Analyze the poem Ariel in perspective of the volume ARIEL.
The work which most perfectly embodies Plath’s conflicting sets of figures concerning power and nakedness is “Ariel” (October 1962), for this poem shows how Plath’s metaphorical universes collide but also how her mutually exclusive systems of representation give rise to some of the most effective and beautiful poetry she wrote. Plath noted in her journal that she was privileged to listen to Auden discuss his view of Shakespeare’s Ariel as representative of “the creative imaginative”, so one might assume that in this poem she is revealing something about her own view of creativity. What is curious is that the creativity which emerges so energetically here is ultimately undone within the context of the poet’s own presentation of that creativity.
M. L. Rosenthal points to the basic conflict of the poem in observing that “In a single leap of feeling, it identifies sexual elation (in the full sense of the richest kind of encompassment of life) with its opposite, death’s nothingness”. In fact, however, Plath is not conflating two opposing states of being; instead she is capering dangerously between metaphorical designs which seem to consume the poem from within. Obviously the movement of the poem is very powerful and very positive since the speaker proceeds from stillness and ignorance (“Stasis in darkness”) toward light at a very rapid pace. The speaker moves with some potent force - a horse, a sexual partner, some aspect of herself - which compels her, and given the title and Plath’s remarks concerning Auden, we can assume that this force must relate to some aspect of Plath’s creative self. The speed of the journey is such that the earth “Splits and passes” before the speaker, and even those delicious and tempting enticements that come between the creator and her work are not enough to impede her; they may be “Black sweet blood mouthfuls,” but the speaker of the poem consigns them to the category “Shadows,” things which threaten the vision (light) and power of her creative surge.
The female force of the poem flies through air, and suddenly she begins to engage in that most essential of poetic acts - at least for the writers of Plath’s generation; she removes those restrictions which threaten her gift. She tosses her clothing off like a rebellious Godiva and rides free, fast, unclothed, and fully herself toward her goal:
White
Godiva, I unpeel --
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And she reaches a moment of apparent transcendence: “And now I Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.” Her epiphany is associated with traditionally female symbols. (We might make a connection between the wheat and Demeter, goddess of agriculture, or between wheat and the mother earth. The sea, moreover, certainly seems closely connected with female cycles and with the female symbol of the moon.) Her moment of triumph, moreover, is conveyed in verbs which may suggest - if sexuality is at all to be considered appropriate here - female rather than male sexuality. To foam and to glitter have arguably much more resonance when considered in terms of female orgasm than in terms of male orgasm. The energy of these verbs is great, but it is a more sonorous and sustained energy than a directed, explosive, and aimed burst. To make use of Luce Irigaray’s paradigm, woman’s sexuality and woman’s pleasure are not “one” but “plural” because “woman has sex organs more or less everywhere”.
But now the speaker enters a different metaphorical paradigm. Her final “stringency” is removed, “The child’s cry / Melts in the wall,” and she can become more powerful only by moving her fully exposed (naked) female self toward the power which she so covets, the power of light and heat and vision - the sun. To make this journey she must transform herself from wheat and water to something much more dangerous and traditionally powerful - an arrow. And here Plath is forced - by the desire of her speaker to assert herself, to move and fly - to appropriate an inappropriate figure for her speaker’s flight: the speaker of “Ariel” becomes an arrow. She transforms herself into the most potent figure of the patriarchal symbolic order - the phallus. The arrow is clearly a figure Plath associates somewhat resentfully, with masculine power. In The Bell Jar, Buddy Willard’s mother tells him that a man is “an arrow into the future” and that a woman needs to be “the place the arrow shoots off from”. Esther’s response to Buddy’s reiteration of Mrs. Willard’s platitudes is that she, Esther, wants to be that arrow: “I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself”. In “Ariel,” Plath demonstrates the consequences for the female artist of such proud and self-affirming desires when these desires are couched in the only symbolic structures available to her.
While the speaker of the poem may call herself the arrow, while she might arrogantly lay claim to that title, she is still female, still the wheat and the water, still naked and exposed and vulnerable. It is important to note that once the speaker begins her flight, she is no longer the arrow; her femaleness has ineluctably reasserted itself. Inescapably female, she is
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
And dew must be consumed by the power of the sun. The speaker of the poem is fully aware that her urgent desire for the power she has arrogated for herself is destructive to her as a woman, for she refers quite deliberately to her journey as suicidal. What is perhaps most tragic about both the speaker of this poem and about Sylvia Plath as the creator of that speaker is that the impulse toward self-disclosure, the desire to move toward the eye/I of awareness, is destined to destroy both of them. In Western culture the unclothed female, whether it be the self-disclosing creator or the emblematic and naked female subject, can be a symbol only of vulnerability and victimization, even when the audience to the glorious and hopeful unveiling is the self.
Placing “Ariel” in a feminist context, Sandra Gilbert argues that the “Eye” toward which this poem moves is “the eye of the father, the patriarchal superego which destroys and devours with a single glance” (“Fine, White Flying Myth”). But such a reading, by ignoring the play on words of “eye” and “I,” leaves unremarked a central ambiguity in the poem and underestimates Plath’s commitment to her female subject and her wild and creative commitment to her own art. The speaking subject here is not just moving toward a powerful male entity, the sun; Plath’s speaker is moving implosively toward herself as well, toward the eye/i that has become the center of her universe, the focus of her attention. The tragedy of Plath’s work, however, is that she has conceived of this overwhelmingly omnipotent figure in the only metaphors available to her - those of the masculine poetic tradition. In this tradition, power is the sun/god, as Gilbert has observed, and to be fully revealed before him, to be naked before this God, is the most transcendently powerful act a human can perform. But when you are female, when you burn with your own sun and expose yourself confidently to that sun, you are consumed. Your body, your self, is still vulnerable. It will be destroyed. The most telling irony of the poem is that the masculine God of patriarchal discourse has been displaced here by the “I” which is the speaker herself. And the female speaker has become the phallic arrow which impels itself toward that sun. But such a journey into knowledge will prove deadly - because the language, the signifiers of that journey dictate that it must be so for the speaking subject who is still “dew,” still female. Even when the father is replaced, his words speak for him, his language secures his position: the dew will be dispersed by the sun.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Analyze critically the poem Daddy in its historical perspective.
In “Daddy” and a number of other late poems, the most difficult problem is the effort to assess the poet’s relationship to her speaker. Because “Daddy” calls upon specific incidents in Plath’s biography (her suicide attempts, her father’s death, her marriage), we are tempted to identify the poet and the speaker directly, although such an identification cannot account for the fact that Plath employs techniques of caricature, hyperbole, and parody that serve to distance the speaker from the poet and at the same time to project onto the speaker a strange version of the poet’s own strategies.
“Daddy” becomes a demonstration of the mind confronting its own suffering and trying to control what it feels controls it. The speaker’s simplistic language, rhyme, and rhythm become one means by which she attempts to charm and hold off the evil spirits. Another means is the extreme facility of her image-making. The images themselves are important for what they tell us of her sense of being victimized and victimizer; but more significant than the actual image is the swift ease with which she can turn it to various uses. For example, she starts out imagining herself as a prisoner living like a foot in the black shoe of her father. Then she casts her father in her own role; he becomes “one grey toe / Big as a Frisco seal,” and then quickly she is looking for his foot, his root. Next he reverts to the original boot identity, and she is the one with “The boot in the face.” Immediately she finds “A cleft in your chin instead of your foot.” At the end she sees the villagers stamping on him. Thus she moves from booted to booter as her father reverses the direction, and the poem’s sympathies for the booted or booter shift accordingly.
The mind that works in this way is neither logical nor psychologically penetrating; it is simply extremely adept at juggling images. And it is caught in its own strategies. The speaker can control her terrors by forcing them into images, but she seems to have no understanding of the confusion her wild image-making betrays. When she identifies herself as a foot, she suggests that she is trapped; but when she calls her father a foot, the associations break down. In the same way, when she caricatures her father as a Fascist and herself as a Jew, she develops associations of torture which are not exactly reversed when she reverses the identification and calls herself the killer of her vampire-father. The speaker here can categorize and manipulate her feelings in name-calling, in rituals, in images - but these are only techniques, and her frenzied use suggests that she employs those methods in the absence of any others. When she says, “Daddy, I have had to kill you,” she seems to realize the necessity of the exorcism and to understand the ritual she performs, but the frantic pitch of the language and the swift switches of images do not confirm any self-understanding. The pace of the poem reveals its speaker as one driven by a hysterical need for complete control, a need arising from a fear that without such control she will be destroyed. Her simple, incantatory monologue is the perfect vehicle of expression for the orderly disordered mind.
In talking to A. Alvarez, Plath called her late poems “light verse.” “Daddy” does not seem to fall easily into that category, despite its nonsense rhymes and rhythms, its quickly flicking images. It is neither decorous nor playful. On the other hand, considering its subject, it is neither ponderous nor serious. Above all it offers no insight into the speaker, no mitigating evidence, no justification. Perhaps Plath’s classification is clear only if we consider her speaker a parodic version of the poet - and, of course, if she were consciously borrowing from Hughes’s animal poems, these poems must be read as a comment on his poetic voice as well. Plath’s speaker manipulates her terror in singsong language and thus delivers herself in “light verse” that employs its craft in holding off its subject. For all the frankness of this poem, the name-calling and blaming, the dark feeling that pervades it is undefined, held back rather than revealed by the technique. The poet who has created such a speaker knows the speaker’s strategies because they are a perverted version of her own, and that is the distinction between the speaker’s “light verse” and the poet’s serious poem. If this poem comes out of Plath’s own emotional experience, as she said her poem did, it is not an uninformed cry from the heart. Rather, Plath chooses to deal with her experience by creating characters who could not deal with their own experiences and, through their rituals, demonstrate their failure.
Plath’s poem shows the limitations of the mind that operates only to rehearse the perfect kill. . . . “Daddy” is a poem of revenge, and its violence is a reaction against torture. . . .
Plath’s depiction of the monomaniacal daughter-victim-killer suggests she was aware that such a figure was far from a genius. The simplicity of her language matches the simplicity of her thinking; in fact, her violent rage has subsumed all other feelings or thoughts. . . .The father-husband figure whom she finally kills is then a “Panzer-man,” “A man in black with a Meinkampf look,” emblem of all the black men who have loomed as threatening forces in her poetry.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Write a detailed account of some of themes that are dominant in Sylvia Plath’s poems. (P.U. 2004)
In a sensible essay, “The World as Icon: On Sylvia Piath’s Themes”, Annete Lavers argues that Plath may well be a symbolist poet: ...for all the freshness of perception they reveal, the [Plath] poems are essentially emblematic. They derive their meaning, both profound and sometimes literal, from an underlying code in which objects and qualities are endowed with stable significations, and hierarchized.
Lavers goes on to suggest that “the symbolic net which Sylvia Plath casts on the world of perception has above all a personal value”, that is, Plath’s themes and images are saturated with personal significance or symbolism. Lavers suggests that, “This code is extremely rigid, in as much an object, once charged with a given signification, never forfeits it: the moon, the snow, the colour black, always have the same function. But the attitude of the poet can vary and thus introduce some ambiguity; the colour red, the color blue, can play different parts in various contexts. The child as theme and the child as subject appears in very different guises”.
This framework gave Plath an opportunity to create a scale of values. It also gave her work a “destination” from the merely personal experience. Thus, there is “cultural imagery” in Plath’s poetry; “classical reminiscences, references to historical events, contemporary allusions, numerous Christian anecdotes and symbols, philosophical concepts, legends (such as that of the vampire) and superstitious (such as that of the cracked glass as a portent of death”.)
However, “the subject of the [Plath] poems is never anything but an individual experience...The primary object of experience is...explored at leisure and all its symbolic potentialities reviewed, only to organise themselves finally according to familiar categories, with man firmly in the centre”. Thus:
Nature, reality, the world, are only in appearance interrogated as potential sources of meaning; for this meaning has been chosen once and for all, and henceforth they will only be used for their expressive possibilities.
This makes Plath an idealist/projectivist, even perhaps a solipsist, but almost certainly a hermeticist or gnostic, perhaps like Yeats. Plath’s “speaking voice” always “remains individual”. Further, “Sylvia Plath’s particular way of experiencing life is shown to have been an interplay between the particular and the general...The juxtaposition of the sublime and the homely, the ‘poetic’ and the scientific (words like carbon monoxide, acetylene, ticker-tape, adding-machine)...reveals a constant and vivifying exchange between depth and surface”. There is, moreover, in the world of Sylvia Plath, “an intuition of kinship between poetry and death.” The major “theme of vulnerability” creates an impression of “an overall threat”...The mood is virtually always negative...and ranges from mere foreboding to hopeless revolt and utter despair”. Thus,
“The living flesh is felt as essentially vulnerable, a prey to axes, doctors’ needles, butchers’ and surgeons’ knives, poison, snakes and tentacles, acids, vampires, leeches, bats and bees, jails and brutal boots. Small animals are butchered and eaten, man’s flesh can undergo the final indignity of being cut to pieces and used as an object. The poet feels her kinship with “the aged and the meek/The weak/ Hothouse baby in its cradle” (“Fever 103°”).
As a result, subjects “and metaphors include a cut, a contusion, the tragedy of thalidomide, fever, an accident, a wound, paralysis, a burial, animal and human sacrifice, the burning of heretics, lands devastated by war, extermination camps: her poetry is a “garden of tortures” in which mutilation and annihilation take nightmarish protean forms...” This makes Plath’s poetry a mine of Gothic imagery, often shading off into the Surreal. And “on the psychological plane, the mind cannot but see a sign of its own fragility in this very multiplicity of symbols. Disintegration threatens, all the more because of a past history of breakdown”. There is imagery of “anarchic forces and centrifugal destruction”. This “obsession with catastrophe is in itself the most potent force of disintegration; it sometimes takes the form of revolt and despair, and at other times of almost an infatuation with death...it finally vitiates and destroys every foundation for hope.” Moreover, “in some poems”, Plath “seems to show an awareness of herself as primarily self-condemned...”.
Lavers enumerates “two of the numerous dangers which threaten in (Plath’s) poems (which) occur with a symbolic frequency”.
The first is the threat of stifling or strangulation, in which an obstacle stands between life and the person, finally destroying the latter; scarves, fumes, veils, placenta and umbilical cords, tentacles are found in “Fever 103°” or “Medusa”, for instance. The second is the threat of destruction by small enemies, outside or inside the body: bats and piranhas, bees....(‘Stings’)…
Further, “Death by fumes or carbon monoxide shows how the first threat is reducible to the second, since death is due to changes in the small units of the body”. Death, indeed, wears many “veils” or guises in Plath’s poetry; it is always ubiquitous and it circumscribes life. Lavers notes that, characteristically in Plath, “blood is almost always presented in a plural forms, as “the blood berries” (‘Ariel’) or a “bowl of red blooms” (‘Tulips’), as if the individual was made up of smaller units endowed with a spontaneity not necessarily in agreement with the conscious self”. Further, the “threat being interiorized means that one touch of decay can start a systematic degeneration”. Broadly speaking, then, “we can say that the dialectic of life and death is the sole subject of the poems.”
The poet’s existence is presented as a cosmic drama in which these two great principles are confronted and their struggle is expressed in patterns, whose structure is accordingly antithetic.
This “binary” opposition is presented in terms of a “code” or system:
The life-principle is colour, pulsating rhythm, noise, heat, radiance, expansion, emotion and communication. Death is the other pole, darkness, stasis, silence, frost, well-defined edges [knives, arrows] and the hardness of rocks, jewels and skulls, dryness, anything self-contained and separate and which derives its positive attributes from some other source, instead of generating them freely—for death is absence, nothingness.
The positive side of this antithetical system is life, and the
...natural symbol of life is “the beautiful red” (‘Letter in November’). It is the colour of blood, the life-fluid, which expresses emotion by its pulsating centre, the heart, in its turn comparable to a wound which reveals life, or to the mouth, which kisses and screams. Colour comes as a “gift, a love gift” (“Poppies in October”), “the heart opens and closes/ Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me” (‘Tulips’) with essential exuberance and generosity in several poems, flowers like tulips and poppies evoke this centre of energy: “Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds (‘Tulips’)”
“Redness” gains, in Plath’s poems, through it being contrasted with a neutral “colour” like “white”:
But the poet’s reaction to the violent affirmation of life against a neutral background of white [the nurses’s uniform in ‘Tulips’, ‘snow’ elsewhere] varies according to (Plain’s) degree of vitality, humble thankfulness when life manifests itself in the desert of depression and daily chores (‘Poppies in October’) or despair at not being able to experience its bite and burn any more (‘Poppies in July’) and the consequent wish for sensation to be finally dulled (the poppies here are a conveniently dual symbol, evoking life but containing death).
In this context of torpidity or ennui, most disturbing of all is the call of life when vitality is at a low ebb; for it cannot be responded to. The individual feels unable to cope with the demands from life, the latter in turn threatens with disintegration and appears as malevolence:
Even through the gift paper I could hear them...
...African cat... —(‘Tulips’)
Here..., whiteness, the anonymous life in hospital and needle-brought unconsciousness are preferred as a refuge.
Lavers also sees the moon as “white...also an absence of colour”, and “the perfect symbol” of “death, for it shines in the night, its light is borrowed, its shape regular, well-defined and self-contained and its bald light turns everything into stone”, as if the moon were Medusa. According to Lavers, in poems like “Medusa”, “Elm”, “The Moon and the Yew Tree”, “Childless Woman”, “The Rival”, “The Munich Mannequins”, “Paralytic” and “Edge”, they “form a constellation, which obviously transcends any personal application;...” But that is the precise point, for instance, in a poem like “The Moon and the Yellow Tree”, where the drama does indeed “transcend any personal application” in quest of a more fulfilling, if not consoling, conception of life and death. Lavers, however, buttresses her argument by suggesting that “Flat” is used, as in “Tulips”, to express a superficial contact with life, when shapes seem two-dimensional, as they do in moonlight”. Further,
...it also points to childlessness—rather as an elected state than when due to sterility—a state both ridiculous (‘The Rival’) and guilty, since it makes passion its own end:
The blood flood is the flood of love,
The absolute sacrifice
It means: no more idols but me,
“me, me and you.”
—”Munich Mannequins”
The moon is also a suitable symbol for sterility because of its circular shape, the most perfect of all, and because it rules the flux of menstrual blood. In the later, death- is in the midst of life, which is cut from its rightful end, according to Sylvia Plath...
Consequently, “the feeling of guilt for a self-seeking life is so strong that it sometimes involves the notion of children.” On the other hand, as in ‘Nick and the Candlestick’ and ‘Berck-Plage’, the candle in Plath’s poems, “symbolises the warmth and fragility of personal life”. Moreover, “Religion, especially as it appears in tender images of mother and child”, seems to offer a refuge against the bald and white moon, as in “The Moon and the Yew Tree”, or “Mary’s Song”, but the poet belongs outside, with the latter. Moreover, “the symbols of possible intimations of a transcendent reality behind the world, clouds, are always depicted as far and high, and indifferent”, as in “The Moon and the Yew Tree”, “Gulliver” and “Little Fugue” according to Lavers. The “stiffness” is associated [in “The Moon and the Yew Tree”] with the blue colour, having a very ambiguous value in this code...” Further, the idea of a sacrifice as the central notion of religion has deeply impressed the poet; sacrifice, either of the heretics, or of the most precious and most innocent, the golden child (in ‘Mary’s Song’), the tortured Christ in ‘Elm’ or his suicidal’ ‘awful God-bit’ in “Years”. As a result, in an “identification in which sadism attributed to the deity is fused with as masochistic drive, the idea of redemption actually has death as a consequence, as appears in “Brusilia”. But “if actual existence can be considered a superiority, individualized existence means separateness which has...a negative value”. Hence, “the desire, expressed in an open or latent manner in many poems, for a transfiguration which will dissolve the limits of the self, this same “old suit, bald and shiny, with pockets of wishes” (‘Totem’).” This transfiguration “can be achieved in orgastic ecstasy, and in the horse’s gallop we find a double symbol, for the utmost experience and the pulsating rhythm of life, and for the dispersion of the individual into the ‘substanceless blue’ (“Ariel”, “Years”, “Words”, “Elm”). However, “Fever 103°” indicates that guilt feelings and a desire for expiation and purification may have determined this choice of a metaphysical framework. Their origin was probably multiple and ancient; this appears when comparing “Daddy” and “Little Fugue...”. “Actually, it is remarkable that in this universe ideas are never felt to be life-giving, intellect is therefore no help” (“The Moon and the Yew Tree”, “Nick and the Candlestick”). This anti-intellectualism can only cause depression, since every enduring reality is thereby interpreted as participating in the nature of death, knowledge is therefore condemned: in Three Women, the male world is “flatness from which ideas, destruction/ Bulldozer, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed/Endlessly proceed...,” and the surgeon lives among cut-up bodies in “Berck-Plage” he is one mirrory eye’ and surrounded by “glittering things”. In this context, it is “only normal and highly significant...the ever-changing face of the mirror is still used as a symbol for life which is preferred to fixity; the shattered mirror is then a metaphor for death”, as in “Contusion”.
Again, the “child is, in principle, the fountainhead of all life and hope, His self is not yet bald and shiny”, he is “vague as fog”..., a vagueness imbued with infinite possibilities, before which the parents are humbled: “your nakedness/shadows our safety”. (“Morning Song”) He is “akin to the elements, the sea, the wind, the clouds ‘with no strings attached and no reflections’ (‘Gulliver’)”. The poet “acknowledges the freedom of her child: “I’m no more your mother...the wind’s hand” (“Morning Song”)”. In the child, innocence, which for the adult can only be obtained in forgetftilness, and annihilation, as in “Getting There”, “Tulips”, “Fever 103°”, is miraculously combined with individuality: “A clean slate with your own face on” (“You’re”). Consequently, in “the face of disintegration and universal dissolution in deceptive glitter, he is a plenum, the fixed point on which the envious spaces lean (‘Nick and the Candlestick’), heavy and precious as gold, a divine redeemer, as in “Morning Song” and “You’re”, by “an accumulation of metaphor”. The child is “like the tremendously compact and potent germ of a future universe, the absolute beginning of some ancient mythologies.” However, “the obvious justification of one’s existence which the child brings is not always potent enough to appease the guilt of the egoist, as appears in the poems on the childless woman or those which show the dead children as appendages to the dead woman” (‘Edge’). In “Fever 103°”, guilt actually evokes the image of a “spotted”, dying child whereas in “Nick and the Candlestick”, the blood bloomed clear in him. Consequently it might be said, “to summarise, that as a subject the child is positive, but that as a theme it is often combined with others which greatly diminish this positive value, and can even make it completely negative; the child-theme is then used to reinforce guilt, fear and despair”.
Much the same could be said “about another theme, that of the lulling context, of everyday life”: Kindness “supplies another necessary fluid”, or “poultice”, and busies itself “sweetly picking up pieces.” Love, in its beginning, evoked ‘a green in the air’, which “cushioned lovingly” the poet.
However, as a poet “who is capable of reading life on two levels at once”, Plath also sees the other aspect—”what happens when interest wanes and the endless stream of the symbols dries up?” The “environment of daily life, when evoked like an incantation in such circumstances, is no more than “dead furniture”, fragmented and powerless...” Similarly, “cooking, often the symbol of daily life, after supplying a delightful metaphor for the child successfully brought into the world, “O high-riser, my little loaf (‘You’re’) can elsewhere be resented as a degrading drudgery, which can make one unworthy of a revelation.”
Consequently, to “the maimed self, therefore, daily life cannot give back wholeness, only crutches, a frequent symbol (‘Berck-Plage’, ‘The Applicant’).” And, “death can actually be welcome, since it frees one from this useless lumber, useless, yet irreversibly acquired, for man is the prey of an ‘adding-machine’.” In “Lady Lazarus” the self is described as:
What a trash
To annihilate each decade
What a million filaments
These images, Lavers points out, “recall Baudelaire’s famous poems entitled ‘Spleen’ in which the self is similarly cumbered with things which no longer have meaning”. This “reflection, which alienates, the living self (and is a frequent theme in Existentialist literature) fits in the neo-platonic scheme...whereby degeneration into matter is the sign of an irreversible degradation.” The “proliferation of “things, things” (‘Berck-Plage’) is used in lonesco’s plays to the same purpose”. And “things are another aspect of death; in ‘Berck-Plage’ the dead furniture turns into nothing, like the corpse: the visible is an illusion and the invisible alone matters”.
It follows “that purification can be achieved in death, in which the scattered personality is seen as gradually withdrawing towards its vital centre, and abandoning its tainted externals, as in “Fever 103°”, in “Tulips”, and in Paralytic”... Similarly, echoes “are often used as a symbol of these externals, since they are a degradation of sound, a repetition travelling away from the original event.” Consequently, if “poetry and death can denounce the illusion of a comfortable life, cannot love bring about the same realization?” Love, in Plath, is “the supremely, ambiguous theme”. To begin with, “some poems, like “Daddy” or “Medusa”, whatever their actual personal associations, present love as something to be achieved in the teeth of opposition, in spite of the past or of terrific obstacles, as in “Getting There”. The “ten-yearly rhythm” of death [in “Lady Lazarus”] offsets the pulsation of life”. However, it “is true that “Lady Lazarus” ends on a note of defiance, and “Daddy” on the successful nailing down of the vampire, the undead, followed by compassion and a purified feeling for this other man, badly known, who was the vampire’s victim: Daddy, you can lie back now.” But elsewhere this forced marriage appears as a certain immolation: “Death opened, like a black tree, blackly” (‘Little Fugue’).
The work which most perfectly embodies Plath’s conflicting sets of figures concerning power and nakedness is “Ariel” (October 1962), for this poem shows how Plath’s metaphorical universes collide but also how her mutually exclusive systems of representation give rise to some of the most effective and beautiful poetry she wrote. Plath noted in her journal that she was privileged to listen to Auden discuss his view of Shakespeare’s Ariel as representative of “the creative imaginative”, so one might assume that in this poem she is revealing something about her own view of creativity. What is curious is that the creativity which emerges so energetically here is ultimately undone within the context of the poet’s own presentation of that creativity.
M. L. Rosenthal points to the basic conflict of the poem in observing that “In a single leap of feeling, it identifies sexual elation (in the full sense of the richest kind of encompassment of life) with its opposite, death’s nothingness”. In fact, however, Plath is not conflating two opposing states of being; instead she is capering dangerously between metaphorical designs which seem to consume the poem from within. Obviously the movement of the poem is very powerful and very positive since the speaker proceeds from stillness and ignorance (“Stasis in darkness”) toward light at a very rapid pace. The speaker moves with some potent force - a horse, a sexual partner, some aspect of herself - which compels her, and given the title and Plath’s remarks concerning Auden, we can assume that this force must relate to some aspect of Plath’s creative self. The speed of the journey is such that the earth “Splits and passes” before the speaker, and even those delicious and tempting enticements that come between the creator and her work are not enough to impede her; they may be “Black sweet blood mouthfuls,” but the speaker of the poem consigns them to the category “Shadows,” things which threaten the vision (light) and power of her creative surge.
The female force of the poem flies through air, and suddenly she begins to engage in that most essential of poetic acts - at least for the writers of Plath’s generation; she removes those restrictions which threaten her gift. She tosses her clothing off like a rebellious Godiva and rides free, fast, unclothed, and fully herself toward her goal:
White
Godiva, I unpeel --
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And she reaches a moment of apparent transcendence: “And now I Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.” Her epiphany is associated with traditionally female symbols. (We might make a connection between the wheat and Demeter, goddess of agriculture, or between wheat and the mother earth. The sea, moreover, certainly seems closely connected with female cycles and with the female symbol of the moon.) Her moment of triumph, moreover, is conveyed in verbs which may suggest - if sexuality is at all to be considered appropriate here - female rather than male sexuality. To foam and to glitter have arguably much more resonance when considered in terms of female orgasm than in terms of male orgasm. The energy of these verbs is great, but it is a more sonorous and sustained energy than a directed, explosive, and aimed burst. To make use of Luce Irigaray’s paradigm, woman’s sexuality and woman’s pleasure are not “one” but “plural” because “woman has sex organs more or less everywhere”.
But now the speaker enters a different metaphorical paradigm. Her final “stringency” is removed, “The child’s cry / Melts in the wall,” and she can become more powerful only by moving her fully exposed (naked) female self toward the power which she so covets, the power of light and heat and vision - the sun. To make this journey she must transform herself from wheat and water to something much more dangerous and traditionally powerful - an arrow. And here Plath is forced - by the desire of her speaker to assert herself, to move and fly - to appropriate an inappropriate figure for her speaker’s flight: the speaker of “Ariel” becomes an arrow. She transforms herself into the most potent figure of the patriarchal symbolic order - the phallus. The arrow is clearly a figure Plath associates somewhat resentfully, with masculine power. In The Bell Jar, Buddy Willard’s mother tells him that a man is “an arrow into the future” and that a woman needs to be “the place the arrow shoots off from”. Esther’s response to Buddy’s reiteration of Mrs. Willard’s platitudes is that she, Esther, wants to be that arrow: “I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself”. In “Ariel,” Plath demonstrates the consequences for the female artist of such proud and self-affirming desires when these desires are couched in the only symbolic structures available to her.
While the speaker of the poem may call herself the arrow, while she might arrogantly lay claim to that title, she is still female, still the wheat and the water, still naked and exposed and vulnerable. It is important to note that once the speaker begins her flight, she is no longer the arrow; her femaleness has ineluctably reasserted itself. Inescapably female, she is
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
And dew must be consumed by the power of the sun. The speaker of the poem is fully aware that her urgent desire for the power she has arrogated for herself is destructive to her as a woman, for she refers quite deliberately to her journey as suicidal. What is perhaps most tragic about both the speaker of this poem and about Sylvia Plath as the creator of that speaker is that the impulse toward self-disclosure, the desire to move toward the eye/I of awareness, is destined to destroy both of them. In Western culture the unclothed female, whether it be the self-disclosing creator or the emblematic and naked female subject, can be a symbol only of vulnerability and victimization, even when the audience to the glorious and hopeful unveiling is the self.
Placing “Ariel” in a feminist context, Sandra Gilbert argues that the “Eye” toward which this poem moves is “the eye of the father, the patriarchal superego which destroys and devours with a single glance” (“Fine, White Flying Myth”). But such a reading, by ignoring the play on words of “eye” and “I,” leaves unremarked a central ambiguity in the poem and underestimates Plath’s commitment to her female subject and her wild and creative commitment to her own art. The speaking subject here is not just moving toward a powerful male entity, the sun; Plath’s speaker is moving implosively toward herself as well, toward the eye/i that has become the center of her universe, the focus of her attention. The tragedy of Plath’s work, however, is that she has conceived of this overwhelmingly omnipotent figure in the only metaphors available to her - those of the masculine poetic tradition. In this tradition, power is the sun/god, as Gilbert has observed, and to be fully revealed before him, to be naked before this God, is the most transcendently powerful act a human can perform. But when you are female, when you burn with your own sun and expose yourself confidently to that sun, you are consumed. Your body, your self, is still vulnerable. It will be destroyed. The most telling irony of the poem is that the masculine God of patriarchal discourse has been displaced here by the “I” which is the speaker herself. And the female speaker has become the phallic arrow which impels itself toward that sun. But such a journey into knowledge will prove deadly - because the language, the signifiers of that journey dictate that it must be so for the speaking subject who is still “dew,” still female. Even when the father is replaced, his words speak for him, his language secures his position: the dew will be dispersed by the sun.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Analyze critically the poem Daddy in its historical perspective.
In “Daddy” and a number of other late poems, the most difficult problem is the effort to assess the poet’s relationship to her speaker. Because “Daddy” calls upon specific incidents in Plath’s biography (her suicide attempts, her father’s death, her marriage), we are tempted to identify the poet and the speaker directly, although such an identification cannot account for the fact that Plath employs techniques of caricature, hyperbole, and parody that serve to distance the speaker from the poet and at the same time to project onto the speaker a strange version of the poet’s own strategies.
“Daddy” becomes a demonstration of the mind confronting its own suffering and trying to control what it feels controls it. The speaker’s simplistic language, rhyme, and rhythm become one means by which she attempts to charm and hold off the evil spirits. Another means is the extreme facility of her image-making. The images themselves are important for what they tell us of her sense of being victimized and victimizer; but more significant than the actual image is the swift ease with which she can turn it to various uses. For example, she starts out imagining herself as a prisoner living like a foot in the black shoe of her father. Then she casts her father in her own role; he becomes “one grey toe / Big as a Frisco seal,” and then quickly she is looking for his foot, his root. Next he reverts to the original boot identity, and she is the one with “The boot in the face.” Immediately she finds “A cleft in your chin instead of your foot.” At the end she sees the villagers stamping on him. Thus she moves from booted to booter as her father reverses the direction, and the poem’s sympathies for the booted or booter shift accordingly.
The mind that works in this way is neither logical nor psychologically penetrating; it is simply extremely adept at juggling images. And it is caught in its own strategies. The speaker can control her terrors by forcing them into images, but she seems to have no understanding of the confusion her wild image-making betrays. When she identifies herself as a foot, she suggests that she is trapped; but when she calls her father a foot, the associations break down. In the same way, when she caricatures her father as a Fascist and herself as a Jew, she develops associations of torture which are not exactly reversed when she reverses the identification and calls herself the killer of her vampire-father. The speaker here can categorize and manipulate her feelings in name-calling, in rituals, in images - but these are only techniques, and her frenzied use suggests that she employs those methods in the absence of any others. When she says, “Daddy, I have had to kill you,” she seems to realize the necessity of the exorcism and to understand the ritual she performs, but the frantic pitch of the language and the swift switches of images do not confirm any self-understanding. The pace of the poem reveals its speaker as one driven by a hysterical need for complete control, a need arising from a fear that without such control she will be destroyed. Her simple, incantatory monologue is the perfect vehicle of expression for the orderly disordered mind.
In talking to A. Alvarez, Plath called her late poems “light verse.” “Daddy” does not seem to fall easily into that category, despite its nonsense rhymes and rhythms, its quickly flicking images. It is neither decorous nor playful. On the other hand, considering its subject, it is neither ponderous nor serious. Above all it offers no insight into the speaker, no mitigating evidence, no justification. Perhaps Plath’s classification is clear only if we consider her speaker a parodic version of the poet - and, of course, if she were consciously borrowing from Hughes’s animal poems, these poems must be read as a comment on his poetic voice as well. Plath’s speaker manipulates her terror in singsong language and thus delivers herself in “light verse” that employs its craft in holding off its subject. For all the frankness of this poem, the name-calling and blaming, the dark feeling that pervades it is undefined, held back rather than revealed by the technique. The poet who has created such a speaker knows the speaker’s strategies because they are a perverted version of her own, and that is the distinction between the speaker’s “light verse” and the poet’s serious poem. If this poem comes out of Plath’s own emotional experience, as she said her poem did, it is not an uninformed cry from the heart. Rather, Plath chooses to deal with her experience by creating characters who could not deal with their own experiences and, through their rituals, demonstrate their failure.
Plath’s poem shows the limitations of the mind that operates only to rehearse the perfect kill. . . . “Daddy” is a poem of revenge, and its violence is a reaction against torture. . . .
Plath’s depiction of the monomaniacal daughter-victim-killer suggests she was aware that such a figure was far from a genius. The simplicity of her language matches the simplicity of her thinking; in fact, her violent rage has subsumed all other feelings or thoughts. . . .The father-husband figure whom she finally kills is then a “Panzer-man,” “A man in black with a Meinkampf look,” emblem of all the black men who have loomed as threatening forces in her poetry.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Write a detailed account of some of themes that are dominant in Sylvia Plath’s poems. (P.U. 2004)
In a sensible essay, “The World as Icon: On Sylvia Piath’s Themes”, Annete Lavers argues that Plath may well be a symbolist poet: ...for all the freshness of perception they reveal, the [Plath] poems are essentially emblematic. They derive their meaning, both profound and sometimes literal, from an underlying code in which objects and qualities are endowed with stable significations, and hierarchized.
Lavers goes on to suggest that “the symbolic net which Sylvia Plath casts on the world of perception has above all a personal value”, that is, Plath’s themes and images are saturated with personal significance or symbolism. Lavers suggests that, “This code is extremely rigid, in as much an object, once charged with a given signification, never forfeits it: the moon, the snow, the colour black, always have the same function. But the attitude of the poet can vary and thus introduce some ambiguity; the colour red, the color blue, can play different parts in various contexts. The child as theme and the child as subject appears in very different guises”.
This framework gave Plath an opportunity to create a scale of values. It also gave her work a “destination” from the merely personal experience. Thus, there is “cultural imagery” in Plath’s poetry; “classical reminiscences, references to historical events, contemporary allusions, numerous Christian anecdotes and symbols, philosophical concepts, legends (such as that of the vampire) and superstitious (such as that of the cracked glass as a portent of death”.)
However, “the subject of the [Plath] poems is never anything but an individual experience...The primary object of experience is...explored at leisure and all its symbolic potentialities reviewed, only to organise themselves finally according to familiar categories, with man firmly in the centre”. Thus:
Nature, reality, the world, are only in appearance interrogated as potential sources of meaning; for this meaning has been chosen once and for all, and henceforth they will only be used for their expressive possibilities.
This makes Plath an idealist/projectivist, even perhaps a solipsist, but almost certainly a hermeticist or gnostic, perhaps like Yeats. Plath’s “speaking voice” always “remains individual”. Further, “Sylvia Plath’s particular way of experiencing life is shown to have been an interplay between the particular and the general...The juxtaposition of the sublime and the homely, the ‘poetic’ and the scientific (words like carbon monoxide, acetylene, ticker-tape, adding-machine)...reveals a constant and vivifying exchange between depth and surface”. There is, moreover, in the world of Sylvia Plath, “an intuition of kinship between poetry and death.” The major “theme of vulnerability” creates an impression of “an overall threat”...The mood is virtually always negative...and ranges from mere foreboding to hopeless revolt and utter despair”. Thus,
“The living flesh is felt as essentially vulnerable, a prey to axes, doctors’ needles, butchers’ and surgeons’ knives, poison, snakes and tentacles, acids, vampires, leeches, bats and bees, jails and brutal boots. Small animals are butchered and eaten, man’s flesh can undergo the final indignity of being cut to pieces and used as an object. The poet feels her kinship with “the aged and the meek/The weak/ Hothouse baby in its cradle” (“Fever 103°”).
As a result, subjects “and metaphors include a cut, a contusion, the tragedy of thalidomide, fever, an accident, a wound, paralysis, a burial, animal and human sacrifice, the burning of heretics, lands devastated by war, extermination camps: her poetry is a “garden of tortures” in which mutilation and annihilation take nightmarish protean forms...” This makes Plath’s poetry a mine of Gothic imagery, often shading off into the Surreal. And “on the psychological plane, the mind cannot but see a sign of its own fragility in this very multiplicity of symbols. Disintegration threatens, all the more because of a past history of breakdown”. There is imagery of “anarchic forces and centrifugal destruction”. This “obsession with catastrophe is in itself the most potent force of disintegration; it sometimes takes the form of revolt and despair, and at other times of almost an infatuation with death...it finally vitiates and destroys every foundation for hope.” Moreover, “in some poems”, Plath “seems to show an awareness of herself as primarily self-condemned...”.
Lavers enumerates “two of the numerous dangers which threaten in (Plath’s) poems (which) occur with a symbolic frequency”.
The first is the threat of stifling or strangulation, in which an obstacle stands between life and the person, finally destroying the latter; scarves, fumes, veils, placenta and umbilical cords, tentacles are found in “Fever 103°” or “Medusa”, for instance. The second is the threat of destruction by small enemies, outside or inside the body: bats and piranhas, bees....(‘Stings’)…
Further, “Death by fumes or carbon monoxide shows how the first threat is reducible to the second, since death is due to changes in the small units of the body”. Death, indeed, wears many “veils” or guises in Plath’s poetry; it is always ubiquitous and it circumscribes life. Lavers notes that, characteristically in Plath, “blood is almost always presented in a plural forms, as “the blood berries” (‘Ariel’) or a “bowl of red blooms” (‘Tulips’), as if the individual was made up of smaller units endowed with a spontaneity not necessarily in agreement with the conscious self”. Further, the “threat being interiorized means that one touch of decay can start a systematic degeneration”. Broadly speaking, then, “we can say that the dialectic of life and death is the sole subject of the poems.”
The poet’s existence is presented as a cosmic drama in which these two great principles are confronted and their struggle is expressed in patterns, whose structure is accordingly antithetic.
This “binary” opposition is presented in terms of a “code” or system:
The life-principle is colour, pulsating rhythm, noise, heat, radiance, expansion, emotion and communication. Death is the other pole, darkness, stasis, silence, frost, well-defined edges [knives, arrows] and the hardness of rocks, jewels and skulls, dryness, anything self-contained and separate and which derives its positive attributes from some other source, instead of generating them freely—for death is absence, nothingness.
The positive side of this antithetical system is life, and the
...natural symbol of life is “the beautiful red” (‘Letter in November’). It is the colour of blood, the life-fluid, which expresses emotion by its pulsating centre, the heart, in its turn comparable to a wound which reveals life, or to the mouth, which kisses and screams. Colour comes as a “gift, a love gift” (“Poppies in October”), “the heart opens and closes/ Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me” (‘Tulips’) with essential exuberance and generosity in several poems, flowers like tulips and poppies evoke this centre of energy: “Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds (‘Tulips’)”
“Redness” gains, in Plath’s poems, through it being contrasted with a neutral “colour” like “white”:
But the poet’s reaction to the violent affirmation of life against a neutral background of white [the nurses’s uniform in ‘Tulips’, ‘snow’ elsewhere] varies according to (Plain’s) degree of vitality, humble thankfulness when life manifests itself in the desert of depression and daily chores (‘Poppies in October’) or despair at not being able to experience its bite and burn any more (‘Poppies in July’) and the consequent wish for sensation to be finally dulled (the poppies here are a conveniently dual symbol, evoking life but containing death).
In this context of torpidity or ennui, most disturbing of all is the call of life when vitality is at a low ebb; for it cannot be responded to. The individual feels unable to cope with the demands from life, the latter in turn threatens with disintegration and appears as malevolence:
Even through the gift paper I could hear them...
...African cat... —(‘Tulips’)
Here..., whiteness, the anonymous life in hospital and needle-brought unconsciousness are preferred as a refuge.
Lavers also sees the moon as “white...also an absence of colour”, and “the perfect symbol” of “death, for it shines in the night, its light is borrowed, its shape regular, well-defined and self-contained and its bald light turns everything into stone”, as if the moon were Medusa. According to Lavers, in poems like “Medusa”, “Elm”, “The Moon and the Yew Tree”, “Childless Woman”, “The Rival”, “The Munich Mannequins”, “Paralytic” and “Edge”, they “form a constellation, which obviously transcends any personal application;...” But that is the precise point, for instance, in a poem like “The Moon and the Yellow Tree”, where the drama does indeed “transcend any personal application” in quest of a more fulfilling, if not consoling, conception of life and death. Lavers, however, buttresses her argument by suggesting that “Flat” is used, as in “Tulips”, to express a superficial contact with life, when shapes seem two-dimensional, as they do in moonlight”. Further,
...it also points to childlessness—rather as an elected state than when due to sterility—a state both ridiculous (‘The Rival’) and guilty, since it makes passion its own end:
The blood flood is the flood of love,
The absolute sacrifice
It means: no more idols but me,
“me, me and you.”
—”Munich Mannequins”
The moon is also a suitable symbol for sterility because of its circular shape, the most perfect of all, and because it rules the flux of menstrual blood. In the later, death- is in the midst of life, which is cut from its rightful end, according to Sylvia Plath...
Consequently, “the feeling of guilt for a self-seeking life is so strong that it sometimes involves the notion of children.” On the other hand, as in ‘Nick and the Candlestick’ and ‘Berck-Plage’, the candle in Plath’s poems, “symbolises the warmth and fragility of personal life”. Moreover, “Religion, especially as it appears in tender images of mother and child”, seems to offer a refuge against the bald and white moon, as in “The Moon and the Yew Tree”, or “Mary’s Song”, but the poet belongs outside, with the latter. Moreover, “the symbols of possible intimations of a transcendent reality behind the world, clouds, are always depicted as far and high, and indifferent”, as in “The Moon and the Yew Tree”, “Gulliver” and “Little Fugue” according to Lavers. The “stiffness” is associated [in “The Moon and the Yew Tree”] with the blue colour, having a very ambiguous value in this code...” Further, the idea of a sacrifice as the central notion of religion has deeply impressed the poet; sacrifice, either of the heretics, or of the most precious and most innocent, the golden child (in ‘Mary’s Song’), the tortured Christ in ‘Elm’ or his suicidal’ ‘awful God-bit’ in “Years”. As a result, in an “identification in which sadism attributed to the deity is fused with as masochistic drive, the idea of redemption actually has death as a consequence, as appears in “Brusilia”. But “if actual existence can be considered a superiority, individualized existence means separateness which has...a negative value”. Hence, “the desire, expressed in an open or latent manner in many poems, for a transfiguration which will dissolve the limits of the self, this same “old suit, bald and shiny, with pockets of wishes” (‘Totem’).” This transfiguration “can be achieved in orgastic ecstasy, and in the horse’s gallop we find a double symbol, for the utmost experience and the pulsating rhythm of life, and for the dispersion of the individual into the ‘substanceless blue’ (“Ariel”, “Years”, “Words”, “Elm”). However, “Fever 103°” indicates that guilt feelings and a desire for expiation and purification may have determined this choice of a metaphysical framework. Their origin was probably multiple and ancient; this appears when comparing “Daddy” and “Little Fugue...”. “Actually, it is remarkable that in this universe ideas are never felt to be life-giving, intellect is therefore no help” (“The Moon and the Yew Tree”, “Nick and the Candlestick”). This anti-intellectualism can only cause depression, since every enduring reality is thereby interpreted as participating in the nature of death, knowledge is therefore condemned: in Three Women, the male world is “flatness from which ideas, destruction/ Bulldozer, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed/Endlessly proceed...,” and the surgeon lives among cut-up bodies in “Berck-Plage” he is one mirrory eye’ and surrounded by “glittering things”. In this context, it is “only normal and highly significant...the ever-changing face of the mirror is still used as a symbol for life which is preferred to fixity; the shattered mirror is then a metaphor for death”, as in “Contusion”.
Again, the “child is, in principle, the fountainhead of all life and hope, His self is not yet bald and shiny”, he is “vague as fog”..., a vagueness imbued with infinite possibilities, before which the parents are humbled: “your nakedness/shadows our safety”. (“Morning Song”) He is “akin to the elements, the sea, the wind, the clouds ‘with no strings attached and no reflections’ (‘Gulliver’)”. The poet “acknowledges the freedom of her child: “I’m no more your mother...the wind’s hand” (“Morning Song”)”. In the child, innocence, which for the adult can only be obtained in forgetftilness, and annihilation, as in “Getting There”, “Tulips”, “Fever 103°”, is miraculously combined with individuality: “A clean slate with your own face on” (“You’re”). Consequently, in “the face of disintegration and universal dissolution in deceptive glitter, he is a plenum, the fixed point on which the envious spaces lean (‘Nick and the Candlestick’), heavy and precious as gold, a divine redeemer, as in “Morning Song” and “You’re”, by “an accumulation of metaphor”. The child is “like the tremendously compact and potent germ of a future universe, the absolute beginning of some ancient mythologies.” However, “the obvious justification of one’s existence which the child brings is not always potent enough to appease the guilt of the egoist, as appears in the poems on the childless woman or those which show the dead children as appendages to the dead woman” (‘Edge’). In “Fever 103°”, guilt actually evokes the image of a “spotted”, dying child whereas in “Nick and the Candlestick”, the blood bloomed clear in him. Consequently it might be said, “to summarise, that as a subject the child is positive, but that as a theme it is often combined with others which greatly diminish this positive value, and can even make it completely negative; the child-theme is then used to reinforce guilt, fear and despair”.
Much the same could be said “about another theme, that of the lulling context, of everyday life”: Kindness “supplies another necessary fluid”, or “poultice”, and busies itself “sweetly picking up pieces.” Love, in its beginning, evoked ‘a green in the air’, which “cushioned lovingly” the poet.
However, as a poet “who is capable of reading life on two levels at once”, Plath also sees the other aspect—”what happens when interest wanes and the endless stream of the symbols dries up?” The “environment of daily life, when evoked like an incantation in such circumstances, is no more than “dead furniture”, fragmented and powerless...” Similarly, “cooking, often the symbol of daily life, after supplying a delightful metaphor for the child successfully brought into the world, “O high-riser, my little loaf (‘You’re’) can elsewhere be resented as a degrading drudgery, which can make one unworthy of a revelation.”
Consequently, to “the maimed self, therefore, daily life cannot give back wholeness, only crutches, a frequent symbol (‘Berck-Plage’, ‘The Applicant’).” And, “death can actually be welcome, since it frees one from this useless lumber, useless, yet irreversibly acquired, for man is the prey of an ‘adding-machine’.” In “Lady Lazarus” the self is described as:
What a trash
To annihilate each decade
What a million filaments
These images, Lavers points out, “recall Baudelaire’s famous poems entitled ‘Spleen’ in which the self is similarly cumbered with things which no longer have meaning”. This “reflection, which alienates, the living self (and is a frequent theme in Existentialist literature) fits in the neo-platonic scheme...whereby degeneration into matter is the sign of an irreversible degradation.” The “proliferation of “things, things” (‘Berck-Plage’) is used in lonesco’s plays to the same purpose”. And “things are another aspect of death; in ‘Berck-Plage’ the dead furniture turns into nothing, like the corpse: the visible is an illusion and the invisible alone matters”.
It follows “that purification can be achieved in death, in which the scattered personality is seen as gradually withdrawing towards its vital centre, and abandoning its tainted externals, as in “Fever 103°”, in “Tulips”, and in Paralytic”... Similarly, echoes “are often used as a symbol of these externals, since they are a degradation of sound, a repetition travelling away from the original event.” Consequently, if “poetry and death can denounce the illusion of a comfortable life, cannot love bring about the same realization?” Love, in Plath, is “the supremely, ambiguous theme”. To begin with, “some poems, like “Daddy” or “Medusa”, whatever their actual personal associations, present love as something to be achieved in the teeth of opposition, in spite of the past or of terrific obstacles, as in “Getting There”. The “ten-yearly rhythm” of death [in “Lady Lazarus”] offsets the pulsation of life”. However, it “is true that “Lady Lazarus” ends on a note of defiance, and “Daddy” on the successful nailing down of the vampire, the undead, followed by compassion and a purified feeling for this other man, badly known, who was the vampire’s victim: Daddy, you can lie back now.” But elsewhere this forced marriage appears as a certain immolation: “Death opened, like a black tree, blackly” (‘Little Fugue’).
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