Sylvia Plath: Deep, Dark, Disturbed

Best/Worst Poems

Some of Sylvias best and worst poems in our opinion

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My favorite poem of Sylvia Plath is “Mad Girl’s Love Song.”  Just by the title one may assume that it might be a poem about someone expressing their love and devotion to another human being but upon deeper exploration it is quite the opposite. This is possibly the most intelligent and sophisticated use of an oxymoron because in this context she uses the word “mad” to refer to someone who is suffering from a disorder of the mind and it is evident when she says “I think I made you up inside my head” over and over throughout the poem. The word “love” on the other hand generally refers to a term of endearment or someone having a tender affection for someone and when we put them together to create “Mad girl’s love song” it creates a whole new ambience and tone for the poem. Her use of personification is exceptionally creative in which she refers to closing her eyes and the world dropping dead referring to going to sleep and entering into a fantasy world and the real world no longer exists.  It seems as though this poem is about Sylvia’s struggle with trust and faith and is unsure of what is real and what a fantasy that is created in her skewed frame of mind.  

 

 

 

Mad Girls Love Song

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

 


This is Syrinx and Pan who Sylvia refer to in this poem

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    I disliked the poem “Virgin in a Tree” and categorized that as being her worst poem.  Sylvia Plath is a very intelligent woman and this poem lacks an original idea and Sylvias use of dark satire. This poem is based on a tale of Greek mythology and about nymphs being chased by Greek gods and all Sylvia does is manipulate the words around and combine them into various stanzas to make them into a poem. At the beginning it talks about the fable but at the end it seems to be more of a life lesson because the end of the poem takes on a new bitter tone as she begins to talk about how beautiful virgins are and people who are not married are referred to as 'ugly spinsters.'  It seems as though she is also stating that if you wait too long to get married and pregnant, you will 'overripe' rot and utterly be useless. This is describing Sylvia's life at the time because she felt inadequate for not being married at a younger age.
 
 
 
 
 

Virgin In A Tree

How this tart fable instructs
And mocks! Here's the parody of that moral mousetrap
Set in the proverbs stitched on samplers
Approving chased girls who get them to a tree
And put on bark's nun-black

Habit which deflects
All amorous arrows. For to sheathe the virgin shape
In a scabbard of wood baffles pursuers,
Whether goat-thighed or god-haloed. Ever since that first Daphne
Switched her incomparable back

For a bay-tree hide, respect's
Twined to her hard limbs like ivy: the puritan lip
Cries: 'Celebrate Syrinx whose demurs
Won her the frog-colored skin, pale pith and watery
Bed of a reed. Look:

Pine-needle armor protects
Pitys from Pan's assault! And though age drop
Their leafy crowns, their fame soars,
Eclipsing Eva, Cleo and Helen of Troy:
For which of those would speak

For a fashion that constricts
White bodies in a wooden girdle, root to top
Unfaced, unformed, the nipple-flowers
Shrouded to suckle darkness? Onlyh they
Who keep cool and holy make

A sanctum to attract
Green virgins, consecrating limb and lip
To chastity's service: like prophets, like preachers,
They descant on the serene and seraphic beauty
Of virgins for virginity's sake.'


Be certain some such pact's
Been struck to keep all glory in the grip
Of ugly spinsters and barren sirs
As you etch on the inner window of your eye
This virgin on her rack:

She, ripe and unplucked, 's
Lain splayed too long in the tortuous boughs: overripe
Now, dour-faced, her fingers
Stiff as twigs, her body woodenly
Askew, she'll ache and wake

Though doomsday bud. Neglect's
Given her lips that lemon-tasting droop:
Untongued, all beauty's bright juice sours.
Tree-twist will ape this gross anatomyh
Till irony's bough break.

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Southern Sunrise

 

Color of lemon, mango, peach,

These storybook villas

Still dream behind

Shutters, their balconies

Fine as hand-

Made lace, or a leaf-and-flower pen-sketch

 

Tilting with the winds,

On arrowy stems,

Pineapple-barked

A green crescent of palms

Sends up its forked

Firework of fronds.

 

A quartz-clear dawn

Inch by bright inch

Gilds all our Avenue,

And out of the blue drench

Of Angels’ Bay

Rises the round red watermelon sun.

        

My Favorite Poem: Southern Sunrise

 
        Sylvia Plath’s unusual light and airy poem “Southern Sunrise” uses colorful wording to express the beauty of a peaceful morning sunrise. This is my favorite poem because there is nothing dark and dreary about it. Sylvia Plath is known for her deep and gloomy outlook on human nature and life in itself. “Southern Sunrise” is unusual for Plath, but surprisingly wonderful in all of its glory. She takes a simple natural beauty and makes it more. Her use of imagery and rhythm ties the poem together making a beautiful portrait of one of life’s most simple pleasures, witnessing nature’s wonders.

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My Least Favorite Poem: Daddy

The tumultuous relationship between Plath and her father is epitomized in one of her most famous works “Daddy”. I found this to be my least favorite poem of Plath’s because of the sheer darkness and disturbia imbedded in its core.

“Daddy” is a literary masterpiece. Plath uses rhythm, rhyme, personification, and imagery to illustrate her less than good relationship with her father. The actual composition of the poem is good; it is the theme that I find displeasing. The dark side of Sylvia shines through this work leaving me sad and disappointed in her view of her father and her life. She is very chaotic with her feelings in this poem. She dislikes her father, then she wants to be dead to be with him, and then she hates him again. Composing “Daddy” may have been her trying to work through her issues with him; however I don’t feel it was an appropriate way to find her true feelings. Regardless of any personal anguish her father left her with, he was still her father and his memory deserved more respect than she opted to show.

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Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons
.

 

 

Unlike her other work, this poem gave a sense of love and joy and that is why I chose this piece as one of my favorite poems of Sylvia Plath.  I understood the title, after reading the poem, metaphorically relating to an infant crying in the morning hours.  The opening line of the poem combines personification, metaphor and simile in a single nine-word sentence; and with the opening word being, “Love," the sentence's subject, is a personification.  The infant created by the couple and their intercourse is then compared in a simile, a "fat gold watch."  Sylvia is so overjoyed and moved by the innocence of her child she states, “I'm no more your mother” which I understood as she was placing her child on a holy level, she isn’t the mother anymore because God is.  Towards the end of the poem, Sylvia is going to nurse her child in the wee morning hours of the day and happy about doing so, “One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral.”  What I got out of this poem was, even though babies will pain and annoy, their presence is a blessing and very powerful and the love a mother has for her children is a strong bond.  A poem showing Plath’s affectionate side; one side she doesn’t show often.  Proving that even though written in 1961, during a time of depression and hard times in Sylvia’s life, she always had love for her children. 

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Cut

For Susan O'Neill Roe
What a thrill ---
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of a hinge

Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz.

A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they on?
O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill

The thin
Papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man ---

The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when

The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence

How you jump ---
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.

            This is my least favorite poem and I don’t like it at all because it has no traditional poetry techniques and is very free verse.  With that being said, it does make the poem seem more real but it clearly shows the dark side of Sylvia Plath.  It develops a tone by describing the motives, feelings, and essence of self-mutilation.  It has a dark, scary theme like many of Plath’s poems and was clearly written at a time when she was very low.  From the beginning this poems first line is about escapism, “What a thrill” suggests that the self-mutilation is deliberate and conveys a temporary feeling of excitement or pleasure.  By the last line, thumb stump, refers to the scar left behind from her cut, and how she will never be the same again. She shows that cutting herself is an ineffective tactic against her enemy, only fueling her depression, leaving her injured and even worse off.  All together this poem is not appealing to me.  To me this poem is telling the reader that you can fulfill your emptiness and relieve pain by using methods of disfigurement even though it won’t fix your problems it will fulfill it for a short time.  Sylvia is setting a theme that isn’t healthy and it shows that she is mentally unstable.