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Sylvia Plath: Another Sad Subject (Part Two)

© Audrey McCrone

"Mirror" is written in the voice of the mirror, which is "unguarded by love or dislike...The eye of a little god, four-cornered." It sees "her back, and reflect[s] it faithfully." The first part of this poem is factual. When Plath says "But it flickers./Faces and darkness separate us over and over," the reader gains a sense of dimming light. In the second stanza, we learn the dim "candles or the moon" are "liars," and Plath greets the mirror with "tears and an agitation of hands." Perhaps she feels herself age "day after, like a terrible fish." Fish, by the way, could be interpreted as a derogatory term attached to feminine vaginal odor. What a stereotypically female image, rather dogma.

"Morning Song" seems to describe an alienated sense of motherhood. The poem is about the birth of her daughter, Frieda, but leaves a cold sense, as the marble statuette image of a child: new, to be ogled by any joyful onlooker. But this poem lacks some matronly sense, the mothering instinct: loving and tender, even protective. Plath's daughter, said Plath, was brought into the world out of love, but the following quote truly disturbs me:

"I'm no more your mother/Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow/Effacement at the wind's hand."

The sea is what she heard first in "Morning Song," and perhaps she wished she was elsewhere for one short moment. She looked at the light of day creeping in her window, which "swallows its dull stars." Dull could represent the drudgery of family life, as typical as a child's wails in the morning, sounding song-like in high notes while "clear vowels rise like balloons." This poem becomes a moment in mundane routine after birth, and can be seen as hinting at postpartum depression. Such weight carries motherhood, for one woman in a “Victorian nightgown,” expected to be so much.

A non-sympathetic reader might fling an insult, labeling her "spinster," but she beat the critics to it. In "Spinster" we see two seasons: Spring (which is messy, burgeoning, giddy, and confusing as love); and Winter (with its orderly discipline, ice and rock "exact as a snowflake"). Plath decided that only idiots truly love,

" And round her house she set Such a barricade of barb and check Against mutinous weather As no mere insurgent man could hope to break With curse, fist, threat Or love, either. "

Love takes on a different meaning to me, and Plath never found a healthy way to love, which is fully give and take, while there are still good men out there to be found. Personally, I think the brutal treatment of her mental illness produced a most frightening catalogue of her deterioration, mentally. She becomes a question in trivia regarding her death (in the CD-ROM game You Don't Know Jack), so trivialized. Therefore, I see her tragedy and her prose the makings of ironic fate; her death, which she welcomed anyway, not forgetting her early optimism in her poetics. Her lonely mind, later.