2. EARLY YEARS
Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932.
In 1940, her father died as a result of complications from diabetes
when she was only eight years old. As a result, his strictness and death
defined her poems and her relationships.
She started a journal at age eleven and published her poems in
regional newspapers and magazines.
3. COLLEGE
She attended Smith College where she was an exceptional student,
but in 1953 she left a note saying she was going for a walk. She took a
blanket, a bottle of sleeping bills and water to the cellar and fell
unconscious. Her mother only waited a few hours to phone the police
and she was found the next day.
4. MARRIAGE AND DEATH
After graduating form Smith College, she went to Cambridge on a
Fulbright Scholarship where she met Ted Hughes. They married a few
months later.
In 1960, her first collection of poems, Colossus, was published.
After Ted left Plath in 1962 she fell into a deep depression. In 1963
she published an autobiography under Vitoria Lucas.
On February 11, 1963, Plath wrote a note to her downstairs neighbor
and then committed suicide using her gas oven.
5. BACKGROUND OF THE
POEM
The poem was written by Sylvia Plath in 1961. It was published by
Faber and Faber eight years after her death in 1971 as part of the
collection Crossing the Water.
7. THEME
Pain comes with losing ones innocence and youth because society
values beauty and youthfulness more than the truth.
8. FIRST STANZA
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful,
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
9. SECOND STANZA
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candle or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman.
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
