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Theories on Sylvia Plath's poems
Discuss Sylvia Plath as a poetess with reference to her poem
Theories on Sylvia Plath's poems
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The poem, “Mad Girl’s Love Song”, highlights Sylvia Plath’s struggle with depression and her mental illness. As a form of expression, Sylvia Plath wrote “Mad Girl’s Love Song” in 1953, her last years of her life. Six years into Plath’s marriage with English poet, Ted Hughes, depression started to kick off in her life. Hughes began seeing other women and not responding to Plath as her husband. According to the Poetry Foundation, “She let her writing express elemental forces and primeval fears”. Plath’s poetry slowly became more violent and intense. Many people like to blame Hughes for her mental illness. In 1953 Plath decided to end her life by using her gas oven.
After reading the poem “Mad Girl’s Love Song” and doing some research on Plath, I came to find out that the poem was very similar to Plath’s personal life. The poem is basically about a young girl who fell in love and gave her all to a boy who never came back to love her. The young girl fell in a depression and made herself believe that she was making it all up. She still had hope that she and the boy could be happy someday, but it never happened and it drove her insane. Perhaps the boy could have been Plath’s husband, Hughes. Everything about the poem is so similar to her marriage with Hughes; the story makes the reader believe the poem could possibly be about Plath herself.
Sylvia starts the poem with “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead”; a line that is repeated throughout the poem to indicate her attempts to escape the world (Plath line 1). However, when she reopens her eyes, she finds that she can no longer hide and that “all is born again” (Plath line 2). In the first stanza, lines 1-3 in the poem, we can already tell that the girl is uncomforta...
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...lly put out during the winter but use again the following spring. Unlike the boy, the car would still be there to “roar back again” (Plath line 17).
According to the Academy of American Poets, “her work is singled out for the intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme.” “Mad Girl’s Love Song” was clearly an example of one of Plath’s intense work. Plath used repetition, personification and imagery to help this poem be very understandable as well as visual to the reader.
Works Cited
Plath, Sylvia. “Mad Girl’s Love Song.” Perrine’s Literature Structure, Sound & Sense. Ed. Thomas R. Arp and Greg Johnson. 11th ed. Wadsworth Cengage Learning 2012. 1003-1004. Print.
"Sylvia Plath." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation. Web. 19 Apr. 2014.
"Sylvia Plath." Poets.org. Academy of American Poets. Web. 21 Apr. 2014
Plath never got over the loss of her father and her failed marriage to well known poet Ted Hughes. She wrote, "Me, I never knew the love of a father, the love of a steady blood-related man after the age of eight .... I hated men because they didn't stay around and love me like a father" (cited in Hughes & McCullough, 1982, pp. 266267). In an article, Jon Rosenblatt describes her poetry by saying “Whether the poems take place inside a house or in the countryside, the identical metaphorical relationships are established between a vulnerable speaker and a destructive environment.” By the end of “Daddy” the speaker comes off as a force to be reckoned with and her message is final
"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.
Plath, Sylvia. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Ted Hughes and Frances McCullough. New York: Ballantine Books, 1982.
Sylvia's genuine emotion that shines through her work is rooted deep in her childhood. Sylvia was a perfectly normal child that enjoyed life until at age eight when she lost the closest person to her. Her father, Otto Plath, died from complication with diabetes. (Kehoe 1) Sylvia had been his favorite and hit her the hardest. The toughest part was that because of her age she was not permitted to go to the funeral so she was never able to let go and say goodbye. She never fully recovered and later in life became convinced that the majority of her pain was caused by losing her father. A. Alvarez, a friend and critic, stated years later “The death of her father, whom she loved, who abandoned her, and who dragged her after him into death.” (Kehoe 1) She tried to pick the pieces up and move on. She moved on to become a good student. In all her years of s...
While at Smith, Plath received many awards in regard to the poetry that she had written. After winning the Mademoiselle fiction contest, the popular magazine offered Plath a place on their editorial board. While working with Mademoiselle, Pla...
Atwood, Margaret. "Siren Song." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 16 Nov. 2015. [The poem is utilized to analyze and illustrate themes that can be juxtaposed to Sylvia Plath's poetry. In case themes, literary elements, and biographical elements are drawn together, then there is a commonality amongst eminent female writers. However, the use of the poems and comparisons is to find the underlying factor that traces these possible connections; in case it is not due to mental illness or embracement of death, then The Sylvia Plath Effect may be redrawn to a new possible hypothesis.]
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.
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.
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.
In Plath's "Daddy," written just before her death and published posthumously, the most readily accessible emotion is anger, and much of the poem is couched in autobiographical allusions. Plath's own father died of a gangrenous infection, caused by diabetes he refused to treat, when Plath was eight years old, and his death was "the crucial event of her childhood" (Baym 2743). Plath makes personal references to her father as a...
As England’s Poet Laureate, and recipient of both the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and T.S. Eliot’s prize for poetry, Ted Hughes was an acclaimed poet. The shadow of Hughes late wife, Sylvia Plath, kept Hughes stagnant in his career, in which he was known as “Her Husband” (Middlebrook). Hughes most recent collection of poems, Birthday Letters, took him over twenty-five years to write, and contains poems which recount the marriage of the couple. Hughes wrote the poems as a loving gesture towards Sylvia, but the poems were misinterpreted as “an attempt to adjust the public record in the wake of her confession and the mass of commentary which has grown up around them” (Spurr 3). Hughes incorporated into his poetry the ideals of postmodernism, his somber life and relationships, simplistic formatting, imagery, and allusions. Hughes influenced the world through his animal images and multifarious tones.
Overall, the imagery that Plath creates is framed by her diction and is used to convey her emotions toward all relationships and probably even her own marriage to Ted Hughes, who had rude, disorderly habits. Even the structure of the poem is strict in appearance as each stanza ends with a period and consists of exactly six lines. In addition, the persona of the poem is very detached and realistic, so much that it is hard to distinguish between her and Plath, herself. However, Plath insinuates that the woman actually wants love deep down, but finds the complexity and unpredictability of love to be frightening. As a result, she settles for solitude as a defense against her underlying fear.
Plath’s father died early in her life leaving her with unresolved feelings, and this brought a lot of troubles later on in life. Sylvia was a great student but when she was overwhelmed with disappointments after a month in New York, she attempted suicide (“Sylvia Plath”). After receiving treatment and recovering, she returned to school and later moved to England where she met her future husband, Ted Hughes (“Sylvia Plath”). Their marriage with two children didn’t last when Ted had an affair. They separated and Ted moved in with the new woman, leaving Sylvia and their two children. Battling depression during this time, Sylvia soon ended her life. She left behind numerous writings that many might see as signs of her depression and suicide attempts.
She uses this allusion to draw parallels to her past two suicide attempts that she survived. “My face a featureless, fine/ Jew linen” (7-9) and “them unwrap me hand and foot--/ the big strips tease.” (27-28), are examples of the Lazarus allusion because Lazarus crawled out of his tomb covered in linen strips and cloth when he was resurrected. Another allusion, which references Sylvia Plath's third suicide attempt, is shown in lines 20-22: “I am only thirty./ And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three.”(20-22). These lines allude to a specific event in Sylvia Plath’s life, her suicide, that was foreshadowed through her writing. Another poem, “Edge”, written by Sylvia Plath is heavily influenced by her troubled life and is rich with literary
A brief introduction to psychoanalysis is necessary before we can begin to interpret Plaths poems. Art is the expression of unconscious infantile desires and the strongest of these desires is the wish to “do away with his father and…to take his mother to wife” (Freud, “Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis 411).This is what Freud called the Oedipal conflict. For women the desire is of course reversed to killing the mother and marrying the father and is called the Electra complex. Children resolve this conflict by identifying with their same sex parent. Loss of a parent can prevent the normal resolution of the Oedipal conflict and result in a fixation or obsession with the lost object (object is the term used to define the internal representations of others). The desire to have the lost object back is also the desire for what Freud called primary narcissism. ...