The Colossus

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The following lines are filled with imagery. She describes the statue’s “brow” and the weeds that are growing up and through the stone. Its a constant process— removing the plant life and hauling around pieces of stone. Readers might take note of the death-like imagery in these lines. The words “skull-plates” and “tumuli” (burial mounds) certainly bring loss to mind. The statue, as a metaphor for the woman’s lost father, is bringing out the emotion in her. Times Literary Supplement, May 5, 2000, Tim Kendall, review of The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962,p. 12. The imagery is so poignant in these first lines and becomes even more so as the metaphor slowly starts to reveal itself. Readers should also take note of the neologisms in this stanza. These, including “Mule-bray,” are supposed to bring the image of the animal to mind as well as the sound that it makes. She’s describing the statue as making these noises. They’re all, oddly, coming out of its mouth. These sounds are “bawdy” and animalistic. It is not something the speaker admires, in fact, it comes across as disturbing and even somewhat sexual. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts, Harper (New York, NY), 1979.

New York Times, October 9, 1979; November 9, 2000, Martin Arnold, "Sylvia Plath, Forever an Icon," p. E3.Timothy Materer wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography,“The critical reactions to both The Bell Jar and Ariel were inevitably influenced by the manner of Plath’s death at 30.” Hardly known outside poetry circles during her lifetime, Plath became in death more than she might have imagined. Donoghue, for one, stated, “I can’t recall feeling, in 1963, that Plath’s death proved her life authentic or indeed that proof was required. ... But I recall that Ariel was received as if it were a bracelet of bright hair about the bone, a relic more than a book.” Feminists portrayed Plath as a woman driven to madness by a domineering father, an unfaithful husband, and the demands that motherhood made on her genius. Some critics lauded her as a confessional poet whose work “spoke the hectic, uncontrolled things our conscience needed, or thought it needed,” to quote Donoghue. Largely on the strength of Ariel, Plath became one of the best-known female American poets of the 20th century. I fell into Plath's spell on several occasions during my freshman year. In many ways, I felt a strange discontinuity in my life when I read her, as if what I was studying in class had little to do with the life force struggling to live and burst forth from the earth. One was in my head and the other permeated everything else inside me. Anderson, Linda, Women and Autobiography in the Twentieth Century, Prentice Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1996. I’m not sure I believe her here. “God” is not a word you encounter often with Plath. Eliot had the comfort of his belief. Plath’s interest is more on the level of one attending – quite willingly – an autopsy.

Van Dyke, Susan R., Revising Life: Sylvia Plath's Ariel Poems, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1993. Booklist, October 1, 2000, Donna Seaman, review of The Unabridged Diaries of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, p. 313. National Post, April 1, 2000, Diana Fitzgerald Bryden, "Lady Lazarus," p. 19; November 18, 2000, "Sylvia Plath's Career Tips for Gales," p. W2.Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to read The Colossus all at once. It's had, it's had an, it's made me. . . I'm sorry, I have to sit down and start again.