Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year —-
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.
Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as cork,
Every one of them permanently busy.
At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.
Never trespassing in bad temper:
Stalling in midair,
Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.
Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy
As Victorian cushions. This family
Of valentine faces might please a collector:
They ring true, like good china.
Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.
The light falls without letup, blindingly.
A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle
About a bald hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper
And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly
With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now.
The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.
Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,
And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,
Crawls up out of the sea.
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I picked this poem to analyze for English class. I picked it because after reading it, I had no clue what she was trying to say.
Here is what I have come up with so far.
I believe this is about the final moments of a woman in a hospital. Listed are some of the things I've made note of. These are just my opinions though.
1.) "Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir"
I believe this refers to a needle, and some antidote in a glass bottle. Nurses pluck the needle to make sure there's no air in it.
2.)"Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as cork,
Every one of them permanently busy."
If you've been to a hospital, you know exactly what it's like. Everyone is moving somewhere, doing something.
3.)"As Victorian cushions. This family
Of valentine faces might please a collector:
They ring true, like good china."
I interpretted this as being the worried family members of the patient in the hospital.
4.)"A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle"
When someone is down to their last moments in life, my guess is that they would be thinking about everything in the past, and the things they've done wrong, or their "shadows."
5.)"And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly"
Blitzkrieg being a type of military warfare, this woman has endured enough of her own internal conflicts with herself, and now she's getting ready to experience the quiet after the storm.
6.)"She has one too many dimensions to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now."
This is where the woman dies, and all of the fears and feelings she had been holding on to have left her now.
7.)"The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.
Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,
And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,
Crawls up out of the sea."
The last lines sum up any kind of life-after-death scene, with the future being grey, and pretty much void.
That's what I've made of it so far. I could be completely off, who knows? I guess only the author truly knows. -
Sylvia has shown her butt with this one. I had to read it three times to find some semblance of comprehension. A very intricate poem here. Yes the metaphors are huge. LOL I love how she desribes the future with the shade of "gray" and in reference to a gull. "The many deminsions" is something I can relate to. Yes, this is a complicated poem, one for poetry class students to take time to analyze.
Renee -
metaphors of unusual size ... WOW
okay, first off, I love that her writing is seemingly stream of consciousness....yet much thought and revision surely went into it. She doesn't fret over sentence structure, punctuation all that grammatical crap that many underdeveloped or just plain sucky poets desperately need in order for the reader to "get it". She doesn't need this, doesn't waste time on it.
Now for the pure genius of her word play...again the theme of isolation and even a glass jar reference. She is caged by her own SELF but is quite aware of the world of beauty that lies just outside her hospital door so-to-speak. Phew, again she exhausts and takes me down a level or two in mood and up beyond notches in astonishment! -
Oh my... should I try to understand this? If I had to guess, the beautifully lain metaphors in this poem point to a deterioration... a seemingly recurrent theme in Plath's poetry. She really was a genius.
I enjoyed this piece, it put me in mind of a gray trailer of some kind. Beautiful wordsmithing. -
I really enjoyed this piece there are many lines that are so detailed that you can't help but to see a picture of them in your mind.. It is a very vivid write as well, I am not great at interpreting her feelings however I know she was a depressed woman, I am wowed by her talent.
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I just read this poem to my 17 year old daughter and it sent her hustling for a dictionary. What a fun poem to share and what a great moment we had as a result. I love that old haughty Victorian feel this has to it, or it that my imagination. Hmmm... It's a good thing nobody can hear me as I read these.
♥ Kimberly -
"Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.
Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy"
The imagery in this poem is magnificant. Such as the first two lines, "Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear." Amazing things brought to mind as I read this. Lovely, different. Patricia -
"A foetus in a bottle" I love this line or half a line should I say, I didn't really get into this poem as much as I had previous Plath writes but I did enjoy this one. She was talented.
LoneStar
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