Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea

This poem written by Sylvia Plath describes an image of a two lover’s summer day in the beach. It has a melancholic tone and it is reflected in the word used like cold and final, the sweet vacation that dwindles, thoughts, disappear, gone, that is all. The poem tries to capsule a moment that slowly fades away leaving memories behind. The poem is written in first person and the narrator as is she was one of the loves staring at the sea. Imageries are used for example when it says “a maze of mermaid hair”, which is also a metaphor, “white whales are gone with the white ocean”, or “a lone beachcomber squats among the wrack of kaleidoscope shells”.

She also tries to say that moments are significant things we have that are hard to remember and may seem insignificant but that’s how it works. It makes the reader think that what ever happens or whatever we think is not going to stop the flow of life. That happens when it says: “Though the mind like an oyster labors on and on,

A grain of sand is all we have. Water will run by; the actual sun. Will scrupulously rise and set; No little man lives in the exacting moon, And that is that, is that, is that.”

Other metaphors like “the attic of the skull” are used to make reference to simple things like the mind, making it sound mysterious and beautiful. Also, used to follow the meter of the poem and make it rhyme with fall in the second quatrain. The poem is closed with a repetition of “is that” to round the theme and close the idea of insignificance.

- Adelaida Caicedo. 

Death & Co. (Analysis of a Sylvia Plath’s poem)

The poem’s structure is based on quintets. The poem is a free verse due to the lack of end rhymes. There is a clear use of anaphora in the poem such as:

“He tells me how badly I photograph.

He tells me how sweet”

“The frost makes a flower,

The dew makes a star,

The dead bell,

The dead bell.”

The anaphora is intended to give rhythm at the end of the poem. Also in the first example of anaphora is pretending to dichotomize the idea of death giving it “a good cop, bad cop” kind of sense. The first “He” refers to a different man than the second does.

The theme of the poem is clearly death. The tone is rather aggressive and the sentences are short, giving it a paused rhythm. From what I could grasp from the poem it is trying to change the idea of death as lonesome idea, giving it company that has a quite different personality than death itself. The person describing it is dying and at the end death and its company depart to rip the soul of someone else. This part is described in the last stanza with the anaphora. 

The fatherless son

Fede p

The fatherless son

You will be aware of an absence, presently,

Growing beside you, like a tree,

A death tree, color gone, an Australian gum tree ---

Balding, gelded by lightning--an illusion,

And a sky like a pig's backside, an utter lack of attention.

But right now you are dumb.

And I love your stupidity,

The blind mirror of it. I look in

And find no face but my own, and you think that's funny.

It is good for me

To have you grab my nose, a ladder rung.

One day you may touch what's wrong ---

The small skulls, the smashed blue hills, the godawful hush.

Till then your smiles are found money.

Analysis

There are 14 stanzas.

Talking about the absence of a father an absence that will grow huge. Comparing the poem to Syliva personal life.

Speaking to his son. 

We know this because she is talking about a born baby, dumb (innocent).

She can see her self in the eyes of the kid which she compares it with a mirror.  

November Graveyard (43)  - Sylvia Plath

Poem Analysis 

Jorge García

November Graveyard be Sylvia Plath is a poem that consists of three stanzas. Representing a strong emotion and Plath's perspective towards what a graveyard means and symbolizes.

The first of the sestet stanzas has a syllable structure 8-11-9-13-11-8, making a meter less evident. This stanza starts off with an evident rhythm, the separation by a semi colon in the first verse, and then the alliteration  in the second verse with the comas, all contribute to marking this rhythm, and while there seems to be no separation in the first part of the first verse, the consonance of the first letters "The Scene Stands Stubborn..." force the reader to separate those stressed syllables, creating rythm. The next two verses start to break this rhythm, the 3rd has only one pause, and the fourth and fifth have none. These verses have the most speed of the stanza, and then breaks down to a slower rhythm on the last one. This rhythm is creating an emphasis on each one of the verses, but this emphasis is greater in the 4th and 5th verses.

Years by Sylvia Plath

First she starts making allusion to Years themselves in the first paragraph but she does not say the word years not a single time through the whole poem.
She makes the allusion to years through animals. Then she also says how they are not like colors greeness or darkness but pure, meaning that they just are. At the end of the first paragraph she ends with saying how years freeze and are. How years still are even when freezing, years don´t freeze.
Then she states her opinion on the second paragraph, making reference to the stars and the universe, black, it bores her, as time and years themselves, eternal.
third paragraph she says how she loves action, "piston in motion" and the horse, making reference to life itself, and things that die, or crash.
She says how at the en the horses are and the pistons hiss, meaning they will still hiss even when the years pass

Child by: Sylvia Plath José Daniel Gómez C 18/02/16

Although a short poem, “Child” takes a look at at Plath’s work as an example of her unequivocal love for her children, and an expression of her stress over being unable to provide for them as she would like to.

 The first three stanzas outline how Plath treasures her child and views him as a perfect creature, uncorrupted by society and civilization. She hopes to expand her child’s horizons by revealing to him the mysteries and magic of the world, a veritable “zoo of the new.” She imagines her young son learning the names of little white flowers, and hopes that what he sees through his “clear eye” is always “grand and classical.” Together, the first three stanzas are easy to interpret expressions of her love.

In the fourth stanza, however, the tone abruptly shifts. She suddenly suggests that the world also carries with it "this troublous / Wringing of hands, this dark / Ceiling without a star." The first three stanzas detail the world as she imagines it for her child. The fourth stanza presents reality as Plath knows it - an upsetting, anxious, and terrible existence. It is almost as though, in imagining a lovely life for him, she suddenly recalled that life is not limitless, but rather defined by limits (a "ceiling") and pain. Further, there she realizes that with her own stress maybe she will pass it to her own son.

This poem has a combination of a desolate tone with a joyful tone, this is very strange in a poem, however this means that Plath uses antithesis as her main technique. This helps her to change the mood of the reader rapidly.