Blackberrying by Sylvia Plath

Question 1

Language Techniques

Answer 1

Imagery- nature imagery.
-We have many of the recurring images found in some of Plath’s best work.
-The sea: symbolic of death and suicide, based on a drowning near Winthrop in her childhood, however it is also an image of beauty.
“Ebon in the hedges”
-the blackberries are black. colour imagery symbolises death and foreboding.
-blackberries may be associated with males- it is a male colour in Plath’s work and it often points to her dissatisfaction with the male gender.
“I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.”
-Poet includes many images of redness here- the colour of life and vitality but can also signify suffering and vulnerability.

-Imagery of the poem seems to evoke a tension between control and chaos in this lonely lane. The sea imagery that Plath ends the poem with seems to threaten rather than heal her loneliness;
“That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.”

Question 2

Form/Structure

Answer 2

• Dramatic monologue in the present tense, gives isolation in the poem it’s own sense of immediacy and urgency.
• Unusual structure- 3 nine line stanzas.
• Poem structured in Spenserian stanzas- an old-fashioned structure which is in tension with the more modern use of run-on lines or enjambment which make it sound more prose-like.

Question 3

Mood/tone

Answer 3

Lonely poem about an isolated speaker.
Critic Paula Bennett: “Virtually all the poems Plath wrote in 1961 suggest the same sense of isolation, frustration and internal division.”

Question 4

Context

Answer 4

• Written at Court Green, 1961.
• Sylvia’s brother Warren had visited towards the end of summer and was helping the Hughes’ settle in.
• Poem is inspired by a walk with Warren.
• However the poet presents herself as alone, Warren does not feature.
• She is cut off and isolated in a landscape that isolated her from all other human contact.

Question 5

Subject

Answer 5

The speaker is out on a walk, and she appreciates the natural world around her, relating to the blackberries she finds on a bush, and she admires the sea.