Nature And The Sublime Flashcards
1: Nature as psychological (Plath) vs Nature as Elemental Force
Opening comparative sentence
While Sylvia Plath constructs nature as an extension of the self- a mirror for psychological turmoil and existential crisis- Ted Hughes envisions nature as an autonomous, elemental force whose power resists human interpretation
1: Nature as psychological (Plath) vs Nature as Elemental Force
Sylvia Plath “The Moon and the Yew Tree”
-Plath’s natural imagery often operates as a symbolic map of internal dislocation. The natural world becomes a cold embodiment of psychological paralysis.
-”the moon is no door. It is a face in its own right”. This disembodied lunar image is bleached of warmth or maternal significance, conveying emotional detachment. No longer a guide, inspiration. The negation denies the reader traditional associations of the moon as a threshold of mysticism, imagination or feminine intuition. The abrupt end-stopping isolates the image, intensifying the detachment. (Speaker’s fractured perception and emotional impasse). (Also could be compared to the moon in “Full moon and little Frieda” where the moon is presented as this reverent, connecting symbol. Plath’s moon rejects human meaning; Hughes’s invites it).
-”the yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape”. The yew tree- a traditional symbol of mourning- is here refigured as a sterile monument. “Gothic” implies drama, but not warmth; it is beautiful but forbidding. It is syntactically plain, which ironically dulls the grandeur and undercuts potential awe. (Also compare to Hughes’s horses where they become sacred through stillness, Plath’s symbols remain dead- stripped of ritual power ”Megalith-still”.)
-”the message of the yew tree is blackness- blackness and silence”. The repetition and dash emphasise finality. It creates a semantic field of death, void and spiritual failure. The dash operates as a thematic hinge- turning reflection into a confrontation with nothingness. Death overrides everything (Silence in Plath is not fertile but sterile, opposed to Hughes’s use of silence as pre-verbal energy ”then the sun/ […] erupted/ Silently”)
-COMPARISON: while hughes finds transcendence in elemental stillness, Plath’s “silence” is devoid of the sacred- suggesting a blocked or failed sublime
1: Nature as psychological (Plath) vs Nature as Elemental Force
Ted Hughes “Wind”
-In contrast, Hughes’s Wind renders nature not as a reflection of self but as a primal, destabilising force that transcends human agency
-”this house has been far out at sea all night”. This metaphor merges domestic and natural realms, likening the house to a drifting vessel. Nature overwhelms the human world, erasing the boundary between safety and danger. It is the opening line- an immediate destabilising image that plunges the reader into Hughes’s elemental world.
-”the woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills”. Personification and auditory imagery amplify the sense of elemental force. The plosive “b” sounds mimic the violence of the storm. Polysyndeton adds breathless intensity- building the sublime as cumulative. Participles suggest continuance, ongoing and never-ending and heightened by the use of enjambement. ”stampeding”, “booming” creates unity and coherence and the ability of the storm to control everything. Where Plath’s sublime is internalised and melancholic, Hughes’s is raw and physical- not a reflection of the self, but its obliteration.
-”the fields quivering, the skyline a grimace” apocalyptic. Personification and metaphor fuse the natural with the human. Suggests pain and implies barely-contained energy. Even landscape is animate. This is the opposite of Plath;s frozen moonlight. Hughes’s world is kinetic and menacing- sublime not in its mystery but in its power
1: Nature as psychological (Plath) vs Nature as Elemental Force
Critics and context
TED HUGHES
-Romantic sublime reworked here: it is not merely spiritual awe, but nature’s indifferent violence.
-Wolosky defines enjambement as “the excess of syntax over the boundaries of the poetic line” and Hughes uses it to convey a sense that the disruptive strong winds in the poem also blows through the boundaries of lines and stanzas. All art is secondary to nature.
-Wolosky also noted that “personification is the kind of description of inanimate nature in terms of human sensibility.” Hughes skilfully uses it to convey the idea that both the human and natural world are strongly connected and the distinction between them is often blurred.
-reflects Hughes’s ecological philosophy: nature is not anthropocentric, but indifferent.
-Hughes’s animism- what Keith Sagar calls his “shamanic naturalism”-locates power in nature’s indifference, not its empathy.
SYLVIA PLATH
-Plath composed this while suffering from spiritual numbness and emotional disconnection in Devon. The bell-ringing of the Anglican church fails to offer transcendence.
-Christina Britzolakis notes that Plath’s natural landscape are “saturated with psychic intensity” but this saturation leads to alienation rather than epiphany.
1: Nature as psychological (Plath) vs Nature as Elemental Force
Evaluative comparison
Plath internalises nature into her metaphoric language of suffering, while Hughes externalises it as a sovereign system that dwarfs the human. Both convey awe, but only Hughes preserves nature’s autonomy
2: Nature as Gothic Collapse (Plath) vs Elemental Renewal (Hughes)
Opening comparative
Though both poets present nature in apocalyptic or destructive terms, Plath renders the landscape as an extension of psychic collapse, whereas Hughes envisions destruction as a prelude to silent elemental renewal.
2: Nature as Gothic Collapse (Plath) vs Elemental Renewal (Hughes)
Sylvia Plath “Wuthering Heights”
-Plath reinterprets the Romantic sublime as a site of disorder rather than inspiration. In Wuthering Heights, the moor becomes chaotic and mournful.
-”the grass is beating its head distractedly”. Highly unusual personification- the grass is not soft or passive but frantic and suffering. Suggests psychic breakdown externalised through landscape. The unexpected adverb “distractedly” adds a modern psychological layer to nature, rather than romantic harmony. Unlike Hughes’s silent and sacred “Horses”, Plath’s landscape is hysterical- not meditative but unravelling. Unlike Hughes’s reverent depiction of nature where the landscape sustains quiet power, Plath’s nature is fearful and frail- it reflects human anxiety not elemental wisdom.
-”the wind/ Pours by like destiny, bending/ Everything in one direction”. Inverts the Romantic tradition in which nature evokes wonder or spiritual renewal. The simile “like destiny” imbues the ind with metaphysical agency, suggesting not liberation but entrapment. Plath’s wind represents an overwhelming force that impose conformity and submission. The verb “pours” conveys not only unstoppable momentum but also the sense of flooding- a loss of boundaries that mirrors the speaker’s psychological disorientation. Evokes a world where resistance is futile; all vitality and autonomy are subsumed under a totalising, unidirectional force. Hughes finds spiritual renewal in silence and stillness; Plath finds failed transcendence. Nature is sickened, stripped of symbolic power.r
2: Nature as Gothic Collapse (Plath) vs Elemental Renewal (Hughes)
Ted Hughes “Horses”
-Conversely, Hughes in The Horses stages the aftermath of destruction as the beginning of sacred stillness. After an implies nuclear catastrophe, the horses remain motionless.
-”And came to the horses/ There still they stood/ but now steaming and glistening under the flow of light”. Captures the transition from devastation to transcendence. The monosyllabic rhythm and syntactic pause creates a meditative stillness that mirrors the poem’s central spiritual motif. They are transformed into totemic symbols of endurance and grace. The light also evokes a moment of revelation and suggests purification- as if the world is being washed clean of human violence. The adjectives “steaming” and “glistening” root the image in physicality and warmth, implying vitality beneath silence.
-“hearing the horizons endure” the encounter requires the speaker’s cognition (part of its rhythms). The speaker does not merely observe nature and the horses, he enters in reciprocal silence with them. Hughes stages the sublime as a path of renewal, transforming silence into sacred presence (serene survival), while Plath’s landscape is imbued with fragmentation, where it signals a breakdown of romantic and spiritual symbolism.
2: Nature as Gothic Collapse (Plath) vs Elemental Renewal (Hughes)
Comparative evaluation
Plath’s nature becomes a vector for emotional collapse- Romanticism inverted into existential despair- whereas Hughes’s is reborn through stasis and myth. Plath’s sublime ends in fragmentation; Hughes’s in ritualistic rebirth.
Plath’s hostile landscape is not just wild, but hostile; not elevating, but deeply alienating. Thus, through the line’s complex metaphor and oppressive tone, Plath reclaims the Romantic sublime as a terrain of loss, not of revelation.
2: Nature as Gothic Collapse (Plath) vs Elemental Renewal (Hughes)
Critics and context
SYLVIA PLATH
-nature does not provoke transcendence but enforces collapse, pressing inward rather than expanding outward. The landscape becomes a stage for psychic suffocation, not epiphany.
-Critic Christina Britzolakis argues that Plath’s nature is “no longer a refuge but a projection of internal crisis” marking her departure from Romantic aesthetics.
-Plath engages with religious allusion only to undermine it- the spiritual fails, just as the landscape fails to offer grounding.
-composed while Plath was living in Yorkshire, the poem uses Brontean landscape not for transcendence, but for alienation. The wild moor romanticised in Wuthering Heights becomes a stage for emotional collapse.
TED HUGHES
-Reflects Hughes’s lifelong engagement with animism, seeing animals as vessels of mythic or sacred truths.
-Hughes often positions moorland as a sacred threshold. The poem culminates not in narrative resolution, but spiritual stillness.
-the silence is not void, but reverent- a return to a primal peace. Hughes offers no comfort in human resilience, only in nature’s ability to transcend.
-his use of totemic animals is tied to pagan cosmology with the sacred through the elemental. As Robert Bly argues, Hughes “reclaims silence as a presence” locating poetic truth in pre-verbal stillness.
-the horses could symbolise a pre-verbal primal consciousness (a state of being beyond language)
3: Nature as Liminal and Unnerving
Opening comparative sentence
Plath’s “Crossing the water” and Hughes’s “Pike” both present nature as haunting and unknowable, yet where Plath explores a spectral, dreamlike landscape that reflects psychological liminality, Hughes offers a vision of nature as brutally self-contained, alive with ancient and instinctual violence.
3: Nature as Liminal and Unnerving
Sylvia Plath’s “Crossing the Water”
-”Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.”. The triple repetition of “black” constructs a visual and symbolic landscape stripped of vitality, where colour becomes a code for emptiness and existential absence. The alliteration adds a lulling, incantatory rhythm, evoking a dream-like trance. Alludes to a voyage, crossing the river of oblivion (forgetfulness). The image of “cut-paper people” suggests two-dimensionality and fragility- humans rendered passive, insubstantial and at risk of dissolution. The abrupt listing creates visual starkness and tonal flatness- reflecting the speaker’s emotional detachment. The line opens with a sense of suspended animation. In contrast to Hughes’s “Pike”, where nature is teeming with violent life, Plath’s nature is spectral and weightless, emotionally deadened rather than carnivorous.
-”the spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes”. The metaphysical statement flattens the boundary between the speaker and the environment, creating a shared essence of “blackness”- a loaded term that invokes death, depression, and unconscious fear. The concept of a “spirit” evokes animism, but without vitality- its a unifying force of absence not energy. Primitive mind/ nature. The mirrored syntax asserts this kinship rhythmically and thematically, presenting the natural world as a reflection of interior void. While Plath finds the sublime in the collapse of self into symbolic landscape, Hughes sees it in the assertion of primal form- his fish are not reflections of the psyche but survivors of its erosion.
-**”Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?”. “Blinded” implies a warning about perception and illusion- a classic romantic concern. To be blinded is to lose rational or conscious to be overwhelmed by something unknowable or seductive. It echos the danger of the sublime: the fear that too much beauty or strangeness destroys comprehension. “Sirens” are dangerous creatures that are thought to lure sailors with their enchanting music and singing voices to shipwreck. Yet the paradox that they are expressionless turns the sirens from enchanting into uncanny- more akin to mute, lifeless dangers than active temptresses. The rhetorical question pulls the reader into a moment of confrontation, making them complicit in the speaker’s uncertainty. It destabilises the boundary between speaker and reader, reflecting the poem’s broader theme of liminality. The sibilance creates an “s” sound- whispering, hiss-like texture, reinforcing the idea of seductive, suffocating silence.
-the speaker, having drifted through the surreal landscape, ends not with resolution but a question- reinforcing the poem’s dreamlike uncertainty. It disrupts the calm, stylised lyricism of earlier stanzas, replacing detached observation with direct psychological confrontation. In contrast, Ted Hughes’s “Pike” deals not with expressionless ambiguity, but with violent precision. His fish are not unreadable- they are terrifyingly knowable, ancient and complete
3: Nature as Liminal and Unnerving
Ted Hughes “Pike”
-In contrast, Ted Hughes’s “Pike” deals not with expressionless ambiguity, but violent precision. His fish are not unreadable- they are terrifyingly knowable, ancient and complete. ”Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin”. Where Plath’s creatures are expressionless and silently deadly, Hughes’s are primordially expressive- not in human terms, but in their structure. His Pike grin with pre-human biological purpose. While Plath’s sirens terrify through blankness and silence, Hughes’s pike terrify through embodied, instinctive knowledge. Both are sublime, but one blinds through uncertainty; the other awes through clarity.
-the gothic anthropomorphism- a fish with “aged grin”- mythologises the pike as ancient evil. Yet this malevolence is not moral, but instinctive. The colon mimic anatomical dissection, connecting origin to outcome- from birth, these creatures are fated to kill. While Plath’s “blackness” is existential; Hughes’s darkness is Darwinian. The pike does not reflect the psyche- it precedes and outlasts it.
-”Pike, three inches long, perfect/ Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold”. The taut enjambement after “perfect” delays satisfaction, highlighting the completeness and symmetry of the pike’s form (Anaphora). The neologism “tigering” animates the fish with predator logic- suggesting violence is not an aberration but part of beauty. This mirrors Hughes’s larger poetic project: the glorification of nature’s ancient violence as a form of sacred design. The line’s rhythmic regularity mimics the calm, contained menace of the pike himself- no chaos, only exactitude. Where Plath’s surreal black lake evokes psychic unraveling, Hughes’s water contains evolutionary clarity- predator and prey in harmony through violence
-”still legendary depth:/ It was as deep as England”. The phrase “legendary depth” mythologises the water as holding ancient truths- linking national history with primal violence. The claim “as deep as England” is hyperbolic yet symbolic: Hughes aligns natural brutality with cultural inheritance. Nature here is not external to history- it is history. The colon sets up a solemn pronouncement. The second line stands alone, like an epigraph- making the statement appear irrefutable. Plath’s lake is unmoored dreamlike, filled with the subconscious. Hughes’s lake is deep, ancestral, mythic- a source of terrifying knowledge, not symbolic collapse.
3: Nature as Liminal and Unnerving
Context and critic
TED HUGHES
- In Pike, Ted Hughes echoes shamanic beliefs by portraying the pike as a primal, almost spiritual force- an ancient animal presence embodying both beauty and violence. Like a shaman’s spirit animal, the pike becomes a symbol of nature’s raw power and the thin veil between life and death. The pike becomes both ancestral and atavistic.
-humans are separate from the divine world of the animals. “Hughes defined fishing as a means of putting the individual back in contact with the primitive being”.
SYLVIA PLATH
-Styx in greek mythology was believed to be an obstacle that must be crossed in order to gain admission to afterlife.
-“Crossing the Bar” by Lord Tennyson (sandbar creates a lagoon which is an invisible barrier between an inlet and the expansive sea”
-a topos of embarkment/ homecoming (Odyssey)
-subtitled by Hughes as a transitional poem.
-Tracy Brain argues that Plath’s poems “dislocate the domestic into the grotesque” and here, even nature’s sustenance becomes tainted by death imagery.
-Linda Bundtzen asserts that Plath’s nature is “neither nurturing nor destructive, but haunted by the memory of loss and presence of death”
3: Nature as Liminal and Unnerving
Comparative evaluation
While Plath’s “Crossing the Water” immerses the reader in a shadowy, psychological landscape where nature becomes a canvas for trauma and absence, Hughes’s “Pike” confronts the reader with a nature that exists before the self- lethal, exquisite and eternal. Each poet reaches the sublime, but by opposing routes: Plath through haunting disintegration, Hughes through elemental awe
INTRODUCTION
Sylvia Plath, a confessional poet whose work interrogates psychological fragility and emotional dislocation, frequently reimagines nature as a symbolic extension of inner torment and spiritual absence. In contrast, Ted Hughes, known for his animistic and mythic portrayal of the natural world, presents nature as autonomous, violent and sacred. In The Moon and the Yew Tree, Crossing the Water and Wuthering Heights, Plath portrays nature as bleak, ghostly and often suffocating- a landscape where transcendence fails and self collapses. Hughes, in contrast, renders nature as a force of primal clarity and existential awe in poems such as Wind, pike and The Horses. While Plath internalises nature into psychic disintegration; Hughes externalises it as a brutal, separate, but ordered sublime.
CONCLUSION
Ultimately, both Plath and Hughes strip nature of comfort, but they do so through fundamentally opposing lenses. Plath’s landscapes- from the bleak stillness of The Moon and the Yew Tree to the haunted moors of Wuthering Heights and the spectral waters of Crossing the Water- becomes psychological terrains marked by detachment, distortion and disintegration. Nature is not healing, but complicit in the speaker’s collapse. Hughes, by contrast, channels the sublime into natural forms that are violent yet reverent: in Wind and Pike, nature is unflinching in its brutality; in The Horses, it offers sacred stillness beyond human ruin. Where Plath’s sublime leads inward toward emotional void, Hughes’s leads outward toward elemental truth- revealing that nature, in both poets, is not passive scenery, but the ultimate measure of the self.
