Sylvia Plath's transformations of modernist paintings

The mammoth, lumbering statuary of sorrow,

Indissoluble enough to riddle the guts

Of a whale with holes and holes, and bleed him white

Into salt seas. (Hughes 1981, 82)

Then she briefly shifts to praising the greatness of Perseus's act, only to return to an even more vitriolic attack on the Medusa. She says its "Snaky head," reflects a

Gorgon-grimace

Of human agony: a look to numb

Limbs; not a basilisk-blink, nor a double whammy

But all the accumulated last grunts, groans,

Cries and heroic couplets concluding the million

Enacted tragedies on these blood-soaked boards,

And every private twinge a hissing asp

To petrify your eyes, and every village

Catastrophe a writhing length of cobra,

And the decline of empires the thick coil of a vast

Anaconda. (Hughes 1981, 83)

Although she recognizes that the Medusa's face is that of "an eternal sufferer," she shows nothing but contempt for her, in whom she represents her own mother (whom she similarly attacks in another poem, entitled "Medusa," which has no reference to the painting).

One cannot know why Plath linked her mother to the Medusa, except that perhaps she felt that just as a glance from the Medusa would turn men to stone (with a power, according to Plath, "to stiffen / All creation"), so too a disapproving look from her mother could do the same to her. Praising Perseus not only for his courage, but, as the title emphasizes, for his wit in outsmarting the Gorgon, Plath seems to yearn for a similar wit with which to defuse her mother's power to make her suffer. In the final words of the poem-"our madness with our sanity" (Hughes 1981, 94)-she suggests that her mother caused not only her suffering, but also her psychotic episodes.

In "The Disquieting Muses" and "Perseus," Plath places the blame for her own suffering on her mother (as she will do again later, in the vitriolic "Medusa") because she cannot free herself from her mother's influence.

She also blames her father for her suffering, in his case for having abandoned her by dying when she was ten. Plath's earlier poems about her father ("The Colossus," "Full Fathom Five," "Electra on the Azalea Path," and "The Beekeeper's Daughter") express her longing to be reunited with him, even if it means her death. Then the later "Daddy" vents her rage at him for dying and abandoning her. In "On the Decline of Oracles" and "The Ghost's Leavetaking" she indicts him for haunting her.

"On The Decline of Oracles"

In "On the Decline of Oracles," Plath blames her father for sending emissaries to torment her and cause "evil" in her life. In a journal entry, Plath says that this poem is based on "The Enigma of Oracle," yet there are almost no details in the poem to link it to the painting. Instead, she seems to be heavily influenced by what de Chirico had written about his work. She copies some quotations from a translated prose poem of his or from his diaries, which she says, "have unique power to move me:"

1) "Inside a ruined temple the broken statue of a god spoke a mysterious language."