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I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears
The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs
Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.
Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,
Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish—
Christ! They are panes of ice,
A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking
Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,
Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo
Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean
In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.
Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses.
With soft rugs—
The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,
Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,
You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.
Our emphasis ought to fall on a Wordsworthian-Whitmanian subjectivity that is just and inevitable. Against this stands the mode of confessional verse, a matrix that has produced W. D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and many other figures. Confessional poetry owes its genesis to Lowell, whose earliest writing looked like a late metaphysical pastiche for which his only precursors might be Edward Taylor and Allen Tate.
-Harold Bloom and David Bromwich
Personification
Simile
Metaphor
Allusion
Style
Under the influence of New Critical doctrines many of these poets began their careers writing tightly controlled formal verse, but then abruptly shifted to a more 'open' or 'naked' style in the sixties;
-Roger Gilbert
Major Themes
To define this process is Plath’s literary objective. Plath realizes that just as men require a thrust outward to connect their vision to the world, so women must also possess an energy capable of leading them out of the room-womb into the world.
-E. Miller budick
Sylvia Plath would have been the first to admit that there were multiple roles for women during the 1960s besides mothering or not mothering. In the age of professionalism, of incipient careerism, a woman would have been expected to have identities other than her status as a bearer of children.
-Linda Wagner-Martin
Blackberrying
Nobody in the lane, and nothing but blackberries,
blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
a black berry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
ebon in the hedges, fat
with blue- red juices. these they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
the accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.
Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks-
Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.
Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within
I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chineses screen.
The honey- feat of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.
One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.
The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me ,
Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmits
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.
The first stanza:
- walking through this amazing path of beaultiful colors
- critic Brita Lindberg- Seyersted says "the imapacient speaker seems to be in a hurry to get to the end of the journey without taking the time to enjoy the experience of the blackberry patch"
- " a sea somewhere at the end of it"- foresight that the reader will come upon this sea.
-" dumb as eyes" not transparent
"these they squander on my fingers."- squandering means the same thing as wasting here
Critic Chris Semansky says " the speaker does not feel worthy of the berries' juice"
the juice is seen as a "sisterhood" because the berries have shed their blood on her fingers.
"the must love me" because she has been eating them and they are shedding their "blood" really juices for her delight.
second stanza:
birds are the only things heard
- they are the only things protesting
" I do not think the sea will appear at all"
Critic: Brita says "This prufrockain evasion is meant to fortify the "child" against dissapointment
- Timothy Materer tells us about Plath's life saying, " they moved from their house near the ocean, which plath missed deeply, to Wellesley, Massachusetts."
the idea of not having the ocean appear is significant to her life of moving away from the ocean and no longer being able to see it
dont want to be building up to many expectations of the end
the highers meadows are green because they are so far up and further from the sea.
" berries so ripe it is a bush of flies"
showing the furthering of the path she is going down.
Third stanza:
"The only thing to come now is the sea"
- longing to see this ending result of where she has gotten.
critic Carl Mowery refers to this as " wishful thinking because there are two hill and one more turn in the path remain in the walk to the sea"
- now there is a discription of wind the scene is changing
the "hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt"
salt makes everything go brown and bad when on something green. the hills are too far away from the end thats why they are still sweet and green
"that looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space of white and pewter lights"- the sea is nothing. the end is just one big blank space.
"beating and beating at an intractable metal" - the end is here and the waves of the ocean are this constant beating.
critic: Brita says this is a " recognition of the naked, bitter truth about the world and her own place in it.
imagery:
- the sea of "nothing"
- the fat berries to the ripe berries
- berries " big as the ball of my thumb"
- "milkbottle, flattening their sides."
- green meadows
metaphors:
- berries are like humans being eaten by the universe- chris semansky
"slapping it's phantom laundry in my face"
personification:
berries = "dumb as eyes"
- berries cant be dumb or see
structure:
3 stanzas of 9 lines each
tone:
relaxed to worried
- anticipation
main themes:
path of life
at the end what will it really be like
constant cycle
end result death
Sylvia Plath
published her first poem when she was 8
her father died when she was 8
she tried killing herself with sleeping pills
February 11, 1963: killed herself with cooking gas at the age of 30
PARAPHRASE!
“We make new stock from the salt.”: women are taken advantage of and men use women
hand
WOMEN'S RIGHTS!!!
the advice I took away from this poem:
** believe in yourself and don't let anyone tell you that you can't do anything because you are a woman. **
** be strong against a man and don't let him control you**
BE CONFIDENT- don't let images and opinions affect you.
"Daddy"
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time---
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one grey toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of *you*,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You---
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.
If I've killed one man, I've killed two---
The vampire who said he was you
and drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There's a stake in your fat, black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always *knew* it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
Stan Smith
"spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other—she has to act out the awful little allegory before she is free of it."
Joyce Carol Oates
Sylvia Plath's tentative identity in such poems as “Winter Trees,” “Tulips,” and even the robustly defiant “Daddy,” is a child's consciousness, essentially, seizing upon a symbolic particularity (tulips, for instance) and then shrinking from its primary noon, so that the poems—like the fiction we read so often today—demonstrate a dissolution of personality.
Glyn Austen
`Daddy' is a poem of remarkable passion: bitter, angry, self-pitying, pathetic, triumphant -- it is a colossal achievement in which the poet manages to engage our sympathy and our admiration alongside our despair at her egocentric obsession with her own victimhood.
Roger Platizky
Plath's poem, indeed, seems like a runaway train barreling through one psychic nightmare after the other, until the speaker pulls the emergency cord that irrevocably separates the self from the tormenting other in the very last line: "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through."
Themes:
-abandonment
-victimhood
-death
-father figure
-breakthrough
7th Stanza:
After the women are trained and are worked together they are seen as “good, helpful” people
8th Stanza:
6th Stanza:
I think she is standing up for women here that images are wrong of women. However, when she says “it is your last resort” Plath is basically saying that having a defective woman in your life is better than no woman.
women are not perceived to be very smart
“It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof against fire and bombs through the roof. Believe me, they’ll bury you in it.”
Shows how during this time women were treated poorly and unfairly.
Women could not show emotion for the heck they went through
4th Stanza:
5th Stanza:
3rd Stanza:
Women's roles in society: always serve and work
it= women
Women are taken advantage of
Caroline Barnard
2nd Stanza:
“Stiches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then How can we give you a thing"
The only way for the speaker of her poems to deny the male victimizer, the only way not to be a victim, is to reject or destroy him altogether. But in so doing—in refusing, for example, to be the Applicant’s “living doll”—she places herself in an equally impossible position, victimizing herself.
my thoughts:
Women’s vulnerability and willingness to do whatever man asks of her for his pleasing
Very derogatory towards women
worthless
shows how men treat women
hand: women --> women's roles
First Stanza:
looking at women in a negative way as if they are an object
that they were made differently from men
the poem itself...
written after WWII
job interview: someone trying to sell themselves as a good worker
role being applied for= wife
woman is not getting a say in things
man is applying for some sort of product
a defective product
ways the poem could be read...
Pamela J. Annas
Susan Bassnett
As in many of Plath's poems, one feels in reading "The Applicant" that Plath sees herself and her imaged personae as not merely caught in--victims of--this situation, but in some sense culpable as well. In "The Applicant," the poet is speaking directly to the reader, addressed as "you" throughout. We too are implicated, for we too are potential "applicants."
'The Applicant' and 'Lady Lazarus', poems filled with images of the hatefulness of marriage and the powerlessness of women caught in the marriage trap
Brita-Lindberg Seyersted
The language of 'The Applicant' (221-22) is highly informal, matching the poem's urgent tone and fast pace. In contrast to the majority of her I-poems, here both speaker and addressee are men. The speaker, a matchmaker cum marriage-license dispenser, fires a series of preposterous questions at a man in search of a usable wife. Answers are inferred by the simple device of repeating a word: 'No, no?' The matchmaker resorts to slang and colloquialisms in his role as a falsely jovial questioner-adviser. He certainly has 'the ticket' for coping with empty heads: he only has to call a 'sweetie' out of a closet. 'Well, what do you think of that?' he triumphantly asks the empty-headed applicant. The extreme informality of the language serves to create a sardonic picture of marriage as a contemptible buying-and-selling operation