'Death Represenataion in Sylvia Plath’s Selected Poems Essay\r'

' last mean in Sylvia Plath’s Selected Poems Mohamed Fleih Hassan Instructor English Dept. / swindle Death is genius of the signifi potentiometert and recurrent bows in the song of Sylvia Plath. This paper aims at showing the poet’s attitudes towards remnant. Certain rimes argon selected to show the poet’s un uniform attitudes to destruction: cobblers last as a feelual rebirth or renewal, and stopping point as an end. Most obvious factors shaped her attitudes towards expiration were the auricula atriily oddment of her induce that remaining her unsecured, and the unfaithfulness of her husband, Ted Hughes, who left-hand(a) her dejected and melancholy.\r\nPlath’s ‘ 2 spots of a Cadaver Room’, ‘Sheep in Fog’, ‘A Birthday Present’, ‘ demonstrate’, and ‘I Am Vertical’ atomic number 18 selected to depict her various perspectives towards remnant. Death Representation in Sylvia Plath’s Selected Poems Generally speaking, remnant is represented in books in various moods shifting from being an ominous terrifying trace to a performer of fulfillment and new beginnings. Death came to be a recurrent theme in Sylvia Plath’s numbers due to the sudden finale of her father. His demise left the daughter with powerful feelings of defeat, resentment, grief and remorse.\r\nSo the absence of the father had influenced her emotional bearing minusly to the design that it is reflected clearly in her meters. Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) passed in periods of nonion and on that point were precursors of suicidal act through fits of breakdown. Among the reasons for her early depression be the early shoemakers last of her father that left her unsecured and her failure to attend a piece of euphony class at Harvard. Though she got a mince as a college guest-editor of the Mademoiselle, and she got mo nononous with nada to fall back on in stark nake d York. She stony-broke down with the unfulfillment of her dream of being a successful writer.\r\nT presentfore, she took an over-dose of sleeping-pills to end her mishap, but she was saved. 1 after(prenominal) successful psychiatric sessions of recoin truth, Plath met Ted Hughes at Cambridge and they got married in 1956. She found in him a motive and respite for the absence of the father. Hughes believed in her exceptional gift. In that period, the join got success and fame with their poetic development, especially when they got children. Her poems had been published in Britain and America like, The Colossus 1960, which dealt with Plath’s preoccupation with ideas of dying and rebirth.\r\nHughes’ retire affair with a nonher(prenominal) woman broke the union of Plath, who suffered the devastation of the broken marriage. Shifting into a new flat in London, she started writing poems of rage, despair, love and vengeance but her poems were slowly accepted for public ation. She suffered the traumatic breakdown and melancholia that she put her head in the oven in 11 April, 1963. 2 Death came to be a recurrent theme in the poetry of Sylvia Plath, and this theme has been represented in different elbow rooms in her poems.\r\nShe did engage the reader either in a personal or an impersonal way to hatful death either as a liberating force or troubling depressing experience. Her depiction of death is reflected by the use of such techniques as imagery, language, structure, and tone. Her negative attitude towards death is caused by the early death of her father that left her dejected. In her poem ‘ devil positionings of a Cadaver Room’ (1959), she presents a disheartened point of view towards death. This poem recounts an experience she had term dating a young Harvard medical student.\r\nShe followed her fashion plate and some other medical students into an operating room where the students were busily dissecting a preserved corpse. Th e verbaliser and her mate ar horrified by the experience, the bank clerk offers both views of the cadaver room as alternate possibilities of portraying death in art; the physical view of death and the amorous view of death. One view is epitomized by the cadaver room contrasting the romantic one of death, which is represented by a flesh bulge out from a Brueghel painting depicting twain lovers, who are spell bounded by one another and careless to the destruction and devastation around them. The poem is written in two billets. The first part creates a futile setting in which things are described in a ‘dissecting room’, which suggests a mood of despondency. She did so by the use of wastelandish parable through comparing cadaver with ‘burnt misfire’: The day she visited the dissecting room They had four men set out, black as burnt turkey, Already half unstrung. (II. 1-3) The place ‘dissecting room’ suggests mercilessness and dehumani zation. The dead bodies are anatomized and bones are removed which suggest a wretched image.\r\nThe poetess compares death with the dissector, in which it takes off the spirit out of the body as did the doctor in dissecting the major constituents of bodies. Death here represents a terrifying force that annihilates man’s liveliness. The dissecting room serves as the epitome of scientific space, which is to claim death’s space. And this is the space not only of pistillate witnessing and female passivity, ‘she could scarcely make out anything/ In that dust of skull plates and old leather’, but also of a bestowment from male to female, from male scientist to female poet.\r\nThe growth of dissecting the dead body indicates the savageness and carelessness of the surgeon, who cuts out the heart; the symbol of man’s brio and feelings. The surgeon is associated with death in the good sense that he extracts the heart of the body, ‘He hands her t he cut-out heart like a cracked heirloom. ‘ The simile presents a really useless pessimistic image for the heart. The heart is not only reduced to a non-functioning machine, but a man hands death to a woman. The heart is the dearest to man and is compared to the heirloom which contains the memory of the dead, but it is uprooted maliciously.\r\nDeath came to be an unavoidable inheritance. 4 In many another(prenominal) of her poems, what Plath perceives is a death-figure which jeopardizes to swallow her up unless she can support her living identity by â€Å"fixing” and gum olibanum immobilizing her enemy in a organize poetic image. Plath transforms death by assuming the grapheme of a photo-journalist who observes the details in a way as to control the scene with the transforming power of language. She follows the technique of fusing various visual images in a meaning(prenominal) way. in that locationfore, she transcends the literal immediacy of what she sees and c reates order out of chaos. The twinkling part paradoxes the first in showing a couple who are ignorant of the horrors of death. Their ignorance of the shadow of death around them intensifies their tragic catastrophic end: Two people only are blind to the carrion forces: He, afloat in the sea of her blue satin Skirts, sings in the direction Of her bare shoulder, while she bends, Fingering a paginationlet of music, over him, Both of them deaf to the playact in the hands Of the death’s-head shadowing their song. (II. 13-19) Plath thinks that the plump for view was untenable.\r\nConfronting the literal physicality of death (as the narrator does in the first stanza), and ignoring that reality (as the lovers do in the Brueghel painting) seem hopelessly romantic and naive. The only way to relinquish the painful awareness of impending death is by relinquishing life itself. Plath committed felo-de-se in her flat moving herself and her work into the realm of myth and psycho-myst ical speculation. The back view of death is the bestowal of death that is interrupted by art. Paradoxically, this interruption of death by art is itself a kind of death, a freezing of life.\r\nThe poem surveys with an eye which is blind and an ear which is deaf. If the lovers’ blindness and deafness to death’s music permits them to ‘flourish’, then this flourishing is ‘not for want’. Paradoxically, the work of art saves from death by paralyzing or fixing the living in an absolute present, which is to say a perfected present, but without future: This booth of death’s triumph by art, this oppositeness of art to death, is itself a kind of death, since it reminds us that those lovers captured in art’s absolute present can do nothing at all.\r\nJust as there are two kinds of music here †the death’s-head’s and the lovers’ †so art is not placed in any simple ohmic resistance to death. 6 There are two kinds of death: on the one hand, death as process, as rebirth or renewal, as imaginary; and, on the other hand, death as end, as factuality. Plath rides into death in ‘Sheep in Fog’ (1963) but death is no longer c onceived as renewal. The objective in ‘Sheep in Fog’ becomes the ‘dark water’: They threaten To let me through to a heaven starless and fatherless, a dark water. (II. 13-15) The sense of dissolution is vanquish in this poem through thee description of the earth of the poem.\r\nEach line and separately stanza of the poem concerns the fade of something. ‘hills step off into whiteness’, ‘Morning has been blacken’ and the starless heaven leave her dejected and wretched. 7 ‘Sheep in Fog’ suggests that there is a infrastructure sundering of poet and poetry, a death of the poet that is the life of the poetry, if only as that which is in mourning for the poet. The impersonality of Plath’s la ter poetry is not arrived at through an ethical self-denial of the poet’s empirical, autobiographical self in the interests of a universal validity, a kind of immortality or demonstration against death.\r\nRather, it is an impersonality in which there is a highly ill-considered and unstable relation between poet and poetry. 8 ‘A Birthday Present’ (1962) is another dramatic monologue in which terror and death predominate. The persona longs to live on the gift presented by his friend. The vocalizer, her friend, and the object â€Å"talk” to separately other in the kitchen. She imagines that the present may be ‘bones’, ‘a pearl button’, and ‘an bead tusk’. Each of these things has white colour and suggests the nature of the birthday present that she wants.\r\nThe three white objectsâ€bones, pearl, and ivory tuskâ€all suggest death because they were once part of living organisms. The persona speaks of the veils around the present. In order to remove the concealing veil, which causes her anxiety and fear, the vocaliser demands an end to the screening off of death from view. She compares her life at the end of the poem to the arrival by mail of parts of her own corpse. At the end, the speaker demands as her birthday present not the previously mentioned symbols of death or the figure representing death, but death itself: 9 If it were death\r\nI would admire the of late gravity of it, its timeless eyes. I would know you were serious. There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday. And the knife not carve, but fancy Pure and clean as the cry of a baby, And the universe slide from my side. (II. 52-58) The poem dramatizes her birthday to be her death. The drama of ‘A Birthday Present’ is frightening in its transformation of a domestic and prosperous occasion into a celebration of suicide. It captures the movement of the speaker’s mind as she throws hers elf into the sequence of go that might lead her to kill herself.\r\nPlath’s second perspective towards death is that it may be elect by the individual himself as a marrow of self-destruction, rather than acting as a horrible exterminating force. The poetess aims to show the suffering and agony of the persona in selecting death as a means of venting of the antagonistic adult male of the person. This perspective is reflected in Plath’s ‘Edge’, which was written on 5 February 1963 and is fancy to be Plath’s last poem. According to Seamus Heaney, one of the biographers of Plath, the poem was a suicide note, which is to say an alone personal, autobiographical communication from a distressed melancholic woman.\r\nFor this reason, the poem is limited by the literal death of the poet, a death that cannot help but be read back into the poem. 10 This death is a negativity that renews, and works within an economy of life. This is not just an imaginary de ath, but death as a figure for the imagination itself, as a negativity that may be harnessed in the interests of life. This poem carries the reader not only to the in truth limit of life, but also to the limit of poetry. And yet, if in this poem the woman is ‘perfected’, it is through a death that takes the form of an aesthetic object, but in which the emphasis none the less falls very much on illusion.\r\nThe speaker in this poem doesn’t endure the anguish of his life and feels that his misery is over: The illusion of a Greek indispensability Flows in the scrolls of her toga Her bare Feet seem to be give tongue to: We have come so far, it is over. (II. 4-8) The bare feet mean the lack of protection and immunity. The tone looks submissive but it indicates the willingness to accept death as an outlet and leave out of the aggressive world. The persona feels alienated in the world around him. No one cares for the persona’s death even the moon, ‘The moon has nothing to be sad about/ Staring from her hood of bone. Therefore, she starts looking at for something beyond death, which is the longing for perfection. Usually come ups symbolize purity, so she compares her folding of the dead bodies of children as petals of a rose close. Therefore she thinks that through death, she will have a new beginning. 11 Death as a means of rebirth is reflected in Plath’s ‘I Am Vertical’. She sets images taken from nature as a background of her poem. This use of nature as a setting for her poem shows death not as a horrible monstrous thing. She presented two fruitful lively images of nature and then she negates her counterpart to them:\r\nI am not a maneuver with my root in the spoil Sucking up minerals and motherly love So that each skirt I may gleam into leaf, Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed Attracting my trade of Ahs and spectacularly painted, Unknowing I must currently unpetal. (II. 2-7) The persona feels rejecti on of the surroundings when ‘the trees and flowers have been strewing their feeble odours. I walk among them, but none of them are noticing. ‘ This represents the negligence of society and the social restraints that the individual feels. ‘each March I may gleam into leaf’ suggests the continuity of life and regeneration.\r\nShe is longing to be fall in with nature via death; the nature that symbolizes serenity and tranquility, ‘ because the sky and I are in expand conversation’. The word ‘sky’ gives death the sense of spirituality and elevation. The speaker is not satisfied in her life and she accepts death as a means for recognition: 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. (II. 19-20) Plath’s life is ended in a world of death and despondency from which there is no rebirth or transformation.\r\n'