## Link To Poems
- [The Applicant](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57419/the-applicant)
- [Lady Lazarus](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49000/lady-lazarus)

# An Introduction
The impersonal rendering of the aspiring groom as ‘The Applicant’ lends the first passage a jarringly formal dynamic, one that becomes representative for Plath of the latent indifference to humanity arising from maintaining the traditional gender roles of the time. Indeed, the poetic voice offers throughout the poem little consideration for the agency of its subject, instead subjecting the reader to its invective demands –  ‘stop crying’, ‘open your hand’, ‘come here’. The ubiquity of these domineering imperatives injects a sense in the reader for the lack of autonomy and freedom in this landscape, depicting a patriarchal world where even men are paradoxically subject to fulfil the expectations ordered of them. Though Plath certainly sees the masculine identity as being impeded upon, the consequences for the woman under these rigid structures are far more corrosive, often rendering her into a ‘doll’, an image suggestive of her predominantly domesticised function in society. In objectifying femininity to little more than some immobile plaything, Plath laments the voice’s haunting metaphor - that even whilst ‘living’, the women of 1950’s America are so often viewed through a myopic pecuniary lens, being valued for only what they are perceived to offer to the patriarchy. As in Lady Lazarus, ‘there is a charge’ for even a mere ‘piece of [her] hair or…clothes’. For the reader, then, femininity becomes some monetary expendability to serve the materialistic considerations of this society. Yet despite these oppressive forces, the narrator in this second passage ultimately becomes synecdochical to Plath of the chance for spiritual rebirth; even whilst suffering under the myopic neglect of ‘Herr God’ and ‘Herr Lucifer’, womanhood can ominously rise ‘out of the ash’.

# If The Shoe Fits...
The ‘black and stiff’ suit offered to the male in The Applicant establishes Plath’s critique of the binding conformity impressed on the male gender. Resembling little more than a straitjacket, this wedding suit in its allusion to conventional marriage encapsulates the suppressing bounds on masculine identity. This abrupt, monosyllabic description implicates the immalleable definition of man’s function, clothing that, regardless of whether it is ‘a bad fit’, society presents to the male identity. In embedding these conventional expectations into such an ill-fitting suit, Plath expresses concern for the often myopic views pervasive in her world that apathetically disregard the intrinsic individualism of people, choosing instead to adopt a generic indifference at the expense of human subtleties. A similar lack of empathy is reflected in the poetic voice declaring on behalf of the groom that his head ‘is empty’, implicating to the reader the sweeping hand of the subject that can offer such broad and general assessments. That considerations of the head, symbolic of emotional and intellectual capacity, should come well after those of the simultaneously more functional yet artificial ‘hand’, ‘glass eye’ and ‘false teeth’ is troubling for the readership; this is a society that expresses a very secondary interest in either the spiritual or cognitive capabilities of the male sex. Just as in the fit of the suit, the individual agency is oftentimes forgotten. And whilst the motif of a suit may well allude to an intrinsic material superficiality, Plath implies how the masculine agency is left ‘empty’ and hollow without ‘the ticket for that’. In the absence of a woman’s hand to ‘fill it’, not only is the male spirit left vacuous, but ultimately ‘stark naked’. This exposed image of the groom’s glaring vulnerability synthesises a sinister tone in the first passage, generating the impression of an almost infantilised being, left void without the prescribed dictates of the narrator. As Plath demonstrates here, marriage – representative of traditional gender tropes – is so often ‘the last resort’ for the men a looming ultimatum that depicts the lack of choice given in determining whether to conform to these conventional values or not. Indeed, the question of ‘Will you marry it?’ becomes in its repeated use throughout a rhetorical expectancy, a query not be answered but simply met. For Plath, then, in the same way that the suit’s artificiality gave the illusion of choice, so too do these supposed questions of society for masculinity become tainted by a desire to impose rather than enquire. Ultimately, ‘The Applicant’ may seem to be given autonomy, but in the end, he can only ‘marry it, marry it, marry it’.

# From The Ashes
Yet within this base patriarchy that so atrophies femininity, the spirited voice of Lady Lazarus in the final stanzas offers a challenge to these retrograde notions. It is the hand the subject plays in her own rebirth that sees her ‘rise’ from the ‘ash’, an active construction suggestive of an autonomy decisively absent from the ‘living doll’ of the first and second passages. With her ‘red hair’, the narrator becomes this bold, effervescing synecdoche of feminine strength, a being reinvigorated with a powerful vitality at odds with the lifeless ‘flesh, bone’ and ‘nothing’ from which she came. Plath likens the speaker’s fiery reincarnation from the ashes to the mythical phoenix - a symbol of life and hope triumphing over death and despair - thereby becoming a metaphorical embodiment of the chance for spiritual redemption amongst the otherwise oppressive society. Though there is a positive note to this revival, Plath creates a palpably disquieting tone to this awakening; after all, given the narrator being left to ‘turn and burn’ and ‘shriek’, the reader senses the vengeful frustration in the female voice wanting to ‘eat men’, a perverse declaration no doubt confronting for her predominantly male audience at the time. Jarring as it may be, the reader is nonetheless made aware of the irony at play here – the same androcentric society that objectified femininity as an empty ‘hand’, now too has become ‘like air’, an insubstantial being subsumed by the formerly subservient womanhood. Indeed, this rebirth of Lady Lazarus becomes indicative of the potential for the inversion of traditional gender structures. The repetition of ‘Beware, beware’ not only functions as an ominous threat to the ‘Herr Lucifer’, but is a literary allusion to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. But in place of “his flashing eyes” and “his floating hair”, Plath offers the reader a similar awe-inspiring individual, this time clothed in the female identity. The poem’s title, too, is a reference to the rebirth of the biblical figure Lazarus, thereby drawing on well-known historical references in order to augment her challenge to conventional notions of femininity. It is a form of manipulating the preconceived images of masculinity across literature to present the reader with the underlying power of women in Plath’s time – the narrator too, can become emblematic of these traditionally male figures and thereby is representative of the intrinsic potential so often forgotten in this society. The menacing sibilance of ‘So, so… So’ implicates a similar underlying capability, a simultaneous consideration and exploitation of the narrator’s control over her ‘Herr Enemy’. In this way, then, Plath evokes to the reader through Lady Lazarus the dangerously reinvigorated spirit of femininity. Not only does it paradoxically arise from the very remains of its incarcerated body, but at the same time, it undercuts the erosive conventions of gender roles which formerly held women for incapable of such menacing power and vigor.


"The Applicant" / "Lady Lazarus"

## Link To Poems:
- ["Nick and the Candlestick"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49006/nick-and-the-candlestick)
- ["Daddy"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48999/daddy-56d22aafa45b2)
- ["Balloons"](https://allpoetry.com/Balloons)

# An Introduction
The “black shoe” the subject speaks of in the second passage makes clear the suffocating fixity of masculinity that Plath sees as central to the early 1960’s female experience. It is the confining walls of this environment that entrap her and render the woman a “foot”, on one level dislocated and fragmented from her body as well as being bound by the rigid expectations of her paternal ‘Daddy’. Across the passages, therefore, there arises a conflict between the oppressive forces of the poet’s society and, as in ‘Balloons’, an ascendant female spirit unchained and effervescent on its “invisible air drifts”. For Plath, the state of womanhood is thus a complex one, far more contradictory than the patriarchal dictates enforcing contentment for the female subject through the domestic sphere. Not only are both her maternal and poetic creativity fragile and ephemeral, as the imagery of these insubstantial yet uplifting currents suggest, constantly at risk from this “black” and ominous “foot” of patriarchy, but societal expectations regarding motherhood seem to suppress and “weld” to the subject, rather than offering any clear form of liberation. And so, in both the oscillating tone and form of these poems, the poet aims to challenge one-dimensional perceptions of woman and mother as solely a role of contentment and spiritual fulfillment, offering up instead visions that bely a more opaque and conflicting experience.

# Up
The “guileless and clear” balloons of the third passage, with their insistence on something altogether pure and uncomplicated, become suggestive of an uplifting and innocent form of liberated female freedom. These vibrant “globes of…red, green” have “lived with[in]” the household, suggesting the subject’s desire for inclusivity, one that erodes the potentially intrusive force that “they” might pose in the form of something foreign and hostile. By incorporating these balloons intimately inside the confines of her own locale, there is also an emergent possibility for a distinctly natural creativity, one that works in harmony with motherhood, rather than necessarily antagonising it. These ebullient and vibrant forces who, much like the female population, take up “half the space”, thus imbue the passage with an effervescing vitality, a liveliness that becomes reflected in the cadences of the poem, as the enjambment promotes an effusive forward momentum – “Delighting/The heart”. Indeed, the pervasiveness of the present continuous tense –  “taking up”, “moving and rubbing”, “scooting” – gestures towards a continual state of movement and progression whose perpetual activity would work to explain the more passive speaker’s initial perturbation at its presence. Such a quality of optimism becomes all the more distinct, especially when contrasted against the chilling, icy “cave” that the voice of the first poem inhabits. In ‘Nick and the Candlestick’, the caesura and end-stopped finality of the opening line – “I am a miner. The light burns blue” – immediately communicates in its perfunctory melancholy and clipped vowels an enervating form of entrapment, an environment that suffocates life given how the flame has been reduced to its asphyxiated “blue”. In contrast to the fervent activity and uplifting exuberance that pervades the initial stanzas of the third passage, Plath presents us here, at least initially, is a world of “waxy stalactites” and “icicles” that drip downwards towards a distinctly more oppressive and lifeless scene. Though the voice may find herself in an “earthen”, and therefore perhaps natural and nurturing, “womb”, the “white” and brittle walls of “calcium” portend a fatal fragility to the mother’s existence. And so, set against the sombre and mostly barren household depicted in passage one, the unbounded “free peacocks” become a colourful reminder for Plath of the distinct potential for a burgeoning sense of a lively female poetics. Even as such fecund creativity is ultimately quashed by the brother, the reader is nonetheless challenged to confront this progressive possibility, the “queer moons” of femininity that the voice finds solace in, “instead of dead furniture”. Thus, in their allusive nod to Robert Graves’ Moon Goddess and the symbol of a fluid, potent female identity that this represents, the balloons posture towards an active female voice, one that, if not permanently, can at least temporarily uplift and inspire.

# I, I, I, ...
In the second passage, however, the subject is contradictorily rendered subservient to her ‘Daddy’, and thereby Plath aims to remind her readership of how overt masculinity works to oppress and wrangle attempts to emerge outside the bounds of patriarchy across the passages. The almost comical repetition of rhyme – “do”, “Achoo”, “blue”, “du” – evokes a strong aural link between the subject and the poem’s opening word “You”; though she may seem to be in control of the poetic medium, this independency is constantly supplanted and replaced by a preeminent focus on the male. Hence, an evocation of how this “Ghastly statue”, in all its ugly weight and permanence, symbolises a forceful masculinity that comes to dominate the voice’s line of thought, even subliminally. Combined with the suggestion of an infantilised female subject that the title evokes, this rhyme scheme also subtly draws links between the infantile cooing of a baby, thereby implicating a hesitant and dependent poetic voice, one that in some sense seems to require the certitude that this “Marble-heavy, bag” provides. In the lexicon of stasis and impenetrability that pervades this poem – “the roller”, “Panzer-man” – Plath therefore establishes a sense of how such obduracy deforms and bends the female identity into a state of subservience. After all, the subject has been “scraped flat” by “wars, wars, wars”, defaced by an inexorably combative and antagonised battlefield of personal relations. The consequences of such violent subjugation are made clear in the stuttering and incoherent quality that mars the speaker’s voice – “Ich, ich, ich, ich”, “your gobbledygoo” – as Plath presents the reader with an uncertain and indecisive narrator, one that, as the repetitive and grating aural quality suggests, is struggling to move past ‘I’, to arrive at and thereby define her own identity in the face of this domineering paternal presence. Indeed, even the volatile creativity of the third passage’s speaker risks becoming tamped by the male. The forceful connotations of the brother “making his balloon squeak” conveys, as was the case with the “roller” of the second poem, a masculine hand that feels justified in actively imposing itself on the female, or, as in this passage, her poetic license. Moreover, through the third passage’s transition from flowing cadences and polysyllabic descriptions – “scooting to rest, barely trembling” – to the blunt, staccato rhythms of the closing tercets – “Then sits/Back, fat jug” – Plath evokes a sense of how such freedoms are constrained, in some ways, cannot survive, in a world of such heavy and suppressive masculinity. And whilst the younger brother may illuminate the constraints of motherhood, the fact that poet is talking to her daughter about “your” brother establishes a feminine bond between the two, as they can only observe how their “funny” and innocent “pink world” can so quickly become forcefully destroyed into a “red shred” by this tense “little fist” of a violent masculinity.

# Creative Destruction
More generally, Plath explores not only the constrictive and erosive paternal presence of her 1960’s society, but also a conflicting endearment regarding the expected roles placed on her as a mother. As the subject of the first passage wakes at night, the home, conventionally thought of as a sanctuary of comforts, devolves into a “cold” and morbid locale of “dead boredom”. The sinister imagery evoked in the assonant “vice of knives” speaks to a feeling of both pain and entrapment; that is, the voice can only passively observe the “black bat airs” that “wrap” her, or the “piranha/Religion, drinking” a communion from her toes. In some sense, the repetitive allusions here to central tenets of the Judaeo-Christian faith that drain and enervate the narrator, makes clear Plath’s attendant critique of how her Western society’s subscription to such an inherently patriarchal ontology erodes the mother, especially in the confines of the 1960’s notion of a ‘nuclear household’ where the woman is relegated to a perennial state of inferiority and deference to the family patriarch. At the same time, the poet works to communicate a sense of how such demands of maternity and life-giving simultaneously drain her of her blood, her creative vitality and energy. Yet as the candle’s “yellows hearten”, there is a palpable shift away from the lifeless tone of ennui that defined the early stanzas – “Even the newts are white, / Those holy Joes” – and towards a more protective and fond quality, an affection more in line with conventional depictions of motherhood. Certainly, her confusion as to how the baby got “here”, whilst perhaps evincing an underlying disconnect between mother and son, when combined with the baby’s “crossed position” seems to suggest that the speaker wishes to return him to her womb, to protect him from the “cold homicides” of her world and to likely reaffirm a sense of her own definitive identity as a mother once more. Contrasted against passage three, where the voice’s son “bites” and in doing so destroys the balloon in which she saw the potential for her own artistic liberation, he is, in ‘Nick and the Candlestick’, the “one/Solid the space lean on”, a presence of reliability that offers the otherwise effaced mother – the vacant “space” – a reassuring form of protection and inspiration. Indeed, as the poem’s title evinces, Plath attempts to draw links here between the new-born life and her own subsequent lightness and revitalised aspect. And so, through the complex and at times conflicting depictions of the female experience, particularly as it relates to the strains of motherhood on attempts of cultivating any semblance of a professional life, Plath intends to subvert and problematise any simplistic visions of her and other women’s life in this society; the baby can both “eat” and destroy, but also be a form of salvation, a “baby in the barn”.


"Nick and the Candlestick" / "Daddy" / "Balloons"

## Link To Poems:
- [Tulips](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49013/tulips-56d22ab68fdd0)
- [The Arrival Of The Bee Box](https://genius.com/Sylvia-plath-the-arrival-of-the-bee-box-annotated)
- [Balloons](https://allpoetry.com/Balloons)

# An Introduction
Through the link Plath draws between the “vivid tulips” - with their insistence on a vibrant femininity - and the way they suffocate the first passage’s speaker and “eat” her oxygen, the pote forces readers to contemplate and empathise with the fervent struggle towards life and away from passivity. Across the passages, we are asked to explore this conflict and in all its atrophying glamour, as the female subjects oscillate between a wistful yearning for isolation and stasis - for not “committing” oneself to the ardours of life, let alone the activity insinuated by the continuous tense - and the potential for losing her poetic and maternal creativity and setting it “free”. Yet set against this depiction of a being on the uncertain precipice of change and transformation, throughout the passages runs a common thread of an immovable patriarchal force, the “fat jug” in ‘Balloons’ that quashes any attempts made by the poetic voice to release these “starry metals” of florid creativity on their cosmic ascension.

# The Ides of March
The speaker’s depictions of the “clean wood box” in passage two, juxtaposed against its contents “angrily clambering” inside, foregrounds Plath’s exploration of the imminent struggle between female control and a more chaotic unbounded creativity. The subject’s tone initially in this poem exudes a form of decisive certainty, with the “square” box and conclusive “too heavy to lift” evoking a sense of simple conformity to the voice’s expectations as well as the weight of the object projecting an underlying rigidity and fixity. This authority is captured aptly in the stanza’s rhythm itself, as the brusque, staccato-like constructions produce an aural quality of assertive demeanour, suggesting the command the female subject has over the box - “...were there not such a din in it”. However, as the poem progresses and the relatively static rhythm shifts towards a more frantic, uninhibited forward movement - “Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!” - Plath asks readers to comprehend the inescapable frenzy of bees inside, themselves likely a metaphor for the effervescing bank of words vying for the voice’s attention that she attempts to keep “locked” within the recesses of her conscience. Whereas the subject at first seemed insisten on the unequivocal and familiar, a box that is “square”, the later repetition of something “dark” lurking with develops a more ominous sense of a decidedly unrestrained entity that defies expectations of rigidity, instead becoming a “swarm” of frenetic disorder. Indeed, despite attempts to externalise and render foregin the “African hands” inside the box, Plath nonetheless makes clear the futility of such endeavours, as the subject “can’t keep away from it”, forced paradoxically closer as if by allure to her words and her voice. The effect here, therefore, is one of an internal, rather than external, conflict, a clash between resisting and making sense of the “unintelligible syllables” that establish this overpowering, forward-driving, often verbose momentum. The first resolution presented is that of playing “Caesar” to this rioting force, an image that, in its allusion to a historical figure of masculine power, conjures a sense of coercion from the decisive hand of paternal or patriarchal posterity, safe from the slings and arrows of the present or future.Yet with the back-stabbing denouement of this historical reference, and in the speaker’s rejection of this unactualised potential, to “not” succumb to the role of dictatorial emperor - and thus not risk her own violent demise as Caesar so endured - she extends towards the alternative of a “sweet God”, one that seemingly unifies the conventional notion of maternal care with the commanding and absolute role of a Christian deity. And so, whilst this passage certainly synthesises an overall tumultuous and tense atmosphere between subject and voice, at this point in her writing, Plath offers readers with the optimistic possibility of cutting through the calculus and finding a uniquely female articulation, one not necessarily bound solely to either the strict and static dictates of her society, nor the regressive notion of a comforting, “honey”-sweet maternal affection.

# Blood Red
Yet in the other poems, written at different times of her career, the message is not so translucent, if not uplifting. Plath instead unveils female subjects across these passages that become embroiled within an equivocal, oftentimes painful word of transformation. The “too red” tulips of the titular first poem, in the seemingly overwhelming visual stimulus they provide for the previously dormant and sombre speaker, attest to the confronting, unpleasant intrusion one feels into her isolated, almost meditative state of consciousness. Indeed, Plath works repeatedly to sustain the trauma that this revitalising transition threatens. On one level, the vulnerable melancholy of the voice - “a sunken rust-red engine” - in conjunction with the initially lethargic cadences of the poem ,speaks a to a desire for passivity, a stasis at the bottom of this “river” of the female experience as opposed to being swept up in its colourful, moving currents. On a deeper level, the tulips and their jarring redness, though symbolising a strong reminder of an invigorated fecundity - be it in the maternal or poetic sense - seem to grate against the subject, “upsetting” and causing “hurt” rather than offering an uplifting, revitalising push towards activity. This inharmonious dynamic is echoed again in the third poem, ‘Balloons’, as the domestic home becomes subsumed and rendered claustrophobic, in some sonse, from the poetic voice’s perspective, “taking up half the space” with their “invisible air drifts”. As with the flowers in ‘Tulips’ that become the “mouth of some African cat”, these invading balloons morph into “oval soul-animals”, an almost comic, playful description that belies the more sinister way in which they consume the attention of the subject, sporadically “moving and rubbing on the silk” in a perpetual state of motion. Nonetheless, this poem appears to move towards these intrusive objects of creativity rather than away. The jubilant note of curiosity, not antagonism, that pervades the initial utterances of the poem is annexed to comparisons of “free peacocks”, which gesture towards an ebullient liberation of a beautiful female subject. Such are the “queer moons” that the balloons become; rather than inflicting trauma, in Plath’s subtle allusion here perhaps to Robert Grave’s creation of the mythological White Goddess of the moon, they symbolise a transformation towards a burgeoning female identity. Contrarily, though the subject of ‘Tulips’ appears to become “aware” thanks to the flowers, of her own “bloom[ing]” heart, like the tears she tastes in the poem’s final lines, they are rendered distant, still largely foreign and unnatural to the speaker who seems to find comfort and safety in the “peacefulness” and “pure” sterility of her hospital room. Consequently, whilst not definitively crafting a transition of the female subject either towards or away from the thriving creativity of which she is capable of flaunting and towards which she begins to shift tentatively in this poem’s closing, integral for Plath across these passages is an establishment of the polarising reality she sees as inherent to the mid-20th century experience of womanhood, a plight the reader is asked to find compassion for as the woman is pulled between a desire for passivity, for escape from pain, and a rejection of the effaced and “dead furniture” that this renders her.

# Plath's Own Trauma
Regardless, then, of the more light-hearted poetic imagery Plath employs for much of the third poem ‘Balloons’, like the other poems, it too concludes with a largely insidious depiction of the “red shred” of a tarnished female and literary creation. The regression from the initially flourishing, polysyllabic ruminations of the speaker - “Delighting the heart like wishes or free peacocks” - to the clipped ending of the passage - “Then sits back, fat jug” - drains the subject of her former fluidity and poetic finesse, replacing it instead with the militant forceful presence of the undisclosed brother. Whilst in some sense, this son many undoubtedly function as a synecdoche for the enervating demands of childhood on the speaker, when combined with the fact that Plath crafts the poem as an unspoken conservation between mother and daughter contemplating the “little fist” of a violent, tense masculinity, his presence is more provokingly read as the potent erosion of female creativity  and spirit by a product  (and future participant) of Plath’s patriarchal society. This establishes, for the reader, a precarious and fragile female subject, a “funny pink world” that whilst comical in nature, is one that the brother trivially “bites” in an image of singular and destructive consumption. Such a sentiment of vulnerability runs across into ‘Tulips’, too, where Plath evokes, through the hospital setting, the traditionally paternalistic, and therefore potentially ominous, doctor-patient relationship, one in which an exposed female like the speaker is forced to place her rehabilitation in the conventionally all-powerful (and almost-universally male) doctor. Plath, having the year prior to penning this poem undergone the unspeakable trauma of a joint misccariage and appendectomy, undoubtedly wishes to communicate her own angst at finding her health again - physically, spiritually and poetically - whilst being so reliant on male care. Even in ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’, the titular insects draw a biographical link between the poet and her beekeeper father, thereby weaving another layer of tension into the speaker’s frenetic disposition, as she subtextually grapples with paternal forms of authority and the overbearing fatherly presence this insinuates for Plath. And so, despite hinting at the possible escape from the liminal zone of uncertainty for her female subjects and emerging into a defined, unique voice, the resonating note across the poems is instead  an underlying acknowledgement of the latent pain of this entire enterprise, as the restricting forces of society stand ready to “eat” and devour such efforts  to transcend, or escape from the “square box”, whilst also being the sources of therapy and care for the very trauma that they have incurred.


ARIEL X SYLVIA PLATH

- 3 relevant posts

"The Applicant" / "Lady Lazarus"

"Nick and the Candlestick" / "Daddy" / "Balloons"

Tulips / Bee Box / Balloons - A Close Reading