“Poets See the World through Eyes Different from Other People” - How far do you think this comment applies to the work of Sylvia Plath?

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A.M.D.G                15th December 2001

“Poets See the World through Eyes Different from Other People”

Question: How far do you think this comment applies to the work of Sylvia Plath?

Sylvia Plath was one of the leading poets of her time. She was born in Boston and later moved to England where she met and married a leading English poet Ted Hughes. Both her and Hughes were unhappy in their relationship. This lead Plath to become suicidal and paranoid, which reflected in her work. ‘Lady Lazarus’ was a poem all about her inner pain and frequent suicide attempts. In 1963 she was finally successful and took her own life.    

One of her many poems clearly illustrates the paranoia Plath felt and her inner pain as she visualises a pleasant task like blackberrying as a dark and twisted world where she is hunted by her enemies, men!

Blackberrying

Stansa One

To open the play Plath uses the word ‘nobody’. With one word she has set the scene as a lonely and destitute place. She reinforces this by describing the lane as ‘nothing, nothing but blackberries’. This double negative helps to back up the emptiness, solitude and lack of purpose Plath feels in life. Plath tends to reinforce the topics she brings up and shows this as she continuously uses the word blackberries to give the reader a sense of their huge number.

Plath uses alien metal objects such as ‘hooks’ and ‘pewter’. This metallic theme is also reflected in some of her other poems (i.e. Mirror). Plath uses this type of personification to great affect and she also uses similes and metaphors to help bring the poem to life. Theses techniques help bring feeling and depth to what would otherwise be a very dull poem.

One such example of her use of personification is bringing the blackberries to life and describing how they ‘squander’ their ‘blood’ on her fingers. As well as bringing the blackberries to life she has given them a sex she describes their squandering of ‘blood’ as an act of ‘sisterhood’ despite this it is more likely that they are male. Thus illustrating her hatred of the male gender and her husband Ted Hughes.

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The next line is probably a covert sexual reference as she describes the male blackberries as ‘sisters’ accommodating themselves to her ‘milkbottle’. This signals the end of the first stansa and now the poem focuses on a different organism, the crow. Each stansa seems to deal with a different topic although they are in fact all linked. Plath is using different things to show her pain and hatred of men.

Stansa Two

The idea of using birds struggling against a strong wind was taken from Hughes play ‘wind’ in which a magpie was blown away by a strong ...

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