Analysis of "Stillborn" by Sylvia Plath

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Ayush Gupta

Grd 12, English SL

STILLBORN

        People who create something always add their emotions to it. Their creations are alive for their creators because it expresses their feelings. However when a creation does not fulfil its purpose and fails to satisfy the creator, then it is very tough for the creator because he has spent his hard work on it. Such a situation is portrayed in ‘Stillborn’ by Sylvia Plath. The purpose of this poem is to convey Plath’s dissatisfaction with her poems to the readers. She achieves this using extended metaphor by comparing her poems with stillborn babies. She also shows her confusion towards her dead poems by the use of diction, figurative language and structure.

        Throughout the poem, Plath has used extended metaphor to emphasize on her disappointment and sadness by comparing poems which are non-living with stillborn babies who are expected to be alive but are not. Plath starts off with her metaphor directly from the first line when she says, “These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis.” She says that these poems do not live but anyways poems are not expected to live. However in the rest of the poem, she continuously personifies her poem by giving them human like qualities such as, “they grew their toes and fingers well enough”. Poems are not expected to have toes and fingers but still Plath uses them to describe the poem’s structure and bodily characteristics. In the last line of the second stanza she says that despite the proper shape and number, their hearts and lungs won’t start. Considering this in terms of poems, she means that despite the proper structure and format of the poems, their content does not turns out to be appealing to the creator. In this way Plath uses extended metaphor to compare babies and poems. By comparing non-living things to living things, the poet effectively displays her affections to her poems. Furthermore one feels huge disappointment when a baby is born dead. Plath also displays her magnitude of disappointment in her poems using this comparison.

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        Moving on, Plath also uses a specific choice of words and figurative language to convey her emotions. Firstly Plath uses a lot of body related words such as toes, fingers, heart, and lungs. These words aid in imagery of human anatomy and help in making the extended metaphor more effective. Secondly she also uses some grotesque words such as ‘pickling fluid’ and ‘piggy and fishy air’ to make the readers feel the disgust towards small babies, hence leading to sadness. Moreover instead of using ‘pig like and fish like air’, she uses the words ‘piggy’ and ‘fishy’ to emphasize on ...

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