Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival.

I recently finished writing an ambitious villanelle, which means I have a few days to forget about my construction before returning to get my hands messy again. Analysing poetry was the obvious choice for a way to spend this time. Sylvia Plath was born on this day 93 years ago, and after seeing Poetry Foundation selected her poem Morning Song for poem of the day, there was no way I could resist a quick analysis. This poem comes from her collection Ariel, which I’ve been reading and learning from over the past few months.

The energy of this poem is clear from the first line. Plath doesn’t ease the reader into the environment of the poem, setting the scene or presenting some theme. Rather, she immediately pulls on the reader’s imagination with the phrase “fat gold watch.” The word “fat” links forward nicely to the descriptions of the newborn in this poem, and paired with “gold” brings thoughts of luxury and happiness. The “watch” gets us thinking far into the future, tempted to imagine a “fat gold” life. Any stability that this poem appeared to present with this first line is disturbed with the next lines. The newborn’s cry is “bald,” another clever moment of efficiency with Plath, describing the voice, while also playing with our imaginations$^{1}$. As this child’s cry takes “its place among the elements,” the reader has a moment to pause. This poem reads like an address to a baby, almost like the speaker is telling a child about how they came to be.

We shift our attention, however, to the present moment, which turns out to be only a few moments later, and the energy from the previous stanza has certainly lulled. Plosives from earlier (“fat”, “slapped”, “took”) give way to softer sounds (“voices”, “statue”, “shadows”, “safety”, “stand”, “walls”). The word “statue” draws attention to itself, contrasting with pairs like “watch” and “walls”; “elements” and “nakedness”; and even “cry,” sharing sounds with “magnifying” and “arrival.” These all pair backwards, but “statue” pairs only forward (“museum”). It won’t be until the very last word in this poem that we hear another sound to match it (other than “you”, of course). The statue’s mention at this point feels surprising, but after the next line we realise this is a picture of the child as a new instalment to the museum (or the “elements”).

It is also worth noting the use of the “O” sound throughout this poem. This is a rare occasion where we see explicit mentions of “vowels” and mouth movements, and, without speculating too much, this sound appears to be important. To list non-exhaustively some key instances, we have examples like

• Stanza 1: gold, footsoles,
• Stanza 2: echo, shadows,
• Stanza 3: own slow,
• Stanza 4: roses,
• Stanza 5: opens, and
• Stanza 6: swallows, notes.

If we’re flexible$^{2}$ about what we call an “O” sound, we have even more instances of crucial words that have this sound. The result is a feeling of cohesion that feeds into the “open”, transparent feeling of this poem. There is a lot of exposure, through windows, and nakedness, and “We” standing around.

The poem ends with a voice. The same voice which started this poem off, desperately then, now closes the poem with intention. The child tries a “handful” of notes, not in a dramatic entrance into life, demanding a place in the world, but with a more playful air. The comparison to balloons invites the reader to imagine a celebratory outlook. There is much still to say about Morning Song, but it is unlikely I will have the chance to write a full review$^{3}$. Ariel is an extraordinary collection, exploring several dimensions of human emotion with rawness and expression, and while the general perception of the collection is as a solely dark one$^4$, this serves as a reminder that even a collection like this can sometimes hit at something so hopeful.

Notes

1. This reminds me of Gertrude Stein. The ability to direct the reader’s mind by forcing them to see things really makes it hard to tell how much agency readers actually have when reading a poem. It seems like no matter how different the lived experiences of the reader and writer are, a good writer can always show a certain level of command over the joint subjective experience that their work provides.
2. The relationship between letters on the page and sounds from speaking them always fascinates me. The written word has a lot of potential for extra depth, and though sound is far more important than how the words look on the page, this still has a part to play (especially if you’re a synesthete!)
3. I imagine I will briefly mention Morning Song in one of my upcoming posts, on the interconnectedness of Ariel’s imagery, which I plan on properly writing after reading and analysing all (or most) of Ariel’s poems in a lot more depth than I currently have.
4. Especially in Hughes’ arrangement (as opposed to Plath’s original order).