An Ode to Sylvia Plath
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“Dying/ Is an art, like everything else./ I do it exceptionally well.”
These eerie words spin in my head on a loop each time my eyes travel from stanza to stanza. That tends to happen when I read poetry, the rhythmical alliteration of the lines striking my brain in ways that leave me aimlessly stewing in my thoughts. While not all poets’ work has this prominent effect, Sylvia Plath’s poetry and prose most certainly does.
Plath, a key figure in 20th century women’s writing, has no shortage of works to read through. From “The Bell Jar” to “The Colossus and Other Poems,” Plath was able to convey passion, desire, wistful hopes and give an inside look to the troubling and often despaired thoughts inside of her head.
“Ariel,” a book of poetry written by Plath two months before her untimely death, outlines these dark feelings that plagued her in the weeks leading up to her suicide. Poems like “Elm” produce these telling words as an insight to her feelings: “I am terrified by this dark thing/ That sleeps in me;/ All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.” In “A Birthday Present,” Plath describes clouds of carbon monoxide, illustrating how “[sweetly], sweetly, I breathe in,/ Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million/ Probable motes that tick the years off my life.” Scholars today have begun to look at her writing collections, specifically ones created towards the end of her life, to analyze the complexity of the issues she would cover, such as the multiple allusions to death that settled in her mind, the importance of female writers and the role of women in the 20th century.
In “Wintering,” Plath illustrates a swarm of bees creating honey in the changing seasons, with underlying questions surrounding the capability of women. “The bees are all women,/ Maids and the long royal lady./ They have got rid of the men,// The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors./ Winter is for women—”, later questioning “[will] the hive survive, will the gladiolas/ Succeed in baking their fires/ To enter another year?” We see this subject again in “Lebos,” when Plath describes the difference between having a daughter and a son: “You say you can’t stand her,/ The bastard’s a girl.” paired with “[you] could eat him. He’s a boy.” She insinuates the reality of the life of a woman more deeply in this poem, describing how “[you] say I should drown my girl./ She’ll cut her throat at ten if she’s mad at two.”
One of the beauties of poetry is that each poem can have a different interpretation depending on who the reader is. We analyze words based on our own lives and experiences, sometimes taking completely different meanings from the same lines. Sylvia Plath’s work shares this individual experience, her hypnotic creations graduating her from a simple poet to a classical icon.
Her impact on the world has lasted half a century, for her works are still being studied, and her name continues to be referenced in other artists’ works. Lana Del Rey famously referred to herself as a “24/7 Sylvia Plath,” as she references herself wandering the town in a nightgown, most likely referencing the opening poem in “Ariel”-- “Morning Song,” where Plath describes “[one] cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral/ In my Victorian nightgown.” In Taylor Swift’s widely acclaimed album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” she writes how “all my mornings are Mondays stuck in an endless February,” many inferring that she was alluding to Plath’s suicide on February 11, as Swift truly took on the role as a poet when creating this 31 song album.
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Plath’s legacy will live on forever through her poetry and prose, even if her life ended unfairly and untimely. Though the plot can sometimes be lost in her writings, the style, language and importance are maintained. I truly believe there will always be a sense of beauty in the fact that her mind was a wild, complex and untamed place, and as readers, how lucky are we that we still have the opportunity to take an inside look into the raw mind of a true poet?
Works Referenced:
Plath, Sylvia. “Ariel.” Ariel, Harper & Row Publishers, 1966.
Strike out,
Ann Harper Covington
Editor: Anna Kadet
Athens