Analysis Of Mad Girl's Love Song

1400 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The poetic personae in Sylvia plath

Sylvia Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song” (1951), shows how the speaker was very drastically and negatively affected by the end of a relationship. The poem tells the thoughts of the heartbroken speaker and how the speaker is trying to create a type of comfort by coming up with different ways to try to feel better while possibly being mentally unstable and ill. This poem is written with great passion and deals with the darkness and sadness produced by heartbreak which then broadens to the subjects of fantasy, reality, and suicide. These subjects are demonstrated throughout the poem with the poet’s use of repetition, word choice, figurative language, and theme. The title of this poem gives the reader a lot of information without even beginning the …show more content…

“The stars go waltzing out in blue and red” (L.4) show both personification and imagery while also exposing sign of mental instability. Plath gives more depth to the poem by giving stars human qualities by describing them as dancing the waltz. With this quality the stars seem to have it also gives dreamlike and fantasy like imagery that the speaker is part of. This stanza also creates a scene where the speaker seems to be hallucinating with these colors and stars that are not really performing those actions. The next line which also shares imagery and personification is “And arbitrary blackness gallops in” (L.5) where darkness and death seems to be exposed while human qualities are also given to the blackness. Although these scenes that the speaker is explaining and experiencing seem to be fantasy like it also shows the reality that the speaker might be having suicidal thoughts. Insanity can also be seen when Plath refers to a different time when the speaker was with the lover and the speaker explains, “kissed me quite insane” (L.8) further showing how the lover turned her

Show More
Related

  • Analysis Of The Song Over There

    725 Words  | 2 Pages

    “Over There” is a song written by George M. Cohan in 1917. Nora Bayes, Enrico Caruso, Billy Murray, Arthur Fields, and Charles King were among many who recorded the song. It was written as a propaganda piece encouraging young American men to join the army to fight in World War I. The song was incredibly popular, selling over two million copies of sheet music and one million copies of recordings by the end of the war. Cohan, the writer, was eventually even awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor for his work on this song.

    Read More

  • Sylvia Plath Comparison Analysis

    764 Words  | 2 Pages

    In American society, the common stereotype is that the father has the role of the dominant figure in the household. Sylvia Plath and Sharon Olds may come across as two seemingly different poets, however, they are really quite similar, especially in their driving forces behind their writing styles in poetry. The lives of Plath and Olds are both expressive of the realities of a father-dominated family, in which both of these poets lost their fathers at a young age. This is significant because both poets have faced a similar traumatic event that has had everlasting effects on their adult womanhood, which is reflected in their writings. For both these woman, their accesses to father-daughter relationships were denied based on life circumstances. Ironically, their fathers were their muses for writing and are what made them the women they are today.

    Read More

  • A Courage’s Attempt to Take Her Life back in Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”

    1990 Words  | 4 Pages

    Sylvia Plath a highly acclaimed twentieth century American poet whose writings were mostly influenced by her life experiences. Her father died shortly after her eighth birthday and her first documented attempt at suicide was in her early twenties. She was married at age twenty-three and when she discovered her husband was having an affair she left him with their two children. Her depression and the abandonment she felt as a child and as a woman is what inspires most of her works. Daddy is a major decision point where Plath decides to overcome her father’s death by telling him she will no longer allow his memory to control her.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Poem Daddy

    949 Words  | 2 Pages

    Sylvia Plath’s jarring poem ‘Daddy’, is not only the exploration of her bitter and tumultuous relationship with her father, husband and perhaps the male species in general but is also a strong expression of resentment against the oppression of women by men and the violence and tyranny men can and have been held accountable for. Within the piece, the speaker creates a figurative image of her father by using metaphors to describe her relationship with him: “Not God but a Swastika” , he is a “… brute” , even likening him to leader of the Nazi Party; Adolf Hitler: “A man in black with a Meinkampf look .” Overall, the text is a telling recount of her hatred towards her father and her husband of “Seven years” and the tolling affect it has had on

    Read More

  • Sylvia Plath and the Bell Jar

    1115 Words  | 3 Pages

    "The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head…” For most people, when the name Sylvia Plath comes to mind, the word “psychotic” is the word that follows; however, there was more to Plath than her demented works. Throughout her shortened life, Plath had a variety of titles bestowed upon her: daughter, sister, student, wife, mother, teacher, author, and poetess However, Sylvia Plath was a haunted soul, as she also had the labels of “manic depressive” and “bipolar.” Her constant struggles with her mental illnesses are evident in her writing, especially her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar.

    Read More

  • Eagle Poem

    1130 Words  | 3 Pages

    Before reading this poem, one might not be too intrigued by its title, but ...

    Read More

  • Analysis of the Song Some Nights by Fun

    1472 Words  | 3 Pages

    "Fun" is an American indie pop band formed by Nate Ruess in 2008. Since then they have released two albums, Aim and Ignite in 2009 and Some Nights in 2012. Both of these albums were both financially successful because of their deep and meaningful lyrics that Nate himself wrote. Their song, “Some Nights”, was released on June 4, 2012 as part of the album with the same name.

    Read More

  • Sylvia Plath

    711 Words  | 2 Pages

    A phenomenal writer’s work generates a powerful bond between their words and the reader. This is factual of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. It contains universal, timeless themes of depression and death that, in these dejected days, many people can relate to. Sylvia Plath was a confessional poet whose oppressive life led to her relatable story. She wrote many astonishing poems, such as “cut”, “Among the Narcissi”, and “A Birthday Present” that all chronicle and showcase her struggle for a release from the suppressed world she subsisted in, a world that many remain to live in today. Sylvia Plath’s poetry narrates both her distinct, individual story and yet universal tale of a woman who searches for a way out of her depressed state of mind.

    Read More

  • tulips by slvia plath

    474 Words  | 1 Pages

    Plath writes in seven line stanzas. She uses a unique rhyme scheme that changes from in each stanza. Occasionally she isolates one line in order to annunciate its meaning. She also uses enjambment to help stress the meaning of certain lines. Plath also like to use metaphor and simile in her poem. Lines nine and ten she uses simile when she writes, “Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in”. She is stationary in her bed and almost doesn’t want to see everything anymore but she cannot hide what is going on around her.

    Read More

  • An Analysis Of A Mad Girl's Love Song

    1599 Words  | 4 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Sylvia Plath's Life and How It Influenced Her Poetry

    1847 Words  | 4 Pages

    Sylvia Plath’s life was full of disappointment, gloominess and resentment. Her relationship status with her parents was hostile and spiteful, especially with her father. Growing up during World War II did not help the mood of the nation either, which was dark and dreary. At age 8 Plath’s father of German ancestry died of diabetes and even though their relationship was never established nor secure, his death took a toll on her. “For Sylvia, who had been his favorite, it was an emotional holocaust and an experience from which she never fully recovered” (Kehoe 90). Since she was so young she never got to work out her unsettled feelings with him. Even at age eight, she hid when he was around because she was fearful of him. When she was in his presence his strict and authoritarian figure had left an overpowering barrier between their relationship. Sadly enough by age eight Plath instead of making memories with her dad playing in the yard she resented him and wanted nothing to do with him (Kehoe). These deep-seated feelings played a major role in Plath’s poetry writings. Along with his “hilterian figure,” her father’s attitude towards women was egotistical and dismissive, uncondemning. This behavior infuriated Plath; she was enraged about the double standard behavior towards women. Plath felt controlled in male-dominated world (Lant). “Because Plath associates power so exclusively with men, her conviction that femininity is suffocating and inhibiting comes as no surprise” (Lant 631). This idea of a male-dominated world also influenced Plath’s writing. Unfortunately, Plath married a man just like her father Ted Hughes. “Hughes abandonment apparently stirred in her the memories and feelings she had struggled with when her ...

    Read More

  • Comparing Feminist Poetry by Plath and Sexton

    1203 Words  | 3 Pages

    Plath and Sexton's lifetimes spanned a period of remarkable change in the social role of women in America, and both are obviously feminist poets caught somewhere between the submissive pasts of their mothers and the liberated futures awaiting their daughters. With few established female poets to emulate, Plath and Sexton broke new ground with their intensely personal, confessional poetry. Their anger and frustration with female subjugation, as well as their agonizing personal struggles and triumphs appear undisguised in their works, but the fact that both Sexton and Plath committed suicide inevitably colors what the reader gleans from their poems. However, although their poems, such as Plath's "Daddy" and Sexton's "Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman," deal with the authors' private experiences, they retain elements of universality; their language cuts through a layer of individual perspective to reach a current of raw emotion common to all human, but especially female, understanding.

    Read More

  • Relationships In My Papa's Waltz And Daddy

    543 Words  | 2 Pages

    On the other hand, the diction and imagery of “waltzing” in line 4 creates a soft and sweet image of a father and child dancing. The image of “My right ear scraped a buckle / You beat time on my head” (line 12-13) seems violent and rough at first, but with Roethke’s delightful transition into “Then waltzed me off to bed / Still clinging to your shirt” (line 15-16) depicts a small child being put to bed but still wanting to spend time with their father. “Daddy” contains allusions to World War 2 with images of a swastika in the sky (line 46-47) and references to German concentration camps, “A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen” (line 33). She states her father clearly to be a German man with “I thought every German was you” (line 29), “with your Luftwaffe” (line 42), “And your Aryan eye, bright blue” (line 44). Plath alludes to the popular anti-Semitism of her era in Germany depicted in lines 31-40.

    Read More

  • Mirrors by Sylvia Plath

    975 Words  | 2 Pages

    Giles, Richard F. “Sylvia Plath.” Magill’s Critical Survey of Poetry. Ed. Frank N. Magill, b. 1875. Pasadena: Salem Press, 1992.

    Read More

  • A Women's Relationship With Men in The Poem Daddy by Sylvia Plath

    1014 Words  | 3 Pages

    Sylvia Plath has brought the attention of many Women’s studies supporters while being recognized as a great American poet. Most of her attention has come as a result of her tragic suicide at age thirty, but many of her poems reflect actual events throughout her life, transformed into psychoanalytical readings. One of Plath’s most renowned poems is “Daddy”. In this poem there are ideas about a woman’s relationship with men, a possible insight on aspects of Plath’s life, and possible influences from the theories of Sigmund Freud.

    Read More

More about Analysis Of Mad Girl's Love Song

Open Document