Sylvia Plath (Leaving Cert English): Model Answers

"Sylvia Plath's poetry can be an uncomfortable experience." Give a personal response to this statement.

I agree with the statement that Plath's poetry can make readers uncomfortable. She delves deeply into intense emotions and describes them in great detail. Sylvia's poetry shows a wide range of disturbing imagery to convey her themes of depression, self-loathing, fear, resentment, and love. Plath's poetry creates an uncomfortable atmosphere as she tests the limits and writes about what no other poet dared to do during her time. The large emotions that she experienced still make readers uneasy today. Of course, Plath's life heavily influenced her writing style and techniques. Still, I ultimately feel that her descriptions of these eerie and threatening elements, combined with the intense emotions we feel through her poetry, make readers uncomfortable. The poems I feel best represent the statement above are Elm, Arrival of the Beebox, Mirror, Child, and Poppies in July.

Plath's poetry is extremely unique as she tackles her innermost thoughts, exploring fears, suicidal thoughts, anxiety, postpartum depression, and more. In her 1962 poem Child, Plath takes us into her mind as she admires her second child, Nicholas. It is an extremely moving poem that sharply contrasts the joy and colour of his potential life with the despair and darkness that characterised the poet's own. Child opens with the poet speaking directly to her son: "Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing." The poem has a frustrated tone, as she feels she is an obstacle to her child's happiness—"this dark Ceiling without a star." Motherhood is a recurring theme in Plath's poetry, and there is a sharp contrast between the love she feels for her child and the self-loathing she feels for herself: "this troublous Wringing of hands." Reading how Sylvia regarded herself and her capabilities has a heartbreaking and distressing effect on readers. Despite the heavy meaning behind this poem, Plath uses innocent language, "zoo of the new," and uses nature as a metaphor to describe her child: "stalk without wrinkle." The poet's use of stripped-back and playful language makes this poem even more unsettling, similar to the use of children in horror films. How can something so innocent be so disturbing?

Mirror also evokes discomfort as Plath explores her fears about ageing and death. The poem is written from the perspective of a mirror—"silver and exact," with "no preconceptions." The mirror insists it objectively reflects the truth, which greets the woman who looks in it daily as a reminder of her "terrible" mortality. "She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands." Shaking hands, a recurring motif in Plath's darker poems reflects the anxiety and fear that haunt her. The entire poem gives the reader a sense of uneasiness. In my opinion, the mirror's tone seems almost threatening, as if it enjoys knowing how much it hurts the woman who "drowned a young girl" in it. The mirror takes pride in how much the woman relies on it: "I am important to her. She comes and goes." The personification of the mirror makes the poem even more unsettling. Plath wrote the mirror with such intelligence and self-awareness that it felt strange and frightening simultaneously.

Arrival of the Beebox contains similar eerie qualities. Plath explores feelings of fear, control, and freedom, imagining a "bee box" as a metaphor for her inner turmoil. She creates uncomfortable imagery, describing a "clean wood box" as a "coffin of a midget or a square baby" in the opening stanza, immediately throwing the reader off balance. Plath continues with strange, grim metaphors and similes, referring to the box as "dangerous." The line "I have to live with it overnight" effectively evokes the poem's uncomfortable atmosphere. Plath seems aware that, just like with a bee box, it would be dangerous to unleash the terrible demons inside her chaotic mind. She describes the box's crawling contents as "a swarmy feeling of African hands, minute and shrunk for export, black on black angrily clambering." As the noise reaches a crescendo, she becomes more terrified, trying to make sense of the "furious Latin." However, in a moment of clarity, she realises she can take back control: "They can be sent back. / They can die, I need feed them nothing. I am the owner." This new sense of control brings her clarity, and she concludes, "Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free." The final floating line is ambiguous—does it mean she is contemplating giving up on life, or is she suggesting that her bouts of deep depression are temporary, like the box? Either way, the dark themes of depression undoubtedly make the reader uncomfortable.

Poppies in July is another example of how Plath's poetry can disturb readers. Written shortly after discovering her husband Ted Hughes' affair, this poem beautifully demonstrates the agony of love and how completely broken Sylvia was after the betrayal. The title, Poppies in July, suggests a joyful poem about the beauty of nature, but it is far from that. Plath metaphorically compares the poppies to the fires of hell—"little hell flames." She rhetorically asks, "Do you do no harm?" as if accusing the poppies of deception—they look innocent but are capable of great harm. She describes her self-destructive tendencies, "I put my hand among the flames," but "Nothing burns"—presumably because her capacity to feel has completely diminished. This evokes unease in the reader as Plath describes her pain in such intense detail, expressing her desire to feel something, even if it means putting her hand "among the flames." The imagery becomes more violent and bloody towards the end, as the poppies are compared to "A mouth just bloodied" or "Little bloody skirts!" Eventually, she longs for the opium the poppies can produce: "seep to me, in this glass capsule," so she can become oblivious to the world and float away on the "dulling and stilling" qualities of opium until everything becomes "colourless, colourless."

Finally, I believe that Elm is the most unsettling of Plath's poems. It is written in free verse, structured as a dramatic monologue, with all fourteen stanzas filled with disturbing and terrifying imagery. Plath imagines herself speaking to an elm tree, which tells her it knows "the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root." The elm tree knows all of her secrets and inner turmoil. Plath often uses the metaphor of a shadow to represent dark and evil things: "Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it." In Plath's view, love is futile; it disappears, leaving only a mark like a horse's hoof. In my opinion, this poem is one of the darkest, most uncomfortable, and emotional of Plath's works. The poem mentions several dangerous elements: "sound of poisons," "tin-white, like arsenic," "hand of wires," and "I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me." The wide range of disturbing imagery is why I consider this poem one of her most unsettling. The final stanza returns to the snake motif from the Garden of Eden: the pain of love hisses like a snake, threatening the will. The poem ends with an eerie repetition: "that kill, that kill, that kill," leaving the reader with a discomforting and unpleasant feeling.

In conclusion, I believe that reading Plath's poetry can indeed be an uncomfortable experience for readers. Her unique and compelling poetry clearly contains pessimistic subjects and ideas. Her use of detailed and distinctive imagery enhances this discomfort, allowing her to describe her emotions vividly. Plath's tragic life allowed her to convey these so intensely. While deeply devastating, her poetry would not have been as raw and captivating without those experiences. As Plath herself said, "I felt now that all the uncomfortable suspicions I had about myself were coming true, and I couldn't hide the truth much longer."