Sylvia Plath's "Mirror." William Logan and Sharon Olds, continued

I'm not ready to leave the issues and questions I've tried to stimulate in the previous two posts about William Logan, Frieda Hughes and Sharon Olds.  However, my mysterious attraction to my own photo of a fish, along with the humorous comment about it from Pasadena Adjacent at my last post,  have recalled for me a poem by Sylvia Plath.

Since Sharon Olds is sometimes discussed as Plath's psychic daughter, and Frieda Hughes is Plath's actual daughter, and William Logan writes about them all, and I write about William Logan writing about them all, a practice that William Logan has mockingly called Theory . . . well, all the stars seem in alignment for us to consider the three luminaries: William Logan, Sharon Olds, and now Sylvia Plath.

Here is "Mirror" by Sylvia Plath:  'Mirror' by Sylvia Plath

First, I'm interested in my own acceptance of Plath's bold, explicit, perhaps self-indulgent switch in speakers to open the second stanza (or verse paragraph): "Now I am a lake." Part of me wants to reply, "Really. You get to be what you want, when you want. Well, I'm an avalanche, baby, and I just crashed some boulders into your lake, just cluttered you up, just obliterated your arrogant damned lake."


Does she get to do that, simply change horses in midstream because she feels like it and then she can shout it from the rooftops? Doesn't that break some important rule? Is she thumbing her nose at old stuffed shirts, telling them (us? me?) to stuff it if we can't loosen up, can't take a joke? But this is no joke, is it? This is aging, this is shriveling, flesh-gone-to-scales mortality, isn't it?

I feel as if Plath has seized something of mine, and I've said that's okay, boss, go ahead, you can have it. Maybe I didn't want it anyway, though I wasn't sure yet. But go ahead, take it. It was only my cornucopia, my horn of plenty of male logic. It wasn't doing me much good, and your mood, or your mysterious . . . strategy . . .  is surely more important.


Secondly, I'm intrigued by the power of the poem's closing: "rises toward her . . .  like a terrible fish." Sometimes I have images, or personifying glimpses, of old age that are not unlike terrible fish. Yet I'd never have pinned them down and thought, "Oh, yeah, terrible fish, that's exactly what I saw-felt-imagined."  My images had nothing to do with fish, yet I'm perfectly satisfied with Plath's decision that a fish is what she and I both saw in the mirror.

Finally, I am thoroughly satisfied with her vague adjective, "terrible." Why?  Usually I'd ask for something more precise to describe the poem's most dominant image, the fish; but "terrible" seems not just acceptable, but perfect. Maybe it's because I don't usually think of fish as terrible; or maybe something more individualizing about this fish would distract and separate me from the real issue and its creator, while a "terrible" fish, rising at me, feels like just the right transmogrification to capture the universal insult of aging. From flesh to scales in the stroke of a pen. Or tick of a clock.


I wonder if William Logan would say that Plath has managed to capture an unflattering portrait of the human body without resorting to the peep show tactics he attributes to Sharon Olds.  I sure think such wondering is important fun, like a seventh grade dance, where we're all fools, and, whether we dance or stand against the wall with our hands folded, we're glad to be there. But don't tell a soul.

'Mirror' by Sylvia Plath

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Sylvia Plath's "Cut"

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In spite of a typo or two, I chose to print Plath's "Cut" from this site because of the readers' comments (are they all students?). I found them consistently entertaining, often funny, sometimes intelligent and sometimes mean. Maybe they're more about social networking than responding thoughtfully to the poem. I might go easy on a teacher who became impatient with this level of analysis, though some of the earlier comments make an honest effort and have merit.

I hope you will paraphrase Plath's train of thought and consider what each new image might add to her notion of a cut. If "homunculus" and "trepanned" are new to you, be sure to look them up.

Also, notice Plath's use of rhyme and other sound devices in a free verse poem. Once noticed, they might feel so exaggerated that they suggest violence. If they do, it's a good example of poetic devices adding to or carrying meaning, rather than serving as little flower decorations on a birthday cake.

I find all those aspects of the poem to be like certain kinds of neurosis, in love with themselves, hysterical, hyperbolic, but at the same time, too menacing to dismiss as frivolous. If a friend had handed me "Cut," I hope I'd have insisted on some long talks and attempts to persuade him or her to see a professional. How does one do that, by the way?

Below is the link to the poem itself; the second link offers Plath's reading of it on YouTube.


Cut - A poem by Sylvia Plath - American Poems

YouTube - Sylvia Plath reads "Cut"


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Sylvia Plath's "Metaphors"

Technically it's still spring, so I offer two bird pics involving parenthood. Sparrow Dad with Junior-the-Charity-Case is a re-run, but that little two-tone job is new. It's a young blue jay, and I promise, he looked even stranger in real life.

Speaking of the strangeness of children, and since I mentioned Sylvia Plath in the last (June 2) post, here’s a reminder of her voice.

Metaphors - Sylvia Plath

I wonder, by “voice,” which is so often used and perhaps over-emphasized in discussions of poetry, do we mean a physical manifestation of the speaker and poet’s attitudes, the interior made external, palpable?

Try applying the word to singers. To mention a few obvious choices, Elvis, Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, Odetta, and Joan Baezare unique. We recognize their voices with no need for introduction, and realizing that led me to consider poets and other writers in the same way. Would I recognize the voice of so-and-so with no name attached? I'm still not sure how essential that is, but at least I get the issue now.

Of course, and to get back to juveniles, we have to make allowances in many cases for the poet's stages and phases, for example, the early, middle, and late voices of the same person. It's a given that the early and later (or modern) Yeats are pretty much two different guys. Sylvia Plath began by writing sonnets and villanelles by the dozen.

So, about the Plath of "Metaphors," how many mothers have viewed pregnancy this way? The self-effacing humor and complaint about weight are familiar and often jovial. But can we finish "Metaphors" with a smile? Or does the last line add something too chilling for a mere “fat momma” poem?

Try to forget what you know about Plath's life. Would you want the psyche behind this voice to babysit your children? If you answered yes, please read Plath's poem, "Daddy."

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Confessionalism, continued

Left: Torso of a Giant, Jean Arp, 1964, Detroit Institute of Art




In the April 22 visitor comments here, Brenda writes:

“Do/did you ever have your students write essays based on the poetry style you are reading? In this case, the students would write confessional themes?

“Or is that too introspective, for students to reveal that much?

“In high school, our English teacher used to bring in huge photos of street scenes and we had to write an essay of what we thought was going on.”

Brenda, I like your English teacher’s assignment. I’ve done that kind of thing with descriptive essays, but I've only encouraged, not required students to imitate authors’ styles. There’s just never enough time for all good things, so I figured that the really motivated students would try it on their own if I pointed out the possible benefits (some did, some benefited, others not so much).

Sometimes kids have written somewhat confessional stuff, but I’d never ask or require them to; in fact I've cautioned them against it. I've encouraged them to base poems, stories and essays on personal experience and to try to see in their lives what's universally human. But confessional work takes that up several notches, and, as you say, those kinds of revelations can quickly become risky—going too public on too much intimate stuff and regretting it later, or getting into psychologically dangerous territory, or getting me sued.

Here’s my impression, not a fact: kids who want to reveal too much about themselves tend to be histrionic personalities and will do it without my asking or despite my forbidding it. They’re exhibitionists, and that's the heart of confessional work. "Look at me. I'm willing to say anything if you'll just look at me."

Are they honestly inviting me to share important human experience, or more grandiose, abstract pursuits of beauty and truth? Or do they just want readers, including me, to celebrate the wonderfulness of their dirty underwear, their self-indulgent escapades, their mental crucifixions of their parents, teachers, siblings, lost loves?

So I'm wary about such personalities among the professional poets. Anyone who writes for a public has some exhibitionist tendencies (yes, that includes me); but these days we have a convenient new expression for excesses, and we should heed the warning: “TMI: too much information.” Maybe the younger you are, the more you should think about that.

Aren’t there things that reasonable people (shall I call them “normal”?) wouldn’t dream of making public? And despite the voyeur in us all, we usually don’t want to hear it. Confession might be good for the penitent, but it's lousy hard work for the listener. Ask any shrink or priest.

In addition to their skill with language, edging up to, or crossing, that line of audience discomfort is at the heart of the power in Plath, Sexton, and other confessional poets. “Watch me say what others are afraid to say.” However, those professionals can go too far, and adolescents or young adults most certainly can—restraint and judgment are not traits often ascribed to the young.

Of course, the flip side is poetry or fiction so distant, formal, or academic that we feel a robot wrote it. The author didn’t emote, so how can we? I think some readers feel that way about Wallace Stevens and Richard Wilbur, to mention a couple of notables who have appeared on Banjo52 at one time or another.

So, Brenda, maybe that begins to respond to your questions as well as inducing a very fine nap for you and any innocent bystanders. But let me add one more note about confessional matters: in poetry and in life, I think it’s possible that we suffer from too little self-revelation rather than too much. Formality or reserve or custom, or whatever, are forms of artifice, dishonesty, fear, and conventionality that can deaden meaningful communication as much as confessionalism can turn it into a ten-cent carny act.

So where’s the boundary? This is why most (not all) multiple choice exams in English classes are an affront and a cheat.

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