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Blackberrying By Sylvia Plath

599 Words3 Pages

Sylvia Plath’s writing has long been touted as emotionally and visually charged, a dramatic showing of emotions and sentiments. Plath’s poetic style of vivid imagery and purposeful syntax in “Lady Lazarus,” “Ariel,” and “Blackberrying” allow for the externalization and objectification of pain, ultimately laying the groundwork for her ability to expose the realities of self-denial. Plath’s poetry often manifests itself as an assault of metaphorical and symbolic language, the nuance in her words evoking particularly meaningful images. It is precisely the violence in her lurid visual imagery that so well conveys her “function or nonfunction of the mind rather than the meaning of the experience” (Uroff 3). Plath’s control of “caricature, parody, and hyperbole” truly exposes the machinations of the mind during times of duress …show more content…

This is perhaps best embodied by the metaphorical victimization she lends Lady Lazarus in “Lady Lazarus” when she instantiates her as a Jew in the Holocaust, her pain an extension of Nazi atrocities. To Plath, everything appears in a state of exaggeration, from the feeling of existence as a circus act in front of a “peanut-crunching crowd,” to the way the mind figuratively burns as a phoenix and is reborn (Lady 10). The visual lent to these image is unmistakably harsh and grotesque, creating a world for the reader in which death is not only art, but also escape. This is then similar to the way Plath invites horror into a ride on her beloved horse in “Ariel,” a poem by which she means to express the mind’s coming to terms with becoming free and insane. She begins by dashing her joyous scene with the line, “black sweet blood mouthfuls, shadows,” of which connotates death and the unknown. The darkness of her imagery comes full circle when she uses suicide as a metaphor for freeing

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