Poem Breakdowns Flashcards
Tulips
“The Tulips are too excitable” - more alive than the narrator
“I am learning peacefulness”
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage”
“My husband and child smiling out of the family photo; Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks” - fish or family? Comfort or pain?
“How free it is, you have no idea how free – The peacefulness is so big it dazes you” - fantasizing, yearning for death
“It is what the dead close in on” - death is an attractive state
“The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me,” “I could hear them breathe,” “Thier redness talks to my wound,” “The vivid tulips eat my oxygen” - the tulips are drowning her, troubling her and in general are problematic
“A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck” - problematic
“I have wanted to efface myself”
“The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals” - the tulips symbolise life, that is why the narrator is disturbed by them
Context – completed 18th March 1961, Plath had a miscarriage in February 1961, February 1961 Plath also has her appendix removed. Poem may be about her experience in hospital
Ambivalent poem
Narrator is most likely Plath
Daddy
“In which I have lived in like a foot for thirty years” - suffocating
“Barely daring to breathe or Achoo”
“Daddy, I have had to kill you” - exorcism of her own father
“a bag full of god” - supposedly should be worshipped
“I used to pray to recover you” - lost her childhood
“I could never talk to you” - not close
“It stuck in a barb wire snare” - connotations of conflict
“I thought every German was you” - true way Plath feels about her own father
“I think I may well be a Jew” - Plath becomes something her father hated
“I have always been scared of you” - ‘ogre’ comment from Plath’s diary (1959)
“Luftwaffe,” “neat Mustache,” “Aryan eye, bright blue,” “panzer man, panzer man” - Hitler and his ideologies, German air force
“A cleft in your chin instead of your foot” - father was a nazi
“I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die and get back, back, back to you” - Plath’s father died when she was eight (1940) and she then had her first suicide attempt at 20 (1953)
“And I said I do, I do” - marriage to Ted Hughes
“there’s a stake in your fat black heart” - dealt with and now moving on
“Daddy, daddy, you bastard I’m through” - father, Hughes, successful suicide
Ariel
“Ariel” - name of horse Plath rode in Devon, means ‘God’s lion’ in Hebrew
“statis” - stillness
“Pivot of heels and knees” - at one with the horse
“I cannot catch” - on the verge of losing control
“Something else” - volta, physical experience, nonphysical (abstract) experience
“Thighs, hair; Flakes from my heels” - leaving her body behind and becoming a spirit
“White Godiva I unpeel – dead hands, dead stringencies” - removing trauma and harsh expectations. Lady Godiva – Angelo Saxon noble woman, rode a horse naked through the streets of Coventry
“The child’s cry” - now a single mother
“suicidal”
Interpretations – 1) optimistic, leaving behind problems 2) true freedom involves death
Finished 27th October 1962 – during a period where Plath wrote a lot, shortly after Hughes split
Wuthering Heights
“Wuthering Heights” - novel by Emily Bronte 1847, died 1848 because of the climate – refers to the house in the novel, Top Withens (the house) - about a walk to Top Withens - ‘Wuthering’ Yorkshire slang for windy
The horizons ring me” - imprisoned by the land
“Tilted,” “unstable”
“I can feel it trying to funnel my heat away.” - personification, the wind is a deliberately murderous force
“If I pay the roots of the heather too close attention, they will invite me to whiten my bones among them” - kill her, become a skeleton
“The sheep know where they are” - narrator feels lost in this landscape
“Grandmotherly disguise,” “wig curls”, “yellow teeth” - the sheep are disguised as wolves like in Little Red Riding hood
“The sky leans on me, me, the one upright” - narrator is the only living thing in this landscape
“Among all horizons” - link to being dead, line links to lying down, perhaps lying in a grave
Everything is breaking apart in the landscape – sematic filed of instability
Writes the poem in September 1961 about an experience had in September 1956
Full Fathom Five
“fathom” - depth of water
“Full fathom Five” - part of the song sung by Ariel to Ferdinand in The Tempest (Shakespeare) The words refer to Ferdinand’s father, Alonso. But Ariel’s words are not a trick as Alonso is not drowned but alive and on the island.
“White hair, white beard, far-flung”, “the old myth,” “you defy other godhood” - links to gods of water (Poseidon or Neptune)
“To make away with the groundwork of the earth and the sky’s ridgepole. Waist down you may wind” - Plath makes the reader feel as confused as she feels about her father
“inscrutable” - can’t read or make sense of anything
“father” - Otto Plath, he has power and authority and influence or is he being turned into a myth by Plath to create a gap between father and child
Half rhymes throughout – not full rhymes because her understanding/ knowledge of her father is incomplete, mirrors Plath’s knowledge
The experience of reading the poem mirrors the experience of the narrator – narrator can’t make sense of the father, reader can’t make sense of the poem
Themes – parent child relationship that lacks truth and information
Dated 1958
Morning Song
“Morning Song” - homophone, morning – start of the day, a new start, mourning – death of loss of someone/something, mourning the freedom she has lost
“Love set you going like a fat gold watch” - sounds celebratory
“We stand around blankly as walls” - new mothers are always doing something, Plath feels as though she is not
“New statue” - statues are cold and impersonal, there to be looked at
“I’m no more your mother than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow effacement at the winds hand” - distance, doesn’t feel like the mother of the child, lacking motherly instincts and feelings
“Stumble…cow-heavy” - fatigue, doesn’t want to get up and tend to the baby
“Dull stars” - even the stars are tired
“In my Victorian nightgown” - forced modesty, Plath feels as though she has been thrown back to an older time period
Plath has a problem with the distance between her and her father in Daddy – does the same thing to her own child in this poem
A letter home 11th May 1960 - “It’s impossible for him to work”, “whilst I cook and clean and care for the baby”, “I don’t mind that my own writing comes later”, “he has to have his peace and quiet”
Written February 1961 less than a year after the birth of Frieda in April 1960 – suggests that the speaker is Plath 9typical confessional style) talking to her newborn baby
The Manor Garden
“The roses over” - the plant wont bloom, decay, and death
“Incense of death” - the air is laced with a smell of decay
“The pears fatten like little buddhas” - prospering a sense of fertility and plenty, religious figure of peace
“a blue mist is dragging the lake” - alludes to movement of struggle, sense of fatigue
“You inherit white heather, a bee’s sting” - ambiguous, Plath’s father was an expert on bees, child might inherit Otto’s problematic characteristics
“Difficult borning” - sense of struggle and awkwardness, speakers mind is occupied with thought or problematic events, perhaps anxious about problems during birth
Written late 1959
Frieda born 1/4/1960, birth is three months away, addressing the unborn baby inside her
One interpretation is that Plath is observing a decaying garden, a different interpretation is that Plath uses nature to explore her personal problem and experiences
