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Raúl Rosa Mesa

Professor Stanislav Kolář

KAA / 2AML2 (American Literature 2)

14 March 2023

Commentary Paper of “The Colected Poems” by Sylvia Plath

To begin with, the chosen topic is the poetry written by the American author Sylvia Plath.

Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Smith College, and thanks to a

scholarship she was able to study at Cambridge University. Plath had a somewhat complicated

adult life, and certain events such as suicide attempts and other traumas, including infidelity, a

turbulent relationship with her future husband and writer Ted Hughes, and the death of her

father. All of these events could definitely serve as an inspiration for her future works. In one of

these cases, the prose work and unique novel “The Bell Jar” was about telling and expressing her

feelings according to this tragic and painful side of her life in an autobiographical way. The Bell

Jar became one of his most famous books to date.

In this commentary paper, it will be attempted to place the most important characteristics

of her poetry, as well as the feelings involved in her writing, the aim, and/or themes addressed in

her wide range of poetic texts. Examples of her poems, such as one of her most important and

acclaimed poems like Lady Lazarus among other poems that appear in her work “The Collected

Poems”, will be placed here on the following pages. The poem's tone, form, whether it includes

stylistic literary devices, its symbols, title, and theme, among others, will be identified for

understanding the purpose and meaning of the poems.

“The Collected Poems” was her last collection of poems published in 1981 and was

widely acclaimed by critics, including more than 200 poems which led her to become the first
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poet to receive a Pullitzer Prize. In this collection, one finds a poet who is quite intimate,

afflicted, personal, profound, and emotive. “The Collected Poems” includes a large literary

repertoire rich in all its aspects and analysed from several perspectives: literary,

psychoanalytical, gender, and personality.

“The Collected Poems” features the inclusion of her books and collection of unpublished

poems, among which there is an evolution of themes ranging from nostalgia, peace and

melancholy in nature, female power, and the struggle against patriarchy, to love for her husband

the famous poet Ted Hughes and the shadowy facets of that relationship, to the author's deep

depression and fragile state of mind. Finally, one of her most acclaimed books was Ariel,

published in 1965 when Plath was already dead. Poems such as Love Letter focus on a point in

her relationship with Ted Hughes, apart from that, Poppies in October seeks a melancholy

beauty in the nature that surrounds us.

In addition, the poetry written by Sylvia Plath is described as confessional poetry, which

is a type of poetry that focuses on the expression of the "poetic self" by choosing intimate,

individual themes that attempt to explain or develop facets such as sexuality, depression, suicide,

deep thoughts, and the romanticism of grief. This poetry shines greatly in its use of subjectivism

and personal descriptions. Confessional poetry is a term that came into use in the late 1950s in

the United States of America. In short, analysing and understanding Sylvia Plath's poetry allows

one to discover in detail what her life was like. A brave, young woman, beautiful inside and out,

pained, and talented, who unfortunately had to live through a great number of obstacles and

tragedies that unleashed her art and a final tragedy undesired for anyone.
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The first poem on display here is her acclaimed, and important subject of literary

criticism, Lady Lazarus, a poem written in her last work “Ariel”, and included in this collection

of poems. This title refers to the biblical character Lazarus whom Jesus raised from the dead. In

order to understand the deepness of the title of the poem, it is also necessary to analyse its lines.

In general, this poem talks about suicide and what leads a person with great suffering in her days

to romanticise it, and the fact of thinking and talking about it. Since, knowing Plath's history,

suicide here is kept directly explicit “I have done it again. / One year in every ten / I manage it-”.

In these first verses, the poem reflects that the writer acknowledges doing it (attempt to

suicide) or thinking about it on several occasions, and how she sees herself as capable of

carrying it out. “Soon, soon the flesh / The grave cave ate will be / At home on me”. (Plath,

Furthermore, in the following lines, it is found out how she would be comfortable within this

tragic event. “And I a smiling woman. / I am only thirty. / And like the cat I have nine times to

die”.

Moreover, she recognises herself as a happy woman, or trying to be, and shows how even

a human being is vulnerable to the damage of a life that constantly beats you down, and also she

uses the expression that cats have nine lives to say that she can revive and die again with the

intention of rising again. Plath also acknowledges in a later verse that dying or committing

suicide was not her intention when she was 10 years old, but later this escape route becomes a

recurring one for escaping pain just as it can be achieved in one's sleep. “Dying / Is an art, like

everything else / I do it exceptionally well. // “Herr God, Herr Lucifer / Beware / Beware”.

In these verses, one could understand and find something interesting: it could sound like

a call for assistance and help, as well as an acknowledgement that death is not her enemy, but

rather a welcome friend whom she knows how to treat very well. The following verses suggest
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how a person can ask for indirect help that goes unnoticed because, perhaps using a bit of

sarcasm, she refers to dying in an exceptionally good and real way, and not as a victimised cry

for attention.

Nowadays, the argument is often linked to people who use the term suicide for just

wanting attention, and the rest understand this as they are not really brave enough to do so and

tend to be dismissive rather than providing real help to that person. But also, it might be a

figurative death in which the author shows the way to suffer in order to rise again, to be stronger.

Moreover, this autonomy of power contrasts with a feminist facet of the poem in its last lines by

exposing patriarchy as a deteriorator of women, and finally reaffirming her power to rise again as

a woman. “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air”.

Like most of her poems, she uses a subjective tone which is recognised in confessional

poetry. The stylistic devices used such as metaphor allow us to enrich the beauty of the poem as

in the case of the title Lady Lazarus as a perspective of rebirth. Irony can also be used as a

tearing of emphasis which makes the author focus on the content of the verse - Do I terrify? Or,

it can be, the talk of death in the lines - I do it so it feels like hell... can be another irony of life.

Finally, the emphasis is on alliteration and anaphora in the repetition of sounds and structures.

“Soon, soon the flesh” // “I do it so... / I do it so... / I ...”.

The second poem to be analysed is Tulips, a poem written for her book of poems “Ariel”,

as well as Lady Lazarus and Daddy. And clearly, there is a confessional poetry that uses a

subjective tone and is written in the first person expressing her experiences during her stay in the

hospital due to her mental illness.

In Tulips the author uses the hospital room as an image implicitly written in the poem

through the winter and how the white, cold, and snowy colour invites her to soothe her purity in

the hospital bed. Tulips bloom in the season from February to May, more precisely in the spring

season, a season when the cold begins to fade, so it is clearly not the exact place for her, but

perhaps the necessary calm. “The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here / Look how white

everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in”. // “I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly

/ As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands”.

What the poem indicates between the great contrast of the tulips and the cold hospital

room representing winter is, perhaps, a duality between the sensitive closeness to death - again a

recurring theme in her poems - and life. Between the pure, muted colours, and the exciting and

vivid colours - as Plath uses in the first lines - such as red, the characteristic colour of the tulips.

It is curious how, in this poem, Plath seems to consciously afflict herself by indicating how,

although she wants to be calm and how is treated with gentleness and delicacy, her family will

miss her. But this allows the reader to get a very realistic and close-up picture of how she details

her poetry with so much description. “My husband and child smiling out of the family photo /

Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks”.

This internal struggle between wanting to rest or return to life is tragically seen as a

painful decision. It seems to be understood that Plath sees returning to life as a painful decision

while she sees death as a refusal to keep on living. The critic and author M. D. Uroff comments

in a critique of Plath's poetry that "The speaker herself seems surprised by her own gifts and ends

the poem on a tentative note, moving toward the far away country of health". This poem does not

follow a fixed metric, being again free verse. It includes different literary stylistic devices such

as personification “The vivid tulips eat my oxygen”, which makes the object tulips gain strength
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by attributing a human quality such as eating, thus giving energy and strength to the title and one

of the main images and symbols of the poem.

In addition, it is found the simile, a literary device used to clarify an idea that can allow

the reader to associate that idea with another more recurrent one using the particle "like" or “as”,

this happens, for example, in - Lightly, through their white swaddling, like an awful baby.

The third poem which will be analysed here, and in order to analyse another of her

greatest poems, is Daddy. Furthermore, according to numerous critics, The Colossus is also one

of her most acclaimed poems that touches on the trauma of the death and absence of Sylvia

Plath's father.

Daddy is a critically acclaimed poem and at the same time complex, not at all simple, as

can perhaps be seen in all her poetry. It relegates a somewhat confused paternal sentiment that

can be interpreted in such a way that, after the death of her father, this trauma has left her

desolate and she tries to fight against this reality consuming her. Furthermore, references to her

parents' roots seem to be palpable in the poem with the allusion to nationalities, countries, and

historical highlights, and perhaps these roots seem to torture her, or she is tortured by not being

able to know the truth because of her father's early death. "Daddy, I have had to kill you / You

died before I had time" // “Ich, ich, ich, ich, ich, / I could hardly speak / I thought every German

was you”.

Throughout the poem, we find Plath both able to fight with her memories and able to

destroy them. Once again, as in the first poem analysed in this commentary paper, the author

knows that she can or will try to get rid of something, in the case of the poem Lady Lazarus

where she knows that she can decide whether or not to die because she is very good at doing so.
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Here, after numerous descriptions, repetitions, alliterations, and other stylistic devices, she shows

that she can finally make the decision to let go of the torture that haunts her because of her

father's death. A complex love-hate relationship created by her childhood trauma:

The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year

Seven years, if you want to know

Daddy, you can lie back now

The tone used here places the reader in the perspective of a daughter who has lost her

father, with themes such as love, hate and loss, written in a poem of 5 verses each stanza. It

includes important symbols such as war that bring us closer to interpreting the pain, and at the

same time it takes us to a real historical moment. On the other hand, there are many images and

metaphors such as the black shoe, blackboard, or black telephone, as the author alludes to in the

poem, associating her father with the colour black, dark and fearsome, like the colour of the

shadows that haunt her, among other adjectives to define her father. Among other stylistic

devices, personification is used. "An engine, an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew". Once

again, metaphors, similes and personifications adjectivise the figure of the father, letting readers

know how she sees him, how she feels him or what her faded image of her father is like, in the

voice of a distressed author with a certain feeling of rage that leads to a full stop for the author's

pain at the end of the poem. "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through."

In conclusion, Sylvia Plath's raw, fragile, intimate, and therefore confessional poetry

shows that, due to the tragic events that took place in her life, she opens the doors to her deepest
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experiences in a way that few other poets could do in her time. However, due to the historical

context, her poems are also influenced by the sad decadence of those years, as the Poetry

Foundation website states in one of its blogs about those times: "You may notice that earlier

poems demonstrate a disbelief at the scope of the conflict, while later poems express a mournful

acceptance and a turn toward individual voice and empathy". In summary, poetry that creates a

strong link between life and writing, death and soul, trying to go beyond literary modernism.
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Works Cited

Plath, Sylvia. “Daddy”. The Collected Poems. Edited by Ted Hughes, Harper Collins Publishers,

2016, EPUB ed, pp. 277-280.

Plath, Sylvia. “Lady Lazarus”. The Collected Poems. Edited by Ted Hughes, Harper Collins

Publishers, 2016, EPUB ed, pp. 305-309.

Plath, Sylvia. “Tulips”. The Collected Poems. Edited by Ted Hughes, Harper Collins Publishers,

2016, EPUB ed, pp. 197-200.

The Editors. “The Poetry of World War II by the Editors.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry

Foundation, 11 Nov. 2016, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/91359/the-poetry-

of-wwii

Uroff, M., (1977) “Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry: A Reconsideration”, The Iowa

Review 8(1), 104–115. doi: https://doi.org/10.17077/0021-065X.2172.