations have become darker and darker, as if she is mining her depression (linking to the opening metaphor ‘I am a miner’). The turning point in the poem comes with the line ‘The candle / Gulps and recovers its small altitude, / Its yellows hearten’. The onomatopoeic ‘gulps’ is almost humorous, but it could suggest someone gulping for air, struggling to survive; ‘small’ connotes vulnerability – there is always the potential for the candle to flicker out again (and the candle itself could be a metaphor for the brevity of life). Despite this, the colour yellow connotes warmth and happiness and the mood of the poem changes; ‘yellow’ also contrasts with the colours of the cave: black, white and colourless (‘panes of ice’). And the word ‘heartens’ connotes comfort (even more so as it includes the word ‘heart’, which links to love and her relationship with her baby).

She addresses the baby as ‘O embryo’ – the ‘O’ connotes wonder; ‘embryo’ refers to the baby sleeping curled in the foetal position, a position of comfort and safety.

The baby is presented as innocent and pure: ‘The blood blooms clean in you, ruby’. This recalls the ‘clear vowels’ and ‘nakedness’ of ‘Morning Song, and the ‘clean slate’ of ‘You’re’ – for Plath, it seems, babies represent something pure and innocent. The reference to ‘blood’ in the alliterative ‘blood blooms’ connotes life and vitality; ‘blooms’ connotes a flower blossoming (the continuation of the ‘bud’ mentioned in ‘You’re’, with reference to Frieda, and the reference to ‘roses’ in ‘Morning Song’. The reference to flowers connotes possibility and potential; however, flowers also connote the fragility of life (like the candle). The word ‘ruby’ shows how precious the baby is to the speaker.

The speaker’s love for the child is shown by the repetition of the word at the

beginning of stanza 11: she addresses the baby as ‘Love, love’ – this shows her deep connection with the baby (and links to the first word of ‘Morning Song’); the repetition suggests she is overwhelmed by her emotions for the baby.

The baby comforts her; now that the candle is lit again, the cave is presented as more comforting: ‘I have hung our cave with roses, / With soft rugs’. ‘Roses’ links back to the use of ‘bloom’ to describe the baby (and to ‘bud’ in ‘You’re’ and the ‘flat pink roses’ of ‘Morning Song’); they connote beauty – the cave is no longer filled with black bats and white newts and piranha fish (however, roses are ephemeral, so perhaps there is still a sense of vulnerability). The reference to ‘soft rugs’ is made more gentle and comforting by the use of the sibilance and fricative. In addition, the roses and rugs show she wants to comfort and protect him.

The baby is described as ‘remembering’ its time in the womb, its ‘crossed position’. The use of ‘crossed’ connotes Jesus. The final line reinforces the link between the baby and Jesus: ‘You are the baby in the barn’. This is appropriate as she views the baby as her saviour – he is what will get her out of the darkness; he is a symbol of hope. Interestingly, however, the earlier images show she has little time for organised religion. The speaker says ‘Let the stars / Plummet to their dark address’. This apocalyptic imagery (so different to the ‘stars’ in ‘You’re’ which symbolise hope, beauty and magic) is disturbing (with ‘plummet’ in particular connoting fast, uncontrollable falling) – however, she is saying that even if the world ends, she will be safe because she has her child. This is beautiful and incredibly moving. However, it can be argued that this is a lot of pressure and responsibility to put on a baby.

Plath uses another apocalyptic image: ‘Let the mercuric / Atoms that cripple drip / Into the terrible well’. The image of crippling atoms dripping into a well is disturbing. Does she feel she is crippled by life? Despite this disturbing imagery, the baby can rescue and protect her.

The speaker tells the child ‘The pain you wake to is not yours’. This is ambiguous. It could mean that any pain in the family is not the baby’s fault; however, it could be talking about the pain of the world/society in general. She wants to protect the baby from it; also, the pain is not the baby’s because the baby is innocent and pure.

The speaker tells the child ‘You are the one / Solid the spaces lean on, envious’. Placing ‘one’ at the end of a line shows the importance of the baby to the mother. Does it suggest the baby is the only one who can save and protect her? ‘Solid’ placed at the beginning of a line is also emphasised – the word itself sounds solid, emphasising the power and strength of the baby (this links to Plath comparing Frieda to Atlas in ‘You’re’). The spaces are personified as being jealous - of the baby? Of her because she can lean on the baby and they can’t?

SoundTechniques to analyse include: alliteration, assonance, consonance, sibilance, fricatives, plosives,

onomatopoeia

The gentle sibilance of ‘roses’ and ‘soft rugs’ – the cave is changed from a hard, violent place (signified by the plosive ‘b’ of ‘black bats’ and the harsh, sinister sibilance of the opening stanzas) to somewhere gentle and comforting. It is the sight of the baby in the candlelight that has effected this huge change in attitude.

Notes on “Poppies in July”

Themes/Content:

The speaker contemplates poppies in midsummer. To her the flowers are associated with bleeding and violence (through their deep red colour) and unconsciousness/sleep/death (through their link with opium/heroin).

Attitude/Tone: fascination, incredulity (note use of interrogative) anguish and desperation.

Imagery

Two strands – redness-colourlessness

Stanzas 1-4 focus on the blood-red colour of the poppies. Initially they are represented as “little hell flames”; then in stanzas 3 and 4 there is a fluid shift to comparing them with “the skin of a mouth…. a mouth just bloodied” and then “little bloody skirts”. All of the red imagery is associated with violence, pain and bloodshed.

Stanza 5 introduces the “opiates”; the colourless intangible, invisible “fumes”. The imagery is continued in the “liquors” of the stanza 7 at the repetition of “colorless” in Stanza 8. This imagery connotes a drowsy, drugged state – leading to unconsciousness/death.

Structure

The poem falls loosely into two halves – the first half focussing on the red imagery, the second half focusing on the colourless imagery. Within this, though, the movement of imagery/thought is unpredictable and typically fluid. This makes the poem appear open and somewhat loose in structure; but this is not, in fact, the case. This is a highly wrought and tightly structured poem.

The two strands of imagery are brought together in the pivotal lines of the poem in Stanza 6.

“If I could bleed, or sleep! –“

The options she offers herself here are either (i) a form of masochistic violence (“if my mouth could marry a hurt like that!”); or (ii) unconsciousness/death. Significantly the last lines move away from bleeding/violence towards the “dulling and stilling” of the opiates.

In the final stanza (moving from couplets to a single line) we are offered a bleak distillation of what the poppies suggest to the speakers.

“But colorless. Colorless.”

Sentence

Note the use of the interrogative and exclamatives. Also, the prevalence of short sentences. (eg. “You flicker.” “Nothing burns”. “But colorless”. These features, along with the irregular line length, help to create the staccato, jerky, nervy rhythm of the poem.

Also, note the breakdown of grammar from stanza 6 onwards. In the concentration of imagery and the intensity of feeling, the poet breaks out of conventional grammatical structures. Instead we are left with a series of disjunctured, apparently dislocated utterances which convey her frame of mind far more powerfully than could have been possible within the rules of conventional grammar.

Some notes on “Daddy”

Context

Written in October 1962. Plath and Hughes had separated in August 1962. Otto Plath died in 1940 when Plath was 8.

Content

The primary significance of the poem relates to the speaker’s relationship with her father. The father figure is presented as austere and oppressive and as having had a detrimental effect on the speaker’s whole life. As he died when the speaker was a child, she has not had the chance to resolve this unhealthy relationship; this is what she attempts to do through writing the poem. The situation is complicated by the fact that the speaker chose her husband in the image of her father. Towards the end of the poem the two male/patriarchal figures become almost indistinguishable, as the speaker expresses her hatred of the male oppressor.

Audience

The second person is used throughout the poem. The ‘you’ addressed is the speaker’s deceased father. As a ‘confessional poem’, it represents the speaker’s stream of thought; in this sense the poet is her audience, alongside the reading public.

Attitudes/Tones (see below)

Primarily angry, sardonic, bitter; but with an undertone of yearning and thwarted affection.

Purpose

Mainly, to come to terms with her father’s death and the poor relationship she had with him while he was alive and the detrimental effects this has had on her life. The extent to which she achieves this is debatable.

Also, to express her anger and hatred towards her father/husband/(men?).

Themes

Bereavement; father-daughter relationship; marriage; male oppression; mental suffering/torture.

Title

The word “daddy” has various connotations:

As a way of referring to her father, the register is more immature than terms like ‘father’, or even ‘dad’. As such it suggests that the speaker is stuck in a childlike relationship with her dead father; as a 30 year old she still relates to him as she did when she was 8 years old.

The father-daughter relationship in the poem could invite a Freudian reading (Electra complex).

Alternatively, a feminist reading would link the title to Plath’s angry response to patriarchy (literally, the rule of the father).

Tone

The predominant tone of the poem is angry and sardonic. Like “Lady Lazarus”, the poem conveys an intense bitterness towards men.

Nevertheless, there is an undertone of affection; a desperate yearning for the love of the father who died when she was a child.

The ambivalent tone is evident right to the very end of the poem:

“Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”

The aggressive and dismissive tone is undercut by the repetition of “daddy” which suggests a childlike tenderness and vulnerability. This is reinforced by the juxtaposition of the harsh plosives in “bastard” with softer assonance/rhyme in “through”. (See notes on sound below).

Sound

Throughout the poem there is an ongoing, if irregular, use of rhyme. The rhyming words include:

‘do’, shoe’, ‘achoo’, ‘you’, ‘blue’, ‘two’, ‘jew’, ‘true’, ‘goobledygoo’, ‘through’, ‘who’, ‘glue’, screw’. This repetition/echoing of the soft “oo” sound has led to a variety of interpretations:

sobbing sounds, evoking a sense of the speaker’s anguish. orgasmic sounds?? (supports a literal application of the Freudian/psychoanalytic reading). infantile (cooing) soundsPutting aside the Freudian reading, it can be noted that the rhyme provides the poem with a softer/gentler edge which helps to draw out the undertone of vulnerability and longing.

These softer sounds are, in turn, juxtaposed with harsher sounds within the poem. For example, the guttural, Germanic “ch” sounds:

The tongue stuck in my jaw

It stuck in a barb wire snare

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak……..

Note, also, “Dachau, Auschwitz” and “back, back, back”.

The latter phrase also exemplifies the use of alliteration and hard plosives which lend a harder edge to the poem. Other examples include the repeated use of the work “black” (again combining plosive with guttural sounds) and the lines:

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

These contrasting aural effects are brilliantly fused in the final line of the poem (see above), emphasising the ambivalent tone of the poem’s conclusion.

Structure and form

The structure of the poem is fragmented/irregular, as Plath shifts fluidly from one idea to the next. The poem traces the speaker’s stream of thoughts in a free and spontaneous way. It can be argued that the effect is to emphasize her disturbed/turbulent state of mind.

This, in turn, is reinforced by the use of free verse. Although composed entirely of five line stanzas, the line length is irregular; rhyme is used, but in an irregular, spasmodic way. Further, there is a frequent use of enjambment from one stanza to another. This breaking out of the imposed stanzaic order, could be seen as reflecting the speaker’s failed attempts to control/order her feelings. Alternatively, it could be seen as reflecting her attempt to break out of the mould/behaviours which she has been stuck in for the last twenty years.

Imagery

The extended metaphor of Nazis/Jews has connotations of conflict/war, persecution, oppression and extreme suffering. This represents the speaker’s perception of the relationship between father and daughter (or, if you want to pursue an autobiographical reading, between Otto and Sylvia Path!).

Some critics have argued that Plath’s use of this metaphor is a misappropriation of the Jew’s suffering at the hands of the Nazis. In other words, in is inappropriate for the speaker to equate her personal suffering with that of millions of persecuted Jews; it is seen as an almost offensive/distasteful analogy. On the other hand, a more sympathetic reading is that the intensity of the speaker’s anguish is so great that she must seek the most horrific imagery imaginable in order to adequately convey her feelings. Readers who have suffered intense depression or mental anguish often remark on the power and poignancy of the holocaust metaphor.

English Literature Poem GridPoem: Wuthering Heights

OverviewThink about: content, context, audience, attitudes, purpose, tone, themes

Content: the speaker walks on the wild and windy moors; she feels threatened by nature.Context: Plath and Hughes visited Yorkshire on holiday, and they both wrote poems. This poem was written after a visit to Haworth, where the Brontës lived. Emily Brontë wrote the novel Wuthering Heights. She grew up on the edge of the Yorkshire Moors and had a deep affinity with the land; she tried to leave on many occasions, but the pull was so strong that she always returned. Brontë’s novel is set on the bleak and beautiful Yorkshire Moors. She also wrote a series of poems about a fantasy world, Gondal (The Gondal Saga); the imaginary Gondal has much in common with the Yorkshire Moors. Brontë’s poem ‘Spellbound’ evokes beautifully the image of a woman trapped on the moors – however, by the end we realise that she is in part staying through her own free choice, that she is drawn to the violence and power of the moors. Brontë’s poem draws on the Romantic tradition of the Sublime (which you should be familiar with through your sessions on Frankenstein).

Audience: the poem is an internal monologue (like Emily Brontë’s poem ‘Spellbound’).

Attitudes: nature as threatening; fear of losing her identity in the bleak moors; isolation.

Tone: fear; isolation; disconnection.

Themes: nature; literature; death.

Form and StructureTechniques to analyse include: confessional poem, free verse, stanza, line length,

rhythm, rhyme

It has been argued that Plath is the speaker; however, it can be argued that Plath is taking on the persona of Emily Bronte.

The poem is an internal monologue. The enjambment in the first stanza mirrors the vastness of the sky and the

moors, a vastness that is too much for the speaker –she feels that she is losing her identity.

SentenceTechniques to analyse include: sentences (declarative, imperative, interrogative,

exclamative), punctuation, lists, ellipsis

The poem is written as a series of statements; this could mirror the bleakness of the moors.

LanguageTechniques to analyse include: simile, metaphor, personification, juxtaposition,

oxymoron, paradox,

The title refers to Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights. The opening simile connotes entrapment: ‘The horizons ring me like faggots’;

the use of the plural ‘horizons’ connotes the vast emptiness of the Yorkshire

moors – the sky seems limitless. The speaker is uneasy, shown by the use of ‘tilted’ and ‘unstable’ – it is as if the vastness of the sky is putting her off balance. The opening emphasises her insignificance in the face of powerful nature (this links to Romantic poetry about the sublime).

The speaker is on the moors at sunset: she vividly evokes the beauty of the sunset: ‘Touched by a match they [i.e. the horizons] might warm me’ is positive. She is cold, and the vivid orange of the sky has the potential to make her feel better. This is reinforced by the beautiful imagery of the metaphor ‘Their fine lines singe / The air to orange’. The sky is dramatic, and looks as though it is burning; the delicate nature of the lines (streaks of clouds?) is evoked by ‘fine’ (which also connotes high quality) and the assonance/internal rhyme of ‘fine lines’. Plath writes that the sunset comes ‘Before the distances they pin evaporate, / Weighting the pale sky with a solider colour’. ‘Pin’ connotes holding something – however, the distances ‘evaporate’ as darkness (the ‘solider colour’) falls – everything then becomes black. A different reading of these lines: By contrast it could be argued that ‘Touched by a match’ means ‘If the sky was touched by a match it would be beautiful and could warm me, but it isn’t’ – in this reading, the ‘solider colour’ would be the orange of sunset that she desires (but the sky only dissolves, connoting greyness and bleakness).

‘Evaporates’ and the repetition of the sibilant ‘dissolve’ refers to the horizons disappearing as night falls; however, it also connotes the speaker herself disappearing, losing her identity.

Simile: ‘the wind / pours by like destiny’ connotes its power, and creates an image that nothing can withstand it, emphasising the speaker’s vulnerability. The power of the wind is reinforced by the word ‘bending’ (emphasised by the plosive ‘b’ and the enjambment) – it can bend ‘Everything’ (including the speaker) – nature is far more powerful (as in Bronte’s poem ‘Spellbound’).

‘I can feel it trying / To funnel my heat away’. Here there is a sense of disconnection, a fear of loss of identity (which links back to ‘evaporate’ and the repeated ‘dissolve’).

The heather roots are personified as inviting her ‘To whiten my bones among them’. The imagery of death is made to seem tempting through the use of the word ‘invite’ and the lexis of unity (‘among them’); there is a sense that if she dies here, she will become part of the moors.

The description of the sheep is interesting. Unlike the speaker, they are at home here, they feel no sense of disconnection: they ‘know where they are’. They are personified as ‘Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds / Gray as the weather’, an original image, which presents them as benign. However, this shifts and the sheep are presented as more sinister: ‘The black slots of their pupils take me in’. ‘Black’ connotes death, and the sheep are presented, not just as staring at her, but as actually drawing her into them. The sense of her losing her identity is reinforced by the simile ‘It is like being mailed into space, / A thin, silly message’.

The image of the sheep standing ‘about in grandmotherly disguise’ is threatening; it evokes the wolf in the fairy tale Red Riding Hood. Does this suggest childish fears? The threatening imagery is continued by the ‘yellow teeth’ (‘yellow’, which in ‘Nick and the Candlestick’ connoted happiness as the flame came back to life, here connotes decay) and the ‘hard, marbly baas’ – the cold hardness of the image is reinforced by the image of marble, and by the plosive ‘b’ sounds.

The imagery of dislocation and emptiness continues: the speaker finds evidence of habitation – but it has been deserted a long time ago: the

doorsteps are ‘Hollow’; the lintel and sill are ‘unhinged’. ‘Unhinged’ also connotes a disturbed mental state. The speaker feels isolated: ‘solitudes’.

The air is personified: ‘Of people the air only / Remembers a few odd syllables. It rehearses them moaningly’. The people who lived here left a long time ago, reinforcing the speaker’s sense of isolation. The onomatopoeia evokes a disturbing image of pain and sorrow. The repeated ‘Black stone’ connotes hardness and death, evoking the bleak emptiness of the moors.

The moor is desolate: the sky is personified as leaning on the speaker – she feels oppressed: ‘The sky leans on me, me, the one upright / Among all horizontals’. However, this also evokes the image in ‘Nick and the Candlestick’ of the baby being the one solid the spaces lean on – is the sky leaning on her, not to oppress her, but for support? What do you think? The repetition of ‘me’ could be her expressing her identity defiantly; conversely, the repetition could emphasise the feeling of oppression. The grass is personified as ‘beating its head distractedly’ – this connotes fragility (and pain through the violent, plosive ‘beating’ – the image is of someone who is disturbed hurting themselves), and can be linked to the speaker. The image of the grass as fragile is reinforced by the use of ‘too delicate / For such company’. ‘Such company’ refers to the wind which is terrifying: ‘Darkness terrifies it’. Does darkness also terrify the speaker?

The moors are therefore presented as bleak and forbidding. However, in the final line there is a sense of hope: ‘Now, in valleys narrow / And black as purses, the house lights / Gleam like small change’. The similes suggest a glint of hope. However, it is ‘small change’ – does this mean that it is little more than a glimmer of hope; that the houses should be more comforting than they are?

SoundTechniques to analyse include: alliteration, assonance, consonance, sibilance,

fricatives, plosives

The sibilance through the poem mirrors the sound of the wind. The repeated plosives (for example in ‘beating’ and ‘bending’) connote the

harshness of nature.

ENGLISH LITERATURE: LITERARY TECHNIQUES TO ANALYSE

Alliteration: the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words.

‘Five miles meandering in a mazy motion’ (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Kubla Khan’)

Allusion: an intentional but undeclared reference within a text to another text or to a historical event, person, belief etc.

Ambiguity: open to more than one interpretation.

Assonance: the rhyming of vowel sounds within two or more words.

‘The sweep/Of easy wind’ (Robert Frost, ‘Stopping by Woods’)

Asyndetic list: a list which just uses commas (no ‘and’).

‘birds, a distant lawnmower, his hoarse, frightful endearments’ (Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Stafford Afternoons’)

Blank Verse: unrhymed poetry based on the iambic pentameter.

But God left free the Will, for what obeysReason, is free, and Reason he made right (John Milton, Paradise Lost)

Caesura: a pause or a break in a line of poetry which contributes to the rhythm of the line.

‘To be or not to be [pause] That is the question’ (Shakespeare, Hamlet)

Cliché: a trite or overused expression or idea e.g. ‘good as gold’; ‘white as a sheet’. Avoid these in your own writing.

Connotation: the associations of a word (e.g. green is associated with envy).

Consonance: a number of words deliberately placed together in which the same consonant sound dominates. ‘green and heavy-headed/Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods’ (Seamus Heaney, ‘Death of a Naturalist’)

Couplet: two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme and usually have the same metre.

Declarative: a statement.

‘God tried to teach Crow how to talk’. (Ted Hughes, ‘Crow’s First Lesson’).

Denotation: the straightforward dictionary definition of a word (e.g. green is the colour between blue and yellow in the spectrum).

Diction: choice and use of words in speech or writing.

Enjambment/enjambement: when one line of a poem continues into the next without a pause.

After we’d both calmed down, I finished the wine

on my own, hearing him out. I made him sit

on the other side of the room and keep his hands to himself.(Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Mrs Midas’)

Exclamative: an exclamation (signalled by an exclamation mark).

‘Nay, we are seven!’ (William Wordsworth, ‘We Are Seven’)

Free verse: poetry which doesn’t conform to strict metre; the rhyme scheme (if any) is also irregular

I celebrate myself and sing myself,

And what I assume you shall assume,For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

(Walt Whitman, ‘Song of Myself’)

Fricatives: f and z sounds (e.g. fizzing fireworks)

Full rhyme: between words whose last stressed and all following sounds are identical (e.g. knows/foes; way/day; biters/fighters).

Hyperbole: an intentionally exaggerated statement.

I’ve been waiting ages; I’m so hungry I could eat a horse; a ton of money.

Iambic pentameter: a poetic metre in which a line has five pairs of syllables, with the stress falling on the second syllable in each pair.

Imagery: any aspect of a text that appeals to the reader’s senses. Also used more specifically to refer to the use of similes and metaphors.

Imperative: a command.

‘Let down the veil’ (Sylvia Plath, ‘A Birthday Present’)

Interrogative: a question.

‘Is this the world?’ (Ted Hughes, ‘New Foal’).

Juxtaposition: two images placed side by side, for dramatic impact.

Metaphor: direct comparison between two unlike things; no use of ‘like’ or ‘as’. ‘I’m … a melon strolling on two tendrils’ (Sylvia Plath, ‘Metaphors’)

Metre: rhythmic pattern of stresses in a poem.

Onomatopoeia: the sound of a word closely resembles its meaning.

Bang, squelch, splat, fizz, oink, splash.

Oxymoron: two contradictory words are placed together to create a dramatic effect, for example deafening silence and bitter sweet.

‘A damned saint, an honourable villain.’ (Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet)

Pathetic fallacy: a literary technique that uses natural elements (such as the weather) to reflect human mood and emotions.

Pararhyme: rhyming through exchanging vowel sounds.

Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade (a)

How cold the steel is, and keen with hunger of blood; (a)

Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash; (b)

And thinly drawn with famishing flesh. (b) (Wilfred Owen, ‘Arms and the Boy’)

Persona: the assumed identity or fictional ‘I’ assumed by a writer in a literary work. Remember the ‘I’ is not necessarily the poet speaking. In Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’, Browning takes on the persona of an Italian Duke who has killed his wife.

Personification: a type of metaphor that gives human qualities to non-human things, ideas and animals. Keats’ ‘To Autumn’ personifies Autumn.

Plosives: b, p, g, d, and hard c sounds (e.g. ‘boughs bent’)

Pun: a humorous play on words, dependent on a word or phrase having a double meaning. “My wife went on holiday”. “Jamaica?” “No, she went of her own accord”.

Register: variety of language used in a specific setting (e.g. in an interview we would use a formal register, while at home we may use an informal register).

Repetition: can be repeated words, images or ideas.

Rhyme: repetition of identical or similar sounds. End rhymes occur at the end of lines; internal rhymes occur within lines. ‘In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud’ (Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’)

Rhythm: a term used to refer to the recurrence of stressed and unstressed sounds in poetry. Depending on how sounds are arranged, the rhythm of a poem may be fast, slow, jerky, smooth.

Sibilance: the repetition of s, soft c, sh and z sounds.

‘We heard his stealthy slithering sound across the earthen floor’.

(Oodgeroo of the Noonuccal tribe (Kath Walker), ‘Ballad of the Totems’)

Simile: compares two different things using ‘like’ or ‘as’.

the room contains no sound

except the ticking of the clock

which has begun to panic

like an insect, trapped

in an enormous box.

(Wendy Cope, ‘At 3am’)

Stanza: a group of lines of verse arranged in a regular and recurring pattern, which fixes the number of lines, the metre and the rhyme scheme (also known as a verse).

Symbolism: Use of a person, object, image, word, or event to evoke a range of additional meanings beyond and usually more abstract than its literal significance. In Macbeth, blood is a symbol for guilt.

Syndetic list: a list which uses at least one conjunction (e.g. and).

‘I love thee to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach’ (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘How Do I Love Thee?)

*Remember – it is not enough to refer to these techniques – you must always discuss what effect has been created. Use the SEA framework: Statement, Evidence, Analysis

Click below for two videos on Plath’s life and work:

Video One www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gixYZrmayA

Video Two www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3IijkIQzUY

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