I confess I have difficulty in understanding poetry, particularly the work of specific poets, Sylvia Plath being one of them. But I thought I would give this collection of hers a try.

I have given it four stars because Plath’s poems are obviously what I would call ”rich” and perhaps brilliant; but on the other hand I have, as stated, difficulty in comprehending them.

She avails herself of an extensive vocabulary, and I have never previously encountered many of the words she uses.

She writes a lot about death.

She killed herself at the age of 30 following the break-up of her marriage to Ted Hughes.

Perhaps if I knew more about Plath’s life I would better comprehend her poems.

Here is the first verse of her poem entitled ”Two views of Cadaver Room”:



The day she visited the dissection room

They had four men laid out, black as burnt turkey,

Already half unstrung. A vinegary fume

Of the death vats clung to them;

The white-smocked boys started working,

The head of his cadaver had caved in,

And she could scarcely mke out anything

In that rubble of skull plates and old leather.

A sallow piece of string held it together.



In their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow,

He hands her the cut-out heart like a crooked heirloom.



She also writes about nature, though perhaps the following poem is more about leave-taking:



Here are the first two verses from “Departure”:



The figs in the fig tree in the yard are green;

Green, also, the grapes on the green vine

Shading the brickred porch tiles.

The money’s run out.



How nature, sensing this, compounds her bitters.

Ungifted, ungrieved, our leave-taking.

The sun shines on unripe corn.

Cats play in the stalks.



Judge for yourself. ( )

The Colossus was the only collection of poems published in Sylvia Plath’s lifetime. It’s also the title of one of three poems in the volume that deal with the early loss of her father. In it, he is depicted as a ruined statue that his daughter is heroically but unsuccessfully trying to preserve. In “Full Fathom Five,” he is the old man of the sea, Neptune; the speaker, his daughter, is a mermaid, choking on air; she would rather breathe water. The mermaid imagery turns up again in the collection. The third is “The Beekeeper’s Daughter.” Her father was an entomologist, and Plath herself tried her hand at beekeeping. Yet it contains the oppressive line: “My heart under your feet, sister of a stone.”
Family relations also turn up in poems that treat the ambivalent experience of pregnancy, such as the poem that opens the collection, “The Manor Garden.”
Many of the poems record observations from nature, juxtaposing life and death. “Water Colour of Grandchester Meadows,” for instance, updates Tennyson’s “red in tooth and claw.” However, the poet’s observation of nature is faulty in one case. In “The Ghost’s Leavetaking,” a powerful description of the departure of a dream upon waking, she speaks of the “new moon’s curve,” but that is visible in the west just after sunset, not in the east just before dawn. Picky, you might think; bear with me on a pet peeve. A surprising number of otherwise excellent writers evoke the moon, but inaccurately.
The language throughout is elevated. It seems there was one word I needed to look up in nearly every poem. In only one case, the latinate “palustral” in “Frog Autumn,” did I feel she was trying too hard for enriched vocabulary. There are also some beautiful neologisms, such as “lapsing” in “The Lorelei” to describe the sound of waves at the shore (in “The Winter Ship,” the speaker tells us “the water slips and gossips in its loose vernacular”). Whether set in the U. S. or in England, the seacoast is a recurrent source of inspiration.
It’s all too easy to read these poems in the wake of the author’s suicide; death does indeed haunt many of them. Had she resisted the urge to end her life, the reader might take equal note of the will to live that is also present. Back in university, long ago, Plath’s recently-publish posthumous collection, Ariel, was the lodestone for more than one aspiring poetess in my acquaintance. Perhaps that’s why, at the time, I only read some of her most famous poems, such as “Daddy.” I’m glad enough time has passed that I can read and appreciate these. ( )

A very baroque and fully-realized matrix of gothic motifs and tropes. Every element goes on to form satisfying converging themes that connect and contain everything - nothing is wasted or unaccounted. An oddly self-contained and clenched-tight collection of poems. ( )

The Colossus

I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
It's worse than a barnyard.
Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or
other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.

Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails
of lysol
I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull plates and clear
The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman
Forum.
I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are
littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin.
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-
color.
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.
My hours are married to shadow.
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing. ( )

Not every poem in this collection captured my attention, but it did give me a glimpse into her life. The way Plath perceived the obligation that is motherhood, her thoughts on existence and death. If you do pick up any of her poetry, you have to listen to her reading it. It’s an entirely different experience and makes everything that much more enjoyable. Just type up on youtube “Sylvia Plath reads”.

Out of the collection, the following were my absolute favorites!

Two Views of a Cadaver Room
The first half about an autopsy, similar to Esther and Buddy’s excursion in chapter 6 of The Bell Jar. The second half of the poem is all about a painting by Bruegel. A poem which speaks of death and love and their inseparable coexistence.

Lorelai
A poem of sirens calling men to their doom. The strong allure of death. The poem begins “ It is no night to drown in.” and ends “ Stone, stone, ferry me down there.”

The Ghost’s Leavetaking
A poem about dreaming. About a life we lead outside our realm of reality and one we must depart each morning, like a ghost fading in daylight. ( )