If you have read Sylvia Plath’s poetry, you have probably wondered what it was about and why she wrote the way she did. Her work has always provoked intense feelings, because it exudes emotion and controversy at every turn.
Born in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Massachusetts, Plath became an author that students all over the world have tried to understand. Her provocative writing has been analyzed time and time again evoking many interpretations. Her mother Aurelia was an American of Austrian decent, and her father, Otto Plath, was German. Plath wrote about her father in the poem “Daddy,” which later became one of her most famous pieces of work.
In 1950 at the age of 18 Plath’s poem “Bitter Strawberries,” was published in the Christian Science Monitor. Here I feel she is writing sardonically about the war and using every day imagery. She analyzed too much, and became bitter in her way of communicating.
“All morning in the strawberry field
They talked about the Russians.
Squatted down between the rows
We listened.
We heard one woman say,
“Bomb them off the map.”
Her Father.
Plath had a strong relationship with her father, and when he died in 1940 from widespread diabetes, the little eight year old Sylvia said “I’ll never speak to God again.”
Let’s take a look at the way she talks about her father in “Daddy.”
“You do not do you do not do
Anymore black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years poor and white,
Barely daring to breath or Achoo.”
In this verse Plath is remembering her father as though he was a tyrant that she had to hide away from hardly “daring to breath or Achoo.” It looks to me also that she felt this oppression her whole life even with her father gone.
“Not God but a swastika
so black no sky could squeak through,
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.”
Sylvia Plath was a Unitarian Christian living in America. In this verse Plath uses the imagery of a Nazi kicking someone in the face as a metaphor for her intense feelings about her father. Her reference to the Holocaust throughout the poem has made some people unhappy, since she had no experience of Nazi Germany and was not Jewish. It is up to the reader to figure this one out. I see it as strong imagery that evokes the same kind of fear and suppression that she may have felt as a child.
Ted Hughes.
Sylvia Plath sailed to England to take up her place at Cambridge University. It was here that she met and married the poet Ted Hughes. It is said that she “met her match,” when he ripped her hairband and earrings off of her when he tried to kiss her and she bit his cheek.
Plath and Hughes experienced life as fully as possible for a while. Plath described Hughes as a “singer, story-teller, lion and world-wanderer” with a “voice like the thunder of God.”
Their daughter Frieda was born on April 1 1960 and their son Nicholas was born in 1962. They rented an apartment owned by Assia Wevill, and Hughes immediately began an affair with her.
Depression.
It was around the time of the affair and the birth and toddler years of her children that Plath began to sink into depression. She had always found life hard, feeling bitter and creative simultaneously, but in the early sixties her ship sank deeply.
This first verse from “Morning Song,” reflects Plath’s feelings as her baby was born.
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles
and your bald cry took it’s place among the elements.
To me the first line is slightly frightening. The comparison of a “Fat gold watch” to love, shows me that Sylvia Plath saw things differently, she ‘stood outside and looked in’ rather than experienced the world full on.
Plath’s first attempt at suicide was a car crash in July 1962.
During 1962, Plath wrote ferociously. The majority of her poems were written in this time, including her “Ariel” collection.
Plath left Hughes and lived alone with her children. She was on antidepressants.
The nurse, sent by Plath’s doctor, called around on February 11 1963 and found Plath dead from carbon monoxide poisoning.
It was noted the room had been sealed off with wet towels and cloths, this showed that Plath had thought this through. Knowing exactly what she was about to do, she protected her children from the gas.
“Outcast on a star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness.
I look down into the warm, earthy world.
Into a nest of lovers’ beds, baby cribs, meal tables.
And feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.”
Sylvia Plath.
Sources:
http://neuroticpoets.com/plath/