H1 Sample Essay | Sylvia Plath
H1 Sample Essay | Sylvia Plath
‘Plath’s provocative imagery serves to highlight the
intense emotions expressed in her poetry. Discuss’
Sylvia Plath is an iconic poet, renowned for her thought-provoking and disarmingly
honest perspective on life. In exploring her own varying intense emotions and
unpredictable psychological states, Plath helps us better understand the insecurities
and ambivalence we all experience at some stage in our lives. These poems which
universally connect with the reader in a dark but comprehensible manner convey
Plath’s esoteric but somewhat elegant view on life through her poetic genius. Plath’s
poetry has a tendency to be more pessimistic than optimistic, although poems such as
‘Morning Song’ and ‘Child’ reveal the power of the ephemeral positivity her children
bring her.
‘Elm’ exposes the dark, disturbed, deflated world Sylvia Plath lives in through her
sinister, striking and at times, shockingly provocative imagery. Plath’s iconic
pessimistic and depression-fuelled poetry is perhaps best represented by ‘Elm’. The
opening stanza introduces the personified elm tree addressing Plath as it were her
conscience. The elm tree arrogantly greets her with ‘I know the bottom, she says. I
know it with my great tap root. It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there’. I
felt the elm was addressing Plath in an omniscient manner, essentially articulating her
pain and emptiness, explaining how it will inevitably worsen. This arresting image
shows the sinister outlook Plath has not only on life but herself. The elm tree maintains
this authoritative tone throughout, taunting Plath about the elusive nature of love, ‘love
is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it. Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off,
like a horse’. The elm offers no reassurance, twisting the proverbial knife at a time
when Plath’s marriage was falling apart. The elm tree furthers this torture by reminding
Plath of her mediocrity, focusing on her faults and failures, ‘these are the isolate, slow
