Elegy in Sylvia Plaths Poetry - Assignment Example

Elegy in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry If in Greek and Roman poetry, elegy is determined by a type of poetic metre –– a poem of alternating dactylic hexameter (six metrical feet) and pentameter (five metrical feet) lines1 – oftentimes used in love poetry,2 in English poetry, elegy is characterised not by its form but by its substance, as it pertains to a “reflective poem of lamentation or regret, with no set metrical form, generally of melancholy tone, often on death,”3 which either mourns an individual person – an example of which is Walt Whitman’s ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ (1865): An elegy written in memory of the late President Abraham Lincoln.4 – or humanity in general – famous of which are Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ on Edward King, Shelley’s ‘Adonais’ on John Keats, and Mathhew Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’ on Arthur Hugh Clough.5 This genre as an outpouring of grief, sorrow, desperation, disappointment and distress – emotions which oftentimes result from a loss of loved one, is believed to characterise Sylvia Plath’s poetry. How this is so would be understood not only by feeling the poet’s poems but also by knowing the poet herself. Like her poems, Sylvia Plath, who at an early age was subjected to intense emotional experiences such as the loss of her father,6 the painful war, the pain of rejected works, etc., affecting her deeply is someone not easy to understand that she and her works are judged disparately by critics, often in conflicting ways. This may be attributed to Plath’s efforts in her poems to acknowledge, understand and in the end, hoping to reconcile her own paradoxes she felt within herself and the realities she confronts outside.7 Just like her life, which violently swings like a pendulum, it would be observed that her poems often display “intense coupling of its violent or disturbed imagery and its playful use of alliteration and rhyme,”8 to which Pamela J. Annas presumed as Plath’s “way of imaging her own ambivalence and sense of division.”9 With her poems appearing to be self-revealing in nature, her critics classify her a confessional poet, implying that her poems should be understood from an autobiographical lense.10 To Rosenthal, “Plath puts the speaker herself at the centre of her poems in such a way as to make her psychological vulnerability and shame an embodiment of her civilization.”11But it is strongly argued that to interpret a poem merely by comparing or linking it to the personal life of the poet would be inherently dangerous as it may lead the readers away from the genuine truth the poem intends to impart. Thus “an effort must be made to separate Plath and her poetry from the fascinating but misleading speculations of her audience.”12 One misconception is the view very strong among feminists that Plath was a victim of a male-dominated culture13 causing her to commit suicide. Yet it was also contended that the literary career of Sylvia Plath, which was extraordinarily successful, although a complicated one, does not present explanation to her suicide.13 … whatever the actual causes, her death took place in an atmosphere of misery and despair. It was not the victory of an artist who had followed her material wherever it would lead, even to her own destruction, but the defeat of a human being who found it impossible to suffer any longer the separation and isolation of her self. From Plaths childhood on, art had given her ‘a way of being happy’, as she wrote in her childhood memoir ‘Ocean 1212-W’. She was brought to suicide by pressures and forces that would ultimately be satisfied neither by art nor by any other human activity.14 So, to understand Sylvia Plath’s poems simply from biographical and psychoanalytic point of view would deny the very fact that Plath’s excellent academic studies highly influenced by the likes of Sigmund Freud, Sir James Frazer and Otto Rank had given her an overpowering erudition regarding psychology, folk tales, and myth combined with her natural talent in writing had enabled her to create her own system of poetic symbols based on mythical classic which she had vividly and imaginatively shaped in her poems15 “not as testimony of mental disorder, but rather as a series of poems which create an archetypal Ariadne’s Thread... Plath probably found inspiration to personalise these myths, and to mythologise her personal experiences.”16 “In her poems, Plath is not concerned with the nature of her experience, rather she is engaged in demonstrating the way in which the mind deals with extreme circumstances or circumstances to which it responds with excessive sensitivity.”17 The conflicting ways of perceiving Sylvia Plath’s poems is not surprising as the poet herself is caught confused in her own strategies – “She can control her terrors by forcing them into images, but she seems to have no understanding of the confusion her wild image-making betrays.”18 However, despite the conflicting ways in and views of understanding Sylvia Plaths’ poetry, one thing is evident – Sylvia Plath’s poems express feelings of pain and sorrow. “Her sentences anguished. Her poetry bled at the seams.”19 Her poetry appears like an elegy of her life – a life characterised by so much pain and hatred in the loss of a loved-one, a life imprisoned by the shadow of her mother and her religion, a life constricted by being a woman. To empathise with the poet will lead one to understand her poetry as her way of freeing herself with all these damnations in order to be reborn again, this time in a new form, in a better world: The woman is perfected. Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga, Her bare Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over. (Edge, 1963)20 The first line: ‘The woman is perfected’ – impeccably expresses the poem’s message: “Death is equivalent to stasis, and stasis, a stopping of process with its continual imperfections and need for rebirth, is perfection of a sort.”21 With the aid of her most beloved pen, hysterically moving in the rhythm of combined feeling of guilt and wanting of freedom, as if time is running out for her, she creatively performs her death to be purified from the million fibres of guilt and anguish that continually persecutes her, tormenting her: Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air. (Lady Lazarus)22 Rosenblatt in critiquing Sylvia Plath’s works correctly stated that the significance of the poet’s place in recent American poetry does not lay in the discovery of her life story, but more on how she dramatically approached the portrayal of a self that is violently dying out. “Her mixed, violent world of nostalgia and hatred, of self-transformation and negation, would have little poetic force were it not for her conversion of fantasy and memory into dramatic expression and encounter.”23 As expressed in one of her poem ‘Initiation’, written in 1953: “And she knew that her own private initiation has just begun.”24 With everything that was said about the poet and with all the criticisms thrown at her poetry, Whittington-Egan vividly described Sylvia Plath as “both icon and artefact... a deception... the shining, super-wholesome, all-American, super-clever, straight Alpha, scholarship-winning, prize-carrying-off, prize-to-be-carried-off college girl. But she was really one of the gods high-heeled walking wounded, come to the Old World to die.”24 To which I will add, in order for her to be reborn into a new form soaring freely transcending the limitations being imposed on her by man’s consciousness. Sylvia Plath died may times in her poems, but in her death she lives totally transformed, because in her death, the English elegy that once had been exclusively a male domain, in her poetry together with those of Mary Shelley, Emily Brontë, and Emily Dickinson, has now been transformed into a new form – the ‘feminine self-elegy’25 – as proposed by Patrick H. Vincent refers to “a troped posthumous elegy in which a dead speaker mourns herself.”26 With this, a dead woman speaks and is being heard. It is this literary mystical reality that makes Sylvia Plath’s poetry an elegy – her self-elegy – ‘the posthumous voice’ in Raymond’s words. Plath was undeniably a prolific poet, but it was only after her death that she won a Pulitzer Prize – the first ever posthumously – for her ‘The Collected Poems’.27 Hers was not an easy life. An exceedingly intelligent, talented, beauty who would like to soar above the skies, wanting to discover the pinnacle of truth, pushing the limits, longing to achieve the unachievable, was killed many times – by her strict and authoritarian father, by her over protective mother, by her constricting religion, by her philandering husband, by a patriarchal society, by the traumatising horrors of war, by her being a woman – leaving her discontented for life, her mind travelling uncontrollably, her heart bleeding in anguish, in pain, in misery, loving, hating, wanting more, not wanting any more, as she tried to avenge herself through the might of her most beloved pen, her best friend, her confidant, which had most willingly brought her own death, her atonement. Thus through her poetry she mourned for herself, long dead in anguish but wanting to live, forever transformed. In a BBC interview, this struggle between life and death, between freedom and submission, between self and reality resounds: I think my poems come immediately out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with these "cries from the heart" that are informed by nothing except, you know, a needle or knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience; and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.28 Plath’s poems are her self-elegy that powerfully echoes her pathos. In fact, what makes her poems forceful is their capacity for suffering and the inescapability of the voice’s suffering.29 “Her poems enact loss and grief in such a devastating fashion that one wonders how the reader, much less the author, can survive them.”30 In her ‘Daddy’, one of her most compiled poems written on October 12, 1962, a year before her successful suicide, is a callous, atrocious poem that basically speaks about loss, mourning and trauma and the effect of an obstructed grief.31 The poem expresses intense emotions as it delves into the anguish women experience in their various relations to and with men. How men hurt women, imposing on them their power, owning them as if women are mere properties and denying them their lives? How do those painful experiences with them turn their love to hatred? The poem, filled with imagery of intermixed factual truth and emotional truth,32 offers a myriad of truth that the reader unravels as he/she opens his/her consciousness to the realities of life and as he/she takes a stand. Although ‘Daddy’ generally deals with the anguish of a child, who was abandoned by her father at an early age: I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do. It also mourns for the speaker, herself because with her father dead, she also died. You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo And having been brought back to life, she found a way how to survive, how to overcome the overwhelming loneliness that grips her in losing her father – and that is to find his replacement in a husband. But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. But just like her father, the husband, whom she had loved reliving her, also left her in desolation making her to hate her father, her husband and everything they represent. However, this does not directly picture Plath as a feminist, because her relationship with her men is a love-hate relationship – a relationship she longs for, yet has caused her death, thus she later hates it. What the poem rather affirms is her resoluteness to be freed from the pain and misery inflicted by her infidel loved-ones causing her in anger to acknowledge the insufferable truth that the relationship will no longer work. Something unbearable as the speaker has to accept the unacceptable; something dreadful as the speaker has to live in her death. So daddy, Im finally through. The black telephones off at the root, The voices just cant worm through. If ‘Daddy’ is an elegy for the death of her father and an elegy of her death caused by loss and rejection, ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ on the other hand “is an elegy for everything that had to be outgrown in her femininity to acquire such clarity, such mastery within the medium of the distinctive poetic method and subject matter that would make her name.”33 ‘The Rabbit Catcher’s’ opening line – It was a place of force – aside from being read as an incantation would be more meaningful when understood as a place charged with longing in elegy for the dead – “The Rabbit Catcher” also catches the speaker’s death making elegy – an exclusive right of men by virtue of masculine tradition, to become ‘a place of force’, too, for the feminine speaker.34 In ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, Plath “dramatizes a struggle of feminine elegy by rejecting quotidian markers of the female mourning poem while positing that generic ‘place’ of male elegy as threatening to the feminine speaker.”35 The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair, Tearing off my voice, and the sea Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead Unreeling in it, spreading like oil. (The Rabbit Catcher)36 Plath was able to turn her obscurity as a feminine speaker against the marble-like stone tradition of masculine elegy by artistically forcing through that ‘place of force’, the feminine self-elegy to take its rightful place into the genre, claiming its own audience and excellence,37 avenging itself, proving itself, claiming the life once denied. I tasted the malignity of the gorse, Its black spikes, The extreme unction of its yellow candle-flowers. They had an efficiency, a great beauty, And were extravagant, like torture. There was only one place to get to. Simmering, perfumed, The paths narrowed into the hollow. A companion piece to Daddy where once again, Plath effectively combined the ‘personal pain and corporate suffering’ is ‘Lady Lazarus.38 In reading the poem, one would listen to a woman monologuing impulsively in her anguish and dissolution.39 Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say Ive a call. Its easy enough to do it in a cell. Its easy enough to do it and stay put. (Lady Lazarus) 40 ‘Lady Lazarus’ shows how the speaker is perceived differently by people around her, as expressed in various imagery and symbolisms: For the Nazi Doktor , she is a Jew, whose body must be burned; for the "peanut-crunching crowd," she is a stripteaser; for the medical audience, she is a wonder, whose scars and heartbeat are astonishing; for the religious audience, she is a miraculous figure, whose hair and clothes are as valuable as saints relics. And when she turns to her audience in the middle of the poem to describe her career in suicide, she becomes a self-conscious performer.41 Different perceptions which she abhors, because none of those identities are acceptable to her, none of those justifiably defines her, instead they deny her of her existence, killing her, burying her, throwing her to oblivion. Every time people judge her, she dies. Thus she will resurrect just like this biblical character, Lazarus, to avenge herself and prove their impurities. Thus, she has to die for her to live. It is in dying that she lives. Sylvia Plath’s poetry is an echo of the pain and anguish of going through an unbearable life and a self that is abhorred both by the self and the society. It is a struggle of wanting to be freed, to be happily rested in a place she sees to be equally hers and be the self and the life she longs for. The anguish, sorrow, and desperation in her poems are very evident, affecting one’s consciousness and true understanding of life and death. I believe, Sylvia Plath has brilliantly achieved her purpose, she died in her poetry, and with her death she has achieved immortality putting in place women’s equal rightful claim to a genre long possessed by men. With her poetry, Plath has shown us the painful ironies of life: love and hate, tears and laughter, pain and joy, death and life. Her life may not be as successful as she would have dreamed it to be, but in her successive frustrations, she was able to discern in her words, now deeply scribbled into the memory of the pages of literature, what life really was. She was able to bring forth the power of words to transcend death and live beyond life. Ironically, Plath’s poetry is her self-elegy, the voice of her death, as was discussed above, but it was also her laurel – the proof of her genius, her triumph, her victory. In her death, her poetry brought her back to live, to fame, to immortality. References Abrams, Meyer Howard anmd Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. (2009). A Glossary of Literary Terms. Wadsworth Cengage Learning, Inc. Available at http://books.google.com.ph/books?id=o9VkYJuVn9YC&pg=PT106&lpg=PT106&dq=example+of+greek+or+roman+elegiac+verse&source=bl&ots=NYtMbj_DrR&sig=exVvTVFzDmxta93B5wIK_nT1juw&hl=tl&ei=v6rySpiNBNOPkQWVsOm1Aw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10&ved=0CCwQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=&f=false[Accessed on 10/28/09]. Aird, Eillen M. (1972). Sylivia Plath: Her Life and Work. In “On Lady Lazarus.” Modern American Poetry. Available at http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/lazarus.htm[Accessed on 10/28/09]. Annas, Pamela J. (1988). A Disturbance in Mirrors: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Greenwood Press: New York. Axelrod, Steven. (2003). “Sylvia Plath.” The Literary Encyclopedia. Available at http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3579 [Accessed on 10/28/09] Bradley, Amanda J. (n.d.) “A vicious American memory: Sylvia Plath’s feminist criticism of wars, wars, wars.” Xchanges. Available at http://infohost.nmt.edu/~xchanges/xchanges/4.2/bradley.html [Accessed on 10/28/09] DeShong, Scott. (1998). Sylvia Plath, Emmanuel Levinas, and the Aesthetics of Pathos. Quinebaug Valley Community – Technical College. Available at http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.598/8.3deshong.txt [Accessed on 10/28/09]. Elegiac Couplet. (2009). Available at http://artandpopularculture.com/Elegiac_couplets[Accessed on 10/28/09]. Ib, Maria Theresa. (2001). Mind over myth?: The divided self in the poetry of Sylvia Plath. Center for English, University of Southern Denmark Kolding. Available at http://www.sylviaplath.de/plath/dividedself.html [Accessed on 10/28/09]. Kroll, Judith. (1978). Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. Harper Colophon Edition: New York. ‘Lady lazarus’. (n.d.). Available at http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/lady.html [Accessed on 10/28/09]. Neurotic Poets. (n.d.) Sylvia Plath. Available at http://www.neuroticpoets.com/ [Accessed on 10/28/09]. Old Poetry. (n.d.). The Rabbit Catcher. Available at http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/55410-Sylvia-Plath-The-Rabbit-Catcher [Accessed on 10/28/09]. Paps, Jess. (2009). “The Rabbit Catcher” for Tommy.” birdsongmag.com. Available at http://birdsongmag.com/2009/07/17/the-rabbit-catcher-for-tommy/ [Accessed on 10/28/09]. "Plath’s Daddy Essays: Allegory in Plath’s Daddy." 123HelpMe.com. Available at http://www.123HelpMe.com/view.asp?id=7475 [Accessed on 10/28/09]. Plath, Sylvia. (1981). “Edge.” In Ted Hughes (ed.), Collected Poems. The Estate of Sylvia Plath. Available at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=178970 [Accessed on 10/28/09]. Poets.org. (2009). Sylvia Plath. Poet. Available at http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/11 [Accessed on 10/28/09]. Raymond, Claire. (2006). The Posthumous Voice in Women’s WEriting from Mary Shelley to Sylvia Plath. Ashgate Publishing Limted: England. Rosenblatt, Jon. (1979). Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation. University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, N.C. Spark Notes. (2009). When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d. Available at http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/whitman/section7.rhtml [10/30/2009]. The Columbia Encyclopaedia. (2009). Columbia University Press: New York. "The Shock of Sylvia Plaths Daddy." (2009). 123HelpMe.com. Available at     http://www.123HelpMe.com/view.asp?id=7477 [10/29/2009] Uroff, M.D. (1977). “Sylvia Plath and confessional poetry: A reconsideration..” Iowa Review, 8 (1), 104-115. Whittington-Egan, Richard. (1998). The life after death of Sylvia Plath. Contemporary Review, 272 (1588), 238-243. Footnotes 1 See Elegiac Couplets, 2009, par. 2. 2 See Abrams & Harpham, 2009, p. 92. 3 See The Columbia Encyclopeadia, Sixth Edition, 2009, p. 15510. 4 See Spark Notes, 2009, sec. 7. 5 See The Columbia Encyclopeadia, Sixth Edition, p. 15510. 6 See Neurotic Poets, n.d. par. 4. 7 See Annas, 1988, p. 4-5. 8 See Poets. Org., n.d., p. 11 9 See Annas, p. 4-5. 10 See Bradley, n.d., par. 1. 11 See Uroff, 1977, p. 104). 12 See Rosenblatt, 1979, p.4. 13 See Rosenblatt, pp. 4-5. 14 See Rosenblatt, pp. 13-14. 15 See Kroll, 1978, p. 2. 16 See Ib, 2001, par. 8-9. 17 See Uroff, 1977, p. 107. 18 See Uroff, p. 112. 19 See Whittington-Egan, 1998, p. 238 20 See Plath, 1981. 21 See Annas, 1988, p. 122. 22 See Rosenblatt, 1979, p. 39-40. 23 See Rosenblatt, p. 23. 24 See Rosenblatt, p. 23. 25 See Whittington-Egan, 1998, p. 239. 26 See Raymond, 2006, p. 1. 27 See Raymond, p. 1. 28 See poets.org, n.d, p. 11 29See DeShong, 1998, par. 20. 30 See Axelrod, 2003, p. 3579 31 See “The shock of Sylvia Plath’s daddy,” 2009, p. 7477. 32See Plath’s Daddy Essays: Allegory in Plath’s Daddy, 2009, p. 7475 33See Paps, 2009, par. 4 34 See Raymond, p. 188. 35 See Raymond, p. 193. 36 See Old Poetry, n.d.,p. 55410. 37 See Raymond, p. 201. 38 See Aird, 1972, sec. 2. 39 See Rosenblatt, 1979, p. 40. 40 Accessed from http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/lady.html. 41 See Rosenblatt, p. 39. 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