Term Paper on "Colossus by Sylvia Plath"

Term Paper 4 pages (1322 words) Sources: 1

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Colossus - Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath was a troubled, suicidal creative artist, but her work is thought-provoking, eerie, mysterious and stimulating on a level few poets have achieved.

What reaction did I have after reading the book? Sylvia Plath's poetry at first reading appears to be very dark, with ample painful, dreadful, and also death-image-dark themes sprinkled in. She seems to seek to shock with her poetry. And as with all quality poetry, a lot of sensual images - smells (a pig barn with "mire-smirched" sow), sounds ("Mule-bray, pig-grunt") - were present, along with plenty of thought-stirring metaphors ("granite grin"; "blood-spore"; "glassy updraft"; "cabbage-roses"). I reacted with some sense of sadness, but also of being impressed with a poet coming up with such stark, angry, edgy lines and images.

Why did I react that way? Probably, when one is aware that the poetry being reviewed is the work of a person who committed suicide in 1963, and when one reads the poem "Suicide Off Egg Rock" on pages 35-36, a feeling of great sadness is clearly part of any reaction, and mine is not unique in that sense. Was she talking about what she eventually planned to do - kill herself? Or is the dark thought of suicide a very universal idea, because at one time or another in everyone's life, they perhaps think of ending it all; and, aware of this, she lays out those dark emotions for consideration.

The suicide poem "Hot dogs split and drizzled," is an image of grease flowing out of a frankfurter, which could perhaps be blood flowing out of a person, while in the background there are "gas tanks, factory stacks." The two images of gas and a smokestack combine, adding up to a potential explosion from the gas while foul smoke is going up and the man's bowels are as imperfect as the landscape? Is that telling the reader that the man has diarrhea? Did the greasy hot dog caused the bad intestinal action - or is the whole scene a kind of metaphor for bad food, bad indigestion, foul air, death, blindfolded (failure to see the misery surrounding life?) and deaf. What is her point, I ask myself, then read it again and see more in it than before.

And continuing to react to "Suicide Off Egg Rock"; the poet paints a picture of a dog chasing birds off the beach, and flies going in and out of what would seem to be a skull on the beach ("the vaulted brainchamber"), and she has words "wormed off the pages" (skulls, worms, a body "beached with the sea's garbage") - all in all a bleak, battered series of thought made into images.

How did I feel about "The Colossus"? I have emotions of empathy for her mixed with feelings that take me to a bizarre and unpleasant place in my head. This is a moving and mostly likeable poem, apparently about Plath's father, who is pictured (in a way that probably many girls and women think of their dads) as a huge statue, a relic, and a landmark from another era perhaps. She is trying to piece him back together - or is it just the pieces of the puzzle from her memory that she is trying to put into a clear family perspective? Did she not get a chance to say goodbye to him prior to his passing, and she is mournful of that now?

No matter as to why she felt this way, maybe it is a feeling of perhaps gaining some "closure" for her, following his death, that she crawls "like an ant in mourning Over the weedy acres of your brow..."? How could she realistically "mend the immense skull plates and clear the bald, white tumuli of your eyes" for him? Is he really that big, or is she very small juxtaposed with his memory?

And for her to continue, and to squat in the "cornucopia of… READ MORE

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