Introducing
Your new presentation assistant.
Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.
Trending searches
Plath emphasizes the amazing transformation that can come from letting go and becoming one with nature. Once you become at one with your surroundings, you will be able to accomplish and change things for the better. The transformative death within this poem kills off the fragile woman that Plath starts out as, and enables her to become the empowered person we see at the end.
"And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning." (Lines 26-31).
Plath compares herself to the arrow flying straight into "the red eye, the cauldron of morning". Not only is this a nice use of kenning's, it also demonstrates Plath's darker tendencies. the "cauldron of morning" is supposed to symbolize the sun. Plath wants to fly towards the sun until she is consumed. The "cauldron of morning" symbolizes the imminent death that plath is charging forward. Morning sounds like
Mourning. Coincidence? I think not!
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.
God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow
Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,
Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks—
Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else
Hauls me through air—
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.
White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry
Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
The speaker (presumably Plath) is off riding her horse Ariel. Ariel goes crazy and the speaker looses control over the reins, and the thrilling ride brings Plath to meditate on things such as Life and Death with a thrilling and exhilarating undertone.
"Godiva, I unpeel—" (Line 20).
Lady Godiva was a young woman married to Leofric. Godiva repeatedly asked her husband to lower taxes for the town of Coventry. Leofric said that he would the day she rode naked, horseback, through the town. Taking him up on his bed, Godiva completed his challenge and became a heroine for her town. The "un-peeling" that Plath mentions alludes to Lady Godiva un-peeling her clothes in order to complete the bet.
"I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringency." (Line 20-21)
The image of un-peeling dead hands brings in a harsh and morbid image, paralleling the depression that Plath is experiencing in her everyday life. The un-peeling of the speakers dead hands also symbolizes a rebirth, a new beginning achieved through this metamorphosis.