But she knows he is dead, apparently, is the impression I get when she spends her hours "married to shadow" and no longer listens "for the scrape of a keep on the blank stones of the landing." Does "married to shadow" to mean her actual marriage isn't working well? Or that she is in a dark place due to her dad's passing, and she must observe the living world from the point-of-view of a kind of living death? Was there an overall theme to the book of poems? In a way she seems to be conveying a rebellion against the world, against her life, and there are death and dying images throughout the book. She rebels against her piano lessons ("The Disquieting Muses") though she was "tone-deaf" and "unteachable"; she rebels against love ("Love is the bone and sinew of my curse" she writes in "The Stones").

What kind of voice does the poet have? Plath has many voices in these poems, which is one of the strengths of the book. Plath's voice is at once a screech ("...a racket of echoes from the steely street" in "Hardcastle Crags"); then a shrill cry for help ("When the splinter flew in and struck my eye, Needling it dark" from "The Eye-mote"); then it becomes a groan of protest ("The small birds converge, converge With their gifts to a difficult borning" in "The Manor Garden"); and in a few lines it becomes a dead fetus ("In their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow" in "Two Views of a Cadaver Room").

Was the voice believable? All her voices are believable, and because of the depth of her intellect, and her skill at manipulating imagery, readers are brought into her consciousness and there is nothing to do but believe her. She put the work in to create these poems, she deserves to be believed; and after all, poetry is not journalism,...

Are there secondary themes? Some of the poems feature shadows and echoes, and mirrors - but it also seems a secondary theme is her father, and his memory and legacy in terms of her life and times.
An interesting theme in "Frog Autumn" is the passing of summer into fall, with the advent of "scant, skinny" insects and even the spider "drops" from the effect of the frost. This poem could be a metaphor for getting old, "thin Lamentably." And "The Burnt-Out Spa" is laden with insects again, crickets this time, and the "little weeds" are "soft suede tongues between his bones." In "I Want, I Want," the "wasp, wolf and shark" (all potentially dangerous to humans) are set to work, and there are barbs on the "crown of the gilded wire."

Were the poems unified by the fact that they all appeared in this book? First, it doesn't appear that these poems all had relevance to each other; just because a series of poems are in the same book, they don't have to all have familiar or similar themes. But these poems were written at about the same time, so, for the poet, there is a unifying theme: and it was likely related to a window of time in her life.

Bibliography

Plath, Sylvia. The Colossus & Other Poems by Sylvia Plath. New York: Vintage Books,