Voices and Agency

We begin with an anonymised woman in the state of perfection and death. The definite article suggests a particular woman, by leaving the label there, Plath abstracts her identity. Thus, the woman is really a woman, and her circumstances seem to be therefore linked to women in general, not simply Plath herself or someone she knows.

The poem can be loosely divided into two points of focus: the woman and her (also dead) children. 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 childrens’ needs, are ideas prevalent in that poem. In effect, Plath portrays through both poems, her experience of motherhood as a loss of identity and a sort of death.

The Edge of Everything

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

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

One interpretation, then, is that the woman statue is created through suffering, as a baby is created through suffering$^1$, 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 theory just presented, places the lifeless, naked existence of this woman in comparison to the tumultuous existence of newborn children. The enjambment allows the lines to really ring, standing alone with all that space on the right margin.

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. […]

I will let the connections speak for themselves.

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 order of a poem. Of course, with the interpretation of the statue, the strange decision is much more justifiable. What I liked most about the exploration was that the line break created a link between two separate lines that 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:

Abacus in the Nile

Before he died, he placed me in a basket
and an abacus in the basket
and a baby in the basket and the basket
in the river.

I survived through the numbers,
growing and shrinking like lungs,
guiding my little brain along.

The current bobbed my little boat along,
and just like that we were one:

Me, my basket, my abacus, and poetry.

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

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.

References