The Confessions of Sylvia Plath

The temptation to jump neck-deep into Sylvia Plath's biography is strong, primarily because her life was tragic and important, but also because her life appears in her poetry. But it is significant, also, that her poetry did so much more than "confess." In fact, the term "confessionalism" wrongly suggests some kind of straight talk that objectively reveals personal feelings about autobiographical events. Or I should say that the term applies to some less careful poets, but poets like Plath get short-changed by such a label. Her work is carefully crafted, laden with pointed symbolism, and set in a gruesome phantasia of dangers. This transcends mere talk. Take the following, from "Edge":

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

Life is frozen into a cold and mythological approximation of life. The four heavily stressed syllables ("Each dead child coiled") emphasize the critical accoutrements of the perfected (i.e. dead) woman. But they are not just children; they enter they mythical by becoming serpents, suggesting the dangerous result of the promise of the tree of knowledge. Children are the notice of our mortality. As the poem describes, they live in symbiosis with the maternal body, at once a parasite and the petals of a rose. Plath is also a poet who uses nature as a figure for human experience, but not in a straightforward way. The garden stiffens in a process meant to signify death, but we also get the personification of odors that "bleed / From the sweet, deap throats of the night flower."

These are effective lines whether they are drawn back to Plath's biography or not. Their power comes not because they act as documentary, but because they harness our imagination and tempt it to follow the treacherous path, to contemplate death, to experience the full range of human emotion.