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,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.
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.
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.
Neither do I--i.e., think the Colossus is the white male tradition, although I set our class discussion up that way. More and more, I think the Colossus is part of the speaker's self--perhaps, as Bryan suggested, her colossal superego, perhaps, as Ashley suggests in her blog, her creative mind, which is broken. Perhaps it is the literary tradition, but that tradition is injured, in need of reparation...not really the way I imagine the patriarchal tradition to be at the time Plath wrote the poem.
ReplyDeleteOkay, first off, I completely understand what you mean when you say: "The first line really draws me in, gives me this pleasurable discontent that is so hard to explain-" I loveeeeddd dissecting and close reading this piece because of that discontent. There are so many possibilities of how this poem can be read, and I think that's what Plath intended it to be. I think Plath created the Colossus to be whatever the reader needed it to be. To be able to acknowledge you have tried your hardest to "put together entirely" whatever your colossus may be, and realizing that it cannot be successful. Well, I haven't really thought much of how the rest of that idea could be explained, but it's a nice thought, right? That Plath could have been creating her poems to become a medium for whatever the reader needed. Makes me love her a little bit more.
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