poetry texts, poem archive at plagiarist.com

masterful

Sylvia's raw honesty, striking metaphors, and beautifully crafted images in her poems make her (in my opinion) the greatest poet of our time!

What does Alexis mean by "raw honesty" - Surely this poem is anything but "honest"? Rather, it is cryptic and suggestive. It defies linear interpretation - "this is the truth" - and asks a multitude of questions, pointedly refusing to yield up a straightforward narrative interpretation. Whom, for example, do the personal pronouns refer to? The "I" the "she" and the "you" might be variously at times the elm, the speaker of the poem, the reader or the poem's addressee or simultaneously a mixture of these. The poem surely suggests that what is "honest" is open to an infinite number of semantic possibilities....

I don't know about her "honesty", but it's romantic and dark.

ted hughes considered this poem a turning point in plath's writing, the start of her true voice emerging.
this poem is infact, about ted hughes. it suggests a shift in the dynamics in thier relationship. at this point, they had two young children (to the best of my knowledge, nicholas was still a newborn), and ted was beginning to feel suffocated by sylvia and by thier life at Court Green. needless to say, thier relationship failed, sylvia felt abandoned, and commited suicide. (it has been established that she was "allergic" to the anti-depressant medication she was on, so we can't blame ted any longer, damnit.)

It should be 'snakey acids hiss', not 'kiss'. I've seen this mistake in some anthologies also. Look it up in Plath's Complete Poems.

Describes bipolar depression perfectly. Plath wrote in her journal about the case of a man who exhibited all the signs of being 'possessed' by a demon, but could not be successfully exorcised. He was in fact suffering from a depressive psychosis. It makes you ask, What's the difference? And if a devil or a 'thing' flapping out into the night 'looking with its hooks/ for something to love' is more Romantic than a clinical diagnosis of a mental disorder, then why not let it be a demon--suffering refined by art.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand,a hand of wires.

this stanza is about the electro shock therapy plath suffered to try cure her depression. what a masterful twist on the beauty of a sunset.

Although i made that comment 3 years ago, im just seeing your response now! anyways i wasnt necessarily making a comment about ''Elm" in particular, i was more generalizing her array of poems.