Poet Sylvia Plath | Winona Media

Sylvia Plath’s tightly constructed poem of nine lines, “Metaphors,” begins

I'm a riddle in nine syllables.
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils...

This poem uses a series of increasingly fraught metaphors to describe the speaker’s advancing pregnancy and growing worries about the changes being wrought through her and upon her. The poem was written in March of 1959, when Plath was pregnant with her first child, and was included in her first book-length collection, The Colossus and Other Poems, published in 1960. The last two lines are:

I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

(Thanks to Shenandoah Library for posting this poem in its entirety.)

Nine is the traditional number signifying completeness, and is, of course, closely associated with the nine months of a full-term pregnancy. Plath’s poem not only uses nine lines but each line is composed of nine syllables, is end-stopped with skillful slant rhymes (my favorites are “syllables/apples/tendrils” and “house/purse”), and is replete with a roller-coaster of emotions.

*Winter Apples in Blue Bowl* by Leslie Schultz

Context for My Poem “Like This?”:

One of the clues from today’s New York Times Crossword Puzzle is “Colorful analogy, perhaps?” This nudged me early this morning toward considering similes, which for me is never only visual but also filled with music if successful, and that resulted in today’s slender poem. Later, I thought of another poem by Sylvia Plath that I have long admired, about Simile’s more emphatic sister, Metaphor, and so I thought today would be a good time to share it.

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE

Sylvia Plath has been an important influence on my own work since I first began reading her poems when I was sixteen. I have in mind to write some more about how I stumbled over her body of work and how dazzling I found it in a later post. For now, a little about a specific poem. (For a wonderful essay on Plath by Kim Bridgford, visit the Women Poets Timeline Project at Mezzo Cammin.)

For so many years, Plath’s poem, “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” has remained with me, as powerful art will do. Written in 1961, “The Moon and the Yew Tree” was published that year in The New Yorker, and was one of seven poems published together in The New Yorker in the August 3, 1963 issue, about six months after her untimely death. I first read the poem in my treasured first edition copy of The Collected Poems: Sylvia Plath (Ted Hughes, editor; Harper and Row, NY, 1981).

“The Moon and the Yew Tree” begins with these lines:

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

As I understand it, the surface imagery was inspired by the view of a tree in the churchyard neighboring her dream house-turned-prison in the English countryside in Devon, but most of the description draws deeply from Plath’s own inner terrains.

In the decades since my first encounter with this poem, I have also discovered a light-hearted but serious creative tool, “The Poet’s Tarot,” published by Two Sylvias Press. On the last day of March, I idly drew one card from the deck, the major arcana card XVIII dedicated to Plath. Not surprisingly, this card correllates with The Moon in more traditional tarot decks, and is an indicator of deep emotions and psycholgical constructs, powerful but often at least partly submerged from conscious awareness. In other words, the card most attuned to Plath’s way of working as a poet. And I can tell her seminal poem was at the very back of my mind when I arose this morning to a view of the moon through tree branches.

Context for the Poem, “Almost Morning”:

Well, this is an absolutely accurate description of the setting moon this morning, seen from an upstairs window at my house in Minnesota, though only I would have seen it that way. The look of the actual moon was inflected through memories of my long-gone Grand Aunt Isabel, my paternal grandfather’s youngest sister, whose mittens of white rabbit fur I inherited during my last year of high school. (They were very warm. Two years later, they were consumed with relish by my roommate’s yearling beagle whose name was Karma.) Isabel’s generation vied with each other over furs, I recall, something I half-understood but that also terrified me in some kind of inarticulate way. I think this poem was an attempt at articulating that complicated not-quite nostalgia.

(To receive my poem via email, send me word at winonapoet@gmail.com.)

Until tomorrow morning,

LESLIE

Winona Media

Poems & Stories From the Heart

Tag Archives: Poet Sylvia Plath

April 6, 2023 Spotlight on Sylvia Plath’s Poem, “Metaphors,” and Context for My Poem “Like This?”

April 3, 2023 Spotlight on Sylvia Plath’s “The Moon and the Yew Tree”; The Poet’s Tarot by Two Sylvias Press; and Context for My Poem, “Almost Morning”

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