Critical Analysis Of Sylvia Plath's 'Edge'

When first reading “Edge”, one will immediately be able to note that the poem’s flow is very peculiar. This is, in a very large part, due to the brevity and abstractness of each stanza throughout this piece of work. Plath is immediately able to make the reader start to think by organizing the flow of the poem in such a unique style. It is hard to, at first, even pay attention to the contents of the poem without being distracted by the organization of it. It may appear pointless at first, but there is a reasoning behind the structure and stylistic tendencies in this poem. “Edge” conveys a very dark and a very bleak tone throughout its entirety. This can be shown through some very subtle, and some rather obvious events throughout the poem.

This can be proven through the narrator’s very subjective tone throughout the poem, the uses of the word “perfection” in death through copious amounts of repetition, and through key imagery that helps convey a woman troubled, rather than a woman perfected.

At first glance, the reader will see that the poem is penned in the third person. It becomes clear that the narrator is very familiar with the woman in the poem, and seems to be rather heavily opinionated on the events throughout the poem. When one thinks of the third person point of view, one thinks of the narrator tending to be more objective in their narration, but it is most certainly clear that the narrator, too, believes that this woman has immortalized her perfection through the means of suicide. Immediately, the poem stresses that the woman has perfected her life through death, which implies that she did not do anything wrong, or disgrace anyone. “The woman is perfected”. Such a blanket statement surely requires some analyzation from the reader. The woman herself never speaks about the tragedy that has occurred in the poem. The reader is urged to side with the narrator from the very