Category: Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath does present the frightening but liberating freedom of the natural world as preferable to the oppressive, patriarchal structures of the manmade world. The poet makes effective use of conceptual landscape and personification in her poetry, and the ‘natural world’ often seems to echo the narrative voice’s mood clearly. But at the same time , there seems to be a lack of sympathy between nature and the voices we hear. The lack of sympathy comes from inflicting harsh and authoritarian treatment, and occasionally relating to or denoting a system of society or government by men in her work.

In several of Plath’s poems, there is a suggestion of feeling alarm; Wuthering Heights and others all include vindictive natural details. The poem Wuthering Heights depicts a woman walking across “unstable” moorlands, and for readers familiar the works of Emily Brontë, the title instantly indicates a violent and powerful landscape. This is fitting with the critic Janice Markey saying that Plath’s poems about Yorkshire are ‘uniformly bleak and negative’ . The opening lines of Wuthering Heights immediately indicate that the narrator is uncomfortable in the environment. She feels extremely threatened by nature, trapped, stuck in a “ring [of] faggots”, and incapable to get away because the horizons are “disparate”- using a plural for “horizons” is unsettling as we are used only one, everything to her is “tilted” making it seem warped and confusing. Everything is not as it seems, the landscape threatens to “dissolve and dissolve” as she moves – the woman is personifying the moors and making them seem untrustworthy, highlighting her dislocation. After this, Plath goes to describe the other features of the environment around the narrator. There are sheep, and grass, and the fierce winds that threaten to “funnel [her] heat away”. The “heat” is representative of her life and to use a draining verb like “funnel” suggests that the difficult landscape is slowly consuming her. In the third stanza, the sheep are now made the focus, initially they seem harmless, but in line four they too become vile, as they “take in” the narrator with their eyes. Once again, this verb suggests the woman is being consumed by the natural world, a notion reinforced when Plath references the story of Red Riding Hood. Her description of the sheep in their “grandmotherly disguise” is almost comical, it adds to the power of the natural environment, and recall the harsh reality and horror of the fairy tale and relating it to her current situation. All of this indicates how frightening the natural world is to Plath, and you’d think the narrative voice would be more preferable to the manmade world. However, Sylvia Plath closes the poem by focusing on the house lights she sees in the “narrow”, “black” valleys- they fail to provide comfort. There is no feeling of welcome here; instead the gleam seems unkind and miserable. The negativity of the imagery displayed in this poem validates Janice Markey’s reading of it. Overall, Wuthering Heights represents the harshness of the natural world, but it is more embracing, and freeing compared to the manmade world.

The poem of Finisterre is one that demonstrates the frightening but liberating freedom of the natural world in several aspects. The poem starts, setting the narrative at “land’s end”, meaning there is a liminal space between land and sea. It’s a boundary concerning life (the land) and death (the sea)- the sea often depicts death in many of Plath’s poems. This is the literal translation of Finisterre. When Plath talks about “the sea exploding/ With no bottom, or anything on the other side of it,/ Whitened by the faces of the drowned”, she is using war imagery to make it seem like there is a direct threat to the cliffs, but also, to the narrator/Plath herself. The premise that the sea has ‘no bottom’ seems ominous, if someone were to fall in, they would be falling forever. Also, it makes it seem like the sea holds secrets which may be used against the narrator.

The reference to the ‘drowned’ portrays the sea as a killer – otherwise it could mean suicide, a premise which is often explored in Plath’s poetry, connecting with her own failed suicide attempt and eventual successful one. Either way, the sea keeps secrets in its depths, and it is forceful and threatening as it ‘cannons’ into the cliffs. Referring to it in the last stanza as “the Bay of the Dead” could be a clever critique on how Plath believed that the human treatment of the natural world is related with “messy wars” but is ignored by those around, just seen as property for living and business. The sea is both threatening and compelling. It is compelling in the sense that the “Lady of the Shipwrecked is in love with the beautiful formlessness of the sea” and this conveys Plath’s wish for civilization to be more ‘earth-centred’ and make them understand ‘how culture depends invariably on nature.’ , meaning their lives depend on the natural world around him. Finisterre obviously presents the natural world as frightening in Plath’s poetic form, but it is frightening because of its connotations to manmade events. She demonises the natural world – the natural world man has affected.

Our collective relationship with the natural world is one fraught with tensions and paradoxes. Through a refusal to identify any form of objective truth, Ariel by Sylvia Plath moves beyond binaries to posit language as a portal into deepened self understanding. In this essay I will discuss…

In this essay I will discuss how Plath through an exploration of the tensions between the self and the natural world, denying using a dialogical portrayal of the relationship between the self and the natural world, denying an objective centre so that it comes to be defined by the contradictions of its greater context.

Tensions between unity and separation with nature is fundamental to the way we experience our relationship with it. The speakers in Ariel navigate this tension to upend binary modes of thinking. ‘Elm’ is one such example. “I know the bottom, she says”, the poem begins – instantly utilising personification and third person to create a dialogical reading; Language becomes the tool of nature in a subversion of traditional power dynamics allowing the Elm to accuse another, assumedly human presence, of a limited figuring of nature. ‘The bottom’ is inferred to be an ineffable concept of shared origins, as it is “known” with the Elm’s “great tap root” and supported by reference to mythological and biological origins “is it the sea you hear in me”. Plath hints at an idea of oneness between the self and the natural world, supported further as reverse personification integrates the self back into the earth “your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf”. Yet inference to what is shared between the self and the natural world is overlayed by an emphasis of difference “It is what you fear / I do not fear it” thus embodying an acknowledgment of union and fundamental separations. The anthology continues to paint a spectrum of relationship as ‘Stings’ encapsulates the speaker’s fleeting affinity with the “unmiraculous” bees, a mechanisation of nature’s “honey-machine” and refiguring of self/nature power balances “Will they hate me… I am in control”. Traditional dynamics between self, nature and language are disrupted as Plath fuses a relationship that encapsulates both identification with, and observation of, the natural world; as Knickerbocker surmises “only by distinguishing ourselves from the rest of nature can we truly “hear” what it speaks”.

Intention is one facet of a self/natural world understanding that is oft shaped by binary modes of thinking. The intent of unification or observation is one such example, giving rise to identification with or observation of One can have the intent of unification with nature, thus tending toward identification with it; conversely an intent of control can give rise to observational and separatist modes of thinking. Speakers in Ariel dance between these binaries of intent.

It is through dancing the spectrum of the separate/oneness paradox that the power and limits of perception in shaping our experience in the natural world is communicated. The layering and repetition of sound offerings in ‘Elm’, “Is it… the voice of nothing”, “Listen: these are its hooves”, “Shall I bring you the sound of poison?” serves to communicate a resistance to interpretive boxing. Whilst a shift in tone as the “malignity” of an unknown force begining to affect the Elm provokes a warning on the limits and dangers of human perception (Knickerbocker, 2009). This notion of a malignant force is one revisited repeatedly throughout the Anthology, in a variety of contexts – perpetuating Plath’s refusal to define the self/nature relationship in any concrete terms. In ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ narration is returned to the realm of the human whom perceives “the malignity of the gorse” to be “like torture”, whilst a “third person” looms ominously in ‘Stings’. In fact, Luck coins it a “parody [of an] empirical search for centers” (date). Conversely, a sense of “biological kinship” resonates in ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ (Knickerbocker, 2009); Whilst ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’ encapsulates a sense of curiosity and openness to learning from “The unintelligible syllables” of nature. The startling vastness of the spectrum of relationships between the self and the natural world portrayed in Ariel communicates the importance of perception in shaping them; It is on the denial of consistent centre that the possibility of self insight beyond these tensions rests.

Exploration of tensions in Ariel acts as a basis on which Plath posits the similarities of language and the natural world as a portal into deepened self understanding.

In a similar way to which she navigates tensions and perception, she also fuses modernism and romanticism in her approach. That is, coupling an acute attention to language and detail with a desire to transcend the self through union with nature. Indeed, such attention to craft of language is exactly what facilitates a romantic drive for self understanding through an analogous and nuanced portrayal of the natural world. I will now explore how Plath comes to the idea of a self as “Self-in-process” through a discussion of the structural similarities of self, language and the natural world giving rise to the mind/hive metaphor in the Bee sequence. In line with the idea that the self must maintain a degree of separation from the natural world in order to heed it’s wisdom, language served Plath, with its necessary separation, as a means to reconnect to nature (Knickerbocker, 2009). In fact, Plath had come to understand language as a part of nature – and similarly to the tensions of relationship depicted in Ariel, had described herself at times a “victim” to it. Plath’s journals talk of the aliveness of words that often “draw in their horns” in defiance (Knickerbocker, 2009), reminiscent of a similar distinction yet inseparability of the self/nature relation.

As much as Plath found language to be alive and in this way possessing texture and vitality (Knickerbocker, 2009) similar to the natural world, they also share structural similarities. As Luck identifies, each element in Saussurean language systems function only in the context of the greater network of differences (date). Similarly, cognition is defined as “a network of interconnected units in which the connection rather than the units themselves are of most importance” (date). This understanding of self as multiplicities and as defined by its relation to the collective is what Plath coins a “self-in-process” and is portrayed to us in Ariel through the metaphor of the hive. As Plath writes, “Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!”. The Bee sequence, described as a journey from “Self delusion” to “Self awareness” (Knickerbocker), concludes the anthology. It continues to play with perception as the voice of heirarchial separate thought “Tomorrow I will be sweet God” (Bee Box), jumps to an observational fear “Brood cells grey as the fossils of shells / Terrify me” (Stings), ending in a tone of curious subservience and ambiguity “It is they who own me. / Neither cruel not indifferent. // Only ignorant” (Winterings). Moving through these paradoxes the beehives become a frame through which the speaker can understand relationship to “herself, language, and external reality”. As Luck analyses, Plath’s use of the hive metaphor in the Bee sequence incorporates insight into interior consciousness structures.

We are in complete and total control of our thoughts, actions and everyday decisions… whether we choose to believe this is down to us. Throughout my life, I have had several times where I stopped to question myself and my happiness, and what I was doing to feed and maintain it. My curiosity for this sparked when I realised that we, as human beings have this strange need or conditioning to not take responsibility for our own happiness. We expect it to come from an outside source. Now, this can happen, but it’s fleeting. True happiness has to come from within.

Throughout this term, myself and my classmates have been studying the work of the highly recognized female novelist and poet, Sylvia Plath. Alongside her work, we have been analysing the 2012 survival drama film based on Yann Martel’s 2001 novel Life Of Pi. Plath’s work has been recognized as being dark and gloomy displaying common poetic devices of vivid imagery, metaphors and similes. It seems to be that on the one hand we have a poet who talks about her profoundly tragic and never-ending existence and her belief of the lack of control she has over herself and her environment and on the other hand we have someone (Pi) who has completely and utterly no control over his environment, yet full control over his emotions and how he reacts to the situation he is in.

In analysing Sylvia Plath’s work, it is clear that nature and the environment had a profound impact on her mental health and the decisions that she made. This is shown throughout her poem ‘I am vertical’ where she narrates her internal desperation for true beauty and worthy function within the world. The poem’s title reads as a first-line and is immediately answered with the speakers wish: “But I would rather be horizontal”. As Plath continues to give details on her vertical life on earth, she clearly shows how she feels ignored by the nature surrounding her. She continues to anthropomorphize as she states: “I walk among them, but none of them are noticing”.

In the case of both Plath and Pi, it was not the environment that they could control, but rather their reaction to it. Evidently, Sylvia Plath felt as though she had no autonomy over her life. This can be seen in many of her poems, perhaps most notably in her poem “Tulips”, which was written when Plath was hospitalised for an appendectomy.

In this work, for example, we see Plath’s response to being placed in an environment that she didn’t want to be in. She wished, so terribly, to be free. Through the analysis of this poem, we can assume that the poet felt constricted by her environment, and this contributed to her deteriorating mental state. Tulips, however, is full of vivid imagery. Each stanza builds up a stage scene, from the initial peaceful, white walls of the hospital room, to the loud, excitable tulips who remind the speaker of open-mouthed African cats.

Colour plays an important role in this poem and adds to the deeply emotional feelings the speaker experiences. White is chosen as a symbol of peace, virginity and winter – and eventually death. The red of the tulips represents the life-force, from that of a carnivore to the bodily wound, the surfacing of blood. Each line of the poem focuses on the all-important and harmful tulips, their redness hurting, their ability to communicate disturbing things. The tulips are becoming stronger and taking on a life of their own. The redness of the tulips pains her, and she believes she can hear them breathing lightly through their wrapping paper. The colour also speaks subtly to the colour of her wound. The tulips oppress and upset her, and she compares them to ‘a dozen red lead sinkers round [her] neck,’ dragging her down. She used to be alone in the room, but now the tulips share her space, watching her and eating up the oxygen. She feels caught between the tulips and the window behind her, believing she has lost her face while surrounded by flowers and the sun… all of this is proof that Sylvia has a clear dissociation from real life.

Another example of a work that analyses the relationship between humans and the environment is Life of Pi. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi is the story of a young man who survives a harrowing shipwreck and 227 days in a lifeboat with a large Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Many have interpreted the film as portraying “a battle between religion, science and spirituality”. Belief in God is a major theme in Life of Pi and has been the most controversial in reviews of the film. Throughout the novel, Pi makes his belief in and love of God clear—it is a love profound enough that he can transcend the classical divisions of religion, and worship as a Hindu, Muslim, and Christian. By comfortably following three of the world’s major religions, Pi represents not just the possibility of peaceful coexistence between different faiths but also the belief that different religions are merely alternative paths to the same destination. The primacy of survival, loss of innocence and storytelling are also recurring themes in the film.

Pi, much like Sylvia Plath, was placed in a situation in which he had no control of. While Pi’s situation is incredibly compelling, what makes the film so engaging is his response to the challenges that he faced. Unlike Plath, Pi still had hope and optimism after all he had faced because of the strength he received from God. It is shown that without his faith in God, Pi would have had nothing to turn to during his time stranded at sea. Pi prayed for the daily miracles he needed to stay alive. When the reality of sharing a lifeboat with Richard Parker hit Pi, he felt terrified and hopeless. As he considered giving up, he heard a voice in his heart telling him to fight to survive. Pi finds within himself a determination to deal with his circumstances and live, regardless of what his external environment was doing. Pi believed that the mere fact of living from day to day would qualify as a miracle, showing the presence of God with him. As long as Pi remained faithful—and worked hard—he could survive. As Pi stated, “it is by surviving and making sense of all that goes wrong in the world, that uncovers the meaning of man”.

To sum things up, yes, we as human beings get easily and heavily influenced by the environment we place ourselves in. It is in our nature to adapt to the things around us, to feel as if we ‘fit in’… but at the end of the day it truly comes down to us on how we choose to react to our external influences. Whether you believe this or not, there’s always an option to change the world around you. However, most people don’t think about starting by changing from within. We tend to believe that until the things around us are different, we can’t be emotionally sound or feel good about our lives. If Pi managed to do it, my question here is… why can’t we?

Post-world war II period is incomplete without the name of Sylvia Plath. Plath being a significant artist, turned out to be reputable after her suicide in 1963. She has recognized herself because of her famous collection Ariel which hold alarming and acclaimed stanzas. She used bold and wild metaphors, repeatedly disrupting and violent symbolism to summon mythic characteristics in humankind. Her poems speak of social criticism investigating individual and female identity, agony, subjugation and the certainty, inescapable death. Her work explores personal as well as public pain and misery. Her aspirations of discovering happiness through work and family has ruined by miscarriage and the separation of her marriage. Moreover, she felt helpless against male control and undermining common powers, especially demise. Her poems put many question marks on the social status like marriage, mother, relationship with men, sexual and mental lives. The possibility to erase these question marks was through creative writing. But, writing only evokes to think about painful past. The issue for her and maybe the principle issue of Cold War America is in the second part of an argumentative perception, a familiarity with oneself in huge connection to past and future. As Heather McClave echo an interesting quote by Wilfred Owen in his article titled as Sylvia Plath: Troubled Bones, “It was not despair, or terror, it was more than terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit’s”. Plath seemed trapped between the expectations of others and between self and society. A leading assessment of societal impediments experienced by females lead Plath life to suicide.

Plath’s worry with identity wound up bold. In ‘Daddy,’ she straightforwardly pronounces her rebelliousness, cutting off the order and ties of convention that so choked her before in her life. She embraces a few techniques to carry out her finish of freedom, verbally abusing, new identification, disdain, disgrace and violence. She considered herself to be a result of a male society, formed by men to suit their specific impulses or necessities. Her exposure with other women in this setting drove unavoidably to struggle and rivalry. This ambivalence in her own self has never solved, never removed or more regrettable, never understood. She had looked for individualism in conventional points such as gender, marriage, and work but on the other side however these points had not discovered adequate strands to lace her different selves together. Though, she had looked for her character in unconventional points like the psyche, composing creativity and expectations but even these ruined her. For instance, in ‘Daddy,’ her most as often as regularly discussed work, Plath condemn her dad’s power and control over her life and among different suggestions, relate him with Nazism and herself with Jewish casualties of the Holocaust. Plath’s association with her partner provided her with content for poems holding also violent symbolism, where women have debated as dolls and men as fanciful notion. The element of presence terrifies her being in the creation. She changes into an existential revolutionary. She experienced existential self-doubt for her entire life which is obvious from her poetry filled with anguish. She perceived regularly that she needed to hold living on to something and must find a reason to live because the ground under her feet was sliding away. She wound up frightful as death has wished for with an express dismay of resurrection or to run away into a universe of creativity. She wanted an escape from the harsh society. It was poetry which comes to rescue her from anxiety.

Existentialists believed that an individual both men and women have freedom and choice to live their own life as one desired. But this idea seems challenged by Plath as her freedom and choice had controlled by the evils of society. In this way, violence within her self appeared when her freedom has trapped by a society which celebrates patriarchy. Hence, the violent imagery used by Plath in her poems speaks the violence within herself and the violence with her. Her disdain for customary signs, conventional traditions is a hatred for the fake self in herself for the inauthentic reactions, which are trying to build up a self in the world. Sylvia Plath is talking with eagerness her hatred towards the job of a female in any society. The job of a spouse, mother and the confinements of a female has looked in a low status. She feels that the female has caught in a fixed role push onto her by the society. She dislikes the experience of oppression by the society to accept the job push onto her with reference to one’s gender. Plath can see legitimately a void, a nothingness when she finds herself voiceless, detached, futile and submissive. The feeling of the self in the life self-destructs when the experience of reality starts to escape belief and firmness. Plath wanted an escape from the puzzle and cage of individualism and subjectivity defined by the society.

For Plath, there was a continuous violence between her consciousness and unconsciousness state of mind. The symbol of ‘black shoe’ in Plath’s poem entitled as “Daddy” highlights the entrapment of an individual in the cultural and social codes which are against the behavior of individual at social level. All her life in this black shoe she remained quiet and suffered. By using the violent and unforgiving words and images, she tried to put her unconscious state of mind on the paper. All these harsh images speak of the treatment of harsh social ethics upon an individual especially on a female. The complex images tried to search deeper truths for Plath. She finds that there is no agency to her as her life will always rule by authoritative male persons. Plath wanted to discovered personal unconsciousness and wanted to flee from the identity burst upon her by others. At the end of this poem, probably, by asserting that she had killed one man shows the completion of the actions revolving in her unconscious mind. Though through poetically yet she revengefully won and critique the haunting figure of Daddy. Daddy reveals recognition of social reflection that challenges human behaviors. Moreover, she used many political symbols in this respective poem which highlight the involvement of politics in personal self and relations.

Likewise, in another poem “Mirror” Plath highlights social stereotypes magnetized with females. Mirror reminds and reflect that a woman should look in a certain way so that the society will accept her. Another critical point to be highlight is that there is fixed age for beauty of females. After crossing this age typically, a female usually not considered as beautiful. Whereas, there is no fixed age for males and no beauty criteria. Likewise, a hero can be of 40 or 50 but the heroine must be of 25. For example, Salman Khan and Akshay Kumar are still casted as heroes while, Shilpa Shetty and Madhuri Dixit are not seen in current movies as the leading role of heroines. The hero always need a young heroine. These types of inherent truths have questioned and the need of hour is to unlearn these inherent truths. Plath as a female headed to mental illness by an oppressive dad, an unfaithful spouse, and the requirements that parenthood made on her. Plath understood that in between these social values she had lost herself and is unable to find it. Mirror symbolizes as a social mirror which reminds male gaze constantly reminding social morals to females. She was troubled between the social pressures of beauty, youth, purity and an object of inferiority expected from her. There is constant fight between the external part of perfection (conscious) demanded by the society and internal role of perfection (unconscious) demanded by the inner self of an individual. May be Plath’s suicide is the result of this inner violence which reject the social perfection. An individual has no control over her own self rather the external factors of a society has control especially on the female self. We as humans are constantly in need to see our reflection, praise and approval but miserably the patriarchal system of a society controls this approval for their own egoistic needs. It is okay for a man to be selfish but when it comes to a female it is consider as a sin. Plath has raised voice for all the modern victims. Plath uses the symbolism to emphasize her very own trauma, yet an image should consistently convey a solid interpretation of its own. To her interest with death and agony she brings a feeling of battle and savage power in women. She is powerless, indeed, to father and husband. Her absence of traditional belief, her ruinous hatred for her family, the flaws in her marriage, the floating, rootless anger, the interest with sensation and the medicine of death, the assurance to take an attempt to do everything, realizing it would not by any stretch of the imagination stop the agony, no one went the extent that she did in her poems.

Sylvia Plath was widely regarded as “one of the most celebrated and controversial post-war (‘feminists’)” writing in English” [Oates] in the twentieth century. In her ‘Ariel’ collection, Plath explores the gender inequality and expectations that plagued society at that time, and arguably today. Through her poetry, Plath criticises the social norms and values that socially conditioned both men and women to behave in the ‘appropriate’ way. In doing this, she reveals her own personal struggle with existential misery as well as bold metaphors for death and sexuality. Having written a complex biographical body of work, Plath has often been seen as a confessional poet. Her deeply personal lamentations often achieve universality through mythic allusion, presented in pragmatic symbolism.

Viewed as a cathartic response to her divided personae as an artist, mother, daughter and wife, and the inescapable social binding of these roles to herself, Plath’s poems have been praised by feminist critics for shedding light on the personal and professional struggles that women faced at the time. This assigning of gender roles has been present throughout history and has, in recent years, sparked outrage and released pent up frustration on a larger scale than ever before due to the way in which men and, particularly, women have been “culturally constructed”. These factors, along with her suicide, has made Plath one of the world’s most eminent figures, to actively subvert gender stereotypes, in the literary world – resulting in her being recognised as an iconic martyr in the struggle against patriarchy.

Due to the age-old social, and hence cultural, construction of roles assigned to the ‘dominant’ men and ‘subservient’ women, :::: the subtlety or extremity, gender inequality was, and still is prevalent. Various forms of media – such as the “negative stereotyping of women in literature” [Bertens and Millett] – played a significant role in this. A prime example would be the behaviour of male characters towards or regarding the female characters in the works of Henry Miller, who was heralded by many critics for his “daring and liberating depictions of erotic relations” [Bertens]. As Kate Millet, and other feminist critics, observed, those praised male protagonists were in fact “denigrating, exploitative and repressive in their relations with women”. This reflects the way in which Sylvia Plath felt and lived – enduring lifelong torment, by the oppressive men she kept closest – until claiming her own life. One of these men was her father, who died when she was eight. His abrupt death played a part in Plath perpetual sense of abandonment.

In ‘Daddy’, Plath describes her father to have bitten her “pretty red heart in two”. It could be suggested that the colour ‘red’ is symbolic of life, this is contrasted by the subsequent repetition of the colour ‘black’ which only adds to the semantic field of death.

Plath is considered to be one of the major voices writing about feminine subjects during the 1950s and the 1960s. This was a period when feminists started to acknowledge women’s oppression and the 2nd wave feminist movement began in the early 1960s. Within Plath’s collection of poems, Ariel, published in 1965, two years after her death in 1963, we see her adopt different personas, standpoints and tones. The speakers often begin oppressed and manipulated; their roles in society shaped by the patriarchy; at times the speaker is abject, resigned, sometimes defiant and triumphant and at other times bitter and frustrated. It can be argued that Plath’s poetry is shaped by the norms and values of the fifties and sixties and is a response to the restrictions and limitations she feels as a daughter, mother and wife.

Plath explores the idea that the patriarchy shapes women’s very identities, particularly in their roles as daughters and then wives. Psychoanalytical approaches to her work have examined how Plath’s language reveals a tortured relationship with her father and this is evident in one of her most shocking and striking poems from Ariel ‘Daddy’ where we can find images of female exploitation and resistance of the patriarchy. In this poem, the father symbolises the patriarchy as Plath controversially likens him to Adolf Hitler, and her suffering as a victim of the patriarchy she associates with that of the Jews, during the Second World War. The female speaker expresses her love for her father but nevertheless her hatred and resentment is evident as she describes this patriarchal figure who has oppressed her for so many years. Interestingly, despite the vengeful tone she deliberately adopts ‘childish’ words and sounds – even the choice of the title ‘Daddy’ suggests a childlike viewpoint, as does the deliberate use of rhyme. The reader is confronted with a defiant daughter wanting to break free from the fetters of this damaging relationship which has constricted her for so long. At the beginning of the poem, she compares herself to a foot in her father’s shoes indicating that growing up she has been confined in an enclosed space where she has felt suffocated and deprived of freedom in movement and improvement; Plath rails that the speaker has barely dared to ‘breathe or achoo’ because of his overbearing presence. Both are arguably involuntary actions and yet she fears her father to such an extent that she barely dares to do what she cannot control. This indicates how submissive and subdued the female speaker is forced to be in the presence of patriarchal figures and how the patriarchy has shaped her existence. Through the poem she continues to associate her father with imagery of pure evil such as Nazis and Facists and even associating him with supernatural figures such as vampires and the devil. In line 72, ‘the Vampire who said he was you/ drank my blood for a year/ seven years, if you want to know’ Plath is describing her husband, with whom she was married to for seven years, during which he had an affair with another woman; here Plath comments on the ability of Male power to strip a woman of her sense of self. The Patriarchy has dictated her life so when she feels rejected from her husband she feels he has drained her by drinking her blood, or figuratively sucking the life out of her. Her entire identity seemed to be shaped by the validation of her husband and when that marriage ended she lost her sense of self. With this in mind it could be argued that Ariel as a collection of poetry serves as an overall expression of her resulting confusion and loss of identity attributable to the end of her marriage; which would support the argument that Plath’s poetry is shaped by her own experiences: both as a restricted, suffocated daughter and then as a wife where she continued to be a victim of patriarchal values in the 1960s.

In Ariel, Plath’s commentary extends its focus on the suffocating ideals of femininity to the social construction that is motherhood. Feminist critics in the 1960s and 1970s discussed how Plath was writing of the familial restrictions that were still oppressing women; domesticity and the role of motherhood seemed to be at odds with creating a new true identity, free of duty. Critics argue that in ‘Ariel’ the speaker ‘envisages herself being gradually free from her own body, (‘unpeel(ing..) her skin’) until she is seamlessly connected to the natural world around her: ‘Foam to Wheat, a glitter of seas.’ At the beginning of the poem, the speaker is in a ‘calm stasis’ until the horse she is riding bolts off into a mad frenzy. Consequently, she seeks control but ‘cannot catch’ the horse’s neck. We could interpret that the horse symbolises her own suppressed desires of wanting to break free of the ideals of womanhood that have been imposed on her by a patriarchal society; specifically motherhood. The ‘calm stasis’ could reflect her conformity but once she begins to resist her maternal duties as she is forced to ignore ‘the child’s cry’ and let it ‘melt in the wall,’ she sheds her past life and ‘stringencies’; her identity as a mother. As she begins to view motherhood under the patriarchy as a “social mandate, and oppressive institution, a compromise of a women’s independence“, she finds liberation, becoming the ‘arrow’ that will lead her to her new existence. During the poem, the speaker refers to herself as ‘White Godiva’ as Plath makes a link to the wife of an English lord, who submitted herself to the humiliating condition of riding naked around the streets of the town in order to help the submissive tenants. We could argue that here the female speaker subverts the concept of shame that surrounds female bodies; which is an important process of liberating women. Adrienne Rich states that ‘the woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected’: therefore, by making strategic use of the female body women are able to make it an avenue for resistance. Plath comments that the patriarchy has robbed females of their agency over their bodies; and in regards to motherhood under the patriarchy women’s bodies serve simply as a tool for procreation. The speaker in Ariel only reaches a state of liberation after she has rid herself of her own flesh and blood and Dermott Bond argues that by doing so she becomes ‘ethereal and powerful.’ The poem hints at the idea of ‘suicide’ at the end of the poem, perhaps Plath is commenting that the greatest form of liberation for women lies in death where they can truly separate themselves from what has essentially restricted their roles in life; their bodies.

Even if Plath’s female speakers are bold and progressive characters who fight against the patriarchy, their actions and their desire for revenge are still dictated and moulded by the restrictions enforced upon them. ‘Lady Lazarus’, as Bassnett suggests, is “a woman who understands the nature of her enemy and returns to fight back” and with fighting back she “becomes the master, a master who is more cruel than the original because all revenge is appropriate after the humiliations and torments suffered”. In this poem, the speaker moves from being a passive victim of the patriarchy to an effective avenger; issuing warns to her enemies and then threatening them. These threats, which she has issued to her patriarchal enemy, can be considered as a form of ‘public declared resistance’ in which the speaker asserts her new powerful self. At the beginning of the poem we see her as the recipient of the Male actions in which she appears to be acted upon, when they unwrap her. Then when she starts gaining power, she becomes the vigorous agent of resistance who eats men, who are now reduced to being the ones acted upon. The female speaker moves from being caged and confined by the chains of patriarchy to being liberated. So this poem can be described as “a journey from a life of abuse and nightmare to one of liberation.” So, it could be argued that Plath’s poetry is not entirely shaped by the restrictive roles in society because she is able to write a character who boldly attempts to attack the patriarchy and all it stands for; and with this reaches a state of emancipation. However, even in this defiant poem where the speaker is claiming reinvention, she depicts herself as a corpse with only ‘eye pits, the full set of teeth.’ So arguably this character has still been moulded with those restrictions and ideals of the patriarchy in mind.

Plath uses her poetry to express her critique of the patriarchal social order which restricts women and reduces them to terms of passivity, submission and dependence as she features images of female exploitation and it is constantly at the hands of men. Women are depicted as the victims of the patriarchal ideology in which they are compared to the victims of Jews in “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”. However, Plath also draws images of resistance and revolt against the oppressive patriarchal system in her poem ‘Lady Lazarus’, which arguably contradicts the idea that her poetry is entirely shaped by the restrictive roles open to women in the 1950s and 60s because she at times writes bold, progressive female speakers who desire emancipation and do not just accept their inferior role in society; However you could argue that this is an exception. What is definitely true is the fact that within Plath’s poetry there is a constant commentary on the inequality apparent in women’s lives as a consequence of the patriarchy and whether or not her female speaker is a housewife, whose identity is entirely shaped by restrictive social norms, or a female speaker who has agency and acts with intentions of being freed from her submission and passivity, at the core of Plath’s commentary is her hatred for the patriarchy and this shapes her poetry.

Written in 1959, Syliva Plath writes about the feelings of being in the state of pregnancy, in her poem Metaphors. Many of Plath’s works have been influenced by her experiences in dealing with maternity and fertility. Her works mirror her experiences with loss, motherhood, and family. Metaphors was one of the first poems Plath had ever written about pregnancy in the same year that Plath was pregnant with her first child.Plath uses the devices of imagery to describe disgust in her appearance, and diction and metaphors to reveal her loss in individuality and the fact that becoming a mother is inescapable.

Plath uses imagery to show distaste in her own appearance. In the second line of the poem, Plath mockingly describes herself as ̈An elephant, a ponderous house ̈. By illustrating her appearance as looking like an ̈elephant ̈ and being ̈ponderous ̈, Plath sees herself as huge, heavy, and slow. Not only does Plath describe her physical appearance bulky, but says that it is uncontrollable and continuously growing. Plath describes the growth of her stomach in the fifth line as she states,̈This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising ̈. The author illustrates her weight gain by comparing it to a big loaf of bread, which can account for the saying “bun in the oven”, meaning that she has a baby inside of her, and that her stomach is round like baked bread.Yeast, which allows bread to grow and expand, is used to compare with the growth of a woman’s stomach during pregnancy. The stomach continuously grows over the 9 month period of pregnancy, and is not in the hands of the one who is carrying it. Plath realizes her stomach will continuously grow and that instead of her having control over her body, her body now has control over her. Plath once again reemphasizes distasteful opinions about her own appearance in the seventh line of the poem when calling herself a ̈cow ̈ which can be seen as fat, heavy, and unattractive. The author is unhappy and uncomfortable with the look and constant growth of her body. By constantly describing herself as ̈big ̈ using references to animals and bread, Plath indirectly reveals her distaste for being pregnant as it takes away her appearance and her control over her own body.

Plath uses the device of diction to emphasize the idea of loss of individuality. The author calls herself a ̈means ̈ which holds the meaning that she in unimportant of herself and is rather being used as a ̈stage ̈ or carrier for something more valuable-the baby.The author feels as though she is just the carrier of the valuable object. This reference of her just being a carrier is prevalent throughout the poem. For instance, Plath says she is the ̈house ̈ made of ̈timbers ̈ or the structure, and not what it holds inside of it, people (families and friends). She is the insignificant ̈purse¨ who holds valuable material such as ̈money¨. As the carrier, a woman becomes something different than who is was before, as now she must be the source of shelter and nutrition for the health of her baby. Plath realizes that she will soon lose herself and that everything she does is for the benefit of the baby rather than herself.

Plath uses metaphors to show her loss of individuality and choice. In the last line of the poem, Plath states ̈Boarded the train there’s no getting off ̈. Here, Plath also recognizes that she has no choice but to carry on the pregnancy whether she wanted the baby or not. She knows that motherhood is long-term and that she can’t go back to being her former-pregnant self. By saying ̈ there’s no getting off ̈, plath implies that there is no chance of this change not happening, especially during the time period. During the late 1950s, when this poem was written, Plath would not been able to get an abortion because theu were were illegal, but also risky. In the 1950s and 1960s, the number of illegal abortions ¨ranged from 200,000 to 1.2 million per year¨. Although antiobiotics and effective medical treatments were introduced, ¨illegal abortions still accounted for 17% of all deaths attributed to pregnancy and childbirth¨. These numbers were just those being reported, many women hid their abortions and would not speak about them publicly. In this quote, Plath could also be talking about the sacrifices that mothers such as she would have to make, such as her career. During this century, women were stereotypically seen as people who should become housewives and mothers rather than receive educations and jobs like their male counterparts. This was similar to Sylvia Plath ́s case, who was married by the age of 24 and was ̈forced to leave it (academic life) behind ̈ when she became a mother. In the last line of the poem, Plath reveals the hurt and sacrifice in leaving behind a life once dedicated to herself and career, to a life dedicated to another.

Pregnancy as well as motherhood brings substantial changes to a woman’s life. A woman’s physical body, mental health, and her life can change forever. Women have to deal with physical body changes such as increased weight, they have to deal with continuous pain, and even postpartum depression. Many women today, just like Sylvia Plath, must sacrifice their work, their time and energy, to take care of a child. Still to this day in the United States, several state governments have prohibted abortion, preventing women from making their own decisions about their bodies. Sylvia Plath spoke up for those women who were not able to speak for themselves. She spoke up about issues neglected and hidden by society.

Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” is considered by some to be one of the best examples of confessional poetry ever published. In the poem, Plath compares the horrors of Nazism to the horrors of her own life, all of which are centered on the death of her father. Although autobiographical in nature, “Daddy” gives detailed insight into Sylvia Plath’s conflicting emotions by intertwining fact and fiction into an alternate reality through the use of metaphors and symbolism. The poem ultimately reveals the underlying anger and resentment Sylvia Plath feels toward her father for leaving her life so early.

Divided by a couple of years of limbo surrounding her father’s death, Sylvia Plath’s childhood was broken up into two parts: innocence before the death of her father and the harsh reality of life after his death. Until she was eight years old, life was kind to Sylvia. She had a brother two years younger than she, and the family lived near Nauset, Massachusetts. That year tragedy struck the family: Otto Plath, her father and a professor of Zoology and German at Boston University, died from complications of untreated diabetes. Sylvia Plath was never able to fully accept the loss of her father and was conflicted in her feelings about her father for the rest of her life. For almost a year before his death, Otto had been growing increasingly weak but refused to visit a doctor because he feared that the diagnosis would be cancer. It was not until he ran into a dresser one morning and his toe turned black and swelled that he finally went to the hospital. While at the hospital, Otto’s ailment was diagnosed as diabetes, and had he taken care of it sooner, it would have been manageable. Aurelia Plath, Sylvia’s mother, visited Otto daily while he was recovering. One afternoon after she got home from the hospital, Aurelia received a call informing her that an aneurysm had reached Otto’s lung and he had passed away. Sylvia specifically references the incident leading to her father’s death in stanza two of “Daddy”: “Ghastly statue with one grey toe / Big as a Frisco sea!”. As one specialist put it: ‘“How could such a brilliant man be so stupid?”. For the next two years after Otto’s death, the family continued to live in the same house near the beach. This only made it more difficult for Sylvia to put the death of her father behind her and try to continue living a semi-normal life. One day after her tenth birthday, the Plaths moved inland and started a new chapter in their lives. Plath compares the move inland to actually burying her father: “I was ten when they buried you”.

In high school, Plath was a very strong student and received a full scholarship to Smith College from novelist Olive Higgins Prouty. Her junior year in college, Plath unsuccessfully attempted suicide with pills and was treated with electroshock therapy, also paid for by Olive Prouty. Plath references this event in the line: “But they pulled me out of the sack, / And they stuck me together with glue”. She subsequently returned to school and ultimately graduated magna cum laude five years after starting.

When college ended, Plath decided to travel to England, where she met the English poet Ted Hughes, her future husband. The pair courted for a year before they decided to tie the knot and got married. Happily or not, they were together for seven years and were in the process of getting a divorce when Plath committed suicide. She had found out that Hughes had been cheating on her. The loss of a second man in her life finally pushed Plath over the edge, and she committed suicide in her home in London on February 11, 1963.

The emotional wear that the death of Otto Plath had on Sylvia greatly influenced her poem “Daddy” and eventually led to her demise. Plath shows her conflicting emotions toward her father in “Daddy” by starting the poem praying to see him again. She is trying to get to him in any way, even describing her father as Hitler and saying she is through with him: “In the waters off beautiful Nauset. / I used to pray to recover you. / Ach, du. … At twenty I tried to die / And get back, back, back to you. / I thought even the bones would do”. In that passage, Plath refers to her childhood home, where all her memories of her father linger. She references her attempted suicide during her junior year in college as a way to possibly see her father again. Throughout the poem Plath uses German words and phrases to bring up references to Hitler and Nazism, especially using the death camps as a way to instill specific emotions: “Not God but a swastika … / I made a model of you, / A man in black with a Meinkampf look … / Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through”. This same effect can be seen in the passage: “Chuffing me off like a Jew. / A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen”.

Lack of communication also presents itself as an underlying theme of “Daddy;” in the poem, Plath uses the sounds of words to give the reader the feeling of having difficulty communicating and repetition to show the importance of a message: “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”. Without communication, it is impossible to fully know a person. Plath feels that she was unable to fully communicate with her father while he was alive; therefore, she has a very limited memory of what he was really like, and in her anger, she compares him to Hitler and looks at herself as a Jew who has been cut off from the outside world and put into a concentration camp.

Along with many of her other works, death is a recurring topic of “Daddy.” Death is most likely a recurring theme because it is the one thing that haunted Sylvia Plath for the majority of her memorable life. Between the death of her father, her own miscarriage, and multiple attempts at suicide, death was the one constant in Plath’s life and willingly lends itself as the topic of many of her poems.

All critics have their own opinion on the poem “Daddy,” but most seem to agree with each other in some way. Most critics believe that “Daddy” was written in a negative view of Otto Plath, but one critic, A. Alvarez, believes that the poem is actually a “love poem”: “There is a kind of cooing tenderness in this which complicates the other, more savage note of resentment. It brings in an element of pity, less for herself and her own suffering than for the person who made her suffer. Despite everything, ‘Daddy’ is a love poem”. Although he considered it a “love poem” to her father, Alvarez also states that “she seemed convinced… that the root of her suffering was the death of her father, whom she loved, who abandoned her and who dragged her after him into death. And her father was pure German, pure Aryan, pure antiSemite”. It seems that “Daddy” can be read many different ways by the same person and somehow have different meanings each time it is read. Plath may be declaring her love for her father in “Daddy,” but by using so many references to the evils of Hitler and Nazism, she is also throwing it in her father’s face that she is her own person and can make her own decisions. Plath is saying that she no longer needs the crutch of the memory of her father to hold her up. “Daddy” is Plath’s way of finally coping with her loss and allowing herself to grieve for the first time.

Writing from an autobiographical standpoint, “Daddy” reveals the underlying anger and resentment Plath feels toward her father for leaving her life so early. Plath is able to twist her anger and isolation into words and convey her feelings of loss from her childhood to the masses. “Daddy” blends the facts from her own life with incidents from the reign of Hitler and pushes the reader to compare life to war. After growing up with a life surrounded by tragedy, it is no surprise that Plath suffered long-term emotional difficulties and felt that she could only be understood through the horrors of war.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath hounds Esther Greenwood who spends the summer of 1953, “the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs” away from hometown Massachusetts, sent off to intern in New York at a reputable fashion magazine with eleven other lucky girls. She is meant to have the time of her life, be the envy of thousands of college girls just like her all over America but just feels that all her accomplishments she has totted up fizzle into nothing. Esther befriends cynical Doreen, a girl with bright white hair like cotton candy fluff and a bemused sneer, but quickly grows tired of her when Doreen arrives drunk and half-asleep at Esther’s doorstep. Esther resolves to have “nothing at all to do with her. Deep down, she would be loyal to Betsy and her innocent friends”. Like this, Esther remains always split by indecision.

At first, Esther imagines her college boyfriend Buddy Willard “would fall in love with her… and then she wouldn’t have to worry about what she was doing on any more Saturday nights”. However, when Buddy Willard admits he’s had an affair with a waitress at the hotel he worked at Esther grows furious at him for being made to feel sexy and more experienced than him when all the while he has been having an illicit affair with this “tarty” waitress. Suddenly, she detests all of Buddy’s rhetoric about men wanting a mate and women wanting infinite security when before she would have “taken everything Buddy Willard told her as honest-to-God truth”. She immediately resolves to lose her virginity as well and leave Buddy once and for all. When Buddy Willard contracts TB and invites her to visit him at his sanitorium, he proposes marriage, but the idea is preposterous to Esther now, so she rejects the offer and exclaims she will never get married, she is too neurotic to ever settle down.

As Esther’s internship closes to an end, she feels ever-more disjointed; she fails to seduce Constantin, she weeps openly at the company photoshoot, and on her final night in New York she goes on a date with Marco who later assaults her. Esther makes the trip home to Massachusetts and is picked up by her mother who decides to tell Esther right away that she has not made the writing course she applied for. Like air has been punched from Esther’s stomach, she comes to dread spending her summer in the suburbs for the first time.

Over the next several weeks, unstimulated by excitement and change, Esther slides into depression. She buries her head under her pillow and pretends it is nighttime, refusing to bathe or change or sleep even though she has spent most of her time in bed. When Esther requests for more sleeping pills after being given a very strong prescription the previous week, the doctor refers Esther to a psychiatrist, Dr. Gordon. Dr. Gordon, he suggests to Esther’s mother, Mrs. Greenwood, that Esther would benefit from electroshock therapy. Esther undergoes one treatment without anesthetics which leaves her unable to concentrate, her mind gliding off like a skater into a large empty space and leaving her afraid of the procedure. At this point, Esther’s becomes obsessed with suicide. After several unsuccessful or aborted attempts — slitting wrists, hanging, drowning — she wedges herself into the crawlspace of her house and takes sleeping pills, one after the other until she approached the bottom of the bottle. She is missing for several days and wakes up in a hospital. Later, she is moved to a state mental hospital where she meets many people including Joan, another student from Esther’s college and once romantic interest of Buddy Willard too and Dr. Nolan, a female psychiatrist who understands Esther far better than Dr. Gordon did and Esther treats as her mother. For example, Dr. Nolan is aware of Esther’s terror of electroshock treatments but promises to administer the treatment properly, and Esther wakes up only as if from a deep, drenched sleep and that her “bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above her head, she was open to the circulating air”.

Since the shock treatments ended, Joan hung about Esther like she was trying to suck up the sweetness of recovery. Joan eventually moves into an apartment and hopes Esther will come visit her there, and Esther agrees even though she has no intention of following through. With Dr. Nolan’s help however, Esther can purchase a diaphragm should she decide to lose her virginity, so she could be freed from the fear of having sex and ending up unhappy and pregnant. She soon meets a twenty-sixyear-old mathematics professor named Irwin whom she has sex with before she starts to badly hemorrhage. Irwin takes Esther to Joan’s apartment, wherefrom she is driven to an emergency room. Esther is then roused from her bedrest by Joan’s psychiatrist, Doctor Quinn who asks where Joan might be, which Esther is clueless of. Later, another tap on Esther’s door wakes her and Doctor Quinn has returned with news, Joan has been found in the woods, and she has hung herself. Esther reels from Joan’s suicide, she speaks with Doctor Nolan about feeling responsible, meets with Buddy Willard who asks if something about him “drives women crazy” and must witness the six-foot-deep gap hacked in the ground when she attends Joan’s funeral. The novel ends at a forked road, she steps into a room where the decision which determines whether she must remain in the hospital or can return to college meets her.

Throughout an examination of Plath’s poetry, a reader will witness prominent themes of inadequacy and mental anguish. The poet’s lack of self-belief is primarily evident in ‘Mirror’, as the poet struggles to overcome her insecurities. Furthermore, Plath combats her darkest thoughts during ‘Arrival of the Bee Box’ and ‘Poppies in July’ as she confronts her inner demons. But such examples of Plath’s art should not be taken as representative of her entire body of work, which is in many ways distinguished by its lighter and more optimistic notes. While her poems are dominantly pessimistic and dark, they do not uniformly depict themes of death and destruction. In contrast to this assessment, poems such as ‘Child’ and ‘Morning Song’ celebrate the new life of her children rather than inevitability of death.

The first word of Morning Song is ‘love’. This sets the tone as the young mother responds to her new born infant’s cry, still unsure of her role. Deviating entirely from the subjects of decease and despair, ‘Morning Song’ is suffused with tenderness and love as the poem celebrates a new beginning, not just for the baby but for Plath as a mother. A common aspect of Plath’s poetry is feelings of inadequacy and uncertainty, which are explored as the poet describes ‘staring blankly at walls’, unsure and confused by the world of motherhood. The final image is an optimistic one. It ends on a note of celebration, conveying her hope for the child’s future. ‘And now you try/ handful of notes/ clear vowels rise like balloons’. This poem is a strong piece of evidence, in proving that Plath’s dominating theme is in fact not death.

The poem ‘Child’ opens with a heartfelt expression of Plath’s love for her child, while tainted with self doubt, “your eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing”. This poem reflects the poet’s inner turmoil and portrays a strong sense of ineptitude. Such a poem reveals Plath’s sensitivity to the needs of her child. It tells of her wish to fill his eye with “colour and ducks” and create a beautiful, better place than this flawed world. Although the poem begins by celebrating the wonders of her child, due to harsh self evaluation, it ends with a startling image of Plath overcome by tears and agitation. The reoccurring theme of mental anguish is evident in the closing lines, as she doubts her ability to be able to create a world of ‘grand’ and ‘classical’ images for her child. Plath worries about this new innocent life being affected by her inner turmoil and this “ceiling without a star.” This poem lacks the staple Plath themes of fatality and annihilation, proving that there is more to Plath’s work than a meditation on darkness.

‘Mirror’ is one of Plath’s darkest, most haunting poems, which reflects the prevalence of her own self doubt and feelings of inadequacy. In contrast to addressing the matter of death, Plath offers a vivid and stark portrayal of emotional struggle and the dangers of self examination, particularly the modern pre-occupation with image. The poet returns to the mirror “searching my reaches for what she really is”; throughout a reading of Plath one can become accustomed to her unstable inner psyche, which continues to doubt her abilities. Reflectingher own esteem, the poem lacks any hope or respite; she ‘comes and goes’, always returning to be disappointed and unfulfilled upon encountering her own true image. The mirror is a voice of a society which values women only for their looks, rather than their capabilities. Plath was aware of these pressures to conform to the ideal housewife of the 1950’s, and therefore suffered tremendously due to her perceived failure. Thus, the prevailing theme of inadequacy and the torn mind of Plath continue to be a reoccurring aspect of Plath’s poetry.

In the ‘Arrival of the Bee box’, Plath expresses a desire to be in control of the dark aspects of her psyche. Plath felt that in order to be a true poet one had to explore one’s unconscious mind, delving into the darkest depths of the mind. Here, Plath regards the bee box as hidden aspects of the mind, the dark and mysterious parts the true poet must explore. “The box is locked, it is dangerous.” The poet’s fear of the bees suggest her fear of the demons deep within her own mind. Plath’s constant return to the box is symbolic of how desperate she is to succeed as a poet and to feel somewhat adequate. Similarly in ‘Mirror’, the speaker is drawn back to the source of her tears, ‘searching its reaches’ for self-acceptance. The theme of feeling inadequate is undoubtedly a prominent aspect of Plath’s poetry. In the closing stanza, the speaker decides she will confront her darkest fears, “Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.” In contrast to the theme of annihilation, Plath unleashes the “Roman mob” and concludes to the poem on a note of optimism with hope for the future. “The box is only temporary.”

While the title “Poppies in July” suggests a poem about the beauty and richness of nature, this is in fact one of Plath’s bleakest poems. The poem deals with Plath’s struggle with herself, a force she can’t describe because she can’t fully understand it. The poem is littered with intense, surreal imagery to convey common themes such as Plath’s anguish and turmoil. The ‘little poppies, little hell flames’ harass the troubled speaker and cruelly offer no release from the suffering that she must endure. Her pain has become so overwhelming that it has almost made her numb, so much so that she longs to feel something, anything at all. She describes how she puts her ‘hands among the flames’ but ‘nothing burns’. This numbness seems to be due not only to her mental anguish which followed her throughout her life but is particularly due to the realisation of her husband’s affair. Though these images and concepts are quite unnerving, the poem aptly describes the pain of heartbreak. I believe that Plath did not seek to create aspects of death with her poetry, but to unfold the truth of mental and emotional suffering, and she has done so perfectly in this poem.

Overall, Plath’s poetry is of emotional extremes and while there are brief moments of joy and optimism in her poems, the prevailing themes are mental anguish, and the persistent feelings of inadequacy and a lack of self-sufficiency. Although her poetry portrays a dark view of life, the poems represent only suffering and not its grim outcome of death. We must not forget that midst her struggle was the celebration of life and the love for her children.