"I shut my eyes and
all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"
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The poem that I have chosen to analyse is
called “Mad Girl’s Love Song”by Sylvia Plath in contrast to the poem “A Woman
Unconscious” by Ted Hughes.
First of all, I would like to begin by saying that
“Mad Girl’s Love Song” is a very suggestive poem that could be about a love
affair or could also be about the cascade of emotions that Sylvia was going
through at the time she wrote the poem. Maybe she felt that this poem was a way
of expressing the unfairness of existence, how something could be destroyed
with the blink of an eye, how any perfect feeling that enters your life is so
brief and frail that that you struggle to believe in it.
On the other hand, a feeling of disappointment
can be noticed by reading the poem. She made an image up inside her head, an
image of her perfect man, who can return her love, but this idyllic image will
never come true because the man who was supposed to be perfect, is just a
simple man that will never share Sylvia Plath’s love.
I consider the poem as an anguished expression
of broken idealism of the true love, the unreciprocated love.
Of course, the poem cannot be addressed to her
husband, Ted Hughes, because it was written in 1953, several years before she met
Hughes in 1956, but it could probably be addressed to a previous frustrated
relationship with a man who really marked Sylvia for the rest of her life[1].
Secondly, the poem “A Woman Unconscious” by Ted
Hughes is also about disappointment, but in this case it is a different
disappointment, it is the one that one feels when one’s marriage is going up in
smoke. In this poem Huhges is describing how he feels that nothing could have
been done for their marriage because it was doomed to fall apart. He describes
his wife onto the hospital bed being “beyond her last sense”[2].
But the most important thing is how they
express their personal feelings and the differences that we can find in reading
the two poems:
“Mad Girl’s Love Song” is divided into six stanzas. Each of them contains three verses, except the last one that contains four. The rhyme is “aba aca ada eba afa abaa” . The first remarkable feature in Plath’s is the musicality with which she writes. This musicality makes the poem easy to remember. On the other hand, another feature is the fact that the whole poem is written in between inverted commas in the first person singular, showing a direct speech conversation as if she was speaking directly to her ideal man. Besides, we can notice as well the use of brackets in the last verse of each stanza, to say “I think I made you up inside my head” (first line of the poem). This punctuation mark is clearly marking the bondage between her imaginary world, the world in which she has created him and the real world, the one in which as she explains, everything crumbles and she expresses her disappointment through a series of metaphors that show clearly her desperation. Some of them are: the one referring to blackness that she finds when opening her eyes and she realises that nothing is real and “an arbitrary blackness gallops in her beautiful starry sky” (second stanza).
Another metaphor is the one that she uses about God falling from the sky to hell`s fires. This similarity creates a paralellism between how something perfect (as God) can be destroyed just with the blink of an eye, and fall in the deepest desperation (as hell is), (fourth stanza).
Another remarkable aspect is that she uses as well some verbs that show the terrible disappointment that she suffered, verbs that express what she wanted to happen and however, it never did. This is related to the broken idealism of a woman that looked for a lost paradise.
In the last stanza, we can find a tone of irony since she feels spiteful by her idealised man and she is reproaching him for not returning her love. Obviously, the fact that she establishes a comparison between this man’s love and a bird’s love is an exaggeration that she uses to show her big disappointment.
Furthermore, another aspect that I found really interesting to comment on is the treatment of the “I”. The verse “ I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead”, repeated several times throughout the poem gives her a sensation of being the centre of the world. It is a useful device to express her feeling at the moment she shuts her eyes and feels that the world surrounding her falls down.
The use of repetition is a strategy that makes more evident and stronger her feeling of desperation or sadness.
In the case of Ted Hughes I would like to highlight the way in which he explains his disappointment because of his relationship with his wife.
This poem seems to be addressed to Sylvia Plath at the moment she was at hospital. He expresses the frustration that causes on her to know that between him and his wife there is nothing and little by little this relationship is breaking.
His anguishing tone responds to that he knows that their marriage is condemned to break because the things never went right between them. He recognises that it will not endure in the same way that his wife’s sanity will disappear.
As a conclusion, I would like to finish by saying that mwn and women are not so different because we can find this melancholic tone in both poems to talk about personal experiences.