Edge (Sylvia Plath) The woman is perfected
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her
blacks crackle and drag.
Silvia
Plaths
The
Collected Poems
Published/Written in February 1963
http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6642&poem=29362
September (Ted Hughes)
We sit late, watching the dark slowly unfold:
No clock counts this.
When kisses are repeated and the arms hold
There is no telling where time is.
It is midsummer: the leaves hang big and still:
Behind the eye a star,
Under the silk of the wrist a sea, tell
Time is nowhere.
We stand; leaves have not timed the summer.
No clock now needs
Tell we have only what we remember:
Minutes uproaring with our heads
Like an unfortunate King's and his Queen's
When the senseless mob rules;
And quietly the trees casting their crowns
Into
the pools.
Ted
Hughes
http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6616&poem=29564
First
of all, I am going to analyse the title of the poems. According to the title
of the first poem “edge” we can interpret its meaning. This word is a synonym
of border. A dividing line where something starts and finishes. So the first
idea I have had reading the title was that the author is going to tell us
a story about one fact that is going to start. Maybe she wants to start
a new period in her life. However if we read the poem, we realize that
my first idea is close to the main idea of the poem, because she is narrating
a series of facts that have an end: death.
In
the second poem, “September” Ted Hughes is using a month to title the poem.
In this case, the author is using this month to establish a time when the
facts, that he is narrating, happened. In this case, the title does not
give us the main idea of the poem. However, it gives us some interpretations:
the first one is the facts happened in September and the other one, this
month marks the final of the summer and the beginning of autumn. So, maybe
the author is telling us a story which has an end. After having read the
poem, we realize that he is talking about a love relationship that had an
end when the autumn came.
In the first poem, we don’t know who the addressee is, because she is
using the 3rd personal pronoun throughout the poem. But we realize
that the main character of the poem is a woman. However, in the 8th
verse she says “We have come so far”. So, at this point the
addressee is clearly defined: All women. Through this poem we can find a
lot of symbols and metaphors. When she says “a white serpent”, she
contrasts two elements that symbolize purity and sin. The colour white according
to Christian religion, symbolizes purity, innocence. The innocence of the
child can also be found in “rose close, The moon, milk”. She is using
these elements because they are the characteristics that a child has, they
depend on her mother. She is comparing her child with a rose. The serpent
also makes reference to sin, but also death. We can also find a confrontation
between red- bleed and black. She confronts the reader with the colour of
purity, evil and life. We can observe that along the 6 first lines, the
poet is informing the reader what her intentions are “her dead” “her bare”
“ we have come so far, it is over” and at the last verse “Her blacks
crackle and drag” we realize that her objective was completed. She
is using this metaphor symbolizing death. When something is broken, there
is no more life. The idea of death is present throughout the poem. If we
look at the biography of Silvia Plath, we can see that she tried to suicide
two times and if we pay attention to the date when she wrote this poem,
we realize that it was written the same month she died. She, on February
11, 1963, killed herself with cooking gas at the age of 30.(Beckmann, Anja.
Biography) It seems that when she was writing the poem, she knew she was
going to die. And this can be justified by the 11th and 12th
verse “Pitcher of milk, now empty She has folded” because in
the early morning of that day, Plath set some bread and milk in the children's
room. ( Mondragon, Brenda C. Plath)
As we can see, the poem written by Sylvia Plath has a free form structure. In contrast to this, the poem written by Ted Hughes has rhyme: A-B-A-B, C-D-C-D, E-F-E-F,
G-G-H-H.
In these poems we can find the same topic but the poets use
different points of view. Sylvia Plaths, was a neurotic woman. She suffered
grave personal discontinuities, which had their origin in the death of her
father when she was eight. (Beckmann, Anja. Biography) So, in this poem we
can find her suffer and how she has won the fight against “that” which is
causing her so much pain. “Body wears the smile of accomplishment,”
Also, as her writing showed, she was angry about double-standard behaviour.
She is writing this poem as a woman who is against the role that a society
has given to woman. In this poem, she is voicing a theme that has too often
been treated only with piety. Throughout her poetry, she speaks about problems
that our society has. In this age of gender conflicts, broken families, and
economic inequities, Plath's forthright language speaks loudly about the anger
of being both betrayed and powerless. (Wagner-Martin, Sylvia) and as we can
see in her twelve final poems, written shortly before her death, define a
nihilistic metaphysic from which death provided the only dignified escape.
(Stevenson, Anne, Sylvia)
However,
Ted Hughes speaks more sentimentally. In my opinion, this poem seems to
be a romantic poem because of the great use of natural elements that he
uses to narrate his story. However, he has some poems that are not at all
like the traditional romantic view of nature for which English poets are
famous, such as Moortown poems, which began as a journal recording
his farming experiences. The detailed description of nature along this poem
can be justified by the knowledge of Hughes about nature because he has lived
close enough to nature and he knows the cruelty that exists behind the beautiful
surface.(Skean, Ann. Introduction) Hughes believes that poetry is a magical
and powerful way of reaching our feelings and emotions. In his poetry, Hughes
celebrates the natural energies and makes the point that human depends on
an acceptance of all aspects of our nature. In particular, he believes that
we must recognise ourselves as part of the natural world. One of the characteristic
of Ted Hughes is the way he illustrates his emotions, energy and intellect,
as well as his experiences
The
poetry of both expresses, their "inner life", it is often possible to look
at their work and know what their feelings were at the time a particular
poem was written. This is dramatically illustrated by two poems which may
well be related to incidents concerned with their marriage breakdown. Sylvia
apparently heard about the 'other woman' through a phone call. Her poem 'Words,
heard by accident, over the phone'(SPCP.202) seems to describe this
event and her feelings. Hughes' poem, 'Do not Pick up the Telephone'(NSP.215),
may also refer to the same period. (Skea, Ann. Introduction)
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
·
Biography:
Beckmann, Anja.
anjabe_sp@yahoo.com. http://www.sylviaplath.de/
·
Introduction:
Skea,
Ann. Ted Hughes: An Introduction. (ann@skea.com)
09.05.06
http://www.zeta.org.au/~annskea/under85.htm
Sylvia:
Wagner-Martin Linda. Two Views of Plath's Life and Career. From The
Sylvia:
Stevenson, Anne. Two Views of Plath's Life and Career. From The
Plaths:
Mondragón, Brenda C. Neurotic poets. © 1997-2006
http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath/
08.05.06