Mad girl's love song by Sylvia Plath - Essay Example

Mad Girls Love Song" by Sylvia Plath is a poem written as though it were a love song. This is very clear even from the as well as the fact that it is not going to be a happy love song. Through a repeated refrain and very dark and persistent imagery, the poem itself paints a very clear picture of what it is like to be insane. Essentially, the poem is an anti-love song, despite its title. But at its most basic, the poem is about what it feels like to have your honest love for someone manipulated by that person.

The poem opens with an image of what it feels like to close your eyes and open them again. "I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. / I lift my lids and all is born again" (1-2). At first this image seems to be fairly innocent, as though it is just a surprising poetic version of what happens when you open and close your eyes. But the refrain, which is the most important line of the poem, comes immediately after, and casts all that into doubt. "I think I made you up inside my head" (3).

What is particularly important about the refrain is the way it is in parentheses. This makes it sound as though it is just something the speaker is muttering to herself.The rest of the short poem switches between poetic descriptions of life and the universe with descriptions of the speakers romance with the person to who she is speaking. Even the images of nature and the stars are filled with depressing language, such as how "the stars go waltzing out . / and arbitrary blackness gallops in" (4-5).

This image suggests the end of the world, and is followed by an image of the loved one being "dreamed" (7) which makes it sound very much like the loved one is responsible for that end. The loved one is also directly accused of being responsible for the speakers madness. "You . / Sung me moon-struck, kissed me quiet insane" (7-8), the speaker says, before again mentioning the refrain which says that the loved one might not even be real. What is most interesting about this particular section is that it becomes impossible to tell which is true.

Did the speaker make up the loved one? Or did the loved one make the speaker insane and then vanish? This uncertainty follows the reader for the rest of the poem, even when in the next to last section where the speaker says "I fancied youd return the way you said" (13), which adds another accusation onto the loved one. Not only of making the speaker insane, but of abandoning her.The very end of the poem shows the speaker regretting that she ever loved the person who abandoned her. "I should have loved a Thunderbird instead," she says, because "when spring comes they roar back again" (16-17).

This is followed by the opening image of opening and closing eyes, except this time there is no opening. The poem ends with the speaker closing her eyes as "all the world drops dead" (18) and one final repeat of the refrain, a very pessimistic giving up and a final madness which sounds a lot like death.