Pain in Slyvia Plath's Poetry

The pain the poet experiences during and prior to the creative process results in blood flood, which is the release and birth of words, the relentless stream of poetry. The poet bleeds the poems. They will not keep still inside. Out they run and run...

Plath frequently relates and compares the blood and thrill of birth of poetry to childbirth: the child forces its way out in the world, screams for delivery, just as words will keep torturing the poet and will not leave her calm unless they gush forward and amalgamate in poems. The redness of blood also stands for the eruption of emotion and vigor, induced by a fire in which the poet burns and turns into ashes so as to be revived like Lady Lazarus into this new phoenix - the poems, the new form of existence.

The nine letters of the word `metaphors' and the nine syllables of each of the nine lines of the poem with the same title reinstate the similitude between poetic creation and the nine months of pregnancy preceding childbirth. The loaf of the metaphor is engendered after the lengthy fermentation of the yeast - the dough that is a mixture of the poet's gift, muse, artifice, coupled by the endured grief, and who knows by what else, a mystery known only to gods. And once the metaphor eats all the juicy fruit, there's no stopping it, it has `boarded the train, there's no getting off'.

In reference to blood in `Poppies in July', the speaker covets to bleed along with the poppies, to have the redness of the flowers' pain trickled to her mouth and into her glass colourless capsule, to be enfolded by the purgatory red flames. Perhaps such yearning is for the sake of bringing life to her numb body and soul, whereat life implies pain, living the pain to the full, as though feeling pain means being alive.

The bleeding of the thumb when cut comes deep from the heart, and, look! A whirling pool of wine-coloured blood! The body inside is torn into smithereens, hence the written poem `Cut' itself is to alleviate the pain, reassemble it bone by bone, to play the role of `a pill to kill the thin papery feeling'. Yes, and the twenty-eight days of moon's dragging and crackling of her `blacks'. What a relief as the blackberry liquid breaks the tension!

The jars of honey from