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Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Write a detailed account of some of themes that are dominant in Sylvia

Plath’s poems. (P.U. 2004) 

In a sensible essay, “The World as Icon: On Sylvia Piath’s Themes”, Annete

Lavers argues that Plath may well be a symbolist poet: ...for all the freshness of perception they reveal, the [Plath] poems are essentially emblematic. They derivetheir meaning, both profound and sometimes literal, from an underlying code in which objects and qualities are endowed with stable significations, andhierarchized.

Lavers goes on to suggest that “the symbolic net which Sylvia Plath casts on the world of perception has above all a personal value”, that is, Plath’s themes andimages are saturated with personal significance or symbolism. Lavers suggests

that, “This code is extremely rigid, in as much an object, once charged with agiven signification, never forfeits it: the moon, the snow, the colour black, alwayshave the same function. But the attitude of the poet can vary and thus introducesome ambiguity; the colour red, the color blue, can play different parts in variouscontexts. The child as theme and the child as subject appears in very differentguises”.

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This framework gave Plath an opportunity to create a scale of values. It also gaveher work a “destination” from the merely personal experience. Thus, there is“cultural imagery” in Plath’s poetry; “classical reminiscences, references tohistorical events, contemporary allusions, numerous Christian anecdotes andsymbols, philosophical concepts, legends (such as that of the vampire) and

superstitious (such as that of the cracked glass as a portent of death”.)

However, “the subject of the [Plath] poems is never anything but an individualexperience...The primary object of experience is...explored at leisure and all itssymbolic potentialities reviewed, only to organise themselves finally according tofamiliar categories, with man firmly in the centre”. Thus:

Nature, reality, the world, are only in appearance interrogated as potentialsources of meaning; for this meaning has been chosen once and for all, andhenceforth they will only be used for their expressive possibilities.

This makes Plath an idealist/projectivist, even perhaps a solipsist, but almostcertainly a hermeticist or gnostic, perhaps like Yeats. Plath’s “speaking voice”always “remains individual”. Further, “Sylvia Plath’s particular way of experiencing life is shown to have been an interplay between the particular andthe general...The juxtaposition of the sublime and the homely, the ‘poetic’ and thescientific (words like carbon monoxide, acetylene, ticker-tape, adding-machine)...reveals a constant and vivifying exchange between depth and surface”.There is, moreover, in the world of Sylvia Plath, “an intuition of kinship betweenpoetry and death.” The major “theme of vulnerability” creates an impression of 

“an overall threat”...The mood is virtually always negative...and ranges from mereforeboding to hopeless revolt and utter despair”. Thus,

“The living flesh is felt as essentially vulnerable, a prey to axes, doctors’ needles, butchers’ and surgeons’ knives, poison, snakes and tentacles, acids, vampires,leeches, bats and bees, jails and brutal boots. Small animals are butchered andeaten, man’s flesh can undergo the final indignity of being cut to pieces and usedas an object. The poet feels her kinship with “the aged and the meek/The weak/Hothouse baby in its cradle” (“Fever 103°”).

 As a result, subjects “and metaphors include a cut, a contusion, the tragedy of thalidomide, fever, an accident, a wound, paralysis, a burial, animal and humansacrifice, the burning of heretics, lands devastated by war, extermination camps:her poetry is a “garden of tortures” in which mutilation and annihilation takenightmarish protean forms...” This makes Plath’s poetry a mine of Gothicimagery, often shading off into the Surreal. And “on the psychological plane, themind cannot but see a sign of its own fragility in this very multiplicity of symbols.

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Disintegration threatens, all the more because of a past history of breakdown”.There is imagery of “anarchic forces and centrifugal destruction”. This “obsession with catastrophe is in itself the most potent force of disintegration; it sometimestakes the form of revolt and despair, and at other times of almost an infatuation with death...it finally vitiates and destroys every foundation for hope.” Moreover,

“in some poems”, Plath “seems to show an awareness of herself as primarily self-condemned...”.

Lavers enumerates “two of the numerous dangers which threaten in (Plath’s)poems (which) occur with a symbolic frequency”.

The first is the threat of stifling or strangulation, in which an obstacle stands between life and the person, finally destroying the latter; scarves, fumes, veils,placenta and umbilical cords, tentacles are found in “Fever 103°” or “Medusa”,for instance. The second is the threat of destruction by small enemies, outside orinside the body: bats and piranhas, bees....(‘Stings’)…

Further, “Death by fumes or carbon monoxide shows how the first threat isreducible to the second, since death is due to changes in the small units of the body”. Death, indeed, wears many “veils” or guises in Plath’s poetry; it is alwaysubiquitous and it circumscribes life. Lavers notes that, characteristically in Plath,“blood is almost always presented in a plural forms, as “the blood berries”(‘Ariel’) or a “bowl of red blooms” (‘Tulips’), as if the individual was made up of smaller units endowed with a spontaneity not necessarily in agreement with theconscious self”. Further, the “threat being interiorized means that one touch of 

decay can start a systematic degeneration”. Broadly speaking, then, “we can say that the dialectic of life and death is the sole subject of the poems.”

The poet’s existence is presented as a cosmic drama in which these two greatprinciples are confronted and their struggle is expressed in patterns, whosestructure is accordingly antithetic.

This “binary” opposition is presented in terms of a “code” or system:

The life-principle is colour, pulsating rhythm, noise, heat, radiance, expansion,emotion and communication. Death is the other pole, darkness, stasis, silence,frost, well-defined edges [knives, arrows] and the hardness of rocks, jewels andskulls, dryness, anything self-contained and separate and which derives itspositive attributes from some other source, instead of generating them freely—fordeath is absence, nothingness.

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The positive side of this antithetical system is life, and the

...natural symbol of life is “the beautiful red” (‘Letter in November’). It is the

colour of blood, the life-fluid, which expresses emotion by its pulsating centre,the heart, in its turn comparable to a wound which reveals life, or to the mouth, which kisses and screams. Colour comes as a “gift, a love gift” (“Poppies inOctober”), “the heart opens and closes/ Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me” (‘Tulips’) with essential exuberance and generosity in several poems, flowerslike tulips and poppies evoke this centre of energy: “Their redness talks to my  wound, it corresponds (‘Tulips’)”

“Redness” gains, in Plath’s poems, through it being contrasted with a neutral“colour” like “white”:

But the poet’s reaction to the violent affirmation of life against a neutral background of white [the nurses’s uniform in ‘Tulips’, ‘snow’ elsewhere] variesaccording to (Plain’s) degree of vitality, humble thankfulness when life manifestsitself in the desert of depression and daily chores (‘Poppies in October’) ordespair at not being able to experience its bite and burn any more (‘Poppies inJuly’) and the consequent wish for sensation to be finally dulled (the poppies hereare a conveniently dual symbol, evoking life but containing death).

In this context of torpidity or ennui, most disturbing of all is the call of life when

 vitality is at a low ebb; for it cannot be responded to. The individual feels unableto cope with the demands from life, the latter in turn threatens withdisintegration and appears as malevolence:

Even through the gift paper I could hear them...

...African cat... —(‘Tulips’)

Here..., whiteness, the anonymous life in hospital and needle-broughtunconsciousness are preferred as a refuge.

Lavers also sees the moon as “white...also an absence of colour”, and “the perfectsymbol” of “death, for it shines in the night, its light is borrowed, its shaperegular, well-defined and self-contained and its bald light turns everything intostone”, as if the moon were Medusa. According to Lavers, in poems like

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“Medusa”, “Elm”, “The Moon and the Yew Tree”, “Childless Woman”, “TheRival”, “The Munich Mannequins”, “Paralytic” and “Edge”, they “form aconstellation, which obviously transcends any personal application;...” But that isthe precise point, for instance, in a poem like “The Moon and the Yellow Tree”, where the drama does indeed “transcend any personal application” in quest of a

more fulfilling, if not consoling, conception of life and death. Lavers, however, buttresses her argument by suggesting that “Flat” is used, as in “Tulips”, toexpress a superficial contact with life, when shapes seem two-dimensional, asthey do in moonlight”. Further,

...it also points to childlessness—rather as an elected state than when due tosterility—a state both ridiculous (‘The Rival’) and guilty, since it makes passion itsown end:

The blood flood is the flood of love,

The absolute sacrifice

It means: no more idols but me,

“me, me and you.”

—”Munich Mannequins”

The moon is also a suitable symbol for sterility because of its circular shape, themost perfect of all, and because it rules the flux of menstrual blood. In the later,death- is in the midst of life, which is cut from its rightful end, according to SylviaPlath...

Consequently, “the feeling of guilt for a self-seeking life is so strong that itsometimes involves the notion of children.” On the other hand, as in ‘Nick and

the Candlestick’ and ‘Berck-Plage’, the candle in Plath’s poems, “symbolises the warmth and fragility of personal life”. Moreover, “Religion, especially as itappears in tender images of mother and child”, seems to offer a refuge against the bald and white moon, as in “The Moon and the Yew Tree”, or “Mary’s Song”, butthe poet belongs outside, with the latter. Moreover, “the symbols of possibleintimations of a transcendent reality behind the world, clouds, are alwaysdepicted as far and high, and indifferent”, as in “The Moon and the Yew Tree”,“Gulliver” and “Little Fugue” according to Lavers. The “stiffness” is associated [in

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“The Moon and the Yew Tree”] with the blue colour, having a very ambiguous value in this code...” Further, the idea of a sacrifice as the central notion of religion has deeply impressed the poet; sacrifice, either of the heretics, or of themost precious and most innocent, the golden child (in ‘Mary’s Song’), thetortured Christ in ‘Elm’ or his suicidal’ ‘awful God-bit’ in “Years”. As a result, in

an “identification in which sadism attributed to the deity is fused with asmasochistic drive, the idea of redemption actually has death as a consequence, asappears in “Brusilia”. But “if actual existence can be considered a superiority,individualized existence means separateness which has...a negative value”.Hence, “the desire, expressed in an open or latent manner in many poems, for atransfiguration which will dissolve the limits of the self, this same “old suit, baldand shiny, with pockets of wishes” (‘Totem’).” This transfiguration “can beachieved in orgastic ecstasy, and in the horse’s gallop we find a double symbol,for the utmost experience and the pulsating rhythm of life, and for the dispersionof the individual into the ‘substanceless blue’ (“Ariel”, “Years”, “Words”, “Elm”).However, “Fever 103°” indicates that guilt feelings and a desire for expiation andpurification may have determined this choice of a metaphysical framework. Theirorigin was probably multiple and ancient; this appears when comparing “Daddy”and “Little Fugue...”. “Actually, it is remarkable that in this universe ideas arenever felt to be life-giving, intellect is therefore no help” (“The Moon and the Yew Tree”, “Nick and the Candlestick”). This anti-intellectualism can only causedepression, since every enduring reality is thereby interpreted as participating inthe nature of death, knowledge is therefore condemned: in Three Women, themale world is “flatness from which ideas, destruction/ Bulldozer, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed/Endlessly proceed...,” and the surgeon livesamong cut-up bodies in “Berck-Plage” he is one mirrory eye’ and surrounded by “glittering things”. In this context, it is “only normal and highly significant...theever-changing face of the mirror is still used as a symbol for life which is

preferred to fixity; the shattered mirror is then a metaphor for death”, as in“Contusion”.

 Again, the “child is, in principle, the fountainhead of all life and hope, His self isnot yet bald and shiny”, he is “vague as fog”..., a vagueness imbued with infinitepossibilities, before which the parents are humbled: “your nakedness/shadowsour safety”. (“Morning Song”) He is “akin to the elements, the sea, the wind, theclouds ‘with no strings attached and no reflections’ (‘Gulliver’)”. The poet“acknowledges the freedom of her child: “I’m no more your mother...the wind’shand” (“Morning Song”)”. In the child, innocence, which for the adult can only be

obtained in forgetftilness, and annihilation, as in “Getting There”, “Tulips”,“Fever 103°”, is miraculously combined with individuality: “A clean slate with your own face on” (“You’re”). Consequently, in “the face of disintegration anduniversal dissolution in deceptive glitter, he is a plenum, the fixed point on whichthe envious spaces lean (‘Nick and the Candlestick’), heavy and precious as gold,a divine redeemer, as in “Morning Song” and “You’re”, by “an accumulation of metaphor”. The child is “like the tremendously compact and potent germ of afuture universe, the absolute beginning of some ancient mythologies.” However,

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“the obvious justification of one’s existence which the child brings is not alwayspotent enough to appease the guilt of the egoist, as appears in the poems on thechildless woman or those which show the dead children as appendages to thedead woman” (‘Edge’). In “Fever 103°”, guilt actually evokes the image of a“spotted”, dying child whereas in “Nick and the Candlestick”, the blood bloomed

clear in him. Consequently it might be said, “to summarise, that as a subject thechild is positive, but that as a theme it is often combined with others whichgreatly diminish this positive value, and can even make it completely negative;the child-theme is then used to reinforce guilt, fear and despair”.

Much the same could be said “about another theme, that of the lulling context, of everyday life”: Kindness “supplies another necessary fluid”, or “poultice”, and busies itself “sweetly picking up pieces.” Love, in its beginning, evoked ‘a green inthe air’, which “cushioned lovingly” the poet.

However, as a poet “who is capable of reading life on two levels at once”, Plathalso sees the other aspect—”what happens when interest wanes and the endlessstream of the symbols dries up?” The “environment of daily life, when evoked likean incantation in such circumstances, is no more than “dead furniture”,fragmented and powerless...” Similarly, “cooking, often the symbol of daily life,after supplying a delightful metaphor for the child successfully brought into the world, “O high-riser, my little loaf (‘You’re’) can elsewhere be resented as adegrading drudgery, which can make one unworthy of a revelation.”

Consequently, to “the maimed self, therefore, daily life cannot give back 

 wholeness, only crutches, a frequent symbol (‘Berck-Plage’, ‘The Applicant’).” And, “death can actually be welcome, since it frees one from this useless lumber,useless, yet irreversibly acquired, for man is the prey of an ‘adding-machine’.” In“Lady Lazarus” the self is described as:

 What a trash

To annihilate each decade

 What a million filaments

These images, Lavers points out, “recall Baudelaire’s famous poems entitled‘Spleen’ in which the self is similarly cumbered with things which no longer havemeaning”. This “reflection, which alienates, the living self (and is a frequenttheme in Existentialist literature) fits in the neo-platonic scheme...whereby 

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degeneration into matter is the sign of an irreversible degradation.” The“proliferation of “things, things” (‘Berck-Plage’) is used in lonesco’s plays to thesame purpose”. And “things are another aspect of death; in ‘Berck-Plage’ the deadfurniture turns into nothing, like the corpse: the visible is an illusion and theinvisible alone matters”.

It follows “that purification can be achieved in death, in which the scatteredpersonality is seen as gradually withdrawing towards its vital centre, andabandoning its tainted externals, as in “Fever 103°”, in “Tulips”, and inParalytic”... Similarly, echoes “are often used as a symbol of these externals, sincethey are a degradation of sound, a repetition travelling away from the originalevent.” Consequently, if “poetry and death can denounce the illusion of acomfortable life, cannot love bring about the same realization?” Love, in Plath, is“the supremely, ambiguous theme”. To begin with, “some poems, like “Daddy” or“Medusa”, whatever their actual personal associations, present love as somethingto be achieved in the teeth of opposition, in spite of the past or of terrificobstacles, as in “Getting There”. The “ten-yearly rhythm” of death [in “Lady Lazarus”] offsets the pulsation of life”. However, it “is true that “Lady Lazarus”ends on a note of defiance, and “Daddy” on the successful nailing down of the vampire, the undead, followed by compassion and a purified feeling for this otherman, badly known, who was the vampire’s victim: Daddy, you can lie back now.”But elsewhere this forced marriage appears as a certain immolation: “Deathopened, like a black tree, blackly” (‘Little Fugue’).

 Yet in “A Birthday Present”, “love is hoped for, but the parcel is suspected tocontain death instead”. And even “more tellingly, the ecstasy of love, which is

suggested by the gallop of a horse, is always evolved in a strangely passionlessmanner, which leads one to suggest that a blue and transparent transfiguration ispreferred to a more personal feeling, as being psychologically safer”. Thus, “in“Ariel”, the horse is indeed pulsation conquered on ‘stasis in darkness’; but itleads not to a fever of blood but to a pearly ecstasy: “I foam to wheat glitter of seas,” and a happily suicidal wish. We deal here with a sublimation, the idea of love rather than actual love. “Consequently, although a divine visitation is wishedfor in the midst of everyday life, and although the poet cannot help feeling somepride and some nobility in her calling, she always conceives it as another of thosenumerous disintegrating factors which threaten her, and incomparably the mostpotent and terrifying”. There is “another disturbing factor: a profound

uncertainty about the possibility of reconciling womanhood and intellect...”

However, “among the dramatic and unexpected cuts which are such a strikingfeatures of her poems, some are particularly evocative.” For instance, in “Cut”they “perfectly express the highly complex reaction of the speaker, a mixture of fear, breathless fascination and narcissistic tenderness for her own body and aheightening of the intensity of perception conveyed by the clinically precise

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description in the opening lines. In “Ariel”, the cuts convert the final ecstasy and volatilization, and “Fever 103°”, admirably suggests the feeling of ascension andforgetfulness of all earthly involvements an effect very similar to that of the beginning in Baudelaire’s ‘Elevation’...Generally speaking, the cuts tend to inducea strong narrative tension,... “However, the general tone is very rarely purely 

elegiac, since...the effort to dominate experience and the fear of fighting a losing battle results in most poems being built on a feeling of duality and antagonism”. Yet, “the fact that we are always strongly aware of an individual voice, even fromthe midst of despair, is a testimony to the poet’s achievement.” This in spite of the“dolorist accent of many poems...a masochistic infatuation with death, in “A Birthday Present”, “Elm”, or “Lady Lazarus”, and a rather repellent familiarity  with its gruesome aspect. For this passivity is necessarily that of the poet, whomust experience reality with the utmost intensity even if he must be broken in theprocess—an attitude erected into a dogma by Rimbaud and the Surealists.” InPlath’s poems, there is “the essential ambiguity of the themes and the proteanpresence of death”.

Lavers tends overmuch to read Plath as a neo-platonic or even as a Gnostic poet,even though this aspect of Plath’s poetry may suggest yet another indebtedness,on the poet’s part, to Yeats’s poetry. A loosely antinomian structure is evident behind Plath’s poetry. It works, roughly, in terms of the following oppositions, which are not necessarily exhaustive or exclusive:

(a) Life x Death

(b) the Sea x the Land

(c) Nature x Culture

(d) Health x Sickness (“Madness” x “normality”)

(e) Flowers x artificial objects, largely related to modern technology: crutches,crotches, etc.

(f) Female x Male (self-exposure x the Male Gaze)

(g) Father x (Mother) (Daughter x Mother)

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(h) Father x Husband (“Daddy” x the “Black Man”)

(i) Son x Father (Nicholas x Ted Hughes)

(j) Body (“silence”) x Events (language; speech)

(k) the public domain (“history”, “culture”) x the private domain (thefamily/”her” story)

(l) the living x the dead

(m) the dead x the living (“All those Dead Dears”, “Tulips”)

(n) the survivors x the living dead (e.g. vampires/blood-suckers)

(o) art x science (“Dying is an art” x gas, fumes, environmental/degradation)

(p) blood (vitalistic) x blood (violence)

(q) the colour red (“blooms”) x white (“snow”)

(r) the colour red (“blood”) x white (“death”, non-communication)

(s) the telephone x hooks, knives, arrows

(t) the colour blue (positive association) x the colour blue (negative or neutralassociation)

(u) purity x stain (“sullied”, “decaying”, “Dirty Girl”)

(v) the child x the grown-ups (father, mother) 

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