Critical Apreciation of Poems
Critical Apreciation of Poems
Critical Apreciation of Poems
By Emily Dickinson
Critical Appreciation of poem
Emily Dickinson-a great American female poet represented the farthest point in
the 19th century American Poetry. American poetry in regard to the adventures of
the spirit is beautifully reflected in her poetry. She had the distinction of being a
pioneer of 19th century American Poetry. She was an anticipator of metaphysical
poetry, a smeller of modernity and a defender of romanticism.
The poem ‘I am nobody! Who are you?’ reveals the inner feeling of
Dickinson. It presents the picture of a saintly recluse who defied the conventions
of society and who rebelled against the tenets of formal religion. She has also
presented her dislikeness of being popular and similar to somebody.
An autobiographical poem.
Emily Dickinson’s poetry reveals every aspects of her personality. Her poems
are rooted in her personal experience of joy and sorrow.
John Crow Ranson remarks,
‘Dickinson is one of those poets
Who make almost constant
Use of the first person singular.’
The present poem is one of autobiographical poems. By withdrawing into
the privacy of her father’s room, Emily Dickinson denied herself the pleasure of
life. This acts of hers is symbolic her psychic and emotional renunciation and her
loss of all sense of importance of life. In an utter sense of humanity, she tells us,
‘I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too?
The poem is small having two stanzas of four lines. In first stanza, companionship
between poet and listener is established. She says in the first stanza,
I am Nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! They’d advertise—you know!
In this stanza, poetess says to her friends that she is insignificant and minor
person. If listener is nobody, there is pair of their friendship. Two become a pair.
But the poet knows the society. That’s why the friendship should be kept secret.
She asks her friend not to tell anybody. Privacy is stressed. As soon as it would be
revealed, people would start talking and it may harm their friendship. This is the
way of society and her friend perhaps knows that they would punish them.
In second stanza ,
How dreary — to be —Somebody!
How public —like a Frog!
To tell one’s name—the livelong June!
To an admiring Bog!
In this stanza, Emily, she tells about her dislikeness of being similar to one. She
thinks that to be like other is awful and unpleasant. To be somebody is boring and
tedious. To be in public is hated by the poet. According to her, it is really hateful
to get name and to be talked in public. She compares it with a frog and says,
How dreary is to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
This is a habit of frog which sings and sings but has no value. In the so called
modern society, to remember and talk about known people may be a fashion.
One talks the full ‘livelong’ day. Thus, in reality this appreciation does nothing for
enhancement of life so it is labeled as ‘an admiring bog.’
In this ways, the poetess reveals content to be ‘nobody’ rather than
‘somebody’ in the world of poetry. Her attitude toward fame has been firmly
defended as knowing her deep-seated integrity and self-knowledge. After writing
this poem, within few days, Emily wrote to Higginson in a letter:
“If fame belonged to me, I could
Not escape her. If she did not, the
Longest day would pass me on her chase.”
As far as poetic style is concerned, the poem is well- arranged piece which shows
Emily’s spontaneity and directness. We find lucidity and directness in the poem.
The poem consists of two stanzas. Each has four lines. The poem begins with ‘I’.
From ‘I’ the poet comes to ‘us’ and shows the process of being one two and one.
In the poem, Simplicity is achieved by clear cut, short, simple sentences.
In an eight line poem question mark has been used twice and four times
exclamatory mark. Two adjectives’ livelong for day’ and admiring for ‘bog’ are
attractive. As we see the poetess created sound pattern through alliteration and
repetition of words.
Conclusion
To summing up, the poem is a confessional document of the eccentricities
of poetess’s mind. The poem has a cardinal note on Emily’s self negation which
reveals a record of her reactions to some unnamed events in life. It reveals sober
personality with admirable maturity of wisdom. In a short, this personal poem
reveals that her understating of life is complete and thorough as
Allan Tate observes,
“Emily Dickinson mastered
Life’s intricacies by rejecting it.
By revealing herself through
Her poem, Emily Dickinson
Understood better her own
Relation to the world.”
________________
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain
By Emily Dickinson
Critical Appreciation of poem
This is one of the greatest poems of Emily imaginary. The theme of the poem is
not the funeral, real or imaginary, but an aberration of the mind, the gradual
break-up of rational powers and the final onset of madness. The theme is
presented through the medium of the funeral image. Emily Dickinson finds the
funeral the saddest experience in human life. She finds in it, therefore,
appropriate symbols to evoke the image of decay of the mind. The poem has
richly symbolic vocabulary.
In her use of symbols and evolving images through them and in finally
communicating the experience, Emily Dickinson was unwittingly a forerunner of
modern symbolist movement in poetry.
“I felt a funeral in my brain” traces the speaker’s descent into madness. It is a
terrifying poem for both the speaker and the reader. The speaker experiences the
loss of self in the chaos of the unconscious, and the reader experiences the
speaker’s descending madness and the horror most of us feel about going crazy.
In the poem ,Some ineffable experience of the madding mind is described
through the images drawn from funeral ceremony. There is no real funeral
involved here. But all emotions associated with a funeral are felt in the mind of
the speaker.
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Possibly a picture of sad, slow marching funeral procession is evoked in her mind.
The Pall bearers and mourners are described as treading. The whole ceremony
takes place in the theatre of the speaker’s mind. By the oppressive weight of the
treading mourners, the sense of the speaker experiences a break-up of her
rational faculties. This is the initial experience of the disintegrating mind.
And when they all were seated ,
A Service , like a Drum —
When the mourners were seated there was a drum heard, perhaps, as a part of
the ceremony. Like the tread of the mourners in the first stanza, the heavy beat of
the drums and the sadness evoked by them are unbearably oppressive that the
speaker now begins to feel that her mind is becoming numb. The incessant
beating of the drum (suggested by the repetition of the beating) has nearly
benumbed the speaker’s mind. This is the second stage of the dying of the
rational faculty of the speaker.
The third and final part of the funeral is burial. This stanza uses symbols drawn
from the burial process. In this stanza the air of approaching lunacy is thickened.
To an already insufferable weight of the mourners’ tread and the drum beat, a
box and boots of lead are added.
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
The boots of lead also suggest the numbness or dullness of the soul. With the box
and boots of lead cracking ‘across my soul’ the speaker’s mind has begun to
crack, that is, the sanity of the speaker’s mind is being buried by the pall-bearers.
The disintegration of the mind is nearly complete. Till now the entire action
ceremony has taken place in the brain of the speaker. Now the reference to
‘space and its ‘toll’ suggests that the theatre of action is the external world. The
outside world seems to toll the death bells.
In a stroke of fancy, the speaker imagines the space as tolling the bell and that the
Heavens themselves are acting like bells.
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being ,but an Ear,
The heavens are like a huge bell and the space is tolling the bell. The speaker’s
physical being is one gigantic ear listening to the toll of the bell. With the toll of
the bell the speaker’s rational faculties are buried; there is total lunacy now. In
the midst of the sounds of the bell there is no place for silence. Silence is
alienated from the world of noise as much as the speaker is alienated from the
world of rational beings.
One of the versions of the poem has the following four lines as concluding stanza:
The presence of this stanza does not make any substantial difference in the
interpretation of the poem, On the contrary it strengthens our approach to the
poem. The plank stands for a kind of scaffolding across the open grave. Like all
these things, the plank (Reason) is broken by the weight of the mourners’ drum
beats and boots of lead and creaking box. That completes the disintegration of
the speaker’s mind “then”, speaker plunges into the condition of lunacy. The final
word, then looks grotesquely inappropriate here. But then the incoherence and
disorderliness of speech are an indication of the total disintegration, which the
speaker has experienced.
As for as poetic style is concerned , the poem is written in the first-person
omniscient-poetic voice. Emily Dickinson adheres to no strict traditional form or
metrical pattern throughout, although the poem is divided into five stanzas of
four lines each. This structure allows the poet to draw out repetitions and
variations of formal features, such as the rhythmic similarities between stanzas
one and two.
Much of the poem is, necessarily, understood as a metaphor, including its very
premise. Dickinson does also make use of more local metaphorical language, such
as the simile “A Service, like a Drum –”, which is striking for its inversion of the
standard structure of a simile.
Conclusion
The poem “I felt a Funeral in my Brain” by Emily Dickinson is in the form of an
allegory, a tale with a literal level and one or more symbolic levels; the funeral is
an exterior structure that gives coherence to the speaker’s mental state. Because
the loss of the speaker’s mind is simultaneous and tortured, the funeral provides
a symbol for what transpires in the speaker’s mind, a symbol that does not reveal
the inner thoughts of the speaker, thus allowing her feelings some privacy.
Without the structure of the funeral, the reader might have no idea what
happens with the speaker’s mind. The images in the second and third stanzas
clearly convey the speaker’s growing sense of despair, and the images in the
fourth stanza convey her sense of isolation. Finally, when a “Plank in Reason,
broke” the reader understands that the speaker has lost her mind.
_______________
Bereft
By Robert Frost
Critical Appreciation of Poem
Robert Frost was a great American poet who writes a large number of
great poems. Bereft is one of his famous poems. This poem has ominous
tone and there are different interpretations of this poem. The body of the
poem is not very clear but we interpret that the poet is alone in this
world. Poet feels loneliness in his life but he has a great faith in God. The
ending clearly states that the poet is all alone in the world but he is not
pessimistic, he shows his believe in God.
The poem was written about a time in frost’s life when he thought his love and
future wife had rejected him. (i.e when he was young) its about his loss of will to
live because the only happiness (“summer was past and day was past”) seemed
lost to him.
In the first two lines, the poem commences with a question,
Conclusion
“Bereft” is a poem which describes the feeling of a lonely person. The
person is alone not only in his house but also in the world. Everything even
the nature seems hostile towards him but he has a strong faith on God.
Poet uses metaphors and personification to show the cruelty of nature.
There is also a ray of hope in this poem. This poem seems to imply that
although the devil tempts you with fear and loneliness, if you have faith you
cannot be tempted.
_______________
The first poem in Frost’s book Mountain Interval, “The Road Not Taken,” has long
been a popular favorite. Like many of his poems, it seems simple, but it is not
exactly straightforward, and even perceptive readers have disagreed considerably
over its best interpretation. It looks like a personal poem about a decision of vast
importance, but there is evidence to the contrary both inside and outside the
poem. Frost has created a richly mysterious reading experience out of a
marvelous economy of means.
The first significant thing about “The Road Not Taken” is its title, which
presumably refers to an unexercised option, something about which the speaker
can only speculate.
Two roads diverged Ina yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
The traveler comes to a fork in a road through a “yellow wood” and wishes he
could somehow manage to “travel both” routes; he rejects that aspiration as
impractical, however, at least for the day at hand. The road he selects is
“the one less traveled by,” suggesting the decision of an individualist, someone
little inclined to follow the crowd.
In the final stanza, the traveler says that he will be “telling this with a sigh,”
which may connote regret. His choice, in any event, “has made all the
difference.” The tone of this stanza, coupled with the title, strongly suggests that
the traveler, if not regretting his choice, at least laments the possibilities that the
need to make a choice leave unfulfilled.
Has Frost in mind a particular and irrevocable choice of his own, and if so, what
feeling, in this poem of mixed feelings, should be regarded as dominant?
There is no way of identifying such a specific decision from the evidence of the
poem itself. Although a prejudice exists in favor of identifying the “I” of the poem
with the author in the absence of evidence to the contrary, the speaker may not
be Frost at all. On more than one occasion the poet claimed that this poem was
about his friend Edward Thomas, a man inclined to indecisiveness out of a strong
and, as Frost thought, amusing, habit of dwelling on the irrevocability of
decisions. If so, the reference in the poem’s final stanza to “telling” of the
experience “with a sigh , Somewhere ages and ages hence” might be read not
only as the boast of Robert Frost, who “tells” it as long as people read the poem,
but also as a perpetual revelation of Thomas, also a fine poet.
What we clear is that the speaker is, at least, a person like Thomas in some
respects (though there may well be some of Frost in him also). Critics of this poem
are likely always to argue whether it is an affirmation of the crucial nature of the
choices people must make on the road of life or a gentle satire on the sort of
temperament that always insists on struggling with such choices. The extent of
the poet’s sympathy with the traveler also remains an open question.
As for as poetic style is concerned , Frost composed this poem in four five-line
stanzas with only two end rhymes in each stanza (abaab). The flexible iambic
meter has four strong beats to the line. Of the technical achievements in
“The Road Not Taken,” one in particular shows Frost’s skill at enforcing meaning
through form. The poem ends:
Conclusion
The poet would not be an orthodox , a conservative. He refers to have
untrodden path. It might offer him something new and charming . Frost wrote the
poem in the first person to give strength to the argument that sometimes there is
no clear path to take and he uses metaphor to compare life’s choices to a physical
journey and a path which determines the future. Frost uses simple language to
convey a complex theme and allows for wide interpretation. The reader will be as
equally conflicted as the narrator and will be left with questions.
______________
Published in 1914 in Frost’s book North of Boston, After Apple Picking quickly
established itself as one of the most unusual of offerings from the poet, despite
the seeming ordinariness of the setting – a farm orchard.
We must remember that Robert Frost is a landscape poet. His poetry is always
enriched with the depiction of agrarian and natural scenes. In “After Apple
Picking”, he presents a simple theme that how peacefully an overtired villager is
lulled to sleep by “the essence of winter sleep”, Nature. An apple picker has a
plentiful crop. He is picking apples while standing on a two pointed ladder. The
winter evening falls soon. The apple picker is fed up with apple picking now. The
cold winter breeze is filled with the scent of apples.
After Apple-Picking is Robert Frost’s one of the greatest lyrics. It blends the myth
of the Fall with the inevitable and inescapable consequences of modern science.
The “two-pointed ladder” is a symbolic rise of man into the world of science &
technology eventually leading to a wasteland of emptiness, uncertainty and
endless struggle. The poem, in keeping with Frost’s characteristic style, effectively
portrays a continuous clash between action and awareness inhibiting man from
arriving at any truly sustaining conclusion.
The poem begins with a farmer whose ladder is pointed towards an apple tree
and an empty barrel is left, waiting to be filled. In the tasteful scent of apples, the
farmer goes to sleep. He gets into a state of dreaming. He looks at the white grass
through a transparent sheet of frozen water which he “let it fall and break”. Then
his dream shows him “magnified apples appeared and disappeared” and he can
clearly see spots on these apples. He feels the actual pain of his instep arch for
staying long on the ladder. He hears the rumbling of apples from the cellar bin. He
is overtired for plucking a gigantic crop of apple,
“ I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired. ”
The farmer is confuse whether his sleep is like a woodchuck or an ordinary
human-like sleep
The first theme that shows its prominence is the poet’s sheer work and his or her
state of sleep. It is certain that he is weary as an aftermath of the harvest that he
desired. It is unclear where the poet actually is as he jumps back and forth
between his past (his youthful moments) and his present (his old-aged tiredness).
Toil in creativity is the second theme that prevails in this natural lyric. Just like the
magnified apples appearing and disappearing, different creative ideas come and
go from the mind of an artist. He can only be able to jot down a small number of
creative points or even nothing like the empty barrel.
The cycle of life and death is vividly present in this poem. Life is presented
through a year of gardenic period. For a time, the orchard is covered under the
hoary layer, thus referring to the teenage period of human life when he is unable
to see the harsh realities of life. And for the second half of a year, the orchard is
bloomed with flowers, thus indicating towards begetting children to expand his
family as a result of marriage life. Similarly, the cycle of death is denoted through
the hibernation (a long duration of sleep) of woodchuck. An animal that typically
wakes up after six months of a long sleep. Thus, the poet might be indicating the
afterlife of his death as a spiritual or normal rebirth.
The poem is enriched in symbolic beauty. But some symbols are quite confusing
and do not relate to the context of the poem explicitly. For instance, the Biblical
inclusion of the symbol of the ladder may indicate towards Jacob’s Ladder, that
was, again, pointed to heaven, not to pick apples from an apple tree but to secure
himself from his jealous brother. There is no definite reference about the jealousy
of someone with Frost. But as a definite symbol, the ladder indicates towards the
connection between earthily and heavenly life.
Apples signify man’s laborious efforts and his unfulfilled desires. Apples may also
hint at the Biblical Fall of Adam and Eve for eating the forbidden fruit of
knowledge. These apples play a significant role in displaying the cycle of life and
death as the act of collecting apples may indicate death while the reappearance
of apples in spring season may hint at the spiritual rebirth.
Sleep as a symbol points at both temporal and eternal sleep. When the poet is
overtired of collecting the harvest, he shows his desire for rest. But if we ponder
over the poet’s comparison of his sleep to that of a woodchuck, it becomes rather
clear that the poet is talking about death.
As for as poetic style is concerned , The poem is written in the common Yankee
language. It is one of the early works of Frost, that is why there is no proper
rhyme scheme of the poem. The poem is composed of 40 lines and follows
iambic-pentameter.
Conclusion
In After Apple Picking, the apple indicated here is the apple of life and afterlife.
The poem takes the reader into a brilliant journey adorned with splendid imagery.
The poem is a triumph over both classical and modern values.
_______________
Mending Walls
By Robert Frost
Critical Appreciation of poem
Every year a tradition of mending wall is followed by two neighbors that divides
their property. The narrator of the poem feels there is no need to mend the wall
as there is no cattle but only pine and apple trees.
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard
He is a little bit skeptical of the tradition and does not understand what the
necessity of the wall is. He notices that even the natural world does not like the
wall as the stones fall down from the wall without any reason.
The narrator tries to convince his neighbor, but no vain. He accuses him of being
so old fashioned and rigid in valueless tradition. The neighbor on the contrary
insists on the importance of the wall and its mending. He asserts that the wall
crucial in maintaining their healthy relationship. He states
“Good fences make good neighbors.”
The neighbor does not leave his ground and repeatedly says “Good fences make
good neighbors.”
Characteristic details often repeated in the New England landscape is stone
fences; laboriously kept in neat repair by their owners. In this poem, which tells of
the springtime ritual of mending such a wall, two kinds of Yankees-or men—are
dramatically contrasted.
The ‘I’ of the poem is unconventional in his thinking and in his discourse; his
neighbor is a person who stubbornly takes for granted that anything which his
father has thought and said must be a final fact. The narrator opens with some of
his reflections, about the way nature seems to battle, in its mysterious way,
against a wall.
He then tells of an annual arrangement he has with his neighbor to repair winter
damages- “to set the wall between us once again.” There is irony, of course, in
the fact that those who live near one another, thus cooperate to set themselves
apart, an irony which is heightened by the fact that this particular wall has no real
purpose.
In the brief argument which follows, the narrator teases his neighbor about this
situation; but the neighbor repeats an old motto which he has thoughtlessly
accepted.
Like many other poems, ‘Mending Wall’ is about a social situation. The distinctive
use of symbols enhances the significance and deeper meaning of the poem. The
fence suggests national, racial, religious, political and economic clashes and
discrimination which disperses man from man and hampers the ways of
cultivating good relationships. The argument between the two neighbors signifies
the conflict between tradition and modernity.
The young generation wants to demolish the old tradition and replace it with
modernity while the old wants to stick on to the existing tradition and beliefs. It is
a symbolic interpretation of modern situation where national boundaries are fast
disintegrating, promoting an international understanding. Though no wall, no
barrier is required to maintain harmony and peace between people and nations,
yet some kind of self-exercised limitation is inevitable to avoid confrontation. The
poem, thus, grows through contrasts and contradictions.
Mending Wall is a character-study. It has the intensity of feeling as in drama.
Apart from the poet-speaker, the presence of the second person in it is suggested
by quoting his words, “Good fences make good neighbors”. In the process of
arguing and counter-arguing, Frost reveals himself and his neighbor.
The poem is rich in idea; it is rich in artistic excellences. As Jennings points out,
“Frost solemnly indulges at length in the pathetic fallacy even though,
somewhat paradoxically perhaps, he often writes about inanimate objects as if
they were alive”. And in the words of Thompson, the poem is a beautiful
illustration of the poet’s efforts to bring about the reconciliation of three separate
planes of sound; “The first of these is the basic and theoretically rigid meter
which Frost is willing to reduce “virtually” to “strict iambic” and “loose iambic”.
These basic accents, fitted into the variable structure of the line and of the stanza,
offer an underlying foundation for words and phrases.
The second plane of sound is derived from the words and phrases they might be
pronounced without regard to meaning, without regard to context. The third
plane of sound is derived from the tones of the voice which give particularly
4intended shades of meaning to the words when they are spoken as units in their
context of phrases and sentences”. The poem provides Frostian matrix through
his poetic representation of thought, in various forms of inner and outer dialogue.
In its final evaluation, the poem exemplifies :
“counterbalanced ways of looking at one and the same thing”.
_________________
Lady Lazarus
By Sylvia Plath
Critical Appreciation of poem
Lady Lazarus is one of Sylvia Plath’s best known poems. Written in the final few
months of 1962, it is one of several powerful poems Plath wrote in quick
succession, before her death on 11th February 1963. Lady Lazarus is not a raw,
direct confessional poem, despite that first person conversational opening line,
“I have done it again” , but a melodramatic monologue on the subject of identity.
For Sylvia Plath, identity had a strong, inherent existential element. Her German
father died prematurely when she was eight years old, leaving her emotionally
bereft. She nearly drowned when 10 years old whilst swimming out to sea. Many
think this was an attempted suicide. This incident is mentioned in the poem.
Later on in life she again attempted suicide and failed. Bouts of depression
throughout her adult life had to be treated with medication and electroconvulsive
shocks. In the poem the speaker compares herself to a cat, having nine lives.
“I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die. ”
But she also grotesquely states:
“Dying,
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well”.
By describing dying as an art, she includes a spectator to both her deaths and
resurrections. Because the death is a performance, it necessarily requires others.
In large part, she kills herself to punish them for driving her to it. The eager
“peanut-crunching crowd” is invited but criticized for its voyeuristic impulse. The
crowd could certainly be understood to include the reader himself, since he reads
the poem to explore her dark impulses. She assumes that her voyeurs are
significantly invested – they would pay the “large charge” to see her scars and
heart.
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart
It really goes.
Furthermore, it is necessary to understand the anger as being directed against the
general forces of inhumanity, violence and destruction only symbolized by the
males in the poem. By a process of association and surrealism, the protest moves
from common males to Hitler, his experimenting doctor, the scavengers of gold
on dead Jews, the dentists who had a turn before the corpses were disposed for
leather, soap, nightshades and fertilizer! The individual is associatively linked to
inhumanity and oppression. Sylvia Plath said that her
“Personal experience is very important, but ….. I believe poetry should be
relevant to larger things such as Hiroshima and Dachau and so on.”
This means that the frustration and anger against a dominating father, or anyone
for that matter, becomes a starting point or central symbol for larger issues
including Hitler, torture and inhumanity. The poem is, therefore, also about the
victimization of modern war. The persona is not only real people: they are types.
The poem is less autobiographical than it is universal.
In fact, the theme of universal female protest in the modern world is the most
striking theme in the poem. The female speaker represents the creative force and
she is angry with the destructive forces symbolized by males. The allusions of the
Second World War are all real. The anger against the German soldiers, Hitler and
his Nazi party is not too much.
The poem is technically a (bitter) dramatic monologue. The title ironically
identifies a female Lazarus; whereas the original Lazarus was male, whom Christ
brought back to life, the present speaker is identifying herself with a Lazarus
different in sex, behavior, and everything. Plath’s persona is a figure who wants to
subvert all that she can of the tradition that attempts to bring you back and
torture, rather than let you choose death and die! This female figure also
represents the oppressed modern woman conscious of the fact that the male
society will bring her back to life, because it needs to satisfy itself by oppressing
the woman. The poem destroys the myth; it borrows it to reject and state an
antithesis. The poem’s persona does not conform to society’s traditional idea of
lady-like behavior. She is angry and she wants to take revenge in every way.
“I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.”
She owes only to herself, not to Jesses. Self-destruction pervades the poem as it
did Plath’s life.
The myth of Lazarus is transformed in this poem into the myth of the
reincarnating phoenix, the bird which immolates itself very five hundred years but
rises whole and rejuvenated from its ashes. Besides, the bird has become a being
that reincarnates not just to remain immortal, but to take revenge on its
adversaries. Sylvia Plath provided a self explication during a radio reading.
“The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn.
The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit,
what you will.”
As for as poetic style is concerned, Lady Lazarus is a poem of 28 stanzas, each
with three short lines, 84 lines in total.
Syntactically this poem is complex – momentum never quite builds, there is no
sustained beat because of the short clauses, line length chops and heavy
punctuation…end stops, dashes and so on.Lady Lazarus is essentially a free verse
poem – there is no set regular consistent rhyme scheme.
Conclusion
Lady Lazarus defines the central aesthetic principles of Plath’s late poetry.
First, the poem derives its dominant effects from the colloquial language. From
the conversational opening (“I have done it again”) to the clipped warnings of the
ending (“Beware/ Beware”). Lady Lazarus appears as the monologue of a woman
speaking spontaneously out of her pain and psychic disintegration. The Latinate
terms (“annihilate,” “filaments,” “opus,” “valuable”) are introduced as sudden
contrasts to the essentially simple language of the speaker. The obsessive
repetition of key words and phrases gives enormous power to the plain style used
throughout. As she speaks, Lady Lazarus seems to gather up her energies for an
assault on her enemies, and the staccato repetitions of phrases build up the
intensity of feelings. Plath has managed to adapt a heightened conversational
stance and a colloquial idiom to the dramatic monologue form.
_______________
Daddy
By Sylvia Plath
Critical Appreciation of Poem
Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” appeared in her assortment Ariel, which was
revealed in 1965. Yet, the poems within the assortment had been written mere
months earlier than Plath’s demise in February 1963. These poems are among
the finest examples of confessional poetry, or poetry that’s extraordinarily private
and autobiographical in nature. Indeed, in the 1970, the publication of Plath’s
autobiographical novel The Bell Jar beneath her own title—it was revealed in
England in 1963 beneath the pseudonym Victoria Lucas— amplified the context
for “Daddy” and set the poem firmly inside Plath’s life story. That poem and the
book taken collectively made Plath an emblem of the conflicted intellectual lady
concurrently starved for and revolted by male affection. In the 1970, “Daddy”
was celebrated maybe more as a confessional anthem of feminine oppression,
subversion, and resistance in a world dominated by male power and the ability of
male definition than it was celebrated as a poem.
This poem is a very strong expression of resentment against the male domination
of women and also the violence of all kinds for which man is responsible. The
speaker expresses her rage against her ‘daddy’, but daddy himself is a symbol of
male.
The poem can also be analyzed from a psychological point of view. It is the
outpour of a neurotic anger through the channel of creative art, or poetry. It is a
kind of therapy. The poem is also significant for its assonance, allusion and
images. Though it is slightly autobiographical, the poem must be interpreted
symbolically and psychologically without limiting it to the poetess’s life and
experiences also.
The poem begins with the angry attack on daddy:
“You do not do , you do not do
Any more, black shoe
I have had to kill you”.
The name -calling continues: daddy is a ghostly statue, a seal, a German, Hitler
himself, a man-crushing engine, a tank driver (Panzer man), a swastika symbol of
the Nazi, a devil, a haunting ghost and vampire, and so on.
The speaker has lived for thirty years, poor and white, as in the Nazi
concentration camps of the Second World War. She is not able to breathe or
express her pain. Her tongue is stuck in her jaw, or in the barbell wires. She is
always scared of daddy or the German images of terror. She feels like a Jew
herself. She feels she is crushed under the roller as the Polish were killed by the
German in 1941.
“In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars , wars ,wars .”
She is afraid of the German language that is obscene and vague. She remembers
the concentration camps like Dachan, Auswitz and Belsen where thousands of
Jews were tortured and killed.
“Chuffing me off like a Jew”
She feels she is a descendant of a gypsy ancestress (ancient mother). She is afraid
of the neat mustache like that of Hitler, and the Aryan eye. The image of a boot in
the face comes to her troubled mind. She thinks her daddy had a brutish (savage)
black heart. She remembers the image of a strict teacher near the blackboard,
which is also her father’s image. She was ten when he died. But she wanted to kill
him again, and throw him out of her mind. She also tried to die herself, but they
prevented her.
“I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back , back to you.”
Then, she made an effigy or (model) of him and killed it. She had killed him and
his vampire that drank her blood for seven years. She claims that all the villagers
also hated and still hate him. So, he can go back and die forever. She calls him a
bastard.
“Daddy ,daddy, you bastard , I’m through.”
The extremity of anger in this poem is not justifiable as something possible with a
normal person in real life. We should understand that this is partly due to the
neurosis that Plath was actually suffering from. Besides, it is essential to
understand from the psychoanalytical point of view, the poem does not literally
express reality alone: it is the relieving anger and frustration, and an alternative
outlet of the neurotic energy in the form of poetic expression.
Furthermore, it is necessary to understand the anger as being directed against the
general forces of inhumanity, violence and destruction only symbolized by
‘daddy’. In fact, Plath’s father loved her very much when she was a child, before
he died when she was only eight. So her death was always a shock to her. But,
while she felt tortured and destitute without her father, she also felt suppressed
by her father’s dominating image. The idea is mixed and complex.
She said, “He was an autocrat… I adored and despaired him, and I probably
wished many times that he were dead”.
When speaking about her own work, Plath describes herself (in regards to
‘Daddy’ specifically) as a
“girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God”.
She adds on to this statement, describing her father as “a Nazi and her mother
very possibly part Jewish”. Through the poem, she “has to act out the awful little
allegory once before she is free of it.”
Literary historians have determined that neither of these statements about her
parents was accurate but were introduced into the narrative in order to enhance
its poignancy and stretch the limits of allegory.
As for as poetic style is concerned, the poem has 16 stanzas, each with five lines,
making a total of 80 lines. The meter is roughly tetrameter, four beats, but also
uses pentameter with a mix of stresses. Metaphor and simile are present, as are
half-rhymes, alliteration, and assonance. The father is compared to a black shoe, a
bag full of God, a giant, cold, marble statue, a Nazi, a swastika, a fascist, a sadist,
and a vampire.
This poem is full of surreal imagery and allusion interspersed with scenes from the
poet’s childhood and a kind of dark cinematic language that borrows from nursery
rhyme and song lyric. Every so often German is used, reflecting the fact that
Plath’s father, Otto, was from Germany and must have spoken in this language to
Sylvia in her childhood.
Conclusion
Sylvia Plath begins ‘Daddy’ with her present understanding of her father and the
kind of man that he was. She then offers readers some background explanation of
her relationship with her father. As ‘Daddy’ progresses, the readers begins to
realize that the speaker has not always hated her father. She has not always seen
him as a brute, although she makes it clear that he always has been oppressive.
As a child, the speaker did not know anything apart from her father’s mentality,
and so she prays for his recovery and then mourns his death. She even wishes to
join him in death.
She then tries to re-create him by marrying a man like him. It isn’t until years after
her father’s death that she becomes aware of the true brutal nature of her
relationship. Though he has been dead in flesh for years, she finally decides to let
go of his memory and free herself from his oppression forever.
_______________