The Effects of Death, Personal Experience and the Supernatural Element

These five poems by Sylvia Plath are all connected by the theme of death, self-loathing, and by the presence of historical, even mythological, concepts. Sylvia Plath uses very powerfully charged imagery of controversial and emotional topics in order to best describe her own life. Most of the poems gleam her own personal life, including the events that she has experienced and, more appropriately, the relationships and emotions that she has felt. Every single one of these five poems uses the word dead and the topic of death itself is prevalent in almost manner. Of particular interest is the presence of her relationship with her deceased father, and her own reluctance to let go of his memory. Plaths poetry reflects her own self-loathing and disregard for her own existence. Her poems often remark her own attempts at suicide, in addition to her personal experiences with trying to get rid of her suicidal likings. In each of her poems she evokes the images of historical and mythical cre atures and concepts linked with the phantasmal and the supernatural. In addition, her poems can be connected by the idea of being held back or held down by some sort of feeling, either of desire for a loved one, escape from mortal existence or of a fantasy world. . The five poems are all relatively similar in structure, as they are all done with stanzas of continuous set lengths in each poem. The heavyweight, Daddy and Balloons are all written in five-line-stanzas. While The Colossus has no particularly obvious rhyme pattern, it does maintain a steady rhythm. Daddy does have a rhyme scheme focusing on the go bad U it is present in every stanza except for one. Balloons does not have a set rhyme scheme, but it does have a sort of feed to it,... ...s. Introduction to incline Literature. Comp. Trent University Department of English. Toronto Canadian Scholars, 2010. Print. (Plath 57) Plath, Sylvia. Cut. Introduction to English Literature. Comp. Trent University Department of Englis h. Toronto Canadian Scholars, 2010. Print. Plath, Sylvia. Daddy. Introduction to English Literature. Comp. Trent University Department of English. Toronto Canadian Scholars, 2010. Print. Plath, Sylvia. Lady Lazarus. Introduction to English Literature. Comp. Trent University Department of English. Toronto Canadian Scholars, 2010. Print. (Plath 55-57) Plath, Sylvia. The Colossus. Introduction to English Literature. Comp. Trent University Department of English. Toronto Canadian Scholars Press Inc., 2010. Print.Websters English Dictionary. Canadian. Toronto Strathearn Books Limited, 2006. Print.