27 September 2013

The Colossus

Reading Plath's poem 'The Colossus' was an interesting experience- it was one of those poems that, upon reading for the first time, I couldn't tell what exactly it meant but I knew that I enjoyed it.  The first line really draws me in, gives me this pleasurable discontent that is so hard to explain- "I shall never get you put together entirely."

Even after I've read the poem several times, I just can't decide what it is that she's trying to put back together. In class, we threw around several ideas- the patriarchal poetic tradition, her own work, her marriage, even, but none of them really seemed to fit. It seems the Colossus itself is to me a sum of shards that I just can't piece together- but I suppose out of the possibilities I've entertained, the closest that comes to working and the one that breeds the most interesting questions is that this monster represents the poetic tradition that Sylvia Plath tried to fit herself into. 
Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.
This is my favourite stanza- especially if we're taking the Colossus to be the poetic tradition that she is trying to squeeze herself into. This crumbled monster still speaks from its place in the sand, and Plath has spent her entire life writing, reading, and trying to make something other than silt come out of its throat.

I still don't really think that this Colossus = White Man Poet tactic is exactly what she's going with in this poem, but then again I don't really know what she's going with at all.

18 September 2013

The Goring

Plath's The Goring really stuck to me, even before we got to talk about it in class: the  way in which she spoke of the violence of the bullfights that she saw in a manner that might not be quite expected, one way or another:


The Goring Arena dust rusted by four bulls' blood to a dull redness, The afternoon at a bad end under the crowd's truculence, The ritual death each time botched among dropped capes, ill-judged stabs, The strongest will seemed a will towards ceremony. Obese, dark- Faced in his rich yellows, tassels, pompons, braid, the picador Rode out against the fifth bull to brace his pike and slowly bear Down deep into the bent bull-neck. Cumbrous routine, not artwork. Instinct for art began with the bull's horn lofting in the mob's Hush a lumped man-shape. The whole act formal, fluent as a dance. Blood faultlessly broached redeemed the sullied air, the earth's grossness.
I love the way she portrays her dissatisfaction with the bull fights in this poem; not in a way that she was bored with it, but that the "obese, dark faced" picadors and matadors seemed bored with it.  

I felt this dissatisfaction she held with the ceremony of it all without really thinking too deeply until we spoke about it in class- especially considering the line "Instinct for art began with the bull's horn..." What does this have to do with art? We were asked, and it seems that it really has nothing to do with art, in the standard, creative sense- but it led me to ask the related question what does Sylvia Plath define 'art' as, anyways?  


Well, we have evidence in this poem that what the bull does, for Plath at the very least, is art for her, and not what the over-comfortable picador does: cumbrous routine. The picador is comfortable in his place with the bull, when the bull stays away from him and allows itself to be killed. This it not art, nor is it interesting, nor I think is it the true reason behind the ceremonial bullfights, and when a picador or matador is too comfortable in the ring the ceremony looses its meaning, its ritual.  

Art, then, is struggle, is unexpected, is a bull horn in the side, watching an obese picador doing his job for the day turn into a "lumped man-shape." There is nothing interesting or even relevant about bull fights when there is no risk. To put an animal in a cage with one's self to fight, to see which one comes out on top, is to simulate man's fight with nature itself.

Is it a celebration of man overpowering nature, becoming master of what triumphs over it? Which in this day and age is given to the point of irrelevance and thus this ceremony feels arrogant, death for the sake of meaningless entertainment. Which is why the injury (death?) 'redeems' the sullied air, the earth's grossness, the ritual of the fight- the entire ceremony is useless when all that happens is the act of the picador killing the bull ("ritual death each time botched") and not the bull retaliating ("Blood faultlessly broached").

17 September 2013

Fig Trees

I haven't read The Bell Jar yet, but in my internet travels I found an illustration by Zen Pencils that someone had done of a quote from the novel. I don't have much to say on the matter, but I thought it was a great representation of the quote, and since it was relevant I decided I'd post it up onto the blog. You should take a look!


11 September 2013

First Impressions

From my first impression of these two poets, Plath is most interested in relating personal thoughts and events to her readers, while Hughes is more interested in relaying these personal thoughts and events to his.

That's not to say that Plath's poetry (early poetry, mind you- I haven't looked on to anything of hers past Juvenalia, as I have read nothing of Hughes' past his 1957 Hawk in the Rain) isn't personal and confessional at times- Family Reunion springs to mind, where names of what can be assumed are actual relatives appear- just that, more than Hughes, Plath makes a solid and probably intentional attempt at including the reader in her work.

Well, wasn't that sentence opaque. What I mean to say is that she tries to let the reader in, and has a few tricks that she uses to get her readers to see where she's coming from. One that she uses quite often is allusion to older, more prevalent texts- folk and fairy tales are favourites of hers, as is musical terminology.  Cinderella and Bluebeard are names that catch the attention of anyone who knows the importance of a glass slipper or a locked drawing room. What she says in these poems can be highly personal, or have very little to do with the plot of the tales themselves- sending back the key to Bluebeard's study was hardly an option, I think, for the poor woman in the original story once she knew what she was in for- but with this simple incitation of the known she invites readers to fill in the gaps of the poem where it would be cumbersome to spell out exactly what she was meaning to say.

Cinderella, for example, is a poem that without context would mean almost nothing: a strange woman dances with a prince at a lavish ball, and is alone in feeling the chill of a clock striking midnight.
Cinderella 
The prince leans to the girl in scarlet heels,
Her green eyes slant, hair flaring in a fan
Of silver as the rondo slows; now reels
Begin on tilted violins to span 
 
The whole revolving tall glass palace hall
Where guests slide gliding into light like wine
Rose candles flicker on the lilac wall
Reflecting in a million flagons' shine, 
 
And glided couples all in whirling trance
Follow holiday revel begun long since,
Until near twelve the strange girl all at once
Guilt-stricken halts, pales, clings to the prince 
 
As amid the hectic music and cocktail talk
She hears the caustic ticking of the clock.

Tying this sonnet into the story of Cinderella fills in the rest of the plot: the 'strange girl' is in a place that would not welcome her were it not for her intricate mask, and because of this she alone is aware of any event that may ruin break the spell she has cast to allow herself entry into the society. This otherness is something that Plath very well could have connected to a personal moment, turning this into a poem much more like Family Reunion. Instead, she connected it to a community moment, a story that many would be able to channel into and ultimately feel more welcomed to relate to.

The poetry I've read so far of Hughes tackles this a little differently. Poems like The Jaguar, The Horses, and The Thought Fox have a very autobiographical feel to them, rather than a distanced look at what could be a personal thought, like what Plath does with her allusions.
 The Jaguar 
The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion
Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil
Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or
Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.
It might be painted on a nursery wall.
But who runs like the rest past these arrives
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes
On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—
The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—
He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him
More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.
The scene portrayed in The Jaguar is so specific, so clear, that it is difficult to imagine the poem's conception without putting Hughes right in the scene- maybe off to the side near the boa constrictor's cage when the jaguar meets him in the eye. The poem doesn't even have to have any deeper meaning- the retelling of an event amazing enough to be put into poetry is motive enough. It is easy to enjoy this poem, to feel the rhythm and alliteration, but not quite as easy to attribute this to one's life without really going vague- a connection with nature? Connection with nature in a man-made place. Is it anti-zoo? Maybe it's a comment on the wilderness inherent in all that comes from the wild. Who knows.

Hughes doesn't seem to be all that interested in making sure we know, though. In these earlier poems he turns to nature for inspiration and as such many times the result is a nature-like poem: it is there, and it is to be enjoyed, but maybe not analysed. The Horses can very easily just be a straightforward account if that one time that Hughes watched the sunrise one fiery, ephemeral morning with a pack of horses.

09 September 2013

This is the blog that I'll be using to post my blogs for LITR 450 on the writings of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.