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Interpreting Sylvia Plath

© Linda Sue Grimes

Sylvia Plath's reputation, no doubt, influences the way readers approach her poetry. As soon as one encounters darkness, blackness, blindness, paleness, silence-or just about any term linked to depression, illness, and death-the reader is off and running, finding another gloom-filled Plath poem. While there are a few of her poems that this view fails to account for, most of the time it can, in fact, be of great assistance in interpreting Plath. Even her little lyric in Ariel titled "Morning Song" has a stretch of gloom expanding through it.

The poem I am focusing on here is from her transitional poems collected in her book of the same title Crossing the Water. My guess is that if Plath has not completed her suicide the poems in this volume would have taken a different interpretive turn for most readers. But as she did successfully close her life, most readers are directed to find those gloom-filled metaphors.

From my Classic Poetry web site I received a question about Sylvia Plath's poem "Crossing the Water." I decided that my interpretation of the poem could be useful for my 20th Century American Poetry readers.

The poem consists of four three-line stanzas. I offer them here with my paraphrase following each stanza:

Crossing the Water by Sylvia Plath

Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.
Where do the black trees go that drink here?
Their shadows must cover Canada.

The speaker observes two people in a boat. It is at night or after dusk. The speaker wonders about the trees near the lake and muses that they must be tall enough to throw their shadows over a whole country.

A little light is filtering from the water flowers.
Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:
They are round and flat and full of dark advice.

The water lilies seem to reflect some light, and the speaker thinks they are inviting her to stay awhile. She describes their shape and claims that she intuits some disturbing thoughts from them.

Cold worlds shake from the oar.
The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.
A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;

The speaker imagines an other-worldliness bouncing off the ends of the oars as the rowers continue to cross the lake. The speaker is filled with darkness, and she even claims that that darkness even fills the fish in the lake. She sees the rower have some difficulty as if hung up on some obstruction; she imagines it to be the hand of a dead body greeting the rowers.