“I am Vertical”

by Sylvia Plath

“The Seven Sorrows”

by Ted Hughes

I AM VERTICAL

But I would rather be horizontal.

I am not a tree with my root in the soil

Sucking up minerals and motherly love

So that each March I may gleam into leaf,

Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed

Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,

Unknowing I must soon unpetal.

Compared with me, a tree is immortal

And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,

And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimallight of the stars,

The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors.

I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.

Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping

I must most perfectly resemble them--

Thoughts gone dim.

It is more natural to me, lying down.

Then the sky and I are in open conversation,

And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:

Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath/vertical.shtml

THE SEVEN SORROWS

The first sorrow of autumn
Is the slow goodbye
Of the garden who stands so long in the evening-
A brown poppy head,
The stalk of a lily,
And still cannot go.

The second sorrow
Is the empty feet
Of a pheasant who hangs from a hook with his brothers.
The woodland of gold
Is folded in feathers
With its head in a bag.

And the third sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the sun who has gathered the birds and who gathers
The minutes of evening,
The golden and holy
Ground of the picture.

The fourth sorrow
Is the pond gone black
Ruined and sunken the city of water-
The beetle's palace,
The catacombs
Of the dragonfly.

And the fifth sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the woodland that quietly breaks up its camp.
One day it's gone.
It has only left litter-
Firewood, tentpoles.

And the sixth sorrow
Is the fox's sorrow
The joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds,
The hooves that pound
Till earth closes her ear
To the fox's prayer.

And the seventh sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window
As the year packs up
Like a tatty fairground
That came for the children.

http://www.poetseers.org/poets/ted-hughes-poetry/seven-sorrows

COMMENTARY

First of all, this commentary is going to focus on two poems, the first one that I am going to treat is “I am Vertical” by Sylvia Plath and the second one is “The Seven Sorrows” by Ted Hughes.

These poets had a close relation, since they started to study at Cambridge University. In 1956, they met and by the time a couple of months had passed and they decided to get married. They had two children. The marriage met with difficulties and they were separated less than two years after the birth of their first child. Her strong and conflicting emotions of love, hate, anger and grief at the loss of her father were to affect Sylvia for the rest of her life. She also developed periodic bouts of depression, insomnia and also thoughts of suicide, as evidenced in her works. All these things affected their marriage and their separation was mainly due to her mental illness (Neurotic Poets).

These two poems, “I am Vertical” and “The Seven Sorrows” were written by different authors but they have similarities and at the same time both poems have differences.

Both poems seem on the surface to be about the thoughts or feelings that each author has. The poems refer to the same issue, generally speaking, “I am Vertical” and “The Seven Sorrows” emphasize, more or less, the aspect of nature together with death during the whole duration of the poems. Both speakers of both poems have the same thought: they start showing us the nature and conclude with death.

As I have already said the structure is, more or less, the same in both poems. The poems could be divided in two parts. In the first part of both poems the Plath and Hughes write about nature, for example in “I am Vertical”, Sylvia Plath uses: “tree, minerals, flower” and Hughes in “The Seven Sorrows” uses words like: “garden, poppy, lily, pheasant”; and then they conclude their poems with death. We can observe this when Plath says: “…And I shall be useful when I lie down finally…”, she means, when she dies. In the other poem we can observe a reference of death in the last stanza when Hughes says: “… And the seven sorrow/ Is the slow goodbye/ Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window/ As the year packs up/…”. Here the author refers to the passing of time, the old age and then death.

As we can find in both poems, the poets show us the same idea, their real life. But when you read the poems you can observe a big difference, it is their approach to the question, in this case death. Sylvia Plath wrote “I am Vertical” in the first person, as her own experience. I mean that death is shown as a wish, something that she always wished. “I am Vertical” as the title says “but I would rather be horizontal”. I have thought this because while you are alive you are always “vertical”, except when you are sleeping, as she says in her poem too, but when you die, you are “horizontal”, in your own coffin. In this poem we could see the wish of death that Sylvia had because of her illness. “She fell into depression and worked with a female psychiatrist on her problem, her suicide attempts”. (Neurotic Poets). On the other hand, Ted Hughes does not personalize his poem, this author writes general ideas that probably are feel by a lot of people. In this poem death appears like something natural, everybody will pass it. Hughes does not show us that he wants to die, however he shows us that death is a natural sorrow that always will exist. Ted Hughes also shows us in his poem the passing of time. Both authors use different ways of showing us that the situation is reliable, each one from their point of view. Concluding this aspect I could say that the first poem, “I am Vertical”, is as an imaginative situation, a wish, and the second one, “The Seven Sorrows”, as a song of experience.

The meaning in both poems is straightforward, while you are reading you can understand what the authors are talking about or referring to. I mean that these are not very complex poems when talking about their language. I have to say that in Plath’s poem her wish for death is occult; I mean that if you do not know about her suicides attempts, you do not think it. The authors of these poems use clear connotations to refer to what they want to mean. We can say that both authors dedicate the poems to nature and death.

Another feature is the type of poem that they are. About “I am Vertical” we can say that it is obviously autobiographical. Apart of the story that I have already told about her suicides attempts and her final suicide, we observe in the poem a lot of first personal pronouns. For example: the pronoun “I” appears fourteen times, once the pronoun “my” and “me” appears four times. All these pronouns refer to the speaker. In the other poem, “The Seven Sorrows” we can not observe any personal pronoun, but as it is a general feeling, we can think that Hughes is telling us his own experience. This poem could be also autobiographical.

“Animals appear frequently throughout Ted’s works” (The Academy of American Poets) as we can observe in this poem. “Hughes’ poetics works are rooted in nature, in particular, the innocent savagery of animals” (Ted Hughes- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). Sylvia’s poems are in her own voice and the similarities between the two poets’ works, Sylvia and Ted, are slight”. (Sylvia Plath- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia).

With regard to the length of the poems, they are different. “The Seven Sorrows” is longer than “I am Vertical”. The first poem is written in seven stanzas structure, sorrow by sorrow, it is forty-two lines long, six lines each stanza. The second poem is written in three stanza structure, it is twenty lines long, seven lines the first stanza, three the second and ten the third. The rhyme scheme that both authors use in both poems is irregular during the course of the poem. Both poems have a logical distribution.

In this commentary I try to observe if in the poems exist any reference or if I can observe that something exist that could differenciate the literature written by men or by women, but concretely in this poem it does not appear. I think that in both poems the features or the way of writing them do not make me think about the author. Both poems could be written by both, since nature or death is a general theme that both women and men feel. Probably if I had chosen another theme I could have observed it. But I wanted to know how they treat this theme. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes immerse the reader in the theme and at the same time the poems make you think about what they are saying, death and nature. In my opinion, the authors are showing their emotions, what they feel or felt in their life. They are composed by simple words and especially they have a simple theme as it is nature and death.

by Merce Quiralte Moragues.

(11 May 2006)

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Webpages:

-The Academy of American Poets- Ted Hughes-. The Academy of American Poets. Last modified 2006. Visited 7 May 2006.

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/113

- Ted Hughes- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Wikimedia foundations. Last modified 5 May 2006. Visited 7 May 2006.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Hughes

- Neurotic Poets. Brenda C. Mondragon. Last modified May 2005. Visited 7 May 2006.

http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath/

- Sylvia Plath- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Wikimedia foundations. Last modified 4 May 2006. Visited 7 May 2006.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath

Sources:

- Neurotic Poets: I am Vertical. Brenda C. Mondragon. Last modified May 2005. Visited 7 May 2006.

http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath/vertical.shtml

- The Seven Sorrows- Poet Seers. Abichal Watkins and Richard Pettinger. Visited 7 May 2006.

http://www.poetseers.org/poets/ted-hughes-poetry/seven-sorrows

Academic year 2005/2006
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Merce Quiralte Moragues
mamerqui@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press