CARLOS MANUEL MARTINHO LAJARIN POESÍA DE LOS SIGLOS XIX Y XX

CARLOS MANUEL MARTINHO LAJARIN POESÍA DE LOS SIGLOS XIX Y XX

carmarla@alumni.uv.es GRUPO – A

In this paper I´m going to analise the poems “ Prologue to Spring” by Sylvia Plath, and “September” by Ted Hughes. This work is about the poetry of a woman and the poetry of a man. And I´m going to find out if we are so different. First I´m going to analise the poem by Sylvia Plath and then the poem by Ted Hughes and finally I will present the conclusion of this work.

The poem “ Prologue to Spring” by Sylvia Plath is divided in five stanzas with three lines each one. We only have rhyme in the second stanza a-ba-b, and in the third stanza a-b-a.We don´t have any other rhyme pattern in the poem.

As the title says, this poem is about the prologue to spring. In other words. It is talking about winter.

The first phrase of the first stanza is in relation with the title, because “ The winter landscape hangs in balance now” express the end of winter and the beginning of Spring, is in balance between both of the seasons.

In the next lines of the first pargraph, Sylvia Plath talks about the gorgon´s eye. Here the author is making reference to the mythology, and tries to express that in winter everything is frozen like if some kind of magic acts in the landscape. Then in the third line we have a metaphor in “ stone tableau”. It refers to the lakes that in winter are frozen and look like a stone tableau.

The second paragraph is describing the winter as a “tilted china bowl”. The poet is trying to say that everything seems like made of glass and that everything is very fragile.

The third paragraph is a description of the winter. It is describing the leaves falling and being trapped in ice. In this part we have some adjectives that make us realise that the winter is all stillness like in: “spell of steel”, “ quartz atmosphere”, and “ the country still”.

The three lines of the fourth paragraph makes a question. Sylvia Plath is wondering what kind of magic could undo the spell that has stopped everything. When the author says: “ stopped the season in its tracks”, it is a metaphor that means that in winter everything is very quite. And the same happens in the third line when Sylvia Plath says; “ And suspended all that might occur?”. Here we have another metaphor, it is like the author is waiting for the birds to sing, to see the leaves falling from the trees... and all that kind of stuff that happens in spring. But in winter everything is very quite.

In the first line of the last stanza, we have the typical image of the winter. When the author says; “Locked in crystal caskets are the lakes” it is a metaphor, because the lakes cannot be locked into crystal. It is a perfect description of the fact that in winter with the low temperatures the water becames frost and it looks like crystal. In the second and third line of the last stanza the author is describing the moment when spring comes. Because Plath talks about the ice but also talks about the birds that start to sing. She talks about the transition of the seasons.

The poem “September” by Ted Hughes is divided in four stanzas, and each stanza has four lines. In the first stanza the rhyme is a-b-a-b, but in the rest of the stanzas we don´t have any pattern.

First we have the title. In the title we know what the poem is about. It is about a month, in this case September. This gives us a clue and we can imagine what the poet is going to tell us.

In the beginning of the first stanza the poet says:”We sit late”. As readers we don´t know who is the author referring to. We can imagine that it is the author with another person, but the poet doesn´t give us more information about the other person. In the first two lines, we have a description of what is going on. It is a situation of calm, where the time doesn´t matter. Then in the third line of the first stanza we can imagine who is the other person when the author says: “ When kisses are repeated and the arms hold”, Ted Hughes is talking about his wife Sylvia Plath. “He was also famously married from 1956-1963 to the American poet Sylvia Plath and was believed by many to have helped to cause Plath's suicide”( wikipedia).

In the second stanza Ted Hughes situates the action. We can know that it is midsummer, and he makes a description of the landscape in that season. And as in the first stanza, the author tells us that there is no time in that moment; “ Time is nowhere”.

The third and the fourth stanzas are connected. In the two first lines of the third stanza, the author talks again about themselves, about the leaves in summer and about time. It is like a sum up of the two first stanzas. Then we have the connection between the two last stanzas. The author says that “ we have only what we remember” and talks about the “ Minutes uproaring with our heads”, like it is something annoying. And in the last stanza the author makes two examples of that kind of troublesome situations; like the senseless mob rules to the kings or when part of the trees falls into the water. This are examples of situations that break that stillness and that calm.

CONCLUSION: We can notice that when this poet talks about a season or a space, Sylvia Plath focuses on the description of the landscape, and uses more adjectives and metaphors, but Ted Hughes describes the landscape only a little and focuses on the romanticism of the scene. We can say that Sylvia Plath is more descriptive and that Ted Hughes is more romantic. And that breaks the topics. Because often people say that women are more romantic than men, but in this case not. And for that reason I think that there is no distinction between women and men in poetry, sometimes a man can be more romantic and a woman can be more descriptive. There is no reason to think that a woman and a man can write differently. If we don´t have the author under the poem we don´t know who is the author, a woman or a man. In poetry there is no distinction.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Prologue to Spring - Established August, 1994

September – Ted Hughes- Poem By - PoemHunter.Com Paris, France. last modified 5/10/2006 http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6616&poem=29564 “ www.poemhunter.com”

Ted Hughes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia” info-en@wikimedia.org. This page was last modified 03:32, 6 April 2006.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Hughes “ www.wikipedia.com”

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