![]() ![]() The life – and death – of Sylvia Plath (1932-63) can sometimes appear to eclipse her poetic achievement, as well as her achievement in fiction (she wrote one novel, The Bell Jar, as well as a collection of short stories). ![]() The poem also demonstrates what a fine ear Plath had: the way the song of those ‘sirens’ turns into ‘silence’ in the final two lines is particularly fine. The water being crossed in this poem is, first and foremost, the boundary between the United States and Canada – but this poem is also suffused with images of darkness and blackness which suggest that another boundary, between life and death, is also being summoned.Īgain, we see the importance of the colour symbolism influenced by the White Goddess – here, the colour black, which looms large throughout the poem. This poem gave its title to a posthumous collection of Plath poems published in 1971. This poem is one reason why critics have sometimes categorised Plath as a ‘ Cold War Modernist’ as well as a Confessional poet. ‘Waking in Winter’ examines the bleakness of a winter created by man rather than nature – of ‘destructions, annihilations’. Written in 1960 and infused with Cold War and environmentalist elements, ‘Waking in Winter’ offers a bleak vision of a post-nuclear winter where the sky doesn’t just look like tin – the whole atmosphere tastes metallic, too. This may sound like a poem describing a natural scene, but in fact ‘Waking in Winter’ is about a nuclear winter, although it also reflects Plath’s time spent in various hospitals. In this poem, the white serpent gives way to the blood of the (red?) rose, before culminating in the ‘black’ of the moon herself. In the triple-goddess structure of Graves’s theory, white symbolises the virgin, red the mother, and black the hag or crone. Written in taut, terse, unrhymed couplets, this poem is one of many by Plath which reflect her interest in the colours of white, red, and black, which often suggest the three phases of the White Goddess, a concept invented by Robert Graves. Fittingly – and eerily – it’s about a dead woman, whose body has been ‘perfected’ in death (and, presumably, suicide). This poem, written just six days before Plath committed suicide in February 1963, was probably the last poem she ever wrote. (We’ve picked some of Ted Hughes’s best poems here.) Written in October 1962 (on her thirtieth birthday), just four months before Plath committed suicide, ‘Ariel’ became the title poem in Plath’s posthumous 1965 volume, publication of which was overseen (controversially) by Plath’s widower, Ted Hughes. ‘I unpeel’, she tells us, likening herself to Lady Godiva, the eleventh-century Saxon noblewoman who defied her husband’s harsh taxation of the people of Coventry and rode naked through the streets of the town, according to legend. ![]() One of Sylvia Plath’s most widely discussed poems, ‘Ariel’ describes an early morning horse-ride towards the sun, using imagery that is loaded with significance and suggestiveness.Īs Plath rides Ariel through the dawn light, it is as if she is shedding her past self and become reborn as something else: the experience of riding the horse is almost transcendent. This poem is also a good example of how Plath might be viewed as a belated modernist as much as she is a confessional poet: the imagery is elliptical, the expression taut, the poem almost imagistic. Instead, we have Plath’s speaker (based on Plath, herself a mother to a small child when she penned this poem) stumbling out of bed ‘cow-heavy and floral’ in her Victorian nightgown.Īlthough this poem gives a nod to Plath’s own suicide attempts (the last of which, of course, tragically, was successful) in its reference to a woman in an ambulance whose heart is likened to the flowering poppies, it is, first and foremost, a poem in celebration of the bright red flowers. ‘Morning Song’ is about a mother waking in the night to tend to her crying baby, and so doesn’t celebrate the beauty of the sunrise or an aesthetically pleasing landscape as seen at dawn, like some of the poems on this list. Although we haven’t arranged this selection of Sylvia Plath’s best poems in any kind of chronological (much less preferential) order, it seems fitting to follow ‘You’re’, a poem about pregnancy, with ‘Morning Song’, a poem about a mother tending to her new-born child.
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