Morning Song by Sylvia Plath



Morning Song by Sylvia Plath

Introduction

Of all the confessional poets, Robert Lowell earned the most substantial literary reputation; it was Sylvia Plath who, in the years following the posthumous publication of her second poetry collection, Ariel (1965), became the movement's chief icon. Yet while Lowell's fame needs no more explanation than the aesthetic merit of his work, Plath's quick rise to near-legendary status owes much to other factors (Bawer, 2001). For one thing, Plath's notion of herself as a victim of two domineering men—her father, who died when she was a child, and her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, from whom she was separated at the time of her suicide in London in 1963—made her extremely useful to the women's movement. (Perhaps no one has more memorably expressed the feminist position on Plath than Robin Morgan, who in a poem entitled “Arraignment” accuses Hughes of Plath's murder and envisions a group of women entering his home, “disarm[ing] him of that weapon with which he tortured us, / stuff[ing] it into his mouth, sew[ing] up his poetasting lips around it, / and blow[ing] out his brains.”) Meanwhile, Plath's proudly flaunted self-destructiveness, and her romantic image of herself as a sensitive genius in a brutal and indifferent world, made her a natural idol for many a young person in the throes of adolescent torment (Bawer, 2001).

Discussion

Even in literature, image ruled. Plath writes her mother about course possibilities at Smith: “Imagine saying, 'Oh, yes, I studied writing under Auden!' … Honestly, Mum, I could just cry with happiness.” If many a bard before and since has longed to forge the uncreated conscience of his race, Plath, in journal entries about her poetic aspirations, takes the tone of a high-school climber angling for a graduation medal, noting that “I must get philosophy in [i.e., into her poetry]. Until I do so I shall lag behind A[drienne] C[ecile] R[ich].” Her willingness to bow to both literary and subliterary totems is exemplified by her habit (as noted by Stevenson) “of talking of Wallace Stevens in one breath and Mademoiselle in the next.” Just as she deliberately wrote insipid stories at Smith to win approval from the editors of Seventeen, in later years she was equally desperate for the approbation of The New Yorker, whose first acceptance of a Plath poem occasioned an almost frighteningly rhapsodic journal entry (Bawer, 2001).

The ease with which she puts together unassuming yet deeply communicative metaphors, her ambiguous similes that turn a reader's attention like whiplash and then leaves the whole world wondering just what happened…if anyone has ever been a technically perfect poet, it is Sylvia Plath (Brown & Taylor, 2004).

“Love set you going like a fat gold watch.” This first line of “Morning Song” is beautifully suggestive in its imagery. The poem, written to and about an infant Frieda Hughes, here steps off with a comparison of human life to that of a wound clock, strong but most definitely finite (and, if we're not careful, too ...