An Analysis Of A Mad Girl's Love Song

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A Mad Girl’s Love Song In Sylvia Plath’s poem “A Mad Girl’s Love Song”, it is hard to determine whether the speaker is mad or going mad. Plath along with all women in this time period were defined by their relationship to a man. When a woman was abandoned by her beloved it was Earth-shattering, as it still can be for many women today. Before the reader even gets into the poem itself the speaker is already described as “mad” and this word has multiple connotations. This forces the reader to ask themselves, is the speaker responding to her loss in an appropriate but angry fashion or is she losing her mind and actually going mad over the loss of a man? I believe the answer is both. The speaker expresses her feelings of hopelessness, despair, and her inability As the tone changes the perspective of the reader changes as well. There is no clear way to determine whether the speaker is responding to her situation with the appropriate amount of madness or is actually going mad and escaping into her own mind. Plath’s poem shows how a woman 's happiness was defined by her relationship to a man, which is enough to infuriate or drive any woman insane. The speaker struggles to continue her very existence because of her lost love. It is true that the speaker is very emotional and feels things very deeply, but that is not enough to prove that she had lost her mind. By the end of the poem the speaker seems to realize that she is wasting her time waiting on a man. She would rather have a present love that is completely unfathomable than a real love that is not around. The repetition in this poem makes the reader believe this loss is actually causing the speaker to lose her mind, but through changing tones that mirror the emotions anyone would go through in a situation of loss like this the speaker’s response is completely

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