Sylvia Plath | Sample Answer
Sylvia Plath | Sample answer
‘Plath makes effective use of language to explore her
personal experiences of suffering and to provide
occasional glimpses of redemptive power of love’
(2014)
The poetry of Sylvia Plath is fundamentally a combination of suffering, desolation and the
occasional glimpse at the redemptive power of love. There is no escaping the fact that Plath's life
was an incessant battle with depression; a battle in which she was forced to endure until the age
of thirty, when she ended her own life on the 11th of February 1963. Despite this, or perhaps by
virtue of this, her poetry is wrought with effective language and jarring imagery in order to explore
her personal experiences with these distinct and universal emotions. Her ever-growing readership
is perpetually struck by the visual intensity of Plath's poems and by the hallucinatory, almost
surreal quality of her metaphors and symbolism. Plath flawlessly demonstrates her profound
knowledge in poetic form and literary techniques, lacking in the monotony and inaccessibility that
often infiltrate poets of a similar regard. The poems that I believe best represent her unique style
are "Finisterre" "The Arrival of the Bee Box" "Poppies in July" "Morning Song" and finally "Child".
Plath’s poetry is often haunted by her personal experience of suffering with a plethora of mental
illnesses such as depression. In "Finisterre", the sea's violent fury is often taken to represent
Plath's tumultuous mental state. The ocean is depicted as a terrifyingly vast "exploding force"
that "canons" into the coastline "with no bottom, or anything on the other side of it". Plath's use
of a hyperbole suggests a comparison between the infinite void of the ocean and her own
suffering mind. As we have seen, the images associating the water with an invading army
reinforce our sense of its volatile violence. She describes how the mist "erases" the rocks and yet
she still enters it. It’s as if on some psychoanalytical level she herself desires to be erased from
existence. It is evident that the effective imagery of the souls almost choking the speaker
highlight Plath's self-destructive desires as they "stuff [her] mouth with cotton". There is only a
slight semblance of hope in "Finisterre". The peasants mention a peaceful place "tropical and
blue". As the poem concludes, I am left with a yearning for the faraway waters to which the
peasants have "never been", symbolising the hope for inner peace within the poet herself.
