Voices and Agency

We begin with an anonymised woman in the state of perfection and death. The definite article suggests a particular woman, maybe representing Plath herself. However, by choosing to be particular about much else, Plath abstracts her identity, extending the scope of the subject to women (or mothers) in general.

The poem can be loosely divided into two subjects: the woman and her children, the latter of which are also directly linked to death. Through Plath’s choices of narrative actions for the former, Plath appears to actively reduce the scale and importance of the woman’s voice. She smiles, and “her bare feet seem to be saying” things, but the woman herself never says or even does anything except in relation her children. This seems to hint at a restriction that childbirth brings, consistent with the fact that Plath had recently birthed her second child at the time of writing this collection. The poem Morning Song is an example of a poem that touches on these tensions quite explicitly: the attention babies draw to themselves, and the way mothers attend instantly to their children’s needs, are ideas prevalent in that poem. Through both poems, Plath portrays her experience of motherhood as a loss of identity and a sort of death.

The Edge of Everything

The title was a bit of a mystery to me, but I have two guesses (and no particular reason to reject either) one:

1. The “Edge” is the chisel that forms the woman, a Greek statue.
2. The “Edge” is the boundary between death and ‘not-death’.

One interpretation, then, is that the woman statue$^1$ is created through suffering, as a baby is created through suffering$^2$, and that both creations now transitioned not from death to life, but from non-existence to existence, and that this existence can often be more accurately a dead existence.

Also worth noting are the enjambed lines “Her dead / Body […]” and “Her bare / Feet […].” The emphasis on these words, in the context of the interpretation just presented, places the lifeless, naked existence of this woman in comparison to the tumultuous existence of newborn children. The empty space formed by the line break allows both phrases to really ring, and emphasises the isolating death.

To tie everything together, consider these lines from Morning Song:

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New Statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. […]

In the context of Morning Song, the statue in the museum is the newborn, and this image is a well-crafted exploration of this creature settling into its existence, being marvelled at by the people around. In Edge, the statue is the woman, and here, rather than focussing on perception, we focus on the person herself.

Overall, this confirms the link between the two poems, and acts as a darker side of the same coin: if Morning Song explored the good and bad of start of a life, Edge explores the good and bad of the end of one.

The Garden

Now we consider lines 9 to 16. Taking these words literally, the dead woman’s children are themselves dead. The comparison of the children to snakes does a few things. First, it trains the reader to see the children through a dehumanizing lens. Second, it may describe a literal foetal position. Lastly, by using the image of a snake, we portray them as evil, dangerous beings, which colours the next image with an uneasy tone. The children are positioned as if about to be breastfed, but both mother and children are lifeless. It is as if the children are to blame.

Yet, rather than this death providing distance, Plath appears to see this death as a source of closeness between the mother and her children, so close in fact that the children are ‘folded’ back into her. The word ‘folded’ is uncomfortable and rules out any affectionate, motherly interpretation of the woman’s actions. This matches with the idea that she is “now empty” of milk and therefore motherly provision.

One other note is the use of colour in this poem. White is used in Tulips to describe a form of pure peacefulness, consistent with the way people with suicidal ideation might romanticize death as a perfect escape, rather than a painful one. This isn’t to say Plath was unaware of the impact death leaves on loved ones, but the fact that the woman in this poem brings her children with her suggests that, to her, the solution to being separated by death is more death. It’s a heavy and heart-breaking portrayal of the complex set of feelings that several people have felt, and that many have tragically acted on.

Structure as a Compass

By far the biggest source of intrigue in this poem for me was the choice to break lines 2 and 6 after only two words. I’d initially imagined its purpose was simply to create an awkward feeling in the poem, but there are several ways to create a tense emotion, that don’t involve such disruptive breaks to the stability of a poem.$^2$ What I liked most about the investigation into this choice was that the line breaks served to highlight two phrases as connected, a link which guided most of my analysis.

One lesson then is that sometimes, associations can be created not through explicit juxtaposition through line order, but through the similarity between various structural elements of the poem.

I’m in the drafting process for one of my poems, an Ars Poetica titled Abacus in the Nile. I realised I could use structure in a similar way in this tiny poem to hopefully say a lot more than what is immediately apparent:

This poem is based largely on Mary Oliver’s passing metaphor of Poetry as a river, in A Poetry Handbook but I chose not to explicitly state that anymore, and to instead use the list of objects in the end, to let the reader come to the conclusion themselves, when they realise the river is the only item missing.

Similarly, I link the “little brain” to the “little boat”, and the numbers to the current. One effect of this is that now the mind is nurtured by numbers, the vessel that this survival comes through is itself is guided by poetry, slightly twisting the use of the word survival to say that actual survival comes from the river but the basket (the mind) makes it hard to tell.

Undoubtedly there is room to add more exploration, particularly to the nature of numbers/mathematics beyond those three lines, which is what I am working on at the time of writing this paragraph; but I share this version to highlight the effectiveness of structure as a compass, guiding the reader around the concept-world the poet creates.

Notes

1. Or, the dead woman who is like a statue. This may be a stronger possibility.
2. Okay, “suffering” is a slight leap, but I’m relying again on Morning Song here, and its portrayal of a baby’s cries, to justify the connection.
3. Of course, with the interpretive links to dying and existence, the strange decision is much more justifiable, as explored earlier.

References

1. Plath, S. (2010). Ariel. Faber And Faber. (Original work published 1965)
2. Oliver, M. (1994). A poetry handbook (pp. 9). Harper Collins