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What I love about Sylvia Plath thematically is her constant obsession with mortality, frustration, and most especially the struggle for self-identity. I find I can very well relate to this. Stylistically I enjoy the way her words roll in your mind after you read them, thinking them feels interesting, for lack of any better way to explain it. Phrases like "Black marauder", "Moon and Yew Tree", or "You do not do, you do not do/ Anymore black shoe" stick in your mind with the images they connotate and the rhythms they beat out. At times, one feels as though they have followed her into a nightmare, with the garish and sometimes queasy images she presents of surgery and such. At other times, however, she accomplishes a sense of peace, often times in hope of a complete connection to the natural world. One more thing I find fascinating is her continual use of personal symbols- the yew tree, the pheasant, the narcissus, along with many others. Here follows my favorite poem by Plath and links to a couple quite good sites on her life and poetry.
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You said you would kill it this morning.
Do not kill it. It startles me still,
The jut of that odd, dark head, pacing
Through the uncut grass on the elm's hill.
It is something to own a pheasant,
Or just to be visited at all.
I am not mystical : it isn't
As if I thought it had a spirit.
It is simply in its element.
That gives it a kingliness, a right.
The print of its big foot last winter,
The tail-track, on the snow in our court-
The wonder of it, in that pallor,
Through crosshatch of sparrow and starling.
Is it its rareness, then? It is rare.
But a dozen would be worth having,
A hundred, on that hill - green and red,
Crossing and recrossing : a fine thing!
It is such a good shape, so vivid.
It's a little cornucopia.
It unclaps, brown as a leaf, and loud,
Settles in the elm, and is easy.
It was sunning in the narcissi.
I trespass stupidly. Let be, let be. |
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