sylvia plath: behind the rhymes (draft)

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sylvia plath: behind the rhymes

  • Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Boston, and died 30 years later by taking her own life.
  • Her father died from lung cancer when she was 8.
  • She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1959, 3 years after meeting him in Cambridge and they had two children together, Freida and Nicholas.
  • She was clinically depressed for most her adult life, and had attempted suicide several times before. She was treated multiple times with electroconvulsive therapy.  
  • In 1962, Hughes had an affair which led to their divorce. During this time, Plath experienced a great burst of creativity and wrote most of the poems on which her reputation now rests.
  • Plath was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning with her head in the oven, having sealed the rooms between her and her sleeping children with tape, towels and cloths. She was just 30 years old.

The common themes she writes about are:

  • Death. She explores the void in her life left by her fathers death, and how suicide will release her from the difficulties of life.
  • Victimisation. Plath explores how her father and her husband, Hughes, victimized her.
  • Nature. It is often associated with her father through the sea and oceans depicted in her poems. The sea is often shown as powerful, like her father. Nature is unpredictable and encourages her creative writing.
  • The patriarchal society she was raised in. She explores how men are superior and women were forced into becoming the perfect housewife.

The poem, “Circus in Three Rings”, by Sylvia Plath, is about the different stages of love. For all I know, it could have a different meaning, one that is significant to the author, but love is what I gathered. I like this poem because it speaks to me, it is very intricate in its wording, and uses an excessive amount of poetic devices. This poem starts off exploiting imagery when it says, “designed by a drunken God”, “champagne-coloured rain”, and much, much more. For example, “A rose of jeopardy flames in my hair” , “a fatal flair” , and “perilous wounds with a chair” , these lines set a dangerous and rebellious atmosphere. The author uses a simile when she says, “the fragments whir like a weather vane”. She exclaims how the fragments of her heart whirring like a weather vane because her heart is broken and the pieces are shattering apart. She also makes a reference “Mephistopheles”, a German legend of an evil spirit. There is a heavy amount of alliteration in this poem too, however, my favourite form is within the quote, “my demon of doom tilts on a trapeze”. The combination of those letters sound satisfying. There are quite a few reasonings I have for my assumption of this being a poem about love. For one, the first stanza talks about her extravagant heart and the metaphors of how it is breaking. In the second stanza, she is metaphorically putting up walls and barriers when her “gnawings of love begin”. Once a person gets into that mindset of seeing the meaning of the poem in that way, they can vaguely comprehend the rest of the poem. I don’t recognise what each individual metaphor implies, but I do understand that the whole poem is a metaphor for the ups and downs of love and how epic emotions can be.