Sylvia_Plath_Essay

From studying the unique poetry of Plath, I found it intense, deeply personal and somewhat disturbing as she wrote about the horrors of depression with ruthless honesty. Sylvia Plath’s poetry allows me to journey with her through personal experiences, and emotions that she feels that wasn't acknowledged during her lifetime and in a way it made her poems brilliantly intense. This can be seen most clearly in ‘Child’, ‘Poppies in July’ and also ‘Mirror’. A poem that describes the intense and disturbing life of Plath in a deeply disturbing and personal way is ‘Poppies in July’. In the unsettled atmosphere, it is evident that Plath is permeated with heartbreak and depression. ‘You flicker. I cannot touch you. I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.’ Her anger is displayed through the disturbing use of the colour red, also symbolising danger. Poppies are usually a magnificent image of happiness and nature, but in Plath’s poem we can see through her dubious and appalling honesty that even the nice things in life are making her angry and upset, she can get no happiness from anything anymore.”Colourless”... I feel an intense sadness for Plath as I read this poem because what she is aching for is help a human hand. She is looking for escape, oblivion, relief or neutrality, she can see no life worth living anymore and this makes ‘Poppies in July’ even more disturbing. If I could bleed, or sleep! Plath’s poetry is a great example of the exploration of the mind and how deeply personal poetry can be. “Child” is a perfect example of this. The poem begins with a fascination and love for her child: “Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing”. The clear eye later reflects Plath’s image back at her but her admiration for it leads her to the impulse to “fill it with colours and ducks”. She feels her child deserves the best; that she deserves to be happy and in awe of “the zoo of the new”. Plath compares life to a zoo. She feels life is a big collection of cages for people to be trapped in. This becomes apparent when she says “not this troublous wringing of hands”. The troublous wringing symbolises her agitated mind and a world which is “without a star”. She feels there is no hope in life and her feelings of inadequacy – not being able to fill her daughter’s life with colours and ducks – lead me to conclude that this poem is both deeply personal, disturbing and intense. Another poem by Plath that I found to be personal on an intense and disturbing way was ‘Mirror’. It is clear as Plath looks into the mirror that she is unhappy, watching her age. A mirror never lies, but Plath cannot find solace in what she sees. She fears herself as she sees her past and youth before her. “In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman rises towards her day after day, like a terrible fish.” Plath also called candles and the moon, both symbols of love and light. “Liars”: they both cast a shadow. This disturbing, empty thought clearly shows her tormented mind and that love is futile. In conclusion, I found the poetry of Sylvia Plath to be intense, disturbing and personal. I enjoyed her poetry as everybody has off days so her poems are relatable in the sense that everyone feels empty and unknown sadness’s now and again. Knowing about her sad death really cements these feelings in the poems as we can see that unfortunately she gave up, she never found the hope or person she as looking for to save her from her tormented mind. Therefore, it is obvious that Plath’s personal poems project her life in an intense and disturbing way because in the end plath could see nothing to live for.