Hughes’s “Pike,” Plath’s “Mirror”
Abstract: Sylvia Plath’s 1961 poem “Mirror” can be read as a rejoinder to Ted
Hughes’s 1958 poem “Pike.” Plath shrinks her husband’s mythic grandeur to
reveal a psychodrama of the self as a vanishing façade.
Sylvia Plath’s 1961 poem "Mirror" builds up to the appearance of a terrible
fish, an internalized counterpart of the watching consciousness under the dark
pond of Ted Hughes's 1958 poem "Pike." Whereas Hughes's poem evokes the
spirit of the place and the genetic residue of England's violent past, a version
perhaps of Clarence's dream of the sea of fish-eaten victims of the Wars of the
Roses in Shakespeare's history play Richard III, and the sunless sea from where
ancestral voices prophecy war in Coleridge’s “”Kubla Khan,” Plath's "Mirror"
narrates a lifetime of interactions with a nameless, faceless woman and imagines
aging as disfigurement. In Hughes’s poem, pike are both weapons (cf. a “pike”
as an instrument of warfare) and vital presences in the physical world that
provide inspiration for his poetic vocation. In Plath’s poem, a fish resides in the
mirror, a monstrous figuration of coming to recognize oneself as an aging,
vanishing façade. The poet speaks through the voice of her mirror.
Exploring timeless, primitive, ruthless fish, “Pike” chronicles a series of
vignettes that, observes Matthew Fisher, begin in plain diction, giving an
objective, scientific description: “Pike, three inches long, perfect/ Pike in all parts,
green tigering the gold.” The word “tigering” in the second line, pace Fisher,
perhaps evokes William Blake’s “Tiger, tiger, burning bright/In the forest of the
night,” an image of the destructive, devouring element of Creation. The green
and go...
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...Hughes’s Pike,” Explicator 47:4 (Summer 1989): 58-59.
Freud, Sigmund. (1919) “The ‘Uncanny’,” trans. James Strachey, Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James
Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), XVII: 218-252.
Hughes, Ted. Collected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber, 2004).
Hughes, Ted. Letter to Leonard and Esther Baskin, January 1959 (London:
British Library manuscripts).
Hughes, Ted, ed. Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems (New York: HarperPerennial
1982).
Keegan, Paul, ed., Ted Hughes, Collected Poems (London: Faber, 2004).
Plath, Sylvia. Collected Poems, ed. Ted Hughes (New York: 1982).
La Belle, Jenijoy. Herself Beheld: The Literature of the Looking Glass (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1988).
Porter, David, “Beasts/Shamans/Baskin: The Contemporary Aesthetics of Ted
Hughes,” Boston Review 22 (Fall 1974): 13-25.
Symbolism in The Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye", published in 1951, is his best piece of work. The story is about a sixteen-year-old young man by the name of Holden Caulfield. Holden is being expelled from Pency Prep and decides to leave three days early. He chooses not to go home, enabling his parents to receive the letter that his headmaster at Pency Prep wrote to his parents about his expulsion. He chooses to hang around in New York until Wednesday, when he is going to be able to return home.
.... Nevertheless, the defeat by the land provided O'Brien with a refreshingly new revitalization of the traditionally romantic motifs of water and land, while also exploiting the ambiguous nature of war.
Wallace, Daniel. Big Fish: A Novel of Mythic Proportions. North Carolina: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2012. N. pag. Print.
...rmation we seek, for example “I remember big fat ties with fish on them.” (Brainard 6) could perhaps
In today’s modern view, poetry has become more than just paragraphs that rhyme at the end of each sentence. If the reader has an open mind and the ability to read in between the lines, they discover more than they have bargained for. Some poems might have stories of suffering or abuse, while others contain happy times and great joy. Regardless of what the poems contains, all poems display an expression. That very moment when the writer begins his mental journey with that pen and paper is where all feelings are let out. As poetry is continues to be written, the reader begins to see patterns within each poem. On the other hand, poems have nothing at all in common with one another. A good example of this is in two poems by a famous writer by the name of Langston Hughes. A well-known writer that still gets credit today for pomes like “ Theme for English B” and “Let American be American Again.”
Have you ever heard of the term “doppelgănger”? If not, it means “double” in German. To say that the character, Joan Gilling, is Esther Greenwoods “double” in the novel “The Bell Jar”, by Sylvia Plath, would be an understatement. Esther and Joan are one in the same. Joan and Esther endure many of the same obstacles throughout the novel. Joan’s actions to these struggles ultimately make Esther come to terms with reality. Either change her ways, and move on with her life, or end up like Joan, dead.
In the early 20th century, many writers such as T.S. Eliot (Thomas Stearns Eliot) and Langston Hughes wrote what scholars of today consider, modern poetry. Writers in that time period had their own ideas of what modern poetry should be and many of them claimed that they wrote modern work. According to T.S. Eliot’s essay, “From Tradition”, modern poetry must consist of a “tradition[al] matter of much wider significance . . . if [one] want[s] it [he] must obtain it by great labour . . . no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists’ (550). In another term, tradition only comes within the artist or the art itself; therefore, it should be universally monumental to the past. And, Langston Hughes argues that African-Americans should embrace and appreciate their own artistic virtues; he wishes to break away from the Euro-centric tradition and in hopes of creating a new blueprint for the African-American-Negro.
Greenblatt, Stephen, and M. H. Abrams. "The Dream of The Rood." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 8th ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. 27-29. Print.
"The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind had loosed his chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel.
Upon first glance the differences between Hughes and Cullen seem very clear. Hughes writes in rhythm, while Cullens writes in rhyme, but those are just the stylistic differences. Hughes and Cullen may write poems in a different style but they both write about similar themes. The time they wrote in was during the Harlem Renaissance, a time period when African Americans were discovering their heritage and trying to become accepted in the once white dominated society. The African Americans had their own cultures and their own style of music and writing but they wanted everyone to know they were still human, that they were still American, even though the differences in color were apparent.
Metaphors by Sylvia Plath describes feeling heavy, fat, and nauseous literally. However every phrase, every line, and every word in Metaphors symbolizes a deeper alternate meaning. Sylvia Plath uses metaphors, symbolism, and motifs to explain the feelings associated with pregnancy.
...eats as well, when he refers to “…the shore of the wide world…” it symbolizes the world of his experiences, which he ponders on. It is only by deeper inspection of these symbols can a clear idea of what the poets are expressing be understood. By comparing both these poems, it is evident that although death is the focus of both these poems, Tichborne has accepted it, while Keats fears it, but has found a way to resolve his fears.
“Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.” ( http://thinkexist.com/quotes/sylvia_plath/)
Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved swims like a garden pond full of minnows with thoughts and memories of days gone by. Each memory is like a drop of water, and when one person brings up enough drops, a trickle of a stream is formed. The trickles make their way down the shallow slopes and inclines, pushing leaves, twigs, and other barriers out of the way, leaving small bits of themselves behind so their paths can be traced again. There is a point, a vertex, a lair, where many peoples streams unite in a valley, in the heart of a pebble lined brook, and it is here that their trickles of days gone by fuse with each other, and float hand in hand until they ultimately settle to form the backyard pond.
After the death of the albatross which “In this case…stands for all animals.” (Hochman 148), their ship is left stranded on a barren, windless sea. The shooting itself is senseless, the act without meaning. “That is, killing an animal apart from the purpose of survival, Coleridge seems to say, is a crime, i.e., murder, notably against the animal but against all of nature, especially one policed by spirits.” (Hochman 148). After drifting for days or perhaps even weeks, the crew is visited by the spirits of death and living-death. The spirit of death claims the lives of the crew while the spirit of living-death curses the ancient mariner to spend eternity on the windless sea. Lost and now alone on an endless ocean, the ocean mariner gives up hope of ever knowing anything else, and in his effort to shut out the blistering sun and taunting waves, he begs for a chance to repent. “Ironically, it is the “slimy”, “rotten” creatures themselves that finally comfort the Ancient Mariner and allow him to pray.” (GradeSaver, 4). Although, the Ancient Mariner experiences an interlude or of peace with the sounds of the skylark and gentle whispers of the wind, this “…does not transform him in the way the blessing of the water snakes did. The act of blessing