Modernist Poets

Modernist Poets

Monologue At 3 AM
By Sylvia Plath

Analysis of the Strenght & the Weakness of the Author throught her poem

Paola Enguix
paenfer@alumni.uv.es
Gr. A

1.- Introduction

In this work I’m going to analyze a poem by Sylvia Plath, Monologue At 3 AM, written in 1956. I have choosen this poem because I just needed one read to feel the strong emotion that the author felt when writing it. I will analyze this strenght of Sylvia Plath to speak clearly about her feelings, deep, sincere and raw like no one has written them before, and at the same time, the anguish, the desperation of the one who feels her life running away unnavoidable, loosing all its sense, killing her slowly. Unless she does her best to move forward to it.

2.- The Poem

Monologue at 3 AM

Better that every fiber crack

and fury make head,

blood drenching vivid

couch, carpet, floor

and the snake-figured almanac

vouching you are

a million green counties from here,

than to sit mute, twitching so

under prickling stars,

with stare, with curse

blackening the time

goodbyes were said, trains let go,

and I, great magnanimous fool, thus wrenched from

my one kingdom.

http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/3am.html

3.- Analysis of the Poem

3.1.- Title

The title of the poem is not quite explicative by itself, in fact, just reading the title will mean nothing for the reader unless curiosity by the strangeness of the chose make him or her go further and read the poem. It’s necessary to read further to understand the complexity of the title, the meaning beyond the hour; Sylvia Plath is alone, mourning, feeling fury and unable to share her feelings, in the middle of the night. She feels alone, lonely, and resoluted to come to a term with her life. At this hour, into the night, she resolves it’s better to suffer from reality than keep quiet, turning mad and unable to avoid it. If she has to suffer she prefers to suffer out loud, showing everybody, than myserably, quiet and pretending to be fine. 3 AM are the pure loneliness in which just a loner person can think rationally into her own unrational self-destructive feelings. It’s freedom.

3.2.- Themes

Famous for her tragic life and suicide, Plath is also known for writing The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel detailing her struggle with depression. Along with Anne Sexton, Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry that Robert Lowell and W.D. Snodgrass initiated.

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

The theme of this poem is loneliness, resolution, fury, determination, her own strenght to decide what’s wrong with her and what she has to do to avoid falling into madness. She has to be honest, to reflect in her words the violent passion of her emotions. The fact that she has to decide whether she lives longer suffering or dies leaving pain aside. Just for herself. Because she feels she’s all alone in this moment to make her decission. And she decides it’s better to feel than to restrain her emotions.

3.3.- Structure

In this poem there are two stanzas well defined and different one form the other:

3.3.1.- First Stanza

Better that every fiber crack

and fury make head,

blood drenching vivid

couch, carpet, floor

and the snake-figured almanac

vouching you are

a million green counties from here,

In the First Stanza we can see a very vivid image of the death, the pain of the separation, both physical and emotional that led this dark thoughts of her to the point of thinking in suicide and depict it as a snake-figure, represented by the blood, her life, and the sin, the knowledge, because she knows her own life is a prove of her love a million green counties from here, from her.

3.3.2.- Second Stanza

than to sit mute, twitching so

under prickling stars,

with stare, with curse

blackening the time

goodbyes were said, trains let go,

and I, great magnanimous fool, thus wrenched from

my one kingdom.

While, in the Second Stanza we can identify sorrow, for the loss, the giving up of hopes and the right to be furious, just to sit and stare, like a living doll, never interacting, avoiding the painful situation she’s livig, in order to die slowly inside exposed to everything outsida, unable to do anything for herself.

Plath is making a choice in this poem; she’d rather die, live intensely and painfully for a brief time, than stand, or try at least, the pain of her living situation, and cope with her expectatives as a wife, as a woman, never realized because she cannot have what she wants. She won’t be free to express herself.

3.4.- Style

3.4.1. Communicative Structure

Sylvia Plath is narrating from her perspective, in the 1^st person plural during all the poem, both stanzas. She is an omniscient narrator, that knows everything, and she is adressing to someone she would not reveal to the reader. It is a very intemate poem, as all her poems are.

3.4.2. Cohesion

During most of the poem she uses juxtaposition to lead one image, one word with another, giving a sense of separate things but at the same time related, one after the other.

(...)blood drenching vivid

couch, carpet, floor

and the snake-figured almanac(...)

than to sit mute, twitching so

under prickling stars,

with stare, with curse

blackening the time

goodbyes were said, trains let go,(...)

She uses coordination to emphasize the begining of a sentence or to put two elements together as one leading to the other.

(...)and I, great magnanimous fool

3.4.3. Lexis and Semantics

Sylvia Plath loved to use metaphores in her poetry, and references to mithological and old characters in the history. Here she uses a very direct language to express her emotions, but when she has to describe something difficult for her, she visualizes an image that express in one word lots of feelings. Her language is not difficult nor arrogant; she is addressing to someone intimately, as if talking directly, so her poems are easy to read but difficult to understand for the complexity of her emotions.

3.4.4. Rhythm and Rhyme

Plath's work is valuable for its stylistic accomplishments--its melding of comic and serious elements, its ribald fashioning of near and slant rhymes in a free-form structure, its terse voicing of themes that have too often been treated only with piety.
http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/plath/twoviews.htm

In this poem she, as well as most of the modernist poets, uses free verse rhymes, giving strnght to the poem by the words used more than for its rhyme, so the meaning of the poem is not threatened by the choosen of words by its rhyme. Its a matter of rhytm when reading, to know the words that emphasizes the final meaning of the poem.

4.- Personal Interpretation on Monologue At 3 AM

For me Monologue At 3 AM is a poem full of passion that shows a woman consumed by her longuing to be self-sufficient, to led and lead her own life and wishes, and fullfil each and every one of them. But she feels trapped in a world where she cannot make her aspirations come true. She carries a burden, a trauma, since she was a child, and her vision of life has been changing to a point where she cannot stand dissapointments. She needs to be free, to stay in peace with herself. In this poem she is telling us, addressing to someone unknown, that she needs to feel herself by herself, and to know things although they are apinful. Because she can’t be a mere espectator of her own life.

5.- Analysis of the Strenght & the Weakness of the Author throught Monologue At 3 AM

‘In early 1956 Plath learned that her grandmother in America had stomach cancer, and she herself suffered with insomnia and sinus infections as her writing was rejected from publication after publication while what was published was receiving poor reviews. One night, she attended a party held to celebrate the launch of a new Cambridge literary magazine, St. Botolph's Review. Among the poetry she most admired in it was that of a poet named Ted Hughes. After arriving at the party quite drunk she gazed across the room at a "big, dark hunky boy, the only one... huge enough for me," and wanted to know who he was immediately.

After meeting Hughes in person, she proceeded to quote one of his poems to him. In a side room into which he had guided her, he ripped her hairband and earrings off when she pulled away as he tried to kiss her. Soon after, she bit his cheek when he went to kiss her. Each of them, it seemed, had met their match. Walking back to her college later, a male friend warned her that Ted Hughes was "the biggest seducer in Cambridge."

Ted Hughes had earlier published a poem about a "Jaguar"--so over the next few days, Plath composed the poem "Pursuit" in which a woman is stalked by a panther. On her way to a spring vacation in Europe, she spent a night with Hughes and his friend in a London flat. The attraction between Sylvia and Ted was even greater at this meeting--she found Hughes' power and strength irresistible. She spent even more time with him after she returned and throughout the spring. By the time a couple of months had passed, the two were discussing marriage.

They decided to get married, but secretly, so that it would not jeopardize Sylvia's academic career or fellowship grant. So on June 16, 1956 while her mother was visiting, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes were married in the Church of Saint George the Martyr in London. Sylvia wore a pink suit and held a pink rose which Ted had given her. The newlyweds spent time that summer in Paris, Madrid and Benindorm, Spain on the coast, where "every evening at dusk the lights of the sardine boats dip and shine out at sea like floating stars." They spent their days writing, studying, swimming and enjoying the quiet town. Some of the poems Sylvia wrote during this newlywed summer of writing include "Fiesta Melons", "Alicante Lullaby", "The Goring", "The Beggars", "Spider", "Rhyme", "Dream With Clam Diggers", and "Epitaph For Fire And Flower". There was one alleged episode which darkened the otherwise idyllic days of their summer. Years later Sylvia told a friend that one afternoon as they sat on a hill Ted was overcome by such rage that he started choking her, and she resigned herself to die. The episode made her question her somewhat hasty decision to marry him.

(...)

There is some mystery over her whereabouts in September. One likely story claims that, having become pregnant, yet still believing she needed to keep the marriage secret, she had travelled to the States to have an abortion. The first-year Fulbright student (and aspiring poet) she had met and become friends with on the ship back to England tells of a strange remark Sylvia made one night in London. When he asked her if she would like to go see the new movie War and Peace, her cryptic reply was "Listen, some day I'll marry a poet like you and kill myself." (!)

By October she was back in Cambridge, not only writing and submitting her own work, but acting as Ted's literary agent as well by submitting his work to both English and American publishers. By now Plath had learned that the marriage was no threat to her fellowship, and so Mr. and Mrs. Ted Hughes lived openly married in Cambridge. Both of them were so into astrology and the occult--believing they would be just like Mr. and Mrs. W. B. Yeats--that they created a Ouija board which they came to believe would bring them money by predicting the football results.’

http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath

Plath's style breakdown by her husband, Ted Hughes went in three modes; Juvenilia, early 1956-late 1960 and late 1960-Febrary 11, 1963. Sylvia's goal as a writer was to control and manipulate experience with an informed and intelligent mind.
Early 1956-Late 1960 was influenced by Hughes and his marriage to Plath. Ted monitored Sylvia's work closely during this period. A period also marked by Sylvia's rapidly shifting style. Plath did this in poetic experiment trying to find her own personal voice. With each set of shifts Sylvia left behind a group or Family of poems which all share a general likeness and are asociated with a particular place and time. These were collected later and set in Sylvia's first published collection, "The Collossus".

http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Cafe/3683/plathstyle.html

Born in October of 1932, Sylvia Plath was a prolific writer who wrote in a wide variety of genres. Though best known as a poet, she was also a novelist, essayist and short story writer.(...)
During her years writing poetry, Plath, along with Anne Sexton, advanced the genre dubbed confessional poetry. That form was initially credited to Robert Lowell and W.D. Snodgrass, and it appears in the work of Elizabeth Bishop, another Massachusetts native.
Seemingly compelled to perfection, Plath suffered from severe depression throughout her life. It is speculated that she suffered from either bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia or obsessive-compulsive disorder. During the summer of her junior year while still a student at Smith, Plath attempted to take her own life by swallowing an excess amount of sleeping pills. That experience forms the basis of her novel, "The Bell Jar." (...)
(...) barely two years after the birth of their first child, Plath and Hughes marriage fell apart. Living alone with two children, little money and a life of hardship, the mental health issues returned. On February 11, 1963, barely 30 years-of-age, Sylvia Plath did in fact take her own life.

http://www.miamipoetryreview.com/2007/01/sylvia-plath-poetry011907.html

We can see in this 3 fragments that Sylvia Plath was a very passionate woman, a person unable to restrain herself from what she wanted, yet careful with its implications.
She found in Ted Hughes her “soulmate” and her weakness. Because Sylvia Plath was free before Hughes, and that freedom of choice gave her power among herself and her own life. Hughes took an important part of Sylvia, and that disturbed deeply Plath’s feelings, both good and bad. Because he gave her happiness, and also wronged her with another woman. Plath, a person who had attemped suicide before, found in Hughes’ betrayal a cause for her emotions to go wild.
Though I don’t think her suicidal tendencies were an illness such as bi-polar disorder, schizophrenia or obsessive-compulsive disorder, as it is said in text 3; Plath’s suicidal tendencies were moments of breakdown, not a mental issue, for if she had wanted to kill herself, she would have attempted several times, not only 3. If she were really tired of living she would have commited suicide long before Hughes, long before university, and never writing poems. Her dark feelings led her to poems, and in them she found catharsis. She wrote to feel alive, to find a sense for her life and express all she couldn’t out loud, threatened by electroshocks. She was really tortured by her incapacity to express her feelings, and fell into a depression deeper and deeper.

Her 3 attempts of suicide, one of them successful, had each one a clear relation with an exact moment in her life:
·The first attempt had to be with a trauma provoked by the death of her father, who with she had a strange relationship.
‘Sylvia was still confused and angry about her father's death--she sometimes felt that, in a way, he had committed suicide because he could have prevented it. 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.’
[http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath]
·The second one has to be with stress, with the preasure she was bowed with, as her poetry made her more famous and dissapointments beyond her control took place. That one was a serious one, one undoubtfully planned to be the last. She was into a deep depression.
‘These successes in publication, however, came after much hard work and persistence in submitting her writing to numerous periodicals. Time after time the rejection slips would come--sometimes causing Plath to begin doubting her abilities and fearing she had lost her talent. She developed a pattern where, throughout her life, stress would often lead to bouts of illness, which would cause depression and more stress, each feeding upon the other to lead her spiralling down. Slowly, though, she would seem to recover--her successes and achievements helping to buoy her spirit.
In the Fall of 1950 Sylvia entered Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts. She continued to build her writing career as she wrote and published in both the college newspaper and in large-circulation magazines like Seventeen, Harper's and The Christian Science Monitor. In 1952 she won Mademoiselle's college fiction contest with her story "Sunday At The Mintons". Throughout college she also dated many boys, and the most serious relationship was with Dick Norton, a Wellesley neighbor. However, she also developed periodic bouts of depression, insomnia and also thoughts of suicide, as evidenced in her journals: "To annihilate the world by annihilation of one's self is the deluded height of desperate egoism. The simple way out of all the little brick dead ends we scratch our nails against.... I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to crawl back abjectly into the womb."
Sylvia spent most of June 1953 as one of twenty "guest editors" at Mademoiselle magazine in New York City. Having earned the position through an application process started the previous Fall, the experiences of this month were to mark a turning point for Plath. One day she missed an unplanned lunch her editing manager spent with Dylan Thomas. She was so upset over missing this chance to meet Thomas that she became obsessed with attempting to meet him another way. For days she would hang out at his favorite New York taverns and she even spent time waiting in the hallway of his hotel. Another girl described Plath's increasingly strange behavior just before their time in the program ended. Sylvia came into her room one night asking to borrow a dress because, she claimed, she had thrown all of hers off of the roof of the hotel.
(...)
At the end of the month, Plath returned to Wellesley. Mademoiselle's August issue featured several articles by and about Plath, and her poem "Mad Girl's Love Song". Despite the seeming success, the month in Manhattan had exhausted and disillusioned Sylvia. The stress of June, and the disappointment of learning that she had not been accepted to a particularly desired course at Harvard Summer School led her to believe she was a disappointment to everyone around her. As time progressed she began to lose concentration, to the point where she could not write, and she developed severe insomnia, not sleeping for days at a time.
One day when her mother noticed healing scars on her legs, Sylvia said she just "wanted to see if I had the guts" and admitted that "I want to die!" She was immediately taken to see a psychiatrist. After several sessions and a diagnosis of severe depression, Plath was prescribed what was thought at that time to be the best therapy for emotional problems: electroshock therapy. Her first session began July 29, and eventually she developed an acute insomnia where she did not sleep for three weeks and became immune to sleeping pills.
On August 24, 1953 Sylvia waited until she was alone in the house, then broke into the family lockbox to steal the sleeping pills that had been locked away. After leaving a note that she had gone for a long walk, she entered a crawl space under the porch through the cellar and swallowed about forty of the pills. When her family discovered her missing, an all-out search was launched, with friends, family and local officials searching as far away as Boston.
By the next morning, the story of Plath's disappearance was in the front pages of several major newspapers. Her mother grew more distraught when she discovered the pried-open lockbox and missing pills. Two days later the story continued to run in the papers, including the information about the missing sleeping pills. Aurelia explained that her daughter had been upset over her inability to write as of late. Sylvia was finally discovered on the 26th after someone heard moaning in the cellar. She was covered in her own vomit and, dazed but alive, was rushed to the hospital in a semi-comatose state.’ [http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath]
·The third one was her last and successful attempt to end her life. Her reasons not to have done it before have little to do with the electroshock therapy, which has been proved not to be effective in depressive cases. Her 2 attempts before had happened when she had no one who she felt she could rely on. That las one, though, has to do with betrayal. Hughes, as I said before, fired Sylvia’s dark and hidden suicidal emotions, these taht dealt with dissapointments, pain and loneliness. She couldn’t bear that different dissapointment, though sha has always been a dark figure, it does not imply sha had always willed to die. The fact she was overcame by the situation sunk her.
‘In December Plath moved herself and the children back to London, to a flat once occupied by W. B. Yeats, whom she admired. Deciding that the best way to get back at Ted was through her writing, Plath had begun work on a new novel titled Doubletake (and later, Double Exposure) in which the heroine's seemingly perfect husband turns out to be an adulterer. She also wrote the poems "Brasilia", "Childless Woman" and "Eavesdropper". Facing her first Christmas without Ted since they had met was difficult. Friends and family started to feel that despite the brave face Sylvia put on and her claims that she was happy to be rid of him, she secretly hoped for a reunion with Ted. They suspected she was undergoing a severe emotional crisis, not unlike those feelings of rage, fear and abandonment that she underwent at the death of her father twenty-two years earlier.
In mid-January The Bell Jar was published in England under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. It met with positive reviews such as that of one critic who wrote: "There are criticisms of American society that the neurotic can make as well as anyone, perhaps better, and Miss Lucas makes them triumphantly.... This is a brilliant and moving book." From January to February she continued to write poetry: "Sheep in Fog", "Child", "Totem", "The Munich Mannequins", "Paralytic", "Gigolo", "Mystic", "Kindness", "Words", "Contusion", "Balloons" and "Edge". The last, about a dead woman, being perhaps the last complete poem she wrote.
The January weather had been horrible in London, and it only added to Plath's worsening depression, as her friends and physician witnessed. Her doctor attempted to find her a bed in the over-full psychiatric hospitals for weeks. In the early morning of February 11, 1963, however, Plath set some bread and milk in the children's room then cracked their window and sealed their door off with tape. She went downstairs and, after sealing herself in the kitchen, knelt in front of the open oven and turned the gas on. Her body was discovered that morning by a nurse scheduled to visit and the construction worker who helped her get into the house.
Plath's world had become too much for her to take. The depression had overcome. Just six months before her death she wrote of feeling "outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers' beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass."’ [http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath]

Monologue At 3AM was written in 1956, the year Sylvia and Ted married, and the year she had second thoughts of her decission. It is impossible to know what led her to this thoughts in the middle of the night, for her life at the moment did not seem to be chaotic nor unhappy, not at all, though she carried a depression never utterly cured with the electroshocks. Motherhood might had also been a possible cause for her thoughts that night. One way or another, a person who has attempted to commit suicide, will always try again, and Sylvia Plath wasn’t an axception. But her catarsis in the poems helped her to freed herself.

6.- Conclusion

I have choosen this poem because of its strenght, the passion that fills every word, put in its exact place to mean not less than the word before, but to emphasize the feeling of sadness yet powerful longuing to find herself. Because the title call my attention, and the poem took my heart. The emotions are so powerful you can feel identified with her anguish, and yet even knowing there is no escape, feel relieved. Just because you know it. And knowledge is power, if not over someone else, over yourself.

7.- Bibliography

Sylvia Plath Homepage
http://www.sylviaplath.de
http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath
http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/3am.html

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Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia
http://www.wikipedia.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath

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Compiled and Prepared by Karen Ford and Cary Nelson
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