Important Themes Of Sylvia Plath’s Poetry. As we have a deep analysis of Sylvia Plath’s poetry, we come to know that she is a poetess of electrically charged perceptions and uniquely amplified imaginations. Her poetic thoughts and ideas are complex and difficult to understand for an average reader. Her poetic style is also Perplexing and disturbing.
That’s why it becomes hard for the Caders to derive the exact meanings of her poems. As it is said that the influence of personal experiences of life always affects one’s poetic imagination and vision, so, same is the case with Plath’s poetry. Her poetry is a wonderful manifestation of her life experiences. The glimpses of her personal life experiences are very much evident in her poems, as “Ariel”, “Morning Song”, “The Bee Meeting” etc.
Whatever happened or felt for life by her, she honestly revealed in her poems. That’s why, it is rightly said that she has very honestly revealed her feelings, thoughts and even her sufferings in her poetry. She reveals all these by using different metaphors, similes and images. She started writing from the very early age of her life. She was the girl of many great wishes, desires, ambitions but all these were disturbed or frustrated by her hardships and worries of her bachelor life as well as her married life. Her family life was not satisfactory and happy.
There is no doubt in saying that she spent a life full of depression, despair, enigma and isolation. Her poetry is rightly considered to be the revealer of all her these passions because she has presented these passions as the themes of her poems.
Her imaginative approaches of mind could be tallied with those of her mother and husband. Her relations with her mother and husband remained enigmatic. The betrayal of her husband caused her isolated life which resulted as her poetry to be tinged into a melancholic tone. It was her habit that she never-used to tell her feelings and ideas to anyone; not even to her husband rather to let them flow out through her pen.
As it is rightly acknowledged that she was an electrified intellectual, she had a god gifted ability of converting her raw material into the concentrated final form. Once she determined to write down on any of her erupting ideas or emotion, it seemed unstoppable to check her natural erupting force of her Poetic vision. That’s why, she always wrote with a terrific spirit of intellect and swiftness.
She tried to verify her inner desires of living a pleasant and romantic life by serving her husband in order to get pure and sincere love from her husband in return. She has presented her little desires of being a fortunate person with a life replete with hope, love and affection. Being a poet of the modern era, she has always had modern thoughts and did not want to lead her life in mental restriction and limitations. She herself was a lover of freedom and always wanted to live in a life of full liberty. She has presented different pitiful aspects and events of her life in her different poems.
In her famous poem, she presents a miserable picture of her deserted life and her unsuccessful relations with her relatives and society. This poem presents the downfall of her soul and the destruction of her hope, dreams and pleasures. Similarly, her another poem “Morning Song” presents her unfulfilled desire of being pampered and beloved child of her parents. In addition to it, she has also presented the theme of marriage in this poem.
She wants to say that marriage is the bond of two levels of human personality-one is physical and second is spiritual. She is of the view that fidelity is a basic passion of marriage but unfortunately she could never get this passion from her husband. Her husband Ted Hughes proved to be faithless to her, and fell in love affair with Assia Wevill. This behavior of infidelity caused of a great shock and depression for her mentally and physically. She has very beautifully depicted such kind of brutal behavior and mental torture of men to women in her poem “Morning Song” she considers her society as a man dominating society in which women suffer from miseries, troubles, misfortunes and deteriorating conditions, created by men. It is very worthy to note here that she feels herself to be a victim of male-society She rightly utters as;
“Every woman:adores a fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you”
In her another poem “The Bee Meeting”, we see that he expresses her feelîngs of loneliness, isolation and death Fars Here she symbolizes: herself with a bee. She thinks ñerself a such miserable creature whom nobody loves and cares about. She describes her condition in such words:
“I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me? In addition to this, she has also presented the themes of death, decay, destruction and despair in this poem. However, the most significant and outstanding theme is of dehumanization. After – observing and analyzing her relations with others. human beings, she regrets over the destruction of humanity during World War II. Talking about the theme of death, she says that she is afraid of death.
In Spite of her death fear, she has expressed this fear by her own pen in many of his poems. In her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, we see that from her “age of 12 to the days before her death, she has described her life going towards death..
To conclude this above mentioned topic of the characteristics of her poetry, we can say in the concluding remarks that most of her poems show her different moods of isolation, loneliness, fear of death and destructive aspects of her life. There is no doubt in saying that she spent an isolated life which was deprived of loveful charms of relationships, pleasures of childhood, freedom of thoughts and prosperous married life. All these elements of her deprived life became the themes of her poetry. She wanted to love and to be loved.
Similarly, she wanted to show her sympathy for others and Wanted to be sympathized. Unfortunately her dreams never came true and her depressed feelings got relief through her poetry. Talking about her fate, she herself says in the following words:
“It is as my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative, whichever is running at the moment dominates my life and floods it. I am now flooded with despair, almost hysteria as’ if I were smothering. As if a great muscular owl is sitting on my chest, its talons clenching and constricting my heart”.
In brief, we can say that her life was full of lack of parental love, betrayal of husband’s love, enigma, hatred, despair, pessimism, sexual frustration, etc, which ultimately led her to commit suicide in order to set free from all these itching and ills of life. Her great collection of poems was published by her husband Ted Hughes after her death and won the Pulitzer prize.
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