Satinder Kumar Verma
Surinder Kumar Verma
Technique and Style of Confession in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath is usually assigned the epithet of a confessional poet and that view is facilitated by an apparent autobiographical element in her work. Her poetry has been called confessional and personal and has often been placed in the school of Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton. She, of course, admired both these poets and knew them personally and was also influenced by them. Nevertheless, she remains a poet of her own kind, different from them both, in content and in manner.
The timeless excellence of Sylvia Plath’s poetry lies in the sense of language and of metaphor. Sylvia Plath was a brilliant and compelling lyric poet particularly in the poems of Ariel, which even now, almost 43 years after her suicide, seize the reader with their stunning, immediate power. Sexton owes to explain: “Poems left behind were technique-lasting, but, actually over. We talked death and this was life for us, lasting in spite of us, or better, because of us…”(175).
But despite all the talking, all the taunting death, Sylvia Plath in the coldly sober hours of the years while she was building choice to concentrate on the “technique” of writing poetry rather than the expectant “life” of dying, fixed on the how; not the what to do.
In the poems of Sylvia Plath there is a marked difference in the earlier and later style. However, the change is not sudden, the style keeps on evolving. The judgement of Alvarez seems typical: “Throughout The Colossus she is using her art to keep the disturbance, out of which she made her verse, at a distance. It is as though she had not yet come to grips with her subject as an artist. She has style but not properly her own style.”(58) The transition between the earlier and later style may be studied in Crossing the Water and Winter Trees. She found a voice and medium of her own in the poems of Ariel. Ted Hughes, her husband in his “Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems” says:
She wrote her early poems very slowly, Thesaurus open on her knee, in her large, strange handwriting, like a mosaic, where every letter stands separate within the work, a hieroglyph to itself. If she didn’t like a poem, she scrapped it entire. She rescued nothing of it.(188)
Sylvia Plath has extraordinary descriptive powers; it is correctness and accuracy that combine the look of things with their fearsome powers of menace. Precision interests her and she has also the power of the visual, part of the preference for precision over rhetoric.
The Colossus is an impressive first collection. Although it does not have the terrible intensity and startling originality of the later poetry, it does contain a number of poems that combine a strongly individual vision with a sophisticated technical control which together give shape to unusually heightened imagination and pressure of feeling. John Frederick recommends The Colossus as a model of well served apprenticeship. But, even while he is pointing out the fact that the first book is structural and stylistic groundwork for the second, he hedges by remarking, “without the drudgery of The Colossus, the triumph of Ariel is unthinkable.”(136) Compared with the burning images of Ariel, however this earlier volume has a cooler surface, a slower and more cautious approach to its themes. There is always a great art, a craftsman skill of ordering and shaping at work. In The Colossus, the controlled style has a persuasively rational tone.
John Frederick praises Plath for her use of the English meter, for its mimicry of the human heart beat and breath rate. Plath knew how to write Iambic Pentameter and by the time she published The Colossus, she knew that she had to disarrange and derange it to express herself. In “Kindness” she said “The blood jet is poetry / There is no stopping it.” Rhythm is the life blood of poetry and Sylvia Plath’s rhythm is like a heart beat, fast in excitement, steady in calm - a ‘heart rhythm’. That existential heart beat “I am, I am, I am” could be technically described as ‘iamb, iamb, iamb’. The soundness of iambic pentameter is due to the fact that on average there are five heart beats to each normal breath. Yet, if the underlying rhythm is iambic, the form of the poems is unconventional. Plath shared John Frederick’s conviction that “Iambic is the lub-dubb of the heart beat, perhaps the first sensation that we, months before our birth, are aware of”(146). It has always been in common speech.
Rhythm, in the later poetry of Sylvia Plath comes not from rhymes, but from other devices like alliteration, internal rhymes and emphasis on a particular word or group of words. Sometimes there is a repetition of words and phrases:
“I am, I am, I am”
“The Dead bell
“The Dead bell”
“Death and Co.” (Collected Poems, 254)
“You do not do, you do not do”
“Daddy” (Collected Poems, 222)
In The Colossus rhythm mainly emerges from the use of syllabic count. The poems of Ariel are in free verse but the form is not loose or wildly. The best example would be “Daddy.” The rhythmic patterns are extremely simple, almost incantatory, repeated, and giving a very steady return as in the first line of “Daddy”, “You do not do, you do not do.” In “Daddy” the rhymes revolve around as ooh! Sound – ‘do,’ ‘shoe,’ ‘blue,’ ‘you,’ ‘two,’ ‘Jew,’ ‘glue’ – which simulates human anguish by sounding like a cry for grief. In “Lady Lazarus”, the rhymes are repetitive to give the poem a cyclical movement and suggest the impossibility of any way out of the vicious circle of life-except death. In “Tulips” the poem has no set rhyme scheme but there are many assonantal correspondences in the line ending: explosions / surgeons; pillbox / hooks; fuss / noise; me / sea. This keeps the poetic flow, like a heart, in the right place. There is also a profusion of similes which give a textural density to the poem and contribute to its fluency: ‘like an eye,’ ‘like a black pillbox,’ ‘like a communion tablet,’ ‘like an awful baby,’ ‘like a loud noise,’ ‘like dangerous animals,’ ‘like the sea.’
Sylvia Plath’s use of syllabic count for lines of poetry is quite another thing, neither ironic nor obviously symbolic. Yet the syllabic count is more than a simple mathematical exercise. She intends the syllabics of “Departure” and “The Companionable Ills” to be diagrammatic of meaning. John Frederick says, “Writing in syllabics can be a salutary exercise in countering the singsong – and this is one of the syllabics in The Colossus. They tend to be colder poems: objective, intellectual, descriptive.”(147) Plath’s syllabics are probably best understood by way of Dylan Thomas, who used syllabics more than anyone seems to have realized – and then almost always in his most death conscious lyrics. For Sylvia Plath, as for Dylan Thomas, syllabics are the slow drip, as unstoppable as the bleeding of a hemophiliac, of words expiring syllable – breathing out and dying. There is only one syllabic poem in Arial, and it is not one of the better poems. In Arial, there is almost no metrical innovation. The lines in Arial are by no means always pentameter.
Plath’s uses of sound, even if they are in principle imitative, are in practice original and brilliant. John Frederick remarks, “the sound of words – any page of Sylvia Plath shows her pre-occupation with it. (140) The influence of Dylan is present in the poem in phrases like ‘eyelids and lips / storming the hill tops,’ and ‘the barred yard,’ and the theme itself can be profitably compared to Dylan’s treatment of death in “After the Funeral.”
The techniques and styles of the poems in The Colossus reveal great craftsmanship. A wide and inventive vocabulary gives precision and insight to the exploration of ideas and feelings. The diction is also frequently chosen as much for its sound as for its meaning. Plath’s later poems use ordinary events as the springboard for emotion. Practice gave Plath the confidence to be direct. During the Ariel period, virtually any action or reflection revealed itself as the occasion for a poem. Striving to avoid the colloquial, Plath used a thesaurus to extend her vocabulary. In the poems of The Colossus, for example, there are 2360 words that appear just once, while in The Winter Trees group of poems contemporary with Ariel, the figure is only half, 1254 unique words.(Bulter 291-312)
Sylvia Plath is more brilliant at metaphor. In her two books almost all the metaphors are on target. Her apt command of metaphor proclaims her artistry and it is this that should warn us against being excessively autobiographical in the treatment of her work. Her personal agony was like an open wound but she had enough self control to put a pinch of salt on it from time to time. In The Colossus we find ‘the pears fatten like buddhas’; a corpse is ‘black as burnt turkey,’ ‘Sun struck the water like a damnation’; and everything glittered like blank paper; dead males are ‘shapeless as flung gloves-‘and the maggots are ‘thin as pins.’ In Ariel, it is said of a new born baby that ‘love set you going like a fat gold watch’ and of its voice, ‘the clear vowels rise like balloons.’ Plath’s most surprising metaphors are made of or for parts of the body. In “The Colossus” the simple, workaday girl creeps around the giant ruins brushing “The bald, white tumuli of your eyes” and rests “in the cornucopia / of your left ear…” Sylvia Plath has a striking gift for the metaphorical extension of an idea and in making these metaphors central to her poems’ development she is able to create a strong climate of feeling without explicitly arguing for her perspective. Sylvia Plath’s particular gift for creating lively and original metaphors which combine the description of a subject with the feelings may be seen:
In their jars the snail nosed babies moon and glow.
Description of the sea in ‘Point Shirley’
And I come by
Bones, knees only, pawed and tossed,
A dog-faced sea.
(Collected Poems, 110)
The fact that the images grow out of a description of action and movement rather than out of some stationary object is also typical of many of the most original metaphors in these poems. Often these poems gain their curves of energy from a dazzling display of metaphor and symbol which swing in and out of the lines creating poetry not of statement but of image. In most of the poems the syntax is remarkably straightforward, almost prosaic.
Obscurity in Sylvia Plath’s poetry arises due to references to private history. Ariel was the name of an actual horse, Sylvia Plath rode. So, the meaning of “Ariel” is clear only after reading Ted Hughes’ explanatory note. In “Daddy” there is a reference to Otto Plath whose leg had to be amputated.
The tone of “Lady Lazarus” is deliberately ambiguous; on the one hand it has a seriousness and apparent honesty, but on the other the somewhat slangy diction and simplistic syntax strike like a flippant, rather exhibitionist note. Critics like David Holbook have argued that the ambivalence of tone, especially in the last stanza, is a sign that the poet has achieved complete mastery of her material.
Thought and emotion are depicted through the use of words and images that are strangely appropriate. “Fever 1030” contains images that rise upwards. As the speaker ascends, she is becoming a pale bodyless lamp, generating her own light and heat.
I am a lantern - -
My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.
(Collected Poems, 232)
The poem is remarkable for its images. Sylvia Plath shows a more conscientious commitment to her images. “Hardcastle Crags” begins:
Flintlike, her feet struck
Such a racket of echoes from the steely street,
… that she heard the quick air ignite
Its tinder and shake
A firework of echoes…
(Collected Poems, 62)
When Plath followed Hughes’ suggestion and read Robert Graves’ The White Goddess, she found traditional symbols of moon and which she took for her poetry bit by bit, using mythology and mysticism, she made herself into a woman poet. Plath’s lunacy is, however, often about death or sterility in “The Moon and the Yew Tree.”(Kroll 40) Peter Davison feels that the images of Sylvia Plath depict her inner alienation: her images “connect the eye that sees but cannot understand with the heart that beats and cannot feel.”(106)
The colors used by Sylvia Plath are also extensions of the mind of the beholder. This existential appreciation of blood is often at work in the poems where red is a symbol of energetic life. In “Poppies in October” there is the woman whose ‘red heart blooms through so astoundingly’. In “Tulips” Sylvia Plath’s own heart ‘opens and closes its bowl of red blooms’; in “Daddy” she speaks of her ‘pretty red heart’. Red is alive and warm and full of blood and palpably there opposed to the virility of blood is the sterility of white. In “Edge” we have “Each dead child coiled a white serpent”, and hovering over this white perfection are the black shadows in which lurk the horrors of life. In several poems, flowers like Tulips and poppies evoke this centre of energy: “Their redness talks to my wound it corresponds”.
The moon is a suitable symbol of sterility because of its circular shape. Words like ‘Pearl,’ ‘Silver’ or ‘ivory’ which can be used to describe moonlight, always announce some untoward event or indicate a condemnatory judgement as in “A Birthday Present,” “The Munich Mannequins,” “Childless Woman,” “totem,” “Lady Lazarus” etc.
Roy Fuller best sums up the general reaction: “And though the themes of these poems are the traditional deep ones of poetry time, death and the curiousness of the physical world the poet is always well in control. Possibly too well.”(70) What Fuller implies is that Plath’s impeccable workmanship is compulsive as deliberate and tense as her habits of composition. She stiffly fixed on forms, calculating her words, writing “in her large, strange handwriting, like a mosaic, where every letter stands separate within the work a hieroglyph to itself.”(Hughes 188) Her poems express a collapse of identity, and yet their language, rhythm, and imagery have a paradoxical zest and energy of life.
Works Cited
Alvarez, A. ‘Sylvia Plath’. The Art of Sylvia Plath, ed. Charles Newman.
Butler, C.S., ‘Poetry and the Computer: Some Quantitative Aspects of the style of Sylvia Plath’ Proceedings of the British Academy. Vol. 55, 1979
Davison, Peter. ‘Three Visionary Poets’. The Atlantic, 229 February 1972
Fuller, Roy. Book Reviews. London Magazine, OS8. March 1961
Hughes, Ted. ‘Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems’. The Art of Sylvia Plath, ed. Charles Newman. London: Faber and Faber, 1969
Kroll, Judith. Chapters in a Mythology: The poetry of Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.
Nims, John Frederick. ‘The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: A Technical Analysis’. The Art of Sylvia Plath, ed. Charles Newman. London: Faber and Faber, 1969
Sexton, Anne. ‘The Barfly Ought to Sing’. The Art of Sylvia Plath, ed. Charles Newman. London: Faber and Faber, 1969