Written in 1956, The Shrike offers readers an insight into Plaths thoughts on her marriage to Hughes
by
omomomom (student)
Breaking Bad
The year 1956 had its fair share of joys and shortcomings for Sylvia Plath. It was the year she married Ted Hughes and it was the year she became aware of the pressure of the social obligations she had to comply with both in her artistic and domestic lives. Starting from Hughes’ success to Plath’s loss of inspiration, 1956 proved to be a critical moment during Plath’s lifetime. It was in this year that her self-conflicted identity was challenged, and brought in to capitulate to societal pressure and expectations. It was also in this year that her skills as a poet were questioned and contrasted against those of her husband. Despite all these factors affecting Plath’s perceptions, Plath always held Hughes’ with regal regard, and it is this regal regard that can be seen in “The Shrike” and “Stings”, and it is that same high regard, along with societal demands and ideals, that prevented her from fully expressing herself to her husband, but Plath used her poetry, especially her last poem “Edge”, as her scapegoat and expressed her every emotion and opinion of significant moments of her life in her writing, until the pressures proved to be too much and she surrendered to the one thing she knew best; death.
Written in 1956, “The Shrike” offers readers an insight into Plath’s thoughts on her marriage to Hughes and the love she holds for him, but also the jealousy and envy that started to edge in that same year. The reader can see that the speaker of the poem feels subjugated and victimized and Plath manages to portray this by using phrases such as: “While she, envious bride” (7), “Shaking in her skull’s cage” (11), which allude to the reader that the speaker feels envious of the spouse, but also that the thoughts of the reader are oppressed not because of the speaker’s inability to express them but because of the high regard that the speaker holds their spouse in. Throughout the whole poem, the motif of a domestic monarchy is repeated (a hierarchy in which the husband is on top (the ruler) and the rest of the household members are the ruler’s subordinates/beneath the ruler in command and respect “Such royal dreams beckon this man/As lift him apart/From his earth-wife’s side” (2-4)). This motif is the key to understanding the symbolism used in the text and it is the key to fully grasp Plath’s thoughts and tone as she was writing this poem. In the poem, the shrike could symbolize the freedom from male dominance that is occurring in her household and also freedom from her lack of thoughts and inspiration, in both interpretations Plath’s usage of the shrike symbols justifies to the end that the shrike’s ability to grant freedom to Plath will empower her over her husband not only domestically but also artistically, and this can be clearly interpreted from the following lines: “Escaped among moon-plumaged strangers;/So hungered, she must wait in rage/Until bird-racketing dawn/When her shrike-face/Leans to peck open those locked lids, to eat/Crowns, palace, all/ That nightlong stole her male,” (14-20). During this year Plath suffered some artistic difficulties and found writing poetry challenging as she was running dry on inspiration, unlike her husband Hughes who was at the height of his career and that in turn overshadowed Plath’s poetic greatness and that, together with societal demands for her to be a wife first to Hughes then a writer, made Plath feel oppressed. Overall, after taking into consideration all these personal influences, motifs, symbols, and the structure of the poem- it being a 24-line enjambment- the tone created by this poem is very passive and weak, unlike “Stings”.
