Plath and Hughes poem Flashcards
Daddy structure
1) 14-5 Line stanzas – narrators entrapment
2) Enjambment– bars of the cage ; lack of free verse – did they ever escape?
3) Stagnant nature of 1940s
Daddy
1) Larkin “horror poet”
2) Narrator rejects their Electra complex in a psychological battle with the ‘self’
3) Repetitive patronizing rhyme ‘you do not do’ paganistic chant to block out tormentor
4) Half rhyme ‘shoe’/’do’ (Old woman who lived in a shoe) regressed into a childish fairytale paradigm to cope with oppression
5) Psychoanalytical mirrors Plath’s inability to escape the trauma of her father’s death as she was unable to mourn
6) Narrator aligns their oppression with a “Jew”
7) “Ich” Jews trying to breathe in gas chambers/ I – the narrator is struggling to exist
8) 1950s WW2 and mass genocide of the Jews
9) Fem lens: Plath’s point “stake” “fat black heart” - plosives brutality of the action but the necessity
10) Stagnant 1950s
Her husband structure
1) 5 Quatrains – no freedom or love
2) Enjambment – infantile repetitiveness of arguments
3) Eco-critical
Her husband
1) Lack of connection within a relationship
2) “One-man gynocidal movement”
3) Plosive monosyllabic “dull with coal dust” monotonous daily grind of lives
4) Both physically “dull” and it is a metaphorically “dull” atmosphere
5) Eco critical: pollution / industry
6) Personifies troubles to “the stubborn character of money” as if the symbolic “money” is a stingy businessman unwilling to raise wages despite unhappiness
7) Marxist: How a capitalist society represses love and reduces it to a grinding oblique nothingness
8) Vehement environment plosive onomatopoeic “slam” – Husband antithesis of loving
9) Grotesque harsh consonants “bunched in a hump” hag rather than the maiden, and him as a martyr
‘Crone’ last stage of cycle soon relationship will end
The Bee meeting structure
1) Entrapment – long sentence lines reaching out for help
2) Enjambment – led away from safety
3) Plath no longer the security of the relationship
The Bee meeting
1) Vulnerability of the narrator
2) Rhetorical question “Who are these people at the bridge?”
3) “bridge” liminality forced across the bridge to death
3) Ceremonial: “rector midwife sexton” marriage, childbirth, and death (the role of a woman - Plath questioning)
4) Kroll “put her husband’s career before her own”
5) Narrator tries to find protection in nature
6) “I cannot run” I am rooted” simplistic language dramatizes their fear
7) Dual verb “rooted” as if they have metamorphosed into a tree (Daphne myths) / “rooted” to the spot out of fear yet delegated to the hive “white and snug as a virgin”
8) Extended metaphor of “white” to the “box” as if they are being slowly effaced
Crows first lesson structure
1) Diminishing lines – lack of hope/ mans fall from Earth
2) Finality of the end stop – as if God has given up
3) Confessional – Hughes own feelings after Plath died
Crows first lesson
Rewrites the Genesis story
1) Passive tone “God tried” foreshadows failure
2) Surprising as “love” (agape” 10 commandments) yet Crow “gaped” at this. Pun - word meaningless
3) Hughes given up on Christian beliefs after Plath’s death 1963
4) Horrific metaphor of Crow’s reaction extended in the triplet “gaped” “convulsed” “retched” the word is physically repulsive
5) Stevenson “chauvinistic..” inability for Hughes to love and treat women with respect
6) “Swivelling eyes” “Jabbering protest” mans unnatural birth
7) “protest” - humans are forever complaining and never satisfied
8) Consumerist culture
Edge structure
Couplets - life and death cycle
Enjambement - flow of natural energy
Plath suicide 1963
Edge
Perfection in death
1) Simplistic beginning of “the women is perfected” as if no longer has the burdens of life
2) Plural noun “women” impossible to be perfected in life (domestic housewife)
3) Greek imagery likens her to a God/statue
4) “Greek necessity” - eternity not subject to decay / “scrolls of her toga” - story written and preserved
5) Plath remembered how she wants to be before her death
6) personified “moon” has “nothing to be sad about” as understands women has reached last part of the life of cycle / “hood of bone” - crone
7) White Goddess
Elm
1) “I know” - repetition, passive tone experienced this before
2) “Tap root” - “root” source of life/breadth of knowledge
3) Plath sees life and knowledge but also paradoxically sees it as death. Water in Plath’s poetry afterlife - can’t access FFF “I could breathe water”
4) “Gallop” “Echoing” - prince abandoning her
5) Hughes left
6) “arsenic” extended metaphor of poison / “snaky acids kiss”
7) Poison of society
8) “That kill” (harsh plosives) as the serpent killed the female deity in Eden
Wuthering Heights structure
Enjambement - the pull of destiny dragging the narrator in one direction
Wuthering Heights - bleak imagery of the moors
Wuthering Heights
Vulnerability of the narrator
1) Violent and harsh “Horizons ring me” echoes Prospero in Cock Crows but, whilst CC symbolises new beginnings at dawn this symbolises entrapment
2) Extended simile of the faggots “always unstable” as if they will collapse any second
3) Hughes left Plath
4) Find comfort elapses into fairy tale paradigm but greeted with a nightmare “grandmotherly disguise” “marbly baas”
5) Threatened as a women to be anything but the domestic housewife
6) Personification “sky leans on me” extended metaphor of the unstable faggots
7) Simile “gleams like small change” - far from safety
8) The poet longed to be ordinary
Medallion structure
Tercets - biblically represents divine completeness
Enjambment - natural flow of energies
Plath - solace in death
Medallion
1) “star and moon” fate and destiny”
2) “Gate” liminality - entrance to another world
3) Suicide (1963)
4) In life unnatural manmade quality “inert” “pliable” £crooked” but in death likened to a dragon slumbering “chainmail” “old Jews”
5) Plath saw death as a perfection
6) From death comes new life “white maggots coil” yet humans lack respect yardman “flung his brick” - Onomatopoeic “flung” carelessness of the action
