The Plath Podcast: A guide for Leaving Cert English students

My name is Laura Daly, I’m an experienced English teacher from Dublin and I’m going to be taking you through an exam-focused overview of Plath’s work in this  podcast.

I cover a range of different topics in this podcast, such as: 

I recommend having each poem to hand while you listen to the podcast. You can find all of these poems by looking them up on Google. I have also included the transcript of this podcast so you can take down the notes you find useful.

Have a listen below, or wherever you get your podcasts!

Or if you prefer, you can watch listen to it on Youtube it instead!

Below is a transcript of this full podcast packed full of top tips and H1 notes. Make sure to copy these into your notebook to use on the day of your exams!

Hi there welcome to this Studyclix podcast on Sylvia Plath. My name is Laura Daly, I’m an English teacher from Dublin and I’m going to be taking you through an exam focused overview of Plath’s work today.

Just like in a Leaving Cert essay I’m going to follow a structure to give this podcast coherence. First of all, I’m going to tell you a little bit about Plath’s background, her cultural context as poet. After that then we’ll look at the overarching structure that your essay should follow and this section is transferrable to all other poets on your course.

Then, with possible exam questions in mind, we will go through each of the 10 poems on the course with a with a view to condensing them into the bitesize elements to make them easy for you to remember.

These bitesize element will include looking at:

So let’s look briefly now at Plath’s biography. She was an American poet, born in Boston in1932. The year a poet is born is significant because you can then take note of the era that they came of age. It offers great insight to consider what were the pervading societal attitudes at the time and what big events might have influenced their art. Plath was in her 20’s in the 1950’s, a strange decade in terms of the rolling back of freedoms that women had enjoyed during WWII.

There was a cultural desire to re-establish the traditional family and its traditional roles to overcome the trauma and chaos that had unfolded during the war. We see the impact of this patriarchal agenda in Plath’s work. There is a dichotomy at play in her poetry; her desire to be the perfect woman/mother/wife, coupled with a feeling of inadequacy. The threat of the Cold War and nuclear destruction also hung like a menace over the world, and a sense of menace permeates her poetry at times. Plath went to College first in Massachusetts and then moved to Cambridge where she met and married the poet Ted Hughes. They lived in London and had two children together.

They moved from London to Devon and the marriage unravelled, Ted had an affair and left the home. Plath was left isolated with two young children to raise and this had a huge impact on her mental health. She had always suffered from bouts of mental illness, and in the past had received electroshock therapy and attempted suicide several times. Ultimately she did take her own life, tragically when she was only thirty, by gassing herself in an oven.

So what should you mention about Plath’s biography in your Leaving Cert Essay:

Now we’ll look briefly at how to create an overarching structure in your essay.

• P is for purpose – am I answering the question asked?
• C is for coherence – am I linking my responses coherently.
• L is the marks awarded for language, ‘lively phrasing’, vocabulary, syntax etc.
• M is for mechanics, spelling and grammar.

Purpose, coherence and Language are all 30% of the essays marks and the remaining 10% is for mechanics.

When you’re approaching your individual analysis of the poems in your Leaving Cert essay, a good visual to have in your mind’s eye is an inverted triangle. What I mean by this is that you will move in your discussion from a broad overview of the poem, to a more focused analysis of the imagery and techniques and finally you will be focusing on specific words and language of importance in the poem.

The analysis is a subtle drilling down that always begins with an overview. A common error I see when correcting Leaving Cert poetry essays is a student who is so enthusiastic to show their knowledge of quotation and what individual images mean, that they forget to give a bit of an overview of the poem, or to contextualise it all, before launching into imagery.

Finally, a great structural technique to use that will make your essay stand out as
exceptional is to use a quote from the poet, particularly the last line of the essay if you reference something the poet has said about her work it gives a lovely structure and adds greatly to the essay.

A fantastic quote to use by Plath is when she said;

It captures the dark nature of Plath’s writing and the impact that the raw, honesty of her writing can have on the reader.

Morning Song is a poem about motherhood and the stark, vulnerability associated with parenthood, particularly in the early days of a child’s life when they are so fragile. The title 'Morning Song’ refers to the child’s cries we hear at the end of the poem, and morning also suggests a dawn, a new beginning, in this instance Plath’s role as a first time mother. The form of the poem is unrhymed tercets, three line stanzas, and it is filled with aural imagery again lending to the idea that this is a ‘song’.

The poem opens with an unusual simile depicting the birth of her child;

A gold watch is valuable, yes, but the image lacks the softness one would expect when describing the birth of a child. This is what is so appealing about Plath, her unique perspective. She continues this abstract imagery in stanza two comparing the baby to a ‘new statue’ whose ‘nakedness / Shadows our safety’. This metaphor and the accompanying sibilance highlighting the beauty of the baby, it is almost a piece of art to be revered, but also its sheer fragility, which threatens the new parents.

Their ineptitude is highlighted by the fact that they stand ‘blankly as walls’. Plath subverts the idea prevalent at the time that all women had a natural maternal instinct, instead she is showing the very real uncertainty that becoming a mother can create. And this exploration of motherhood continues into the third stanza, which in a way is the crux of the poem.

In this image Plath compares herself to a cloud and the child is the rain that has fallen from the cloud and produced a pool of water on the ground, now mirroring the cloud above, as children often reflect their parents. ‘Effacement’ is a hugely significant word in the poem, often overlooked by students. It has three meanings, the process of eliminating something, to reduce in significance and also it is the thinning of the cervix in labour.

When a woman has a child the impact of motherhood can be the loss of the woman’s sense of who she was before the child, and her needs can also become secondary to the needs to the child. Plath sees the realities of motherhood as a diminishment of herself, this is a radically feminist view of motherhood for the 1950’s.

This change is depicted later in the poem when she describes herself as ‘cow-heavy’ with breast milk in her unflattering ‘Victorian nightgown’. The loss of self is mitigated somewhat in the final stanza when the child’s cry:

this cry is in sharp contrast with the ‘bald cry’ from the opening stanza and there is a more uplifting tone here.

However, critics often cite ‘Morning Song’ as a celebratory poem, but I wonder is it more a mourning, as in grieving, song, lamenting the mother’s lost identity with the birth of her child?

So to recap:

• Themes: motherhood, the vulnerability of becoming a mother and the loss of self.
• Key images: the watch, the new statue, the cloud and the puddle, cow heavy and Victorian nightgown, the baby’s cries.
• Stylistic features: sounds permeate the poem, assonance, alliteration.
• Tone: reflective, disorientation, uplifting.

‘Child’ is a fantastic poem to link with ‘Morning Song’. 

‘Child’ is a short, simple poem, again in unrhymed tercets. Plath’s adoration for her son shines through from the opening stanza ‘Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing’. This joyous, self-assured tone is followed by all of her hopes and dreams as a mother and what she wants to do for him;

These images capture optimism of young motherhood, the lovely nursery rhyming sound of ‘zoo of the new’, illustrates how the ordinary things in life are fascinating when seen afresh through a child’s eyes. Enjambment takes us to the next stanza when two metaphors mark the shift in tone. Here she compares her child to an ‘April snowdrop’, delicate and innocent, and then herself to an ‘Indian pipe’, a flower that takes feeds off other plants. This disturbing image shows how she fears she will ‘feed off’ or damage her child. 

The image of the ‘pool’ seen in ‘Morning Song’ is found again here, the eye is compared to a pool in

Here the word ‘should’ is very telling; Plath is again worrying about her abilities as a mother.

The final stanza is filled with despair, as a poem that began so optimistically, descends into guilt. The child’s eye, which has been the focus of the poem, in reality sees only his mother’s anxious hands above him

The final line of the poem is made all the more poignant by the fact that less than two weeks later, Plath committed suicide. Her image of her son having no guiding light,

foreshadows this awful reality. Even more tragically her son would later go on to commit suicide also.

So to recap:

• Themes: the ideals juxtaposed with the realities of motherhood
• Key images: the child’s eye is central, all other images stem from it, zoo of the new, the two flowers, the anxious hands, and the dark ceiling.
• Stylistic features: simple almost like a nursery rhyme, enjambment signifies being carried away by emotion.
• Tone: hopeful, turns anxious and eventually into despair

‘Poppies in July’ is a remarkable poem, my favourite by Plath. It is a poem about a mental breakdown, a mind in turmoil, seeking relief. This turmoil is captured stylistically by the sometimes awkward syntax; the desperate rhetorical questions; the exclamation marks and dashes; and the repetition.

Plath’s marriage was breaking up and the poem really captures the idea that a person in psychological pain can crave, physical pain or alternatively numbness to alleviate their psychological pain.

One of the most cryptic lines of the poem

suggests the root cause of all this anguish is indeed her marriage and the pain it has brought her. The speaker in the poem addresses the poppies throughout the poem. She opens the poem by comparing them to fire, ‘little hell flames’ and then asks ‘Do you do no harm?’.

The second stanza has short, staccato, contradictory sentences.

She cannot touch them yet she puts her hands on them, she touches flames but they don’t burn her; there is a sensory confusion here that illustrates her confused mental state ‘it exhausts me’ the speaker exclaims.

The imagery moves away from flames to blood, first comparing the papery texture of the poppies’ petals, to the bleeding lips of a mouth

And then to ‘Little bloody skirts’ with connotations of femininity and
menstruation here.

The poppies then become the source of something more valuable to the speaker, their seeds which contain opium is another possible avenue to alleviate her suffering;

She craves the ‘dulling and stilling’ of the drug but ultimately this is all wishful thinking and the poem ends with the repetition of ‘But colourless. Colourless.’

The overall tone is one of deep suffering and despair and these final lines offer the speaker no respite, evoking sympathy in the reader. The finality of the two full stops adds to the depressive nature of the stanza.

So to recap, the key elements:

• Themes: mental breakdown or turmoil, desire to self-harm and self-medicate.
• Key images: the poppies are central – poppies as fire, as bloody skirts, as the bloody lips of a mouth, the opiates, the glass capsule, colourless.
• Stylistic features: awkward syntax; desperate rhetorical questions; punctuation such as exclamation marks and dashes; and repetition.
• Tone: suffering and despair.

This poem touches on a topic which is explored by many poets, that of poetic inspiration itself. Watching a black rook rearrange it’s feathers in the rain prompted Plath to write the poem and stave off a period of writer’s block. She discusses poetic inspiration as a sort of divine inspiration, a miracle that one must wait for, and without which, life is bleak and depressing. There is a strong interplay in the poem between light and darkness, the light represents inspiration and the darkness, the depression she feels without it.

Another motif running through the poem is that of religious symbolism, she uses language such as ‘miracles’ , ‘ceremony’, ‘celestial’, and ‘angel’ thus linking poetry to the divine. The form of the poem is eight, unrhymed, quintains.

So let’s take a closer look at some key imagery now that we have an overview of the poem. The opening stanza introduces the black rook of the title, the unlikely source of inspiration for the poet. Yet the action of the rook

is a metaphorical nod to the construction of a poem, the editing involved in the creative process. Plath claims she does

and here she is acknowledging two contrasting paths towards poetic inspiration, the divine and the accidental. A central theme of the poem is explored in stanzas 3 – 5, the idea that the most ordinary and everyday objects are deserving of inclusion in poetry when looked at through the artist’s eyes;

Throughout the poem there is an apocalyptic feel at times; the imagery of the ‘desultory weather’, the ‘mute sky’ the ‘dull ruinous landscape’ and the ‘season of fatigue’ all work to evoke the depressive state of the speaker whose biggest fear is that of ‘total neutrality’ a feeling of nothingness. This image is terrifically evocative as depression is often characterised not by a feeling of sadness but by a numbness, not feeling anything at all.

The speaker knows she must be patient, reinforced by the repetition of ‘wait’ in the final stanza but the waiting is worth it seen also with the repetition of ‘miracles’ in this stanza too. She personifies the act of creation as ‘the angel’ whose ‘descent’ is ‘rare and random’.

The language in this poem is particularly beautiful, ‘spasmodic tricks of radiance’, being a personal favourite line, but the beauty of the language almost belies the message of the poem. Perhaps writing poetry is more a honed skill than random, divine inspiration bestowed upon the writer; is Plath selling herself short here?

So to recap:

• Themes: poetic inspiration, writer’s block, the worthiness of the ordinary in poetry.
• Key images: the rook rearranging the feathers, light and darkness, divine imagery.
• Stylistic features: repetition of ‘wait’, ‘miracles’ and ‘angel’.
• Tone: an interplay between, depressed and hopeful.

There are a variety of ways to read ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’. The way I will interpret it is that the bee box is a metaphor for the speaker’s mind, her thoughts are at times chaotic, unintelligible and even ‘dangerous’. Throughout the poem, there is a power struggle and tension exists about who is in control, the speaker or her inner voices.

The box is a place of confinement and claustrophobia but also a source of deep curiosity. It is almost a metaphorical Pandora’s box, urging the speaker to release her thoughts. The poem is also about creativity, and the bravery and vulnerability required to access our inner thoughts and feelings and subsequently release them, through art, into the world. Similar to ‘Black Rook in Rainy Weather’ the poem is in quintains, seven stanzas, with a final single line.

The poem opens with the assertion that the ‘bee box’ was something she ‘ordered’. She assumes responsibility for it, at the same time as being slightly fearful of it. She uses an odd and quirky metaphor to describe the box;

and these unsettling images foreshadow the unsettling tone of the poem throughout. This unsettling feeling is evoked in part due to the focus on noise throughout the poem and the onomatopoeia; there is a ‘din’, ‘angrily clambering’, ‘unintelligible syllables’, ‘Roman mob’, ‘furious Latin’. At one point she says:

Some other key imagery in the poem is her image of the bees as the inside of the box as ‘dark, dark / with the swarmy feeling of African hands’. This image cannot but evoke connotations of the slave trade and is, therefore, deeply disturbing. She also compares the bees to a ‘Roman mob’ in the fourth stanza, evoking chaos. But a tentative sense of order returns to the poem as Plath begins to take back control over her thoughts.

The images that follow, of her as ‘tree’ or in the beekeeping costume ‘moon suit and funeral veil’ are much more passive and relaxed, the tone has shifted and the speaker has resolved that: 

The final line of ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’ that ‘The box is only temporary’ is a reluctant assertion that Plath must release her feelings and thoughts, she must order her internal chaos perhaps through the medium of poetry.

Finally, the repetition of the pronoun ‘I’, coupled with the fact that Plath’s father had a keen interest in bees as did she, make this poem an extremely personal poem.

So to recap:

• Themes: exploration of inner thoughts and who has control over them, the creative process.
• Key images: the bee box, the coffin of a midget, the African hands, the Roman mob, the tree, the beekeeper's costume, the speaker as a god.
• Stylistic features: noise, both discussed in the poem and the onomatopoeia. Repetition of the pronoun ‘I’. Rhetorical questions.
• Tone: unsettling, fearful, curious, acceptance.

‘Mirror’ is a poem in which Plath uses the voice of a persona. Interestingly she chooses to personify a mirror and through the mirror, she explores themes such as a woman’s self-worth and how it can often be linked to their appearance. The poem exposes how the ageing process can be overwhelming when so much value is placed on looks. The poem is in two 9-line stanzas, in the first stanza the mirror is hung on a wall, with faces passing, interrupting its view of the speckled wallpaper. In the second the mirror is compared to a ‘lake’ and now appears to be flat on a dresser where the same woman looks over into it every morning. 

The opening line of the poem is interesting and this is where close examination of single words is key to proving your abilities to analyse a poem to a H1 standard.  The mirror claims:

Now the most obvious meaning of ‘exact’ is precise, but it can also be used as a verb, and to exact something from someone is to obtain something. Finally, if something or someone is ‘exacting’ they make great demands on your attention or your resources. All three meanings of the word apply to the mirror. It is precise, it takes away the woman’s self-worth and it commands her attention.

The mirror’s very neutral opening claim ‘I have no preconceptions’ is followed by the more sinister assertion that:

the very act of looking in the mirror seems to diminish the self as the mirror ingests it. In the same stanza the canny metaphor of ‘The eye of a little god’ shows us the importance of the mirror, it is deified due to the power it wields over her. 

The second stanza continues to build on the subtle sinister tone in the first.  Although the poem was written in 1961, its relevance today is remarkable. The woman is:

The woman is looking for her value in her reflection and unhappy with the reality she turns to the flattering lighting of candles or moonlight. In an age where the image reigns supreme on social media, and filtering and editing images is ubiquitous, this poem is immediately relatable. Including a personal comment like this is important to secure an H1. 

Sadly the woman is never satisfied and we see the ‘agitation of hands’ that we saw earlier in ‘Child’.  

The final frightening image:

A young girl dies in the lake and an old woman is resurrected to take her place, this emphasises the terror engendered in our society around the ageing process, particularly for women. The repugnant simile comparing the woman to 'a terrible fish’ is brutal, Plath is unforgiving both to her ageing self and the society that appears to revile it. 

So to recap;

• Themes: a woman’s self-worth and value in society is often in her appearance, internalised misogyny towards the ageing process. 
• Key images: the personification of the mirror, eye of a little god, lake, the candles and the moon, the agitation of hands, the young girls drowning the old woman and the simile of the terrible fish.
• Stylistic features: the voice of the mirror, not the woman. 
• Tone: neutral to begin but increasingly menacing.

The poem is inspired by a trip to the titular French town, ‘Finisterre’, which translated means ‘end of the land’. The poem has four 9-line stanzas and is extremely rich linguistically as well as sensuously. Plath had a deep affiliation to the sea which emerges in this poem and the wildness of the sea reflects her inner turmoil and anguish.

Now for our overview; stanza one depicts the jutting cliffs and alludes to the many lives lost in the treacherous sea, she also describes the  veterans who are housed in the town, so the overwhelming feeling of this stanza is of damaged and lost lives. This stanza is full or aural imagery. In the second stanza Plath is walking along the clifftop surrounded by mist, this is a very tactile stanza. The third describes a statue in the town ‘Our Lady of the Shipwrecked’ and the sailor kneeling at her feet, this is a visual stanza. The final stanza talks about the sellers who man the tourist stalls in the town and the voice of one of the sellers has an ambiguous final message, again the auditory sense is strongest here. 

The image of the cliffs as wizened, arthritic knuckles clinging to the nothingness of the sea opens the poem;

The ‘exploding’ sea which ‘cannons into their ear’ is likened to the ‘faces of the drowned’. The pathetic image of the ‘Leftover soldiers from old, messy wars’ adds to the language of conflict we see throughout this stanza, it is a stark and brutal opening. 

Stanza two takes on an equally chilling, but more mystical edge, as she takes a walk along the cliff top. The mists are compared to souls in an extremely vivid image;

There is a lot of religious imagery in these lines, the idea that the souls are resurrected but where they go seems to be a place of hopelessness, rather than salvation, creates a gloomy tone mirrored by the assonance in the stanza. As the souls pass her she becomes suffocated by them, Plath was haunted by the early death of her father and we see this captured in the claustrophobic imagery here; ‘they stuff my mouth with cotton’. 

The religious iconography continues into stanza three, where a strange mirroring occurs;

The statue of Our Lady of the Shipwreck is oblivious to the prayers of both as she is ‘in love with the beautiful formlessness of the sea’.

The final stanza turns now from the natural and the supernatural to the human endeavours of the ‘postcard stalls’ where shell ‘necklaces’ and ‘pretty trinkets’ from the sea are sold.  A voice tells us ironically that;

Is this line telling us that not everything is as it seems? The final line offers us nothing more than further ambiguity; ‘These are our crepes. Eat them before they blow cold.’ The I of the poem is finally offered some sustenance, some comfort and also a warning to enjoy the moment before it again goes ‘cold’.  An insight into Plath’s volatile psyche perhaps?

So to recap:

• Themes: inner turmoil. 
• Key images: personification of the sea, the cliffs, Our Lady of the Shipwrecked and the sailor, the peasant praying to them.
• Stylistic features: sensuous poem – hearing, touch and sight. Religious iconography The voice of the trinket seller.
• Tone: Dark, mournful, ambiguous.

‘Elm’ is yet another poem where Plath adopts a persona, as in ‘Mirror’, but it has the undercurrent of horror that we see in ‘Poppies in July’. She takes on the persona of the Elm tree who is speaking to the poet, although in the final stanzas the voice of the ‘I’ becomes more ambiguous and unclear.  

‘Elm’ can be overwhelming for students to condense in the exam because there are 14 tercets. To help, here is an overview of the key images from all the stanzas;

We will dissect some of these images in more detail but as always we must first look at the themes of the poem. The poem is about a state of anxiety and fear ‘I know the bottom…it is what you fear’. There is a malevolent presence in the poem which turns the elements of nature into painful and destructive forces. The poem can be read as an exploration of Plath’s ongoing mental struggles and their impact on her.

The tree seems to recognise Plath’s or the listener’s anguish, saying she too has been to the bottom;

In the second stanza this ‘bottom’ is further interrogated. The tree asks if the noise of her rustling branches reminds Plath of the:

Part of this madness could be attributed to the impact of her which is referred to in the following stanza ‘Love is a shadow’. Plath uses the simile ‘it has gone off, like a horse’ to show how love has deserted her.

I just want to pause here for a moment, if you are looking at the transcript of the podcast you will notice that when I’m quoting from the poem I sometimes use three dots in between phrases, this is called an ellipsis and it’s used to leave out parts of quotes that are unnecessary. 

Now back to the imagery of the poem. The elements of nature transmogrified throughout the rain is the ‘sound of poisons’, ‘like arsenic’; the setting sun is referred to as an ‘atrocity’; the moon ‘scathes’ her. The language here is violent and suggests physical pain. One image, in particular, is reminiscent of the electroshock therapy she previously underwent during a period of mental illness;

In stanzas 11 and 12, Plath uses synecdoche (this is a technique where a part is used to represent the whole, for example, the crown can be used to represent the king). Plath uses ‘a cry’, ‘flaps out’, ‘hooks’, ‘feathery’, to suggest a bird without directly using the word bird. The bird is a bird of prey, searching for love, but it is a dark and malignant force.

Repetition is also an extremely important sound technique used in the poem and you should definitely include it in your response. Repetition is always used for emphasis and here it is used to emphasise her despair; her desperate thoughts, In particular you should focus on the repetitions in the final lines;

This final image shows the poet frozen, inactive and in a state of self-destruction, all adding to the disturbing and unsettling tone of the poem.

So to recap, have the pens at the ready:

• Themes: exploring anxiety and fear and mental illness
• Key images: the bottom, the scorched filaments, the atrocity of sunsets, the elm itself.
• Stylistic features: rhetorical questions, repetition, the language of physical pain, synecdoche. 
• Tone: malevolent, chilling, disturbing. 

‘The Times are Tidy’ is unlike the other poems on the course, in that it is a cutting social commentary and there is no personal pronoun ‘I’. As the title suggests, Plath sees the 1950’s as a neat and orderly time in history, but this is not perceived as good thing and instead she is critical of society, in contrast with times gone by.

Three images dominant the poem in the first stanza are the hero and cook, who have been replaced by the mayor and a rotisserie. The second stanza is the knight or dragon slayer, whose heroic deeds are no longer necessary, the dragon has shrivelled to lizard like proportions due to lack of action. And finally, the third stanza laments that all the witches have long ago been burnt at the stake.

It is a common trope in literature, to be critical of the present and romanticise the past and that’s exactly what Plath is doing in her opening image as she laments;

She equates modernity and its technological advancements, such as the record player, with the idea that we have stagnated. The image of the ‘mayor’s rotisserie/turns round of its accord’ means the cook is now ‘jobless’. Is this not still a prevalent anxiety, that technology is replacing humans?

This continues with the imagery in the second stanza; There’s no career in the venture /of riding against the lizard’, the knight is defunct as the lizard is:

The soft alliteration of ‘l’ here, lends this stanza a lovely softness which contrasts with her biting commentary. 

But the most interesting line in the second stanza is;

The despondent tone here is paradoxical, surely Plath should be rejoicing if she were living in a age where danger and threat had been erased? Let’s pause for a moment in our analysis here,

Now back to the poem, I was questioning why she bemoans the relative safety of her modern world, but the subtlety lies in her final image and here the poem takes on a feminist edge. Plath says that:

referring to the archaic practice of burning witches at the stake, widely regarded as a way of legitimising the execution of ‘troublesome’ women. She is mourning the loss of difficult women, as she extols sarcastically that ‘the children are better for it’. There is more to this poem than meets the eye. 

So to recap, have the pens at the ready:

• Themes: a social commentary, critical of modern life and romanticising magical elements from the past. Loss of the ‘crone’.
• Key images: the hero juxtaposed with the mayor, modern life like a stuck record, the cook juxtaposed with the rotisserie, the knight and the dragon lizard, the crone.
• Stylistic features: juxtaposition, paradoxical, assonance. 
• Tone: harsh, critical, nostalgic and mournful for the past.

‘Pheasant’ is outwardly, a straightforward nature poem; Plath admires a pheasant she has seen on the grounds of her house ‘that odd, dark head, pacing’. But like many of her poems there is a disconcerting undertone to it created by the sibilant ‘It startles me still’.

The poem opens with a conversational quality as she addresses a ‘You’ in the first line ‘You said you would kill it in the morning / Do not kill it’, this is both accusatory and confrontational and we know her husband Ted Hughes enjoyed hunting. This reflection on the pheasant alludes to various hidden subtexts such as this, the tension between husband and wife. Another such subtext is the supernatural which we see in the second stanza and third stanza when she refers to being ‘visited’ by the pheasant. However, she is quick to dismiss the connotations of the word she has just used.

We see this playfulness continue when she acknowledges its ‘kingliness’ in his natural habitat, using regal language to suggest his world is ‘court’. 

The wonder at the ‘rareness’ of the bird, emphasised with the repetition prompts Plath’s imagination to run away, she pictures

the exclamation mark illustrating her awe at the beauty of it. She describes it as a ‘cornucopia’, a symbol of plenty and indeed the presence of the pheasant fills her with artistic inspiration. 

While the pheasant ‘Settles in the elm and is easy’ she closes the poem with ‘Let be, let be’ - an admonishment to herself for disturbing the pheasant and perhaps also to the persona who said they would kill it. The ease of the pheasant is contrasted with Plath’s sense of having intruded.

So to recap:

• Themes: reflection on the beauty of nature and how human being interact with nature (desire to kill, be inspired).
• Key images: the pheasant, ‘mystical’, regal language; kingliness, court, cornucopia. 
• Stylistic features: conversational tone, repetition ‘rare’/ ‘rareness’, ‘kill’, ‘Let be’, sibilance. 
• Tone: reflective, wonder, admonishment.

Now we’ve recapped all the poems a final top tip in preparation for the poetry section, which is 12.5% of the overall exam, is to write a sample essay from the past papers and go over the essay with a highlighter. Any time you see a word of poetic terminology or a quote from the poet, highlight it. By poetic terminology I mean; theme, image, simile, metaphor, personification, all the sound techniques; alliteration, assonance, sibilance, onomatopoeia, or words like hyperbole, contrast etc. If your essay is covered in highlighter you are on track for a H1! 

To conclude, Plath is a complex poet, her life and death are of course an intricate part of understanding her poetry, but her work is so much more than her tumultuous marriage and the tragedy of her suicide. Her honesty when it comes to looking at trauma; her outlook on womanhood and motherhood, the internal and external pressures and expectations of both; her cutting social commentaries; and her discussions of the creative process itself, all mean that her poetry is simultaneously challenging and deeply rewarding.  

I hope you’ve enjoyed the podcast and this recap of Plath and best of luck in the exam!