How is Sylvia Plath's life reflected in the poems

Authors Avatar

How is Sylvia Plath’s life reflected in the poems “Daddy”, “Morning Song”, and “Lady Lazarus”?

Sylvia Plath has had an “exciting” life, if I can use this word. Her father died from an undiagnosed diabetes when she was eight. At the same time, a short couplet that she wrote was published in the Boston Sunday Herald. Later, she won scholarships to study in Smith, Harvard, and finally Cambridge. There, Plath married Ted Hughes, who was a good poet, too. What amazes me in her life is that she had attempted suicide three times, once every ten years. In 1963, she succeeded in killing herself as she gassed herself to death. In an outsider point of view I always wonder how a woman with so much going for her would want to end her life: though her husband’s infidelity, she was nevertheless successful--her poems appeared in various prestigious newspapers and magazines, and she was even invited to teach English in Smith College. Plath’s death has been subject to unending analysis and interpretation, framed by the kind of inquiry that usually guides classroom literary discussions. What was Plath’s intention? What did her suicide mean? What did it reveal about her family, her society, her time, her sex, herself?

Two years after her death, “Ariel” was published. This small book includes Plath’s poems written not long ago before her death. She wrote about the crucial issues of her life, but she made outstanding art from those issues. In foreword, Robert Lowell writes that “Though lines get repeated, and sometimes the plot is lost, language never dies in her mouth…Everything in these poems is personal, confessional, felt, but the manner of feeling is controlled hallucination, the autobiography of a fever.” Plath uses powerful language and imagery to express her feelings and thoughts. Most of the poems in “Ariel” show Plath’s self, going from a state of symbolic death to one of rebirth. In this essay we will look into her life through three of her poems in “Ariel”: “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus”, and “Morning Song.”

“Morning Song” is the opening poem in “Ariel.” It is generally agreed that the poem expresses Plath’s conflicted feelings at the birth of her first child, her daughter Frieda Rebecca Plath, especially her sense of diminishment and servitude that only motherhood can involve. On the first line we can see that Frieda was really the fruit of love between Sylvia and Ted—it says, “Love set you going like a fat gold watch.” A gold watch is a beautiful and dear gift. The word “fat” here implies beautiful, too, because fat babies are beautiful. Also, Frieda might have had some kind of breathing difficulty the time she was born, as the second and third lines go: “The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry/Took its place among the elements.” It hints that the nurse (“midwife”) slapped the baby’s soles to make her cry, thus begin to breathe. The second stanza is “Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue./In a drafty museum, your nakedness/Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.” The first sentence states that when Frieda was born, people around her applauded. Then Plath resembled the naked baby to a statue in a big museum, whose nakedness impressed her, making her feel weak. The tone of the poem turns from loving to awe here. Then in the third stanza she writes: “I’m no more your mother/Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow/Effacement at the wind’s hand.” It very well implies that Plath felt helpless to decide the baby’s destiny: the mother was like a cloud that dissolved in rains, created in the earth a mirror, which then “reflects its own slow effacement at the wind’s hand.” Plath was so nervous that night: “All night your moth-breath/Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:/A far sea moves in my ear.”—all night she hears Frieda’s breathing, her small, feeble breath “flickers” in the dark. The “flat pink roses” is the pattern of wallpaper in the baby girl’s bedroom. Soon the baby cried, and Plath got up from bed: “One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral/In my Victorian nightgown./Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square” Here, Plath’s mood swings from nervous to relieved. She even laughs at herself as “cow-heavy and floral in my Victorian nightgown.”, but then she compares the baby’s opening mouth to a cat’s one, which revealed her indifference. The last stanza describes the baby’s cry: “[The window square] Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try/Your handful of notes;/The clear vowels rise like balloons.” Both “clear” and “balloons” embody positive significance, so it seems to show Plath’s affection towards Frieda. Yet even though this, we can still feel the new mother’s unrest and separateness toward her newly born daughter. Through every line I can feel the latent madness behind every calm words and phrases. I have read the poem several times, and every time I see Plath was so scared of her daughter, as if she was facing a monster she had given birth to: She did not see the baby; she saw illusions.

Join now!

Plath associates death in many of her poems. The poem “Lady Lazarus” generally describes how she attempted suicides. At the beginning Plath wrote about two desktop settings: “A sort of walking miracle, my skin/Bright as a Nazi lampshade,/My right foot//A paperweight,/My face a featureless, fine/Jew linen.” These small things stand out for its autobiographical relevance. They hint at the poetess’s manipulation of her horrific experience to set the stage for her art. The whole process of dying and being brought back to life intensifies, and improves, her art. After that she writes about her first two attempts to suicide: ...

This is a preview of the whole essay