You bring me good news from the clinic,
Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white
Mummy-cloths, smiling: I'm all right.
When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist
Fed me banana-gas through a frog mask. The nauseous vault
Boomed with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.
Then mother swam up, holding a tin basin.
O I was sick.
They've changed all that. Traveling
Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,
Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,
I roll to an anteroom where a kind man
Fists my fingers for me. He makes me feel something precious
Is leaking from the finger-vents. At the count of two,
Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard. . .
I don't know a thing.
For five days I lie in secret,
Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.
Even my best friend thinks I'm in the country.
Skin doesn't have roots, it peels away easy as paper.
When I grin, the stitches tauten. I grow backward. I'm twenty,
Broody and in long skirts on my first husband's sofa, my fingers
Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;
I hadn't a cat yet.
Now she's done for, the dewlapped lady
I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror—
Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.
They've trapped her in some laboratory jar.
Let her die there, or wither incessantly for the next fifty years,
Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.
Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,
Pink and smooth as a baby.
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A sad reverie..
She remembers all of the other times she was sick, physically, with others to care for her; but this time is different...it isn't her body, it is her mind, and no one can see it, only by putting it in a lab jar. She has become her own 'mother', but just as ineffectual. Again, just my opinion. -
I agree with the poster above me, but I'd like to know the story behind this poem, it seems there is two or three, I get that this is a poem but I believe the first part of it hints at a real moment in her life in the hospital maybe she got into an accident and had to get plastic surgery to fix it and the rest seems to be a description of ideals that remind her of that situation. Maybe I am wrong but I'm thinking something happened really, and she took that and ran with it. Either way this poem is full of great imagery, interesting wording, cool sound effects and descriptions and unique ideals. She is definately one of my favorites, great skill here.
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The second part in the beginning makes me feel that's about a scared person or little girl (or child) who is being comforted by someone that isn't making 'her' feel so uncomfortable.
'When I grin, the stitches tauten. I grow backward. I'm twenty,'
A person at twenty who needs a 'Face Lift' as the title suggests I don't seem to feel is a very happy person.
I disagree with Scarlett who thinks this is a 'happy' piece or that it 'feels' that way. I feel it really doesn't.
But I do feel that the character or Plath herself committed the action to feel some sort of bliss, like someone doing narcotics to feel good another day, I feel this was 'her' trying to feel good another day.
It's a good piece, I feel it wreaks in fortitude.
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I've noticed Ms. Plath made the reference to being smooth as a baby - or pure as a baby, in several of her poems, so I think she must have often felt dirty. In the Bell Jar her main character speaks of taking a bath - how the world dissolves and the water scalds away all filth. I think she must have felt close to that way herself.
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Ahh yes--I have read this one...:: feels happy :: Although...T
he last three lines of the third stanza always seem to make me cringe...
!~YS4e~!
Scarlett
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