Synderella Plath

This week I am going to take a look at some of Sylvia Plath's work. I have often avoided her due to my knowledge of her suicide affecting my sensitive soul rather too much but I felt in the mood to take her on today and stop being so selfish, especially as I know she did great work for feminism.

The prince leans to the girl in scarlet heels,
Her green eyes slant, hair flaring in a fan
Of silver as the rondo slows; now reels
Begin on tilted violins to span

The whole revolving tall glass palace hall
Where guests slide gliding into light like wine;
Rose candles flicker on the lilac wall
Reflecting in a million flagons' shine,

And glided couples all in whirling trance
Follow holiday revel begun long since,
Until near twelve the strange girl all at once
Guilt-stricken halts, pales, clings to the prince

As amid the hectic music and cocktail talk
She hears the caustic ticking of the clock.

The main things I have noticed in this poem are: the amount of colour; the focus on light/reflections/glass; the significance of 'the prince'.

The first stanza creates vibrant images due to the broad range of colours used by Plath. We notice that the shoes are not merely glass as we are used to but 'scarlet'. This conjures up images of promiscuity rather than royal class, so differentiates the girl from her partner. The green eyes are also unusual and often desirable due to their rare nature. 'Green' usually connotes envy but perhaps here it is jealousy in its original sense (she wants the prince all to herself). Then we come to hair of 'silver', once again contradicting the norm, which is blonde. As silver is not as valuable as a golden blonde, perhaps Plath is suggesting the girl is out of place beside a prince (note how she is merely a 'girl', not even 'young lady'); this is her dream but it is a childish one, leading to her 'guilt' as she knows she must leave but also that she has been greedy and naïve. She has cheated both her partner and herself.

I have interpreted the 'glass hall' to symbolise a trap for the girl, in which she is subjected to the male gaze. This is enhanced by the use of the word 'reflecting' at the end of the second stanza. Plath does not use it overtly to say the girl is reflected in a mirror but the natural impulse to see this as her repeated image is there. The 'rose' of the candles is used in various ways. It first suggests love or passion but then is paled by the sudden 'lilac', which clashes with the first in both colour and scent, creating a sickly image, making the atmosphere of the poem more heavy and oppressive. This is matched by the sickly 'revolving' of the dancers, who go through a pattern out of their control as this is high society.

I have noticed that (excluding the final rhyming couplet) the poem is framed by 'the prince'. He first 'leans' to her and then she 'clings' to him. He is therefore the focus of this coupling, the most important, the protector and the lead. By calling the girl 'strange' in the penultimate stanza, Plath might be using indirect discourse to portray the girl in the prince's eyes. If so, he has no romantic thought of her clinging to him and thinks she is but a 'girl' to his royal status, which carries so much more weight.

I suppose the underlying message of this poem is that you can't get what you want by pretending to be something you are not; everyone else will notice. Also, what you want may not be healthy for you, especially for woman who are brought up to want to be beautiful for men but find that this means being controlled by them and patriarchal society (1950s debates over whether women should be allowed to feel desire). The clock, therefore, beckons the girl away from her man because it symbolises the process of ageing, at the end of which no man will want her again due to the fading of her beauty, just as her pallor fades to 'pale' in fear.

After doing some research on the poem now, I realise that it makes sense for me to be a little confused about the poem's messages because it was one of her earlier poems, so she had not mastered the ability to define her opinions, no matter how contradictory, in an easy and subtle way. Nevertheless I like the direction in which she was thinking.

How about some Heaney?

Yesterday, my boyfriend gave me a book of poems by Seamus Heaney, which he no longer wanted. Therefore it makes sense to dive in right away with the opportunity presented.

I have read a few and like his take on relationships and duty, especially in the father-son relationship. Instead of one of these, however, I have chosen 'Wedding Day'. This purposely sounds as if the poem will be celebratory but, as you will see, the first line removes that possibility.

I am afraid.
Sound has stopped in the day
And the images reel over
And over. Why all those tears,

The wild grief on his face

Outside the taxi? The sap

Of mourning rises

In our waving guests.

You sing behind the tall cake

Like a deserted bride

Who persists, demented,

And goes through the ritual.

When I went to the gents

There was a skewered heart

And a legend of love. Let me

Sleep on your breast to the airport.

More of a funereal tone overall, with the 'tears', 'grief', 'mourning'. Underneath this, though, there is a message: Love is not defined by the custom of marriage. Heaney wants to escape the superficiality of it.

Take the first line. It does not give a complete complement with a genitive to tell us what he is afraid of. It cannot be that he is afraid of marrying the wrong person because the last line reveals an intimate love for the bride; 'sleep' is when a person is most vulnerable and yet he implores the woman to allow him this privilege.

Heaney does not clarify who any of the people are in the poem, except perhaps the bride (although even this is only a simile). We could take the male with 'wild grief on his face' as the father of the bride for he might feel as though he is losing his daughter, especially if he dislikes his son-in-law. It could also be the narrator looking back in a removed position on himself as the 'images reel'. He could be remembering his own sadness as he pleases those around him, his 'guests', although they are in 'mourning' as well.

The final image is of the 'airport'. This initially implies the couple are going on their honeymoon. However, I am considering a few other ideas: the marriage means they are moving abroad, not only taking a holiday, and so he is afraid of the change that comes with the marriage; they have decided not to get married in this way and are therefore running away from the expectation of a marriage and the 'ritual' as he has visualised before it happens and is avoiding due to his fear.

Perhaps none of my theories are what Heaney intended but they all share the key idea that marriage puts a strain on love and relationships without any product which the narrator is pleased with. This is conveyed as marriage warps his perception of love when he goes to the toilet and sees a 'skewered heart'; a violent, trapped and wounded portrayal of those in love, mimicking how trapped he and his bride feel with the 'ritual'. In fact his bride feels trapped to the extent of loneliness, conveyed in the past participle 'deserted'. Maybe she feels her family have deserted her by forcing her into marriage, or maybe she does not love the man as much as he loves her.

I'm sure if I had a verbal conversation about this poem I would make up my mind about what I feel the poem is suggesting; class discussion always helps me see the flaws in my opinions.

Momentous Margaret Atwood

So I am about to read The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood and spotted this poem in my collection: The Moment, by Margaret Atwood. It has a nice message to it and so I thought I'd make it this week's post.

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round. 

The first stanza is purposely misleading; Atwood wants the reader to think the 'you' directly addressed has achieved great things and deserves to call something their 'own'. The ascending list in line four implies that any ownership is encompassed in this poem. However, the caesura created by the temporal clause that is the first stanza separates the human assumption with the natural consequence. The fact that the thought has been merely introduced is highlighted by the decapitalisation of 'is'.

The second stanza personifies nature in an emotive way. The adjective 'soft' conveys a lack of comfort and safety. The verb phrase 'take back' uses monosyllabic words to connote a swift withdrawal after an insult. The repetition of plosives aids this. The noun 'language' implies a loss of knowledge but also of companionship. Then the beauty of the country is gone with the cliffs crumbling beneath your pride. Even something as light as the air retracts itself. Again polysyllabic words in line twelve slow the line down to mimic short gasping breaths - your final ones. Atwood is saying that humans cannot live without nature and without respecting it. The caesura this time is greater as a full stop is used; it feels like the end of the poem comes with the end of this stanza.

Stanza three contains many negatives ('no', 'nothing', 'never' x2). 'No' at first is probably taken as negation but I find you can also read it as if 'they' are feeling a loss and so use it exclamatively, rather like in the movies when someone falls off a cliff (Lord of the Rings much). This negative approach creates an ominous tone, prolonged by the use of the past tense in 'you were a visitor', one who is no longer welcome, or perhaps one who no longer exists. The reference to 'time' connotes that nature has long existed, and quite happily, without human presence because humans are not necessary to any life. The poem ends nicely on the antithetic 'always' which comes as a positive after its opposite 'never'.

Somehow I feel this is a parody of the fall in the garden of Eden. Maybe because 'they' seem rather unforgiving and give no sign of letting things return to how they were; 'the final stanza is mainly past tense and not one part of the poem looks towards a future state. The temptation is to prosper and lay claim to things and once you do you can never co exist again.

Stardust

This is a poem written by my very self this year. I do not profess to have any talent, I just thought I'd add some of my own work in with the works I admire so much. This particular poem was inspired rather obviously by the film/book Stardust (ordered here as I came across them not by chronological production).

Once on a summer's night
A star fell from the sky
In amongst the hills and glades
By dark and light she'd cry

So lost and lonely, cold and tired
Invisible to all
Her light was fading quickly
Only love could save her fall.

Once on a winter's night
Tears dousing her to rock
She came across a river
Who her weary path did block.

He would not check his current
For some lowly dust and ash
So sighing she stepped downward
And removed her fraying sash.

Each tear drop of the struggle
Ebbed away her final strength
He did not know his water
Ebbed away the dirt at length

Until the star lay gleaming
On the other riverside
He looked and loved upon her
All in vain; his star had died.

The William Blake Take on London

Now to tackle the mysterious Blake. Do I choose one of his sombre, thought-provoking poems or a sweet note on love? After reading and liking about ten, I have chosen 'London'. Many of his poems are shorter than this and therefore have a different sort of weight to them as he can pack detailed concepts into a small space (try 'The Angel that Presided O'er my Birth'). Here, Blake uses a longer form to cover the varying scenes of his home city in 1792 (he would later move away to the seaside, not surprisingly).

I think I have chosen this poem also because I have a love hate relationship with the city. It is a nice place to visit for a day but I would never wish to spend more than that length of time there, not even one night. This is probably due to the crowding, the smells, the seemingly disgruntled and unhappy people, particularly the workers. The same sort of depressing atmosphere must have haunted the place in the 118th Century as well, if for slightly different but not irrelevant reasons.

Below is the product of the five minute annotation session I had earlier when I found I had a copy within a poetry collection I own. I shall now explain the most important of these observations as you probably can't even read them/my poor handwriting. At least you can read the poem:

Blake presents us with the images of grown men (including soldiers), young women, children and babies. They are each surrounded by unseen people as well, alluded to through buildings mainly. For instance, we are introduced to the chimney sweeps. Blake probably means both the infantile sweeps and the adult ones as he has used the same verb, 'cry', applied to both in the second stanza as in this third stanza. The children especially would have been what 'appall[ed]' the 'church', which represents religious leaders.

I could not decide for myself whether Blake meant to cast this institution in a good light or not; the 'black'ning' denotes that the churches are not employing the sweeps as a form of protest but is Blake being sarcastic? Is this colour supposed to give negative connotations of evil or degeneration? I have found out that he disliked the religious establishment so it must be the latter. Maybe the church was turning an immoral blind eye to the suffering and therefore disliked to hear the cries of the sweeps, 'black'ning' implying that it must be cleaned as every other building is.

In 1789 the French Revolution occurred. This probably prompted the lines on the 'palace walls', which represent the monarchy and those in charge of the country. The escalation from a soft, harmless 'sigh' to 'blood' is emphasised by the phonetic movement from fricative /s/ to plosive /b/ and /d/. This metaphorically states that the pain endured by the ordinary people is of no consequence to the upper classes and those causing the battles at the top. 'Hapless' is sarcastic and probably there to provoke the word 'helpless' in its place as he is not in poor luck just under poor leadership.

The end of the poem gives prominence to prostitution and how it causes many bad things. 1. 'new-born' children have no father or secure place in the world. 2. Marriages break down, hyperbolically linked to death in the semi-oxymoron of 'marriage hearse'. 3. Venereal disease is brought about - the literal 'plague' which metaphorically is the more overt meaning. 'Blights' brings connotations of infertility and degeneration too - blood lines are impure and thus London is a breeding ground for filth and poverty.

There is so much more to say, I know. A lot is on the picture above but hardly all of it.

I'll continue to endeavour to find one of my poems!