due to Hughes, as a modern figure, writing about his own personal experiences; his bitter sadness is bound up with the bright side of love and positivity that has come in the wake of their relationship. ‘Pink Wool Knitted Dress’ references this happiness, as he recalls Sylvia “you sobbed with joy”. The use of the word ‘pink’ in the title is deliberate, denoting femininity, innocence, and happiness, things that are all destroyed eventually. There is contrasting motivation to write this text compared to the other two, as this appears to be Hughes way of dealing with his feelings of sadness following Plath’s suicide. The journey through their relationship from the happiness of their marriage in ‘Pink Wool Knitted Dress’ starkly contrasts some of the later poems. For example the poem ‘Epiphany’, with the title meaning sudden moment of realization, shows the deterioration of their relationship, as Hughes epiphany is that “our marriage had failed”. The use of the word ‘had’ shows the certainty that the marriage was finished, and they were no longer right for each other.
Within Birthday Letters, there is a rich dialectic that is not evident in the other texts. Dark melancholic thoughts such as in ‘The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother’ where Hughes says “I buried her where she fell” shows his bitter sadness. Thoughts such as these battle against bright love, as they both shape and affect each other, competing in a mutual and dynamic way. The poetry collection produced by Plath at the time. ‘Ariel’ may be a source allowing further understanding of the relationship. Within her poem ‘Lady Lazarus’, Plath presents herself as a “phoenix” stating “I eat men like air”. In this first meeting, she bites him and scars him. Evidently, this hints how th...
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...dark side of love has a common thread within all three texts, of jealousy and obsession, but it appears in different shades. For Birthday Letters, the mental turmoil of Plath that is ignited by her obsessive love for Hughes appears to have cast a dark shadow over him, and their relationship. The dark side of love in Rebecca, is not as psychologically deep as the others. The darkness instead is jealousy and obsession characterized by gothicism and the supernatural, made for dramatic entertainment. Above all, the dark side of Othello is the jealousy and obsession that he feels over his wife and her actions, of which Iago acts as a catalyst, only speeding up the destruction of their relationship, shownt through the dramatic superiority of Othello. All shares the common thread of obsession and jealousy, affecting the characters and bringing about negative repercussions.
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Show MoreLucinda lived a very long life of ninety-six years. From what Masters conveyed with his poem, it seemed like Lucinda enjoyed her life and was very satisfied with everything she had accomplished. In the first few lines of the poem she talks about going to different dances and how the frequently switched partners, until one day she met Davis. They were soon married and stayed together for seventy years. She and Davis had twelve children, but eight of them died. How the eight children died when never explained in the poem, but it could relate to the time period in which the poem was placed in. In the early 1900?s it was normal to have many children, but unless a family had the resources needed, some of the children may die. She also did many activities such as spinning, weaving, kept the house up and also nursed the sick, which could relate to the time period this poem is taking place in also. The intent that the author was trying to get across is one that, people could life happy lives in a very simplistic way, such as Lucinda did.
While studying in England, Sylvia Plath met Ted Hughes, an English poet. Plath married Hughes on December 7, 1956. Plath and Hughes moved back to the United States in 1957. While in the country, Plath worked as a professor at Smith College teaching English Language and Literature; however in 1959, Plath gave up teaching and moved back to England to continue her writing. In 1960, Hughes and Plath had their first child, Frieda. Two years later, the couple had their son Nicholas. The same year Nicholas was born, Hughes left Plath for another woman. Hughes affair greatly impacted Plath’s writing as well as her other relationships with men such as her father’s. (Smithipedia)
The common thread of jealousy ties together the main plots in Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and The Winter's Tale. In each of these plays, the main conflict is centered around some form of jealousy. While jealousy is the mutual, most prominent cause for turmoil in these plays, its effects on the characters, and ultimately the plots, is different in each case. This difference has much to do with the way in which the concept of jealousy is woven into each play, and what it is intended to accomplish.
In Othello, no "good" love exists between any of the characters. Shakespeare creates a cast of romantic and platonic couples whose affection is weak and unsustainable. Iago, not Othello, is master of this play; he establishes all the action. There is an underlying weakness and depravity in all the characters, or Iago would never have been able to ruin so many lives. But Iago is unswayed by the external; his black heart is his only guide.
Despite the fact that both poems compare life and it’s obstacle, they both express their experience in different manners. In contrast towards Hughes's poem, Espada’s poem provides the reader with an expression of empathy as stating: “ Every open book was a pair of hands upturing and burning” (Espada) which
Sylvia Plath's works are known for their extremes. Much of the influence of her poems came from the males in her life that had the most effect on her; her father, Otto Plath and Ted Hughes, who she married and later it fell apart when Ted began having an affair. The effects of these men on her were mostly negative, making her poems to have loathing and suffering.
She then had attended a party where she met Ted Hughes an English poet who immediately caught her eye at first glance. By the time Plath and Hughes had been together for 2 months they were discussing marriage and decided to get married secretly so it wouldn’t jeopardize Plath’s fellowship grant.
Plath never got over the loss of her father and her failed marriage to well known poet Ted Hughes. She wrote, "Me, I never knew the love of a father, the love of a steady blood-related man after the age of eight .... I hated men because they didn't stay around and love me like a father" (cited in Hughes & McCullough, 1982, pp. 266267). In an article, Jon Rosenblatt describes her poetry by saying “Whether the poems take place inside a house or in the countryside, the identical metaphorical relationships are established between a vulnerable speaker and a destructive environment.” By the end of “Daddy” the speaker comes off as a force to be reckoned with and her message is final
The first character we meet is Ruth Younger. Ruth is a hardworking mother who has had a thought life up until this point. The Writer opens up describing her by saying that “she was a pretty girl, even exceptionally so, but now it is apparent that life has been little that she expected, and disappointment has already begun to hang in her face.” (Pg. 1472) This description bears a strong resemblance to the line in Harlem, “Does it dry up, like a raison in the sun?” (Line 2) We immediately are thrown into the madness of her life. She wants desperately to have a happy family and is in constant disagreement with her husband’s ideas. We see how her living arrangements have made her believe that there will never be anything better in this world for her. The saddest part is that she believes that bringing another child into this sad existence is something she cannot do. When she makes the decision to visit the abortion doctor, it immediately brought me to the final line in the poem where Hughes states “Or does it explode?” (Line 11) There had to be an explosion of desperation for a w...
Five years later her father retired from his job to take care of all of the children and happened upon Lazarus’ poetry notebooks. After reading them and taking a great liking to them, he carried the poems off without Lazarus’ consent and had them published for private circulation. When Lazarus was informed, her poems had already received much praise so, adding t...
Love is a force that can overtake large adversities and can stumble over small challenges. Love is an intense feeling of deep affection. Love is eternal, but can be deflected. Different forms of love are expressed by Othello, Desdemona, and Iago in Shakespeare’s play Othello. As a result of romantic love, Desdemona splits from her family, and Othello slays his wife. Next, familial love, not as dominant as romantic love, is evidenced in Desdemona's choice to marry Othello against her family's requests. Lastly, Self-love is the basis for characters such as Iago and Othello to abandon moral reason. Love comes in different forms.
First, in accordance with the pessimistic approach, the prevailing themes in Othello were addressed from a negative point of view. Love, the main subject around which the play evolved (Heilman 94), was important to the characters: judging from Othello’s words, he “did thrive in this fair lady’s love, / And she in mine” [his] (Shakespeare, Othello 1.3.125). These words were confirmed by the lady herself, Desdemona, who dared to disobey her father for she “did love the Moor to live with him” (Othello 1.3.248). Iago acknowledged the significance of love for others, whether they were spouses or friends. Nevertheless, he stated that love is short-lived, ceasing “when the blood is made dull with the act of sport” (Othello 2.1.227). By suggesting that it is “merely a lust of the blood and a permission of the will” (Othello 1.3.304), he doubted love’s existence altogether.
Overall, the imagery that Plath creates is framed by her diction and is used to convey her emotions toward all relationships and probably even her own marriage to Ted Hughes, who had rude, disorderly habits. Even the structure of the poem is strict in appearance as each stanza ends with a period and consists of exactly six lines. In addition, the persona of the poem is very detached and realistic, so much that it is hard to distinguish between her and Plath, herself. However, Plath insinuates that the woman actually wants love deep down, but finds the complexity and unpredictability of love to be frightening. As a result, she settles for solitude as a defense against her underlying fear.
Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night revolves around a love triangle that continually makes twists and turns like a rollercoaster, throwing emotions here and there. The characters love each another, but the common love is absent throughout the play. Then, another character enters the scene and not only confuses everyone, bringing with him chaos that presents many different themes throughout the play. Along, with the emotional turmoil, each character has their own issues and difficulties that they must take care of, but that also affect other characters at same time. Richard Henze refers to the play as a “vindication of romance, a depreciation of romance…a ‘subtle portrayal of the psychology of love,’ a play about ‘unrequital in love’…a moral comedy about the surfeiting of the appetite…” (Henze 4) On the other hand, L. G. Salingar questions all of the remarks about Twelfth Night, asking if the remarks about the play are actually true. Shakespeare touches on the theme of love, but emphases the pain and suffering it causes a person, showing a dark and dismal side to a usually happy thought.
The poetry of Sylvia Plath can be interpreted psychoanalytically. Sigmund Freud believed that the majority of all art was a controlled expression of the unconscious. However, this does not mean that the creation of art is effortless; on the contrary it requires a high degree of sophistication. Works of art like dreams have both a manifest content (what is on the surface) and latent content (the true meaning). Both dreams and art use symbolism and metaphor and thus need to be interpreted to understand the latent content. It is important to maintain that analyzing Plaths poetry is not the same as analyzing Plath; her works stand by themselves and create their own fictional world. In the poems Lady Lazarus, Daddy and Electra on Azalea Path the psychoanalytic motifs of sadomasochism, regression and oral fixation, reperesnet the desire to return to the incestuous love object.