A Red Red Spirit

847 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Theories on Sylvia Plath's poems

A Red Red Spirit

Life and death, beginnings and endings. The death of one person: the ending of two lives, or the beginning of both? Sylvia Plath, tumbling through madness toward suicide, created a collection of poems titled Ariel, and used the theme poem to express the revelations she had while planning her own suicide. Thirty years later, the man who was blamed for her madness and death - her husband, British poet Ted Hughes - finally responded to the accusations with a set of his own poems he called The Birthday Letters. His poem Red is a direct response to Ariel. The two poems seek to present opposing views of Plath's madness and the "revelations" she found within insanity. One sees her death as a beginning, an entrance into a new state of consciousness. The other looks at it as an ending, as the loss of something unique and priceless. Sylvia Plath seems to suggest that her entire life had been meaningless, flat blankness, but that her madness had opened her eyes to a new world. Ted Hughes appears to look upon her death in a distinctly different way. He sees it as violent, as an enormous loss, as a fallacy that ruined everything Plath had.

Plath states her feelings in the first stanza of Ariel: "Stasis in darkness. / Then the substanceless blue. / Pour of tor and distances." Her words suggest that she believes her entire life had been meaningless, flat blankness, but that the outpouring of emotion that went into Ariel allowed her to see things differently. She speaks of "substanceless blue." Blue - the color of the sky, representative of light and knowledge. The "pouring" of lava - which forms tor - suggests that the enormous number of poems she created in a very short period of time allowed her to gain knowledge she had never had access to before.

Even the title of the poem seems to suggest an evolution within the author. The name Ariel has two different meanings. First, it is the name of a spirit in Shakespeare's The Tempest. This spirit, near the end of the play, is released from her servitude to Prospero, and becomes a being of pure energy, free and beautiful. There is a direct connection between this image, and the image of Plath gaining some new revelation near the end of her life, causing her to view the world in some new and wonderful way.

Show More
Related

  • The Plath Celebration: A Partial Divided

    1862 Words  | 4 Pages

    Specifically, both the context of the poem and Plath’s life. In “Daddy” Plath displays what is called an Electra complex. The Electra complex is similar to the Oedipus complex where the daughter feels an unyielding sense of affection towards her father. In the book “The Norton Introduction to Literature” by Kelly J. Mays, it goes more into detail about the Electra complex where despite Electra having a “tyrannical” father, “Electra persists in loving her deeply flawed father long after he is dead” (1100). In order to translate this complex into her writing, Plath chose to compare her flawed father to a well-known tyrannical force. By using this comparison we get a sense of what her relationship with her father was like. The Electra complex is also apparent throughout the poem, where in the beginning we see how her younger self associated her father with this god-like figure and despite the obvious fear Plath had for him through the line “I have always been scared of you,” (41) she wanted to end her life in order to “get back” to him (59). Supporting the notion that Plath did have an Electra complex with her father at least throughout her childhood.

    Read More

  • Rebirth in Sylvia Plath's Lady Lazarus, Fever 103, Getting There, and Cut

    1293 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Ariel-period poems of Sylvia Plath demonstrate her desire for rebirth, to escape the body that was "drummed into use" by men and society. I will illustrate the different types of rebirth with examples from the Ariel poems, including "Lady Lazarus," "Fever 103," "Getting There," and "Cut."

    Read More

  • Lady Lazarus, by Sylvia Plath

    1123 Words  | 3 Pages

    “Lady Lazarus” is a poem by Sylvia Plath, written in 1962 shortly before her death in early 1963, and published posthumously by her husband, poet Ted Hughes, in 1965 in the collected volume Ariel. “Lady Lazarus” is a poem about suicide as a rebirth, and was in part inspired by Plath's own life and draws heavily on Plath's lifelong struggle with bipolar depression and suicidal feelings, and uses holocaust imagery to paint a bleak portrait of suicide and hopelessness.

    Read More

  • Ted Hughes: The Shadow of Sylvia Plath

    2307 Words  | 5 Pages

    As England’s Poet Laureate, and recipient of both the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry and T.S. Eliot’s prize for poetry, Ted Hughes was an acclaimed poet. The shadow of Hughes late wife, Sylvia Plath, kept Hughes stagnant in his career, in which he was known as “Her Husband” (Middlebrook). Hughes most recent collection of poems, Birthday Letters, took him over twenty-five years to write, and contains poems which recount the marriage of the couple. Hughes wrote the poems as a loving gesture towards Sylvia, but the poems were misinterpreted as “an attempt to adjust the public record in the wake of her confession and the mass of commentary which has grown up around them” (Spurr 3). Hughes incorporated into his poetry the ideals of postmodernism, his somber life and relationships, simplistic formatting, imagery, and allusions. Hughes influenced the world through his animal images and multifarious tones.

    Read More

  • Women's Fight Against Social Convention in Sylvia Plath's Poem, Ariel

    657 Words  | 2 Pages

    "Ariel" is the title poem from Sylvia Plath's controversial collection of poetry written during the last few months of her life in 1963. The traditional gender roles of 1960s America promoted a double-standard and wrongly imposed upon women the idea of a "Happy Housewife Heroine" who cherished "the receptivity and passivity implicit in (her) nature" and was "devoted to (her) own beauty and (her) ability to bear and nurture children" (Friedan, 59). Plath comments on the devastating effects of social convention on individuality, but she realizes that both sexes are affected by society's oppression of its members. She contemplates this theme throughout Ariel, especially in the "The Applicant," a critique of the emptiness of the stereotypical roles of men and women at the time.

    Read More

  • Mirrors by Sylvia Plath

    975 Words  | 2 Pages

    Plath employs a shift to accentuate a change in time. The speaker of the poem says “I am silver and exact/Now I am a lake” (1, 10) to indicate an alteration in time. The purpose of the device is to convey an adjustment in c...

    Read More

  • Mad Girl Plath

    588 Words  | 2 Pages

    The poem, “Mad Girl’s Love Song”, highlights Sylvia Plath’s struggle with depression and her mental illness. As a form of expression, Sylvia Plath wrote “Mad Girl’s Love Song” in 1953, her last years of her life. Six years into Plath’s marriage with English poet, Ted Hughes, depression started to kick off in her life. Hughes began seeing other women and not responding to Plath as her husband. According to the Poetry Foundation, “She let her writing express elemental forces and primeval fears”. Plath’s poetry slowly became more violent and intense. Many people like to blame Hughes for her mental illness. In 1953 Plath decided to end her life by using her gas oven.

    Read More

  • Sylvia Plath's Life and How It Influenced Her Poetry

    1847 Words  | 4 Pages

    Sylvia Plath’s life was full of disappointment, gloominess and resentment. Her relationship status with her parents was hostile and spiteful, especially with her father. Growing up during World War II did not help the mood of the nation either, which was dark and dreary. At age 8 Plath’s father of German ancestry died of diabetes and even though their relationship was never established nor secure, his death took a toll on her. “For Sylvia, who had been his favorite, it was an emotional holocaust and an experience from which she never fully recovered” (Kehoe 90). Since she was so young she never got to work out her unsettled feelings with him. Even at age eight, she hid when he was around because she was fearful of him. When she was in his presence his strict and authoritarian figure had left an overpowering barrier between their relationship. Sadly enough by age eight Plath instead of making memories with her dad playing in the yard she resented him and wanted nothing to do with him (Kehoe). These deep-seated feelings played a major role in Plath’s poetry writings. Along with his “hilterian figure,” her father’s attitude towards women was egotistical and dismissive, uncondemning. This behavior infuriated Plath; she was enraged about the double standard behavior towards women. Plath felt controlled in male-dominated world (Lant). “Because Plath associates power so exclusively with men, her conviction that femininity is suffocating and inhibiting comes as no surprise” (Lant 631). This idea of a male-dominated world also influenced Plath’s writing. Unfortunately, Plath married a man just like her father Ted Hughes. “Hughes abandonment apparently stirred in her the memories and feelings she had struggled with when her ...

    Read More

  • tulips by slvia plath

    474 Words  | 1 Pages

    Plath writes in seven line stanzas. She uses a unique rhyme scheme that changes from in each stanza. Occasionally she isolates one line in order to annunciate its meaning. She also uses enjambment to help stress the meaning of certain lines. Plath also like to use metaphor and simile in her poem. Lines nine and ten she uses simile when she writes, “Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut. Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in”. She is stationary in her bed and almost doesn’t want to see everything anymore but she cannot hide what is going on around her.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Lady Lazarus And Tulips By Sylvia Plath

    1314 Words  | 3 Pages

    According to Dyne, “Plath borrowed the miracle of Lazarus, the myth of the phoenix, the hype of the circus, and the horror of the holocaust to prophesy for herself a blazing triumph over her feelings of tawdriness and victimization” (397). By using the title of this poem, Sylvia Plath creates an allusion. She refers to the biblical Lazarus, who Jesus raised from the dead. According to one source, “…like the Lazarus of the title, its persona miraculously survives each brush with death” (Maramarco 85). Within this poem, Plath also compares herself to appalling remnants from the Holocaust:“my skin / Bright as a Nazi lampshade / My right foot / A paperweight / My face a featureless, fine / Jew linen” (Rooney). Sylvia imagines that she is a primary victim of the horrific Holocaust just trying to survive day by

    Read More

  • Research Paper On Sylvia Plath

    1669 Words  | 4 Pages

    Through her dark and intense poetry, Sylvia Plath left an eternal mark on the literary community. Her personal struggles with depression, insecurities, and suicidal thoughts influenced her poetry and literary works. As a respected twentieth century writer, Sylvia Plath incorporated various literary techniques to intensify her writing. Her use of personification, metaphors, and allusions in her poems “Ariel,” “Lady Lazarus,” and “Edge”, exemplifies her talent as a poet and the influence her own troubled life had on her poetry.

    Read More

  • Animal Rights Essay: Why Should Animals Have Rights?

    1667 Words  | 4 Pages

    Every year millions of animals are used in medical experiments for the benefits of human health. Animals are used from anything from vaccines and other pharmaceuticals to cosmetics. Luckily, in the latter years scientist have found other ways to test drugs and make-up rather than on animals in some cases. Medical testing, especially in the early stages, can be excruciatingly painful for animals and can even cause death. The same can be said about the cosmetics testing. There are many rallies against animal testing as to where the line is drawn when it comes to animal rights.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Lady Lazarus And Daddy, By Sylvia Plath

    966 Words  | 2 Pages

    Death is inevitable and a lifelong process in every individual’s life. Most importantly, we are unaware of when or how it will happen and, because death can come at a time when we least expect it, it allows some individuals to fear death. In both poems, Lady Lazarus and Daddy, by Sylvia Plath, show different ways to view death. In Lady Lazarus, Plath talks about the characters attempts to commit suicide. Throughout the poem, we discover that the first time she tried to commit suicide was an accident while her second and third time were intentional. While Daddy reveals the process of how a girl came to terms with her father’s death. Although some may assert that the poems show rebirth, both poems reveal death as a way to escape from reality.

    Read More

  • Psychoanalytically Analyzing the Poetry of Sylvia Plath

    1843 Words  | 4 Pages

    A brief introduction to psychoanalysis is necessary before we can begin to interpret Plaths poems. Art is the expression of unconscious infantile desires and the strongest of these desires is the wish to “do away with his father and…to take his mother to wife” (Freud, “Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis 411).This is what Freud called the Oedipal conflict. For women the desire is of course reversed to killing the mother and marrying the father and is called the Electra complex. Children resolve this conflict by identifying with their same sex parent. Loss of a parent can prevent the normal resolution of the Oedipal conflict and result in a fixation or obsession with the lost object (object is the term used to define the internal representations of others). The desire to have the lost object back is also the desire for what Freud called primary narcissism. ...

    Read More

  • A Women's Relationship With Men in The Poem Daddy by Sylvia Plath

    1014 Words  | 3 Pages

    Plath’s father died early in her life leaving her with unresolved feelings, and this brought a lot of troubles later on in life. Sylvia was a great student but when she was overwhelmed with disappointments after a month in New York, she attempted suicide (“Sylvia Plath”). After receiving treatment and recovering, she returned to school and later moved to England where she met her future husband, Ted Hughes (“Sylvia Plath”). Their marriage with two children didn’t last when Ted had an affair. They separated and Ted moved in with the new woman, leaving Sylvia and their two children. Battling depression during this time, Sylvia soon ended her life. She left behind numerous writings that many might see as signs of her depression and suicide attempts.

    Read More

More about A Red Red Spirit

Open Document