The speaker of today’s poem¹ is a ‘paralytic’, suffering with the inability to be a part of the world around him². As time passes, he remains unable to do anything but think and speak his thoughts to the reader. In this sense the poem becomes something of a desperate cry, before its bittersweet conclusion.

A fuzzy start

It happens. Will it go on?

This opening line sets the tone for what will be a crushing monologue. The use of the present tense throughout the poem creates a sense of endlessness. However, when we first read “It happens,” we have no idea when “it” started or if “it” has ended. It is the question that makes the vagueness matter, creating intrigue, rather than only frustration. The rest of the poem will explore what “it” is, and in that sense the dash after the question mark can be read as acting similarly to a colon.

The effect of this framing is that rather than describing a series of moments as short events that happened across a narrative, Plath stretches a single moment dramatically, exploring the nuance of the speaker’s mental and emotional state.

Suffering and the Non-self

At the closing turn of the poem, our speaker reaches a point of respite, described in a way that hinges on its reference to Buddhism:

…[I]gnorance concerning the three characteristics of sentient existence—suffering, impermanence and non-self—will lead […] to appropriation (the identification of certain elements as ‘I’ and ‘mine’). This leads in turn to the formation of attachments, in the form of desire and aversion… ³

With a brief survey across the poem, we find several instances of the speaker referencing himself and his things: his ‘mind’, his ‘two dust bags’, his ‘sleeping couch’, his ‘wife’, his ‘daughters’, his ‘lips’, and finally his ‘bare back.’

Two girls
As flat as she, who whisper
‘We’re your daughters.’

It’s worth mentioning that in English, possessive pronouns are more flexible than just talking of ownership, but here they seem to have ownership as an additional loose implication, even for family members, in the sense of attachment to people and things of the world and the self. Thus, the two daughters would not have said ‘You’re our father’, as this would be a statement of the speaker’s identity, rather than of connections to the speaker (and also, explicitly stating “father/mother” would weaken the sense that the speaker is reduced to nothing).

In this stanza, a sort of dissociation begins: the speaker has children but solely as a matter of objective fact. The speaker has not claimed these children as his. The progression from the mind and subjective (metaphorical) descriptions, to the speaker’s relations in the world, to finally only the objective parts of the speakers body, is a progression from being intrinsically attached to the world, to being completely removed from it.

The fitting conclusion is therefore not “I smile, … desire / Falling from me”, but an exploration of what it means to be fully detached. For the first time, we focus not on the speaker, but a flower from the world, the world that the speaker could not touch.

A world made for touching

Read with the rest of Ariel in mind, this poem is quite fascinating. The speaker in several Ariel poems longs to experience the world yet is missing an crucial, intimate connection. The idea was explored in ‘Balloons’, where our speaker attempted, and failed, to ‘eat’ a non-existent world inside a pink balloon, and in ‘Poppies in July,’ where the speaker seems disappointed at the non-heat of the flowers’ ‘flames’.

‘Paralytic’ is loaded with a similar disappointment: the magnolia at the end (asking ‘nothing of life’) seems at first to be a representation of the ideal, what the ‘paralytic’ wishes to be, but instead it presents a dubious portrayal of freedom.

For a start, the idea of “its own scents” implies the magnolia has a self, an ‘I’, and therefore isn’t quite as free or enlightened as we might have guessed.

Additionally, the description of the magnolia’s ‘claw’ loads the concluding image with a sense of danger, not peace.

The word ‘drunk’ simultaneously taints the purity of the magnolia’s mission, while also providing another⁴ meaning to the title of the poem, as the word ‘paralytic’ is also slang for being “extremely drunk, [especially] to the point of being unable to do anything.”⁵

Notes