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" A snowflake is an apt metaphor for a spinster, a woman separate and unattached, not moved or controlled by another person (and particularly not by a man), a snowflake drifting.
In the fourth stanza the girl definitely feels tempted by "a burgeoning" of sexual desire that affects her physical senses ("her five queenly wits"). "Vulgar motley" represents allowing sexual feelings to take over uncontrolled. The girl sees this state as "A treason not to be borne" or her body working against her rationality. Society (and her mother, perhaps) has told her only fools allow men to have their way, that women who have sex before marriage become society's pariahs. So the girl says, "let idiots reel giddy in bedlam spring; she withdrew neatly." Bedlam spring is unrestricted love. She doesn't dare participate, and so she withdraws from the man.
In the final...
"And round her house" (house is a metaphor for her body and consciousness) "she set such a barricade of barb and check" (barb and check are controls such as unfriendliness, a critical attitude, sarcastic comments, etc.) "against mutinous weather" (uncontrolled passion) "as no mere insurgent man" (someone attempting to break down her defenses) "could hope to break with curse, fist, threat or love, either." This girl is so uptight and afraid of sex, she is unable to recognize love as anything but a threat to her control over herself.
It's not that she is incapable of feelings but that she chooses never to express them. There may be other reasons why this particular woman never wants to get married, but her attitude towards sexuality is the primary focus in the poem.
Sylvia Plath: A Brilliant but Tortured 20th Century American Poet One of America's best known twentieth century poets, Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) lived an artistically productive but tragic life, and committed suicide in 1963 while separated from her husband, the British poet Ted Hughes. Before her death at age 30, Sylvia Plath had suffered a bout of severe depression for several months, the likely result of her separation from Ted Hughes and
Sylvia Plath's Daddy Any attempt to interpret a work of literature by a writer as prolific, as pathological, as tormented and as talented as Sylvia Plath requires a good deal of caution. A lot of Path's work is biographical -- one might successfully argue that the vast majority of the work of virtually any author is biographical to a certain extent. For Plath, however, this association between art and life, poetry
There were also a few children's books by Sylvia Plath that there publish which include: "The Bed Book" (1976), "The It-Doesn't-Matter'Suit" (1996), "Collected Children's Stories" (2001), and "Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen" (2001). In conclusion, Sylvia Plath is a great American poet, short story writer, novelist, and essayist that provided the world with many great poems, short stories, prose and essays. For most of her short life, she suffered from clinical depression,
Ultimately, Lady Lazarus uses her status as a failed suicide as a source of power, not disempowerment. The haunting words of the end of the tale that she is a woman who eats men like air are meant to underline the fact that despite the fact that the doctors feel that they are the source of her coming to life again and again, there is a strength of spirit within
Sylvia Plath's poem "Tulips," the speaker is a sick woman in bed in hospital. She weaves in and out of a drug-induced sleep, and much of the poem reads like a hallucinogenic stupor. The reader perceives the hospital room through the speaker's eyes, which focus especially on the colors white and red. White represents the peace and calm of snow, winter, nurse's caps, and purity. The red of the
The reader must search for the theme of the poem, and only from learning about Plath's own life can ascertain that the subject. Plath's esoteric references are less accessible than Lincoln's musings about suicide, death, and hell. However, both Plath and Lincoln do directly mention death in their poems. Lincoln's narrator mentions in line two of "Suicide's Soliloquy" his "carcass" and then in line three, the "buzzards" that "pick