Trapped in language: aspects of ambiguity and intertextuality in selected poetry and prose by Sylvia Plath - Critical Essay

Style, Spring, 2002 by Andrea Gerbig, Anja Muller-Wood

If a poem is concentrated, a closed fist, then a novel is relaxed and expansive, an open hand: it has roads, detours, destinations: a heart line, a head line; morals and money come into it. Where the fist excludes and stuns, the open hand can touch and encompass a great deal in its travels. (56)

In this frequently cited passage from "A Comparison," Plath juxtaposes an autistic, uncommunicative poetry to an expansive, communicative prose. Open and roving, the novel connects with the world it describes and thus manages to communicate its meaning; closed and condensed, poetry is walled off from reality. Plath illustrates her point with recourse to her poem "The Yew Tree":

that yew tree began, with astounding egotism, to manage and order the whole affair. It was not a yew tree by a church on a road past a house in a town where a certain woman lived [...] and so on, as it might have been, in a novel. Oh no. It stood squarely in the middle of my poem, manipulating its dark shades, the voices in the churchyard, the clouds, the birds, the tender melancholy with which I contemplated it--everything! I couldn't subdue it. And, in the end, my poem was a poem about a yew tree. That yew tree was just too proud to be a passing black mark in a novel. (57)

Plath here imagines her own poem in terms of a struggle between author and reality, with the central motif, the yew tree, as the fulcrum of writerly authority. While in prose the yew tree would provide a trigger for an expansive exploration of life, in the poem it dominates the imaginary world in which it has been placed. While in prose the yew tree is a catalyst of authorial intention, in poetry it develops a life of its own, literally "demanding" a symbolic meaning and significance within the text.

Overshadowing the process of writing the poem, it is emblematic of the failure of the poet to create a world. Plath elaborates this point elsewhere. In "Context," she describes poems as "deflections" from reality, written by poets "possessed by their poems as by the rhythms of their breathing" (92).

Surely the great use of poetry is its pleasure--not its influence as religious and political propaganda. Certain poems and lines of poetry seem as solid and miraculous to me as church altars or the coronation of queens must seem to people who revere quite different images. I am not worried that poems reach relatively few people. As it is, they go surprisingly far--among strangers, around the world, even. Farther than the words of a classroom teacher or the prescriptions of a doctor; if they are very lucky, farther than a lifetime. (93)

Despite the conciliatory tone of her words, Plath's perspective on poetry in this passage retains the ambiguity she evinces in her journals: "Must agonizingly begin prose--an irony, this paralysis, while day by day I do poems--and also other reading--or I will be unable to speak human speech, lost as I am in my inner wordless Sargasso" (401). Although such professions as teaching and medicine are "useful," Plath suggests that poetry has a superior impact and significance, a suggestion corroborated by the marked ambiguity, if not anxiety, with which Plath saw these professions. (10) Nevertheless, the "solid" and "miraculous" nature of poetry confirms the forbidding closeness she describes in "A Comparison." Unlike prose, poetry rebuffs the reader. Linguistic creativity limits communication. Whatever pleasure poetry may incite, it has no obvious utilitarian value. Plath's overt revaluation of the genre is immediately undercut by her deeply ingrained doubts about its social significance. Poetry, to invoke a term used in "The Rabbit Catcher," is not efficient. Its inherent ambiguity prevents easy communication and instead demands of the reader a greater decoding effort.