PLATH'S PATH (2) / NO.14 / 4th MARCH 2024

 Plath and her works

    Dear readers, This blog post is a sequel to the last one. To view the previous blog, please click here . The first poem of Plath that I ever read was "Edge". It enthralled me right away. Her poems typically have a gloomy and unsettling mood. Although I can't recall the exact year I read this poem, I am positive it was a long time ago.

    It was also prescribed for us in our syllabus. Oh, how I cherished the Women's Writings paper. It was like the cherry on top—poets like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Kamala Das, and Mamta Kalia were prescribed. I still recall that we were taking hybrid classes during the Covid-19 period. Some of these poems were taught via Gmeet in the online mode, while the others were taught in a hybrid format.

    It was hard to tell who was speaking in class with all the masks and such. Our professor used to teach and  people would answer during discussions, but it would take us a few minutes to figure out who was speaking. The battle of ideas and the explanations are still fresh in my memory. Plath draws a connection between a woman and the moon in "Edge". We had insightful conversations around gender norms and these similarities. We had a fantastic time indeed!

    Given that Plath suffered from serious depression for a number of years, the themes of death, tragedy, and trauma are easily visualized in her works. According to Plath, the recently deceased woman in the poem absorbed her children back before they were even born. "She has folded / Them back into her body as petals /Of a rose" . That is something I could never have thought of. It's beyond what I could have imagined. What may have been possible (her death prevented her from giving birth to her future children) became an impossibility. Plath has developed a remarkable viewpoint on birth and death.

    Her other poems, "Mad Girl's Love Song," "Tulips," and "Daddy", highlight this facet of her existence. There's the melancholy strain in every line. If only people could read between the lines, they would see how depressed she really was. It is said that her well-known book, The Bell Jar, is partially autobiographical. The tale does a fantastic job of capturing her early existence. Once more, her trauma, sadness, and suicide all have an impact on it.

    "Lady Lazarus" is another poem that really caught my attention. I was drawn in by the title. The first time I read the poem, I was a teenager. Being a naïve one, I wondered how Lazarus could be a woman. All I knew was that Jesus had risen Lazarus from the dead. I had trouble understanding Plath's point of view. As the years passed, my literary background enabled me to fully comprehend the message.

   She was discussing how she managed to attempt suicide once in every ten years. The entire poem describes her attempt at death and her subsequent survival. She says,

 "Dying / Is an art, like everything else. /I do it exceptionally well."

    She believed that she was an expert in the art of dying because of her feelings of depression. She made multiple attempts at suicide, yet she managed to survive. The line "Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair" is her explanation for this. Whatever said and done, her act of suicide cannot be justified by anyone.

    She didn't realize that living life despite all of the challenges and setbacks is art in its purest form, when she declared, "Dying is an art." 

Wish she had lived a little longer...

An ardent fan,

S. Jennifer Sandra